What Really Happened to Jif?

This is not a fact-based expose post. This is an accusation. I may believe, in good faith, that the situation is worse than it actually is. I hope I do. But I believe my suspicions are grounded.

I couldn't really give Jif peanut butter full marks for flavor and quality. It's sweetened. I like the way peanut butter combines with sweet flavors, but the brand of peanut butter I always liked was JFG, which was flavored and preserved with salt only, and tasted like ground-up salted peanuts. You could really tell that JFG was fresh.

"Lower sodium" food sounded like a nice idea. Some people need a low-sodium diet,. and others can always add salt at the table, right? The trouble is that food that's bottled or canned in a completely "natural" condition, without salt, sugar, or some nastier chemical added to it, has a short shelf life. So food packers started preserving foods with sugar instead. That's fine if the original food was orange segments or pineapple rings, which nature intended to be sweet, but sugar in cornmeal, sugar in tomatoes, sugar in peanut butter...somebody Out There is probably putting sugar in sardines, by now.

Peanut butter manufacturers just loved the idea of preserving peanut butter with sugar because, when peanut butter is not infected with toxic black rot but merely becomes stale and rancid after sitting on a shelf for three years, it shows its age by picking up a nasty, sickish, sweetish flavor.

All the peanut butter packers in today's market are aware of this, and extend the shelf life of their products by dumping sugar into it. You can't tell by the taste whether Smuckers or Peter Pan peanut butter is ten years old. The smell deteriorates overtime but the stuff tasted like sugar from the day one. Apparently America's preschoolers aren't complaining--they're wired to seek high-calorie, high-sugar foods. Adults have always had mixed feelings about peanut butter, it seems. I can't say I really like Jif but it tastes less sugary/rancid than Smuckers or Peter Pan.

Not that I think of peanut butter as food, exactly. Celiacs digest food in different ways than non-celiacs do. For my purposes peanuts are food. Saturated fats, like the oil added to peanut butter to keep the natural ground-up nuts from separating into thin tasteless oil and dry tasteless crumbs, are mild laxatives that sometimes help push glyphosate-tainted food through my body faster. Since 2015 I've bought peanut butter, not every month, but on average probably about once a month.

Jif peanut butter served its purpose until last spring when Food Lion ran the big sale on it., Not that the savings were all that great, relative to the regular price,. That's the old Food Lion trick. When customers have complained about a few packages of whatever-it-may-be, Food Lion will immediately raise their regular price on that item, by about thirty percent.  Then they mark down the existing supply to about five percent off the previous regular price, so that it looks as if this is the customer's last chance to get a decent price on this item. Sometimes the customers have already found and complained about all the bad food in the batch. More often they have not. Food bought on a red-hot sale at Food Lion often has to be thrown away.

So I bought a jar of Jif on sale at Food Lion, and I was not thrilled.

Like most of the big-name food brands in the United States, Jif's marketing is ultimately controlled by one huge horrible corporation, but the manufacturers of the original product keep some control over things like labelling. Jif labels proclaimed that Jif peanut butter was gluten-free and GMO-free. Glyphosate-free they never promised, but a friend whose Glyphosate Awareness was raised by cancer used to say we ought to buy and promote things that didn't make us sick, and sure enough, Jif didn't make me sick. There was that. Between 2015 and 2020 that was rare and special.

As we sow, the Bible says, so shall we reap. What can we hope to reap when we've become a nation where nearly all the plant-based "food" has been deliberately poisoned?

Well...as I've mentioned, the quality of life in my neighborhood has declined ever since a Professional Bad Neighbor moved in.

The neighborhood had been a real community when the older generation were alive. Many of them were related to one another; the others were friends, as their parents and grandparents had been. Everyone agreed on the rules and boundaries. Everyone thought well and spoke well of everyone else. Those days are gone.

In the 1990s the neighborhood started to deteriorate. Everyone was hearing the worst of everyone else. Everybody was seeing acts of petty vandalism, and thievery that was below even the scale of "petty." I saw firsthand that deliberate efforts were made to suggest that people who had no quarrel with each other were the ones doing these things to each other.

For years all anyone learned about the identity of our "prankster," or "pranksters," was that a very small amount of the damage really was done by animals, while several people who had been accused died. Then I heard the prankster confess, loudly boasting that he was in the process of "running off all of" my relatives and me in order to buy all the land in the neighborhood. He had not bothered to make any offers to buy any property. He had been deliberately working for years to make people want to stay away from their ancestral homes.

Why would he want our land? It's not more valuable, in cash, than many other family farms in the area. Other family farms have assets ours lack. This man's family had owned such a farm. Two things had happened that might have made him want to leave his ancestral home.

One thing was that his family farm is situated on one of those beds of pinkish "Marcellus" shale. We called it "slates" when I was growing up. It's a kind of layered sedimentary stone that a child can crumble in one hand. By a more complicated process of "hydraulic fracturing" it can be made to yield burnable natural gas, sometimes in a form that shoots flames out the water taps of people whose property is being "fracked." Shale is harder to predict and control, even in nature, than the "frackers" like to admit. Pennsylvania has lost a large amount of land to an underground fire.

The other thing was that this Bad Neighbor's home must have become a sad place for him. In the year 2000 he lived on his ancestral farm, near his parents, one sister, and one brother, with his wife and the one child they had. Between 2005 and 2015, all of them died. A rational person might have considered that something he was doing, such as recklessly spraying poison on the land, could have had something to do with this. An irrational servant of Satan might have suppressed that kind of rational thought and tried to focus on making more people more unhappy with what had been a True Green community.

But he must have known he was on thin ice when he started harassing me. He is my third cousin. He and I inherited High Sensory Perceptivity from the same ancestors. He got away with some of his pranks because other people couldn't wake up as quickly and see as clearly, in the middle of a dark night, as either he or I can still do. Although I never seriously wanted to harass anybody in the way the Bad Neighbor does, I have the physical ability to do all of the same stunts he does. He is taller, and used to be faster. I am younger and have taken better care of myself. And I'm not going anywhere. The harassment slacked off for a few years.

