Rising sea levels and coastal erosion are threatening farmers on America’s mid-Atlantic coast, but a crop from colonial times may be the future harvest in places like Delaware and New Jersey. The issue is that more and more mid-Atlantic farmland is becoming inundated with salt making crops like corn and soy ungrowable, but a group […] The post Colonial Grass Could Become a Bumper Crop Even with Salty Soil, and Stop Coastal Erosion appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Reading the Weird  “He Stinks of the Ground You Buried Him In”: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 8) Just a normal neighborly conversation about wendigos, cannibals, and the reanimated dead… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on August 21, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapter 26. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! At the Crandalls’, Norma stays up longer than usual. By the deftness with which she works on a sampler for the church Christmas sale, her arthritis is much improved. She’s recovered well from her heart attack; ten weeks before the cerebral accident that will kill her, Louis can see the girl she once was. Jud and Louis finally sit alone at the kitchen table, beer glasses to hand. Louis has already drunk more than his usual limit, but tonight it seems okay, even mandatory. The cat awaits him at home. The cat who could be—anywhere at all. Jud says it was town ragman and drunkard Stanny who told him about the Micmac burial ground. Stanny’s grandfather was the pride of their “proper Canuck” family. In the 1800s, he ran a lucrative fur trading operation, driving a rawhide-covered wagon decorated with crosses and “pagan Indian signs.” Grandpa was a Christian who’d preach on the Resurrection when drunk enough. He also believed that all Indians belonged to the lost tribe of Israel, thus Christians in “some queer, damned way.” Grandpa did good business with the Micmacs because he traded fairly. They told him about Little God Swamp and the burial ground the Wendigo had soured. Jud figures the Wendigo legend arose out of the need to justify starvation-driven cannibalism during long winters. If the Wendigo walked through a sleeping village and touched the inhabitants, they would succumb to a taste for their own kind. Could be the Micmacs buried the bones of whomever they ate in the burial ground. Anyhow, in 1910, Jud’s dog Spot was dying from infected wounds. His father sent the ten-year-old away while he euthanized Spot. Stanny came upon Jud sobbing and offered to help. Jud had to take Spot’s body to the Pet Sematary, but he must not bury him. At midnight, they’d go there together and work the trick. Jud snuck out and joined a staggeringly drunk Stanny who nevertheless managed to tote a pickax and shovel to the sematary. He thought Stanny would break his neck climbing the deadfall, but Stanny sailed over, as did Jud himself, carrying Spot. They walked through woods rustling with unseen animals, Stanny as easily as the Indian Jud imagined he’d become. At Little God Swamp, Stanny warned Jud to ignore strange sounds and sights—especially don’t speak to anything that speaks to him. Jud did see something, which he won’t describe. The five times he’s gone to the burial ground since, he’s never seen it again. Louis wants to believe he’s listening to senile maunderings, but he knows three things: Church was dead, Church is alive again, Church is fundamentally changed, and wrong. He remembers the “capering, gleeful thing” he glimpsed last night in Jud’s eyes and realizes Jud’s decision to “aid” Louis wasn’t entirely his own. The rest happened to Jud and Spot as it did to Louis and Church: the burial ground interment and cairn-building, Spot’s return home the next morning. Jud pauses. He’s never told anyone this story. People who know about the burial ground don’t talk about it. Anyhow, Spot was changed, stiff and dulled, and he exuded the smell of sour earth no matter how often he was bathed; nevertheless, to Jud he was a good dog right up to his second death. The only dangerous revenant Jud knows of was Lester Morgan’s prize bull, which he had to shoot two weeks after its homecoming. Maybe this is why Jud took Louis to the burial ground. Maybe “kids need to know that sometimes dead is better.” That’s something he feels Ellie doesn’t know, maybe not Rachel either. If Ellie’s like Jud, she’ll still love Church, “but she’ll draw her own conclusions” about his present state and be relieved when he finally dies. While Louis is still processing Jud’s reasoning, Jud suddenly covers his face and struggles against sobs. He repeats that he did mean to spare Ellie an abrupt trauma, but admits that wasn’t his only reason. The burial ground gets hold of anyone who’s used it. It’s a secret you want to share, so you find excuses that are good enough, “the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world.” But still. Maybe Jud was wrong. He isn’t God, but bringing back the dead is “as close to playing God as you can get, ain’t it?” Now, if Louis was to kill Church again tonight, he’d never say a word. Louis resists the urge to fire back that he didn’t go through “all that” just to kill the cat. After Jud says he’s talked out, he does ask one more question: “Has anyone ever buried a person up there?” Jud’s jerk knocks empty beer bottles to the floor. “No!” he says. “And who ever would? You don’t even want to talk about such things, Louis!