Yes, politicians adopt policies to please their wealthy donors. That's my point. I think it's bad.
I had a serious poison ivy infestation right up against my house in a garden bed, and all along the south wall of an outbuilding -- places that the lawn mower can't get to, basically. I'm very sensitive to it so I didn't want to try manual extirpation (see, I have a big vocabulary), so I broke down and bought an herbicidal preparation containing glyphosate (not wanting to mention the brand name). Yeah, it's not my usual choice but it was a difficult situation.
Well, I sprayed it three times. It started to look a little bit unhappy, but it didn't die, and it recovered. In other words, the Toxicodendron radicans that appeared in the middle of a 20 acre property on which no pesticide of any kind has ever been applied throughout history (the property was woodland when I bought it and hadn't been cultivated for more than a century), which in turn is surrounded by state forest, is highly resistant to glyphosate.
There are cornfields in the area that use the glyphosate/resistant seed system. One was less than a mile away but it's been converted to goat pasture. Another is still in use and it's maybe a mile away. The plant is spread by birds that eat the berries and then shit out the seeds so it's not hard to explain how the plants got here. The lesson should be obvious. Whatever poisons we come up with, the targets evolve. That goes for insecticides, herbicides, and antibiotics. To the extent our food supply and our health depend on them, we're getting into trouble. We can fix this, but it's going to take a lot of work, a bit of sacrifice, and a whole lot less short-sightedness, all of which seem beyond the current powers of humanity.
(BTW I attacked it with a hoe. It will probably take a few tried to finish it off but now that I think about it, I could have tried that in the first place.)
2 comments:
Cervantes,
For all the caterwauling on the left about 'getting money out of politics' and how corporations and special interests are skewing the election and how horrible that is, I'd like to point out that Biden has almost twice as much cash as Trump.
But I don't hear you or anyone else complaining about it.
Right. That's because Biden has raised far more in small donations. From the NYT:
President Biden may be struggling in national polls, but he recently overtook former President Donald J. Trump in at least one important measure: the total number of donors who have given to his campaign, which is often seen as a proxy for voter engagement. Across most of the country, Mr. Trump has fewer donors than he did at the same time in 2020, while Mr. Biden has more.
Detailed maps of where people have donated to the Trump and Biden campaigns in 2024 and in 2020 show that Mr. Biden is overperforming and that Mr. Trump is underperforming in many of the battleground states they will need to win, in comparison with where they were at this point in the 2020 cycle.
As of the end of March, Mr. Biden had 1.1 million unique individual donors, compared with one million for Mr. Trump. The difference is apparent in their total fund-raising hauls: Mr. Biden's campaign committee has taken in nearly $160 million so far in this election cycle, compared with Mr. Trump's $114 million.
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