Then I warned the neighborhood odd-jobs man that his efforts to control kudzu with glyphosate were turning his home into a kudzu graveyard, poisoning the vegetables in his garden (he'd sold me a bag full), and making him sick. He tried to warn the Bad Neighbor, for whom he worked, too. The Bad Neighbor listened to the warning, with some difficulty. (The odd-jobs man neither hears nor speaks very well. People who were brought up better tend to end up braying and bellowing at him, because he seems to hear and understand a little more when they do.) Then the Bad Neighbor brayed, "Oh, she wants some 'Roundup,' does she?"

From that day forward he has done his damnedest to keep the air in my neighborhood full of glyphosate vapors. Especially on Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Day, Easter Sunday, and the weekend of the Fourth of July, because those are days when my relatives were likely to gather at our ancestral homes.

That is the kind of person who wants a "right to spray," Gentle Readers. By insisting that local laws specify that there is no such thing sa s "right to spray" unless it be accompanied by an enumerated "right to stomp a poison-spraying fool into the ground, in self-defense," some of you may be able to keep Professional Bad Neighbors out of your neighborhoods.

This web site does not, of course, officially recommend stomping people into the ground. This web site recommends that all things be done "decently and in order." The decent and orderly way to deal with glyphosate sprayers is to revise our existing laws in a way that recognizes that spraying poison into the environment is a violent crime against people. It is always best to do things in a nice, orderly way. If the nice, orderly way fails, we may need to use whatever other way occurs to us, to defend ourselves against this violent attack.

Well...it's hard to know what a word spoken or printed may accomplish. I mentioned that my cats, who could no longer safely drink from the stream near my home, would not drink town water but would drink either Pure Life or Deer Park water. From a local store, those brands have been delivered, every week, ever since. Hmm. Serena is not as keen on pepitas as Heather used to be, but she loves pepitas from the Price Less store soaked in the broth from a tin of Great Value chicken. She likes Chicken of the Sea mackerel, too.

And, unfortunately for humankind, corporations as loathsome as Bayer can use and pay the kind of human wreckage who demand a "right to spray," too.

Well, you may ask, what has this to do with Jif peanut butter?

This is what. Jif has been one of the few big-name food brands that's shown enough overt friendliness to Glyphosate Awareness to use the "NO GMO" label.

Of course, labelling GMO and non-GMO food products is an idea enthusiastically approved by 96% of all humans polled on the issue, but you have to bear in mind that some people's brains show more glyphosate damage than others.

Consider, once again, the Bad Neighbor. If he'd wanted simply to farm the land, the way we'd all always done it, my elders and their heirs would have welcomed him. If he'd wanted to accumulate enough "big land" to lease it out to a company that rents time-shares to hunters, I would have said, "No! Not them! We can do better than that." And we would have been making money by now. Instead of which...As far as I would know, although several people have made dire remarks about the Bad Neighbor's cows, I think he actually poisoned them himself. He used to be considered intelligent, but that was fifty years ago.

I've told the ugly truth about glyphosate. I'm a target.

Jif acknowledged the truth that, whether specific genetic modifications are harmful or not, people do want to know whether they're eating GMO. Jif is a target.

That jar of Jif I bought at Food Lion was definitely substandard. It did not, however, contain the contaminants that got the plant shut down this summer. No salmonella; no rodent traces. It did contain...bad peanuts. Several pieces of peanut, black with rot. When picked out and put together the pieces did not form a single bad nut. The jar smelled of black rot because several rotten peanuts had been scattered into that batch of peanut butter.

The jar before that had seemed acceptable. But the jar before that had given me some sort of mild food poisoning. It wasn't salmonella. I had noted that "the cats think I smell contagious, and may be right since I do have a low fever," when I hadn't been in town or exposed to any virus. And after the symptoms had subsided, they returned when I ate a little more of that jar of peanut butter. They did not, however, include slimy greenish diarrhea.

The disgusting peanut butter was informative. The food poisoning might have been something other people didn't notice--I didn't have it tested. The black rot is toxic. The Board of Health could and should have shut down the Jif factory for the batch of peanut butter that had the black rot in it, alone. But they didn't. They shut down the factory for completely different reasons--the factory also, later, having been infested with salmonella-infected rats. Most rats are crazy about peanut butter but that does not explain how three completely different, unrelated things went wrong with the peanut butter at the same factory. If rats carried in the toxic agents (which is possible, because some wild rat species are known to drag food and other objects into places when they take food out) they were, at the very least, different rats, not carrying the same toxic agents. At least two, and I believe three, different toxic agents. One after another.

It's a question, not a proof...but if I were a Jif manager, I'd be looking for evidence of deliberate sabotage.

We know that Bayer will stoop very, very low.

We know the corporations are depending on tactics like censorship, whining to our government to protect them from the consequences of what they've done, and using such pathetic wastes of human intelligence as the Bad Neighbor to harass those who tell the truth.

I'd say that we know that Bayer's goons could and would have sabotaged Jif, and the only question is whether, in fact, they did.

 

So, how safe is it to buy the jars of Jif peanut butter that are coming back to grocery stores? I'd say the labels tell the story. If Jif's caved on the "No GMO" labels, the sabotage may end and the peanut butter may be fit for human consumption...depending on the GMO involved. If they're not telling which GMO are being used, it's probably the ones with genes from E. coli spliced in, which are trademarked as "Roundup Ready" and a guarantee that the "food" will have been marinated in glyphosate, and I personally wouldn't want to let my cats eat it.

Morgan Griffith on the Inflation Reduction Act

Agreed: Calling it "the Inflation Reduction Act" is a textbook example of "weasel wording." A way to suck the meanings out of words the way weasels suck the yolks out of eggs.

