Tim Kaine on Military Budget Cuts to Fund Border Wall

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), with editorial comments below:

"

Dear friend,

More than a month ago, I sent a letter to Acting Secretary of Defense Shanahan about my concerns with President Trump's plan to take billions of dollars from the Department of Defense's military construction budget to build his border wall. I asked which military projects would be affected and the negative impacts it will have on American servicemembers if those projects are terminated. Unfortunately, DoD refused to give us that list before the Senate voted on President Trump's emergency declaration.

Last week, in an Armed Services Committee hearing, I pressed Secretary Shanahan on the delay and this past Monday, the Trump Administration finally released the list of projects that are at risk of losing funding.

Not only do these projects support military readiness, including military training centers here in Virginia, they also ensure the security of our servicemembers, both at home and overseas. The projects at risk include a plant to prevent water contamination at Camp Lejeune, a child development center for military families at Andrews Air Force Base, security updates at the Pentagon and bases across the Commonwealth, and a cyber ops facility at Joint-Base Langley Eustis.

President Trump's own defense advisors have made clear that there is no military emergency on our southern border. Yet the President is still trying to ransack the Pentagon's budget. President Trump is prioritizing his border wall ahead of the safety of our troops, and Congress cannot let this stand.

I hope my colleagues will take a serious look at these projects that support our military and then vote to override the President's veto.

Sincerely,

Visit my website: kaine.senate.gov

"

Editorial comments: Meh. The three Virginia projects on the list look like the sort of thing that can be postponed as long as we stay out of war, but then all defense maintenance projects look that way unless, and until, we're attacked. I think Trump should be doing more to get those who want the wall behind his Gofundme page. I really like the idea of fundraising as an alternative to federal funding.

Morgan Griffith on Cutting Carbon Emissions

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

"

ICYMI: Griffith Op-Ed in Roanoke Times“Innovation Will Reduce Carbon Emissions”

Wednesday, March 20, 2019 – Congressman Morgan Griffith (R-VA) wrote the following op-ed for the Roanoke Times outlining his plan to reduce carbon emissions: Innovation will reduce carbon emissions A recent letter to the editor claimed that I had not offered a plan to address climate change as an alternative to the “Green New Deal.” This is incorrect. The writer would find in my weekly newsletter, comments in committee and on the House floor, press statements, and elsewhere dozens of calls for research, technological innovation, and “all of the above” energy policies. I believe any effective plan to counter climate change must be based in science, rely on America’s technological strengths and bountiful natural resources, and have a global vision. I have supported policies that meet these criteria, but the Green New Deal fails on each count and cannot be taken seriously as a way to improve the environment. To continue reading the op-ed, please click here.

"

Editorial comment: Dang straight.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" is neither Green nor new, nor is it rational. It is the effusion of a little girl who may have noticed about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy but still believes the Marxist fairy tale: "When people don't have to make decisions, be responsible, own property, earn money, or behave like adults in any other meaningful way, they'll be as happy and as good as little children are!" Anyone who still believes that, will believe anything, and really has no business in Washington even as a student.

Congressman Griffith has consistently shared with this web site several thoughts on energy technology. (That all of them have not appeared here is my fault: I read too many e-mails and don't get through them while they still qualify as news.) I'm sure every reader in the Ninth District would rank those thoughts differently if asked to say exactly which ones we found more credible than others. This is to be expected since the Ninth District includes Gate City and Martinsville, and all those other towns as well. In any case there's been no room for doubt that our man in Washington has given a lot of thought to diversifying our historic common interest in energy production. Newsletter material reposted at this web site can be found quickly by clicking on the labels "coal," "electricity," or "energy" at the bottom of this post.

The Roanoke Times' correspondent may have overlooked the fact that the Ninth District is already doing more than the rest of our Commonwealth is doing to address "climate change" simply by staying rural. Most of us do indisputably drive too much, and some of us may even still be burning coal at home, but we are still dramatically cooler than Washington, Richmond, or Norfolk--all year!

Makers & Takers: Should People from Washington Visit Gate City?

Well, duh. Of course they should.

That big bad winter storm is heading our way, at the time of writing, but we've had some lovely springlike days, and the blossoming of Prunus trees (fruit-bearing and ornamental) and forsythia and dandelions and other beautiful things reminds me of a Washington tradition I used to enjoy when I lived in or near the city.

That tradition is usually called a Weekend Getaway, but after sharing it with me my husband prodded, "The purpose is to pump a little money back into the local economy." Sometimes I miss the subtleties of these things. Although I was and still am a frugal fanatic, after it had been spelled out in so many words I remembered the purpose of the Weekend Getaway and packed a hundred dollars or so to spend on our monthly road trips.

But in a way he paid a price for explaining the purpose of the Weekend Getaway to me. Before that time, I used to enjoy visiting other people's favorite places, Morgantown, Pittsburgh, Chincoteague, Luray, Roanoke, Charlottesville, Asheville, Ocracoke, and of course everybody likes the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Afterward, my husband would receive monthly coupons for one night free and one night half price in a participating hotel. He'd say, "Where would you like to go?" and I'd scan for participating towns and say, "We can go to Bristol or Wytheville...I have things to do in Gate City."

The other day I talked to a village idiot type who said, in a confrontational way, "Do you buy things you don't need, just to support someone's business?"

When I read the words by themselves, printed on paper, a funny thing happens. A different answer comes to mind. Nonverbal elements of communication, as the late blogger known as Ozarque often said, change the meaning of the question.

My answer to "Did you use to buy things you didn't need, just to support someone's business?" would have been, "People include different ranges of meaning in the word 'need.' It's a good word not to use if you want to know what sort of things I bought. I did not buy the kind of gift items that are most likely to be re-gifted, the bric-a-brac made in China and so on. If a business deserves support, it sells things for which we can find a use. Prices for things people use regularly, groceries and toiletries, tend to run high in the cities; often we spent our spending money on gas and groceries, and felt that we'd found good bargains relative to what we paid for those things in Washington. More optional purchases, like the yarn stash that still takes up about a quarter of a room in my home...some of those yarn packs were bought as souvenirs of a trip, and yes, I remember the towns, the shops, and the occasions. And if a man wants to make a good impression on me in the city, yes, he should definitely buy flowers from one of the students and immigrants who stand out in the weather and sell flowers. Yes, when possible I do buy new books and records in order to encourage living writers and musicians. I never pay retail prices for ready-made clothes but I do pay for hand-made clothes or clothes resold for a good cause."

My answer, if the village idiot had asked, "Do you ever buy things you don't actually need, just to support someone's business?" in a pleading, despondent manner, would have been, "Yes. Although my handknitted blankets will last for years, although many of them could literally be buried in mud for a month, be dug up and machine-laundered, and look almost as good as new--while your cut-and-hemmed polyester 'fleece' blankets will shrink every time they're laundered--I would buy a few of your blankets, and resell them beside mine, because there is a market for cheap junk and because I recognize the natural limitations on your talent, or lack of one. Fleece blankets are good for pets." Well, "yes" is all I would have said out loud, but...yes. That.

