Mark Warner on Cybersecurity

Editorial comment suspended. From U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-VA:

"

Friends, 

I wanted to make sure you heard about important national security legislation I introduced last week.

Here’s the deal: our Intelligence Community has raised important concerns about foreign tech threats that have made a foothold in U.S. markets. What exactly are these threats? These are apps already on our phones, equipment used to power the internet, and software that helps operate critical infrastructure like transportation, energy, and health care systems.

Right now, you may be hearing concerns about TikTok and its close ties to the Communist Party of China – but we’ve been fighting threats like these from various adversarial nations for decades, without a clear system to address them moving forward. We’ve taken a Whac-A-Mole approach to our national security online, and we absolutely must have a stronger strategy.

That’s why I wrote and introduced the RESTRICT Act, a completely bipartisan solution that will allow the government to address threats in a proactive, risk-based manner. Senator John Thune of South Dakota, a Republican, is co-leading the effort with me, and already we have 6 additional Democrats and 6 additional Republicans on our team – and more folks are getting on board every day.

Instead of punitively targeting one company like TikTok, the RESTRICT Act gives us a framework to address the entire next generation of threats, providing a smarter way to prepare for the ever-changing technological landscape. It’ll empower the Department of Commerce to identify and mitigate foreign threats to a range of critical communications tech.

Particularly when we’re dealing with technologies that are forums for Americans’ speech and expression, it’s vital that any action be risk-based, rule-bound, and strike a careful balance in mitigating national security threats and avoiding impacts on free speech. I’m proud to have prioritized that in my bill, and that’s why it’s already gaining tremendous momentum.

To protect our national security, our economy, and our critical infrastructure, it’s time to stop playing Whac-A-Mole and start adopting a clear, risk-based approach to foreign tech threats. I’m proud to have put forward a solution to do that.

If you want more information, check out some videos, graphics, or articles produced on this bill. If you want to share your thoughts about Big Tech or any issue that's important to you, you can send me an email any time using the form on my Senate website.

Sincerely,

[that signature graphic Google doesn't like: Mark Warner]

" 

Historical Personages to Read About

The prompt at LongAndShortReviews asked for a "favorite historical personage to read about." 

Do I have to pick just one?

I like diaries, memoirs, and biographies. I particularly like reading the biographies other people wrote about the authors of good diaries and memoirs. 

I remember going through a real Helen Keller "reading phase" in middle school just because so many editions of her first book, plus other people's books about her and Anne Sullivan, came out around that time. Then there were Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, Anne Frank, C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and by that time I was in college and didn't schedule enough free reading time to devour everything by and about a particular writer any more. I still enjoy comparing what people wrote about their own inward experience and what other people wrote about their more outward lives, though. 

There are people who wrote a great deal about their work and wrote very little about their personal lives. I like that about them. They knew that their thoughts on art or science or politics were more valuable to humankind than their personal lives were. Books by Martin Luther or John James Audubon or Thomas Jefferson are very different from books about them. Nevertheless, when somebody like Albert Einstein wrote a book that was all about mathematics, phsyics, and politics with never a chapter about the writer as an individual, that also was a statement about the writer as an individual. 

At the moment, while and because I've been reading about butterflies, I'm feeling interested in the old naturalists like Linnaeus; this week I've found James Duncan's Foreign Butterflies, and I'd be interested in reading more about him. 

But, "favorite"? My favorites come and go depending largely on what I've found about them. The historical personage I admire most is Jesus of Nazareth. No one else comes close. Many people have, however, had interesting lives, and my favorite this week may be Alexander, because I have a good book about him for sale. Next week it might be Harriet Tubman, or Lillian Moller Gilbreth, or my sense of "favorite" might go all the way back to Helen Keller. 

Book Review: The Beautiful West

Title: The Beautiful West 

Author: Rowan Campbell Millar

Date: 2022

Publisher: Rowan Campbell Millar

Length: 288 pages

ISBN: 979-8444577677

Quote:  "It is significant that so many peoples put the abode of the dead beyond the ocean." 

In the "Old World," Africa, Europe, and Asia, the metaphor of dying as "going west" seems to predate the invention of writing. In this very speculative, but provocative, "compilation with commentary," Rowan Campbell Millar suggests that there was a real reason for this. Much of what people believe about the afterlife comes from near-death visions people have reported, but there could have been another source of belief: sailors' stories.

Many sailors have reported perilous adventures at sea in which they may have dreamed, or may actually have found, themselves in some exotically attractive place where they rehydrated and recovered. Real or imaginary, such places would naturally have seemed like paradise to people who had collapsed from thirst and exposure. Or like the reverse: places of exile, places impossibly far away from where the sailors were trying to get to. 

Emphasis on Columbus being the first European to document the Americas has led historians to assume too quickly that all the sailors' stories were dreams or fictions. In fact the islands in both oceans, and the Americas, became populated. While lack of consistent physical differences between the Asian and American "races" led to an historical theory that all Native Americans were descended from Asians who crossed the Bering Strait, differences in the gene pools support an alternative claim that some Native Americans were also descended from Asians, Africans, and Europeans who drifted across the oceans. Certainly groups living on the east coast of South America showed some incidence of African-type DNA and historians know that Malian ships sailed west about the same time European ships started doing that. 

