 Migrant Worker Center and Day-Care Center, Downwind from Chemicals, Kern County, California It is beginning to dawn on me that President Trump is not merely some bloated orange spectacle from a reality show.
He is consciously presiding over the demolition of health in the country. The New York Times ran one of those special public-interest sections on Thursday, the kind they seem to produce regularly – a Pulitzer-worthy section of the week. This one was on the environment – in many of the corners where I used to work as a news reporter, including the Kanawha River in Almost Heaven, West Virginia. The lead article is by Eric Lipton and John Branch, a great reporter with whom I had the privilege of working for a few years. John is based in his home state of California, and he already won a Pulitzer for his work on the science of a murderous avalanche. Branch is a member of the sports department but they rarely send him out to cover games; he’s part of the direction the Times is going – important journalism being committed on a daily basis. (Yes, I miss baseball box scores and daily Mets coverage, but would choose the vital journalism being produced by the Times these days.) Branch and Lipton write about the farmlands of Kern County, Calif., one of the major agriculture centers in the country. Since Trump was inaugurated in January of 2017, in front of those yooge crowds in Washington, he has facilitated dozens of downgrades of environmental practice. The Times documents them in this section. The presidential approval of pesticides in the vegetable garden of America could be poisoning you, wherever you are, but it is certainly sickening the workers – many of them brown and Spanish-speaking – the braceros, the obreros, who pick your lettuce, when they are not fainting and vomiting from the poisons Trump has let loose. The children's day-care center is downwind from the sprays. The pesticide, named Chlorpyrifos -- why, look here, it’s from our old friend Dow Chemical -- belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, as Nicholas Kristof wrote in a Times column in 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/opinion/sunday/chlorpyrifos-dow-environmental-protection-agency.html Kristof added that the nerve gas is “now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked to lung cancer and Parkinson’s disease in adults.” This poison is now being sprayed all over Kern County, killing insects and sickening humans and also enriching the companies and the politicians that enable this toxic man. Congratulations to the newspaper and web site that grow more serious and more invaluable all the time. Here’s the on-line version of the article by John Branch and Eric Lipton: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/26/us/politics/donald-trump-environmental-regulation.html
Brian Savin
12/28/2018 10:20:22 am
Merry Christmas, George. More Trump porn. This has been a very, very long-simmering dispute and it is important to note that it was not set to be banned until Obama was safely OUT OF OFFICE. So, I detect a bit of pandering and duplicity involved, don't you? What we technically have here is the continuation of the status quo and more work to be done in science and courts. Trump appointed Sec. Pruitt and he's now gone. We'll see what happens.
George Vecsey
12/28/2018 02:35:00 pm
Brian, we have lots of time while Trump scientists and more scoundrels like Pruitt do their deeds.
Brian Savin
12/28/2018 03:44:13 pm
Funny how with all the stuff slinging, nothing sticks. But you have inspired me to illustrate what I mean when I encourage you to keep looking for corporate greed: The Times is hardly in the vanguard of the environmental movement, now, is it?
Ed Martin
12/28/2018 04:15:05 pm
When I was pursuing graduate studies at Pitt an eon ago, B.F. Skinner was reporting research on reinforcing desired behavior and extinguishing undesired behavior. It turns out that while rewards increase behavior, punishment does not extinguish negative behavior, it is, somehow, a reinforcer. Instead, not responding, not commenting, i.e., ignoring the behavior, is the most effective way to reduce or eliminate undesirable behavior. Knowing your gentle and humane qualities, you may not wish to follow this path with Brian. Happy New Year.
