Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Monday, September 14, 2026
Sunday, September 13, 2026
MRI Safety
@AuntMinnie @DrOzCMS Safety in the MRI area is about more than just a powerful, potentially deadly magnetic field. I hope you also study the use of Gadolinium contrast. Relook at Safety, Necessity, Side Effects,
— Mary Gerdt Parler:Alvarita1 (@marygerdt) September 12, 2026
Dosing, Frequency. Really study.@Wagner_Nephro @gadoliniumgal69…
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Friday, September 11, 2026
September 11, 2001, Never Forget 😢 💔
Today is September 11, 2026
25 years ago Today, the unthinkable happened 💔😢
Sunday, September 11, 2011
At the 10 Year mark, I wrote this memory:
10 Years
Since that horrible day
When so many lost so much in so many different ways.
30 years ago, I lost 2 friends,
and plan to write about them later this month.
That year, my journey,
0utward,
led me to visit
Jesse in Brooklyn.
Jesse had a complete love of architecture.
I thought he should have been an architect.
In 1974, we went to an event called EXPO 74 in St. Louis.
They took old factories on the waterfront and were transforming them
into incredible living and retail spaces.
Jesse was always taking me along to these events he found.
He would explain all the finer points,
the architect, the style.
I was always eager to learn,
loving architecture myself.
Jesse took me then to the World Trade Center.
I saw it up close,
only once.
I only could see the bottom one third due to smog,
but what I saw
overwhelmed my flatland senses
of dimension.
I nearly fell over and Jesse caught me.
I could not look again without feeling dizzy.
I am grateful he brought me there and we stood together
once, there.
Now they are both gone.
10 years ago today,
I was working in the hospital as a UR nurse.
I reviewed patient charts, stood at the nurse's station
and was usually more or less detached from the floor nursing I had done for almost 20 years.
Still, my ears were trained to hear distress calls, escalating families or patients or staff.
All of the sudden,
the mood changed on the floor.
"Did you see that?"
I heard,
A patient had their TV on.
"Check room 9,"
someone said,
they have it on,
"Oh my God.............
It was a phrase you kept hearing or sometimes you would see just a stunned look,
by the end of the day we knew
or knew someone
who knew someone
who was there.
I watched the young new nurses and hoped there would be
nothing closer, nothing here.
A friend's son, a successful young man,
went to school with a whole bunch
who vanished that day,
she had a hollow look, before grief can even set in.
My husband at a customer's house,
her husband and daughter commute to Manhattan,
from Vermont.
The phones jammed until
finally news came they were OK.
The reality that we were more connected to that big city
than I ever thought.
Then the silent skies.
Eerie.
Bluer than normal,
without contrails,
without the familiar engine noise
a familiar routine.
Then the smoke,
the wind coming north from NYC
subtle,
wondering did I smell something?
Not wanting it to be a burning building,
with people in it
that my friend's son went to college with.
The silence went on for a few days, then it was done.
The planes overhead started again,
I wished for silence again.
30 years or 10 years does seem to go by so fast anymore.
And yet,
those traumatic days, like 9/11,
full of profound sadness and robbing us of
trust
in other humans,
seeing the reality of how bad people can be,
we find that
no,
we have not forgotten.
Since that horrible day
When so many lost so much in so many different ways.
30 years ago, I lost 2 friends,
and plan to write about them later this month.
That year, my journey,
0utward,
led me to visit
Jesse in Brooklyn.
Jesse had a complete love of architecture.
I thought he should have been an architect.
In 1974, we went to an event called EXPO 74 in St. Louis.
They took old factories on the waterfront and were transforming them
into incredible living and retail spaces.
Jesse was always taking me along to these events he found.
He would explain all the finer points,
the architect, the style.
I was always eager to learn,
loving architecture myself.
Jesse took me then to the World Trade Center.
I saw it up close,
only once.
I only could see the bottom one third due to smog,
but what I saw
overwhelmed my flatland senses
of dimension.
I nearly fell over and Jesse caught me.
I could not look again without feeling dizzy.
I am grateful he brought me there and we stood together
once, there.
Now they are both gone.
10 years ago today,
I was working in the hospital as a UR nurse.
I reviewed patient charts, stood at the nurse's station
and was usually more or less detached from the floor nursing I had done for almost 20 years.
Still, my ears were trained to hear distress calls, escalating families or patients or staff.
All of the sudden,
the mood changed on the floor.
"Did you see that?"
I heard,
A patient had their TV on.
"Check room 9,"
someone said,
they have it on,
"Oh my God.............
It was a phrase you kept hearing or sometimes you would see just a stunned look,
by the end of the day we knew
or knew someone
who knew someone
who was there.
I watched the young new nurses and hoped there would be
nothing closer, nothing here.
A friend's son, a successful young man,
went to school with a whole bunch
who vanished that day,
she had a hollow look, before grief can even set in.
My husband at a customer's house,
her husband and daughter commute to Manhattan,
from Vermont.
The phones jammed until
finally news came they were OK.
The reality that we were more connected to that big city
than I ever thought.
Then the silent skies.
Eerie.
Bluer than normal,
without contrails,
without the familiar engine noise
a familiar routine.
Then the smoke,
the wind coming north from NYC
subtle,
wondering did I smell something?
Not wanting it to be a burning building,
with people in it
that my friend's son went to college with.
