Committees of Correspondence

(Long rant, referring back to several topics with which regular readers are familiar, by way of explanation of a call to action. Feel free to scroll to the bottom. If the last few paragraphs make sense, congratulations, you've moved beyond Level 101 of ths blog. If not, use the headings to scroll back up to the parts of which you missed something.)

Censorship on Social Media

Unlike loathsome Facebook...

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/facebook-advocates-government-regulation-online-speech/

Twitter doesn't censor. I have spent several online hours in committees discussing why Twitter must avoid any kind of overt censorship, no matter how many alleged people scream that any opposition to their point of view might catch the eye of a dangerous lunatic and be involved in the ravings of the next Prozac Dementia homicide-suicide case. People who are violently insane may blame the Republicans; they may blame the Democrats; they may blame the weather, or the moon, or what they distinctly heard a rock tell them to do. We don't censor Republicans or Democrats, nor do we try to destroy rocks, because of this. We lock up the poor lost souls, if we get to them before they kill themselves, and pray that psychiatrists can find ways to deactivate the violence circuits in their brains while leaving them enough working neurons to sort socks in a Goodwill warehouse, although so far this is not guaranteed and it might be more humane just to kill them...In any case, we recognize that ideas millions of responsible adults can discuss and debate without even resorting to profanity are not to be blamed when people who are not responsible adults become violent.

My stake in Twitter owes something to a mistake (long story, not available online) but, after years of not doing Twitter and then years of using it only every few months, I have acquired a small stake in Twitter. I've seen that its fast-paced, headlines-only format, which initially seemed silly, can have a really valuable part in mass communications--in emergencies, e.g., where Twits can track weather disasters and use any working cell phones to find and help survivors. I care personally about keeping this site from going the way of either Facebook, which is simply rotten to the core, or Freedom Connector (the one I remember fondly) or other social media sites that self-destructed by targeting only one side of a debate.

There have been social sites that protected people from any kind of disagreement by advertising that they were there for one group or another. Freedom Connector was "for" Tea Parties; it fell apart when (1) some Tea Parties realized how diverse the appeal of "Taxed Enough Already" really was--I like that, but some people couldn't handle it, and (2) the rest realized that almost all Tea Parties are made up of taxpayers who have jobs, most of which don't have titles like "Social Media Consultant" and don't allow a lot of time for online socializing with random new acquaintances. I remember spending an hour or two with a site that was "for" Christians, long dead for similar reasons, and actually doing a few live chats at a site that was "for" Republicans. (No, I wasn't needling them; I was chatting about live networking opportunities. That would have been a cool site, had it survived.) There've been social sites for left-wingers and many other interest groups too. I've actually been paid to play hostess on a few; they all paid other hosts too, and that's not why most of them have fallen apart and the ones that still survive without paid hosts aren't growing. There are a few truly great blogs--Making Light used to be one, and Ozarque's while she was living, and The Blaze while Glenn Beck was still there, and Scott Adams' blog before he went video-only, and Return To Order for conservative Catholics, and who else remembers Matt Drudge and Brad Hicks?--that attract enough like-minded people to come back enough times that e-friendships form. I've wished this blog would become one of them. But in the absence of a really good celebrity writer who consistently delivers interesting content that keeps the chat going and personally moderates the comments, these like-minded community sites do not become miniature social sites. The social media sites that work have to keep the doors open and let everyone, including rude kids and Flat Earthers, find their own social circles.

(Before anyone says "If you, writer known as Priscilla King, were going around these sites clobbering people with your opinions, no wonder..."--Hello? This is my site. My job here is to air my own opinions. As a paid hostess on other people's sites, my job is/was to get other people to share their opinions. I found out firsthand at what point each site started automatically blocking responses to comment like "LOL" or "Dittos" or "Tell us more?")

Vaccination

So, recently on Twitter people claimed that panic about a measles outbreak was making them feel justified in demanding a social media ban on "anti-vax" content.

I propose as a general Meta-Rule for all social media:

THE SIDE CALLING FOR CENSORSHIP OF OPPOSING OPINIONS IS ADMITTING IT CAN'T WIN A RATIONAL DEBATE, AND CAN SAFELY BE CONSIDERED "WRONG."

The "pro-vax" corporate shills are so misguided they don't even notice that there's a wide range of opinions about measles vaccinations. I actually favor them--only for couples who are trying to become parents without having had the disease or the vaccine as kids. Fetuses can be damaged by the effects of live measles, mumps, or even puny little rubella virus inside the mother's body. For most of us who've already been born, by far the healthiest way to become immune to these "diseases" is to have them as a child. I had the diseases, then I had the vaccine, and it happened to be a contaminated batch of vaccine, and I would recommend the diseases over the effects I got from the vaccine to anybody.

Only in 1985 was MMR vaccine linked to an especially virulent form of mononucleosis that made masses of young people ill for a year or longer. I had acute hepatitis, with cramping, nausea, weight loss, and jaundice, into 1987; I remained jaundiced and asexual through the late 1980s. People who had MMR vaccine in other years did not have that reaction. They had other ones, which Robert Kennedy has chosen to investigate and document. I'm not employed by him, although I'd like to be, and don't presume to claim him as an e-friend, although I'd like to do. I am as proud of him as a previous generation of Irish-Americans were of his late father and uncle. Click here to see why:

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/nyc-mandatory-measles-vaccination-violates-ny-state-law-chd-challenges-legality/

But there are true anti-vaxxers--Orthodox Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, members of the defunct Lord's Covenant Church in which I committed my life to Christ in 1978--who believe that having any vaccination is wrong because it involves contact with extracts from other living creature's blood. In the United States they have a constitutional right to act on that belief without prejudice.

Then there are those who want to use a risk-benefits analysis. In connection with vaccinations I think Ben Carson's explanation of the RBA is valuable...



For what it's worth, Dr. Carson says that for most people the MMR vaccine presents a merely acceptable risk. I think if he'd had it in 1985 he'd feel otherwise, but I appreciate his explanation of the risks and benefits of vaccines anyway. I would renew my vaccinations, or encourage a child to have vaccinations, against a highly fatal disease for which a mostly safe vaccine exists, like cholera or polio. I would not recommend that most people bother about vaccinations for trivia like measles or flu.

And among the RBA crowd there's also a division between those who generalize about vaccines and diseases merely by pathogen species, and those who are interested and expert enough to make distinctions among specific batches of vaccines. Sometimes some people actually feel qualified to tell working parents, "Don't let your child have Vaccine A, which is being used at his school. Bring little Timmy to a clinic that gives Vaccine B, which is safer." If I were a parent I'd think it was worth the trouble to investigate these people's qualifications further before telling little Timmy he ought to have a vaccine, but sometimes they are right; if I'd had that MMR shot at Loma Linda University, or maybe at Radford where the high school guidance counsellor thought I ought to have been, rather than at Andrews University I might have had no side effects whatsoever.

Then there are further distinctions of opinion among those withholding our support from a particular kind of vaccination...I'm always irked by the simplistic "Vaccines cause autism" meme. The overdiagnosis of "autism" among children who do in fact have impaired vision, hearing, or mobility, and may be painfully shy, but do not lack empathy, ticks me off. I don't think it helps either those children, or the young man I once met who is likely to fall over if spoken to because sounds disturb his hypersensitive inner ears, to use "autism" as a synonym for "brain damage of any kind." Some vaccine reactions may cause fevers, which may either cause or aggravate brain damage of whatever kind. Some vaccine reactions may or may not do as much damage to infants as prenatal exposure to measles, mumps, and rubella, alone or together, might have done to them as fetuses. Much remains to be learned and although it seems obvious that vaccine manufacturers and government offices are suppressing valuable data, because releasing that data would create financial liability for the government that mandated vaccines, "Vaccines cause autism" is an overgeneralization that's easily refuted and unlikely to help.

But the pro-vaxxers want to suppress all rational discussion and just force social media to promote their (profit-motivated) position to the exclusion of all others! Which of these things just doesn't belong? "Pro-vaxxers call for censorship? Therefore they are wrong! What else is wrong with them? Why are they so UN-AMERICAN?" we need to be chanting in chorus, loud enough and long enough that Big Pharma denounces its own scapegoats and the accounts from which the calls for censorship came are deleted and purged. If they were stupid enough to use their real-world names, the corporate shills should have to petition the courts to change those so they can be considered for some sort of job, if only pumping gas, during the rest of their lives.

Feminism

Twitter showed a dangerous level of susceptibility to censorship, admittedly due to someone's personal emotional feelings, in caving to a demand that people who bicker about other people's "pronouns of choice" be banned on Twitter. I posted about that last year; no need to repeat that rant. So far I've not seen a huge surge of support for my own position that people who use the F-word (the other one, besides "Facebook") as a threat or curse should be banned from Twitter. I say that as a feminist. If Twitter refuses to ban anyone who posts that, then it should at least also protect those who may choose to post, in reply, "Well, snip you." Nufsed.

I've added more recently that, in addition to calling out those who offensively pat, pinch, or tickle young people (not always women), or call them by pejorative names, and whine "But there's nothing sexual about it! That's the way I touch or speak to my children!", feminists need to call out men who invoke the "She's Crazy/Stupid/Incompetent" meme. Any aspersion cast by a male on a female's competence should evoke a loud, long, shrill chorus:

"He's a fool, a sexist fool! Shut up, fool! Go home! Get out of social media! Whose son is this, and why did his mother let him out? The only worthwhile thing he has to say is 'I humbly beg your gracious pardon, Ma'am,' for at least the next ten years! Does he have a job, and if so why? Is he in college, and if so why? He's so obviously unfit to be among adults!"