My answer to what the village idiot actually said was "Yes." With nonverbal communication to fill in, "You've both heard and read what I have to say on this subject. I know you've been planning an insulting comment for some time, so bring it on...and pay for it." So idiot spewed, and paid, and if idiot is now telling people I've lost none of my edge at the verbal abuse game, idiot very deliberately asked for it. There's no sin in winning a game. I'm not convinced that there's a sin even in enjoying the misery of sore losers whose verbal abuse game requires them to pretend they're red-faced and teary-eyed about something other than having lost the game. But that's beside the point.

When we want to help people...disasters and emergencies happen, and we should all prepare to handle those and help others handle them, as best we can. Beyond that I think we all need to support one another's business, whenever it's feasible, as opposed to buying things from big-chain stores or giving money to those who just sit around going "needy-needy-needy."

(Which unfortunately does include some otherwise good church, community, and humanitarian causes. I don't mind buying things from their store or bazaar, or even putting money in the plate if I go to a concert or movie or lecture. My father used to say that churches should ban the custom of passing plates for money during regular services, and I used to say, "If people go to an ordinary lecture they chip in a little to pay for the cost of the hall, don't they?" and he used to say, "But a minister ought to be an example of doing without and giving to others," and we agreed to disagree. Dad never acknowledged that extroverts get some benefit from reading and discussing the Bible in groups; I concede that they do, but I notice no benefit to me in doing that, or anything else, along with a group of extroverts. But I'm not willing to pay people for advertising or fundraising. I'll forgive them for doing a little of that if other things they do are worthwhile, but if most of people's e-mails ask me for money, I will stop opening them. If you want to increase sales of a product that's been in the stores for more than one year, show me a low price in the store, not a TV commercial. I'm not rich, but if I were George Soros's last living heir I still wouldn't have any money to donate to the full-time fundraisers.)

We need to support makers, not takers.

We need to support people whose work we respect, not people who we believe are so pathetic that we can congratulate ourselves for being better off than they are.

We need to support people who will, with a little support, be as well off as we are...if only because, by and large, those people tend to be younger than we are, and like it or not we will eventually have to depend on people their age to drive our cars and clean our floors, and anyone over about age 25 should start cultivating a few carefully selected younger friends. I see a lot of baby-boomers in denial about the fact that friends who visit our homes can do a lot more to make our old age enjoyable than wage slaves who work in retirement projects. I see older people who take their children for granted...sometimes their own children are all these people hoped they would become, sometimes not.

Washington is unique because it was meant to be only our nation's capital, the place where our federal government worked as many days as was absolutely necessary before going back home, but it has become a real city in its own right too. Most Washingtonians are, by any reasonable measure relative to any reasonable portion of the rest of the world, rich. The ones who travel overseas know that. They have two "communities" to support: the people who are doing good work in Washington, and the people who are doing good work in the home or host towns where they go on weekends. They can afford to show respect to both.

I read and hear rumors about vague attempts to cut the federal welfare budget. Gate City has a small group of educated people--I refer to them generally as social workers, although some of them have moved up to legitimate jobs, or retired--and a large group of old-age and disability pensioners, both of whom can be counted on to kick and scream about any suggestion that their handouts might be reduced. The rest of us can hardly help thinking thoughts like "My parent/s, grandparent/s, etc., did work and pay into a Social Security handout fund, even if they knew all along that it was an unsustainable scam that was designed to fall apart before they started claiming their money...or X does have a major disability...but actually they like to have something worthwhile to do besides sit around and gossip! They want to work! And those other people who prefer to sit around and gossip? If they did starve, I'm not trying to be cruel, but seriously, they'd never be missed."

I like the idea of cutting the welfare budget. Yesterday this web site passed up an opportunity to commend a specific proposed cut. There are better ways and worse ways to cut the welfare budget and, as long as all I've seen of a proposed cut is someone's name on it, my guess would be that that person wouldn't recognize the better ways if they walked up and bit him. (For example, since social worker types get "high" on believing that "all they ask for is gratitude," by all means cap their salaries at ten percent of the minimum hourly wage.) But cuts do need to be made. People who gossip, people who push welfare, people who fail to support those who set up micro-micro-enterprises to keep themselves off welfare, need to be spending their days on a day labor site, advertising their capacity for unskilled labor. They may not need to starve to death but most of them could only benefit from the experience of hunger, and even more than that, from the experiences of walking to work and doing physical labor. Forcing some people to do physical work, like removing weeds from roadsides with a hand trowel, might actually relieve their physical disabilities.

People in Washington can benefit from meeting the people in towns like Gate City. The makers, not the takers--especially the social workers who claim to speak for the takers, who actually, in many cases, are speaking against the best interests of the takers.

The makers do not, in fact, want visitors to come out and spend their whole $100 in our stores, or roadside stands or flea market booths, just because that would make our days. Well, it would, of course. Days go by when we do not see a hundred-dollar bill. Oh this is sad. We love the sight of Benjamin Franklin's benevolent, un-handsome, greenish face. But actually we want you to buy, e.g., a doll dressed to match a children's book because you know a little girl who likes dolls and whom you'd like to interest in books, or a hand-sewn wallet because you want something to stop money sliding out of your pockets into seats, or a chunk of homemade fudge because you like fudge, and so on. Naturally the more you buy, the better we are pleased, but I don't know anyone in Gate City who is actually selling junk. (The village idiot who's flooding the market with "fleece" blankets is donating them, to the full-time professional "needers.")

Actually we like being a small town in a rural setting. The main reasons why you'd want to visit Gate City would be outside the city limits. People who don't come here to maintain their own homes and visit their own relatives, come here to camp in the woods, paddle on a clean, fresh river, and pick their own fruit on a farm. And you don't actually need to spend a lot of money to do that. Visitors can and should pay to ride the chair lift, swim in the nice safe pool, buy snacks, or rent boats on the Clinch River. If they prefer to bring their own boats and snacks, keep their faces out of the water, and walk on the trails, they can do that free of charge. Some pretty nice trails with lots of bird, flower, and leaf peeping potential are even wheelchair-accessible, too--free of charge. For people who are new to Washington and have not learned how to minimize spending on boring everyday things there, my town does offer a full weekend's worth of pure change-of-scene that won't cost anything beyond the rent of a vehicle you can "camp" in. At the Natural Tunnel Park, cabins with hot showers rent for $30 or $35 a night, plus $5 if you bring a dog.

However, here is a Top Ten List of things to shop for when you visit Gate City:

1. Handmade wooden furniture: Look for this in the Friday Market, but don't be surprised if you don't see any. The couple who make those "Amish-style" chairs, trunks, etc., bring out a truckload when the weather seems right.

2. Garden produce: Pick your own in season, buy from a roadside stand, or look in Friday Market, but be aware that the really fresh local produce is rarely sold to visitors (except zucchini, in some years, and occasionally tomatoes). Farmers who grow organic produce usually sell to short lists of close friends and relatives, then long lists of townsfolk, and only then in public places. For strawberries and blueberries, the long lists can be very long indeed. If people are willing to commit to hand-cultivating these crops, perhaps in time they'll be available to visitors. Much of what you buy even from farmers' stands is retailed from out of state and not organically grown. If the sign says "Mann Farms," it is local and fresh, though not 100% organic, and the quality is probably good. And if we can get a local ban on glyphosate spraying into effect, it will be REALLY good.

