Category: Uncategorized

The 9th circuit court issued a scathing rebuke of the EPA in its overturning of the agency’s approval of Monsanto’s (now owned by Bayer) XtendiMax dicamba based herbicide. You can read the actual decision at https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2020/06/03/19-70115.pdf

It is a very interesting document. Considering how generally dry and dull documents like these are, this one is actually pretty interesting. It is a scathing report on just how bad the EPA has become.

Basically the EPA downplayed, ignored entirely, dismissed, or never seriously examined known issues with the herbicide. It dismissed or ignored reports of serious problems with the herbicide drifting over long distances. It ignored or dismissed reports of crop damage caused by the herbicide, calling them “alleged”. It vastly underestimated the actual amount of damage the herbicide was causing, completely ignoring continued reports by scientists, universities, farmers and others concerning the extent of the damage. It substantially understated or even ignored entirely the risks posed by use of the product. Where it did acknowledge damage was being done, it claimed that the damage was being over reported based solely on the word of Monsanto, the company that made the stuff.

Basically the entire document is a graphic illustration of how the EPA totally failed to do its job properly.

Anyway, as of June 3, 2020, EPA certification for the dicamba blend from Monsanto and two other vendors has been revoked and supposedly it is now illegal to use the stuff at all. And while a lot of farmers and others who have had their crops, orchards and ornamental plants killed or damaged by the stuff are a bit relieved, you can be damn sure that this isn’t going to be the last of it. Bayer is, of course, going to immediately appeal the decision. And as for EPA itself, it’s been virtually useless for years already, with a lot of the higher ups being former employees of the very businesses it is supposed to regulate. Same is true over at USDA and most other government regulatory agencies.

I normally don’t do this, but I want to plug Affinity Photo which is now on sale until June 20 for half price, $24.99.

Before that, though, I should point out that I am not associated with Affinity in any way. I don’t get paid anything, haven’t received free or discounted products from them, nothing. I recommend it because it is just plain good. And cheap. Even at its original list price of around $50 it was cheap. Now that you can buy it for $24.95, well, that’s about what Adobe gets per month for using PhotoShop. And Affinity does damn near everything PS does.

I’ve had Affinity for my iMac for several years, but because I already owned Adobe CS 6 on the iMac I rarely used it. It was an impressive piece of software, but I was used to PhotoShop and didn’t want to invest the time in adapting to a new program.

But now that I’ve switched over mostly to Windows, and was getting tired of coughing up about $25 a month for PhotoShop on this machine, well, I decided I finally needed to look at alternatives once again. I just bought Affinity for Windows and installed it and so far, well, wow, it’s amazing. Especially at this price.

If you’re a photographer or artist, even someone who only occasionally fiddles around with graphics, take a look at Affinity Photo. At $25 on sale it’s amazing. And if you aren’t willing to drop money now, you can get a free 90 day trial.

Woke up around 4 AM for some reason, pulled open the curtains and saw – snow??? Yeah, snow, not that daffodil up there from this weekend. But I’m not going to put up a picture of snow because things are depressing enough, so hopefully a daffodil will cheer you up. We knew it was coming, the storm, but I don’t think we really believed it. We were lucky because we got just a light dusting. Other parts of the state got as much as 5-8 inches. Sheesh. Welcome to spring.

I have to admit that all of this is getting to me. I’m a rather anxious person to begin with and this whole climate of fear we’re living in with the 24/7 virus news going on right now certainly isn’t helping. I try to avoid even watching the news or reading newspapers, to be honest. But it’s hard not to. You can’t turn on the television, pick up a newspaper, turn on a radio or get on the internet without being bombarded with infection numbers, number of deaths, warnings to stay home and if you do have to go out wear hazmat equipment and treat everyone you meet as if they were infected. And meanwhile we have an administration that is saying everything is going really, really well and the isolation may be lifted at the end of the month, and at the exact same time the crawler down at the bottom of the screen is showing the number of deaths ticking up all the time and an announcement pops up that New York had to hire a contractor to begin digging mass graves on an island in NY harbor because they can’t deal with the number of bodies, and one of the heads of the Wisconsin legislature is shown in full hazmat gear telling people it’s safe to go vote in person without taking any kind of special precautions and later claiming the election is totally valid even though hundreds, perhaps thousands of people gave up trying to vote because of the 4+ hour wait times because most of the polling places were closed (only 5 out of 180 were open in Milwaukee) and the fact that the post office didn’t bother to actually deliver hundreds, perhaps thousands of absentee ballots that people had sent in for weeks ahead of the election, and even if people did get them and sent them in they won’t be counted because the post office didn’t put a postmark on them…

Yeah, it’s starting to get to me.