…Some things it don’t pay to be curious about.” For the first time, Jud looks old to Louis, even infirm. Later, at home, it will occur to him how Jud looked at the moment of his outburst. Jud looked like he was lying. What’s Cyclopean: Sometimes we get powerful, evocative descriptions and jewel-like language. And sometimes we get “that stage of drunkenness where you’re as wide awake as an owl with diarrhea”. Which is, you have to confess… evocative. The Degenerate Dutch: Jud imagines that Stanny, leading him to the burial ground for the first time, is an “Indian” with a “tommyhawk” who’s going to scalp him. This is possibly related to Stanny’s grandpa being convinced that “all Indians were hellbound”, but also descended from the lost tribes of Israel. And therefore, somehow, “Christians all the same, in some queer, damned way.” Which manages to be insulting to Native Americans, Jews, and probably also Christians with more sense than Stanny’s grandpa. Anne’s Commentary I expected King to open Chapter 26 by shuffling Norma Crandall right off to bed; given the shopping trip she and Jud took, she might have retired even earlier than usual. A sentence or two would have cleared the stage for the “menfolks” to get down to their post-resurrection debriefing. Instead, King gives us a longish paragraph about how Norma sits up with Jud and Louis “for quite a while.” It doesn’t seem like she suspects them of nocturnal sacrilege. In “some queer, damned way,” to borrow Jud’s turn of phrase, she looks and acts reinvigorated, revived, but in a good way, unlike Church. Her arthritic fingers nimbly work a sampler. She looks “less haggard and actually younger,” so that Louis “could see the girl she had been.” But have a look at her embroidery. It features the sun sinking behind a country meeting house and casting its rooftop cross into black silhouette. What’s the homey message this sampler will bring to the church Christmas sale: that night conquers faith, darkness light? Perhaps in her last flare of vitality, Norma knows what’s coming. If the reader doesn’t, King follows the good news about her heart attack recovery with some abrupt and clinical foreshadowing: In less than ten weeks, a “cerebral accident” will finish Norma off. Ouch, did I need to know that? I guess so. In the midst of life we are in death. If there’s a convenient Micmac burial ground nearby, in the midst of death you could be back in life, or a simulacrum thereof. Only if you’re a nonhuman animal, though. Nobody would ever, ever, ever try to call a dead person from the grave. Not even in the wildest fiction has such a thing happened. Nope. Christ on His throne, just ask Jud! There’s only one problem about Jud. Sometimes Jud lies, and not just to the womenfolk, as he confessed back in Chapter 24. In life and fiction both, if something can be done, someone will do it, or at least try. That applies to magic as well as technology and plain old physiological limits. The only unthinkable act is something no one’s thought of yet. This is why, in order to live in groups of more than one, we need systems of morality, rules, laws, religion. This is why we need taboos. Taboos such as: Don’t eat others of your own species. Or if you do do the (socially) undoable, something for which you can’t bear to blame yourself, make sure you have some other entity to blame it on, the more supernaturally irresistible the better. The Devil makes many people do bad things. Ditto the Wendigo, that insatiably hungry monster-god of the north country. Jud nails it when he says, “[The Wendigo] was a story [the Native Americans] had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories.” Does that last statement mean Jud doesn’t believe in the Wendigo? Louis would like to think so. He’d also like to think that he himself doesn’t believe in cannibal demons and raising the dead. Too bad Church prevents him from doing so, as Spot did Jud—Spot and whatever other pets Jud has ushered to the burial ground. He admits to going there five more times since Spot. He confesses that saving Ellie grief, and in some convoluted way teaching her that “sometimes dead is better,” isn’t the reason he took Louis beyond the deadfall. That was one of those “sweetest-smelling reasons” to justify yielding