3. Homemade food: Well, duh, I am typing this in a cafe, what d'you expect? Mostly sweet baked goods, plus eggy things for breakfast, hot soups and sandwiches in winter, cold salads and sandwiches in summer, can be pre-ordered at the Family Bakery Cafe. Spicy Mexican meals and icy Mexican drinks are available at Molcajetes. Pies, fudge, and other homemade snacks are often sold in the Friday Market as well.

4. Hand-knitted blankets and winterwear: While selling those in the Internet Portal store last winter, I sold a few that were then displayed for resale in other stores. I don't display them in summer, but store them in town and can bring them out on request.

5. Hand-knitted or crocheted washcloths, towels, table covers, etc.: These used to be the specialty of a retired teacher (yes, one of mine), during her lifetime. A few of hers may or may not still be available at the Ivy Cottage, which was her store--if so, they may not be used but they're hardly "new." Others are now making them for sale at Roberts & Jones. I've made a few in each category.

6. Window treatments: If you want to reduce heating expenses in a hastily built Washington or suburban flat, consider a Window Blanket. (These were actually Grandma Bonnie Peters' idea, although if they're knitted they're almost certainly mine.) They're made to be hung over large, odd-shaped windows on cold nights, and can be stuffed with insulation. I also knit lacy curtains to hang in front of windows just for looks.

7. Dolls: I usually dress adult-or-older-child-shaped dolls made at a scale of 2 inches to 1 foot; can dress other kinds of dolls to order. Knitted doll outfits, made with scraps of craft yarn in shapes and colors that generally match a picture, cost $5. Sewn doll outfits, which can involve embroidery and tiny beads and so on, cost more.

8. Chickens or turkeys: If you want to inspect the bird before having it killed and cleaned...I've been pleased to see that the live birds sold in the Friday Market had a healthy, contented look, strolling around in roomy cages, sipping water, "talking and singing" to each other, until they were sold. I'm not so pleased to think about the fact that people who bought them didn't plan to make pets of them, because most of them would have made good pets. Chickens, anyway. Domestic turkeys have been selectively bred not to have enough brain to be made pets, as have some breeds of chickens; my point here is that the chickens I've seen were not those breeds. They were the kind that would have answered to names and followed people around the yard. Anyway, whatever your intentions, Gate City is a good place to buy live chickens and sometimes turkeys. People grew up thinking of these as companion animals and are likely to have led them out to graze in real grass, at least some of their days.

9. Eggs: Hens who have been reared as companions and led out to graze in real grass lay "country" eggs, with a firmer, darker-colored, more nutrient-rich yolk than supermarket eggs have. (I once heard someone say he preferred wimpy, pale-colored supermarket eggs. Pooh! Not only do those eggs contain more cholesterol and less beta-carotene, they also came out of sickly, unhappy hens, and they're likely to contain salmonella.) Buy directly from hen fanciers to be sure of getting fresh eggs.

10. Wallets and cell phone covers: I mention these because they're what I've seen for sale in Roberts & Jones. People who sew them could probably sew other things. Anyway, they're locally made by church ladies who want to be makers not takers, so that alone makes them nicer than the kind sold at Wal-Mart.

This is only a Top Ten List. I'm sitting at the cafe, and just as I got to ten locally produced things I've seen visitors buy, the part-time worker came in. She knows not to interrupt writers, so it's only the sight of her that reminds me that she's the daughter of a fairly well known painter. He's still alive, although retired, and would probably be chuffed if you arranged to look at some of his unsold paintings.

Then there's the knife maker, the T-shirt artist, and others who didn't feel able to commit to keeping the Internet Portal open, but they still live here and would bring out their products to show visitors who wanted to buy them. Sometimes they come to the Friday Market, sometimes not. Some of them tour a more upscale craft show circuit, some don't. Some of them have web sites, some don't. You just have to come out and shop.



(Currently featured on sale in Roberts & Jones. Johnny Cash and June Carter are gone, and the Carter Family Fold is...easier to get into than it used to be. But how could I mention visiting Gate City and not mention live, oldtime country music as performed by the Carters, Holston River Boys, Dwain Reed, Jim & Jesse, Mac Wiseman, Ralph Stanley, and other twentieth century legends? Most of our celebrity musicians are at best very old, but their former students are still here. If you're not in town in time to spend an evening at the Fold, which is technically in Hiltons, you're probably in time to visit Leonard's Pickin' Parlor, which is technically in Weber City...depending on the time and day you can buy acoustic instruments, have them repaired, sing along, or listen to the professional quality band that's formed in the store.)



If our elected officials and other government employees make a personal commitment to support the individual makers who don't want or need handouts, we could really cut the federal welfare system. More Americans would have taxable incomes, and feel better about having them. Only people who are genuinely disabled would need handouts--and the handout system could probably be trimmed down to the point that people would receive their disability pensions while they were in fact disabled. Oh wouldn't it be love-r-ly!

Tim Kaine's Staff Will Meet the People in Gate City

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, D-VA:

"

Dear Friend,

On March 21, my staff will host Kaine Connects office hours in Gate City from 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM.

Although I can't be there in person, this is a terrific opportunity to get personalized and undivided attention from my staff. Please make an individual appointment by emailing Laura_Blevins@kaine.senate.gov. Walk in visitors will be accommodated upon staff availability.

Appalachian Community Action & Development Agency175 Military Lane
Gate City, VA 24251
March 21, 2019
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

For more information on upcoming Kaine Connects, click here.

Sincerely,

Visit my website: kaine.senate.gov

"

Belated Tortie Tuesday SEO Cat Post (Updated)

At the time of writing my steadiest paying job is writing SEO guest posts. I could still be making more money, and recently a prospective client asked to see the SEO posts I've been contributing to a growing forum site.

Y'know what? I don't even have links myself. They're published anonymously, mostly in translation, at an academic forum site based in Europe. They all answer academic questions that have SEO potential. I never know which language(s) a post may be translated into. And it'd be a violation of contract to tell you if I did.

But since it's Tortie Tuesday and this web site closed with a cat cliffhanger last week, here is a Tortie Tuesday update written in SEO format...one of them. Different web sites use different SEO rules. Since this web site is bookish and wordy, let's try the SEO rules other people have worked out for forum posts by analyzing what works for Quora. If you're familiar with the Quora rules, seeing them applied to this topic may be funny. (The keywords were, of course, "Samantha," "Serena," and "Traveller.") If you're not, well, I'll try to make the cats' post mildly amusing anyway.

(Update: At the time of writing I mentioned not using Quora because they snubbed me because I post under my screen name. This changed; I now have some posts at Quora, some SEO and some not.)

"Question from Anonymous:

Tortie Samantha, what's going on with your outrageous daughter, Junior Queen Serena, and her mysteriously tiny, non-Manx, non-tortie, and non-calico kittens? I've been waiting all weekend to learn whether those kittens are really hers and whether they’ve survived. What about Traveller? Is he still around? But mostly I want to know about you, Samantha. I'm a great fan of yours."

Answer:

Samantha: "This woodbin belongs to me!"

Serena still has four tiny, skinny, long-tailed kittens--two white with black spots, and two white with gray spots. After giving birth, she continued to look pregnant for a few days, but only because she had packed on some fat to make milk. (If our human had not been hiding indoors, she would probably have noticed that. Humans are thick but not all that thick.)

