Tuxie Thursday: Bad Week at the Cat Sanctuary

Sommersburr, the big old black and white neutered tomcat ("tuxedo-patterned" or "tuxie"), has a lot to say. He sounds as if he really used to "talk" to some human, in the past. All I understand of his "meows" is that he's dissatisfied with a lot of things.

Well, this week, that makes sense. I'm never sure exactly what Sommersburr is dissatisfied with, apart from the Cat Sanctuary not being his home and me not being his human, but I can imagine...a Cat Sanctuary Interview post. (This is not a "conservative" post. It's about human relations, so it's political, but it's not been claimed by a political party.)

PK: So, you don't like the generic version of Purina Cat Chow as much as you like the generic version of Purina Kitten Chow. I'm sorry about that. I'll pick up another bag of Kitten Chow as soon as I go back to the store that sells it.

Sommersburr: Well, that, and also everything else.

PK: You are now a writer's cat so why don't you tell the readers about "everything else"?

Sommersburr: Where do I start? I mean "everything else." I miss my human. I miss my home. I miss my long-gone youth. A flea was biting me; thank you for chasing it off the top of my head, anyway. I feel bad that Serena feels bad.

Serena: Oh I'll get over it. Don't mind me.

Sommersburr: Well, she's a large cat and carried it well, but when she started to look pregnant, did she ever look pregnant.

Serena: Without uttering a single "meow" I told our human to clean out the box where I spent my kittenhood and set up a place for my kittens. She was a good human and is now allowed to pick me up, which I've not allowed since she sent my two little Tuxie kittens away. She watched them wriggling around inside me and asked, "Are there four of them?"

Silver: If I'd been in that sort of shape there might have been four. Or maybe only two. I'm still growing.

Serena: There were eight of them. Four male, four female. One little male, who looked like his great-grandfather, was born dead. The other seven were all full-sized and very lively.



Some bigger than others, and as you see, if there hadn't been so many of them they might have waited another day or two to be born.  Still, they were crowded inside and wanted to come out all at once, all during one night. They could have been stronger when they were born, but they were far enough along that they could have lived, too. They came out the way I've been told I was when I was born, tiny and wrinkly, but "a hand full" for the human. They all had pink skin, and all seven living ones had spots of color on their backs and heads. It was a long night but the human looked in at me and said, "What a nice clean warm nest you've made! I'll leave you alone. I know you know what you're doing." The air grew very cold but I kept my babies warm..

Sommersburr: Then, just as the sun started to come up and we thought it might be safe for Serena to go out for a drink of water, there was one of those horrible smells humans seem to like in the air...the one they use to make the kudzu and Spanish Needles grow.

Swimmer: The human sneezed a lot. I heard. I was near the door and I sneezed too.

Serena: I came back before my babies were cold, and every one of their hearts had stopped. And the human came out to serve breakfast. I said, "Look at my babies! Do something!" She said, "I'm not going to bother your babies, Serena. I'll look at them when it's not so cold. Wow, the air temperature actually is below freezing. What seems like an early spring aaalways leads to a frost in early May..." I bit her hand. I said, "No, look at them!"

PK: It's hard to tell whether kittens are dead or sleeping. We brought them inside, all snug in their blanket, and set them near the heater and tried to resuscitate them. No use.

Serena: It was my fault. She wanted to put the nest box in the office room, where I had spent my infancy in it.

Silver: Maybe the walls would have kept out the poison vapor along with the cold...

Swimmer: But who knew that either of those things was going to happen? And what if the babies had lived through this poisoning and then died in the next one? We smell that smell almost every month from one direction or another.

Sommersburr: I never saw anyone die of it before.

Serena: Some kittens do. These two, and the other two who were born with them, were ill for a few days. The human gave them charcoal. Since then Silver's not been quite so ill again, but Swimmer feels it every time.

Sommersburr: Well, so do I actually, but not as badly as little Swimmer does.

PK: I feel it too, of course. It's never killed me yet but it's worse than any silly little chest cold like this virus that's got all the humans' knickers twisting this spring. Monday and Tuesday were beautiful days but I didn't feel like hauling the laptop back into town. Wednesday was wet, and even today, waiting for a car pool, I felt a couple of waves of nausea in the morning even though I had nothing much to lose from that. While as for the kittens...Sometimes kittens do go into comas and come out again. I didn't bury them until Wednesday. They still hadn't gone stiff but they'd started to smell nasty. Burying kittens in the rain made me think of a poem. Whoever poisoned all of us, on a night when no green plant was going to grow anyway, should not see the sun again; he should die in the darkness--painfully!--and be buried in the rain.

