Author Archives: JCNCharole

Trump friend and climate foe Sam Clovis is up for a big job at the USDA.

by JCNCharole Posted on May 15, 2017

In early May, laborers harvesting cabbage in a field near Bakersfield, California, caught a whiff of an odor. Some suddenly felt nauseated.

A local news station reported that winds blew the pesticide Vulcan — which was being sprayed on a mandarin orchard owned by the produce company Sun Pacific — into Dan Andrews Farms’ cabbage patch.

Vulcan’s active ingredient, chlorpyrifos, has been banned for residential use for more than 15 years. It was scheduled to be off-limits to agriculture this year — until the EPA gave it a reprieve in March. Kern County officials are still confirming whether Sun Pacific’s insecticide contained chlorpyrifos.

More than 50 farmworkers were exposed, and 12 reported symptoms, including vomiting and fainting. One was hospitalized. “Whether it’s nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seek medical attention immediately,” a Kern County Public Health official warned.

If chlorpyrifos’ presence is confirmed, the EPA may have some explaining to do. The Dow Chemical compound is a known neurotoxin, and several studies connect exposure to it with lower IQ in children and other neurological deficits.

The Scott Pruitt–led agency, however, decided that — and stop me if you’ve heard this one before — the science wasn’t conclusive.

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Trump friend and climate foe Sam Clovis is up for a big job at the USDA.

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How the ‘Mushroom Death Suit’ Breaks Down Your Body for Nature

by JCNCharole Posted on April 14, 2014

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How the ‘Mushroom Death Suit’ Breaks Down Your Body for Nature

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The Whimsical Fascists of Wes Anderson’s "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

by JCNCharole Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is very, very Wes Anderson—which is to say that the colors pop, the quirky humor abounds, and your emotions are sneakily toyed with. Few directors have the kind of total control over the way their actors talk, move, and express quite like Anderson does. Anderson’s singular style and eccentricities make virtually everything in his films (even harrowing elements such as suicide and war) oddly whimsical. And in The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Nazi analog is made into something of a goofy villain.

The comedy is set primarily in the 1930s in Zubrowka, a fictional central-European republic that has endured European totalitarianism and world war (the movie was shot on location in Germany, but the setting, sounds, and visuals were, in Anderson’s words, “a pastiche of the greatest hits of…Eastern Europe”). The core of the narrative (starring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Tony Revolori, Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Keitel, and several Anderson regulars) is a murder mystery, but the backdrop routinely advances to the fore as the grip of a fascist party grows more and more clenched. “Part of why I feel the impulse to reimagine World War II rather than just do it is because it’s been done so many times before,” Anderson told NPR.

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The Whimsical Fascists of Wes Anderson’s "The Grand Budapest Hotel"

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