Testing stuff

I’m not sure what’s going on with WP this morning but I’ve been running into all kinds of issues here. I can’t “Like” posts or comments on other WP sites, I can’t Like comments on my own blog, for heaven’s sake. I can’t access WP tools from my website, only if I go directly to my administration page. All kinds of weird stuff. I don’t know if it’s something local (i.e. and issue with my browser) or if this is effecting other people. Hopefully it’s just a temporary thing, possibly caused by system overloads. It’s about 7 AM local time so that means a hell of a lot of people are probably trying to get online to check emails, do work, school, etc so it could be just some kind of overload.

I did a bit more digging into the case of the Missouri peach grower who won a large judgement against Bayer and BASF over it’s dicamba herbicide blend and ran across this item. Bayer markets a dicamba blend called Xtendimax and BASF markets a similar herbicide called Enginia. In addition to a $15 million judgement for actual damage, the jury tacked on $250 million in punitive damages. So the total judgement against the company stands at $265 million. punitive damages are awarded when a jury finds the actions of the defendant to be especially harmful.

They will certainly appeal this case and, like the judgement against Bayer/Monsanto over health problems with it’s glyphosate herbicide, the monetary amounts will almost certainly be reduced by a huge amount on appeal or even thrown out entirely. And even though I dislike dicamba a great deal, even I have to admit that there are some serious issues with this particular case.

There was evidence that trees in the orchard were suffering from Armillaria root rot which could have caused the problems the trees were suffering from. Some testing did indicate the trees were exposed to dicamba, but at a time before Monsanto released its Xtendimax herbicide for use, so how could Monsanto be responsible if the product hadn’t even been released for sale yet?

As with the case where Bayer/Monsanto lost the glyphosate trial, there seem to be some serious problems with this verdict, at least on the surface. I didn’t hear the testimony and didn’t read the entire court transcript, but from what I know now, if I’d been on that jury I don’t know if I would have been able to rule against the company.

But that goes only for this specific case. Dicamba is a nasty, nasty herbicide that vaporizes easily and can drift for miles. There is absolutely no doubt that it has caused millions of dollars in damage because of drifting, despite what the company says. Bayer continues to claim there is no problem with it, and that all of the problems either A) didn’t really happen, B) were due to illegal applications of its product, C) caused by applicators not following application guidelines or D) were due to other plant diseases.

Source: BASF, Bayer Found Liable for $15 Million in Dicamba Peach Damage Trial – AgWeb

I haven’t done an ag related post in quite a while so it’s kind of sad that the first one I do involves something like this, but the whole dicamba thing could have the potential to do a hell of a lot of damage.

To summarize, Bayer (now the owner of Monsanto) and BASF which also makes a dicamba product, were found guilty of being responsible for significant damage to a peach orchard in Missouri and liable for $15 million in damages. The companies will almost certainly appeal, of course. The companies are claiming that the peach trees were already dying from disease, it seems. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. You can be sure that as with glyphosate, the other product Monsanto/Bayer is being sued over, the dicamba problem has armies of lawyers lining up at the doors of court houses all over the country to file suits.

I’ve talked about dicamba before, but here’s a brief recap: Dicamba is a rather powerful herbicide with some serious problems. One of the biggest is that it vaporizes easily and can then drift for long distances, some claim for miles, and cause significant damage or even kill plants that are not resistant to it. Monsanto (now Bayer) and BASF (which has a similar product) claim that their version of the stuff has special additives which prevent it from vaporizing so easily. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case because as soon as the stuff came into widespread use for dicamba resistant soybeans, hundreds, even thousands of reports of damage to non-resistant soybeans, other crops, trees, bushes and ornamental plants began to flood in.

The response of Monsanto and others making and selling the stuff has been to blame everyone and everything, except themselves. The damage isn’t from their product, they claim. Or the plants were already diseased. Or people were using the product the wrong way, applying it wrong, even using non-approved and illegal dicamba formulas the companies didn’t make. But when it comes down to it, it seems that the only people who believe the companies’ claims are the PR departments issuing the statements.

Despite increasingly strict regulations, strict training requirements, restrictions as to when it can be applied, etc., the alleged problems haven’t gone away. If anything, they seem to have gotten worse. A lot of farmers are being forced to plant Monsanto’s dicamba resistant beans (at a steep cost) just to keep from losing their crops in case their neighbors use the stuff. (And some farmers are claiming that’s exactly what the company hoped would happen.)

Monsanto (well, BASF now because they’ve inherited all of Monsanto’s problems after buying the company) is already facing hundreds, even thousands of lawsuits over alleged health problems caused by glyphosate, the active ingredient in it’s RoundUp herbicide. And those suits haven’t been going very well for the company so far. And now the dicamba thing? The company is going to be tied up in the courts for years, if not decades.