Millar shows similarities in ancient artefacts that don't prove, but suggest, other contacts betweem the "Old" and "New" (or "Western") hemispheres. Ancient Central American art shares motifs and seems to share symbolism with ancient Egyptian art. Is it a coincidence that both places developed written language before people to the north and south did, or that people in both places tended to be shorter than people to the north and south? That "first contact" between European and indigenous American people found some evidence of undocumented earlier contact, including a Welsh Bible that had been preserved by a midwestern tribe? Millar's study of ancient art and mythology shows additional evidence that a few people, even before St Brendan or Leif Ericsson, may have crossed the Atlantic Ocean on sailboats or even rafts. Such people would not have been able to document where they had been or persuade anyone to try going back there, but in vague mystical descriptions of the afterworld Millar finds some suggestions that early explorations of the American coast may have been made. 

Millar's findings dig back into prehistory and won't become part of the official summaries of history taught in schools. They won't be "suppressed"; they'll just remain on the fringe, material that is interesting but lies outside of history as such. The Beautiful West may be most valuable as a collection of ancient art. Much of ancient art was symbolic more than representational, and what Millar proves is that some of the symbolism in Egyptian and Mesoamerican artefacts seems to overlap. 

Millar also gives some examples of the difficulty of figuring out just what Egyptian and Sumerian words meant to their authors, whether an early document was a hymn or a recipe (or perhaps both).

The comments are on the academic side, and sometimes seem to assert as facts what Millar elsewhere admits can only be accepted as valid educated guesswork, but they are readable and they lay to rest the racist idea that only Europeans were clever enough to guess that the world might be round and try to sail to the other hemisphere. Most of humankind have always found enough to do, where they are, to be uninterested in sailing far away. Living in colder, less-rich climates probably encouraged western European and British people to take more interest in sailing and exploring than Indian and Chinese people did; still, all people living near coasts liked to sail around coasts rather than haul freight over land, and people intending to sail around coasts sometimes found themselves far out at sea.

In fact, as C.S. Lewis observed in The Allegory of Love from his reading of other historians' work, educated people before Columbus' time generally thought the world and the space around it were round; they imagined the universe as made up of concentric spheres. Columbus' revolutionary idea that he could reach the East by sailing west was not new, as some have imagined. What was new and bold in Spain, at the end of the fifteenth century, was not the idea that such a thing might be done by superhuman powers, but the idea that the technology of that era made it something people might be able to plan on doing as part of regular business.

If you're looking for documentation that, despite the distrust between countries whose religious differences had been politicized, African and Asian voices were part of the pre-Columbian world's idea of mysterious, mostly unreachable "isles of the blessed" west of Britain, here it is. 

While The Beautiful West didn't revolutionize my view of ancient history so much as it supports some suspicions historians have long entertained, its compilation of ancient art belongs in any school or museum where art history is studied. 

Lies, BLEEP Lies, and Silly Statistics

This post was prompted by a Washington Post Style Invitational humor contest. The prompt was "Make up silly statistics that aren't true, but are funny because they remind us of something else." 

To make it easier for all Internet readers to spot the statistics that aren't true, I'm borrowing an old linguistics convention: A sentence that's "wrong" is flagged with an asterisk. Example: * These is false statistics maid up for chokes.

1. * "The world will come to an end in twelve years," wailed the most junior member of Congress, picking one of her 350,000 long black hairs out from between 3 of her 37.5% oversized front teeth. "Lighten up, Al," suggested another junior member. "But it will," wailed the Congresschick, "because I'll be too old to have babies."

2. * "America is 40% greater than it was in 2016," bellowed a fellow in a red baseball cap. "Say what?: one of his Tweeps obligingly sqiawked. "I'm thinking like a rich man," the Trump fan explained. "The more debt you're in, the more credit you have, which makes you greater!"

3. * Due to ethical constraints on sacrificing any more innocent animals to glyphosate testing,t he product was tested on 250 senior employees of chemical companies. Of these, 47% developed gastrointestinal reactions, 53% developed respiratory symptoms, 16% developed skin lesions, 8% suffered kidney damage, 9% developed thyroid symptoms, 2% became completely paralyzed, 3% developed tumors in sex-specific body parts, 5,6% committed suicide, and 0.4% developed a persistent delusion that he was Donald Trump's vermiform appendix. 

4. * Following the experiment described above, 99.8% of the cmpanies' remaining employees have been working on weeder robot technology, and 0.2% have gone int hiding.

5. * As a result of the radical redirection of the chemical companies, a large-scale survey indicates that 2.22 million Americans reported feeling 100% better, 2.7 million reported feeling70-95% better, and 35,479 are currently suing one or more chemical companies.

6. * A YouGov poll found that 23% of all free online courses re taken int he names of domestic animals and 4% are actually taken by the animals. Priscilla King's missing cat Heather, who had taken four freshman courses from Harvard Online with a GPA of 3.6, was found on Harvard's main campus, meowing for admission to regular classes. (In real life the cat died by misadventure.)

7. * 99.4% of the population of Takoma Park, Maryland (17,462) have higher IQ scores than 95% of the population of Rockville, Maryland.

8. Brett Favre, Jerry Rice, and Tim Tebow together have scored 216 touchdowns. (Google says this is true. I thought these statistics would be funnier if there was a real one on this page, somewhere.)