She now looks as trim and healthy as Manx cats ever do. They are a wide-framed, heavy-coated breed. Although my daughter is only a small part Manx and has a complete tail, she's doomed to go through life being described as "that big fat cat" whether she has fat on her ribs or not.

Traveller is still around, complaining about the quality of the kibble we get. Well, I think the kibble we got this weekend was foul too, but you don't hear me complaining! You see me chasing squirrels.

But enough about the younger generation. First of all I'd like everyone to read this web page, which is so, so true: "If you're friends with a Samantha, you should consider yourself very very lucky."

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Samantha

Of course my name literally means "listener," which suits me, because I am a Listening Cat, but that urban slang definition suits me even better!

All of our favorite feline friends are doing well. Fight with each other? Not so much. Male cats don't hang out together, but what a thrill it was when Burr and Trav banded together to protect my precious daughter and grandkittens!

They have a lovely little home, all lined and covered with layers of quilts and blankets, and of course we dragged in a few pieces of our human's clothing. It was warm and had fresh human scent on it.

Finally, no, I'm not pregnant. My husband Burr and I have yet to decide on having other kittens. I don't want to travel, but at my age (two) I'm not growing younger and may want to make a movie first, or pose for a cat glamour magazine.

I am such a total glamour puss!

"Comment from Tickle:

Serena looks quite a lot like her grandmother Irene.

Serena: "I'm the Queen Cat around here."

Irene, when she was about the age Serena is now: "You photographed Ivy first? Whyyy?"

Irene was a sweet, kind cat--she was our aunt, and "mothered" Tickle and me--so I like that look. It's not what I usually find attractive though.

But, is Burr a husband? Cats don't have weddings. Of course, if we're social cats who bond with friends, those of us who can have kittens can choose to do that with our friends. Yes, I still love Inky, but there's nothing exclusive about it. Maybe what we have is what humans would call an open marriage.

And, since when has Samantha had wanted to be a movie star? I don't see an IMDB page for her! Maybe she fancies herself as a singer, because she and young Burr certainly get together and make some noise. Maybe they'll travel as a band! I do like her, though, and her daughter too, at least when they're interested in producing good-looking kittens.

Comment from Traveller:

Tickle moved out before our human learned about SEO writing--using relevant words, trending words, and their synonyms to produce an article that answers a question intelligently while also activating the right computer algorithms. I see Samantha as more athlete than actress. She can jump five feet straight up in the air. I think Serena is prettier. Don't you agree?

Cat Sanctuary Update: The Incredible Shrinkproof Serena

How is it possible not to know when your own pet cat has given birth? "Really, Pris. You know about feral barn cats, but not about Serena, who was born in your office and snuggled in your hand before she was a full day old?"



With Serena all kinds of things are possible.

Serena is Burr's daughter. Burr is a mixed breed, but he looks like a classic Stumpy Manx, a big fat cat with extra-long hind legs, a thick body shape, a big round head, and less than half a tail. This look is produced by a mutant gene that is lethal if kittens get two copies of it. I have wondered, too, about my American Short Hair cat family; our long-ago Queen Mogwai had a different mutant look, with extra-long hind legs, a slim body shape, and an extra-long tail, and I've wondered whether that gene might be one that mixes especially badly with the Manx gene. I recommend sterilization for all Manx cats on principle. Not that they aren't lovable animals--if anything they'd be ideal cats to rescue from a shelter, because shelter cats have to be sterilized in any case, and when Manx cats bond with a human they're great pets.

But Serena has a complete tail, not even a short one, and a graceful body shape with both pairs of legs in normal proportion; she doesn't show the effects of the lethal Manx gene. She's just a big fat cat, a spring kitten who's already taller, longer, and wider than many adult cats get, and still growing.

"Oh no," I said. "The January thaw was so warm for so long that that Manx cat got pregnant...she ought to have been spayed."

"That cat's not Manx! She's a special, social cat, and so will her kittens be. I want one," someone said.

"Well...I don't want to abort kittens, anyway," I said, "but Manx kittens suffer and die young."

"Not all of them--they couldn't. Not the ones whose parents look normal."

So Serena grew rounder and rounder in peace. She is already as big as her grandmother Irene, and Irene was a substantial-looking cat.

Unlike all spring kittens I've known who were pets, including Irene at that age, Serena politely declined to come indoors even on the coldest nights of her first winter. "I'll be fine," she nonverbally said. "Feel my extra-thick coat? I'm fine out in the cold."

Saturday afternoon was a fine warm sunny February-thaw day. Serena seemed nervous and irritable, possibly because kittens were due, I thought. For the first time in her life she slapped at me impatiently, turning her back on me, rather than playfully.slapping and running away...she's always liked playing tag. I noticed, too, a lot of evidence of visiting cats, all keeping out of sight. Sometimes father cats annoy mother cats right after kittens are born; sometimes they even attack the kittens. I went out a few times and told those visiting cats to go home.

Around midnight on Saturday night I heard cat battle cries. I went outside. Serena was not visible--snug in the nest she and Traveller built for themselves by pulling layers of fabric down over storage bins on the porch, I guessed. The other resident cats, Samantha and Traveller, and the occasional visitor Burr, were all glowering at someone up in the hedge. Another cat? Burr disapproved of Serena's sneaking out with the father of her kittens? Or was it a predator? Oh goodheavens, what was that on the step? Why, it was a newborn kitten--large, but still attached to the placenta, which it was trying pathetically to drag about. It looked just like the occasional visitor Tickle, who is Serena's first cousin once removed. Had it come out of Serena? It was big enough to be hers all right.

Risking wounds, I stuck my hand into Serena's nest. She was there all right. She was still round and slightly lumpy to the touch. She was purring, wrapping her big fluffy body around a tiny fluffball. Right. I turned back to the kitten on the step, which had slumped down beside its placenta. Figuring it couldn't possibly survive breaking its own umbilical cord, I fetched a pair of scissors and snipped. The kitten snuggled into my hand. I reached back into the nest. Serena sniffed it over and began licking its damp, thin coat as if she were willing to rear it after all. The other cat in the hedge yowled. Burr yowled louder.

"Burr," I said, "can you guys take your disagreement somewhere else? I'd like to get some sleep tonight."

Burr is nobody's pet, so his intelligence and good will continue to surprise me. He advanced on the hedge, yowling, "You heard what the human said! Get on down the road!" and the other cat apparently obeyed.

Sunday morning was still warm, though rainy, and Serena purred and invited me to look at the four tiny kittens in her nest. The big one who looked like Tickle had been cleaned and dried, but he (very obviously a he) was dead anyway. The four little ones, with their slim builds, long stringy tails, and tiny pink paws, looked as if none of them could possibly be Burr's and Serena's. Maybe they were Tickle's and Serena's, by the look of them. They were basically white kittens with black and grey spots, like Burr--but Burr and Serena would have had Manx-looking kittens, which these were not. They'd been groomed and fed all night, but their neatly trimmed umbilical cords hadn't even started to shrivel.

So, Serena found another mate, not her father or cousin? Nice. Then I took a good look at Serena.

She did not have the hollow, damp-flanked look of a cat who'd just given birth to kittens of her own. She was as round, slightly lumpy, fluffy, and dry as ever.

