Guest Post By Marieke
I sometimes envy the Teabaggers: not only do they crave and enjoy the fear and anger to which they have been classically-conditioned, but life has got to be so much simpler when you're blind to the interconnectedness of the past, the present, the future and indeed of everything all around you. Our semi-forgotten rural area is just a dot on the map and actually weathered this disaster far better than places both above and below us, but there are probably few people in this country who won't ultimately be affected by the excess rain we've had all summer and the muddy mess of a river to whose calm beauty hubby and I were drawn for solace on 9/11/01
It's still raining off and on -- we just laughed hysterically at a thunderstorm last night when it cut off the power and threatened to bring a tree down on the house (obviously all is well or I wouldn't be typing this, but every tree in the Valley will be at huge risk for at least a week after it finally stops raining). Oh, and people are being warned not to pump out their basements because the water in them at least equalizes the pressure of all the glop outside and otherwise the walls could collapse. So there's that. We'll assess our damage as soon as we think the soil might be able to handle our walking on it, but I'm not sure how many trees, shrubs or flowers can be salvaged on our (once-lovely) three acres of pretty high and very wet ground.
The Susquehanna is the largest river east of the Mississippi and, like the Father of Muddy Waters, she likes to meander, regularly leaving her silt (etc.) on a half-mile or more of bottomlands on either side. Also too, much like with the Mississippi, the levees built in her wake actually compound the flooding problem by creating artificial bottlenecks upstream and a rampaging monster downstream once the water crashes past. But I just want to talk about one tiny example of something that happened here and how its effects will affect so many others.
First off, although floodplains in this area and elsewhere were identified quite a while back, all sorts of restrictions on them have been eased and re-eased so that a sewage plant in the city of Danville -- which was being rebuilt so as to reduce Pennsylvania's impact on Chesapeake Bay -- did not have and was not going to get ANY KIND of retaining wall sufficient to keep out the river and keep in the sewage. When the sandbagging in Danville failed, the sewage went everywhere, including both their Middle School and back into the river -- meaning of course that rich, rich bottomland where corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes and fruit trees once grew and cattle once grazed -- and will again. The school is mandated to mitigate, but not the farmers: they will sell whatever they can salvage this year, but their soil will be contaminated from this and so many other unknown contaminants in that water for years to come.
So don't buy Pennsylvania (and New York and Delaware and Maryland) products? Not so fast. Your apples may be labeled (they won't be our Fujis or Galas in any case; they're shot), but not your canned tomatoes, if any of ours can be saved, and our corn is sold everywhere, by Cargill et. al., mixed in with everybody else's and used in everything. A lot of it was flattened, but there'll still be some kind of a crop, and whether you get it as a sweetener, a filler, or feed in whatever grain-fed meat you buy, you could very well be ingesting some of Danville's half- or non-treated sludge.
This is just one teeny, tiny example of how poor decision-making in the past, whether one poor choice or a cascade of them, can impact millions and millions of people in our interconnected world. The same thing happens, of course, every time the Mississippi floods, or any of its tributaries also too. And it's not just sewage -- the contents of an abandoned asbestos factory in Ambler, outside of Philadelphia, are also coursing into Chesapeake Bay along with Lord only knows what else, so likewise think twice also about eating any Maryland seafood. I haven't the heart to write more -- believe me, there are many such examples because we have been living the past thirty or forty years in the midst of a Randian crescendo.
The real issue is, what can be done?
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UPDATE: Sarah Palin and Glen Rice -- h/t to Ella
This update really should be a separate post but I do not want to take away from Marieke's important message so I will leave it here as an update.
Quite a story. Will it develop any further? Is there something more to learn about it in Joe's book? I really do not know, but we will all find out if we read Joe's book which will be released in less than a week.
"On her first day of office, Sarah changed the screensaver on the mayor's official computer to read, 'GOD LOVES YOU, SARAH PALIN.'"
—from The Rogue, by Joe McGinniss
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Comment by Patrick:If only a small amount of Sarah Palin's personal secrets will be revealed in Joe's book, it should be enough to finish Sarah's "career."
I have never seen a person with so many personal secrets like Sarah Palin.
I find it interesting that it really seems to matter for the US media who publishes something, and not whether Sarah actually sued the media outlet in question. The media gives Joe McGinniss a lot of credibility, which is very good. They apparently didn't believe that the National Enquirer was credible when they revealed the affair with Brad Hanson three years ago - despite the fact that Palin never bothered to instruct her lawyer to sue the National Enquirer.
I once published inside info for example about the relationship of the Morlocks to the Palins, and I was quite excited about it, but in the end, nobody picked it up.
HERE and
HERE.
With pictures intact:
HERE.
Same of the course with
my posts about Track and Curtis Menard Jr. But fortunately, there are enough other personal Palin secrets to pick from - it's like a big fat cherry tree!
It was a real shame that nobody picked these stories up, and I was disappointed...but I got over it. Other people experienced similar disappointments (including the National Enquirer, who in 2008 consistently reported very solid information about the Palins, which didn't find the audience it deserved. However, the same cannot be said about the reporting of the National Enquirer regarding the Palins in the following years!).
The sexual affair with Brad Hanson did happen, it's a fact. As I wrote for example
in my earlier post about the Morlocks at Palingates which I mentioned above, I once spoke to a member of Brad's family on the phone who confirmed it - and several other sources from Alaska confirmed it as well.
So it's my hope that Joe's book will be the "final nail in the coffin" of Sarah Palin's already half-dead political career - and that we can all move on, once and for all. It's about time.
Ideally, I would of course like to see all her major secrets exposed, but it's probably unlikely that this is going to happen. However, I am hopeful now that a few really big secrets will be exposed by Joe McGinniss.
Who will pay all the psychiatrists for the Palinbots when they will need therapy for the next 10 years or so....?
I really wished I could look into the future. The suspense is killing me what will happen during the next weeks, months, years. So I guess it's quite difficult for me to move on as well. ;-)
+++UPDATE+++
Joe McGinniss Jr, son of the author Joe McGinniss, confirmed the media reports about the one-night-stand of Sarah Palin with Glenn Rice on his facebook - and adds additional, previously unknown information:
This comment by Joe McGinniss Jr. is particularly interesting:
interesting...yeah...he was in college and it was apparently a real crush...phone calls and letters, etc...
"Phone calls and letters!"
Now it becomes harder and harder to wait for Joe's book! :-)
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