9. * 91% of Montgomery County Metrobuses run on or within 2 minutes of schedule, 85% or more of the time. 75% of Arlington Metrobuses run within 5 minutes of schedule, 75% or more of the time. 87% of Alexandria Metrobuses run within 10 minutes of schedule, 90% or more of the time. 51% of Fairfax County Metrobuses run within 5 minutes of schedule, 55% of the time. 40% of downdown DC Metrobuses run within 2 minutes of schedule, 90% of the time. Any resemblance between the observed behavior of Prince Georges County Metrobuses and their schedules is coincidental.

10. * According to a recent survey of sixth grade students, 59% could not find Canada on a map, 71% thought British was a foreign language (and 17% thought it was written with kanji characters), 6% were able to name their own state capitals, and 45% failed to spot the misprint in the US first edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which states that 42 is the product of multiplying 7 by 9. However, 84% self-identified as Democrats, 63% thought they might be homosexual, and 91% thought male-to-female transsexuals should be counted as women. Upon the release of the results of this survey, 21 sixth grade teachers attempted to leave the US.

11. * According to a survey conducted by off-duty DC traffic police officers, 51% of DC drivers have never had a DC license, 42% have never had a Maryland or Virginia license either, 33% indicated lack of familiarity with the term "license," 22% were drunk or stoned, and 49% were diplomats. Only 24% correctly answered questions about the rules for turning left on a red light in DC, Maryland, or Virginia. When asked how tourists should get around the city, 99% said "Ride Metro."

12. * 99% of Marylanders surveyed did not know that February was National Return Shopping Carts Month. 98% of Marylanders didn't know that Virginians think they push all those shopping carts into rivers themselves. 95% of Marylanders did not know that, when you call a store to report a shopping cart stuck in a watercourse, the Chesapeake Bay Monster makes one of your wishes come true.

13. * Taking primary responsibility for house cleaning, especially scrubbing bathroom floors, extends male sexual activity by an average of 13.6 years.

14. * You can lower your WSSC water bill by $40 per person per month if you flush your toilet by filling a quart container with water from the sink (while washing your hands) and dumping it into the bowl. (This is enough water to activate the flush mechanism without completely refilling the bowl, which can be done whenever one anticipates a need. I've tested this method. It really did lower my bill dramatically, but I'm not aware of any real statistical studies.)

15. * You can lower your Pepco bill by $50 per month if you think of all electronic devices as room heaters. When you turn on the air conditioning, unplug the TV sets and computers until the day of the first frost. (Again, that this lowers the bill is true; statistical studies of how much it lowers the bill were made up.)

New Book Review: Charlie Utopia

Title: Charlie Utopia 

Author: Nowick Gray

Date: 2022

Publisher: Cougar

Length: 363 pages

ISBN: 9781990129230

Quote: "He had even plotted the end of his autobiography, envisioning life after fifty as icing on the cake."

Why read this novel? It's funny in a dry way, but not too funny to read in public. It's sad in a dry way, too, but not so sad as to be depressing. Mainly it's nostalgic. Charlie Utopia is a baby-boomer who lives in his utopian dreams, brings them into life in most ways--he succeeds at all the different things he wants to do as fun jobs, doesn't have to give much time to jobs taken just to pay bills, builds his own house, travels with a band, gets into all the beds he seems really to want to get into. Yet he's always just slightly depressed, because for all the self-help books he reads and all the trendy roads to happiness he follows, something eludes him.

And what that something is, is Love. Charlie's always loved himself and arranged for his own comfort. He's a decent man, and his own comfort includes doing honest work well, being a satisfactory bedmate, and providing for his one positively known child. But his good will fails to extend beyond the end of his own nose. He seems to keep track of the names of the women he's married or lived with, but beyond their different demographic profiles he's aware of very little about them, so it's hard for the reader to remember which fits into which part of his story (and that plus the philosophical fads are often the only indication of what year it's supposed to be, from scene to scene). He doesn't abuse his daughter, but he seems to know nothing about her except as baggage that comes with one of the women he's given pleasure yet failed to know. People always drift away from him and he never knows why. He has no religion. He hopes being a left-winger will appease the envious masses of people who have less than he and his friends have, but never gets to know any of them personally either. Determined to use his talents to preserve the space for the rich interior life his introvert brain needs, he fails to find the working partnership his introvert brain craves next. Many people seem to agree that he's a good neighbor, but he has no close friend, male or female.

It doesn't take 363 pages to paint a credible portrait of a man who has everything but love, so reading this book is mainly a nostalgia trip for those currently over fifty. If you have or have had a Partner For Life, you can enjoy feeling sorry for Charlie. If not, you may enjoy sharing his richly detailed life travelogue of work, thought, passion, and the sense of mild depression that sets in just when Charlie is in his workshop enjoying the other things. 

Ideas This Web Site Classifies as Rabid Right: Part 5 ot 5

This is the end of the series about the way this web site uses the terms "Right" and "Left," as opposed to "Rabid Right" and "Loony Left." Right-wing extremists are rare, but people do keep reporting evidence that they exist. They...

* Really do not like or trust any foreigners at all. Accept the benefits of peace but think we might be better off to build an empire.

* Often don't like or trust other parts of the United States either. Stereotype States to their North, South, East, and West with reckless abandon. May seriously think secession, or dividing the Union in some other way, would be a good idea.

* While it's easy to exploit racism, it's not so easy to practice it. Even Hitler found it necessary to enter into alliances with people who, urgh ick, were not German. Rabid Right people might spout hate of some demographic group or other while having active and prominent members in their own groups who have come out of the group their group supposedly hate. This type of person, typically a young man, is thinking clearly about what he feels--hostile energy--and what he wants--a good rumble, "good" being defined as one he or his gang will win. He is not so clear about whom he wants to fight with and why. He may form a pattern/habit of picking fights with other young men in town, in the expectation that the young women they date will talk them out of fighting before they actually come to blows. 