This is, of course, a counter-reaction to the resurgence of sexist bigotry documented here...Tina Fey is very witty, but the problem is not actually funny.



GlyphosateAwareness (and its Live Chat on Twitter)

So perhaps that's why the glyphosate shills picked a typically female name for the one that whined on Twitter recently that "since we've got a way to hush up the dangerous anti-vaxxers on social media, maybe now Twitter can do something about the anti-glyphosate..."

I was in the middle of a celiac reaction when I read that, and if a real woman had been in front of me, saying that, I seriously doubt that I would have been able to ask her, seriously, rationally, and empathetically, what had caused her to spout such a toxic-waste idea. "Y'want censorship? Go to China!" would have been a reasonable thing for anyone who is not an aunt, a Christian, and a chat moderator to have said...but I felt something like the surge of real, violent anger, followed by massive depression, that can be a symptom of fatal but rare multiple myeloma when it's not a symptom of ordinary hypertension and/or celiac sprue and/or some other digestive system disorders. People who have that feeling can and do become violent. I would warn all readers against mentioning the mere idea of censoring Glyphosate Awareness in the presence of any Irish celiac. Violence is not what we need. However good it might feel at the time. The pro-censorship fools are the ones who need to be in the padded cells.

Well...Devin Nunes' call for counter-censorship seems sorely misguided. The trouble with mandating protection for two official parties is that a lot of issues are not being adequately addressed by either of those parties. Things like #GlyphosateAwareness are the property of either party, neither, both, or however other many other parties may be out there.

But I saw that Nunes was right about one thing. I'd wondered where some of my Tweeps had been lately, and some people might have wondered about me, before my Twitter activity chart took a nosedive. New Twitter has in fact rolled out a subtle form of de facto pro-corporate censorship.

It's called "Top view." Up to this year, when you opened a page on Twitter you saw tweets--from people you follow on your own feed, from individual Twits on our profile pages, from all users of hashtags on the hashtag pages--in chronological order with the newest tweets first. When you came to something that didn't make sense, you could scroll down and see it in its context. But now Twitter has started mechanically rating "Top" tweets, picking for you the one tweet you see above the first irrelevant paid ad, then the next few between that and the next irrelevant paid ad...and Twitter has indeed admitted allowing its paying sponsors to determine how those "Top" tweets are picked. It's not in order of their popularity with actual readers, as I initially thought when I thought defaulting to "Top view" was merely annoying and confusing. It's to make sure you see sponsor-approved content and miss those independent opinions that companies like Bayer may be paying to keep you from sharing.

Celiacs Are Not Alone

It's to keep somebody like a poor lonely celiac student in California from realizing that (1) true celiacs really are rare, and (2) we got our lovely market for gluten-free food from people who actually aren't even sensitive to natural wheat gluten but have pseudo-celiac or other painful reactions to glyphosate, and (3) if he, as a celiac, wants more food he can eat to be sold at his school, he needs to be using that natural alliance with #GlyphosateAwareness, because glyphosate-laced food may be gluten-free but it'll still make him sick, leaving him one of the poor duped celiacs who seriously believe that what we inherited is not just a gene that should shape our food choices but a horrible chronic disease that may or may not be helped by following a severely restricted diet and whining and wailing for more subsidized painkillers, or gene therapy, or who knows what-all...

I call foul. The celiac genotype in no way excludes other genes that really are lethal, and that we know less about how people might be able to live with. (Among other things it may be one of a combination of genes that, together, produce susceptibility to schizophrenia.) But those of us who did not inherit other, more lethal genes along with our celiac gene can be models of excellent health--when other people don't keep on poisoning us with glyphosate. Growing up celiac forces us to overtrain so, like the survivors of physical therapy who go on to compete in the Special Olympics, we can and should enjoy super strength, super immunity. I am, I did, and for many years I was the leading local model of those things.

On this topic I'm not entitled to clobber people with my opinions. Who needs opinions? I am entitled to speak the truth in thunder tones. I host the #GlyphosateAwareness chat because this is the topic I own by natural right of inheritance. From a Great-Grandmother Susan from Ireland whose long, miserable life ended at the age of 103 when then unscented gas leaked into her home, where she lived alone with a "modern" gas stove. She was living alone at 103 because (1) she was no fun to be around, if not complaining of one minor health problem then complaining of three others, and (2) she was, nevertheless, still competent to live alone. And her daughter, a rodeo queen called Texas Ruby, and her daughters, my mother and "Aunt Dotty," and I, and some of The Nephews and some of our cousins on that side, all look just like her. Faces considered classically handsome or beautiful when we're healthy, ugly and pitiable when we're not, identifiable in Mother's box of old photos only by dates or background items to determine whose photo is whose--the baby pictures aren't even identifiable by gender. Smashing successes in early life that ran up against chronic, intractable minor disabilities at age 30. Until I, the writer known as Priscilla King, broke that "old family curse." Dang right I'm entitled to enjoy a long and healthy old age, and even brag about it.

And, if a pro-censorship fool were to start spewing toxic waste here in the cafe, feeling safe just because s/he is bigger than I am, I'd be entitled to pick person up, carry person out, and drop person on the curb. Not to be violent, of course. Nobody has a right to be violent. Violence is a wrong not a right. But just to show that nature has indeed given me, age about 50, height about 5'4", the right to lift and carry more than my own weight...when really violent people are not making me sick.

I would know more about this than the poor fools and tools in the corporate lobbies. A lot more. I say it's time we acknowledged that the celiac gene is a rare gene, a trait, a feature...oh, like polydactylism, or having concentric circles of different colors in your eyes. There is no reason why the celiac gene should be more inconvenient to us than those other genes. People with two-tone eyes may waste a lot of time talking about a feature that's become old and stale to them, as do we, but neither they nor we need to waste time feeling sick. The celiac gene simply refuses to digest certain things as food. Well, every human body refuses to digest certain things as food. Nobody can safely eat rocks, or nails, or lawn grass. Celiacs can simply add wheat to that list and get on with our lives. If people agree that shared meals need to contain natural foods that don't contain wheat or wheat products, celiacs can even share meals with other people.

Instead of which we're being specifically targeted, for what can fairly be called #IrishGenocide, by corporations that want to tell you that "the science" means it doesn't matter how sick their very profitable products are making some people, since each of those people's reactions to glyphosate is, considered all by itself, so rare that "statistically" it's "insignificant." That is: only a few people (and dogs, cats--like my four kittens still suffering at home today--and rabbits, and birds, and fish, and bees) have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate, although pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate are at least twenty times more common than true celiac reactions to wheat.

(How do we know this? Numbers! Those numbers the corporate "science" types want to ignore! When even in Ireland only 1 out of 10,000 people develops true celiac sprue, usually late in life, while in a glyphosate-poisoned world as many as 1 out of 4 or 5 White people, plus substantial numbers of non-White people, are "gluten-sensitive," that tells us something, doesn't it kiddies? And when those "gluten-sensitive" people are reporting that, in certain European countries where glyphosate is banned or used in a less reckless way, they can eat wheat without being sick...that tells us all we need to know. No more animals need to suffer to explain why this is the case. And if you want to know who deserves not censorship but actual jail time for committing acts of senseless violence, imagine how a pseudo-celiac reaction feels to a kitten who's not even developed the ability to excrete its bodywaste without external help...all that gas and no ability to... Hard time!)

Nevertheless, most people don't have pseudo-celiac reactions to glyphosate. Lucky them...maybe. Some people have sinus allergies, or other respiratory reactions like asthma. (I had asthma, once, after walking several miles down a freshly sprayed road; I don't usually have respiratory reactions to glyphosate. Most people exposed to large amounts of glyphosate have combinations of reactions, over and above their usual, default reaction.) Some develop skin rashes, especially after skin contact with sprayed plants or food. Some have kidney reactions that involve the nervous system and can include narcolepsy or acute fatigue. Some become paralyzed. Some have cognitive or emotional reactions. Some may survive long enough to develop cancer, which either kidney reactions or celiac-type reactions help to promote, or to give birth to badly deformed children.

I've watched a patient-who-doesn't-look-geriatric (who uses glyphosate, herself, and stopped speaking to me when I told her that was probably the cause of her lingering "complications from flu" she had years ago) come out walking like a 25-year-old model, inhale glyphosate vapors, immediately reel and stagger, become confused, and have to be guided to sit down until someone could take her home. (I wouldn't have presumed to offer that kind of insight to someone that much older, even a close friend, if the sight hadn't been so unmistakable and unforgettable and shocking.) 

The celiac reaction to glyphosate seems to be the most common not because it is, but because it comes on fast, goes away fast, and is unique, not part of an overall reaction people have to lots of other things. When I stood in a crowd of mostly middle-aged and senior citizens who were exposed to glyphosate vapors, and observed their reaction, by far the most common complaint was that people who had felt fine and been enjoying lovely spring weather, earlier that morning, suddenly felt "old" and "tired." The younger set, observing the basic immune reaction that produces "colds" among their coevals, started theorizing about "something going around." There was also a lot of idiocy about "allergies" to spring flowers that hadn't been bothering people until some moron decided to spray poison on some of them.

That was the day I realized I was not alone, or even in a minority. Glyphosate is doing most people harm, in a wide variety of ways. Each individual reaction seems to be a minority...but the overwhelming majority of all life forms exposed to glyphosate, even at low levels if those levels are sustained over time, are showing painful physical reactions. We're now seeing smaller animals die out. Insect and bird counts are dropping into the danger zones. At the same time we're seeing animals that used to be considered hardy and easy to care for, like house cats, suddenly become fragile creatures that have to be nursed through acute illnesses almost every year. Vets are now classifying cats' recurring illnesses as losses of immunity to a virus, but very few cats lost immunity to that virus before glyphosate levels reached their current height! And we all either know that we feel more than ten years "older" than we were ten years ago, or know people who do, or both.