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

"

Congressman Griffith's Weekly E-Newsletter 8.8.22

So-Called Inflation Reduction Act Taxes and Spends, Won’t Reduce Inflation Like a horror movie monster seemingly finished off at the end returning for a sequel, the Democrat tax-and-spend reconciliation bill that once appeared dead has returned in the summer of 2022. Originally dubbed “Build Back Better,” this monster bill now goes by the “Inflation Reduction Act.” The text, however, shows that it does no such thing. Instead, it seeks to implement provisions of the Green New Deal, impose socialist price controls, raise taxes, and empower the Internal Revenue Service. Analysts have already dispensed with the idea that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act would meaningfully reduce inflation. According to the Penn Wharton Budget Model, “The impact on inflation is statistically indistinguishable from zero.” In fact, the model finds that the bill would continue to push inflation upward until 2024. So the bill does not do what its title says it does, rendering it an example of George Orwell’s Doublespeak. But what do its authors and supporters say it will do? Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tweeted: “The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will be the largest package on climate change ever passed by Congress.” The text of the bill supports this contention of Senator Schumer more than it supports the idea of inflation reduction. But the provisions he has in mind will hurt Americans already struggling to cope with soaring costs and unreliable energy while providing negligible benefits to the environment. Shelling out billions of dollars to subsidize solar and wind power will not make those power sources more reliable. At the same time, the bill targets reliable and affordable fossil fuels with more taxes. More power plants using fossil fuels will close, but wind and solar will not be able to meet the resulting demand. Handing out billions of dollars in “environmental justice” grants will be little comfort to Americans who cannot be sure their power will stay on. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), one of the bill’s negotiators, argues that these provisions are balanced out by a commitment from Senator Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and President Biden to pass permitting reform separately, apparently including accelerating completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP). There is reason to doubt, however, that these reforms will get enough support from his side of the aisle to become law. Further, many Virginians I know who live in the path of the MVP are opposed to its completion. Progressives may be happy to take what Senator Manchin offers them now and object to his permitting reforms later. Another major Democrat priority included in this bill is price controls on prescription drugs. I agree that drug prices are too high and have worked on legislation with Democrats and Republicans to address the problem. The approach to drug prices taken in this bill, however, threatens to harm medical innovation without actually solving the price problem. The bill’s authors call the price controls “negotiations,” but the negotiations take the form of telling drug companies that they have to come to terms or else be subject to punitive tax rates. When Democrats pushed similar legislation in the House of Representatives, I noted that this provision would run afoul of the Constitution’s takings clause prohibiting the taking of private property for public use without just compensation. After I made that point, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service agreed with my analysis that this provision was unconstitutional. In addition to their unconstitutionality, these price controls would lead to less investment in medical innovation, reducing the number of treatments and cures available to patients. That outcomes counts as a significant cost to taxpayers. To pay for these schemes, Democrats opted to raise taxes and expand the Internal Revenue Service. The bill would spend $80 billion for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents to go through the returns of ordinary Americans. A corporate minimum tax would fall heaviest on manufacturing and producing industries such as coal. President Biden pledged not to raise taxes on Americans making under $400,000, but citizens of all income levels would feel the hand of government falling heavier upon them. Reducing inflation should be a priority of the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats. After all, they did so much to cause the problem. But bringing back the same old agenda and calling it inflation reduction is an insult to the Americans now pressured by surging costs and shrinking real wages. If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

" 

Local Warming Is a Fact

My part of the world is tilted sunward at this time of year, and we have really been feeling those solar flares. Even in the cool green hollow in which the Cat Sanctuary nestles, far enough up the Blue Ridge Mountains that our water boils at 218 degrees Fahrenheit, we've had temperatures well over ninety degrees Fahrenheit. How often, and by how far, downtown Kingsport has broken the 40-degree-Celsius mark, I'm glad I don't know. The temperatures at their official weather station always run so much closer to ours.

Downtown Kingsport, like downtown inmost cities and large towns, has been miserable. It's hard to say how much of the misery observed in our cities has been caused by the heat, by chemical pollution, by delayed reactions to the coronavirus and/or the vaccine, or by the combination of these things. All I know for sure is that the rate of disabling, even hospital-room-worthy, symptoms among people I know has been fierce.

Four out of six people with whom I'd been working, this spring, have been hospitalized: two cardiac cases, one case that started out with a simple accident and then went on from there, one case for which I've not heard an official diagnosis. Plus the odd-jobs man was hospitalized after an accident, but not for a full day--he's still drifting around the neighborhood, working when hired. Of the crowd that used to hang out on the porch of the retirement project in Gate City, I've seen two of the better preserved ones, still on their feet. They were the ones who drove and did errands for the others, last summer., They no longer drive or do errands.

My Significant Other wanted to be one of the first to try the COVID vaccine, because he hadn't noticed having the virus and wanted to reassure people about the vaccine. Bless him. He had no immediate reaction. He'd been fighting chronic Lyme Disease for ten years. In December he went into the hospital for an operation that sounded horrible. He's ot up yet. He's still maintaining a cell phone, but he's not getting much use out of it.

I had the virus, advised the State to send my vaccine to one of the countries that reportedly needed it, and what I hear these days is "You're looking well--gaining weight, and didn't you dye your hair? I've seen it starting to look grey, but now it's black!"

That's the part of glyphosate poisoning that shows. That's what pain looks like, Gentle Readers. The rest of my body looks the way it always has, but glyphosate reactions cause the midsection to puff out, with inflammation and fluid retention more than actual gas or blocked bodywastes. It's like being pregnant with poison. I hate it, feel disfigured by it, don't find it physically comfortable either (especially when wearing clothes that have waistlines). And both white and black hairs fall out, but the white hair falls off faster and grows back more slowly. And I feel tired and bummed out, and arm starting to show various nutrient deficiencies due to being unable to digest nutrients, so between the lack of energy, the continually lurking sub-nausea, and the black hair, I really feel as if I might be twenty-nine again.

Remember We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Gentle Readers? It was a very literary, credible, brilliant study o a young psychopath. Merricat Blackwood expressed annoyance with her family, when corrected for some childish fault, by poisoning all but two of the extended family gathered for dinner. In the present reality of the story we see her heading into another family conflict. It's one of the few really well written horror stories in English literature.

Can you imagine the law saying to Merricat Blackwood, "Of course you mustn't buy any more arsenic, but you must go ahead and use up your existing supply"? No? But that's what our government is currently doing about glyphosate. The day when it's actually going to be taken off the market keeps being pushed back. The corporations must be allowed to sell, and the fools who still buy glyphosate and other poisons must be allowed to use up, their existing supply. Possibly some of our legislators and judges ought to have dinner with Merricat Blackwood.

The name "Merricat," you might like to know, is explained in the book as a childish variation on "Mary Catherine," but it's also been documented in other countries as a term of hate for Americans. (And of course one of Al Gore's kids thought that would be a great name for a charity...bless her heart.) The Trump Administration applied pressure for countries like Thailand and Korea to lift the glyphosate bans their people unanimously want. I've not read that the Biden Administration has done thing one about this situation. So calling American poison sprayers "Merricats" does seem sort of appropriate.