* If not physically predisposed to brawl, may find other ways to cling to race prejudice, even though racism is hard to practice in real life because it is unrealistic. What they really feel is infantile fear of strangers. They cope by telling themselves that people who look or talk like them in some way are part of their "family" category of people, often a dangerous mistake, and people who don't are the ones they can safely fear and reject, often an expensive mistake.

* Deep fear of other people, in adults, comes from distrust of oneself. People who are not afraid of strangers don't believe that everyone is a friend, but do believe that they'll be able to take care of themselves if they find themselves talking to, working with, car-pooling with, or even living with people who prove to be enemies. People who are afraid of strangers sense that they don't have any skills for coping with other people's undesirable behavior except hitting, kicking, and biting, all of which are likely to lead to fights they are likely not to win. This makes Rabid Right "racists" very undesirable as neighbors even for members of their own official "race" group.

* Deeply dislike, distrust, and fear the effects of overpopulation but, due to their twisted thinking about people inside versus people outside whatever groups they may identify with, may cling to the idea that their having more children will give them more allies in the constant struggle against other people. Worry a great deal, if White, about the trend for White people to be leading the world away from the dysfunctional old idea of having multiple children.

* Believe things they've heard from Old Left propaganda--e.g. that all Black Americans are poor and this poverty is what makes them violent--and react to those things in the way the propagandists didn't want--e.g. believing that all Black Americans are violent and need to be cowed by displays of superior force. 

* Once led into that critical mistake of thinking that life's conflicts consist of "my group against other groups" instead of "my ability to defend myself against harm," may fall for any number of additional fallacies, though these vary from year to year and not all of them are likely to be present in the same individual. Take war propaganda and campaign rhetoric literally. Believe that

** All men are violent bullies who believe might is always right and brawling is the ultimate solution to everything.

** Women (or women other than the Rabid Righty's mother, sisters, and/or daughters) are good for only one thing and should not be really trusted even in regard to that.

** The old take away more than they give to the young.

** Today's young are more clueless than today's adults were at their age. (This is possible?)

** One's own religious beliefs are altogether true and divinely guided, and all other religious beliefs are false insofar as they differ from one's own and of satanic origin, and therefore people of other faith can be considered decent human beings only after they convert to one's own school of thought.

** Alternatively, in some religious beliefs, people of other faith can't convert to the One True Faith because it consists partly of physical descent from the right ancestor, and there are no good people outside the tribe. Or, as in medieval Jewish writings, there are exactly 36 righteous Gentiles scattered around the world.

(This kind of beliefs usually come in matched sets for back-and-forth hostile exchange.)

* So, favor censorship as long as it's "our" kind of censorship. Ignore the probability that "our" kind of censorship will be taken over and used against "us" by "them."

* Favor technological espionage and "social credit" systems, on the same reasoning, or lack of reasoning.

* Believe nothing can be learned from history and we're all doomed to repeat it endlessly in any case.

* Seriously believe that the world, or at least some part of it, was a better place when women weren't hired for most full-time jobs and "racial" groups were segregated. There is usually something in the way of a base for these beliefs; some South Africans can make a plausible case that some ethnic groups in that country have reacted badly to the official policy that grants them equal civil rights, some people feel very bitter about their early family lives, etc. 

* Claim to revere the Bible or whatever portion of it their religious group accept as valid, but do not study it in depth. Want to believe that everything in the Bible boils down to whatever subset of simple rules and doctrines the individual was taught as a child. Never take a bite of the "strong meat" of biblical teaching for adults. 

* Probably don't believe that ethnic groups recognized today can be traced to those mentioned in the Bible but, if they do, hold rigid and judgmental beliefs about those groups. Memorable barbs aimed at the policies some groups or leaders were taking, by contemporary preachers, must be accurate descriptions of the way every member of those groups will always be. (People who think this way try to ignore the implication that even the apostolic Christians of pure Jewish descent were "children of Hell.")

* Distrust radical, "fanatical" followers of their own religious traditions and may persecute them as viciously as some Jews did Jesus or some Christians did Luther. (Deep down they do feel called to follow the same radical practices these reformers do, even if it is true that, as with Ann Lee and lifelong celibacy, it's feasible for only some people to be called to practice certain disciplines. But liberal believers who simply don't feel called to lives of celibacy, or communalism, or evangelism, don't feel a need to throw stones at those who heed such calls. The haters who do throw things at the radical believers are really fighting against a feeling of inferiority because they either have not had such callings or have rejected the callings they had.)

* Really yearn, because of their fundamental inability to rely on themselves, to follow a leader who they expect will be able to make everything better. (No matter how blatantly flawed a man may be, if he gets into a leadership position and is then able to use the talent and experience he has to make some improvement in the organization or the nation, these people want to believe that just keeping him as a leader will make everything better. Thus the widespread support for Trump in 2024, ignoring the fact that Trump's age was already working against him in 2020 and the probability that he'll be physically unfit for the presidency by 2024, as well as the number of things he did that were unwelcomed even by Republicans and were counterproductive for the nation. Trump briefly reversed two major D policy mistakes, therefore Trump must be the savior of the nation.)