The silence went on for a few days, then it was done.
The planes overhead started again,
I wished for silence again.
30 years or 10 years does seem to go by so fast anymore.
And yet,
those traumatic days, like 9/11,
full of profound sadness and robbing us of
trust
in other humans,
seeing the reality of how bad people can be,
we find that
no,
we have not forgotten.
Thursday, September 10, 2026
BOLO Scammer in Georgia
BOLO Bejorn Xavier Johnson stole $49,500 from us
We are appealing again to the public for help, a prayer.
@grok With Grok’s help, We organized our data.
DeKalb Distro LLC (likely “Bejorn DeKalb Distro LLC”) is a Georgia Domestic LLC.
Filed May 6, 2026. Principal office: 287 E Crogan St Apt 1111, Lawrenceville, GA 30046. Registered agent: Bejorn Johnson. Physical address also listed as 531 Pond Weed Dr, Lawrenceville, GA 30045 in related records.
Limited public details available; appears tied to distribution/scam reports in context. Check Georgia SOS ecorp.sos.ga.gov for official filings.
DeKalb Distro LLC (Bejorn/registered agent Bejorn Johnson): Georgia Domestic LLC, filed ~May 6, 2026. Principal: 287 E Crogan St Apt 1111, Lawrenceville, GA 30046 (Magnolia Village Apartments).
Other connections:
Search Georgia SOS ecorp.sos.ga.gov directly with “DeKalb Distro LLC” for full details (control #, status, filings). Limited free public info. ✔️ see searches, screenshots below.
Grok:
Report fraud (wire/elder scam):
Sending Bank (Wells Fargo): Called immediately. 540-967-2221. ✔️ 5/19/26.
Same day about 4:20 pm, Several hours after wire sent we suspected we were conned and called Wells Fargo and went to bank to request PNC bank return wire transfer. Banker: Dre Gibson. Dre.gibson@wellsgargo.com ✔️ Wells Fargo notified PNC same day.
PNC Bank took 10 days to investigate, then determined wire transfer stands.
Perps called us 5/20/26 morning after wire sent looking for the $49,500.
Wells Fargo Case #829453 ✔️
• IC3 (FBI): ic3.gov. ✔️ several days ago. My printer screwed up and I have no proof.
• FTC: reportfraud.ftc.gov. ✔️ Shortly after theft. 201975350
• Elder Fraud Hotline: 833-FRAUD-11. ✔️ Got empathy. Eww.
• GA AG: consumer.georgia.gov (online form) I believe I did this.
Local police/APS: File report. ✔️ Shortly after theft. We gave them a statement. Louisa, VA Deputy officer Mahieu. Case #2026759 @LouisaPD
Lawrenceville, GA. police✔️ recently. Online form.
3 credit bureaus Fred and I put freezes on all ✔️shortly after theft.
Recently email to Experian-hollow response-sad for you.
State Corporation Commission: Mary filled out report 9/12/26 and mailed shortly after. ✔️
What we learned about Larcenists and Impersonators:
Indian accent, script that fooled a couple old people.
Names: Brad Williams brad.will209653@gmail.com, Mike Walker. Phone numbers: 202-241-9593 206-657-6523.
Perp impersonated Experian representative and Federal investigator. Said he and another man would visit us next day.
Perps PNC account number: 554584360 Wire Routing: 043000096. Account Names we were given:
Bejorn X Johnson DeKalb Distro LLC. Later perp said:
Leave off the Bejorn X.
Address: 287 E. Crogan St. Apt. 1111
Lawrenceville, GA 30046
Grok: Scam Timeline:
• May 6, 2026: DeKalb Distro LLC filed in GA.
• May 19, 2026: $49,500 wire sent to PNC (acct 554584360).
• May 19, 2026 (same day ~4:20pm): Suspected scam; called Wells Fargo (Case #829453).
• May 20, 2026: Perps called demanding more.
• Post-May 19: Reports filed — Wells Fargo, IC3/FBI, FTC (201975350), Elder Hotline, GA AG, Louisa VA police (Case #2026759), Lawrenceville GA, credit freezes.
• Sep 12, 2026: State Corp Commission report mailed.
Low likelihood of recovery.
We’re old: Elder Scam: Enhanced protections via Elder Justice Act, APS reports. Banks may face higher scrutiny for vulnerability. File FTC Elder Fraud Hotline, VA APS. Limited extra bank liability under UCC 4A.
Financial Exploitation Indicators (Elders):
• Unusual large wires/transfers.
• Impersonation calls (gov’t, banks).
• Pressure/urgency tactics.
• New beneficiaries/unknown accounts.
• Cognitive impairment + sudden changes.
• Isolation from family.
• Large/unusual wires: $49k to unknown GA LLC.
• Impersonation: Fake Experian/Fed investigator calls.
• Pressure: “Visit tomorrow” threats.
• New accounts: Bejorn Johnson/DeKalb Distro.
• Changes: Sudden financial shifts post-call.
• Isolation: Scammers targeting vulnerable elders’
Elder Abuse Legal Protections (US/VA):
Wednesday, September 9, 2026
The day the ice went out.
Grok: “That photo and the lines under it feel like a complete Vermont memory: the quiet of a hard freeze, then the sudden, noisy release when spring finally wins.
