With the first air strikes visiting Iraq and Syria earlier this week -- one of them finding a city of 200,000 people, which, just off the top of my head, must have killed civilians, since ISIS has but 30,000 soldiers presently -- both the Friends Committee on National Legislation and Peace Action West help you tell your Congressfolk to stop this war. Congress has been extraordinarily cowardly in heading off an impeachable offense by this President, but nothing stops them from coming back from campaigning vacationing working in their districts and holding a special session, since the Founders had good reasons for trying to stop Presidents from going off to war all the time. And to head off another line of reasoning: we can't take a TARDIS back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and dissuade all the Western powers from meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, but there must be a point where "someone else broke it and we have to fix it" is no longer an excuse to keep breaking it -- and I, of course, say that moment is always now. Treating the nations of the Middle East with a little more respect in diplomacy might be a good start.
Meanwhile, Swiss corporation Syngenta has petitioned the EPA to dramatically increase allowable thresholds of neonicotinoid pesticides on corn, wheat, alfalfa, and barley -- in the case of wheat hay, to 400 times the current limit. As you know, scientists have told us that neonicotinoids (or "neonics") depress bees' immune systems, contributing mightily to the collapse of half of America's honeybee colonies over the last decade. Syngenta made $14 billion last year, so clearly they have the money to do things the right way. They would tell us they are doing things the right way -- that they're using the neonics in a leaf spray, so the neonics don't penetrate the entire plant, and that alfalfa (for example) gets cut before it blooms, when bees are, as you'd imagine, most interested in them. But having witnessed, in the last few years, incidents of wind carrying GMO seeds over to farms where they ruin organic seeds, you can also easily imagine the bad neonics getting spread around to other blooms the bees might use -- and then it's still game over for many of our food crops. So the Sierra Club helps you tell the EPA to reject Syngenta's petition, and thus reject more poison in our crops.
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