* While only a few can fairly be called neo-Nazis (radical rebels in the U.S. who believe that even the German Nazional-Sozialist party at least corrected some Marxist Communist mistakes), this kind of Rabid Right thinking is compatible with other versions of fascism. The American Rabid Right can usually see clearly where Hitler, Mussolini, and Saddam went wrong but they may think that Francisco Franco's approach to government has possibilities.

* And it does not go by ethnicity alone, but these people are substantially more likely to have German or Slavic rather than English or Celtic names; the Rabid Right don't come from old established families, or have much appeal for those who do. They tend to be closer to Eastern Europe, where feudalism led directly into socialism without people having had the benefit of a better political philosophy. One can see how that would tend to make fascism look good, or less bad. 

One more...

* Are subject to parody by moderate Rightists who don't take the Rabid Right seriously. Thus, after certain memorable outbursts of political hate from the Left, bloggers who had previously identified as centrists or moderate Rightists started adopting screen surnames like "Deplorable," "Ultra MAGA," "Terrorist Domestique," "Pirate," and "Refusenik" (that one was in regard to coronavirus vaccines). So far as I've been able to determine by following them on Twitter and at forum sites, most of these people are retirees whose online activity is more social than political.

The Rabid Right are so incompatible with the socially liberal, libertarian, individualist thinking found at this web site that we tend to forget that they exist. They are a small minority not represented in our part of the world. They are human beings too, and deserve to be loved and educated...but other people are more likely to be able to love and educate them than we are. I usually write to Righties because that's the largest recognizable category of this web site's readers, but I wouldn't know what to say to the Rabid Right--if they'd even listen to a biracial woman, which I doubt.  

Morgan Griffith on WOTUS

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

"

No to WOTUS Rule

In January, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Army Corps)’s published a final Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule. This rule is scheduled to take effect on March 20^th. It makes significant changes to expand the federal government’s authority to regulate any body of water.

Using sweeping terms to define millions of acres, the rule places enormous burdens on private property owners, creating uncertainty for Americans.

This new rule arguably gives the EPA and Army Corps the ability to regulate a medium sized mud puddle in your yard. When building a fence on their land, Americans shouldn’t need a team of attorneys to navigate federal regulations.

The Obama administration proposed a similar rule. I have always opposed this flawed regulatory approach.

As soon as the final Biden rule was published, I co-sponsored House Joint Resolution, H.J.Res.27, to terminate this rule through the Congressional Review Act, which provides a mechanism to overturn regulations.

I voted for H.J.Res.27 on March 9th, which passed 227-198.

The Senate must also pass the resolution in their chamber. I think the Senate is likely to pass this resolution.

However, the President must sign the resolution into law. I do not foresee that happening.

As an aside, I have always thought this part of the Congressional Review Act was illogical because it takes both houses of Congress and the President to pass a bill, but an unelected bureaucracy working for the president can pass regulations on their own. The elected Congress ought to be able to disapprove with a mere majority.

Since that is not currently the law, the fight against this bad policy turns to the courts.

After the rule was published in January, Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the rule. The lawsuit argues that the federal agencies tasked with implementing this rule, “unconstitutionally and impermissibly expand their own authority beyond Congress’s delegation in the Clean Water Act—intruding into state sovereignty and the liberties of the states and their citizens.”

I agree with the theory put forward in the Texas lawsuit.

In February, Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares filed a similar lawsuit against the EPA and Army Corps. He did so along with 23 other states.

I support Attorney General Mirayes joining the lawsuit on behalf of Virginia as landowners in the 9^th District and around the state shouldn’t have to worry about the federal government policing rivulets or medium sized mud puddles.

As the Farm Bureau said, farmers are worried about noncompliance after doing something as simple as plowing their fields.

WOTUS sounds likes big brother has reared its ugly head.

Recognizing the negative effect this rule will have on thousands of small businesses, multiple business groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed their own lawsuit in February to challenge the Biden Administration’s WOTUS rule.

In their press release announcing their lawsuit, the NCBA Policy Vice-Chair Gene Copenhaver of Washington County, Virginia, stated, “My cattle operation in southwest Virginia has a creek that only carries water after large storms. Under this WOTUS rule, we could be subject to complex federal regulation.”

That being said, this all may soon be a moot point.

The Biden Administration went forward with their new WOTUS rule despite the fact that there is an impending Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. EPA, which is expected to provide a plain, unambiguous, meaning of the law upon which the WOTUS rule is based.

In the 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case Rapanos v. United States, which challenged federal jurisdiction to regulate isolated wetlands under the Clean Water Act, Justice Kennedy created the “significant nexus” test. In determining what constituted waters of the United States, this test had two parts: First, there must be a connection to a downstream waters of the U.S. Second, the area in question must have an effect on the chemical, physical, or biological integrity of traditional navigable water. 

Many have criticized the “significant nexus” test as being too vague and that the expansive language encourages regulators to interpret the definition of WOTUS as increasingly broad.

While the Trump administration did not utilize the test, instead opting for a narrower definition, the Obama and Biden Administrations both used the “significant nexus” test when defining WOTUS.

If the Supreme Court rules that the significant nexus test is not valid or changes it in a significant way, the Biden Administration rule will be void and they will have to start the process all over again.

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.