Serena: That wouldn't bring my babies back. Well, if their father and I live so long we can try again.


PK: Wouldn't it be nice if more kittens lived than died? Then you wouldn't have to keep trying to have kittens and lose them...if the wind didn't carry poison vapors. Wouldn't you like just to rest and be a grandmother?

Serena: Hah! How old was that cat my mother called old Heather when she started taking long naps every day?

PK: Six or seven. A middle-aged cat. To humans every month of a kitten's first year is like a year of our lives, and every year after that is like at least seven of our years.

Serena: Why would I want to retire earlier than she did? I'm barely full-grown. I'll be all right when the lactation cycle is over. I'm starting to feel like playing with Silver and Swimmer already--only not for very long.

Sommersburr: Isn't she a splendid Queen Cat?! I wish I could be the father of her kittens.

PK: I'm glad you can't. The world needs no more of your DNA, Sommersburr. But I have to wonder whether any amount of DNA could ever make another cat like Serena. She is amazing. Serena, can you imagine a day, however far off in the future, when you'd be content to stop giving birth to kittens and only adopt them, the way our Founding Queen Black Magic used to do? A lot of kittens get shoved into shelters at this time of year--and you can't imagine what awful places they are. Sometimes our readers try to give me guilt trips because we can't rescue more of those kittens. Could you adopt kittens as babies, the way you adopted Traveller as a brother and Sommersburr as a grandpa?

Serena: Not right away, because I was poisoned too, and my lactation cycle is shutting off. Later on I might consider it. It would depend on the kittens. And of course, even though you humans are trying to keep a distance from one another right now, you have suffered enough...

PK: I have indeed. If anyone wants to send kittens to us, they need to tell me about it first...not just wander up here and dump kittens out of a truck!

Sommersburr: And they should understand that even out in the country like this, where we're all so happy and so healthy, most of the time, the wind still carries poison! What do humans call what they need to do about that?

Everyone, loudly and clearly, including the non-talking spirit of Grandma Bonnie: BAN GLYPHOSATE!

The Brain-Child That Looks Like Its Father

So I read this madly speculative, mostly light historical fantasy novel that leads through a chapter of pure tragedy and then speeds back into its predominant hopeful whimsical tone: The Impermanence of Lilies by Daniel Yeo. (When I get a new laptop the Amazon link will go here.)

What can I say? Yeo has a wild imagination. He's done a lot of reading; he's scrambled the facts that ought to underlie an historical novel. It's so easy to look up those facts on Wikipedia that I suspect he scrambled them deliberately to establish that his central character is an Unreliable Narrator. At what point will you stop wondering "Is this supposed to be a novel about a real person in history?" and start wondering "Is this Unreliable Narrator going to unmask as a lunatic, or just end this preposterous tale as the frantically romantic young man he seems to be?" If you like speculative fiction, read it and find out...it's a new book, and Yeo deserves encouragement.

When Jee Leong Koh sent it to me for review, I sent back a review based on my notes on (1) the first incredulous reading and (2) a second, fascinated reading. It's bizarre, it's surreal, it's the pick-up line to end all pick-up lines. It leaves me wondering what Yeo will do next.

A bright, modest young man from Singapore (whose name is not Daniel Yeo) read The Impermanence of Lilies too, made some observations that have more of a "literary" (and Singaporean) tone, and proposed a mash-up of his notes and mine. I thought his name ought to appear in the by-line too. He demurred. A higher percentage of the words in the mash-up came from my longer review.

The resulting review is now live at https://singaporeunbound.org/blog/2020/4/15/titanic-singaporean-imagination .

It's mine, mostly, but it doesn't read like my voice. It doesn't read like an American voice. It has picked up a Singaporean accent. Well, why not, when the review is of a Singaporean book?

I can only compare the feeling of reading it to looking at a child, knowing it to be your own child, but seeing it, at times, as a miniature of its other parent.

Producing this little mental "baby" together with a man I've never met, while I've been mostly isolated in Virginia and he's been isolated in New York City, was fun; I'd do it again.

Fellow Writers...