"I've been spraying this, instead," said the Grouch cheerfully, as if expecting commendations. 2,4-D? Where'd he ever dig that up? I tried to remember what I knew offhand about 2,4-D. In 1974, the last year my Drill Sergeant Dad was asked to teach a class about this kind of thing, that name appeared on a list of known carcinogens, which I remembered because the names rimed:

chlordane

lindane

malathion

parathion

cyperquat

paraquat

2,4-D

2,4-T

Then I seem to remember paraquat distracting me. It was then suspected, and is now known, to cause Parkinson's Disease. I had a great-uncle who had that. Call him Great-Uncle Park. Dad got the whole neighborhood turned against the idea of spraying poison because look at him. I'm one of the last few living people who remember hearing Great-Uncle Park speak. He had been a preacher, a muscular Christian, farming forty acres and rearing seven sons. My sister remembers him mute and bedfast, harmless but horrifying, the Nightmare Life-In-Death. He went down that fast. He was disabled for almost twenty years before he died.

"Are you feeling suicidal?" I said to the Grouch.

"What's it do, besides causing cancer?" he said. "I'm seventy-five years old. We all have to go some time."

"What does the label say it does?" I was curious. The label didn't mention 2,4-D causing cancer but did warn that the stuff is so corrosive that a person who has swallowed it should not be allowed to vomit. Allowed. The person would want to. The label also mentioned that the poison would kill various desirable plants in the Grouch's yard.

"I can't believe it's not illegal to spray things like that in town, where they'll destroy your neighbors' gardens and make your neighbors ill," I said.

"That neighbor sprays glyphosate," the Grouch pointed, "and every time that one mows his grass I get hayfever. I don't care about them."

It is hard to dispute that, if people are still spraying glyphosate, their greatest achievement in this life will probably be as cadavers donated to medical science, and the sooner they perform that service, the better. However, inflicting yet another carcinogen to the toxic waste we in the Point of Virginia inflict on innocent people in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana is not the right thing to do with the feelings any rational being would naturally have about the glyphosate-spraying neighbor.

"That neighbor has children, and that one has dogs," I said. "And I have relatives in Tennessee who never did you any harm."

The Grouch wanted to change the subject. "Doesn't it seem to you that this summer's the hottest one you can remember?" he said.

"Actually," I said, "it reminds me of the summer of 1987. Though 1994 was a miserably hot summer, too. And although you and I were too young to feel it, a lot of older people died of the heat waves in 1977." In 1977 the Grouch was working full time. I was still lazing around the house, listening to the reports about heat-related fatalities on the Mutual News & Sports Radio Network.

(By some synchronicity, I then went home and turned up an old newspaper I saved for some other reason. On the back I read: "North Dakota's all-time high temperature was set here [in the town called Steele] in July 1936, at 121. [Interviewee Paul] Smokov, now 81, remembers that time and believes conditions this summer probably are worse," because the drought had "started in the late 1990s. 'The 1999 to 2006 drought ranks only behind the 1930s and the 1950s. It's the third-worst drought on record...' [federal meteorologist Brad] Rippey said.")

"If it snows in July," said the Grouch, "would you say you remembered that having happened before/"

"No," I said. "That was in 1920. My grandfather remembered it, but I'm not quite that old."

This was on the day the POG lay down and died. The POG, or Piece Of Garbage, was the miserable excuse for a laptop I used for two full years. I was surprised, and in a way disappointed, that that thing lasted a month. I don't like any computer that's infected with Windows 10, but it was the way the POG tried to force me to use battery power that gave me the time to entertain all those fantasies about taking it down to the lake and throwing it in. This laptop has a battery too feeble for almost any purpose...and that's actually an improvement over the POG. There are attempts at Green changes that turn people against the whole concept of Greenness.

Nevertheless, it occurred to me that this web site needs a post about climate change.

Here's the deal. Climate change is not just a science fiction trope any more. It is as indisputable as that spraying glyphosate is a way of torturing and killing people.

The downtown core of Kingsport, Tennessee, is about ten miles south oft he Cat Sanctuary. It is slightly closer to sea level, and is located on the banks of the Holston River. In the 1980s the temperature in downtown Kingsport ran three to five scrawny Fahrenheit degrees warmer than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. In theory "greenhouse gas" emissions are suppose dot have been better filtered since the 1990s, so in theory this "greenhouse effect" on temperatures should have become less noticeable now. Has this actually worked the way left-wingers claim? It has not. Today we routinely see temperatures in downtown Kingsport twenty Fahrenheit degrees hotter than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. Whatever has been done to reduce the greenhouse effect in the 199s has been offset by other factors.

The climate at the Cat Sanctuary has not changed noticeably since the 1970ps.The weather changes from day to day, from year to year. There are hotter and milder seasons, wetter and drier ones, colder and milder ones, earlier and later springs, more and less colorful autumns, richer and poorer harvests. The traditional rule for people who have orchards has always been to plant both peach and apple trees so that, more years than not, the orchard will produce one kind of fruit or the other. Usually it will be apples. In 1981, we had a cool wet spring followed by a sunny summer, and people harvested both peaches and apples. I've not heard of that happening twice; it was probably my generation's equivalent of Grandfather's having seen snow on the Fourth of July. This year's early, warm, dry spring, followed by a wet summer, is not making farmers happy. But this kind of year-to-year variation is not what is meant by terms like "climate change." Weather changes, sometimes from hour to hour. Climate is the whole general range of weather that can be expected in a given part of the world.

But the climate of downtown America has changed drastically since the 1970s. Even in the 1970s it was true for the big cities that, e.g., temperatures on the National Mall ran eight to ten degrees hotter than temperatures in Alexandria and Takoma Park, whose temperatures ran eight to ten degrees hotter than in Fairfax and Columbia. That gap has not closed, or even narrowed. If anything it's grown. The climate along the Maryland-Virginia border is generally mild, pleasant, and what the majority of humans like. The climate in downtown D.C. is too hot for almost anybody's comfort.