"

Editorial comment: We as a nation discussed this and rejected it more than ten years ago. We need some sort of permanent rule that, when a bad idea has been soundly defeated once, it must be substantially changed before anyone in any government position is asked to bother about it again. Anything that sounds similar to that bad old UN Agenda 21 needs, for a start, to be automatically blocked from further consideration. (Yes, this is out of UN Agenda 21, currently circulating under the name Agenda 2030. It's still a power grab and it still needs to generate deep budget cuts for the UN as well as fines for anyone sponsoring its bad ideas in the US.)

We need to protect the quality of water in North America, and Congressman Griffith could have been more vigilant about that last year. However, the way to protect the quality of water is not by enacting huge sweeping power grabs, just as the way to prevent murder is not by putting everyone in a padded cell. We assume that people are not going to commit murder until convinced that they are, and then try to keep those people off the streets. We should likewise educate people about what damages the water supply, assume that people are not going to commit the crime of poisoning the water supply until convinced that they're doing it, and then get those people away from access to the water supply. 

Twelve years ago, corporate interests were squealing for "cap-and-trade" policies that called for (unenforceable) micromanagement of small air polluters like backyard grills in exchange for tolerance of large air polluters like coal-burning plants. We need a policy that reverses this, that requires large polluters to be dealt with first. 

We do need to recognize that poisoning other people's air, water, or food is a violent crime against persons. When people spray "herbicides" on their lawns, they are violating other people's bodies; they are making their own families ill, they may well be making their neighbors' son "non-binary." They need to be called to account for that. At the very least they need to forfeit their claim on the land they've polluted, both in order to compensate the affected neighbors, and in order to make sure they will have no chance to pollute the land again. 

But land and power grabs, which are all about profits for individuals in high positions and do nothing to benefit the citizens, should be recognized as non-starters whenever they are proposed in the legislature. That much Congressman Griffith is doing, and I believe he's representing us well.

Book Review: Don't Cry for Me

Book Review: Don’t Cry for Me

Author: Klara Jarunkova

Translator: George Theiner

Date: 1963 (Slovak), 1968 (English)

Publisher: Four Winds / Scholastic

ISBN: none

Length: 287 pages

Quote: “Being sick in bed with a temperature is great. Just one evening with 104 and you get whatever it is you’ve been longing for.”

What readers liked about this school story from Soviet Czechoslovakia was that Olga is just like the fourteen-year-old heroines of Betty Cavanna, or even Judy Blume. That would also have been what they disliked about it. Olga’s dreams, crushes, mood swings, rebellions, and love of the younger children she baby-sits have a European cultural flavor, but in the end they’re about as mundane as those of American fourteen-year-olds.

Even the beatings? Well, actually, yes; in the United States too, in this period, many parents and teachers believed in corporal punishment. Adults were always threatening to beat kids black and blue, and actually giving them a whack with a wooden spoon, in the 1960s. Although the warmer climate, richer diet, and genetic diversity in the U.S. seem to have lowered the average age of puberty; American adults usually displayed some qualms about hitting a fourteen-year-old...but then all the fourteen-year-old girls in my class wore adult-sized bras, and most of us were taller than a few of the teachers.

In the course of Don’t Cry for Me Olga hangs out with her friends and relatives, defies her father and persists in baby-sitting the otherwise unsupervised children of the trashiest couple in the apartment building, tries to become a real artist, indignantly rejects the attention of unsuitable older men of sixteen, eventually has a sweet chaste age-appropriate romance with one, goes skiing with relatives, worries that her parents might get a divorce, feels guilty about the probability that she’ll do better than her friends on the competitive examinations that determine which kids go to high school and which to vocational courses, gets her hair cut, and makes a happy ending where she finds one.

Who shouldn’t cry for Olga? Maybe it’s the trashy couple’s children, when the mother, a prostitute, finally attempts suicide and the children are finally offered places in an orphanage; Olga won’t be baby-sitting them any more but at least (she hopes) they’ll have regular meals. Maybe it’s the teenaged girl readers who might not have realized that a teen romance that reaches its natural end can be part of a story that has a happy ending. Or maybe, just possibly—oh, how subversive this thought would have been in 1968!—it’s the English-speaking readers who are shown that, although Olga and her friends aren’t quite as well off as teenagers in the English-speaking world, their lives aren’t altogether miserable. Even behind the Iron Curtain.

Times have changed, and this novel is certainly no longer a story about what living in Czechoslovakia is like today, but some readers may enjoy it for its historical interest. And there may even be a few radical, subversive, artistic high school girls who appreciate the adult perspective Olga takes in narrating the realistically happy end of her first romance.  Editors used to doubt that girls who could accept that their first hormone reaction was less than True Love existed, but they did, and they do. 

Eating "Healthy" in the Suburbs. Part 3: What Giant Got Right

When I started buying my own groceries it was in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., and I was spoiled for life. I was within a few miles of Bethesda, where Mr. Cohen was still making Giant Foods a great supermarket. 

Giant changed considerably in the decades after it became a big corporation. I remember once making a list of thirty ways it had changed for the worse even by the year 2000.  But while the Giant Food stores were a privately owned chain they had some features that all grocery stores should have, but few do.

1. They were budget-friendly. Bethesda is not a budget-friendly city but Mr. Cohen never forgot that his target demographic included students and interns, and Giant was a great blessing to those people while I was one of them. Before Washington had heard much about Wal-Mart, Giant sold nationally recognized brands for "the Wal-Mart price," the lowest regular price on the market. My weekly grocery budget was ten dollars. If I wanted to get through a week on five dollars, as it might be because I wanted to donate food to the church food drive, I could do that, and did. After all, six cans of vegetable soup routinely went on sale for a dollar, two big bagels cost a dollar, enough vegetables to serve four normally cost about a dollar (sometimes less), a loaf of bread cost less than a dollar, a jar of jam or peanut butter cost less, eight cups of flour or cornmeal cost a dollar, a quart of fruit or vegetable juice cost a dollar or less...