...you probably know that Hope Clark is a generous source of tips, leads, and references. But I was going through some e-mails I'd saved, deciding what needed to be printed and/or filed before Yahoo self-destructs, and I found this graphic with the invitation to gank it. Y'know, I think this web site is due for a simple graphic.

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Full disclosure: I receive no commissions from your use of Hope's Paypal link. If, however, you want to pay for the GORGEOUS Glyphosate Awareness Monthly Newsletter, which is also the trailer for a forthcoming *BOOK* about butterflies, please send those U.S. postal orders to P.O. Box 322 or, while Saloli the Message Squirrel is lurking in her virtual oak tree, you may e-mail Pris365@yahoo (which is no longer a working Paypal address) for current Paypal instructions.

And here's your Conservative Content for this week...My income is still outrageously, preposterously low. That's not changed. I'm still qualified to write a book about how it's even possible to survive on such a ridiculous, un-American income. You're still encouraged to help fund the things that have been on my personal wish list for years, like getting the older part of my home re-wired so I could have a refrigerator again. Most Americans would consider most of these things "essential, survival needs" enough to go into debt for them. I've been just waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more...not very happily waiting.

At the same time, I know a lot of other online writers out there are...very likely collecting more money than I am, if you count the dollars alone. But they're enjoying it less, because they're still accustomed to having and spending more; their expenses are higher; if they've gone onto one of those bank-managed payment plans people get sucked into in the cities these days, they may have ten times as much money flow into their bank accounts, have it sucked out again by all the (non-essential) expenses they've agreed to make automatic payments to, and have less money to take to the grocery store.

I owe my existence--let alone the fact that, most of the time, it is basically a pleasant existence, that most of the time I actually feel pretty cheerful--to being fiscally conservative. I don't spend money unnecessarily on myself or on my business. I don't think the United States government, or any individual State government, should spend money unnecessarily either. I think a lot of the people who are wailing about their reduced incomes, prospective unemployment, prospective business failures, etc., actually need to learn more about how they too can live on less money.

I do think we all need to help cushion the blow for these people--especially since far too many of them have children, yes, often more than one child per working parent.

They're being told, "Stay home and homeschool your children."

Many of them could and should have been doing that already, but (1) they've never planned or prepared to do it well, so they are predictably not doing it well; and (2) those top-down, one-size-fits-almost-none diktats don't work very well in a democracy.

They're not merely wailing, but screaming and howling. "Stay home and homeschool our children on what? The handouts the federal government is promising won't pay the rent on our flats for another month!"

(Survival tip: People who are either paying rent or living in flats aren't ready to have children.Yes, that means that if parents want to have time to enjoy being grandparents, they should help reduce the cost of real estate, generally, and also help pre-pay any thirty-year mortgages the younger generation may have had to sign.)

Online writing is a great way to earn money if you can keep your cost of living down to a level online writing will support, which definitely rules out expenses like having children. As an online writer you can afford a major disability if the monthly cost of whatever treatment or compensation or assistive devices it requires is less than, say, $50. You might be able to have a car if you could get somebody to pay specifically for driving it, e.g. by using it as a taxi or wrapping it in paid ads; otherwise, I think most full-time online writers get used to walking everywhere, because few of us can afford to live in cities that have bus service.

How can we help people make the transition from what mindful Americans have known for a long time was an unsustainable economic-bubble lifestyle (remember The Waste Makers?) to a more sustainable lifestyle? Not by bankrupting the federal government or the state government. We really need to be thinking about the fact that the twentieth century's economic boom floated an unsustainable amount of government on which we need to cut back drastically. We can't afford for people to make dependence on government handouts a lifestyle.

We need to get creative about ways to help people get through the Great Artificial Depression. That means that those of us who have food this week should be thinking about the people we know, how many of them have food this week, and what goods or services we can pay people for to ensure that they have food this week.

Real conservatives oppose handouts. Real conservatives don't allow their neighbors to "need" handouts.

I don't find much food that didn't grow in my own not-a-lawn that I can eat, these days, but since the not-a-lawn is not quite wet enough to grow rice I really like being able to buy some groceries at a store. I am also very fond of my one electric light, and of being able to type things into a computer at home. Those and property taxes are my cost of living. It's low. You should show appreciation of my talent and support for my work by all means, and the good news is that for a lot of people that won't rule out showing support for other deserving writers as well.