Cats don't always give birth to all of their kittens at once. Social cats, who rear kittens communally, can get into trouble by trying to nurse someone else's kittens before their own are due; Tickle's mother Heather lost her first litter that way. The lactation cycle terminates the pregnancy. The offspring of the too-kind mother cat come out before they're able even to drink milk on their own. They can be born alive, and the mother does her best for them, but they don't live long.

But there was nothing premature about the kitten with the placenta. It was almost twice the size of any of the tiny living kittens.

Cats seem to have at least some voluntary control of the birth process. Serena wouldn't be the first cat I'd seen give birth to multiple kittens on different days. Both mothers and kittens can survive that way, sometimes.

Later I went out and saw a cat who looked just like the four little fluffballs, dead, beside the road. Nobody I know has admitted having any idea where that cat came from. It was a long, lean, black-and-white cat with a long tail, apparently both hit by a car and gnawn by predators. It could have been the father of Serena's kittens.

It could have been the mother of kittens someone could have brought to Serena--but who? If it had been dumped near the Cat Sanctuary while giving birth, why wouldn't it have stayed with its own kittens? If its humans had delivered the kittens to the Cat Sanctuary, why hadn't they spoken to me about it, and how had the kittens got into Serena's little private den? Neither Burr nor Tickle is a normal tomcat, but would any tomcat, however social and intelligent, rescue a dead or dying cat's kitten--or kittens--and deliver them to a different mother cat?

Hearing that an invasive neighbor had stolen some cats from another local Cat Sanctuary (claiming they were "starving" while the human in charge was ill), and sent them to a Humane Society shelter, I'd indignantly told someone, "They should at least have brought those cats to me, rather than kill them!" I meant it. But people need to know that the way to bring animals to any kind of sanctuary, or even shelter, is to ask the human(s) in charge first; they might need to clear out a cage and bring in extra food; they might direct you to take the animals to a different location for foster care, or even directly to their Fur-Ever Home if they've had time to consult a prospective adopter. Even at a Cat Sanctuary no one should ever just dump a cat and run.

Meh. It seemed most likely that the kittens Serena was nursing were her own. Sometimes cats' muscles feel lumpy the day after they've given birth. Serena hadn't bulged nearly as much as a smaller, thinner cat would have bulged. Maybe she'd just done a better job of cleaning herself up, early Sunday morning, than a less resourceful and queenly cat could have done.

By Sunday night Serena was careful to wrap the curtains around her entrance to her nest; it was getting chilly. I asked her again if she'd consider moving back into the nest box of her kittenhood. She was in a mellower, more cuddly mood than she's been in since her eyes opened, and even snuggled a bit, but she didn't want to be indoors.

She wouldn't be the first cat I've seen express resentment of a human's trying to force her to do something in the interests of her kittens. Heather very deliberately refused to feed one litter; I've seen mother cats kill and eat their own kittens, too, if rearing them got to be too frustrating.

"You want to lie around and keep them warm day and night, do you?" I said, having no positive ideas what else could be done for the kittens.

"Of course! How not? Silly human. Feed me now so I can get back to them," Serena commanded, pointing to where the kibble was stored.

Monday was sunny and chilly. "Is she going to have kittens in March?" someone wondered, watching Serena come out for a meal. She still looked pregnant.

She still does. Monday night, Tuesday, Wednesday, and today have been freezing cold. Serena's hardly left the nest, but when she does, she still looks as pregnant as she did last week. At no time has she had that "waters-have-broken" look. She has consistently managed to look like a happy, devoted mother cat, and like a pregnant cat, at the same time.

Yes, I do know that this mystery would be easily solved if I just scooped up Serena and the kittens, stuffed them into the nest box, and watched further developments in the office room. I also know that the care of kittens is not a topic on which I care to lock horns with Serena. Some new mothers of their first litter would consider human opinions about what they ought to do. Serena is not that kind. She's a sweet, gentle pet, even affectionate in her way, but she has her own opinions and no noticeable fear of anything or anybody. Her kittens will be brought up her way or not at all.

By this time next week, the natural course of events should provide some further information as to which...kittens brought up Serena's way, or not at all.



And this is what Amazon suggested for a book to go with the thought "cat mystery"? Hah. If I knew that a human had sneaked into the Cat Sanctuary's yard and interfered with any cat's pregnancy, even the ever-so-capable Serena's, to this extent...

If you have to give up a cat, or kittens--even newborn kittens from a fatally injured mother--a (real) Cat Sanctuary, a rural place where animals can live somewhat natural lives, is a better place than a Humane Society sort of shelter where they're locked in cages in a warehouse while they wait to be sterilized or killed. But wherever you go, always  ask first!

Formal Complaint: Police Should Not Be Used to Harass Pedestrians

I received a payment on a Friday. (Not last Friday. This complaint has been allowed to sit for a few weeks because it's a complaint about behavior that is not specific to one individual.) I wanted to pick up provisions for the weekend. Jane Doe, Joe Jones, and Jill Smith had already gone to the grocery store. John Roe wanted to go on Saturday. I did not particularly want to spend all day Saturday waiting on him. It was raining a little, but it wasn’t cold. So I started walking.

I had worn a pale beige London Fog overcoat. If it had been a human that overcoat would be old enough to vote by now. I had also worn a pair of pale beige fake leather shoes. If they had been humans those shoes would probably have been married with children by now. I thought the indestructible trench coat and the shoes that needed to be worn out and burned were a good choice to wear on a dark, wet night. The shoes gleamed almost white in the dark. I sometimes walk to the store in what I wore at work all day, which is often blue or black, but this evening for once I was at least wearing something nice and pale-colored for visibility.

As regular readers know, there’s not a great selection of grocery stores in Gate City, Virginia, since the young heir let the locally owned Thriftway store fail. (The young heir was in my class at school. Sometimes a town of active senior citizens is a weird place to be fifty.) There’s a Dollar Store. Some things Dollar Stores don’t sell are sold at Food Lion, but I’ve learned the hard way about the convenience of buying food at Food Lion. I don’t know what they spray in the store but even trusted brands in sealed packages have made me sick. So I buy some things in Weber City and some things in Kingsport. If anybody wants to revive the Thriftway store, count me in. Anyway I took the computer home for the weekend and parked it in the house, more than two miles, before heading back out to walk seven more miles.

So I walked out along Route 23.

Further along the route I had planned there is no alternative to walking on Route 23, but at that point there is a “business route” that runs parallel to the four-lane highway. “Don’t you find it safer than the highway?” people have asked me. For safe footing away from motor traffic, it has some good sections with real sidewalks and some bad ones with deep puddles and ditches, but on a Friday night, the main difference is that that “business route” leads past that drug treatment place where the drug crowd hang out. They are not local people. Gate City people are mostly related to me and their vices do not include beating up old ladies. About the druggies somebody got a grant to bring into one part of town, who knows? I definitely felt safer on the four-lane highway with only the wind behind me.

I was walking briskly along, thinking how nice it would be if Joan Brown were driving to Wal-Mart this evening, when a police car stopped.