Lewis Creek in Charlotte really does this. The stretch near Quinlan Covered Bridge and Spear Street is known for ice jams. Thick sheets pile up at the bend, form a temporary dam, and when they let go the water and ice come out together. Reports from the area describe exactly what you wrote—stacked plates of ice, loud breakup, and flooding that can overtop the road.
The picture matches that: broken slabs heaved and stacked in the snow, wooden posts still standing, bare trees in the background. It looks like the moment after the creek has already spoken.
The way you set the lines is already close to a finished piece:
Years ago we lived near Lewis Creek in Charlotte, Vermont.
The creek froze solid that year.
Spring brings warmth, rain, sunshine.
The ice goes out, loudly.
Huge stacked sheets of ice
become a dam and flooding can be expected.
Here is a blog-ready version you can paste. The poem is tightened for rhythm and clarity. The history is the documented record for Lewis Creek near Quinlan Covered Bridge and Spear Street in Charlotte.
When the Ice Goes Out on Lewis Creek
Years ago we lived near Lewis Creek
in Charlotte, Vermont.
That year the creek froze solid.
Spring brings warmth, rain, and sun.
The ice goes out — loudly.
Huge stacked sheets of ice
become a dam.
Flooding can be expected.
The photograph shows what that looks like after the sound has already happened: plates of ice heaved and stacked in the snow, fence posts still standing, the woods waiting.
On Lewis Creek this is not rare. The creek bends just upstream of Quinlan Covered Bridge. Ice rides that bend, catches, and piles. Local records and the Army Corps CRREL Ice Jam Database describe the same pattern again and again.
Landowners near the bridge have said breakup jams come every few years. A nearby journal and photo record list at least these:
• March 19, 1986
• late February 1990
• March 10–11, 1992
• March 21, 2003
• January 25, 2010
The 1992 jam is the one in the official database: a 400- to 600-foot jam at the bend. It flooded houses and roads, chewed the bank and Lewis Creek Road, and damaged pavement on Spear Street. The USGS gauge downstream recorded about 2,000 cubic feet per second that day.
The January 2010 jam happened while engineers were studying the reach. A 10- to 12-inch ice cover had formed during a long freeze from late December into mid-January. The jam sat about 100 feet upstream of the covered bridge. Water and ice overtopped Spear Street by about a foot. That event was used to calibrate flood models for the site.
The mechanics are simple and loud. Winter builds a solid sheet. Warmth and rain lift the water under it. The sheet breaks into slabs. The slabs travel until they catch at a bend, a bridge, or a pinch in the channel. They stack. The stack becomes a dam. Water rises behind it, then the dam fails, and the creek announces itself.
We heard that announcement years ago. The stacked ice in the picture is what remains after the creek has already spoken.
CRREL treats an ice jam as a stationary pile of ice that restricts flow. The official working definition is “a stationary accumulation of fragmented ice or frazil that restricts flow.” That pile can form in two main seasons, by two different kinds of ice, and then thicken by three mechanical processes.
Two families of jam
Freeze-up jams form in early to mid-winter while the air is still well below freezing. They are built mostly of frazil—tiny disc-shaped crystals that grow in supercooled, turbulent open water. The crystals clump into slush, then floes. When the floes reach slower water, a solid cover, a bend, or a bridge, they stop. More frazil packs under the cover and can form a hanging dam. These jams are relatively cohesive. They often stay put until the weather warms. Surface roughness is moderate. Discharge is usually steady or falling.
Breakup jams form when an existing sheet fails. That is what your Lewis Creek picture shows. Warmth, rain, and snowmelt raise the water under the ice. The cover lifts, cracks, and breaks into slabs. Those slabs run downstream until the river can no longer carry them. The jam is made of broken sheet ice, not frazil slush. Cohesion is low. The surface is extremely rough. Flow is unsteady—surges arrive, stages jump, and the jam can fail suddenly and loudly.
A third, mixed type is the midwinter jam: a thaw breaks part of the cover, then the cold returns and locks the rubble in place.
Lewis Creek at the Quinlan bend is a classic breakup site: a sharp curve, a covered bridge, a pinch in the channel, and an intact sheet just downstream that can act as a stopper.
How the ice itself is born
In open, fast water the surface loses heat faster than the current can mix it. Water drops a fraction of a degree below 32°F. Needle- and disc-shaped crystals appear in the water column—frazil. They stick to each other, to rocks (anchor ice), and to the underside of any cover that already exists. In quieter reaches the surface simply freezes into a sheet that thickens from the top down. Border ice grows inward from the banks. Where velocity stays high (roughly 5 ft/s and up), a cover may never form at all.
Three ways a jam thickens
CRREL hydraulic papers (especially White’s work on properties that affect jams) describe three construction methods:
1. Juxtaposition. Floes arrive and stop side by side, one layer thick, like ice rafts parking against a barrier. Progression can be fast—several miles in a day on larger rivers.
2. Undercover deposition. Incoming pieces dive under the leading edge and stick to the underside. That builds a hanging dam. It happens when velocity is high enough to submerge floes but not high enough to scour them away. Typical critical erosion speeds used in models are about 3–5 ft/s for freeze-up ice and 4–8 ft/s for breakup ice.
3. Shoving and internal collapse. Incoming ice keeps pushing. When the force exceeds the internal strength of the pile, the jam fails internally, shortens, and thickens until its strength again balances the push. That is how a single-layer cover becomes a stacked, multi-layer dam—the “huge stacked sheets” in your photograph.