Not all people are or should try to be writers. Not all people are or should try to be online. When my income exceeds my cost of living...well, I've tried to save out a little to put into expanding the Internet Portal; before the virus panic I'd scraped out enough to look at another physical store site. I have, whenever possible, made time to buy a cup of overpriced coffee "to go" from the cafe that employs the mothers of the two adorably well behaved children. Somebody's paying me for what writing I can do with my drastically reduced online time, so I'm paying those women something, passing it on. If I were being paid more I might be able to pay other people to do more of what they do--things like driving, or replacing roofs, or rewiring houses. Or providing a phone and Internet connection to a physical store.

Readers who still have incomes should definitely support this web site but there are others you should consider supporting, too. I've tweeted about the Singapore Unbound site's fund for Asian-American artists and authors. Why is that site ethnically specific? When a web site exists to publish the work of authors and artists within that specific literary niche, in a Great Artificial Depression it becomes necessary for those publishers to try to make sure those authors' and artists' children eat regularly. Those of Amy Tan's fans who have gone on to discover an interest in modern Asian literature will want to help the young writers we've discovered, but that in no way implies that our support for the people who are desperately trying to become full-time online writers this summer needs to be ethnically specific. I don't happen to have been working with a site dedicated to introducing modern British, European, African, or Latin American writers to the U.S. market, but sites like that exist. Maybe you know a legitimate one of them that deserves support.

In an overcrowded world, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his 'need'" is about as de-motivating a thought as can be imagined. In an overcrowded world people who sit around "needing" are clearly seen not to need anything, to be in fact a waste of oxygen. But that doesn't mean we become selfish hoarders; the thought is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."

The same principles that worked in the 1930s will work again, to keep people working without the monster corporations that needed to implode years ago, without the federal handouts they should never have been able to get, without the advertising and other organizational bloat...just doing something useful in their own neighorhoods.

Use money to encourage those who deserve it, Gentle Readers.

Jeffrey Smith to Bayer/Monsanto, with Video Link

For our "conservative" readership who may think, "Salsa Labs projects generally range from 'liberal' to 'total left-wingnut,' such that that alone should discredit the Institute for Responsible Technology"...what can I say? The pieces fit. Gene splicing, rightly though right-wingers distrust it, and hubristic though I agree that it is, did not make me or my cats sick at first; BT corn's actual ecological effect was to breed hardier caterpillars. Glyphosate, and E. Coli corn (and soy) engineered to soak up glyphosate, and also fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains that had glyphosate sprayed directly on the "food" to make mechanical harvesting easier, did make me sick. These abominations, which came on the market in 2009 so cannot be blamed on the Trump Administration, have been harming almost everyone this web site knows, albeit in different ways. There is no politics about the scientific facts:  

Glyphosate is not a "safe pesticide." There are no "safe pesticides," and glyphosate harms every living thing whether it has two, four, six, eight, or no legs...in a bewildering variety of ways that remain remarkably constant across species.

GLYPHOSATE IS WORSE THAN CORONAVIRUS--slower, more painful, but no less deadly!

Trump's indulgence toward Bayer does show personal economic involvement...not with Bayer so much as with a smaller chemical company that also sells a glyphosate-based "herbicide" formula. While the focus has been on Bayer because that corporation is so huge and so rich, and so knowingly bought the responsibility for so much corporate irresponsibility, fear it not, Sanofi, and Syngenta, and Dow and Dupont and all the others out there...Glyphosate will destroy all who touch it. If corporations do manage to evade responsibility for the harm it's done under due legal process, they will literally call out all the powers of H...(I am not talking about a tourist town in Michigan, here.) Blood-throwing worked for the homosexual lobby and, if we have to stoop to that, glyphosate victims have plenty of ammunition.

Glyphosate Awareness has observed that politicians on both sides have been equally useless. The closest thing we have to elected officials who are willing to stand up to Bayer have been Bernie Sanders, who won an election in California on personal charm but would be too old to be a viable presidential candidate even if his ideas weren't outdated, and Robert F. Kennedy (junior), who deserves to be elected on the basis of his righteous work but has, so far, merely been appointed. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, nor Libertarians, nor even Greens, have climbed out of the beds Bayer has smeared with its (multiple) loathsome diseases. But please, Gentle Readers--the handful of you who are still finding chances to read things online while your schools and offices are closed for quarantine--share this friendly notice with any elected officials you know: Glyphosate can destroy their careers too. They need to reject it and denounce it now. If they have invested in companies that were raking in profits from glyphosate (or other poisons), they need to use their stockholder leverage to steer those companies as far from glyphosate (and from the whole concept of spraying "herbicides") as it's possible to get.