It occurs to me that if the state trooper’s supervisor were listening to the conversation, the supervisor would have missed a very important part of the conversation. The trooper introduced himself by name, and my mind went off on one of those old-lady loops that form when people haven’t recognized an old childhood acquaintance on sight for a long time: "You do look just like one of my brother's classmates who had that family name. Is that who you are? But if that's who you are, why does your brother look more than eight or ten years older than you do? Are you an old acquaintance, or the son of one?" 

People who are fifty years old don’t say this kind of thing; I think the minimum age for saying it out loud is seventy-five.

It’s not, of course, the first time anyone’s ever called the police to report “a woman walking on the street who might be in some sort of distress, I was afraid to ask,” and it would be the first time if I hadn’t expressed my extreme disapproval of any police officer participating in this sort of thing.

If we want to reduce local warming and so on and so forth, the first thing we as a nation need to do is remind ourselves that walking is the default way humans move about. Some people feel afraid or ashamed when they’re questioned by the police about why they’re walking (down a public street at six o’clock in the evening), and some of them may have reasons. Certainly the idea that other people think walking is such odd behavior that they don’t even want to ask us why we’re doing it, or whether we want any kind of help, amounts to “peer pressure” applied to people who might feel inclined to save money or improve their health by walking instead of driving across town. I can deal with that because my family are about as solid a feature of the local landscape as the baby-faced trooper's family are. Someone less secure would have been humiliated...for doing something that is healthy and public-spirited.

People whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers need to be proactive about applying “peer pressure” in the opposite direction. They should be coming up with public campaigns to THANK PEDESTRIANS FOR NOT DRIVING. Instead of acting as if non-drivers were suspicious characters, they should be publicizing the statistics about how many resources we’re not wasting, how much we’re not contributing to local warming, how much our presence serves as a deterrent to street crime, and how many little children we’re not maiming or killing.

I've spoken much more severely to some other officers, who were also in my brother's class at school, than I did to baby-face; I wasn't sure whether he was an old acquaintance or not, and in any case he wasn't a relative like the one I positively scolded. The man with what I still saw as a younger-child face didn’t seem to know me and he did seem tense. He didn’t seem to understand why I was speaking severely to him at all.

I had time to wonder, while the trooper was bandying my real name about on the scanner, whether he was being set up. I wondered whether new state troopers get those “concern calls” to annoy me because their colleagues think it’s funny to get them scolded by a taxpayer.

I said, “I will be making a complaint about this harassment.”

He looked indignant—as if there were any question of his having behaved improperly toward a woman, which there wasn’t. I felt empathetic and elder-sisterly, or auntly, or whichever. Assuming sufficient reason for his believing it was appropriate for him to check whether I had a criminal record—which I don’t—he did that in a perfectly professional manner. He said, “Harassment?”

I said, “Yes, I don’t think you should participate in this kind of games. You have better things to do and so have I.”

He actually blathered about my not wearing any special reflective gear. Really. The only excuse for the existence of those dreadful pale-colored glossy fake-leather shoes, much less for anyone wearing pale-colored shoes in winter, was that they were reflective. I don’t normally wear white shoes, even in summer, but taxpayers have a right to walk down the street unmolested if they choose to wear solid black from head to toe.

Seriously, I don’t know whether there was a real “concerned citizen” call, or one was fabricated by another trooper as a sort of initiation prank. I do know this, though. In any town that’s big enough to have a drug treatment clinic, silly calls from “concerned citizens” are likely to be made when there is a special reason to want the friendly local policeman to keep away from a certain street. “Somebody’s walking down the street in the rain!” and “There’s a cat about fifteen feet up a tree!” are just the sort of distractions that make a caller sound stupid, but not so obviously suspicious as if the caller had reported an imaginary crime or fire.

I think it would be a good idea if all police departments were required by law to investigate these “concerned citizen” calls—not by checking the identity of the person walking down the street, but by checking the identity, and also the circle of association, of the callers. While baby-face was politely annoying me, it’s very likely that the druggies who hang around the clinic in the evening were waiting for a special delivery from Tennessee. The person they were waiting for would have crossed baby-face’s path about a mile past the point where he was checking my legal identity.

I think it would be a good idea if all police officers, and their families, were required by law to show respect for pedestrians’ rights by walking across town regularly, just to break up the perception that anyone is stereotyping pedestrians as suspicious characters.

I think it would be a good idea if all police departments proactively hired law-abiding pedestrians, especially women, just to break up the perception that we can ever afford to allow anyone to feel that our streets don’t belong to women—at all hours of the day and night. Or that employers can afford to discriminate against women who don’t drive because it’s acceptable for anyone to be able to imagine that women are more likely to be raped while walking to work than they are to be injured in car crashes while driving to work. (I’ve encountered overt discrimination for that reason, and I also think it would be a good thing if all employers were required by law to pay an extra road tax for any failure to prioritize hiring people who walk to work.) Public employees should be actively promoting the idea that “A woman’s place is out in the air and sunshine...a criminal’s place is behind bars.”

I think it might even be a good idea if all people who make “concerned citizen” calls were routinely told that, since they’re such “concerned citizens,” they need to show their good faith and public spirit by walking up and down the street. Every pedestrian on the street is a deterrent to crime; even the lookouts from drug gangs who make these “concerned citizen” calls would serve as deterrents to other types of street crime, and these “concerned” people might actually make themselves useful to some law-abiding person somewhere, as well as being made less available to criminal gangs. It’s even possible that, if required to walk fifteen miles a night for a few months, some sincerely concerned citizens might get lives.

Bad Poetry: Old Times O Bheal Poem

This one was finished, not published, during last year's O Bheal Poetry Challenge. (Each poem, however long or short, used five words provided for that week.) It's not a family story. All through (and before) history, people in the Appalachian Mountains have hidden things, projects, valuables, reserves, sometimes ourselves, in any available cave or space between the chunks of limestone that make the mountains. 

With lamps put out to save coal oil,

He honed his blade by firelight.

The steady scraping of his toil

Lulled her to sleep on many a night.

Mornings, he walked into the town;

An office job; the pay was good.

Returning home, he turned off down

Beside the creek to work the wood

He’d hidden sheltered from the rain

In the cave, where rocks would not erode

Before he’d used knife, saw, and plane

To shape the cradle from the load.

The water broke at 2 a.m.

He went to the cave, having sent the word,

And prayed God would be kind to them,

And served his child as if his Lord.

In old age, when his sleep grew light,

He muttered to the stars above

Whether he’d fled the awful sight

Of birth from cowardice, or from love.

Amazon book link? Right up. This one is also historical fiction about a cave in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is based on bits from several Scott County families' history, including mine.

Tuesday Status Update: Phenology, TortieTuesday, Me Me Me....

Because all the phenology, cat, and me-me-me stuff is easier to type into one page and then share on Twitter...

1. Phenology: It's co-o-old again (by Virginia standards), overnight lows down below freezing. Most water on the ground this morning had formed at least a thin layer of ice but began to melt when the sun hit it. This makes it sort of amusing to see stores dutifully change with the calendar. People are more likely to wish they had a blanket today than they were during the February Thaw, or even January Thaw, but blankets have been replaced with plants, garden stuff, sun hats and (at Wal-Mart) a row of kayaks, because it's March. Those who don't feel like kayaking yet can still get a space heater from T. Quillin's hardware store; they stay prepared for everything, all year.

