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Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Combo update: excess of corporate power, psychiatry gets medicated, political assassinations, and the Herbicide Merry-Go-Round

Though I wish I had time for in-depth analysis, I'll have to resort to a quick summary of some interesting stories:

Eight Words That Could Save Our Country - a constitutional amendment proposed to limit the power and legal rights of corporations, reserving those rights for people.  This essay offers arguments about the benefits of limiting corporate rights and the rather tawdry legal history of the debate.

Psychiatry gets medicated - a fascinating look at how mental health therapy has shifted the couch to the back seat, and drugs to the front, despite little medical evidence that drugs are more effective.  Given that there's money to be made in drugs and not couch time, don't count me surprised. 

One thing the story leaves out is whether therapy also makes a patient more resilient to other types of related mental health problems, versus a drug that may only address one.

Political assassinations - not only is it awful that President Obama has authorized the killing of an American citizen without due process (as a terrorist), it seems that this tactic has a rather poor history of making us safer.

The Herbicide Merry-Go-Round continues - much like the problems with overusing antibiotics causing disease resistance, overuse of herbicides on agricultural land creates super weeds.  Only this time, it's happening with "Roundup Ready" genetically modified crops.  These super crops were bred to be resistance to a particularly effective weed killer, so you could spray your mutant crops with impunity. It was so effective that everyone is doing it:
Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
Unfortunately, the overzealous use of Roundup Ready crops and Roundup herbicide has created resistant super weeds, scarcely 10 years after the genetically modified crops were introduced.  Hello, agribusiness!  You're already making antibiotics less useful by giving them to pigs.  Maybe that should have been a hint.

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