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| Julie Ann Edgar, Inauguration of Governor Tom Wolf, 2015 Photo, Wendy Lynne Lee |
The purpose of the following is to prevent harm, defend free exchange, and tell the truth.
But--especially to prevent harm.
The note below hails from self-described "Ms. Witchdoctress" Julie Ann Edgar. She posted it to her Facebook friends on a thread concerning appropriate remedies to bee-sting after she banned me from the thread.
I could, of course, not see the post, and "Ms. Witchdoctress" apparently assumed it would not make its way to me.
But it did.
To put it another, more explicit, way:
Ms. Edgar determined that for whatever reason (we'll pursue that below), I ought not to participate in this discussion, so she banned me from it--rendering me defenseless against the excoriating tirade she then posted.
I quote it here in full, and with sincere thanks to the source who believed I had a right to see it--that I have a right to self-defense, especially against attacks that come without provocation, without forewarning, and--as we'll see--without an once of justification.
Greetings friends, i have blocked Wendy from this thread she has chosen to hijack for her obviously pathological vampiric energy needs.
I have answers to her many criticisms, but it is my opinion that she presents them mostly because she needs attention and not because she would listen to a damn word i said if i bothered to respond to all of them.
I am saddened at her ignorance because Quantum physics will continue to bear out that many things she is falsely claiming are pseudoscience are absolutely NOT--
and she who considers herself an ecofeminist is surely NOT, because a pillar of ecofeminism is the validation of the witchdoctress/botanical healer archetype, and the validation of nonlinear ways of knowing.
I don't have the patience to deal with these spurious claims, and since this is my wall, i have gotten rid of her.
It is obvious from her disproportionate response and UBER-argumentative style that she seeks attention more than anything else.
Namaste~
First, some context:
The discussion was about remedies for bee sting. Julie had recommended Tea Root--Melaleuca. While I cannot produce her exact words--as I am banned from the thread--she had clearly recommended it for a wasp sting, and claimed that she had "run, not walked" to access the remedy. She strongly implied that Melaleuca was a remedy as opposed to a mere analgesic, and later in the thread she bragged that she had "saved" many children by making this "remedy" available to their parents at places like parks.
When the post came up in my Facebook feed, I had to respond for two reasons:
First, while I do not know exactly what Ms. Edgar meant by "saved," what I do know is that Melaleuca is nothing more than a modest pain-reliever. It will have no effect whatever in case of allergic reaction.
To therefore recommend it without being very clear for what it's intended is simply irresponsible, and it had to be said.
I know this firsthand: Several years ago I was stung by three wasps on my back porch. I barely made it to the phone to hit 911 before I began to suffocate. It was terrifying, and people die from this kind of allergic reaction.
From the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Insect sting Anaphylaxis: INSECT STING ANAPHYLAXIS
Second, though a native tree of Australia, Melaleuca is an extremely damaging invasive in the United States, especially in Florida where it is responsible for tremendous species and habitat loss.
For sources, please see:
Melaleuca
http://pesticide.ifas.ufl.edu/courses/pdfs/melaleuca/Melaleuca.pdf
Melaleuca Trees in South Florida - YouTube
So, here's an argument:
Since Melaleuca is no more effective for treating non-allergic bee sting than, say baking soda; since the only sort of bee sting you'd "run, not walk!" to treat needs the intervention of epinephrine--an epi-pen--why would you recommend an invasive species plant responsible for wildlife decimation?
In other words, if baking soda works just as well for non-allergic bee sting, why would you risk contributing to the destruction of Florida wildlife? I thought that's what the gas companies did.
Ms. Edgar's response was that she purchased the Melaleuca from botanicals in Australia--hence she's not personally contributing to the decimation of habitat in Florida.
Well and good.
But consider two things:
1. Melaleuca, Inc--The Wellness Company--controls a virtual monopoly on the plant in Australia. Buying Melaleuca from Australia virtually requires that you join Melaleuca, Inc--for $45.00 per month.
Melaleuca, Inc. is owned by Frank L. VanderSloot, the profoundly anti-gay campaign chief for Mitt Romney, and "major financial contributor to Republican campaigns" in Idaho--the corporate home of the company. He also donates heavily to the American Heritage Charter School, a far right wing K-12 that advertises itself a "free, rigorous, and patriotic" (American Heritage Charter School - Home). And VanderSloot has a nasty reputation for "threatening to sue just about anyone who puts his name in print"--that's one way, after all, of banning a critic (Mitt Romney's Money Man: Who Is Frank L. VanderSloot? - DailyFinance).
