Bah. Humbug. Oh, that’s right. Christmas is just barely past. But it’s déjà vu all over again. No, not the holiday season. I’m talking about the Donald Trump chaos season. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet and Congress is spinning in turmoil just like the Tasmanian Devil with more spinning to come now that pseudo-president Elon Musk has elbowed himself in to handle governmental operations the way he sees fit. Money talks, I guess.
I’m seriously hoping the latest upgrade, Trump 2.0, will be less buggy than the previous version, but since he’s already said he won’t be able to lower the grocery prices, one of his big promises he made to get elected, I have my doubts. Anyone who thought he could affect the price of eggs was asleep at the proverbial wheel.
It’s probably no big secret to anyone that climate change is upon us and the droughts in lockstep with it are degrading land around the world. The UN realizes that deserts are spreading because of drought and it will cost trillions to reverse their creep. But even though we like to put this all on Mother Nature’s head, the biggest driver of the degradation is the way food production is rising to meet population growth. To keep up, farmers pour on the pesticides. The bulk of the funds needed to restore the land is already, and will be, coming from public money even though the private sector is responsible for food production and the pesticides that are part of it. We, the actual human-type people in the public, pay for 94% of the cost, while the semi-human private sector that creates the problem only pays six percent. What’s wrong with this picture?
Coincidentally, the Trump 1.0 administration used our taxpayer dollars (you did pay some, didn’t you?) to fund a public relations campaign to stifle the protests coming from scientists, journalists, Oscar the Grouch (he doesn’t want tainted trash in his can) and UN officials who were trying to get pesticide reforms. If it means costing those guys money generated by the poison manufacturers in the short term, Trump and his cronies say, “(Bleep) the long term and future generations. We’ll be long gone by then.” The stifling was done through a private online social network they funded where they had profiles of more than 500 people who were pesticide opponents and could be intimidated to block a conference on pesticide reform in East Africa, among other sinister actions. Now that we’ll soon be in the throes of Trump 2.0, I’m sure he’ll be back at his stifling best, adding “Drill, baby, drill” to see how much of the environment he can destroy before he’s admitted to a memory care hospital.
One thing to be thankful for is that we’ll no longer be exposed to Frankensalmon. AquaBounty Technologies, the company producing the GMO fish, has drained its tanks and shuttered its last operating facility. They finally got the message that genetically engineered food is a losing investment. I haven’t heard what they did with the last of their GMO Frankensalmon, but if you should happen to run across a two-headed, three-eyed salmon trying to eat your pet, return it to AquaBounty for a refund in genetically engineered bitcoins.