When I started researching the connection between my glyphosate exposures and my celiac reactions, I had some doubts about glyphosate causing birth defects in livestock in South America. Currently I have some reservations about the claim that it's functioning as a "xenoestrogen" unbalancing older people's sex hormones. I started the #GlyphosateAwareness chat because I'm sure that some of the allegations being made about the harmfulness of glyphosate have to be mistaken. But along came the Ramazzini study to show that glyphosate causes birth defects among the offspring of individuals who don't show painful reactions to it, themselves...I wouldn't be surprised if the claim that glyphosate is unbalancing people's sex hormones could be refuted. Neither would I be surprised if it could be proved. We need more real observations from unbiased people, and at this point I think we've seen enough animal studies and need to confine "the science" to reports from human patients and "anecdotal" observations of animals. We know glyphosate is harmful to all living creatures. What remains to be learned, about how and why it's been more harmful than we already know for sure that it's been, should be learned from those living with any effects that linger after the much-needed ban goes into effect.

Bayer: Crazy Like a Fox

And corporations like Bayer...I seriously suspect Werner Bauman and his henchmen, er um corporate board, are trying to divest their own assets and bankrupt Bayer in time for them to get out before actually paying any damages to the millions of people they've harmed. Their clinging to glyphosate, with their ludicrous trotting out of the Monsanto-approved studies that actually condemn glyphosate to scream "But it doesn't necessarily cause cancer," is...not something any serious attempt to market any brand could hope to survive. My guess is that Bayer is planning its own bankruptcy, the way my husband planned his bankruptcy when his ex's reaction to his possibly-positive test for prostate cancer was to ask for a divorce; Bayer executives are likely choosing their aliases, forging their documentation, and working on long-term visas or changes of citizenship, as I type.

I would like very much for this summer not to be another season of sickness for me and my close relatives, and death for our friends, animal and human, like last summer was. Even the #GlyphosateAwareness campaign is giving me only limited grounds for hope. But I'd like for more people to be saying this to the makers, sellers, and too-stupid-to-live continuing users of glyphosate products. One more summer like the last one isn't going to kill most of us--it's just going to make us angrier. And celiacs, though rare, are already angry, we're already Irish, and we're coming after you with all our celiac toughness. Start running to the rocks and screaming "Fall on us" now!

How do I know Bayer (and the other corporations lined up behind them) are going down, and know it? By their use of this "can't answer them, so make a lot of noise and try to drown them out" strategy. I never expected #GlyphosateAwareness to be the sort of favorite hashtag Twits visit daily, like #TortieTuesday or #ChooseCuteness or #GreenBayPackers. I expected most of my followers to show strong preferences for any and every other topic, which they do. Nobody--including me--enjoys #GlyphosateAwareness. Even when my body forces me to think about it, I personally feel better when I think, read, talk, and tweet about cute puppy pictures. But the enemy, the people who are actively making you ill and me sick, are feeling a need to censor this topic!

Well, WOO-HOO and YEE-HAAAA!

The Glyphosate Awareness chat has never seen a lot of traffic. Most of the people who've been personally invited to it have declined to post on this topic; I know some of them have read the hashtag from time to time, but never participated in the chat. This is as it should be. So why would a massively wealthy corporation even bother to suppress an unpopular, uncomfortable chat?

Because they can't answer one dang thing I've said.

We've watched them try.

We've watched them fail.

One really smart, cute young fellow, who I hope has abandoned glyphosate by now, tried drawing me into a very erudite discussion in French. Well, by now tout le monde sait que j'ecris francais comme une vache espagnole, everyone knows I write French like a Spanish cow, I mangle their lovely language...but actually, the more erudite a discussion gets in any of the European languages, the easier it is for speakers of the other European languages to read. Tweeps watched me beat the kid at his own game as handily as even Venus Williams could still beat you or me at tennis.

Then another French guy, who's still tweeting in aid of glyphosate but has stopped replying to me, tried to use the documents Monsanto used on our Environmental Protection Association, only without the bribery. We made figurative hash of him (though not a Twitter hashtag, because he doesn't deserve one) in a few hours.

Then a bunch of alleged farmers in Australia tweeted hate at us for a day or two. We took them down fast.

Then a pro-glyphosate Twit asked me to discuss glyphosate on a radio show. You're on, I said. I've heard no more from him. One day watching me smack down pro-glyphosate whines with indisputable facts was all he cared to see. I could destroy his arguments on radio, and I would, and he knows it.

Then Kevin Folta, who's actually respected in some circles--or was--got into it, and the poor nerd regressed so far that, in his confusion, he emitted an ad hominem (or ad feminam) sexist insult to Stephanie Seneff. He's still on Twitter but he's avoiding me.

So, when all else fails--if you want to build a corporate brand, you drop glyphosate like a live grenade, which it is; but if you want to destroy a corporation just as soon as you can get your personal assets out of it, you roll out a little money and call for corporate censorship!

Sinners, run to the rocks and say, "Rocks and mountains please fall on me!"



(Actually the misquote comes from the musical...whatever.)

And So, in Conclusion... 

We are winning, Tweeps. We may be reeling and bleeding, but we are winning.

We need to share the good news; and because these corporations are interconnected and it has taken a lot of corporate funding to sustain the Internet, we can't count on the Internet to do it.

In the American Revolution, there was no Internet; people were widely separated from each other and spoke different dialects--and, in the case of Pennsylvania, languages! Nevertheless, plans and alliances were made by what called themselves Committees of Correspondence, people who hand-wrote and hand-copied letters to lists of friends. These lists branched out like trees and united a population of individuals who'd never seen or spoken to one another.

On Twitter, after reading Devin Nunes' helpful complaint and confirming that it's true, I asked yesterday whether we should promote Glyphosate Awareness by buying ads or by deserting Twitter. I woke up this morning thinking, "Neither, of course!" Here's a better strategy:

1. Right now, although Twitter doesn't make it as easy as it used to be to print lists of our followers, Twitter does make it easy to find our followers--in chronological order. Go to your  profile. Open your f'list. Scroll all the way down through all 200 or 500 or 2000 of them (yes, Twitter will do that). Start working up the list, oldest followers first. Reconnect with each and every one of your Tweeps, even if you have no idea who they are or why they ever followed you. Make sure they know why glyphosate-related tweets may be suppressed on the "Top" view of any page (and Glyphosate Awareness may, for example, be suppressed on the "Top" view of the #glyphosate page). Warn them to make sure they read only the "Latest" version of any page on Twitter. Encourage them to encourage Twitter just to lose the "Top" version, altogether. Do this individually because, although Twitter is using the "Top" view to show people pro-glyphosate garbage instead of accurate Glyphosate Awareness, so far Twitter is not blocking our notifications or individual pages; we can still connect with each other individually--we're just being prevented from connecting at random, the way most of us "met."

2. In view of the amount of money that's been poured into schemes that rely on the use of glyphosate as if it really were "no more toxic than table salt," expect further difficulties. Not only could we be temporarily banned from Twitter; Twitter, or the whole Internet, just might collapse. Have a mail drop, and web site that displays its address, ready in case we have to move back to hand-typing (or even writing) letters to people we've never met. Start preparing to use those, because Bayer is going down, and it will go down hard.

Morgan Griffith on the Radford Arsenal and Holston Defense Plant

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"
The Radford Arsenal: A Vital Mission
The men and women who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces are among the finest our nation has to offer. It is essential that we provide them with the best equipment and supplies available.
In Shakespeare’s Richard III, the king famously laments, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” He loses a battle, his realm, and his life because he lacks a horse at the pivotal moment. We cannot allow our liberties to be lost because of a similar lack of quality supplies when they count the most.
Southwest Virginia makes a critical contribution to this effort. The Radford Army Ammunition Plant is the primary manufacturer of propellant for the Department of Defense. So as our warfighters battled ISIS in the Middle East, Radford’s products propelled their munitions toward their targets.
The Radford arsenal has its origins in World War II, when it employed as many as 23,000 workers. In the decades since, it has remained a key provider for the military and an important employer in our area. Current staffing consists of a small garrison of Army personnel and a larger civilian workforce managed by BAE Systems. Additionally, other businesses, such as Northrop Grumman, maintain an on-site presence as well.
Recently, the arsenal celebrated its 78^th birthday. To mark the occasion, Secretary of the Army Dr. Mark T. Esper toured the facility as part of a swing through Southwest Virginia. He is the first sitting Army Secretary to visit the plant. His itinerary also included a visit to Virginia Tech, where he met with administrators and the Corps of Cadets. In fact, Virginia Tech is one of only six institutions apart from the service academies designated as a senior military college.
I accompanied Secretary Esper on his visit to Radford. We saw all that the arsenal does for our servicemen and -women and the pride its employees take in their work. We also learned more about the projects that fulfill its aim to be a good neighbor and part of our surrounding community.
Radford is not just the primary supplier for some products, but the only supplier. Among the products the Radford arsenal makes is nitrocellulose, a propellant that produces less smoke than alternative propellants. It is the only North American manufacturer and supplier of the substance.
As an aside, it is notable that while Radford supplies the propellant, many of the explosives that are propelled are made close to the Ninth District as well, at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport.
While impressed by the importance of the Radford arsenal to our military supply chain, I am also encouraged by the steps its leadership and the Department of Defense have taken to improve the environment in our communities.
The manufacturing activities occurring at the site, including the burning of waste products, inevitably produce pollution. Recognizing these ills, the Department of Defense has taken important steps in recent years to minimize emissions. From 2017 to 2018, a 47 percent reduction in waste destroyed by open burning occurred. The base’s current commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Scott, set as a goal a 50 percent reduction in this waste by 2021, so the progress has been impressive.
Significant upgrades to the facility have already taken place. Perhaps the most important, the installation of a new incinerator that captures most of the emissions, is scheduled for completion in 2023.
These actions will benefit the environment and contribute to a more harmonious relationship with residents of the surrounding jurisdictions.
While we were at the arsenal, Secretary Esper and I recognized Shirley Turner, an employee celebrating 50 years of work at the facility. This milestone event indicates the long-standing importance of the Radford arsenal as an employer in the New River Valley. The facility maintains a health and wellness program for employees, another signal that it takes its obligations as a major employer seriously.
I am glad that Secretary Esper had a chance to see the important work done at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, and proud that through the facility, Southwest Virginia continues to make a vital offering to the nation’s defense.
If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.
"

Tortie Tuesday: Serena Has Worst Day of Her Life

Serena is the classic calico cat.

