Musings: Sheer Torture

The election season is entering its last tortuous month.

Last night's debate — if you can call it that — left me (and no doubt many others) with feelings that see-sawed between sick and aghast. As one moderator noted, voters now have to decide whether they want the status quo, as personified by Hillary, or if Trump is the one to “offer something different.”

A critical point came when Trump said he'd urged people to vote for him “because things couldn't get any worse.”

Uh, yeah. They could. Way, way worse. The last thing this, or any, country needs is a blustering, bullying, big-mouthed, BB-brained, bigoted, blowhard billionaire at the helm.

Especially one with such a disgusting attitude toward women. 

Like so many other creeps, Trump thinks his lavicious drooling and pawing is a form of “admiration,” like women should be grateful for or complimented by his unwanted advances. Ugh.

Which is why I liked this meme:

Which speaks to every man's some men's deepest psychological fear....

And just in case you thought one of the third-party picks might be preferable:

In local elections, Councilman Mason Chock is trying to muscle into Gary Hooser's turf by portraying himself as a local farming advocate. He's featured in The Garden Island's puff piece on the Korean natural farming method.

Though there's no actual proof it works, despite a year-long trial funded in part by a grant from Kauai County, Chock is already promoting it as having “a lot to offer our farmers:”

“It will bring costs down for farmers by utilizing local sourced and produced methods for fertilization, pesticides and bio-remediation. I am supportive of these methods and would like to see them used more prevalently on Kauai.”

Yeah, we don't need no stinking evidence. So why don't they have any?

[Ray] Maki said the year-long test came back inconclusive because the pesticide that was targeted for breakdown was DDT, a chemical with a half-life of 20-40 years.

“Maybe we could have picked a different class of chemicals to work with, but with a one-year study we didn’t have enough time or conclusive results to say we had meaningful results from the test,” Maki said.

Ya think? Shaking my head, scratching my head. And wondering why, if it's so successful, "South Korea imported about $25 billion in agricultural goods in 2013. Agricultural exports were $4 billion."

But hey, doncha know it's the one and only way to go?

“These bigger companies have the capacity to look at whatever we’re doing in our own homespun way and do it more effectively than we can because they have the resources,” [yardener Felicia] Cowden said. “That capacity of those companies is profound if they wanted to do something like this.”

Because of course what works in someone's back yard will be equally effective on a commercial spread with thousands of acres.

I'm for all for exploring different approaches to agriculture. But it strikes me as wanton hubris to have yardeners telling people with doctorates in plant pathology and agronomy how they should farm. Especially when they can't even develop a meaningful one-year trial project.

And why is Kauai County funding projects that have no meaningful measure of effectiveness?

But no worries. When farming fails, there's always real estate (or campaign donations from Realtors):

Kinda reminds me of the guy who knows more about ISIS than the generals, more about the tax system than any man on earth... 

To paraphrase, I love the smell of delusion and self-aggrandizement in the morning. It smells like politics. Gag.