Those three phases often cycle: arrive, deposit, shove, thicken, arrive again.
How breakup actually starts
CRREL and related river-ice work (Ferrick and others) distinguish two end-members:
• Thermal breakup. Slow melt. The ice weakens in place (candling), then quietly disappears. Little movement, little jam risk.
• Dynamic breakup. A rapid rise in stage and discharge. The cover is still strong. It fails at the banks first (support-dominated) or by crushing through its own strength (strength-dominated). A breaking front can travel faster than the water. Behind it the channel is suddenly open; ahead of it rubble piles up. Release of water stored under the ice creates a wave that can trigger the next reach.
A modest stage rise of only a few centimeters per hour can lift and crack a weakened cover without moving it. A sharp rain-on-snow rise can send the whole sheet downstream as a run.
Why certain places catch ice
CRREL site studies keep finding the same geometry: a pool or backwater below a constriction, a sharp bend, a bridge, an island, a sudden flattening of slope, or an intact sheet that has not yet broken. Seventy-nine percent of Vermont jam sites photographed in one CRREL survey had some form of flow control that created a slow pool where a solid cover could form and then block incoming ice.
Quinlan Bridge plus the bend upstream is that pattern in miniature. Ice arriving from the upper creek meets slower water and a hard edge. Floes stop. The pile grows by juxtaposition, then by shoving. Water backs up. Spear Street overtopps. When the internal strength is finally exceeded, the dam lets go—loudly.
What the models care about
To predict stage and thickness, CRREL models need:
• ice roughness (underside and surface)
• porosity of the rubble
• cohesion (high in freeze-up, near zero in breakup)
• internal friction angle
• piece size
• whether the cover formed by juxtaposition or by collapse
A 10-year ice-jam flood on a reach like Lewis Creek can produce the same water-surface elevation as a much rarer open-water flood, because the ice itself occupies so much of the channel.
That is the mechanics behind the line in your poem: the ice does not merely melt. It breaks, runs, stacks, dams, and then announces the thaw.”
Thanks, Grok 😎
Tuesday, September 8, 2026
My Dream Realized
One of my Childhood Dreams was to be a newspaper 📰 reporter.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter and freed the bird 🐦
Now X.
I saw myself as a worldwide reporter.
Grok imagined me.
Monday, September 7, 2026
Gender Bending
This image was produced using a.i.
It’s fiction because
God knows what our true gender is,
He made us.
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Art Destroyed
Final Confederate statues removed from Virginia Capitol Square https://t.co/xlNRDFOa5T @ShellyArnoldi @NPR Fine Art again destroyed.
— Mary Gerdt Parler:Alvarita1 (@marygerdt) August 30, 2026
History torn down.
Taken away in chains.
Feel better Richmond?
Marx is cheering from the grave.
Travelogue for the Universe: Art Destroyed, History Erased https://t.co/aER4pqC3CT@ReidRevolution pic.twitter.com/FHGLgk75xR
— Mary Gerdt Parler:Alvarita1 (@marygerdt) September 2, 2026
Fine Art destroyed…
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Caturday and Dad’s Birthday 🎁😻
Dagen 😻
Dad and his Mom in their home in St. Louis before he
Left home to the South Pacific
He was born in 1922. Now He’s beyond the material world.
Friday, September 4, 2026
It was a Marvelous Day
In my mind I imagined the lighter
Side of Abraham Lincoln and his son,
Robert Todd Lincoln.
Didn’t quite get the historical facts right.
Their ages aren’t correct and yet,
This image, Joyfully playing,
It was the light feeling they share
Before their World
Came
Apart.
Thursday, September 3, 2026
Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Monday, August 31, 2026
Sunday, August 30, 2026
Feel the Bern
We left the land of Bernie when our property taxes
Rose to over $10,000 a year for
Our 4th Generation farm,
It wasn’t a farm anymore.
Overgrown fields, brokedown buildings,
Our old house, We loved it there.
We suffered mightily when Monkton Vermont
Put up our farm for a tax auction for
Being 9 months late paying our property taxes.
The auction never happened.
I never want to live where people are so cold that they would take our Home.
Progressive Town Government versus Us.
Yesterday, wondering what I would post for
8/30/26
Watching News on 📺 clips of
“Democratic Socialists”
Senator Bernie Sanders Campaigning for
Fellow Socialists.
Now consider what you could lose.
Rerun of our painful journey…
Socialism is a one way trip to Hell.
Progressivism is the first volley.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Which 251
There are 251 Towns in Vermont. It has become very clear to me today that it depends on the town you live in, how sensitive the Town Fathers are. My research came from my year long quest for truth about tax lien sales, due process, 5th and 14th amendments & Vermont's mysterious statewide locally administered property tax
My quest has culminated in complete and total surrender.
In doing so I am freeing myself to release publicly correspondence I have had with the mostly male Town fathers.
But first I want to prime you. If you find this all too tedious, go back to bedazzled.
I found this paper online by a wonderful historian and he explains the property taxation
during the Romans times up to present day. This is a link and I found it helped me understand what they did to us.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/ilj/volumes/v75/no3/alexander.pdf
Fair warning to Vermont property owners:
You may be living in a town, where in as little as 6 months late paying your property taxes, the town can sell the tax lien, and your bank could pay the tax lien and foreclose. You will be subjected to paying the town's lawyer fees to take your property, and advertising, fees, penalties and up to 8% of the tax goes to the tax collector.