For more about VanderSloot's own version of "silence the critic," see: Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics - Salon.com
Melaleuca Inc. has been described by Forbes this way: "Melaleuca is a pyramid selling organization, built along the lines of Herbalife and Amway" (If You Believe - Forbes).
From Daily Finance:
To sell these wares -- and "350 other household and 'health' products" -- VanderSloot relies on what Forbes describes as "an army of part-time hucksters." For Melaleuca is essentially a pyramid scheme -- or, more politely, a "multilevel marketing firm," like Amway or Herbalife (HLF) -- in which so-called independent marketing executives make money by peddling the company's dietary supplements and cleaning products, as well as recruiting more salespeople (the newer recruits being on the lower levels of the pyramid).
This business model has been spectacularly successful for VanderSloot (who stands, of course, at the pyramid's apex). Melaleuca had $1 billion in revenue last year, according to Mother Jones, which points out the glaring disparity between the earnings potential advertised for would-be salespeople and the real income those "marketing executives" derive.
On the its website, "Melaleuca pitches itself as a means to gain the economic freedom to live your dream life -- all while working flexible hours at home." A video shows several women who "claim to have made six-figure incomes through Melaleuca," Mother Jones reports. "One says she's earned more than $500,000."You have to be a member of the Wellness Company to purchase its products. From the Website:
The actual annual average earnings of a Melaleuca salesperson: a paltry $85 a year.
Discover all the ways that Melaleuca enhances the lives of thousands of people just like you by helping people reach their goals. Learn how members of Melaleuca are spending less money for safer, more effective products, getting out of debt, and making a difference in the lives of those they touch.
Whomever is a member is also expected to "huckster" for a company CEO who "ostensibly believes that the Garden of Eden was located in Jackson County, Missouri, and that Native Americans are actually Jews" (The Most Loathsome People in America: The Double Dirty Dozen | Alternet).
So given that it is very hard to acquire Melaleuca from Australia any other way that through VanderSloot, we are entitled to infer the following about Ms. Edgar's insistence that she does not contribute to the decimation of species and habitat in Florida:
a. Ms. Edgar buys from the Wellness Company, but does not know who VanderSloot is. Fine--but utterly without excuse--in which case she is also presumably a salesperson for the company. Ms. Edgar has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy--and with that her excuse for not knowing better--for not having better critical thinking skills-- evaporates.
b. Ms. Edgar buys from the Wellness Company, and does know its story, but doesn't care. Fine, but this would make her morally reprobate.
b. Ms. Edgar somehow acquires her Melaleuca another way. Fine--but this defies credulity. Perhaps she could offer receipts from that company. One option might be Emmi's Essentials--very hard to locate--and raises at least two other questions.This brings us to point (2).
a) Perhaps Ms. Edgar is buying Melaleuca from some other company, say Emmi's Essentials, where it retails for $35.00 for two ounces. Another fine. What the "Witchdoctress" decides to spend her own money on is her business. This is, however, the same Ms. Edgar who in late 2012 posted a Fundrazr Campaign titled "Help Julie's Family Stay Off the Street," raising $1,050 dollars (Yasni result for https://fundrazr.com/campaigns/8PLQ5).
To be very very clear: charitable giving is a good thing.
Do it. Do it often.
But it is a far cry from charitable giving to be solicited to support the veterinary care to supplement the funds for someone who, by her own admission (see Fundrazr (1)) cannot in fact adequately support her own children.
In fact, it is cruel to the animals--and to the kids.
And it is crazily hypocritical for someone who insists rightly on her Facebook page that we ought not to eat pigs to assume responsibility for animals whom she cannot even get adequately treated for ringworm.
Not rocket science: if you cannot take full care--veterinary, not absurd "Witchdoctress"--care for your animals, do not acquire them.
What makes this post especially rankling, however, is this: Ms Edgar claims that not only are her cats sick, but so too are her daughters--that they've "ALL" had ringworm since February, and that they're living in filthy conditions.
She lives in Bethlehem. Here's the websites for the Bethlehem Clinic:
http://www.freeclinics.com/cit/pa-bethlehem
Here's an option for a low-cost veterinarian:
http://www.affordablepetvaccines.com/
Why hasn't Ms. Edgar sought better treatment--since February--for her daughters? This is what makes it very hard not to wonder:
Does she have the same apparently faulty beliefs about medicine in general that she has about how to treat bee sting? That some "natural botanical" will do the trick? If so, why should others be expected to pay for treating the damage when her bullshit botanical treatments don't work?