(Tip for those who must be in the city in the summer: Buy those huge cheap styrofoam cups full of ice chips. Never mind the soda pop; just carry around the ice chips. You might be able to use them to save a life.)

We know this change is human-made because it's observed only in "downtown" areas. Heat pumps push more hot air outdoors, downtown. More pavement traps more heat. More glass windows and metal vehicles reflect more heat. More human bodies emit heat into the ar. So the temperatures in and near cities rise, while the temperatures in the country stay the same.

It could still be called the greenhouse effect, if the activists who were screaming about the greenhouse effect in the 1990s hadn't promised to shut up when they got the legislation they wanted. If fewer "greenhouse gas" emissions are causing it, other factors are aggravating it more.

Meanwhile, "global climate change" was supposed to refer to the ice age in the 1980s. If you don't remember that, that would be because no such ice age ever arrived; in fact several heat records were set in the 1980s. Then "global climate change" was redefined as referring to a global warming effect that raised sea level to the point where the Atlantic would be lapping around the beaches of Asheville, North Carolina, by 2010. Oh wait, that never happened either. "Global climate change" still refers to any of several other theories, none of which has been proved, several of which have been disproved, but a vague general sense of which ha become an article of faith in the Socialist substitute-for-religion that wants to worship global dictatorship.

Traditional religions allow room for counterfactual beliefs by postulating a spiritual dimension of reality where people may feel effects of what they know to be true, without being able to measure any effects empirically. The radical rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef from Nazareth died in the early first century; the God he incarnated lives on in the hearts of His followers. Socialism, which began by explicitly denying that possibility for "spiritualizing" counterfactual beliefs, will have a harder time selling its dogma that "only global dictatorship can save us form global climate change." Still so many apparently rational people currently claim to believe that, a rationale for it is sure to be found or invented any day.

So far, some temperature readings, which some regard as evidence of global climate change, have shown a steady warming trend. It's certainly possible that this warming is dangerous. It won't be scientifically proved so unless, and until, the dangers have become facts.

Socialist readers, if we have any, please pay close attention to this:

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to avert the possibility that one more theory, proposed by people who proposed some other theories that have been disproved, might turn out to be true? Not much.

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to reduce their own personal misery, which they feel, and see their neighbors feeling, as they swelter in our cities? Not much, at first. Nobody wants to leave the windows open when the neighbors' heat pump start spewing out heat. Nobody wants to be the first one to report for work with a sweaty face from walking instead of driving in an air-conditioned car. But people are more likely to endure that kind of thing to make a difference they can see and feel, in the local warming nobody can deny, than they are for the sake of some theory espoused by somebody like Al Gore.

Now I know left-wingers have an agenda and won't let themselves be confused by mere facts. I know that, for example, they kept screaming for same-sex marriage as opposed to an end to legal discrimination against the unmarried--never mind that half of every same-sex couple is going to end up without a living spouse, just as half of every heterosexual couple is, so at best same-sex marriage would only benefit half of the people who wanted it. I know the only effect presenting reasonable ideas to these people is likely to have is to make them screech and throw nasty stuff in all directions, just like the animals from whom they used to claim physical descent.

Well, y'know what, Gentle Readers, I am already old enough, biracial enough, non-wealthy enough, and female enough, that haters are going to hate me anyway.

It's nice to look for points of agreement with everybody who's willing to find them, but it's a waste of time to try to please people who aren't going to be pleased.

Anyway, for those who are thinking rationally, there's an obvious call to action here. Leave the speculation about what might happen in the year 2050 or the year 2120 or even the year 2023 to the fiction writers. Speculation can be useful too. But, meanwhile, when calling for people to change their habits, we should back away from theories and dogmas, and stick to facts. If you want to reverse climate change or prevent even more harmful future climate change, you talk about what's happening now, what people can see and feel, ideally, this summer.

Greenland is losing valuable ice. It's possible that the local warming felt in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm, or Vladivostok may be contributing to this loss of ice. It's certain that more people are living more comfortably in Greenland, in ways that affect Greenland the way the comforts and conveniences in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm,  and Vladivostok affect those cities. It's possible that more Green consciousness in Boston would help Greenland keep its glaciers; if that happened it would be a weaker side effect of the stronger effect Bostonians' Green choices were having on Boston.

Sometimes we can be like the toddler whose hand, while clutching six cookies, is too wide to slip out of the cookie jar. In order to eat a cookie the toddler is going to have to release the whole fistful of cookies, unclench the fist, and draw out one cookie between fingers. If left-wingers seriously want to feel less miserable they need to release their dogmas about "global" anything and work with the local facts, which are unlikely to backfire on them as yet another global theory bites the dust. When it comes to that, it's also good to release the dogma about bigger government doing anything to help anything. We've all seen what the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations have done to reverse the effects of glyphosate, and we can reasonably expect any other big government, U.S. or foreign or "global," to do about that much--which is to say, to do nothing--about any climate change that actually happens.

Stick to propositions that relate to what can be objectively verified in the real world. A line I've seen work to change people's behavior was, "We have X number of parking spaces that will remain in available during reconstruction. We have X number of spaces that will have to be closed. We have X number of cars parked outside tonight. Obviously a solution to this problem will involve car pools. Will everyone who wants to keep these events going all summer please sign the car pool form and make yourselves known to the people in neighborhoods near yours."

Similarly: "Showers are being installed in the restrooms, and enclosed closets with space to store clean work outfits, clean outfits to walk home in, and the outfits you wore while walking to work, are being added to every office. While no questions will be asked about physical disabilities, a general policy will be that raises and promotions go to people who walk to and from work."

It's easy to get carried away with our own little ideas of how to make the world better. If I were the mayor of Kingsport, I'd be tempted to declare a state of emergency. Publicize "Code Red Days" and order city bus drivers to offer free rides to anyone walking on those 90-degree-heat, 90-percent-humidity days. Tax people to build free cold shower devices and install one on every alternate corner. Use heavy preaching, restrictions, and bans to reduce the use of motor vehicles, heat pumps, and heat-trapping pavement. Tear up the pavement on Center, Sullivan, Fort Henry, Eastman, and Stone Drive; cover those streets with grass and gravel, and limit their use to motor-free traffic only. Require all gas stations to replace all but one gas pump with solar-powered battery stands. Give people tax breaks for making better use of low-energy-use climate controls like separating rooms, opening windows, and burning biomass instead of gas or electricity. Require schools to give students "Green points" for doing all their research from printed material with no use of heat-generating, air-conditioning-dependent computers. Fine stores for using computerized price scanners instead of price stickers and solar-powered calculators. Give tax breaks to businesses that install shower stalls and remove computer terminals. Sponsor a factory where people build replicas of the world's best word processing device, the Royal Standard typewriter, and make it the standard for all school and office communication.