Nevertheless the following spring foliage was observed this weekend: ground-ivy, daffodils, dandelions, weeping willows, and in Kingsport, where the local warming effect was strongest, a few Prunus.

Ornamental Prunus are bred for sterility so they don't actually produce fruit, but most of them are actually mutant specimens of fruit-bearing trees--mostly cherry, sometimes pear, quince, or apple. Names commemorating this fact will in due course be offered for the consideration of the kittens that arrived on Saturday night...

2. Cats: No, Samantha didn't have kittens. It's too soon to tell whether she's planning to have kittens at a more reasonable time this year, or has just put on a little weight in advance of a final growth spurt. So whose kittens are they? Definitely not Burr's and Serena's: those two wouldn't have produced kittens with extra-long stringy tails. Serena was a big fluffy-looking Manx-shaped kitten on Saturday, and is still a big fluffy-looking Manx-mix kitten today, but during Saturday night she started nursing the four little ones and ignoring the big one. She looks as fond and proud of those kittens as if she were their natural mother, and she induced lactation fast enough...and on Monday someone asked when or whether she was going to have kittens some time in March! I think the kittens are Serena's own, though the tails are too long for them to be Burr's and the color suggests that they're not Tickle's. There's been another black-and-white tomcat in the neighborhood, not stump-tailed...

A Queen Cat stays on top of every situation. I often know when kittens have been born by seeing a mother cat with "water" slicking down her back end, but on Sunday morning Serena's fur was as dry as if she'd never had any "waters" to break.

I have seen pregnant cats nurse someone else's kittens and lose their own...but Serena has not lost anything since Sunday! I suspect the kittens are her own and the remaining roundness is a more generous than average supply of milk. She is one cool customer, in any case.

3. Me: I was looking forward to catching up on e-mail and Twitter on Friday, but on Wednesday morning I smelled strep on someone's breath. So I spent substantial parts of the weekend, including Friday, starving and sweating out the infection. This can be a long and tedious process but it is how many Native North American, Northern European, and Northern Asian people fend off streptococcal pneumonia, or even "colds," which are tiresome enough. If we feel tired out by exertions like writing a blog post or eating a bowl of plain rice without even chicken, we curl up under a pile of blankets and sip water until we fall asleep, then wake up, drop the sweaty sheet in the laundry, wash off the sweat, and go back to normal but cautious work and everyday life. If we feel tired during everyday life, we repeat the treatment as necessary. It's usually possible to do all the sweating out at night and go to work or school during the day, I learned from a school friend (part Iroquois, from Ohio) who managed to avoid sharing colds with Seventh-Day Adventists. It didn't work for me while I was living among Seventh-Day Adventists, who have to be the world's worst for breathing their germs on other people who might otherwise avoid colds and flu...but it has worked for me when I've avoided adding that extra burden to my immune system.

So, if local lurkers see me and I avoid you, that means I care about you. If I were to rush up to you and gush and hug your neck...well, you'd probably know what you'd done to deserve it.

And, according to cafe conversation: this year's flu is A Real Bear and is affecting even people who've had the flu shot, because once again the flu virus is travelling in company with this otherwise harmless little strep infection. Apparently together they defy flu shots, defy antibiotics, and keep people who don't fight infections naturally in bed, not just sweating but feeling ill, for weeks at a time.

Take care of your immune systems, Gentle Readers. Eat garlic if you can, take Vitamin C if you can't eat garlic, don't eat too much of anything else, keep a good healthy distance from people, and avoid getting chilled...



Why this book? Because it contains the pattern--made much lacier with only one strand of lightweight yarn, but basically the same simple stitches worked on the same big needles--for a relative of my Blanket Shawl, under which I was not only avoiding chill but actually fanning myself, in the freezing air, as I walked slowly into town this morning.

Why MeToo Should Be Calling Out the "She's Crazy" Meme

Last week on Twitter I ran into the notorious Monsanto publicist known as Kevin Folta. Let me say up front that although aunts are supposed to provide examples of polite behavior, I do not have a lot of respect for anybody who's still in favor of allowing glyphosate to be made or sold in North America. Too many people have died. (Any is too many.) Whatever respect I did have for this sold-out "scientist" evaporated when I read his reaction to the most important glyphosate study at the NIH website:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/

Read it, please, by all means. Now, this is a very long and detailed study. It's been criticized for including some hypotheses based on the data it contains; that's a format issue, which may concern the editors of some journals, but in no way invalidates the data. If anybody went over every one of those studies it cites, number by number--which Folta should have taken the time to do, if anyone would, and which I suspect he's not done because I'm sure he'd be squawking like a hen over an egg if he had done--then it would be a phenomenon, maybe even a miracle, if they didn't find a mistake somewhere. If any real math-heads Out There want to look for math mistakes and point them out, the way "Notorious KGB Aggie" did for last week's major new study claiming that "glyphosate increases humans' cancer risk by 41%," I'd be delighted to publicize that on Twitter. Real science is all about finding math mistakes and fixing them so that we can get at whatever empirical truth our human minds can reach via the Scientific Method.

I think there's an obvious problem with any claim that anything "increases humans' cancer risk by 41%." Which cancer? There are lots of different ones--and although it's painfully obvious that glyphosate is one of the cancer-promoting factors, there are also lots of different glyphosate reactions. I don't blame anyone with a name like Gillam, or like Kennedy, for liking anything that helps people decide to support a ban on glyphosate. The fact is that we of Irish descent aren't likely to survive current levels of glyphosate exposure anywhere near long enough to find out exactly how much glyphosate raises anyone's risk of any kind of cancer. We'll have died from more immediate reactions long before that can be known.

Folta could have crunched a few numbers, as (anti-glyphosate!) "Aggie" did, and scored some good points that way. Let's rub his face in that now. He let a random Twit who identifies as a Russian-Canadian veterinarian--a female one, and this matters--score those points, while he was making a jackass of himself.

Instead, jackass chose an ad hominem attack on the authors of the study. Tweeting to a female writer, he chose an ad hominem attack. This matters. Writers are people whose high I.Q. scores are based primarily on verbal logic. Statistically, the difference is not enough to amount to a positive sex characteristic, but females' general advantage on I.Q. scores is based on a more widespread tendency for females to excel in verbal logic, whereas males have a less widely distributed tendency to score higher on math. Male scientists are nearly always math-heads. Female writers are nearly always word-nerds. And word-nerds perceive an ad hominem argument as such a non-starter that unless the personal hostility is extraordinarily new and well based, like a serious claim that "This writer killed my dog and ate it, raw," just using the ad hominem argument is an insult to our intelligence. If you're trying to enlighten, rather than annoy, a female writer, you don't use a contemptuous reference to a person, ever. You use a solid fact, if you have one, or shut up.

Why attack one author rather than the other? One reason might be that, on the screen, the name that comes first in alphabetical order is hard to read. During the Twitter storm, people weren't sure whether the male scientist was Sansei, Samsel, Samsei, Sansel, or maybe Sensei (which is Japanese for "Teacher," so it's a good thing to call him if you're not sure, but it's not his name). Nobody took the time to copy and paste it into a proper-looking font that has serifs and find out. NIH's software makes that very easy to do in Chrome. Here's his name, as it pasted from the NIH page:

Samsel

Here's how it looks in our normal font:

Samsel

So now we know. But Folta showed a more sinister motive for attacking the female scientist when he called her "kooky." His ad hominem attack invoked a well documented stereotype, recently documented as undead, that If A Woman Does Happen To Be Serious, or "Smart," or Even Older than a Male Speaker, There Must Be Something Wrong With Her Brain, because the female brain is supposed to be "smaller" and therefore childlike and permanently incompetent, so female competence is a form of brain damage, q.e.d.

