Monday, September 29, 2014

The Banana Peel Hoax revisited for an easy way to get chemicals tested

At the heart of our little organic garden effort is the fact that tens of thousands of chemicals, including pesticides, are out there for sale with no oversight and nobody regulating them.
Makes you wonder if things like the fact that birth rates are going down in many countries might have to do with other things in addition to the much vaunted education bump?
Photos of frogs with two heads, statistics of estrogen levels in way out rural places, cancer, or Parkinson's style "lights out in the brain" - they don't seem to generate a regulation effort.

NPR (National Public Radio) gave us an unexpected, yet simple, hint today. They reported on pranksters and the urban myth that smoking banana peels gets you high.
Singer Country Joe McDonald came up with the hoax, and it appears to have had enough staying power to stick around for decades.

That's when the worrying article about untested pesticides in the Huff Post lost some of its scare.

What if people claimed this or that pesticide gets them high? Wouldn't that get attention and - maybe - some swift testing?

So, pranksters might look for an untested pesticide, get together with a few friends,  make up some imaginary fun drug effects, then publish these?

Would the manufacturer of TheTotallyHarmlessPesticide hand out a press release saying that TheTotallyHarmlessPesticide will not get you high and may damage your health if you inhale, smoke, inject, sniff, eat, or otherwise ingest it?

Warning: Pesticides are always dangerous - after all they are designed to kill living things. Stay away from them. Far away! If you must do something useful, buy the nude farmers calendar.

One more thing: In case the algorithms used to trawl for fishy webby web stuff do barf on this a post, rest assured. It may not be funny, but it is satire.

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