2. What was prepared in the store, or sold as a store brand, was kosher. That matters, even if you're not Jewish. Apart from having inspired some peculiar work-arounds in various Jewish culinary traditions, kosher means a clean kitchen and good-quality food. 

Canned fruit and vegetables are normally the damaged produce. Most supermarkets will sell fresh fruit and veg only if they look perfect, not only fresh and unbruised but conforming to some frankly silly uniform standards of size and color. Perfectly good cucumbers, which aren't sold for canning, are left on the ground to rot on many farms because the cucumbers in the store have to reach the right height and diameter--and shape, the supermarkets demand a uniform oblong shape--and cucumbers naturally grow with more diversity than storekeepers want to display. It's not that a shorter, longer, fatter, or thinner cucumber, or one that grew in a curved rather than straight shape or grew thicker at one end, tastes different from the ones the supermarkets sell. It's not that these "irregular" cucumbers are really ugly, though "Ugly Fruit and Vegetables" was the name of a campaign to prevent these produce being wasted. It's that supermarkets want a fixed price and don't want to leave room for shoppers to start haggling, "If this big cucumber costs 25 cents then this little one ought to cost 20 cents." 

But the bruised peach, the apple that landed on the sharp stone, the ear of corn with the earworm? They went into cans. As a result, even though canned vegetables used to be preserved with generous amounts of salt and taste more like salt than like fresh vegetables, sometimes the salt failed to disguise a nasty taste of mold or spoilage that used to turn children against vegetables for years. 

Giant Foods' canned veg, however, had to be insect-free, fungus-free, perhaps odd-shaped but otherwise good enough to eat raw. I ate a lot of canned veg as a student because I liked them.

3. Giant knew their market. The Takoma Park, Silver Spring, and Hyattsville stores, for example, all stocked all the Seventh-Day Adventist specialties, which in those days had not sold out to big corporations and were still produced by students at varioua Adventist schools, as student labor jobs. Stores in neighborhoods where a lot of diplomats lived offered all their favorite imported foods. Stores in neighborhoods where a lot of people were into "health food" stores stocked blackstrap molasses and nutritional yeast. 

Into the 1980s the Maryland suburbs outside the Beltway were rural. (Into the 1940s, even some neighborhoods in the District Proper, including Anacostia before it became "Ward 8,* were rural, agricultural--the President and Congress had to have their milk, fish, and produce fresh from their sources.) Traditionally people living in Washington would drive a few miles into Maryland, into Silver Spring or Bethesda, e.g., and buy fresh veg from roadside stands or, if it were a Wednesday or a Friday, the Bethesda farm market. In the Reagan Administration Silver Spring and Bethesda were urbanized; in the Clinton years Gaithersburg was. Traffic problems were terrible. Blaming the diplomats is an old Washington tradition but it should not be understood to suggest that the students or the tragic young people growing up in the city aren't menaces to life too--the fact that they get tickets for things like driving on the wrong side of the road, or letting the car roll in through a store window, merely means the suburb-towns get a good bit of revenue from those tickets. Roadside stands were blamed, and in fact were literally endangered, by the traffic snarls. 

So Giant stepped up and designated some stores to offer fresh local produce as it was available, reintroducing the element of surprise to grocery shopping, and allowing shoppers to buy "Ugly Fruit and Veg" at times. You had to be at the right store at the right time, say 6 a.m., to see it but you could still buy Anne Arundel produce in the suburbs. Maybe. 

Local produce matters. For one thing, when stores have the "local produce, occasionally" option open, farmers who want to offer organically grown produce are free to use genuinely organic methods. "Organically grown" used to mean no pesticides, minimal chemical fertilizers, and small batches of unwaxed, unsoaked, natural fruit and veg. Natural fruit and veg has to be fresh; otherwise it starts to rot. For people my age, at least, the idea that "organically grown" foods in supermarkets today probably contain "less pesticide residues" is unacceptable; that's not the way we use or understand the term "organic" and as far as I'm concerned, if a spray can was opened within sight of a plant after it sprouted, calling it an "organic" product is a LIE. 

For another thing, after most plant-based foods are picked, their nutrient value begins to decrease. Some nutrients are more stable than others. If you want the full nutrient value of most produce, though, you don't want to take time to cook them, or to fill a bushel basket. Fill a one-quart bucket, rinse those babies under the hose, and eat them raw. There are benefits to cooking some things--once beans develop in their pods they need to be cooked, and while tomatoes are nutritious when they're raw some of their nutrient value actually increases when they're cooked--but most plant-based food is best while it's still growing.

Corporate food packing operations have pit huge amounts of timeand money into keeping small food producers out oft he supermarkets, so Mr. Cohen was really swimming against the tide by registering "Roadside Stand" as a brand, buying the roadside stand produce, and selling it in Giant stores. But he was loved for doing it. More stores should only be doing that now.

Old Book Review: Call Me Charley

Book Review: Call Me Charley

Author: Jesse Jackson

Date: 1945

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 183 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Doris Spiegel

Quote: “You’ve got to see my workshop and maybe you will get to see the hideout if we initiate you into the club.”