And, because these measures would be all about me, my ego, my good idea over your bad habit, Kingsport would be howling for a special election to replace me within a month. People would claim that they had arthritis and couldn't bear to type on real typewriters. Messy garbage would be dumped in the shower stalls. It'd be similar to the way even people who'd been wanting to ride bicycles around Kingsport reacted to the bicycle lanes, only moreso.

True Green changes come from the grassroots. People in government can certainly encourage Green choices; Green choices work best when nobody tries to force them on anybody.

One of the easiest ways to stop local warming is to stop using motor vehicles. But even on a college-campus scale, top-down bans on motor vehicles can backfire. People with major mobility impairments need to be able to drive. They should be able to win friends and influence people by making every drive a social event. The rest of us, when we see one of our number driving, could be sighing and clucking. "Poor old John Doe, I just realized how much older he is than he looks. I saw him driving, alone, just from his house to the hardware store!" With corrections: "Biomass burns hot. Biomass-burning furnaces are very heavy. Maybe he needed the minivan to haul his new biomass burner." But meanwhile anyone who wanted to be seen as young and fit would be bringing home, e.g., a new bathroom sink, in a handcart. That's an achievable Green change we can make just by agreeing that it's trendy. And it would do a lot to reverse local warming.

Other realistic approaches to the indisputable fact of local warming would work in similar ways. Land use regulations can favor conversions of property back to small farms, away from stack-and-pack apartment blocks. Every child deserves a room and a garden of per own. Most work can and should be done in the workers' homes, and no, no invasive camera technology is necessary, just digital text messaging is enough to allow communication and supervision. Most people need to go downtown only once a week, but can't we work up to only once a month?

A problem in public health and safety is that people seem often to have an unconscious set-point of "acceptable risk" that they try to maintain. When things they do are made safer, people do those things in riskier ways. When every car had seat belts, people demanded higher speed limits. Those who really want to reverse warming should probably bear this in mind. Better filters encourage people to feel less guilt about driving when they could walk. One way to offset this is to redirect the focus of campaigns away from "safety" to the benefits of the target behavior. Instead of talking about even local warming at all, we might want to talk about the benefits of walking for weight control and the convenience of removing electrical power grids from our lives.

"But 'warming' is part of another campaign," some people might say. Consider Elon Musk, the genius car designer and would-be Twitter renovator. One of those friends who had a project going on early this spring, then spent the summer in and out of hospitals, was (is! is! person is still alive!) a fan of his. "Battery cars work! I could build one! I want to buy a couple dozen battery-powered cars cheap in China and resell them here. We could buy that old convenience store and convert it to a battery charging station!" I read about solar-battery-powered cars in grade seven and wrote science fiction in which the cool guys converted a trendy sports car to solar battery power. For some Americans the idea of solar vehicles is a self-seller. When it's not, the major point of doubt is "Could all those batteries be charged by solar power alone?" From my point of view, it seems as if Musk's main communication challenge now is (1) being sure he actually has a workable plan to charge all those batteries, and (2) convincing my neighbors.

From Musk's point of view, it's obviously product-supportive if people believe that some version of some "global climate change" theory is true. But that's a dangerous marketing ploy; people who believed that Florida was going to be underwater in 2010, the way Al Gore said, have cooled to the point of frost on both "global warming" and Al Gore.

I'd suggest to Musk and company that they consider the set-point model and then think about ways to market solar-powered cars that do not depend on theories of global climate change. Plenty of facts can be made to support the product:

* Battery-powered cars are new, youthful, trendy, and they can be made cute. (The ones I've seen bordered on being fubsy. For a car I prefer the small-and-efficient kind of cuteness to the fubsy kind.)

* Battery-powered cars can be made waaay cheaper than gas-powered cars.

* Battery-powered cars could in theory be cheap to operate. Cover your garage, not even your house, in solar collectors, don't use a lot of electricity around the house, and stockpile charged-up batteries.

* Battery-powered cars could be made so hip the newspapers print the short list of celebrities waiting to buy one, the way the Post marketed the Prius in Washington twenty years ago.

* Battery-powered cars are as close as humankind has ever come to perpetual motion. The sun will eventually burn out but it's not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

But as far as warming is concerned...if the same number of people drive the same number of miles in battery-powered cars, that's still a lot of friction on pavement and heat reflected off glass and metal. The question for Musk thus becomes whether he wants to reverse confirmed local warming, or sell cars. If the former, he might do better to focus on the health benefits of walking and the improved efficiency of working from home. Battery-powered cars are a nifty notion but, in order to reverse the warming effect, they'll still need to be driven much less than gas-powered cars.

Morgan Griffith Visits the Flood Zone

U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith describes what was taking place just fifty miles away while, as usual, Gate City had rain:

"

A Wild Day From Wise to Washington

Serving as the U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Ninth Congressional District has meant putting a lot of miles on my car. Getting around the 29 jurisdictions in the district’s current boundaries as well as to Washington, D.C., requires frequent travel here and there.

Even so, the driving I did on July 28-29 was quite a lot for one day.

That legislative week in the House of Representatives began on Tuesday, July 26, and ended on Friday, July 29, and involved more than 30 votes on bills, resolutions, and amendments.

While I was in Washington, Southwest Virginia was again struck by heavy storms that caused substantial flooding. Just weeks after floodwaters swept through Buchanan County, the same disaster befell Dickenson and Wise Counties.

Serving in Congress requires choices, in how I vote and how I spend my time. As damage reports came in on Thursday, I decided that I needed to see the situation for myself. I try to avoid missing votes whenever possible, but the bills expected at the time on the floor Friday were not controversial and likely to pass by large margins. Being on the ground at the site of the floods was more important.