to the lure of the burial ground, to letting in whatever Louis saw as a “capering, gleeful thing” in Jud’s eyes. It’s damn scary to think that a possessing spirit lurks in the deep Maine woods. It’s terrifying to go a step further and posit that what capers gleefully in one’s eyes on the way to the secret place is not its monster-genius but the human thing that responds to its call, some monstrous part of oneself. The monstrous part that, to hell with all constraints, does want to play God. Heavy stuff for Louis to digest, no matter how many supernumerary beers he puts down. And all the while—the most shuddersome bit of this chapter— Back at home, the undead cat awaits. Ruthanna’s Commentary Okay, okay, I take back what I said about Jud. Most of it, anyway. You can’t blame a guy for what he says while under the sway of a wendigo spirit. Or whatever it is about the burial ground that turns users into pushers. I still don’t think “most guys lie to their wives” was the wendigo speaking. Then again, who am I to speculate about the marital dynamics of anthropophagic spirits? So we’ve got a sacred burial ground, turned sour by some sort of taboo-breaking and therefore abandoned by its original users. The taboo violation may or may not have involved actual cannibalism (insert separate rant here), but left the place watched over by something unpleasant—something that gives monkey’s-paw gifts, in exchange for the opportunity to give more such gifts later. For Reasons, this cycle of white elephant regifting is currently being passed among the descendants of the area’s colonizers. Presumably the Micmac have more sense and/or better advance debriefings. Actually, you know what, let’s talk about cannibalism. This is a thing that actually happens, both to individuals in extremis and in occasional cultures for a range of ritual purposes. IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist)—but I do know that cannibalism shows up way more often in the fiction and rumor of European-descended white folks than in real life. It’s the thing that Those People Do Over There Until We Stop Them. It’s the thing that will happen if Society Breaks Down; what’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland without a cannibalistic biker gang? Its prevention justifies empire and massacre. It’s how you recognize barbarism, a clear line in the sand between inclusion in humanity and exile into the monstrous. In this case, it’s Jud’s assumption that what happened to the burial ground was the Micmac’s’ fault. Even now that the sin is being passed from white guy to white guy, the bad magic comes from Those People Over There profaning the sacred. I feel like there’s a more straightforward explanation for the destructive alien force that came in and broke the sacred land. But that would involve responsibility that none of these people are ready to take. And a tougher backstory than cannibalism. It fits better though, doesn’t it? There’s no reason for a wendigo to resurrect the dead. But white people come and take over the land that was sacred, use it for profit and convenience, turn it from something you can have a deep relationship with to something purely material—or at least they try. And now if you go to the burial ground with something you loved, something possessed of an ineffable spark, you get your beloved bet back with that spark missing. The sacred depth is gone, at a scale even settlers can notice. But they can no more stop making that tradeoff than they can stop trading the land. I don’t think King had all this in mind, to be clear. Not consciously at least. But that deep cultural fear, alongside the obvious denial of death and desire for control, is one of the things I see here. There’s a moral failure bigger than any individual, something the descendants and beneficiaries of settlers can no more get away from than mortality. And deny the power of the land as you will, it’ll reach out and grab you and have its way even decades later. That’s the thing that’s gripping me, even amid all the gender and sexual baggage: the dangers of denial, and the universality of denying our worst fears anyway. Before Pascow dies, we know that a nightmare is beginning and can’t be avoided. Now, we know that Norma—whose life Louis just saved—will be dead in ten weeks. And there will be worse, we can suspect. Why else the question about using the burial ground for humans? Why else Jud’s frightened, false insistence that no one would ever do such a thing? Death is inevitable. And so, on King’s stolen hillside, is a lesson that even adults have trouble learning. Next week, we visit a different sort of tainted land in Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl.”[end-mark] The post  “He Stinks of the Ground You Buried Him In”: Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i> (Part 8) appeared first on Reactor.

