In our Transportation Safety Authority's "Quiet Skies" program, federal air marshals spy on "suspicious" airplane passengers in a putative effort to stop terror attacks. What's that, you say? You've never been charged with a crime? You're not on one of those notorious terrorist "watch lists"? Doesn't matter -- if you ever got a tattoo, or fell asleep on a plane, or stared out into space, "Quiet Skies" might be spying on you. So Demand Progress helps you tell the TSA to end this fishing expedition known as "Quiet Skies." Because a fishing expedition is what this is -- it allows our government to collect information on Americans they couldn't otherwise collect, and once they have this information, they can use it to harass us whenever they want to look like they're "doing something." And it also dumps mountains of useless info on folks who actually fight terror. If it violates our rights and it doesn't work, then our government shouldn't do it.
Meanwhile, Monsanto's brand of the herbicide dicamba, rather pretentiously called XTendiMax, continues to leave a trail of death wherever it goes -- and because it gets into the air pretty easily, it sure does go a lot of places. Dicamba has been around for half a century, but Monsanto is the first corporation to create a version of dicamba for use specifically with (sigh) Monsanto's own genetically-altered dicamba-resistant crops -- and Monsanto may also be the first corporation to forbid independent scientists from, you guessed it, testing its ability to drift to other fields! Even with that revelation, we're probably going to see a lot more of dicamba this year -- except in Arkansas, which last year banned it from use during the growing season. Hey, that should give your state ideas! Environmental Action helps you tell your state's governor to ban dicamba within your state.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your Congressfolk to support S. 3099, the Strengthening Antibiotic Oversight Act, then Penn PIRG still helps you do that. Their latest email missive puts it in a fairly succinct and original way: "(w)hen you're prescribed antibiotics, they always come with clear instructions and a defined dose. There are few instances in human medicine where prolonged antibiotic use would be appropriate. We should apply the same standard to farming." Yes, we should -- particularly when at least 7 in 10 antibiotics in America go not to sick people or sick animals, but to nominally healthy farm animals, and if you're surprised we haven't seen more antibiotic-resistant superbugs after fully digesting that fact, well, you're not alone. Oftentimes we feel alone when we fight antibiotic abuse, but we're not -- and we need to remind our Congressfolk of that, again and again and again.
Comments