We often vote in the evening, but the Congressional Baseball Game for charity was taking place that night. So after votes concluded on Thursday afternoon, I skipped the game, packed up my car, and headed for Southwest Virginia. My staff coordinated with law enforcement to set up the visits.

I arrived in St. Paul to stay overnight around 12:30 am on Friday and woke up around 5:30 am to head to my first stop, Clintwood. There I met with Dickenson County officials and inspected the flood damage.

Following Clintwood, I visited flooded sites in the Towns of Pound, Wise, and Coeburn in Wise County to see how the storms had affected them, joined by county officials and Virginia House of Delegates Majority Leader Terry Kilgore.

At some locations, the waters had not yet receded. Roads and bridges had been washed away, The result of this damage for two neighborhoods in Dickenson County was to cut them off from the rest of the public road system. A ballfield in Coeburn had been covered by three to four feet of water.

Fortunately, no lives were lost, but recovery from the physical destruction will take time and require cooperation at all levels of government and with support from nonprofits, businesses, and individuals.

Just as I left Coeburn, I was notified that a controversial bill would be coming up later that day in the House of Representatives after all, thanks to some procedural trickery.

Earlier in the week, House Democrats had been negotiating between themselves on a package of bills that included a ban on some guns and funding for police departments. Negotiations had appeared to be at an impasse, so these bills were not scheduled for floor action. But overnight Thursday into Friday, a deal was reached so Democrats could proceed with a gun ban. Apparently, they could not agree on supporting the police, but they could find consensus on taking away some guns.

Typically, bills must be available for 72 hours before they can be considered on the floor. The Democrat majority evaded this requirement by passing a rule allowing for “same day authority” to bring up any legislation they wanted within one legislative day.

Knowing the vote would be close, I raced back to Washington from Wise County and after the six and a half-hour drive arrived just in time to vote no on the gun ban. It had been a long ride, but our Constitution, including the Second Amendment, demanded my support.

Ultimately, the House passed the gun ban by a vote of 217-213. If just a few more Democrats had joined the five who voted against the ban, or if the two Republicans who supported it had not, the measure would not have passed. But the narrow margin and strong opposition may have given the bill a “fever,” as we said in the House of Delegates: the bill was now sick and its prospects for survival doubtful. In this case, the Senate hopefully will not want to press forward with the gun ban.

It was a long and demanding day, but I am honored to serve the people of the Ninth District on any day, whether in Wise County or Washington.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405, my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671, or my Washington office at 202-225-3861. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov.

"

New Book Review: Recollections About Race

Title: Recollections About Race 

Author: Janis Leslie Evans

Date: 2021

Publisher: Jahmerican Press

Length: 104 pages

ISBN: 979-8-9851559-0-7 (hardcover) ISBN 979-8-9851559-1-4 (paperback) ISBN 979-8-9851559-2-1 (ebook)

Quote: "I’ve led a pretty uneventful and boring life as a mental health therapist...but my gut told me I had something important to say about the African American experience through relatable stories worth sharing at this moment in time."

Some insects bite through each other's outer shells, not in search of food, but apparently just for fun, while mating. Years ago I read a researcher's description of a specimen as a "minimally damaged female." At the time that seemed a good phrase to describe my experience with the dating game. Now, that's the phrase that popped into my head while reading Evans' Recollections About Race.

Evans is a minimally damaged Black female: middle-class, Jamaican-American, nice family background, successful at school and in her career, with memories of "race" stereotyping that seem like little things, but they do add up. Boys picked fights on the street, but several White boys started a fight with one of her friends while he was with her. Newspaper photographs aren't usually high quality, but the picture of her the hometown newspaper ran reduced her dark face to a shadow. A teacher gave her a low grade for the term despite her higher grades on individual projects because he said she'd never succeed--interesting that she classified this as race rather than gender prejudice; she knew the man, but her basis for classifying his prejudice is not clear to me as a reader. She got into a decent university, made friends, joined a church, found a job, in Washington where she was in the majority "race" category. Nevertheless, she felt insecure. Sharing her memories, being part of a community, and demonstrating support for causes her community supported, helped her heal her emotions.

I have an unusual personality profile, balanced  just in between FP and TJ. I read this book with the FP side of my brain, mentally going "Really!" and "Say what?" and "Oh, that wretch!" and "When guys start fighting dirty, four against one, the Bible only actually prescribes a punishment for women who jump in grabbing their private parts. It says nothing about kneecaps." Talking about this kind of thing can be a bonding experience. Then I came online, the Twitter page I wanted to read was Scott Adams', and I saw a cartoon where one of the co-workers Dilbert seldom talks to was fawning on somebody higher up the hierarchy. "All of your stories made the same point. Thank you for this wonderful gift," etc., and Wally said, "Is he serious?" Ouch. I can relate to Wally's impatience too; in real life people give  nonverbal cues to tell us whether they're interested in the little stories that converge toward one point, or not.

So, other than the total TJ's who have no use for the process of bonding by sharing personal memories, who should not read this book, what types of readers should read it?

1. Black Americans who can relate to Evans' stories and use the questions she asks to open writing or discussion about their own "race" memories. Especially if they've been tempted to resent the stereotype that West Indians who are Black benefit from being perceived as "so different from other Black people, easier to work with, less embittered." Evans explains why this "lefthanded compliment" is perceived as a microaggression. 

2. Non-Black Americans who genuinely need to know why some things we do, sometimes without thinking about "race" in any conscious way, cause unintended pain. (The older I get, the more I realize what a trial it was for a certain distinguished academic, who was far from being my first Black (school) friend, to be my first Black (close) friend.) 

3. People who are stuck in any kind of hostile, bitter emotions, who can benefit from Evans' terse discussion of things that are likely to help. There's a worksheet. If the source of your hurt feelings is something other than "race," you can tweak the questions accordingly. It's a short worksheet, suitable for people who feel no need to spend months or years "processing" their hard feelings but want to move briskly on to thinking about, and doing, things that feel better.

Is this a Christian book? Well...it's a book by a Christian. It doesn't mention any specific religious belief or tradition on every page, but Evans does identify her church in the discussion of things that help. 

Back at Last

Quick status update...

So the Piece of Garbage, which I expected would have died by September 2020, plodded along in its nasty Window-10-infested way until mid-June 2022. Then it did die. 