Folta rallied a bunch of young gender traitors--I don't actually know which ones are subsidized by Monsanto-Bayer and which ones know Folta personally, nor do I care, and some of them may even be Democratic Party goons who were waiting for an opportunity to spew hate at me for not toeing their party line--to scold me for using the #MeToo hashtag to call attention to this vile display of sexist bigotry.

The late Mike Royko comes to mind. #MeToo #MeToo #MeToo. I said it and I'm glad.

A lot of people missed the chance to score off me, too, during this Twitter storm. I typed "Seneff" into a tweet. Twitter reacts to any capitalized word inside a sentence by pulling up a list of Twitter names. I didn't remember the scientist's full name so I clicked on the name of some Twit I don't know who uses "rachelseneff." Duh. It's Stephanie Seneff. But Folta's followers had to forego the chance to call me out on carelessness, because Folta was carelessly using R. Seneff's Twitter name, too, until someone complained...

Anyway, I referred anyone who hadn't read it to Tina Fey's memoir, which I read only recently, and which documents the resurgence of the "She's crazy" meme among hater-boys.



It's a flippin' bestseller, so I find it hard to believe that people are honestly unaware...I mean, my natural sister cited this. Anything from a book that finds its way into my natural sister's consciousness has been well and truly popularized. This is not because the kid is stupid but because she's spent her life trying to be Not Me, Not Mother, Not Cousin -- or Cousin -- or Cousin --, etc. ad nauseam, which basically means not talking about it if she reads much of anything. Some women, of course, really are below the 100-point average I.Q. level, but more women merely have some sort of motive for trying to look as if they were. This has not changed during my lifetime.

For those interested in studying the hideous history of this stereotype, two classics that should still be easy to find are:





Then, earlier in the week, I heard a local lurker's reaction...I didn't tape-record or write down the exact words, and have left out identifying details, but this is the gist of the story:

"
Just lately I heard that my second cousin Tim was telling people I "had mental spells" and "used to chase my sister around with a butcher knife." Tim was trying to impress someone by claiming that he used to live near or be close to our family. If that were true he would have realized how ridiculous that lie is!

Our parents were very religious, and maintained a very wholesome baby-safe environment where they tried to shelter us from the evil influences of school and other children. They were vegetarians, so we didn't even have a butcher knife in the house. We knew what butcher knives looked like from books, but we thought of them the way we thought of razor strops or buggy whips.

And both of us were the kind of goody-goody girls our parents were trying so hard to raise. Quiet, polite, workful, tidy, always attracted to things that allowed us to sit still and keep our clothes clean until we were directed to work in the garden or the kitchen.

We did have just a small spark of childish humor. We liked to giggle about the idea of adults doing stupid things. This was encouraged as being likely to help us say no to stupid choices when we grew up. We laughed at stories or songs about, for example, somebody drinking beer--how icky!

So on one of the old records in the family collection there used to be a song parody. First a man sang,

"I'd be happier, dear,
If you'd throw it in here.
Go get me some beer.
I've been dry all day,"

...and then he sang,

"There stands my wife
With a long butcher knife.
She's after my life.
Brother, I'm on my way."

Well, we thought that was a scream! Booze and violence! We joked about that. We made up a little story or skit about this family, where the father was so incredibly lazy he would sit around and whine for his wife to bring him beer, and then the mother got so fed up she threw him out of the house at knife-point. We gave them a name--a name we'd found in a book, not used by any real people we knew--and some more adventures, which ended up with this foolish father getting into a fight with a policeman and going to jail, and his children dancing and singing "Oh, hurray, hurray, hurray, Daddy went to prison!"

And our parents were not amused by our acting out stupid behavior, even in pantomime...but it got to be a joke that whenever we'd ticked someone off, usually by being goody-goodies, we'd say that that person was "after my life with a long butcher knife." Of course the person was really "after" us with a nasty remark, a failing grade, or at worst a paddle. That was why it was funny to remember the song about the knife.

But as we grew older, both of us did start to worry about having "mental problems." And what were those "problems," exactly? Well, older Christians had told us that the love of Jesus was supposed to remove all feelings of anger, and probably all feelings of lust, from our hearts--and it hadn't! It wasn't working! We still felt angry, oh, maybe every few months, usually when somebody was poking at us to see whether it was possible to make us angry. Sometimes we raised our voices! Two or three times during my teen years, I even said "hello" without the O! Also, almost every month, I used to have dreams if not waking thoughts about touching boys I didn't even want to marry! And both of us, each in turn, was privately, silently worrying that this meant something was wrong with us. I sneaked out and talked to a therapist when I was nineteen, and my sister even checked into a hospital for "postpartum mood swings" in her twenties--because WE WERE LIVING HUMAN BEINGS.

I actually needed to hear a state-certified psychologist tell me, several times, while we observed my "mood swings" over one entire year, that I was not an unusually angry person. If anything, I was unusually slow to anger.

Like most women, I learned, I'd do better--for myself, for other women, and for our children male or female--to express more of what some people may want to call inappropriate anger, meaning anger or at least assertiveness about their abusive behavior. For instance, when guys try to turn us against another woman by using that lame old "She's crazy" stereotype, we need to start saying "What's wrong with HIM, that stupid jackass. How can he imagine that we'd ever listen to THAT kind of idiocy."
"

I last heard from this person here called Tim, again from a third party, trying to impress people by suggesting that he was the person with a similar name they'd been reading about in the newspapers. (He resembles that person, and is probably a distant cousin.) I think young Tim should reconsider the rules of the church in which he was brought up, with help from a therapist if necessary, and embrace his talent for writing fiction. If he calls it fiction and writes it in the third person, it's neither gossip nor lying.

Meanwhile I think women should make a point of expressing support for any woman whose intelligence has been derided by any mere male. Of course women can be wrong, and should be corrected if they are wrong...with facts, but never with sexist hatespeech.

Some Twits suggested--with a conspicuous lack of exact quotes or links--that Stephanie Seneff has made some statements that their malevolent memories recalled as sounding unscientific. Because these Twits' hate was showing I'm not terribly concerned about what Seneff actually said or wrote. If anyone cared to challenge her on facts, that might be worth mentioning. That her opponents prefer to attack her, personally, if not with ad hominem hatespews then with obvious gross distortions of things she has supposedly said, tells me a lot...even if some of her opponents use female-type names on Twitter.

I judge the final score of last week's Twitter debate to be: Seneff 1, Folta 0...and that's giving Folta a point by calling a foul on myself, because his foul performance was sub-zero.

I think it's now clear, too, why Folta is unlikely to try to enter the #GlyphosateAwareness debate. I wouldn't block people who tried to post pro-glyphosate arguments; in fact I've retweeted those arguments. But Folta is not interested in discussing science with competent adults, probably because he already knows that that's one debate it's never going to be possible for him to win.