Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Monsanto has been ordered by a court to pay a man $289 million because one of their products, Roundup weed killer, gave him cancer.  Now, admittedly, the man used a whole lot of Roundup.  He was a gardener for the school district in Solano, California.  He used that stuff all the time and drove around with a tank of it on the back of his truck.
Still, his situation is not unique – probably lots of other gardeners use Roundup in huge amounts and have contracted cancer – so the payouts, if everybody pursues legal recourse, could bankrupt the company.  Hard to say.  It is now Bayer-Monsanto, and they are a bloody huge corporation.
There are two aspects to this case that disturb me greatly.
A) Roundup is still legal.  It goes into the soil, it stays in the soil, and it causes cancer, but it’s still legal.

and B) Monsanto has known this shit was dangerous since 1983.  We have no idea how many lives have been seriously foreshortened between then and now, and the executives at Monsanto don’t care.

I’m sure there are those who would defend its continued legality due to the fact that it actually does kill weeds.  I can see the agricultural need for that, I suppose, although there must be less carcinogenic alternatives.  But in an urban setting, i.e. the lawn around the schoolhouse, chemical weed killers are completely unnecessary.  We can learn to live with a few weeds.  So, our lawns will  look a bit less pristine.  The planet will  be healthier.  If you have a big house, and you want to keep your big, green lawn, then you can always hire somebody to pull the weeds.  This may cost a bit more than chemical weed-killers, but that’s what’s known as trickle down economics.  You pay people to do stuff.
As to its having been known since 1983, well, that is not at all a unique story in the corporate world.  The oil companies have known about man-made global warming since 1959.  Tobacco companies knew that cigarettes caused cancer long before the general public did, but they kept selling them, and kept promoting them.
IMHO, any executive who has this kind of knowledge and fails to make it public is guilty of murder, and should be tried as such.  In other words, it should be illegal NOT to be a whistle blower.
Because killing people is very bad, and ‘it  was just a job’ is not a good enough  excuse.

Politics is complicated and one of the most awkward things in arguing about it is when two people (or entities) who you are opposed to start arguing with each other.  That’s happened several times with Trump, of course, because he eventually winds up arguing with almost everybody.  I’m not about to sing the Koch brothers’ praises just because they’ve turned on Trump, and I’m certainly not going to rush out and buy Omarosa’s book just because she heard Trump say that word, the one that’s an acronym of ginger.  First, it’s not surprising, we know perfectly well he is a racist.   His father was in the Klan, for goodness sake.

His campaign, and his administration, have been racist from the get go.  And she was perfectly happy with it for a long time.  She can’t just come forward and claim to be a champion of the  black race now.  Rachel Dolezal is far blacker than she is, in the way that counts.

Then, there is the whole ‘lying press’ and ‘the press is the enemy of the people’ thing.  Coming from anybody else at all, I’d agree entirely.  They have been spreading lies for a long time.  It was in 1897 that William Randolph Hearst wrote to one of his reporters in Cuba “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”  And he did.  The press helped to lie us into Viet Nam, they sold us the war in Iraq based on complete lies that they knew were lies, and they helped to elect Donald Trump.  So, I’m not too sympathetic with the press.

Over the last couple of days, there’s been a lot of talk about how a hundred  newspapers are writing editorials defending newspapers,  and the role of journalism, from Trump’s unprecedented attacks.  That is not  a terribly surprising, or noble, thing to do.  Newspapers writing editorials saying newspapers are great.  What a surprise.
When they start reporting on the war in Yemen, they might regain a bit of their credibility.  When they start defending Julian Assange, they might regain a bit of their credibility.  But, just saying “We’re not liars” is not nearly enough.  Every liar says that.  Even Trump says that.

Space Force.  The whole thing bothers me for a number of reasons, but there was one specific one that I though of the other day which is a real problem.