Apart from that, I've been as well as anyone separated from the tools of per trade can be. There's a reason why the Bible says that, even if someone gets desperate enough to pawn the tools of his trade, of his own free will, you (the rich person who lends him money) must return the tools to him before the sun goes down. If he had sold his child to you as a slave, you could keep the child for up to seven years, until the official Jubilee when all Israelite slaves were automatically freed. Presumably the child would have better prospects as a temporary slave than as the child of a parent as desperate as that one, anyway. But the tools of a working person's trade could not be separated from the person overnight. Clearer thinking went into this than you might initially have imagined.

Anyway the wonderful wizards of Compuworld found me a better laptop. Improving on the POG did not take a great deal of time or money. Unfortunately the POG tried to take all of my Internet passwords with it as it went, and it's taking some trouble to recover those. 

I still have a Professional Bad Neighbor. 

Serena's three lovely kittens, Biro, Crayola, and Pastel, are still living with us. Serena has expressed no interest in finding homes for them. They are social cats who hunt as a team, but...Serena has a long history of giving birth to mixed litters of normal and oversized kittens, and rejecting the oversized kittens. If she hadn't wanted the little one, last spring, to be reared indoors, she probably wouldn't have let me persuade her and Silver to nurse the three oversized ones. So I've finally learned why. They are cute as all-get-out and even seem healthy, with high tolerance to glyphosate poisoning, but they seem to have inherited their father's intellectual powers. Serena doesn't bring him home. The kittens are friendly, playful and sometimes cuddly, but don't seem to have learned their names or to understand other words. They're none too bright at picking up cues given them by Serena, Silver, or old Sommersburr, either. They don't even pick up survival messages from the world, such as that butterflies aren't good to eat. 

Old Sommersburr positively loves these kittens. Last night, as he came meowing up to the gate, Biro was the first to bound out and sniff noses with him. Normal tomcats don't usually like kittens. Though dumped out by someone who didn't appreciate him, Sommersburr is a social cat, probably a cousin to these kittens. 

We have new cardinals. The male seems to be an early spring chick, son of the male we lost early in the spring. The phoebe was starting to lay claim to the orchard when the male cardinal popped up flashing his bright new feathers and calling "Peep! Peep! Peep!" He has yet to decide whether his grown-up call will sound like "Cheer! Cheer! Cheer!" or "Pretty, pretty, pretty" or "Birdy, birdy, birdy" or something else. Each male cardinal likes to have a different "word" he repeats three times, though many of them sound alike to humans. Other birds (and cats and dogs) can hear some high notes in a bird's warbling that humans miss, so different cardinals' "Cheer" probably sound like different words to them.

Johnny Wren is still here; he tried building some nests the kittens could knock down. I kept one of them, not solid enough for use, as a souvenir. Male wrens do this, apparently to demonstrate to female wrens a message like "See, I want to help, and I have lots of energy. I can't help being an idiot. I need you to show me how to build a nest." Once Jenny Wren has built a reasonable nest, Johnny will sit on the eggs and fetch food for the young, suggesting that he does have a brain after all. Building impossible "dummy nests" is merely an act he does to activate Jenny's protective instincts. 

And, despite the Professional Bad Neighbor's efforts to destroy Mother's flowers, including the gorgeous orange jewelweed that I try to let fill a good half of the not-a-lawn, we still have Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. When there were more jewelweed flowers, last summer, we had a regular flock of them. 

What made Mother love jewelweed so? Jewelweed is a tall, rather pretty native plant in the touch-me-not family. Different species' orange or yellow flowers are as bright as jewels, and are an encouraging shape for hummingbirds. Mother liked flowers and hummingbirds but also her paper-white English skin was unreasonably sensitive to poison ivy, and jewelweed is sometimes also called "soapweed" because the sap will cut oil like a weak solution of soap, so Mother hoped it would protect her from poison ivy in the garden. Considering that she had nasty-looking rashes on both wrists for a month or so, most of the summers, the fact that she thought washing her hands with crushed jewelweed helped is alarming. I keep the jewelweed in memory of Mother, in case any of her pure-White relatives visits, and because I am partial to the hummingbirds.

The Professional Bad Neighbor has sneaked into the not-a-lawn and sprayed the jewelweed at least twice, such that walking past it caused a nasty-looking rash to form on my arm. This gave me some more information. I know now why an innocent piece of old wood caused such a nasty-looking rash on my arms, which tan enough that the scars are still prominent, and legs, which tan less. And I have some new insight into how it was possible for Grandma Bonnie Peters to have had that rash she had in 2006, when everyone expected her to lose her left leg, and for the rest of her life her left leg was hardly half the size of her right leg. She walked without a limp throughout the ordeal, but an ordeal is what it was for all who knew her. That rash baffled medical science. It was ugly, and it stank, and because it was so mysterious GBP had a horrible habit of pulling down her socks and showing it to anyone who was careless enough to ask about her health. It was displayed, documented, and remembered from Florida to Maryland and at many points between. It was a frightening rash. It looked remarkably like the rash on the young man's chest in that document showing the effects of glyphosate poisoning at epa.gov, which would explain why it responded so slowly to treatment for either bacterial or fungal infection. 

GBP lived and walked for another fifteen years. There is still enough jewelweed to supply at least some of the hummingbirds. There is a special place where those who "help" the Professional Bad Neighbor with the "little pranks" he is losing the special ability to do, this year, will spend their eternity.

So many times different people have said to me, "Well! If I knew someone had done that to me or my animals, he wouldn't have one cow left alive." One cow is what the Professional Bad Neighbor has. I am mentioning this expressly for the benefit of those people. Cattle pastured near the Cat Sanctuary are being boarded for a much nicer person. Personally, as much as I might enjoy sharing a bit of kerosene with the Professional Bad Neighbor if he happened to be on fire, I wouldn't take my revenge on a man out of some innocent animal. If you have a grievance with a man, which I'm sure hundreds of people do with the Professional Bad Neighbor, you take it out of him. Not his wife, not his children, certainly not animals and certainly not the land. This web site officially recommends lawsuits, with which members of this web site will help. If one lawyer is compromised, we can help find another. The man needs to be locked up with a metal key, and the key melted down. The animals have done nobody any harm.