The town does not use income sensitivity and can pick and choose what to sell.
The article above does talk about due process and the fact that people can challenge
local towns when due process and fairness are not followed.
But the reality, girl, is that the town does not have to tell you. Your name is second on the deed, right?
The town does not have to give you due process.
So I decided to avoid paying the limitless costs of court battle.
It would be the only way to challenge the final decision by the town fathers.
There is no board or centralized State office who hears appeals about town fathers.
The citizen must file suit. With an attorney, that costs 10k and up. Without an attorney,
doom. Either way a potential to aggravate my MS.
Town wins. Girl loses.
Now I will post over the next span of time, an argument that did not work in this town.
In fact it is weird that the town felt such hardship in 2009, that they would have to sell our fourth generation farm after being 9 months late. This action forced us to suffer irreversibly, completely.
A violation of our trust that people can be kinder than necessary when they see someone suffering.
The article above points to "Tax Farmers" of Roman times. I can envision them raking someone for money.
Also he describes the "Tax Ferrets" of the nineteenth century and the tax collection policies of the 1930 depression.
So if you opt to read the documents I will publish, you may formulate your own opinions.
This is the letter we sent to the town. I edited out some of it but kept the core.
The following is our argument outline of why we believe we should be granted tax abatement.
This explains what we want abated. It states the core of our argument. After the outline will appear comments we believe have merit.
1. Request for Abatement of all Property taxes we paid to the town of Monkton in the year 2009 and also any Fees, Penalties, Interest, town lawyer’s costs and costs we incurred related to Monkton tax including but not limited to:
a. Delinquent 2008 VT & Local Property Taxes, interest, fees, etc: $8,473.68 which was paid after town threatened sale.
b. VT & Local Property Taxes 2009: $4121.83
c. Total of $ 12,595.51.
our property taxes owed in 2009 was 28 percent of our household income.
We understand there is income sensitivity with VT property taxes.
We have faced extraordinary circumstances that make it difficult for us to meet our tax obligations.
Mary was never notified by the tax collector of her being delinquent, nor of her being threatened by a tax sale. Mary wrote the town lawyer and the Monkton select board to get information about what would have been sold and ask how the town attempted to inform her about the tax sale, copy of the ad that Fred and Mary paid for but never saw.
She has not received any of this information.
We have a history of paying our taxes on time and regularly since
becoming owners in 1993.
The farm has been in this family paying taxes in Monkton for over a hundred years.
We have suffered losses, extraordinary challenges, costs, health issues and stress.
Please consider our requests.
Additional comments which we believe are necessary to express:
We feel that we were subjected to a tax sale in a discriminatory way.
We were singled out and treated differently from almost every other tax payer who has been in our position of delinquency of less than 1 year.
One selectman said the town attorney decided which properties would be sold based on value. This is contrary to the policy which states any property owing $250 or greater. There are concerning notations in the select board minutes leading up to the sale like one asking how many delinquent properties have mortgages? Why is that relevant?
The timeline for the Monkton town officials participating and conducting the tax sale, and events leading up to the tax sale are suspicious. Per the minutes, The Conservation committee discussed tax sales in July with a selectman.
John Phillips did send Mary the list of delinquent properties and the policy.
It was impossible to figure out why there was 58 properties late and only 4 were to be sold. It is unclear in the minutes if any property was sold. It is unclear when tax sales have been held since the new tax sale policy in 2004. There have been many properties listed for multiple years late. How can that be if we were 9 months late and threatened with a tax sale?
What was offered in the way of making payments? Offer of abatement per Vermont law? Ultimately, What was the Town of Monkton going to sell?
Comments from Mary alone: I am a landowner and successful taxpayer on this farm since 1993 or so. I have paid my dues so to speak. I have been verbally attacked in the town office by a town official. I do not feel comfortable there. Some will say it was Fred’s responsibility to tell me the Town was selling my property so the bank would foreclose and then they could be rid of me. I thought that too for a minute. That is all.
I deserved to be notified myself, Me, Mary Gerdt, by the Town of Monkton tax collector who decided along with a select board and a lawyer to take my property. The responsibility to notify a landowner must rest with the town.
This relates to the law of real property.
I know the law of land ownership quite well and I know a signature is required from me to take my property and sell it. Even if I am a woman, a wife. No town official approached me or had a sheriff serve me or nail a note on my door. The conservation committee knew about the sale and yet Mary did not know about the sale. This coincided with land deals on abutting property that we both were not notified about. Mary read the minutes but could not tell that her property was up for sale.
It did not make sense. Mary did a spreadsheet of all the properties sold. It does not make sense. Mary has emails to and from the select board and town attorney. Mary still has not seen an accounting of what the tax collector did to notify her/them.
So we both write to the Monkton Board of Civil Authority with pleading for tax abatement and hopefully leaving you with questions to ponder.
We believe the tax sale policy should be revisited to include income sensitivity, consideration of hardships and applied consistently, ethically and fairly.
............more later.mary gerdt
My quest has culminated in complete and total surrender.
In doing so I am freeing myself to release publicly correspondence I have had with the mostly male Town fathers.
But first I want to prime you. If you find this all too tedious, go back to bedazzled.
