First things first. Back in 2010, a TA at a Huntsville, AL Middle School was too eager to further document a particular 16-year-old special needs student's already well-documented proclivity towards rage and sexual violence, and thus sent a 14-year-old special needs student into the bathroom with him. Guess how that went down? The older boy sodomized the girl, and no adult rode to the rescue. What a nightmare for that poor kid. It gets better: the then-Assistant Principal of the school knew of this insane plan beforehand, and then after it went down she said it was the girl's fault, because she was, and I quote, "responsible for her actions once she entered the bathroom." Actions including being sodomized by a bigger, stronger person, I suppose? And is there some rule of law I'm unaware of, where students who normally cannot consent to sex under any circumstance suddenly meet the age of consent once they enter a school restroom? Playing God with children like this is noxious to me, and should be noxious to any civilized person. Hence this petition from Change.org, with which you may call for the firing of those involved in enabling the rape of a special needs' student.
Meanwhile, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell the EPA to reject Syngenta's plan to expose its crops to many, many times the level of neonicotinoid pesticides the law currently allows, then Organic Consumers still helps you do that. The European Union has declared a two-year moratorium on neonic use due to quite understandable concerns over the role neonics play in destroying the honeybee population -- which, as you know, has taken quite a hit over the last few years, and which, as you know, is a very big deal if you like eating fruits and vegetables. If you're especially attentive, you'll note that the study cited by the Harvard School of Public Health in this paragraph's second link covers the effects of imidachloprid and clothianadin, while Syngenta's petition specifically calls for an increase in the levels of thiamethoxam. But that's not a gotcha for Syngenta, because thiamethoxam is similar enough to imidachloprid that Syngenta paid Bayer (the developer of imidachloprid) $120 million just to avoid a patent lawsuit. That's just one reason I tend to be conservative about all these hifalutin pesticides that seem to hit the market before we ensure they're not going to cause a lot of potentially-irreversible damage.
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