Posted on 07/17/2021 9:13:33 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Why did so many Americans receive strange packages they didn’t think they’d ordered?
Sid miller, the Texas agriculture commissioner, sat atop his stallion Smokey and faced the camera. It was Saturday, August 1, 2020. Miller had a message to share.
“Good morning, patriots,” Miller began, raising the coiled lasso in his right hand by way of greeting. “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of all these surprises coming out of China. First it was the Chinese virus, then we had the murder hornets, then we had to close the embassy in Houston because of espionage … Now we’ve got all these mystery seeds coming in in the mail.”
It was the seeds that Miller wanted to speak about. By then, news of the seeds had been circulating for several days. Packets were turning up at homes across the United States; residents of every state would eventually report receiving them. Their address labels and Customs declarations indicated that they had been sent from China. The contents were usually described as an item of jewelry—something like “rose stud earrings”—but inside would be a small packet of unidentified seeds. There was no evident reason why particular people were receiving particular seeds, or why people were receiving seeds at all.
Miller advised anyone who received one of these packages to handle it with extreme care. “Treat them like they’re radioactive,” he said. As Smokey flicked his tail, the commissioner laid out what he considered to be the worst-case scenario: “My greatest fear is that someone will open these packages up—open these seeds up—and be infected with a new virus of some kind.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
She didn’t follow the advice (which directly contradicted the agency’s public statements asking people to mail the seeds to state labs). “I have pets!” she told me. “For all I know, it’s going to be some eight-foot-tall Venus flytrap in my house. I’m going to come home from the grocery store and find my cats and my dogs all missing.”
I’m with her on this.
You want Triffids?
Because this is how you get Triffids.
;)
I tried to read it. I don’t mind The Atlantic in general, they sometimes do have compelling stories. This one is just too long and too much detail to get through - it’s like 8 paragraphs just to explain what he is going to write about. So I scanned and scrolled and scanned and couldn’t find “the answer to the mystery seeds”.
Agreed, kudos to the author for putting in the time and legwork to research - that is missing in most journalism these days... but get to the point faster next time please. Put the extraneous details in an appendix or something.
Chinese watermelon?
What a wordy screed bout nuthin.
The Atlantic is for stuffed shirt libs, they talk about this at cocktail party’s.
Too funny.
.
“many people tried to grow them”
I think the whole thing was an expirement to test how stupid people can be.
(Curiousity killed the cat.)
I would like to have whatever dumbbass who introduced wedelia to this country tried and shot.
i dont really want to go to the atlantic site- what’s the main gist? The seeds were carriers of the virus too? They started arriving not long before the virus did?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The article works to portray suspicions about the seeds as irrational and bolsters opinions of a scam called ‘brushing’ and ‘people forgot they ordered them’; both reasons I find inferior.
Too many for it to be mass forgetting-I-ordered-them. I think people receiving a packet labeled ‘earrings’ which they did not order, arriving from China, and containing seeds were prudent not to trust them. China seeks to damage us in ways both large and small.
"Where's Granny?"
Regards,
I am thinking the “Invasion of the Pod People.” LOL!
Monsanto manufactures Round UP.....
This was a secret plan by China to get people to stock up on Round Up in the event their seeds turned out to be something evil.......
That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.......
It was just a ‘brushing scam’ where people receive unsolicited worthless items from a seller who then posts false customer reviews for a different expensive item to boost sales for it. The scam reviews then appeared to be light. I know a friend in Atlanta that received several of these mystery packages, all worthless junk. The whole scam thing didn’t reach the media until the seeds were sent and everyone thought that was scary.
The consensus is that brushing explains the seeds, but the writer of the article researched it pretty thoroughly and disagrees. He thinks what really happened is people ordered the seeds via Amazon and then forgot about their order and were surprised when the seeds arrived.
That sounds far fetched but guess what—when he contacted several people who reported receiving mystery seeds and had them pull up their Amazon purchase history, all of them had indeed placed an order and forgotten about it. In fact, one of the people was the gardener lady in England who got the ball rolling on the whole seed thing when she posted about it to her online gardening group. She too had forgotten about her order.
The writer is now hoping that more mystery seed recipients will see his article and contact him so he can have a bigger sample to test his theory. Maybe he’ll do a follow-up with the results.
I ordered a plastic item from China, it smelled so awful I couldn’t bring it in the house.
“Can you synthesize it?”
I don’t think that word means what you think it means. :-)
I traded a cow for some magic beans on ebay a while back.
You are reading this so long that you cease to care what it actually was all about. Honestly, I’m no longer curious.
welll, then what happened??? You just can’t stop in the middle of a long sto.........
Honestly, I’m no longer curious
....reinforces FR Rule....don’t read the article.
I scanned the article and read the comments here. Meh. Ordered seeds and forgot? I’m doubtful of that but whatever.
I have kept one article from the atlantic over the many years. It was about Sir Thomas Gold and the Abiogenic Origins of Hydrocarbons from back in the late 70s or early 80s.
Most articles in the atlantic are ponderous and excssively wordy. It is their style but it got us talking about it.
The wierd thing though, I beleive, if I remember 4ight, was that the people didn’t order them and weren’t charged for them, so their argument that people just forgot they ordered them doesn’t fly.
I don’t remember seeing that the folks were charged.
If there was something nefarious about the seeds, it was a brazen assault in broad daylight so to speak
I really haven’t had any problem with the items themselves (tens of items over the past few years). Been lucky, I guess. Also sort of made friends with a lady who works in international sales over there (she’s probably spying on me😳🤔).
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