Once upon a time, when the United States was not so badly overcrowded, there were whole neighborhoods in which children had never seen a person whose ancestors came from a different part of the world, and so there was a need for storybooks about the first and only child from various minority groups in a school. As a rule these storybooks were nicer than some of the actual memories of people who were the only one of their ethnic group in their schools, and nastier than others. There was always an obnoxious child, or a few obnoxious children, who didn’t want to be friendly to someone they saw as different (in real life this was not always the case) and there was always a nice child who did want to be friendly, and by the end of the story they were all playing together.

In real life, there were and still neighborhoods where the new kid at school has to fight his way up to his position in the hierarchy of physical or social bullying. The first member of a minority group would have faced the same overt challenges that a new member of the majority group faced. The key was to be tough enough, if not to win all the fights, at least not to show fear. Children's book publishers at this period very seldom wanted to discuss that kind of schools or neighborhoods. Denial ruled. At schools worth reading about that kind of social life didn't happen.

So children’s books in this genre stuck to the relatively non-controversial issue of playing with other children at recess. Adults did not think children needed to bother their little heads about more controversial issues like job and housing discrimination, religious practice, interfaith or interethnic marriage, the fact that some members of minorities were not always conceded their civil rights, or the fact that sometimes it was the newcomer or minority person who didn’t want to be friendly. Children were supposed to be so innocent that all they needed was an occasional nudge about the benefits of always acting friendly.

Call Me Charley is that sort of book. Charley is the only African-American in his neighborhood. And his story was likely to be the only book in the middle school library—if the school was prosperous enough to have a library, which wasn’t necessarily the case, either, in 1945—about a little boy who really was “a Negro.” In the first scene in the book Charley has to remind his new school friends that his name is not Sambo, which was the name of the protagonist in a sillier story, for younger children, about a little boy in India.

Times have changed more than that. In Charley’s first conversation with his new pals Tom and George, the story they tell him is about how the little boy whom Charley will of course replace in the club got his leg cut off by slipping on the railroad tracks, trying to dodge an oncoming train, when all the boys were picking up coal around the tracks. None of these children is considered poor and desperate. They live in nice houses, with cooks who can afford to let them “steal” an occasional cookie between meals, and scraps of building materials to use in their hideout. Picking up bits of coal that fall off railroad cars was just something “smart, thrifty” adults encouraged kids to do in those days. Call it an early form of recycling.

By the time I was old enough to read books like Call Me Charley, or like Melindy’s Medal or Mary Jane, African-American adults were saying that the need for these books had passed. Libraries could afford to discard surviving copies and give us books by Langston Hughes or Lucille Clifton, unless these older storybooks were loved--and sometimes they were. Another very trendy genre of storybooks by Euro-American authors didn’t mention anybody’s ethnicity in an old-fashioned way, but were illustrated with pictures of ethnically integrated groups of children. Our generation weren’t supposed to be oldfashioned enough to think about where our friends’ parents came from. Some of us perversely and rebelliously persisted in thinking our ethnic roots were interesting.

Our local libraries preserved old books for their historical value for a good long time, so I was allowed to grow up with books about children who would, if real, have been as old as my parents; Charley would be about the age of my mother. On the whole I think those books were valuable, and should be kept available for the rising generation. Call Me Charley was not a favorite of mine, because it’s about boys. Nor was it a favorite of my brother’s, because it’s about city boys; none of the main characters is a horse, or a dog, or even a devoted dog owner. It’s a nice, cheerful story about boys who overlook their differences and play as a group. It’s still worth reading, once, especially by children who have grandparents who might appreciate an opportunity to tell the children about what they were doing in 1945.

Personally, I'd like to see libraries discard only a few really bad books that they shouldn't have acquired in the first place, and keep books that were terribly timely when printed and are historical curiosities now. A library should be a place where people who like historical curiosities can find them. How do we make history interesting for children? If the children like stories, as I did, what works is to let them read stories of other times and places, and let them be attracted to the facts of history by curiosity about how and why things were so different. Children need to know that although most houses had been connected to the electrical grid by 1945, the mad scramble to replace oldfashioned things that still worked hadn't started; many people used electric lights but still cooked with gas and heated their homes with coal. A book from the 1940s, like Call Me Charley or The Melendy Family or Meet the Malones, painlessly installs that fact in their minds and may encourage them to fill in more facts about the period.

Yes, some may fret, but what about the outdated language? Call Me Charley was written by a Black author (the Jesse Jackson who's famous today may have been named after him) and presents Charley's Blackness in the way Black Americans who were born in 1908 preferred to talk about it. I wouldn't worry unless the children in question are fighting a real race war. In a normal modern integrated school, one can hope the giggling about outdated word choices will be mutual, and one can squelch any attempts to revive it with "Are you trying to talk like someone in 1945? Why don't you look up some more about that time? What about 'ration tickets'? What kind of song would you expect to hear played by a 'big band'? Where were people still using animals for transportation, and where were the streets full of cars, and what kind of cars?" When my parents used to do things like that, they really made the historical study projects interesting. They found a 1940s radio comedy rerun broadcast on radio; today you might find recordings on the Internet. You can find recipes, schoolbooks, even newspapers and magazines from the 1940s if you look hard enough, and while children's clothes that old are hard to find, hand-sewn clothes were cool in the 1940s and you might find patterns.