Her mother Samantha is the true tortie.

However, #TortieTuesday embraces both types of three-colored cats.

Serena is a little over one year old, and as I left, late for work, this morning it occurred to me that this is the worst day of Serena's life so far--the first time I've seen her express pain or fear.

Last spring, Samantha gave birth to four kittens who all looked premature. One couldn't possibly have lived; one looked as if it might live, but it never did; one lived for less than a day. This left Serena well fed on all of her mother's milk, and although she often expressed boredom and impatience at having only adult cats and humans to play with, she was the biggest, strongest, healthiest kitten ever. She never showed a reaction during last year's glyphosate poisoning episodes. She was bigger than her mother before cold weather arrived, and there was none of the usual kitten drama about wanting to spend warm nights indoors because spring kittens' fluffy coats don't provide enough insulation...Serena is part Manx, and her extra-thick coat did provide insulation. She'd come into the warm office room where she was born to show friendliness, then start panting from the heat and go out, like an adult cat...in contrast to Samantha, a scaredycat who spent most of her first winter indoors in a nice safe cage, by choice.

I have no idea why she chose the name she did. (It was unmistakably her choice, among others.) She never knew her grandmother Irene, she never watched the "Bewitched" show (where I didn't remember that the character Samantha had a relative called Serena, myself), and I don't think she'd ever heard of the tennis champion either...although I will say Serena-cat's behavior looks as if she'd dedicated her life to emulating a big, strong, yet feminine and motherly athlete. I have more respect for Serena Williams than I have for most athletes, and more for Serena-cat than I have for most spring kittens.

Serena has always been very friendly and affectionate with me, though not in a way other people would understand. As an only kitten she didn't need any more snuggling and mothering. She needed more romping and playing. She shows affection by "clawing and chawing." (I don't encourage her to get close to other people for that reason.) She has really tried to be gentle about slapping and chomping me, too. She has expressed apology. However, she was delighted when someone brought us a rescued feral cat with a kitten just her age! She and Traveller were born a hundred miles apart, but nobody could tell them they're not brother and sister. It's been hard to separate them since the first day they were allowed to sniff each other and start their first game of tag.

So during the night before the first day of March, Serena gave birth to four cute, healthy kittens. One does have a Manx body shape, but all four have complete tails. I worried about them being out on the porch through the winds of March. Serena assured me I didn't need to worry. She comes from a long line of abnormally intelligent cats. She figured out how to drag heavy fabric down between stacks of storage bins to make a warm, soft, well insulated nest with a series of three overlapping doorways to keep out drafts. On the chilliest nights she let Traveller join her and the kittens for extra warmth. The nest remained snug...until the kittens started exploring the world.

Kittens usually want to explore the world when they're six weeks old, but these are Serena's kittens. At five weeks they were as big and as ready to explore as ordinary kittens are at six weeks. She showed them to me right away, and three of the four of them instantly recognized that a human is to snuggle up to. The fourth one backed away and hissed at first, then became the cuddliest of the four by the second day.

None of them is either black or calico, but a kitten of any shape or color is adorable. And we mustn't forget Traveller, still a growing year-old kitten himself...Trav is as proud and protective of these kittens as any human uncle ever was. I have never seen a tomcat bond with new kittens like that before. I don't think Traveller is especially smart or social, by himself, but he knows whose lead to follow! Serena is a true Queen of Social Cats, fully worthy of her remarkably clever and social predecessors Heather, Bisquit, Polly, Patchnose, and the unforgettable Black Magic.

Oh it was a charming weekend at the Cat Sanctuary! Fruit trees and their ornamental cousins, and forsythia, still show a few blooms as redbuds and violets start to color the land. The weather was mild, sunny, and pleasant. The kittens spent Saturday learning how to climb and jump, then spent Sunday and Monday doing all the adorable kitten tricks in the book. If they had been calicos, Torties, or Tuxies they couldn't have been cuter. Even the one with that jugheaded Manx look...he may never be handsome, but he's a purry, cuddly, lovable little guy, with almost enough black spots in his white coat to qualify as a Tuxie.

And then...on Monday they started refusing milk, and crying and screaming when Serena tried to groom them.

Serena remembered where I keep a solution of powdered food-quality charcoal in water in case of accidental poisoning. This is a safe home remedy for humans and domestic animals, though some pharmacies don't stock it because people with food intolerance could easily abuse it. Dose is one teaspoon per cup, one full cup for an adult human, 5 cc for an adult cat, 1 cc for a kitten, a bucketful for a cow. Serena hasn't had this problem herself, but she remembered where I'd put the remedy after giving it to Samantha and Traveller. She walked up to me as I was typing and nonverbally asked for a dose by pointing, first to where the container was kept, then to the container.

Overnight the kittens had lost their bounce and become whiny, listless, bloated, and glassy-eyed; two of them even had globs of mucus around their eyes. Kittens bloat up quickly if they drink their milk without being groomed and cleaned, because, as all cat rescuers know, their bowels don't move without the external stimulation of brisk light strokes around the back section of the kitten. What comes out of healthy kittens is bland white curds and whey, which mother cats eat. Sick kittens' mothers nonverbally say "Urgh" and either "abandon" the kittens, or dump them at their humans' feet saying "See if you can do anything about this."

So Serena did that. If you watch cats closely, "abandon" is hardly the word for the way they walk away from sick kittens. You can see their distress as they tiptoe slowly away. From time to time they'll come back to see whether their babies are living. Usually kittens whose mothers can't feed and clean them will die, and often their mothers are sick too, but if they do survive their reunion will be joyful.

On Monday I gave the kittens three doses of charcoal each, and tried cleaning them. No use. Hardly a drop of tainted cat whey came out of each kitten. They screeched and clawed at my hands during each effort--although they recognized good intentions. They came back to me, as a family of four, to solicit the next feeding and cleaning session six hours after the previous one. They would rest in a basket in the office, I'd be typing on the computer, and then I'd hear scrabbling at the back of the desk and see four little faces peering around the edge. They waited to be invited, then swarmed up for their home remedy, however much they didn't enjoy it. I would not have tried to make that up. During the midday feeding the sickest kitten was feverish, but by evening the fever broke and the kittens were starting to bounce and scamper again.

By Monday evening Serena was glassy-eyed, feverish, and irritable as she requested another dose of charcoal. Her teats were swollen and felt inflamed. The kittens saw her and squeaked for milk, and Serena surged up off my lap, nonverbally saying "They can jollywell have this milk if it kills them."

It didn't kill them. In fact, although the curds were still backed up inside the kittens this morning, enough whey came out to reduce the bloating. They wanted to nurse again, and Serena let them.

But both Serena and I knew that allowing kittens to take nourishment, in this condition, is risky--sort of a kill-or-cure.

Samantha always used to try to follow me to work, being afraid to stay home alone or even with the senior cats when they were present. Traveller used to try to follow me, being afraid to miss any possible petting or cuddling time. Serena never tried to follow me; she kept the other two at home! But this morning, when I was out of sight of the house, only one cat was following me. That was Serena, looking distressed. She even meowed--something Real Queen Cats seldom do! "Don't leave us alone," she cried, with body language I've often seen on other cats but never seen on Serena.

I hadn't wanted to leave them alone. If I hadn't made a commitment to host the #GlyphosateAwareness live chat on Twitter on Tuesdays, I wouldn't have come online today.

I locked Serena indoors and left her. I am not a happy camper today either.

Why had such happy, healthy cats suddenly become so miserable? Something they'd eaten, I thought, and then I came down the hill into town and saw the dead grey and brown tops of the few weeds that grow within ten yards of the railroad track. So the wind and Sunday night's rain must have kept the glyphosate vapors away from me, but cats can never resist a poisoned bird or cricket...

We have got to get glyphosate banned in the United States, Gentle Readers. We've won the right to get local bans. Please nag your local councils today.

Essay for a Contest I Can't Win

Hope Clark shared this information about the contest for which I'm not qualified, but some of you readers might be...

"
IRENE ADLER PRIZE
http://www.lucasaykroyd.com/scholarships
NO ENTRY FEE. Deadline April 30, 2019. Pays $1,000 to a woman pursuing a degree in journalism, creative writing, or literature at a recognized post-secondary institution in the U.S. or Canada, based on an essay competition. Submit a 500-word essay in English on one of the following three topics:

“Why are you studying journalism, creative writing, or literature?”
“Which woman inspires you to write despite not being principally known as a writer herself?”
“If you could live anywhere outside North America, where would you go and what would you do there?”
"

Since I'm not enrolled in any college, university, or trade school course I'm obviously disqualified from the scholarship contest, but these prompts appeal to me.

("Who is Hope Clark?" someone might ask. Hope Clark is the pen name of a mystery writer on whose mailing list all aspiring authors want to be. Here's an Amazon link to her new novel...this "stand-alone" detective story teams two characters who appeared separately in earlier novels.)