I found this paper online by a wonderful historian and he explains the property taxation
during the Romans times up to present day. This is a link and I found it helped me understand what they did to us.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/ilj/volumes/v75/no3/alexander.pdf
Fair warning to Vermont property owners:
You may be living in a town, where in as little as 6 months late paying your property taxes, the town can sell the tax lien, and your bank could pay the tax lien and foreclose. You will be subjected to paying the town's lawyer fees to take your property, and advertising, fees, penalties and up to 8% of the tax goes to the tax collector.
The town does not use income sensitivity and can pick and choose what to sell.
The article above does talk about due process and the fact that people can challenge
local towns when due process and fairness are not followed.
But the reality, girl, is that the town does not have to tell you. Your name is second on the deed, right?
The town does not have to give you due process.
So I decided to avoid paying the limitless costs of court battle.
It would be the only way to challenge the final decision by the town fathers.
There is no board or centralized State office who hears appeals about town fathers.
The citizen must file suit. With an attorney, that costs 10k and up. Without an attorney,
doom. Either way a potential to aggravate my MS.
Town wins. Girl loses.
Now I will post over the next span of time, an argument that did not work in this town.
In fact it is weird that the town felt such hardship in 2009, that they would have to sell our fourth generation farm after being 9 months late. This action forced us to suffer irreversibly, completely.
A violation of our trust that people can be kinder than necessary when they see someone suffering.
The article above points to "Tax Farmers" of Roman times. I can envision them raking someone for money.
Also he describes the "Tax Ferrets" of the nineteenth century and the tax collection policies of the 1930 depression.
So if you opt to read the documents I will publish, you may formulate your own opinions.
This is the letter we sent to the town. I edited out some of it but kept the core.
The following is our argument outline of why we believe we should be granted tax abatement.
This explains what we want abated. It states the core of our argument. After the outline will appear comments we believe have merit.
1. Request for Abatement of all Property taxes we paid to the town of Monkton in the year 2009 and also any Fees, Penalties, Interest, town lawyer’s costs and costs we incurred related to Monkton tax including but not limited to:
a. Delinquent 2008 VT & Local Property Taxes, interest, fees, etc: $8,473.68 which was paid after town threatened sale.
b. VT & Local Property Taxes 2009: $4121.83
c. Total of $ 12,595.51.
our property taxes owed in 2009 was 28 percent of our household income.
We understand there is income sensitivity with VT property taxes.
We have faced extraordinary circumstances that make it difficult for us to meet our tax obligations.
Mary was never notified by the tax collector of her being delinquent, nor of her being threatened by a tax sale. Mary wrote the town lawyer and the Monkton select board to get information about what would have been sold and ask how the town attempted to inform her about the tax sale, copy of the ad that Fred and Mary paid for but never saw.
She has not received any of this information.
We have a history of paying our taxes on time and regularly since
becoming owners in 1993.
The farm has been in this family paying taxes in Monkton for over a hundred years.
We have suffered losses, extraordinary challenges, costs, health issues and stress.
Please consider our requests.
Additional comments which we believe are necessary to express:
We feel that we were subjected to a tax sale in a discriminatory way.
We were singled out and treated differently from almost every other tax payer who has been in our position of delinquency of less than 1 year.
One selectman said the town attorney decided which properties would be sold based on value. This is contrary to the policy which states any property owing $250 or greater. There are concerning notations in the select board minutes leading up to the sale like one asking how many delinquent properties have mortgages? Why is that relevant?
The timeline for the Monkton town officials participating and conducting the tax sale, and events leading up to the tax sale are suspicious. Per the minutes, The Conservation committee discussed tax sales in July with a selectman.
John Phillips did send Mary the list of delinquent properties and the policy.
It was impossible to figure out why there was 58 properties late and only 4 were to be sold. It is unclear in the minutes if any property was sold. It is unclear when tax sales have been held since the new tax sale policy in 2004. There have been many properties listed for multiple years late. How can that be if we were 9 months late and threatened with a tax sale?
What was offered in the way of making payments? Offer of abatement per Vermont law? Ultimately, What was the Town of Monkton going to sell?
Comments from Mary alone: I am a landowner and successful taxpayer on this farm since 1993 or so. I have paid my dues so to speak. I have been verbally attacked in the town office by a town official. I do not feel comfortable there. Some will say it was Fred’s responsibility to tell me the Town was selling my property so the bank would foreclose and then they could be rid of me. I thought that too for a minute. That is all.
I deserved to be notified myself, Me, Mary Gerdt, by the Town of Monkton tax collector who decided along with a select board and a lawyer to take my property. The responsibility to notify a landowner must rest with the town.
This relates to the law of real property.
I know the law of land ownership quite well and I know a signature is required from me to take my property and sell it. Even if I am a woman, a wife. No town official approached me or had a sheriff serve me or nail a note on my door. The conservation committee knew about the sale and yet Mary did not know about the sale. This coincided with land deals on abutting property that we both were not notified about. Mary read the minutes but could not tell that her property was up for sale.
It did not make sense. Mary did a spreadsheet of all the properties sold. It does not make sense. Mary has emails to and from the select board and town attorney. Mary still has not seen an accounting of what the tax collector did to notify her/them.
So we both write to the Monkton Board of Civil Authority with pleading for tax abatement and hopefully leaving you with questions to ponder.