When Monsanto began to shop around for a buyer some years ago I wondered why. The company was in reasonably decent financial shape, it had product lines that would be profitable for a significant time and it had other products in the pipeline that looked promising. It didn’t seem to make any sense to me that the company would be trying to sell itself off to someone and even acting a bit, well, desperate about it.

Well, now I can guess why. Was the company foreseeing the upcoming legal problems? Did the upper management know that they would be facing possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, penalties, lawsuits and possible government intervention over their products in the near future and desperately needed a way to bail themselves out before the storm hit?

Is BASF management now very, very much regretting it ever heard of Monsanto? Frankly I never understood why BASF wanted to buy Monsanto in the first place. Even back then the Monsanto was facing lawsuits not just in the US but in the EU as well over the alleged health issues with glyphosate, and there were already problems with dicamba drift showing up. The potential liabilities were huge.

But that’s the problem with a lot of companies – the upper management, the people who make the decisions, are almost never held personally responsible for the decisions they make. Look at what happened at Yahoo. The last CEO of the company oversaw the company descend into chaos with one failed project and acquisition after another, and all the while collected a ridiculously huge salary, and left with a multi-million dollar payout when the company fell into oblivion and was sold off for pennies on the dollar. Above a certain level at a company, there seem to be no adverse consequences for failure. They get their money whether the company sinks or swims.

Yes, I know there’s an apostrophe missing up there in that title. I don’t know why but the service insists on replacing apostrophes with some kind of weird looking code in article titles. I have no idea why and I’m too lazy to go ask someone.

The Witcher

This is the new Netflix series that seems to have everyone raving about it, and I don’t understand why. I managed to make it (barely because, OMG the pain…) through the first episode and skipped through (one finger on the fast forward button) a few more episodes and, well, no. Just no.

No, it is not Lord of the Rings Lite. Nor is it Game of Thrones lite. Nor is it, well, much of anything, really. It is a rehash of various fantasy themes that have been boring us to sleep for centuries, coupled with a stilted, stiff, emotionless reciting of lines from what is allegedly a script. (In a few scenes the actors, if you can call them that, looked like they were literally reading their parts off cue cards.). Cavill tries to look menacing, grits his teeth a lot, tries to look angry and mean and sympathetic, etc. in all the appropriate places and, well, manages to end up looking like he’d rather be anywhere except in this show. Or is suffering from a really bad hangover. Don’t blame him if he is. I’d have to get roaring drunk too if I had to get through that.

And do you have to run everything through visual filters to make everything look “dark” and “edgy”? It seems that every show these has to run the video through filters to desaturate the color or flip it into grayscale and it’s turned into a cliche.

Speaking of cliches – the costumes are a mishmash of styles, like someone took all of the worst costumes from GoT, LoTW, and STNG, along with some really badly modeled Mr. Spock pointed ears, shoved in a generous helping of “cool” steampunk stuff, shook it all up in a barrel, and then dressed the cast in whatever they pulled out at random. They take Cavill, put a bad wig on him, roll him around in some dirt, dress him up like a lumberjack with a leather fetish, and… Oh, come on, really?

The first scene (after the obligatory “hero kills CGI monster” scene at the start) looks like it was stolen almost word for word out of a 1950s episode of Gunsmoke (“We don’t cotton to strangers in these parts, mister.”) And it goes downhill from there.

There is one scene in the first episode where Cavill walks through a door (without opening it – ooo, magic!) and into some kind of Playboy fantasy world where young, naked maidens wander through a soft focus garden, and, well, it was just creepy . The 3rd episode, after the obligatory “horror” sequence in what looks like a medieval version of a meat locker, shows Cavill in bed with a woman who’s shirt conveniently slips down to bare her breasts for no reason other than the hopes that this will help attract teenage boys to watch the show and bump up the ratings. (I can just imagine the production meetings: “Look, this thing is a real stinker and if we want to get anyone to watch it we have to throw in boobs and disembowelments. That will at least get us the high school market…”)

Someone told me that you can’t really understand what’s going on in The Witcher unless you’ve read the original books, and well, no to that too. This thing is more than 8 hours long, for crying out loud! If you can’t adequately explain what is going on in eight hours without making the viewer go read the original books, there is something seriously wrong with your writers and your whole concept of what a video is supposed to be in the first place.

Look, if you like this thing, good for you. Apparently a lot of people do. But frankly the sight of Sean Connery in a pornstache and running around in a scarlet diaper and thigh-high boots for almost two hours in Zardoz is more palatable than this. (Whatever you do, don’t look at that picture over there on the right. If you do you’ll never, ever get it out of your brain and it will torment your nightmares for the rest of your… Oh, you already looked, didn’t you? Oops. Sorry.)