Out of respect for our readers overseas I'll mention, and then tactfully drop, the fact that I personally wouldn't want to leave North America. The hills of Britain and Ireland appeal to my eyes, and the fundamental weirdness of Iceland is something I might like to visit once, but as a place to live, the only alternative to these United States that I can imagine would be Canada. I like snow. I don't mind rewriting everything in a language I can read but not actually speak. I liked my temporarily Canadian husband enough that I'd have to beware of resenting the rest of the country for not being him. But it wouldn't be home, which is one particular ridge and no other in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

So let's go with the question about the inspiring woman...that'd be Grandma Bonnie Peters, who chose that screen name when she was a proud new grandmother of a child who's now old enough to vote. She warbled about wanting to write a business blog for years. She even sold a few pieces to Associated Content; she was the one who invited me to that site. She never quite got the business site going, and although she's fed me topics over the years, she's never written her own blog.

Nobody is perfect. GBP has faults. I'll mention that to avoid sounding fangirly, and move on.

GBP was an undiagnosed celiac up to the age of 45 or 50 or thereabouts. She was awarded a scholarship to go to college based on her grades in high school, but had an opportunity to go straight into business, instead, and took it. As an empty-nester she went to college and graduated near the head of the class there, too, with a degree in geriatric nursing. She had been a home nurse without the degree and continued to be one with the degree.

She has always made time for a lot of serious fun too. As a Seventh-Day Adventist she taught "Sabbath School" and led "Pathfinder" troops, which are similar to Sunday School and Scouts, in hiking, camping, and swimming. As a diagnosed celiac she taught both vegan and gluten-free cooking schools, branded "Allergy-Ease Foods," some of which were frozen, shipped, and sold around the Eastern States, and briefly sold gluten-free vegan meals in a "Test Kitchen." Decorated with informative fact sheets on the walls instead of pretty pictures, entertaining diners with instructional videos rather than music, the Test Kitchen offered the best meal deals in Tennessee. Sometimes they were even served by the child whose redrawn baby picture was part of the Allergy-Ease logo.

As a home nurse I was GBP's apprentice but, as an adult, I never worked as either a partner or a competitor with her. Her "miracle cures" (she was credited with several) were accomplished by correcting patients' diets; mine (I've been credited with a few) were accomplished by trigger-point massage and exercise. That's not to suggest that GBP didn't walk and work out with patients, too, or that I never showed people how to cook special diet foods. Both approaches will cure some conditions that people have "just had to live with, taking expensive meds that have side effects," for years until they try diet and/or exercise. GBP is generally more wary about touching patients than I am, and I'm generally more wary about recommending food.

She's also been an active grandmother, active member and recruiter for a Senior Hiking Club, farmer, gardener, interior decorator, and lead soprano in multiple church choirs--Seventh-Day Adventists are allowed to attend other churches on Sunday, and through old friendship and barter, first a Baptist church and then a Presbyterian church got GBP to sing in their choirs. She has occasionally dated, since her husband died, but says anyone she'd date "would have to be a card-carrying Adventist."

All the best recipes on this web site are GBP's. She has some good stories, too, if and when she makes a final decision to post them.

What I've written for other publishers has been my own, or theirs, or a combination of both...but this web site is officially at least half GBP's. If she's not written more of her own posts or edited or vetoed more of other people's, that's been her choice.

Tame Cats or Social Cats?

Murrowl from Samantha Scaredycat...

...whose "murrowl" seems to express mixed meanings, which some people seem to think cats don't feel. It seems to mean something like "Greetings, humans, I come in peace, what did you bring me, if anyone but Priscilla touches me any way but the right way for this particular moment I'll bite."

Samantha might have been a roughy-tough little cat athlete like her bigger, stronger daughter Serena if she hadn't grown up among middle school boys, constantly receiving mixed messages about how to play and what's considered polite, rude, or violent behavior. As a result, although I'm fond of her, I can't say she's fit for other people to be around.

If you want to pet a cat while visiting the Cat Sanctuary, pet Traveller, who has a gentle soul, and has almost completely white skin beneath his almost completely black fur, and generally likes being petted by everybody. If he especially likes you he may drool on you, which seems to mean something like "Yes, please wipe the surplus saliva on those hard-to-reach spots behind my ears."

According to the British author Anna Dale, Traveller's color pattern is Amber-Eyed Silver Tip, the creme de la creme of benevolent British witches' cats...although he's American so he may not count.

Frankly a silly book, but worth keeping if you have a cat who looks like our Traveller.

This cat post was brought to you by a local sponsor, and suggested by a Washington Post report on an urban cat rescue project that's doing the "trap, neuter, release" atrocity on most of the city's supposedly feral cats, but at least "social cats are adopted." For those who like the cat interview format...This post has nothing to do with Samantha's or Serena's lives, so I can't base an interview on their behavior. In this post we'll interview Schatzi, another Amber-Eyed Silver Tip, the Queen of a Defunct Cat Sanctuary, the mother of my late lamented kittens Boots and Bruno, and a cat to whom I feel particularly partial.

PK: Schatzi, are you a feral cat, a tame cat, a social cat, or a solitary cat?

Schatzi: Yes. All of the above. Do not try to pick me up.

PK: I won't. I promise. For first-time readers, can you explain how you came to qualify as "all of the above"?

Schatzi: I was born into a family of social cats who were residents at a Cat Sanctuary based in a trailer park. You wondered how we all coexisted so well in the trailer house where our human lived? That's because we had access to another trailer house that was empty, and sometimes the one where our emergency backup human lives, so there was plenty of space for everyone.

I always thought of humans as friendly, helpful creatures. Only one of the humans in the trailer park spent a lot of time cuddling cats. That was the old, sick one who died. She cuddled old Suzie, who was Queen before me, and Suzie's mate. I didn't want to crowd into Suzie's space so I stayed off the human's bed and never cuddled up to anybody. I never was afraid of humans, though. If you had wanted to move into the trailer park with us, I would have wanted you to be my human. I would have liked to have a lap of my own to curl up on.


None of us ever really had to fend for ourselves in an unfriendly world, because all the people in the trailer park knew us and would make sure we didn't starve. Even the dogs and the homeless bum wouldn't hurt us. As long as we didn't cross the road we were quite safe. But we were never anyone's pet, particularly. We were like the feral cats in cities who know where their friends are, but basically live their own lives.

I knew there would be unpleasant changes when our human became ill and people started taking other cats and dogs away, but it's not as if she'd been my pet, is it? There was another one who put out food for me every day. When you tried to tell me I wouldn't be able to live in my own home any more because our human was dead, I told you you were being a poor-spirited silly fool to listen to that sort of human talk. We cats look out for each other. We know our place very well.

I was glad, though, that you took those two kittens I was trying to wean, just when I wanted to keep a distance from them. I wouldn't even have minded being taken to visit them if they hadn't bounded toward me, squeaking for milk! I know kittens normally want to nurse a little after they're old enough to eat kibble, but I didn't want to be tied down forever! And then that big mean-looking Queen Cat came out and glared at me, and I said, "F.T.S. (Forget this stuff!) Now that Suzie's gone, I'm the Queen of my own Cat Sanctuary, and I am going back there!"

And you ran after me whining for me to come back. And that big Tortie cat ran after me saying "Yes, go on back, that's the way you came." I think humans ought to know that, when a cat tells us one thing and a human tells us another thing, we trust the cat. Every time.

So I went home and had my next kittens, and very pretty little Siamese kittens they were too. But then our emergency backup human became ill too! We weren't expecting that! She was taken to the hospital. For a week or two no one remembered to feed us. Everyone but me went to forage in the garbage cans down around the convenience store. And...I don't know what the storekeeper did, where everyone disappeared too, but I do not like the smell of that storekeeper.

PK: Neither do I. She had your relatives trapped and sent to a Humane Pet Genocide Society shelter, is what she did. What can the rest of us do? It's hard to not-shop at a store more than most of us have already been not-shopping at that store.

Schatzi: If everyone came around and hissed and spat and maybe slapped her to get her started, maybe she'd run away! I miss my family.

PK: Who wouldn't?

Schatzi: Our emergency backup human is still alive. Sometimes I go back to see her, and sometimes I stay in another place nearby that nobody knows about. And if you think I'd ever show you where that is, you are a lot more stupid than you look.

PK: I'm not quite that stupid, thank you just the same.

Schatzi: The reason why I came out and meowed at you was to let you know that I'm still alive, and see if you knew anything about my sister Moonglow, my brother, my mate, or my kittens.

PK: Sorry, all I know is that Boots and Bruno were just starting to look better nourished when they died during the glyphosate spraying episode.

Schatzi: My poor babies...I'm sure you did the best you could. Most cats are solitary hunters because they never figure out that they can catch mice and rats more efficiently in teams. You say you've seen Queen Cats hunt together as a team. I've not. I always had my teammates, and Suzie had hers. But it's frustrating always having to hunt alone. Humans wouldn't understand.

PK: Humans are much more social animals than cats are, Schatzi. If we don't understand, it'd be because we'd go too far. Many humans have killed themselves just because they lost their families.

Schatzi: Well, I never heard of a cat being that stupid.

PK: Would you ever consider moving in with me, Schatzi? Heather's gone; she probably did spend some of the time after she left me visiting friends, but her body was found last winter. Samantha and Serena are rough but not mean. Traveller is a sweetheart. You can smell a bit of what they're like on me, can't you?