Protesters Spoil Pelosi's Special Moment With Colbert

The parachuting gentle giants may be chilling their way across the planet.

“Satisfying luxury markets does not justify the substantial threats."

Supermarkets are dens of trickery and deception.

Unfortunately, the species is already facing threats.

ABC’s Good Morning America has always been a team player for the left, so that meant on Wednesday they had to have on-air Obamagasams to get their points across about how Barack and Michelle Obama were an “electrifying” and “forceful one-two punch” with “political and personal” speeches “pummeling Donald Trump in blistering terms..as dangerous, divisive, and petty” on a night that felt “genuinely new”. Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos salivated right off the top, remarking to co-host Robin Roberts: “What a rocking night at the Democratic National Convention.” Chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce was predictably ready to run through a brick wall for her fellow Democrats. This time, though, it was over the Obamas to the point that hopefully her usual source of adulation — President Joe Biden — wasn’t watching: Well, this was a forceful one-two punch by the Obamas. Their remarks both political and personal, pummeling Donald Trump in blistering terms, but also lifting up Kamala Harris, praising her character and substance and making it clear they see Harris as the future of the movement they started. Overnight, President Obama, who once electrified the nation with his vision of hope and change, passing that mantle to Kamala Harris. Bruce laid on thick in-between soundbites of Barack Obama, bragging he “slamm[ed] Donald Trump, saying he puts himself above the interest of the American people” and offered no pushback (i.e. agreement) to Obama “casting Trump as dangerous, divisive, and petty”. ABC's Mary Bruce was once again rhetorically aroused at the #DNC. This time, she did her best Chris Matthews impression.... Bruce “Well, this was a forceful one-two punch by the Obamas. Their remarks both political and personal, pummelling Donald Trump in blistering terms, but… pic.twitter.com/TWSek30DzL — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 21, 2024 She also saved some valentines for Michelle, gushing of her “rare return to the political center stage” and “contrasting the candidates in stark terms...saying they know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Trump’s attack” and “argu[ed] Kamala understands average Americans the way Trump never will”. Notice how deep cuts by Democrats are treated in the press as positives or factual statements while any sniff of mere basic criticism from Republicans are seen as personal attacks. Bruce also had some love for Second Gentlemen Doug Emhoff, but nothing about recent revelations about Emhoff having an affair with the nanny of his children during his first marriage (and getting her pregnant): “The night about reintroducing Harris to voters. Her dedicated husband describing Harris as a joyful warrior...and praising his wife’s dedication to their blended family.” She closed by greasing the skids for Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (D-MN): “The Minnesota governor and former high school football who until two weeks ago never used a teleprompter. He will be speaking to no doubt the largest crowd of his career.” Chief Washington correspondent and three-time anti-Trump author Jonathan Karl also said his piece by fawning over the “electrifying night for delegates here and for Democrats across the country” and the convention proceedings coming off as “genuinely new” (click “expand”): ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Quite a show of force by the Democrats last night. A President, a First Lady, two massive crowds.” Jonathan Karl: “George, this was an electrifying night for delegates here and for Democrats across the country. And, look, it is exceedingly rare to… pic.twitter.com/mNs2lhl54c — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) August 21, 2024 STEPHANOPOULOS: Quite a show of force by the Democrats last night. A President, a First Lady, two massive crowds. KARL: George, this was an electrifying night for delegates here and for Democrats across the country. And, look, it is exceedingly rare to see something genuinely new at one of these national political conventions. But the organizers pulled that off when you saw Kamala Harris simultaneously direct — address a packed convention hall in Milwaukee where Republicans had rallied last month and here in Chicago and the messaging, that there was something new in the messaging as well as — as Barack Obama particularly tried to address Americans who are sick and tired of our deeply divided politics, doing that while simultaneously issuing a brutal takedown on Donald Trump. But also trying to appeal to the people, what Obama called the regular folks who have turned out. And, George, that part of the messaging has been backed up here in Chicago every single night and