Where to Vote: Tuesday March 8 Hawaii Republican Presidential Caucus
Djou Open Letter against Trump: ‘Selfish immaturity unworthy of Presidency’
Hawaii Congressional Delegation How They Voted March 7, 2016
First Decking: Complete List of Crossover Bills
Vegans are Crazy: Does Study Stand Up?
Hawaii Republican Caucus Tuesday March 8
Economic Justice Starts With Correcting Tax System Inequities
CB: Hawaii’s heavily regressive tax system pushes the impoverished down, while simultaneously offering them a hand up….
read … Economic Justice Starts With Correcting Tax System Inequities
Prison Operator Wants Native Hawaiian Inmates’ Suit Wrapped Up
CB: The federal class-action case has dragged on for five years….
read … Wrapped up
Musings: Fact, Fancy and Flat-Out Fudging
KE: I've been looking through the draft report of the Joint Fact-Finding Group on pesticides – the one that was supposed to be released on Jan. 6, 2016, and is now being updated and reviewed prior to distribution later this week.
I sure hope that it's gone through some serious revisions, because this first draft has a lot of problems, not the least of which is speculation. But in fact, the entire report is suspect. The group admits it faced numerous challenges in collecting data, due to both medical and corporate “confidentiality barriers:"
"This put the JFF Study Group in the position of trying to gather and piece together disparate sets of data and match those with peer reviewed national and international research.”
In other words, it's a hodgepodge of data patched together with conjecture and speculation, which is evident in the inflammatory language in the executive summary. I don't know who wrote it, but it seems the intent was to elicit a certain response, knowing most people won't bother to read the full report. Because when I looked at the chapters and data that supposedly informed the summary, they didn't support the rhetoric.
The summary does note that less than 25 percent of restricted use pesticides were sold for agricultural uses on Kauai. “The largest users of RUPs are structural fumigators, the Kauai Department of Public Works (for wastewater treatment) and the Kauai Department of Water.” Buried deeper in the report is the revelation that structural fumigators account for 41 percent of total RUPs sold for use on Kauai between 2010-14.
The JFFG found no data at all on even estimated household pesticide use, though "90 percent of Hawaii's reported pesticide poisonings occurred in a residence." So again, why are only the seed companies being scrutinized? ….
read … Pesticide
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