Schatzi: Yes, all cats can smell the scents--which humans call pheromones, and can isolate from the air but not properly smell--that tell us whether other people are male or female, friendly or not, sick or well, in or out of heat, and so on. But why would I want to move in with a younger Queen Cat? Why wouldn't you consider moving in with me? You might be able to help my emergency backup human when she's sick, and you could bring that year-old male cat...

PK: Well...years ago, a male cat who used to visit my cats decided to move in with us when his human died. If it ever comes to that point, I'm sure you remember the way.

Schatzi: Yes. But I've no plans to follow it! Go and tell those humans who are kidnapping social cats that we have our own family lives and plans, which humans ought to respect and not break up. "Adopting" us, indeed! We have our own mothers, our own mates, and our own kittens! If we adopt new humans for ourselves, that's our choice.

PK: Anyone who was in Takoma Park when I was there would have known that. Unfortunately a lot of the humans who've been swarming into Washington lately would never have fitted into Takoma Park. Some of them sound the kind who would've dug up their azaleas.

Schatzi: We social cats encourage that kind, if they're born into our species, to play in traffic.

PK: It's not just your black coat and yellow eyes I've always liked about you, Schatzi-cat. It's your purrsonality: the way you let me know that you'd just chosen a word I seldom say as your name, the way you found your way back home even though it was more than a mile away, the way you've avoided the horrid storekeeper, the way you've always remembered me but never trusted me to touch you again. You may never have been anyone's pet, but if you ever decided to be a pet, you'd be a once-in-a-lifetime pet.

Schatzi: I've learned some things about humans since my first one died. I've learned that some of them are not friendly after all. Do humans like you really think humans like that storekeeper have any reason to live?

PK: I have no idea. Sometimes they say, like this idjit in Washington, that cats kill birds. Well, nature intended cats to be able to kill very few birds--and to regret it if they ever eat one, because any adult bird a cat can catch, in our part of the world, is already half dead. What actually kills birds in Washington is habitat loss--too many people, and not enough tall trees. If some of those people would move out of the city, as I've done, birds and trees could live there and the summer heat would be less oppressive. What cats actually kill, in Washington, are mice, rats, and roaches. Like all cities Washington has plenty of those already and, if they were to succeed in exterminating their feral cat population, they'd have a lot more. That would mean a lot more tuberculosis, more "colds" and streppy-bugs, for all we know even a resurgence of septicemia--which would definitely thin out the human population in Washington at least. But what a horrible way to do it, when people could just move back to their home towns and use the Internet to do whatever most of them do in Washington.

Schatzi: I don't know or care about Washington. I know the storekeeper thought cats were making their garbage cans dirtier than they were. Hah! Let'em eat rats! Even if I were hungry, even if I wanted to do the people who use that store a favor, those rats are getting far too big for one cat to kill. Some of them could eat a kitten all at once.

PK: Rats that size have been known to rove in packs and attack humans, usually sick ones or little children, while they sleep. People who aren't blessed with teams of social cats had to shoot them or get terriers to kill them. Some humans believe that rats can be controlled by poison. Actually, any time one rat eats poison, the rest of the rat family know what to avoid, so they go on running through the building while the one poisoned rat decomposes slowly in the walls. It's not pleasant to be in a building where people have set out poison for rats. And of course some poisoned rats die outdoors rather than indoors, so they're likely to take a cat, a raccoon, or a kestrel with them when they go. Humans really ought to give thanks to every feral cat they meet, but most especially to the minority of really social cats.

Schatzi: Yes! Exactly! If you're not going to move in and be a real friend, you can go home now.

PK: No fear, Schatzi. Actually I suspect that poor idjit in Washington may have said "social cats" when he meant "friendly cats"...Well, that's a cat blog post, anyway. Can my resident cat friends add anything to it?

Serena: Yes. Tell whoever sent us that fluffy, shaggy, black-and-white mousy sort of thing to send more of them any time! It was the softest, plumpest, tenderest mouse I've ever crunched up!

PK: That's (ugh) your opinion, Serena, and I was not happy to find half of it on the porch. I thought, from the size and coat, something had killed one of your kittens.

Serena: How silly. They're bigger than that by now.

PK: Instead you'd eaten some poor child's neglected pet. I'm not happy with that thought either. Anyway, let me end this cat post with a P.S. to readers: Please do not just set gerbils, hamsters, bunnies, or whatever that poor little fluffball was out at a Cat Sanctuary. Please do not just abandon any animal out at any kind of animal shelter or sanctuary or rescue effort! People offer homes to animals because they like to be kind to animals. That means having a safe place for a new animal to retreat from the rest of us while it decides whether it fits in or not, and the right kind of food for it to eat. Even a Cat or Dog Sanctuary does not necessarily have a place for one more cat or dog in that physical location. We may have a place in mind where it can go, but that place is not necessarily our place. Always ask...both humans and animals.

Some of Schweitzer's ideas have held up better than others. One of the best was "Reverence for Life."

Standing With Rosa: Why Morgan Griffith Should Cosponsor Rosa DeLauro's Bill

One of those "eco" organizations sent me a petition, then claimed the petition couldn't be sent because I don't display live contact information online. (Shouldn't the Internet be required to block numbers from street addresses? If they're not registered with a business, I think that should definitely be required.) Just to protect my own copyrighted material, here's what I wrote on the petition. Gentle Readers, please feel free to paste the text below into your word processing software, fill in your own U.S. Representative's name (duh) and key facts from your own journey toward greater Glyphosate Awareness, and send it. Bonus points if you take the time to print it out on paper, hand-write your name and address and a personal note if you know your Representative personally, put it in an envelope, and mail it.

"
Dear Congressman Griffith,

As you know, I’m alarmed by the lack of regulation of glyphosate, a pesticide that can cause cancer and is sickening a lot of your faithful constituents here in the Ninth District--even though some are bitterly clinging to their poison and indignantly denying that their chronic medical conditions flare when they spray!  To address this issue, I urge you to cosponsor the “Keep Food Safe from Glyphosate Act of 2019” introduced by Congresswoman DeLauro.

Glyphosate is toxic for human health and the environment. In early 2015 The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — the cancer evaluation arm of the World Health Organization — convened a meeting of 17 scientific experts from 11 countries to review the cancer data regarding glyphosate. The IARC experts unanimously voted to classify glyphosate as a probable (Group 2A) human carcinogen.  In 2017, California listed glyphosate as a chemical known to cause cancer.  The EPA calculated that 1-to-2-year-old children are likely to have the highest exposure to glyphosate.

Right now, over 11,200 people with cancer are suing Monsanto. They allege that their exposure to Roundup®—a glyphosate pesticide product— is to blame. Just this past month, a federal jury found Monsanto’s Roundup® to be a “substantial factor” in causing Edwin Hardeman’s cancer and demanded that Monsanto pay him $80 million dollars in damages.

Glyphosate is used in over 750 herbicide products and applied to fields in the U.S. at over 250 million pounds annually. Apart from significant risks to human health, the U.S. Geological Survey routinely finds glyphosate in U.S. waterways. Ecological data also indicates that glyphosate and glyphosate-formulated products are toxic to aquatic organisms and are extremely lethal to amphibians. Independent studies have found concentrations of glyphosate in human urine and breast milk. Recent studies even indicate glyphosate has the potential to be even more harmful in combination with other chemicals.

In the past 19 years, glyphosate use in U.S. agriculture has increased 20-fold. Glyphosate’s long term impacts are just starting to be apparent with monarch decline serving as just one example.  Glyphosate is widely used among the monarch’s migration route — virtually wiping out milkweed, the only food young monarchs eat. A recent report found monarch butterflies would need a 5-fold increase to recover from the risk of quasi-extinction.

Monsanto’s glyphosate is harming our environment and the very ecosystems we depend on for sustainable food and farming systems, it’s harming our health and could be showing up on our plates at unsafe levels. In fact, numerous tests have revealed glyphosate residues on cereal, granola bars and other foods that kids and families typically eat at levels that are higher than some scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety.

In addition, I’m concerned that our federal government has even gone as far as to try to cover up residues of glyphosate in our food. Leaked FDA documents show that FDA officials found trace amounts of glyphosate on nearly every food that it tested. The lab that found over-tolerance levels on corn and some trace amounts of glyphosate on oats and honey was suspended and re-assigned to another project. All the while, these important results were omitted from the FDA’s official assessment scheduled to be published later this year.

We need action now. I urge you to cosponsor the “Keep Food Safe from Glyphosate Act of 2019,” which would increase USDA testing for glyphosate especially for kid-friendly foods, create a permanent tolerance level of 0.1ppm—the lowest level of residue exposure recommended by the EPA—for oats (a food commonly ingested by children) and prevent its continuous widespread usage by changing glyphosate labels to include that “it is unlawful to apply this product prior to the harvest of oats.”

Actually, it should be unlawful to apply glyphosate after any food crop is visible above the soil, and especially in the presence of Ninth District agricultural specialties like tomatoes, strawberries, and apples.

Sincerely,
Priscilla King
VA, 24251
"

For those who care about such things, Rosa DeLauro is a Democrat from Connecticut. So? Let that be a challenge to Southern Republicans to get tighter regulations on this poison!

Tom DeWeese Exposes Poison in the Green New Deal (Edited)

Here comes a reader-funded rant, including part of an e-mail in which Tom DeWeese shows how and why the Green New Deal is actually Poison Green, or anti-Green...

Remember Wendell Berry's wise advice? The major issue for us today--however much it's obscured by George Soros' efforts to keep the undead Communist Party shuffling around--is whether we'll address human overpopulation in what this web site calls Green or Greedhead ways. (This web site is not going to give up either "liberal" or "Green" to the supporters of Big Totalitarian Government, which is inherently Greedhead. Wendell Berry liked the terms "nesters" or "boomers"; since "boomers" is often used as a neutral word for everyone born between 1945 and 1970, that pair of labels doesn't work for me.)