will continue tonight and tomorrow by featuring Republican speakers. Last night, the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona and even former Trump White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham. STEPHANOPOULOS: One thing that is clear for the Obamas, this is personal. KARL: It’s personal. And this is not just a matter of two speeches last night. I was told by a person close to President Obama that he intends to be out on the campaign trail in a way we really haven’t seen since he was running for his own re-election in 2012...He will be on the campaign trail this fall. Not to be left out, Trump campaign correspondent/antagonist Rachel Scott giddily boasted of how “this has been a very rough three weeks for the former President’s campaign” and is now worse because of “new numbers out this morning that show Vice President Kamala Harris has” hauled “in nearly $250 million in July” versus $78 million for Trump’s team. To see the relevant ABC transcript from August 21, click here.

California may soon allow illegal aliens to participate in a state home loan program designed to assist first-time buyers.Earlier this year, Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula (D-Fresno) introduced HB 1840, a measure that would allow illegal immigrants to take advantage of the California Dream for All Program just like citizens and legal residents.Analysis from the Senate Appropriations Committee did note that the bill would likely create 'unknown significant cost pressures' for the Home Purchase Assistance program."Homeownership has historically been the primary means of accumulating generational wealth in the United States," Arambula said back in February. "The social and economic benefits of homeownership should be available to everyone."The California Dream for All Program first began in March 2023, inviting prospective first-time homebuyers to apply for a "loan" through the California Housing Finance Agency. Approved applicants may receive up to 20% of the purchase price or a maximum of $150,000 that can be used toward a down payment or closing costs.The terms of the program are quite generous. To qualify, applicants must be first-time homebuyers who earn no more than 120% of the median income of their county. In L.A. County, for example, the income limit is $155,000.What's more, successful applicants do not need to make a down payment on the loan or even make payments thereafter. In theory, recipients repay the loan when they sell, refinance, or transfer the home, but without any stipulations in the program compelling homeowners to take such actions, the loan may never be paid back in some cases in which homes have been placed in a trust, Center Square reported.In its first year, the program received so many applicants that officials had to implement a lottery system. This year, 18,000 applications were submitted for a share of the program's $255 million budget, but only 1,700 winners were selected.Arambula's bill would make plain that illegal immigrants are also eligible to submit applications to the program, though the program currently has no provision that explicitly prohibits them from participating."When undocumented individuals are excluded from such programs, they miss out on a crucial method of securing financial security and personal stability for themselves and their families," Arambula claimed.HB 1840 has already passed the Assembly and the state Senate Appropriations Committee. It will now head to the floor of the Senate for a full vote.Analysis from the Senate Appropriations Committee did note that the bill would likely create "unknown significant cost pressures" for the Home Purchase Assistance program. Estimates claimed such pressures might be in "the millions annually."Blaze News reached out to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) for comment about the bill and its prospects for becoming law but did not receive a response.H/T: The Post MillennialLike Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The Harris campaign revealed this week that if the Democratic vice president and her running mate — who apparently thinks that communism means that "everyone is the same and everyone shares" — win in November, then they will slap Americans with various new taxes, including a tax on unrealized gains. Despite claiming to be fiscally responsible, Harris and Walz would simultaneously redistribute American wealth in a manner some economists have indicated will exacerbate the very problems they are supposedly intended to remedy. The official 2024 Democratic Party platform was released Monday, revealing what former presidential candidate Joe Biden apparently planned to do if afforded another term. It turns out that just as Kamala Harris was ready to adopt Biden's candidacy and his committed delegates, she is now also ready to embrace many of the policy proposals attributed to him in the document. Those proposals include raising the federal corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. Communist