Jeffrey Smith is a political lifeform like all the rest of us, but there's no partisan politics about the press release he's shared this morning. It's facts. So this web site is sharing it, and we'll even try to throw in a link to his video. (Some of you may have watched his full-length documentary movie...the video is shorter.)

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Press Release

Bayer Ignores Investigator’s Warning at AGM: 

“Change Course or Face Possible Bankruptcy”

Bonn, Germany, 29 April— For Bayer’s Annual General Meeting yesterday, Monsanto investigator Jeffrey Smith predicted that Bayer will face possible bankruptcy from a new wave of lawsuits linking Roundup herbicide to numerous diseases, and that the current expected payout of up to $12 billion to more than 50,000 plaintiffs with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) is only the beginning. In questions submitted at Bayer’s AGM and elaborated in a short video and online presentations, Smith, the founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology, said Roundup is now implicated in several other cancers and more than 2 dozen diseases. “The total number of people suffering from these conditions is staggering,” wrote Smith, “thousands of times more than those currently represented. If even a tiny percentage were to receive a settlement, the award could easily bankrupt Bayer.”

In 2019, Bayer shareholders gave their leadership an unprecedented Vote of No Confidence due to its ill-fated purchase of Monsanto, the maker of Roundup. Massive jury awards in just three trials by four plaintiffs had previously caused Bayer’s stock price to plummet by more than 35% and forced its chairman to step down yesterday. Smith, who has been exposing Monsanto’s dark side in books, movies, and presentations in 45 countries for 24 years, had written an open letter to Bayer investors in 2016, urging them to not to purchase Monsanto. He accurately listed Roundup’s classification as a “Probable Human Carcinogen” as one of the significant liabilities that could hurt Bayer.

At this week’s online side event organized by Coordination against BAYER-Dangers (CBG), Smith explained research that demonstrates how Roundup damages several physiological systems and can therefore cause or exacerbate numerous chronic conditions. In his AGM submittal, he described the threat and outlined a way forward that could protect the company and the public. If the AGM were held in-person, Smith would have been given time to read his statement and could have alerted shareholders to the new dangers. But for this year’s online conference, Bayer received and edited written submissions. They chose not to share Smith’s prediction or proposed way forward. Bayer did restate their claim that Roundup is not harmful.

Bayer Can Take Steps to Protect from Bankruptcy

Based on his analysis of the Roundup trials, which included hours of interviews with attorneys and jurors, Smith says “Two categories of evidence drove the juries’ judgements and large punitive awards, Monsanto’s malicious behavior and the weight of the science. Unless Bayer addresses both, they will continue to lose.”

 

1. Full Disclosure Required

In his AGM submittal, Smith wrote: “Monsanto’s history was fraught with coverups, bullying, lies, and manipulation. . . Juries were furious with Monsanto’s behavior, and with Bayer for keeping the evidence hidden.”

To remedy this, he asked Bayer directors, “Are you willing to make public all evidence on Roundup and Monsanto’s bad behavior, including every internal study and related document on safety, and every instance where Monsanto manipulated, colluded, attacked, and covered up? By exposing and condemning Monsanto’s prior behaviors, you will distance yourself and claim the higher ground.”

2. Independent Research, Not Corporate Fraud

Smith wrote, “The science presented on behalf of Monsanto was thin and superficial at best, and more often fraudulent. Juries were angry at Monsanto for not doing the meaningful tests that could demonstrate safety and protect consumers. At the same time, jurors were given ample data from independent studies verifying the link to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

Although Smith believes there is now ample evidence to remove Roundup from the market, he says that if the company refuses to do so, Bayer should “fully fund independent comprehensive intergenerational studies on the full Roundup formulation, looking for links to disease?” He said in his submission, “If the studies shows safety, then you have the data to fend off lawsuits. If the studies show otherwise, you must immediately remove Roundup.”

Bayer did not share these statements and questions with investors.

Smith says, “We hoped that Bayer would finally become the responsible corporate citizen it claims to be, but instead it has chosen to continue in the tradition of Monsanto. Bayer ignores science, hides evidence from its shareholders and the public, and continues to expose the population to its very dangerous herbicide Roundup.”

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This link should take you to the video.