To the retort that how she cares for her kids and her cats is none of my or anyone's business, I say this: of course it is; she made it my business--and everyone's--the moment she asked for money in cyberspace.
This is how people and critters get really really hurt.
This is how Ms. Edgar's cats and kids have been allowed to suffer unnecessarily.
Ms. Edgar makes it a point to advertise herself as a "single mom and entrepreneur" claiming that she's got an interview for her "dream organizing position" in July. But while she waits for that "dream job," her kids and her animals are suffering. And that is not ok. She calls her situation "legitimate and extreme exigency." But why is that? I too have been a single parent most of my adult life, but what that has meant is that I have worked jobs I hated, lived within my means, put myself through school, and educated my children. This was very hard, and it is absolutely harder for women. But it did not entitle me to not seek out care for my children when they were sick (or substitute magical thinking for medicine); it did not entitle me to solicit money when things got really bad, it did not entitle me to acquire animals I could not care for--and it did not entitle me to subscribe to a raft of homeopathic, "natural" cockamamy that hurts people.
All of this brings me, finally, to Ms. Edgar's very nasty and rather nefarious post above.
Let's consider:
Claim 1: "i have blocked Wendy from this thread she has chosen to hijack for her obviously pathological vampiric energy needs."
Because Ms. Edgar does not specify in any fashion what "vampiric energy needs" refers to, there is no way to respond. This is name-calling pure and simple. I was having a very civil and interesting conversation with a gentleman named Robert. He and I agreed on some things and not on others. That is called "having a conversation." If Ms. Edgar really sees having a conversation as a "hijack," then what she's really after is either silence or unalloyed agreement. But in that case, it seems her commitment to free exchange is rather anemic. Maybe some Melaleuca ointment will help that out.
Claim 2: "I have answers to her many criticisms, but it is my opinion that she presents them mostly because she needs attention and not because she would listen to a damn word i said if i bothered to respond to all of them."
If Ms. Edgar has answers to my criticisms, why doesn't she offer them? If not for me, for the benefit of her readers? What difference does it make whether I'm after attention or not? If she indeed does believe in the ascribed properties of Melaleuca, why not use this opportunity to educate? How does Ms. Edgar know I'm uninterested in listening? Answer: she doesn't. Indeed, the facts are she doesn't have the goods. The properties she wants to ascribe to Melaleuca are easily replaceable by baking soda or mud--and for a lot less money. This is actually just another variety of name-calling--and as such the refuge of she who, not having a good argument, goes for the next best thing--dismissal of the arguer through ridicule--and then banishment. Perhaps I can use my magical consciousness to re-insert myself on the bee-sting thread. Or, well, no.
Claim 3: "I am saddened at her ignorance because Quantum physics will continue to bear out that many things she is falsely claiming are pseudoscience are absolutely NOT--"
This is a particularly tortured sentence, but I gather Ms. Edgar's claiming that Quantum Mechanics will bear out that homeopathic "natural" medicine" is legitimate and that Western medicine is bad. And I gather she premises this claim on the idea that Quantum Mechanics implies that human consciousness is somehow in control of reality. She is entirely unspecific, so it's difficult to know what she thinks is defensible, but we can say this:
The appeal to quantum mechanics by magical thinkers opposed to "linear thinking" are very old, and long-discredited both on empirical--evidenced--grounds and on their internally incoherent and inconsistent logic. The 2004 film "What the #$!%* Do We Know!?" and its 2006 expansion "What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole" re-newed some of the enthusiasm for what New York Times writer, Dennis Overbye, describes as follows:
The "rabbit hole" in the title refers to the philosophical muddle that the contemplation of quantum mechanics, the paradoxical laws that govern subatomic life, can lead to. And it is a legitimate and maddening one. Quantum physics proclaims, for example, that an electron (or any object, elementary particle or not) is both a particle and a wave before we look at it, a conundrum neatly illustrated by a cartoon featuring "Dr. Quantum" in the new film.Physicists have been at war for the last century trying to explain how it is that the fog of quantum possibilities prescribed by mathematical theory can condense into one concrete actuality, what physicists call "collapsing the wavefunction." Half a century ago the physicist and Nobel Prize winner Eugene Wigner ventured that consciousness was the key to this mysterious process.