China's federal corporate income tax rate is, by way of comparison, reportedly 25%. Harris campaign spokesperson James Singer confirmed to Reuters that Harris plans on raising the rate, claiming it would be part of a "fiscally responsible way to put money back in the pockets of working people and ensure billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share." President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans previously cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. When ratifying the bill, Trump noted, "It's going to be a tremendous thing for the American people. It's going to be fantastic for the economy. It's going to keep companies from leaving our shores." A 2017 Tax Foundation study indicated that "empirical evidence seems to support earlier theoretical analysis that domestic U.S. labor bears the largest portion of the burden of the U.S. corporate income tax." "The share of the burden falling on labor is routinely found to be between 50 percent and 100 percent, with 70 percent or higher the most likely outcome," said the study. "As the tax reduces investment, productivity, and wages, the dollar amount of the cost to labor may exceed the revenue raised by the tax by a wide margin." Extra to adversely impacting labor, this Harris tax hike would also adversely impact the stock market. Strategists at Goldman Sachs told Reuters that each percentage point change in the corporate tax rate could shift S&P 500 earnings by "slightly less than 1%." Peter Tuz, president of Chase Investment Counsel, said, "Anything that reduces earnings should ... have a negative impact on the stock market." Harris — who, as vice president, oversaw the U.S. national debt topping $35 trillion and championed various handouts along the way, including the taxpayer-funded subsidization of college education for hundreds of thousands of student debtors — has other taxes planned for 2025, around the same time various other Trump-era tax cuts are set to expire. 'The taxing of unrealized gains, no matter what the level of wealth, will drive assets, jobs and companies away from the United States.' Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration proposed in its FY 2025 budget a 44.6% capital gains rate, reported Moodys Private Client. This increase — from the current rate of 20% left over from the Trump tax reform — would constitute the highest federal capital gains rate in American history. The Harris campaign told the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget that she "continues to support all of the revenue-raising provisions in the President's FY 2025 budget." According to Americans for Tax Reform, the Harris-endorsed budget proposal also calls for a yearly 25% minimum tax on unrealized gains. While initially, this would target only the sliver minority of individuals with income and assets exceeding $100 million, critics suspect this "unconstitutional wealth tax" might ultimately be expanded to millions of Americans. "Capital gains taxes should only be paid when a gain is realized. Harris's wealth tax would break with current tax policy and impose tax Americans based on the value of an asset on a particular arbitrary date," stated Americans for Tax Reform. "This unprecedented tax would give even more power to the IRS, encourage taxpayers to move assets overseas, and will only expand to hit millions of Americans over time." TheStreet's Bob Byrne expressed similar concerns, noting, "While this only impacts a handful of people, and the measure is highly unlikely to pass, even the concept is worrisome. The taxing of unrealized gains, no matter what the level of wealth, will drive assets, jobs and companies away from the United States." Harris has provided a few indications of how she might redistribute some of this wealth. Harris intends to have taxpayers inadvertently provide a $25,000 handout to first-time and certain other prospective homeowners. Some economists suspect this is an exercise in futility. Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's, recently told Axios Moody's that this house credit for buyers would increase demand and "translate quickly into higher prices." While the Democratic platform claims the party is "working to end special interest giveaways," this scheme would no doubt be a big win for those big investment firms that have bought up residential real estate across the country. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget indicated this handout would cost $100 billion over four years, though the number "could be higher and lead to additional costs." Americans for Tax Reform noted that Harris has endorsed other tax hikes including raising Medicare taxes from 3.8% to 5% for those making over $400,000 a year. While such taxes are necessarily coercive, the Harris-Walz campaign suggested in an Aug. 16 release it was simply "asking the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations to pay their fair share." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!