That's funny--I was always given to understand that a monoculture encourages more pests and diseases. So now it's actually the other way around--having more plant varieties in a space encourages pests and diseases? Which is it? Or is the truth that you hire a gardener rather than do it yourself, so you actually don't know? My other grievance with this post is the notion, often expressed on the Internet as "tl;dr" and "this chat is boring" and other such nonsense--that only YOU are important, only YOU exist, and every other human being is just a TV show meant to entertain you. And if they fail in their duty, YOU get to throw a little snit and stamp your little foot and rant and rave, because YOU have lost out on YOUR entitlement. Uh-uh. Missy Madam, you have far more important things to worry about in life than how someone else's veggie garden looks. First and foremost, your dire need for therapy.

"I would be interested in concrete, verifiable cases of the use of secret police being used to terrorize the US population." COINTELPRO in the sixties. FBI vs. socialists and communists earlier than that. FBI *again* in the nineties against the deep ecologists. Oh wait, you meant REAL Americans. Christian, white, Republican, and consumerist as hell. Gotcha.

Are people seriously trying to say, after what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, that there is no racism in this country and that black people are not disproportionately disadvantaged? Seriously? I would LOVE to live in your world. No wait, I wouldn't. I have poor drug tolerance. I apologize for any lower-class whites who post here complaining about how hard they have it, therefore there is no racism. Take a black person and a white person each making $15k a year with one kid to raise and tell me who'd have it worse. I promise you it will be the black person, 9/10ths of the time. I come from rural Louisiana, I've seen the poor areas. The "black" part of town is ALWAYS worse. And I'll weigh in to say that no matter what race you are, the government offering marriage as a solution to poverty is downright insulting. Ms. Homan has it absolutely right. I'm about ready to take down my OKCupid ad, in fact, because I know I have nothing to offer. I'm female, but that doesn't matter--if we're after a gender-equitable world, women have to pull our weight too. Unfortunately it's a bit more difficult than if you're a man, and doubly so if you're a woman with one or more children. Unmarried too? Forget it. Even if I could get married, every asset I gained from then til the divorce (if there were one) would be divided in half. If he and I never improved our economic lot, taxes owed on nothing + nothing are the same as taxes owed on nothing: a big fat zero. Whatever "protections" marriage might offer do not extend to finances.