First of all, it strikes me as very strange that a bunch of people, and a whole political party, who have never been enthusiastic about funding NASA and proper space research – honestly, we could have had a colony on Mars now for a decade already if we hadn’t been so focused on wars over every patch of land with oil under it – are suddenly rabid space enthusiasts.  I’ll bet half of them never even watched Star Trek.  Battlestar Galactica, or Star Gate maybe, but Trek is way too fancy pants intellectual.
Then, it’s the whole idea of bringing the whole idea of violence and nationalism and war into an arena where it never was before and never should be.  Up till now, space has been more nationally neutral and sportsmanlike than the Olympic Games.  Astronauts from many nations share the space station and the scientists all share their data.  The idea of national competition in space is not only a step in the wrong direction, it’s downright dangerous.
But, after Mike Pence’s speech, and realizing that they are absolutely serious, I realized, with a bit of a start, what the big problem is: just like with the Wall, these people can’t tell the difference between a metaphor, a nice slogan, and reality.  I mean, they could just re-name NASA ‘Space Force’ and it wouldn’t cost a damn thing, except for replacing a few signs.  They could add a few more National Guardsmen at the border, say “These brave men are our wall” and be done with it, but they want a real concrete and barbed wire wall, across mountains and canyons and running right down the middle of rivers.  This would inconvenience Mexico a bit, but it would be seriously damaging to the U.S. (I’m only partly talking about trade and labor.  Mostly about image, long term historical  image.)
Space Force, though, could piss off every other nation that’s currently in space or intends to be.  And that is far more than the U.S. is prepared to deal with.

The original plan was for me and Sam to take the bus up to the cottage today and then come back tomorrow but Sam informed me this morning that he had to work tomorrow so  I called Helena and she said ‘well, I  guess we’re coming home tonight then,’ so I unpacked my computer, which  is why I’m typing this now on  her computer which has a weird habit of suddenly moving the cursor back to the beginning of whatever I’m writing every time I try to  capitalize something, so I’m going to try and do that as little as possible.

Anyway, we got to Turnov and Helena picked us up  there but on  the way to the cottage  she decided to stop at a pharmacy to get some cream because  Sam’s got this outbreak  on his  face which I just assumed was a bad case of acne but the lady at the counter said you need to take him to  a doctor and get something prescribed so we did and the doctor prescribed something and told him not to go into work tomorrow or for the next week  and football camp is out too, so Helena said ‘well, it looks like we can stay overnight after all,’ which allowed for  her original plan, which was to drive into  Semily, which compared to Kotelsko is like Metropolis, they’ve got a movie theater and all, and see  Mama Mia, the completely superfluous sequel.
Isabel, and our niece Natalie came along, and I think they enjoyed it pretty well, as did Helena, and, despite my reservations about  why the movie was made in the first place, I  liked it O.K. in the end.
Like the first one it had just about  the right mixture of shmaltzy plot, jokes based on stereotypes, beautiful scenery, and music to keep  you entertained for an  hour and a half.
The fact that it was filmed on Vis, the island we just visited, was also interesting but, really, it could  have  been  anywhere.  Well, not quite anywhere, but you know what I mean.

I saw a thing the other day, and I’m not going to try to find the link.  You can just take my word for it that this exists, that this is happening, or not.  If it isn’t a thing, it should be.  It was out of China, which is no surprise, because China is cutting edge in so many things lately, and energy production is high on the list.  The Japanese are winning in the robotics and AI fields, but China is absolutely kicking butt in infrastructure.

They are manufacturing (or at least they have conceptualized, which is step 1) solar panels which also produce energy while it’s raining.  Kinetic energy.  The romantic pitter-patter of rain on an old tin roof may be replaced by rain, almost silently, recharging your house.  See, they’re still solar panels because they could be anything, really.    If you put some tiles over a series of springs attached by wires to a generator, and you’re going ot get the same.
Like regular solar panels (which they are, except for some fancy high tech stuff in the center, the cream in  the middle of the bonbon), they could be put up damned near anywhere.  In hot climates, the area of the Earth which is soon to be uninhabitable, places like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Cairo, Istanbul and Bangkok, these could be built over every parking lot.  In the future, when cars are illegal, those spaces would then become viable multi-use structures because all you need, really, is a floor and a ceiling.  In a hot enough climate, walls are totally superfluous.