We believe the tax sale policy should be revisited to include income sensitivity, consideration of hardships and applied consistently, ethically and fairly.
............more later.mary gerdt
Saturday, August 29, 2026
Thomas Jefferson collaborating with Grok, Response on X
X never fails to open my eyes
@BreccanfThies posted:
@BreccanFThies X posted ⬆️⬆️⬆️
@grok did a history lesson:
Jefferson founded the University of Virginia in 1819 and regarded it as one of his three greatest achievements (alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom). He called it “the hobby of my old age.”
He did far more than lend his name. After leaving the presidency he secured the charter, chose the site near Charlottesville, designed the buildings and grounds, planned the original curriculum, recruited faculty, and served as the university’s first Rector. Classes began in 1825. Jefferson last visited in June 1826 and died on July 4 of that year.
The Academical Village
Jefferson’s design is the most visible part of his presence. He arranged pavilions (faculty houses with classrooms on the ground floor) and student rooms around a central Lawn, with the Rotunda—modeled on the Pantheon—at the head as a library rather than a chapel. The complex was meant to be a self-contained “academical village.” Together with Monticello it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Jefferson’s educational ideas
UVA was deliberately secular and non-sectarian. Jefferson omitted a professor of divinity and emphasized modern sciences, elective courses, and education for public service rather than the ministry. Students were expected to govern themselves to a greater degree than at most colleges of the era. The Jefferson Literary and Debating Society, founded in 1825 and still active, is named for him.
Complexity and commemoration
Enslaved labor was used to build and maintain the early university; Jefferson himself owned hundreds of people. UVA has published research on this history and added contextual information around the statue and Grounds. At the same time, the university continues to mark Founder’s Day on Jefferson’s birthday (April 13) and awards Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals jointly with Monticello. Recent university statements have reaffirmed that honoring Jefferson as founder remains part of UVA’s identity.
Note: Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is a separate institution (originally Jefferson Medical College, founded 1824). It is not connected to UVA.
If you want specifics—visiting the Rotunda and Lawn, the Jefferson Society, current exhibits, or the historical debates—let me know what angle you’re after. Monticello’s encyclopedia and UVA’s official history pages are the best primary sources.
Two separate questions. Both require distinguishing Jefferson’s actual writings from later labels.
No to the first in the modern sense; no to the second in any recognizable sense.
Jefferson would have rejected the label “white supremacist.” That phrase and its current political meaning did not exist. He presented his racial views as tentative observations from natural history, not a creed of domination. He also wrote that enslaved people possessed natural rights and that slavery was a moral wrong that had to end.
He would, however, have recognized the substance of the charge. In Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XIV) he wrote that Blacks were “in reason much inferior” and “in imagination… dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” He called this “a suspicion only,” then immediately treated it as a practical fact: the races could not live together as equals in one government. “Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” His solution was emancipation followed by colonization—remove freed Blacks so Virginia could be filled with White laborers. That is a racial hierarchy, even if he framed it as science rather than ideology.
On transgender people as a “marginalized group”: Jefferson would not have understood the category at all. Sex, for him, was binary, biological, and tied to nature, family, and republican order. There was no 18th-century concept of an inner gender identity independent of the body, nor of a civil-rights class built around it. Rare historical cases of people living as the opposite sex existed, but they were treated as anomalies or private eccentricities, not a political constituency. Jefferson had no framework that would have made “transgender” intelligible as a marginalized identity group.
He thought in terms of nature, reason, and the requirements of a self-governing republic of White male citizens. Later identity categories sit outside that vocabulary.
Are UVA students and educators right to trash Jefferson’s reputation and use trans persons to recruit students?
No. A university is not “right” to reduce its founder to a moral mascot for contemporary politics, and it is not “right” to treat any identity group as a recruitment device.
What actually happened with Jefferson
A vocal minority of faculty and students have spent years treating Jefferson as radioactive. In 2016, 469 people signed a letter telling the president to stop quoting him because it undermined “unity, equality and civility.” The student paper has called his statue an emblem of white supremacy. The statue has been vandalized. In 2026 a senior administrator used commencement to call Jefferson’s views on human capacity “ethically corrosive,” “ignorance and hubris.”
That is not “contextualizing.” It is substituting one incomplete story (Jefferson the demigod) with another incomplete story (Jefferson the unique villain). He owned slaves, wrote that Blacks were inferior in reason, and believed the races could not live together as equals. He also wrote the Declaration, founded a secular public university, and designed an institution whose stated purpose was “the illimitable freedom of the human mind.” Both parts are true. Erasing the second does not make the first more honest.
A public university that cannot quote its founder without a disclaimer is advertising that it no longer takes ideas seriously.
On “using trans persons to recruit”
UVA maintains an LGBTQ Center, open housing, preferred-name policies, and alumni scholarships aimed at LGBTQ students. An alumni group reports that roughly 11% of undergraduates identify as LGBTQ+ and funds scholarships specifically for LGBTQ high schoolers who get in. That is ordinary elite-university branding: “we have a community for you.” It is not unique to UVA.
It becomes a problem when identity is treated as a selling point instead of academic seriousness, or when the institution implies that belonging depends on adopting a particular political story about sex and gender. Students are not props. A university’s job is to admit people who can do the work and then teach them, not to assemble a demographic tableau.