Green ways mean more enlightened private ownership of land as small farms. We have the potential to actualize the biblical prophet Isaiah's vision of a paradise where everyone had "his own vine and his own fig tree." This means less contact and thus less conflict among people and less need for governmental regulations; not eliminating the rule of law, but greatly reducing the demand for it. Overpopulation can be addressed by simply respecting women's real choice--which, when women aren't being bullied by men, must always be to start only as many babies as it's feasible for them to bring up properly.

Greedhead ways mean bigger government taking over more land, herding more people into miserable, unsustainable, overcrowded neighborhoods where surplus population can be quickly eliminated by a few more events like Hurricane Katrina or the 2001 attack on New York City, and taking control of the medical care system in such a way as to eliminate "antisocial elements" (e.g. older people, poor people, religious people, political dissidents, any category the people in power might happen not to like) with what-a-pity, what-a-coincidence malpractice--as it might be using contaminated vaccine for those mandatory vaccinations people are currently screaming that we all need to have to protect the immune-compromised. (Tip: With or without vaccinations, all healthy people are and always will be walking germ cultures that can kill the immune-compromised. The immune-compromised can best extend their life expectancies by quarantining themselves.)

Greedhead ways appeal to the very young, who don't remember how they have (NOT) worked when tried in other countries. Reportedly Congresschick Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez adorably lisped to reporters that she thought eighty years ought to be long enough for anyone to live. (Revision: There's no documentation that she said those words. The famous "quote" appears to be a paraphrase, which AOC's fans now say shows a misunderstanding. But what she actually said could easily be interpreted as a "dog whistle" endorsement of that idea.) Well, funnily enough, I think that for young people who can't foresee the generation after them replacing "eighty" (or "a hundred and twenty" for that matter) with "forty," thirty years is probably long enough to live. You don't see that one coming, you seriously need to throw yourself on Christian concepts of the right to life, because on Darwinian concepts you do not have any.

Though it's not that Republicans or cultural "conservatives" aren't seduced by greedhead notions and totalitarian power grabs either. (Tangent alert: this news story has bothered me.) This week Congress had to vote on a horrible proposal to require life support for any wiggling fetus that was made visible by either spontaneous or voluntary abortion after the tissue mass had reached a size suggesting it had been growing for six weeks or more. We are not talking here about fetuses that even raise anyone's hope that they're going to become precious living babies. A six-week fetus is a stomach-turning blob of glup, likely to be found in a toilet bowl, where it would raise complaints against a co-worker who failed to make sure it flushed down on the first try. Which species it belongs to is not obvious to the naked eye, even if anyone got close enough to confirm that it was a fetus as distinct from something dropped on the floor by a careless butcher, which few people would care to do. A six-month fetus does, however, usually clean up looking like a baby, raising heartbreaking hopes that it can be nursed along until it becomes one. Boys are more often conceived than girls but less often viable; a lot of spontaneously aborted six-month fetuses look like the sons parents wanted.

Twenty years ago I worked on a document urging more support for efforts to nurture aborted six-month fetuses into life. Twenty years ago I lived near a hospital where doctors were doing that--or thought they were. I would have loved to report that by now some of those maybe-babies had become babies, then children, then teenagers, and were now in college. Thousands of Americans have been waiting for that to be reported. It is not being reported. It is not happening. Much as many of the people who've seen six-month fetuses want them to be babies, to wear the clothes and answer to the names they've picked out for the babies they wanted those fetuses to be...a baby is a living thing, and a fetus outside its mother's body is not a living thing. If incubated fetuses feel anything, they probably feel the kind of pain adult humans fear being dragged through when they make those "Living Wills" demanding that they be allowed to die in peace. It might be worth subjecting them to that kind of pain if they were going to live. They are not. Few survive for a week after being removed from life support.

So, say a fetus, like that premature kitten Samantha-cat and I spent a few hours trying to resuscitate, this time last year, has wiggled before it died. In the natural course of events it wouldn't be able to breathe and would die in a hour or so, whenever the oxygen in its blood gives out. Artificial stimulation, like my gently stroking and Samantha's vigorously licking that kitten, might get it to wiggle longer, even take a breath or make a squeaky noise. But it's not going to keep breathing, squeaking, and wiggling on its own power. It's a dead thing being artificially forced to move. Nature has not actually given it a "right to life."

I know it's not easy to accept the fact that a fetus is never going to be a baby. Especially not when it's grown close enough to look like a miniature baby. Almost every living thing on Earth, including some members of predator species, has parental instincts that make us want to nurture babies of any kind, at least until we can hand them off to other people. You want, I want, almost everyone wants, to wipe the squick off that maybe-baby and snuggle it. If we're not careful we'll start calling ourselves its Mama--er, um, Papa, or Nana...and we'll cry when it dies, too, even if it belongs to a different species, even if it's the offspring of members of other species we didn't think needed to reproduce.

Which is how it's possible for our Congressional Representatives to have fallen for this horrible bill, and also why it's vital that they kill it. How long can a fetus be forced to suffer on life support? Months. How much does it cost? Thousands. At whose expense? Probably not that of the men who bully the majority of women who make that "choice" into "choosing" abortion...

Be nice to your U.S. Representatives this week, Gentle Readers. They have had a rough week. This bill made you feel like a monster of cruelty if you knew better than to support it, and like a monster of cruelty if you thought ahead far enough to oppose it. Nobody should have had to vote on it. This bill came straight out of the Pet Sematary (I'll pass on the remake, but readers who don't remember the original movie might want to buy tickets). Nobody can really blame the kid for wanting to revive the cat, or the father for wanting to revive the kid, but when they do...you just have to keep telling yourself that it is, thank Heaven, only a movie, and all the blood is fake. In real life the artificially undead just lie around "vampirizing" funds; they don't recover enough vitality to attack the living.



I do understand, pro-life readers. Thirty-five years ago I added to my own mother's misery by not wanting to accept that nature did not intend me to have a baby brother, just like some of you. If the option of tormenting that little thing for a year had existed, I would have wanted to have a real baby brother, to be named John Kevin in honor of his godfather John Kerby, and learn to sip milk from the same cup I'd used, and so on and so forth, enough to want people to chip in and pay for that. Thirty-five years ago the option hadn't been tried, and hadn't failed every time. By now we've had the opportunity to learn...

This is the kind of thing I mean by "Poison Green." This web site once identified five shades of green we don't want to be: Sick Green, Bitter Green...or Poison Green, the color of poison ivy, whose bright green leaves have an undertone of deep red.

Red only got to be the Republican Party color on television after the failure of the Soviet Union. In the twentieth century everyone knew red was the Russian color. The Soviet color. The color of tyranny as opposed to American Democracy.

That's the undertone of Poison Green. Poison Green ideas take a nice healthy ecologically sound idea, like the idea that living things have a right to life, and poison it with a fascist boondoggle, like the idea that everybody needs to be taxed to allow the federal government to oversee a plan to fund a failed medical experiment by refusing to concede dead things' right to die in peace.

Generally anything that increases the size, funding, or power of our federal government is likely to be an unsustainable boondoggle. Our federal government has already outgrown sustainability.

Generally anything that increases the total population level, or the level of population density in our cities, is likely to be a literally deadly boondoggle. Already we have increasing homosexual and transsexual lobbying groups. That these groups have any influence is due to their overwhelming tendency to skew rich, White, and male--identifying with a "sexual minority" gives rich White men a chance to grab back whatever they've conceded to historic victim groups--but that they have any size...Well, in animal populations, of almost any species, sterility and "sexual minority" behavior appear whenever the population has exceeded its optimal density. That these reactions are common across species suggests that, whatever we may have to say about certain voluntary behaviors among "sexual minority" lobbyists, the reaction is merely biological and should be considered without hostility. That they are common to overcrowded populations suggests that we may need to be planning new residential construction along guidelines like "Every child should have a room of its own" and "Every child should have its own section of the family's vegetable garden."

In animal populations, if non-reproductive sexual behavior fails to relieve population density, we see increasing incidences of diseases and patterns of really bizarre behavior. Some species collapse from bacterial or viral plagues; some rove in packs, consuming all the food available in one place and moving on, which works for ants and grasshoppers better than it would for humans; many start eating things they don't normally eat, often cannibalizing their own kind, especially the offspring of others of their own kind.

In order to prevent mass deaths from plagues and violent insanity, as well as natural disasters and acts of war, we need to be moving away from the trend for young people to live in apartments after marriage. We need to recover the perspective that read Kay Thompson's Eloise as a sad story about a poor little rich child, and Elizabeth Enright's Four-Storey Mistake as a story about how parents should try to bring up children.





I posted some time ago that "we need more affordable housing," and then, having thought better of it, that we need "houses, not 'housing' projects." Regular readers will recognize this as a change of word choices, not of visions. What I have in mind is the number of houses that have recently been repossessed by money lenders because people weren't able to pay for them. We need to keep these private, fully detached, often very nice houses standing, not to replace them with stack-and-pack apartment blocks. We need to lower the price of houses back to a level where it becomes normal for young working parents to be able to afford private homes where they can bring up healthy children.

I've said for many years that although I don't support the idea of requiring government to oversee these things, I think we need to be severely limiting population density, especially in Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, where greedheads were starting to ruin the quality of life before I left. After a few years of "growth" and increasing population density, newspapers reported, Arlington became one of those places like New York, or San Francisco, where someone had a heart attack at a bus stop and lay where he fell for hours before anyone noticed that he was dead. In the Arlington of small, cheap, shabby but private houses where I was a Bright Young Thing, if someone fell over, or failed to move when the last bus left a bus stop, regardless of age or race or gender, anyone would have offered to help the person. But callousness about the lives of living members of our own species is one of those behavior changes that set in when sterile sexual behaviors fail to reduce population density.