Wigner thereby, and inadvertently, launched a thousand New Age dreams. Books like "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" have sought to connect quantum physics to Eastern mysticism. Deepak Chopra, the physician and author, has founded a career on the idea of "quantum healing," and a school of parapsychology has arisen based on the idea that things like telekinesis and telepathy were a result of probing minds' manipulation of the formless quantum potential. And now the movie.
All of them promote the idea that, at some level, our minds are in control of reality. We are in charge of the holodeck, as one of the characters in "Down the Rabbit Hole" says. And if it doesn't work for you, it's probably because you don't believe.
So what's wrong with that? Like everyone else, I am inspired by stories of personal change. The ideas that consciousness creates reality and that anything is possible make for terrific psychology.
We all know that self-confidence breeds its own success. I wish I were a member of that club.
But physics has moved on.
It has been decades since anybody took Wigner's idea seriously, said David Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at Columbia, who has the dubious honor of being one of the talking heads in both "What the Bleep" films and is not pleased with the results.
Many physicists today say the waves that symbolize quantum possibilities are so fragile they collapse with the slightest encounter with their environment. Conscious observers are not needed. As Dr. Albert pointed out, Wigner framed the process in strict mathematical and probabilistic terms. "The desires and intentions of the observer had nothing to do with it," he said.
In other words, reality is out of our control. It's all atoms and the void, as Democritus said so long ago. Indeed, some physicists say the most essential and independent characteristic of reality, whatever that is, is randomness. It's a casino universe. (Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics? - New York Times).
In other words, the Quantum-consciousness-control-of-reality stuff is far-out--way far-out, but it is also bull shit. Science has moved on, and so must we--at least where the health and lives of other people depend on it.
Indeed, if we do not demand good evidence under repeatably controlled experimental conditions, we are every bit as guilty of perpetrating bull shit as are the climate change deniers, the creationists, and the folks who claim that tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer.
We are, in fact, exactly the same. If this is what Ms. Edgar believes, it amounts to new age fluffer-nutter.
Claim 4: "and she who considers herself an ecofeminist is surely NOT, because a pillar of ecofeminism is the validation of the witchdoctress/botanical healer archetype, and the validation of nonlinear ways of knowing."
Eco-Feminism is an enormous field in philosophy, and many other disciplines. The term was coined by French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974. There is one variety of ecofeminism that subscribes to these mostly stereotypical images of healers, witchdoctresses, and nonlinear thinking. This is appropriately referred to as "radical cultural feminism," and is represented by, among others, the late Mary Daly. But these positions are routinely challenged from across the feminist disciplines--especially feminist science studies theorists like Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Sandra Harding, Greta Gaard, and Karen Warren.
I routinely contribute scholarly work to this discipline, and that can be found here: Wendy Lynne Lee | Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania - Academia.edu, and especially in my 2010 book, Contemporary Feminist Theory and Activism, Broadview. Ms. Edgar might also avail herself of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Ecofeminism: Feminist Environmental Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Among the things she might learn is that there continues to be a serious conflict among deep ecologists--more the Quantum Fluffer-Nutter sorts--and many ecofeminists who argue that identification with some notion of a universal consciousness is precisely contrary to women's liberatory aspirations since it requires self-abnegation--and that's what women have long had to contend with from men.
Indeed, the efforts to elevate the mother image in the interest of reclaiming women's "power" are at great risk of back-firing since these are the very same images that heteropatriarchal cultures have utilized to institutionalize oppression. I take this theme up at great length in my new book, Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Apocalypse, Lexington, 2016, where I evaluate some of the strategies of the anti-fracking movement in Pennsylvania from an ecofeminist point of view, and particularly with respect to the resistance strategies of Sandra Steingraber and Naomi Klein. In short, validation of healer, mother, etc. images is not a "pillar" of ecofeminism; it is simply one---and one long-critiqued from within feminism--theoretical avenue.Not really a claim 5: "I don't have the patience to deal with these spurious claims, and since this is my wall, i have gotten rid of her. It is obvious from her disproportionate response and UBER-argumentative style that she seeks attention more than anything else."
Having mostly canvassed Ms. Edgar's penchant for name-calling, dismissal, ridicule, and banishment, I'll only note this: "i have got rid of her."
Wow.
I wonder if Melaleuca can address that sort of arrogance that allows someone to treat others like the greasy bacon-burger wrapper they just threw out.
Namaste,
Wendy Lynne Lee