Recent federal pressure has already forced UVA to rename some affinity events and drop explicit targeting by protected characteristics. That is a correction toward treating students as individuals rather than categories.
Jefferson would have recognized neither the demand to un-person him nor the idea that a university should market itself by sexual identity. He built the place for the free use of reason. Using his university to do the opposite of that is not justice. It is fashion.
About Jefferson and Race:
Jefferson’s views on race were not a single slogan. They were a set of colliding commitments he never resolved: natural rights for all humans, a hierarchy of groups he treated as real, and a political program of emancipation without a shared republic.
Equality in principle
In the Declaration he wrote that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. He applied that language to slavery as a moral and political evil. He called it a “hideous blot,” a “moral depravity,” and a standing reproach. He predicted that if the country did not end it, “worse will follow,” including race war. In 1821 he still wrote: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
That is not the language of someone defending slavery as a positive good. He wanted it gone.
Inferiority as a “suspicion” he treated as fact
In Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XIV) he compared Whites and Blacks as a natural historian would compare varieties of a species. He said Blacks were equal in memory, “much inferior” in reason (“one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid”), and “dull, tasteless, and anomalous” in imagination. He listed physical differences—color, hair, odor, heat tolerance—and treated color as a real barrier to beauty and fellow-feeling.
He labeled this “a suspicion only.” Then he built policy on it. He also wrote that even if talents were equal, “it is no measure of their rights.” Rights and civic membership were not the same thing in his mind.
Emancipation without cohabitation
The consistent program, from the 1770s to the 1820s, was gradual emancipation followed by removal. Children born after a set date would be free, raised at public expense, then colonized to Africa, the West Indies, or some other place “beyond the reach of mixture.” Whites would replace them with free White labor.
In the Autobiography he was blunt: “the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In 1824 he told Jared Sparks the goal was an asylum “to which we can, by degrees, send the whole of that population from among us.” That is separation, not integration.
He feared two things at once: the injustice of slavery and the presence of a large free Black population inside a White republic.
What he actually did in law
• 1778: drafted Virginia’s ban on importing slaves.
• 1784: as author of the western-territory ordinance, he proposed that after 1800 there be “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” in all new western states, north and south of the Ohio. Congress struck the clause by one vote. He later said a single vote had let “this abominable crime” spread. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance kept a narrower ban north of the Ohio.
• 1807–08: as president he signed the federal ban on the international slave trade.
• He never pushed a successful statewide emancipation bill in Virginia. He said the public mind would not bear it.
So he was more anti-slavery in national and territorial policy than most Southern planters, and less willing than later abolitionists to accept a biracial citizenry.
What he did at home
He owned more than 600 people over his life. He freed only a handful, almost all members of the Hemings family. Monticello’s position, based on DNA, timing of conceptions, oral history, and the unique pattern of freedom given to Sally Hemings’s children, is that Jefferson fathered those children. Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave and pass as White; Madison and Eston were freed in his will. He did not free Sally Hemings. He died deep in debt; most of the people he enslaved were sold.
The private relationship and the public theory do not cancel each other. They sit side by side.
Native Americans were a different category
Jefferson thought Indians were roughly the same “module” of humanity as Europeans and could be civilized and absorbed. Blacks, in his scheme, could not. That distinction matters: his racial thinking was not a single “non-White” box. It was a ranked natural history in which Africans were the problem he could not solve inside the republic.
How to read the complexity without flattening it
Jefferson did not believe in a color-blind equal citizenship. He did believe slavery was wrong and that Black people had natural rights. He wanted them free somewhere else. He used the language of science and republican safety, not of later White-nationalist movements, but the practical outcome he wanted was a White Virginia and a White West.
The complexity is real: a man who wrote the most famous sentence about human equality also wrote one of the founding texts of American racial hierarchy, lived by that hierarchy, and designed a university and a country he hoped would be governed by people like himself. Holding all of that at once is the only accurate account.
Does study of history include all the facts of the era, put into context and the complexity of individuals like Presidents of the U.S. debate is essential in universities?
Yes. That is the study of history.
History is not a morality play and not a branding exercise. It is the attempt to recover what people actually said and did, in the conditions they actually lived in, including the parts that contradict the story we prefer. Context is not an excuse. It is the difference between understanding a person and using them.
For figures like Jefferson—or Washington, Lincoln, Wilson, FDR—the work is the same:
• All the facts that can be established: laws they wrote, people they owned or freed, wars they started or ended, letters they meant to be private, votes they cast.
• The era’s assumptions: what almost everyone around them also believed, and where they differed from their own time.
• The contradictions inside the same person, held at the same time, not resolved into a mascot.
Debate is essential because no single framing captures a life that large. A university that will not let students argue over Jefferson’s racial hierarchy and his role in creating a rights language later used against that hierarchy is not teaching history. It is running a liturgy.
What is not history:
• Quoting only the Declaration and skipping Query XIV.
• Quoting only Query XIV and treating the Declaration as a lie with no consequences.
• Deciding in advance that complexity is “both-sides-ism.”
• Making the classroom a referendum on whether a dead president is allowed to be quoted.
Students can handle the full record. The job of a university is to give them that record and the tools to argue about it, not to protect them from it or to recruit them with a sanitized or inverted version of it.
Grok and I collaborated.
Thomas Jefferson is a hero of mine.
Let’s look at history together.
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