Is Roundup really that bad?
I keep reading where there is a need to ban the use of Roundup for use on public properties. How silly. Roundup has been around for decades and in particular the Kona district where it has, like in most agriculture areas, been used extensively throughout the area with no known detrimental problems. Those of us who are in our 70s to 80s can adhere to the fact that we have been exposed to Roundup since our childhood. Most of us are just dying of natural causes with a little cancer thrown in now and then.
This reminds me of the war days — that is World War II for you juveniles out there. During those days, because my father was shipped off to the camps. (Yes, many, many Europeans from around the country served the same amount of time and experienced the same difficulties that our local Japanese faced). My mother had to go to work. I was hanaied to my grandmother in Hilo where I was born. It was there, although it was happening all over the Territory, that under Martial Law, all of us in Hawaii had to endure being fogged with DDT, at least once a week. I mean that the fog trucks came and literally fogged the neighborhood. The foggers always came in the evening just at supper time and you sat at the table looking at each other through a haze while having a regular conversation and ingesting the fog, enduring DDT fumes and serving one’s self with DDT-inundated vittles and do you know what? We all survived. We had faith in our America that it would do us no harm and that America would win that war of all wars, for the good of the people — that is until author Rachel Carson, published “The Silent Spring.” (See The New Atlantis “The Truth About DDT &Silent Spring, Sept. 2, 2012.) By the way, according to Rachel Carson’s rhetoric, DDT would, or could, decimate the coqui frog. Um, how you figa?
The loss of lives from malaria alone, throughout the world, was, and is astronomical (think 500 million) since the banning of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for International Development. It is much, much worse than the Jewish extermination during WWII.
Question: Are we seeing a repeat scenario of the DDT fiasco happening with this Roundup issue?
Could there be alternative motives out there in the clouds? You be the judge.
Hugon von Platen Luder
Holualoa
Women truly are a brave lot
I read with great interest about the two women officers making it through Ranger School, one of the toughest combat schools in the military. What an accomplishment.
As a combat veteran I use to wonder whether women had what it takes for combat. Not any more.
I work with a woman who, if she has any fault, it is that, as one of our best guards said, she cares too much about the public. On a high surf warning day at Magic Sands, she once swam out with her tube and fins to do a welfare check on a boogie boarder. He was fine but it took her 50 minutes to battle through big surf to get back to shore. Her only comment was that next time she’d call for the helicopter.
It is absolutely routine for her to paddle out on a 12-foot rescue board at Kahaluu during big surf days just to check on surfers to make sure they are handling the hairy conditions.
I have seen her carry a large, lifeless, unresponsive, clinically dead man back to shore at Magic Sands after he went over the falls and injured himself, all the while protecting his neck and then bringing him back to life after CPR and the use of the AED. She is absolutely cool under pressure.
If the women who want to go into combat are anything like this gal, the male combat troops will have nothing to worry about.
Sean Gallagher
Water Safety Officer, Ocean Safety Division, Hawaii Fire Department