Poison Greens have been screaming for a long time about herding people into urban "sacrifice zones" in order to preserve the biodiversity of human-hostile species, like wolves and bears, to whom they babble about returning all the nicer, cleaner parts of North America. If anyone seriously thinks the long-term strategy behind this type of "social planning" is to benefit bears, I'd like to sell that person this utterly fantastic bridge I just inherited, in Brooklyn. No, the human-friendly parts of North America will be reclaimed by more humans, probably not as nice or as ecologically conscious as the old farmers who are being urged to move into nice little apartments, certainly not with any interest in preserving a democratic republic or sustaining a common wealth for ourselves, our neighbors, and our posterity. Greedheads want to grab the wealth now, and to Hell with posterity...although Hell, Michigan, is probably too livable for them to be willing to respect private families' right to keep it.

Personally, although I've been monitoring these things for a long time before I considered blogging, I think of "social planning" as a sort of rest from my current field of study and activism, which is glyphosate. (Yes, there are connections, on a spiritual level if not on a physical level...but youall do not have to read my private prayers here.) I note that the desire to impose our "social planning" on other people, in any way more aggressive than writing science fiction about it, is an abnormal, unhealthy symptom that's probably caused by overcrowding. Monitoring the unsustainable idiocies of the "social planners" has been Tom DeWeese's field, so here are his words about the French activist group, Novethic, which he says is linked to Cutie-Pie Ocasio-Cortez's silly little "Green New Deal" bill:

"

I have discovered an explosive new document hidden on a French Non-governmental organizations’ (NGO) website.

Yes, France has its own Green New Deal, and foreign NGO’s are often more open and honest in their intentions than American NGOs who hide their real goals in innocent-sounding rhetoric.

And remember, these Agenda 21/Green New Deal policies are GLOBAL. The whole world is targeted to enforce these policies. 

Here are just a few of the details this French green group – called Novethic – has revealed of the insane regulations that will be the used to enforce our own Green New Deal. (I’m quoting them directly from the document):

• “New single family home construction, except trailers, prohibited. New buildings must be exclusively condos with a maximum per capita living area of 320 square feet.”  

Remember, I warned that under Smart Growth programs now taking over every city in the nation that single-family homes are a target for elimination, to be replaced by high-rise stack and pack apartments in the name of reducing energy use. The Green New Deal calls for government control of every single home, office and factory to be torn down or retrofit them to comply with massive environmental energy regulations.      

• “For short trips less than 3 miles, the standard should be ‘soft transport’ (bicycles)… Mandatory fixed working hours in order to simplify the implementation of public transport and carpooling.”

 In opposing Smart Growth plans in your local community, I said the main goal was to eliminate cars, to be replaced with bikes, walking, and light rail trains.
The Green New Deal calls for the elimination of the internal combustion engine.  

• “Quotas to limit the consumption of imported products. Especially coffee, chocolate, exotic fruits…ban on substitutable processed foods, sodas, all junk food, hamburgers, pizzas, pasta, chicken nuggets…Meat consumption to decrease by 10% per year from 2020 to 55 pounds per person per year in 2030…the consumption of dairy products will follow the same trend.”  

Most recently I warned that the beef industry is a direct target for elimination. It will start with mandatory decreases in meat consumption until it disappears form our daily diet. The consumption of dairy will follow. Since the revelation of the Green New Deal, the national debate is now over cattle emissions of methane and the drive to eliminate them from the planet. Controlling what we eat is a major part of the Green New Deal.  

The Sustainablists have boldly thrown off their cloaking devices and admitted that their goal isn’t just “voluntary environmental protection.”

Instead, they are now openly revealing that their real goal is socialism and global control, just as I’ve been warning about for these past twenty seven years.

Now they are determined to take congressional action to finally make it the law of the land.  

Keep in mind, each of the quotes in bold above is from a real document detailing the extent of these tyrannical policies intended to destroy our culture, control how you live, and what you eat.

Over these years elected officials have listened to the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, ICLEI, the American Planning Association, and many more, as they assured that their plans were just environmental protection - just good policy for future generations. Well, now the truth is right in front of you. There is no question of who and what is behind this. And no doubt as to what the final result will be.
"

More than one person or group can, of course, get behind an idea. Poison Green groups' agendas usually come wrapped up inside a True Green idea, like walking or bicycling to work, with toxic ideas, like forcing all working people to live in cities, hidden inside...but there is no doubt that crowding-crazy Europeans hope to be the ones to take over the sweet little old family farms we've let ourselves be told were unaffordable, or unsustainable, or in need of too much "greening up" because regulations were not actually written for the purpose of greening up anything.

This is not an issue we can safely trust to Donald Trump, Gentle Readers. It is one we need to keep in the minds of our elected officials. We need to demand policies that return more families to single-family homes, preferably True Green small sustainable farms. To pick just one example, people can walk and bicycle more without being herded into cities and forced to go to work at specified hours; they can work at and from their homes, and save money by renting cars, when they want them, from a community fleet.

Glyphosate Awareness: Flaws in the Ramazzini Study

Yes, somebody found them. For new readers, the Ramazzini Institute studied the incidence of birth defects in rats whose mothers had been exposed to glyphosate, and found that, yes, a lot of those little rats came into this world looking a lot uglier than normal baby rats. Like, some were born without heads. So A Chemist In Langley is quibbling because people like me reported this as evidence supporting a claim of which I'd been skeptical at first--that glyphosate causes major birth defects. Ohhh, ooohhh, don't take it seriously yet, it's only a pilot study, we need to kill a lot more rats, and meanwhile celiac humans need to lose more blood, and stroke survivors need to lose more ground, and "chronic" Lyme Disease patients need to be disabled longer, and thyroid patients need to gain more weight and lose more competence, and migraine patients need to have more headaches, and...The Chemist's quibbles are valid but I think everyone can understand why we don't need to take time to bother about them. When a house is on fire, you don't stand around trying to measure the precise temperature of the flames.

https://achemistinlangley.net/2019/03/24/how-understanding-type-i-and-type-ii-errors-and-p-values-helps-in-assessing-the-conclusions-of-the-ramazzini-institute-13-week-pilot-study-on-glyphosate/

I posted this comment to the Chemist's blog, where it's "awaiting moderation." Since I don't trust people who are still defending glyphosate, however objectively and scientifically, I think I'll re-post it here, free of charge, in the public interest...

"
Nice clarification. Of course, we have to read these things in context. The Ramazzini study simply destroyed a lot of rats whose immediate reactions left them unfit for the study of effects on the offspring of rats who showed no immediate reactions. Across species, glyphosate consistently produces a wide range of immediate reactions that include almost everything from itching to sudden death. Each individual reaction is statistically rare, but the majority of all lifeforms have undesirable reactions.

I am The Celiactivist because, unlike the majority of suddenly "gluten-sensitive" (or glyphosate-sensitive) people these days, I really do have a very rare gene that's harmless when I'm able to avoid symptom triggers. In the natural world, that's easy: I just don't eat wheat. Mind you, that has ruled out most social eating, but being healthy is worth that. But suddenly, since about 2011 when glyphosate spraying got out of hand in the U.S.,  I started having celiac reactions to lots of things that contained no wheat--even to air and water, after glyphosate pollution. Why was I having those reactions? I wrote to food manufacturers about cross-contamination, talked to neighbors about sprays, most recently stood in an open-air market and watched about half the crowd show sudden visible reactions after "Roundup" vapors blew through the place. Long story short: Glyphosate is the only common factor in my now out-of-control celiac disease, which I've worked hard to keep from *being* a disease. It's also the only common factor in a lot of acquaintances' chronic problems, like chronic Lyme Disease, or the new form of chronic mononucleosis. It's *not* the sole and whole cause of many chronic health problems--yet it noticeably makes them worse, in a different individual way, every time. Every. Blinkin'. Time! So yes, I *am* dam' mad about efforts to defend glyphosate by clutching to statistical straws. We need to step back, look at the big picture, see that glyphosate is making everyone sick, and stop torturing animals to find out exactly how one chemical can have so many different effects.

Perhaps it's time to bust a few more myths. I'm not an anti-capitalist organization. I'm an individual who actually believes capitalism is best checked by moral enlightenment. And I'm willing to admit it if my hypothesis *were* to be disproved, as it might be by repeated independent lab tests showing that my celiac blood did not react to glyphosate the same way it does to wheat gluten, only moreso. I think that's about as likely to happen as snow on the fourth of July, but if it did happen, I'd be willing to report it...

So why are these corporations not willing to fund the test? Hah. I think we all know *that*.
"

Feh. Today's glyphosate news was actually encouraging on the whole, but toward the end of the live chat I met a troll who, however clueless and however well paid, made me feel really, seriously angry--not just a passing celiac rage, which last seconds, rarely minutes, and deserve mention only as a symptom, but a genuine permanent belief that the troll ought to be forcibly fed a vat of glyphosate, on live television. How can God allow these creatures to go on forcing other people to be sick? Why doesn't God just redirect all the nasty glyphosate reactions into the glyphosate shills? I want to go online and read that Werner Bauman has developed pseudo-celiac sprue, Kevin Folta has lost his job and driver's license due to out-of-control narcolepsy, and the scum who called for censorship of the glyphosate discussion on Twitter is reporting, after three months of total paralysis, that it spent the whole time in pain and trying to scream. I don't want anybody to rush out and murder these people; I want them to suffer, and I want them to know with every writhe and every groan that they did it to themselves and they deserve it. I feel like signing off with the classic

"Yours faithfully,

DISGUSTED."