Brian Savin
12/28/2018 06:00:37 pm
Ed,
Randolph
12/29/2018 09:55:47 am
George, 12/29/2018 02:02:32 pm
George, a great overview of the poisoning of America by the powerful chemical industry. Trump's frenzied effort to ignore every rule that goes with the EPA is obviously deliberate and destructive. There is no delicate balancing of environment against employment such as in Checkov's "Cherry Orchard" with Trump. There is only a Freudian and sadistic desire to strike out and destroy all before him. A misguided Sampson who is going to pull the entire country down upon his head and the head of every American. He is truly a Monster for the ages, particularly for a ruler in a democratic society.
bruce
1/1/2019 02:34:18 pm
hansen,
bruce
12/30/2018 09:21:41 am
george,
Gene Palumbo
12/30/2018 03:43:25 pm
Here's a jaw-dropper for the ages, courtesy of Brian, who assures us that "Trump is serving us, not himself."
bruce
12/30/2018 03:54:12 pm
gene,
Brian Savin
12/30/2018 08:57:56 pm
In my long experience I have found that ad hominem is the exclusive domain of the ignorant, the schemers and the defamers. No person of learning, breeding or intellectual confidence trades in that coin.
bruce
12/30/2018 09:12:57 pm
brian,
John McDermott
12/31/2018 11:49:54 am
And we all know that Donald Trump, a man of such obvious great “learning, breeding and intellectual confidence” would never stoop to making ad hominem attacks on anyone...oh, wait a minute...cancel that. I like Lebron’s very succinct but so on-point summing up of Trump: “He’s a bum.”
Brian Savin
12/31/2018 08:05:27 pm
Donald Trump is our President, John. He is under constant ad hominem attack, including your added ad hominem. I don’t seecan intelligent responsive comment in response in this thread, or in George’s post. If you guys aren’t embarrassed, you should be. You have nothing to offer anyone except to take solace in collective ignorance. Ignorance seems to be bliss in this blog. I miss intelligent discussion, which I had with George for many years. Maybe I’ve been wrong. Send in the clowns, George.
bruce
12/31/2018 08:20:37 pm
brian,
Brian Savin
12/31/2018 08:32:21 pm
Fuck off, troll. George, I quit. You are now presiding over a completely intellectually dishonest propaganda blog of ad hominem attacks on our President and anyone who offers contrarian views to your own. Shame on you. If you have any honesty left in you, save it for advice to your family to dissociate from from your old propaganda machine.
bruce
12/31/2018 08:38:48 pm
george,
George
12/31/2018 08:52:58 pm
Wait. Was that a New Year’s resolution i heard?
Randolph
1/1/2019 09:23:57 am
Hansen and George,
George Vecsey
1/1/2019 09:59:20 am
Randy, thanks for looking at it. It was a fun exercise to go back over some parts of career. My college life looms large....in retrospect. Was in a great place and time, for me. You were running along the Kanawha? How did that work out? Worst run I ever took was in Chapultepec Park in Mexico, a day after arriving for 1986 World Cup. Inhaled some of the worst air in the world....at altitude....and was messed up for weeks...until the air conditioning went on in the plane heading back to NYC. I love Mexico for people and culture...but inhaled too much, too soon, upon arrival.Be well, GV
John McDermott
1/3/2019 01:01:06 am
George we must have passed each other gasping for air that day in Chapultepec Park! Weeks later, and presumably better acclimated, I played in a Europe vs. Rest of the World media game, which actually included a number of ex-pros who were working for papers or TV. 90 minutes of sucking for air and more or less jogging around in a large, mostly empty stadium in the midfle of Mexico City. It felt like an out-of-body experience. But we did win-on penalties!
Gene Palumbo
1/2/2019 01:12:36 am
I almost missed something very fine. And maybe I'm not the only one. When I saw Bruce's and Randolph's comments about a Hansen/George piece, I couldn't figure out what they were talking about. I was about to send George an email, asking "What did I miss?" when, finally, I saw, in the upper righthand corner of the page, the reference to the interview. I could easily have missed it altogether, which would have been a shame. Hansen, what excellent questions. And George, what fine responses.
bruce
1/2/2019 01:27:18 am
gene, Comments are closed.
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