Whose fault is it?

If we assume the Guardian reported this correctly, someone in a position of responsibility in the Democratic Party was/is asleep at the switch: Biden could be left off general election ballot in Ohio, Republican official warns.

how much nitrogen do row crops need?

Photo by J. Harrington

If we assume the Star-Tribune reported this correctly, person or persons in Minnesota’s governments have been asleep at the switch: '50 years of promises, all of them broken': Southeast Minnesotans worry over state water pollution response, although that same article notes:

Wotzka owns about 10 acres in Weaver in Wabasha County, a mile or so from the Mississippi River. He and his wife grow crops on about a half-acre and keep a fruit orchard on another 7 acres. After eliminating the use of commercial fertilizer, Wotzka said, their water nitrate levels fell from 6 or 7 milligrams per liter when they bought the property in 1997 to about 1 milligram per liter today.

He said Minnesota is too quick to blame nitrate issues on old wells built before federal pollution regulations were enacted. Instead, Wotzka said, the state must focus more on addressing water sources.

"If we start cleaning up the aquifers through changing the land-use practices, the first water that's going to be impacted is the shallowest water and that's where the old wells are," he said. "We don't have an old well problem; we have a contaminated aquifer problem."

And then there’s the issue of Congress’ repeated failure to unequivocally define “waters of the United States”: 

On September 8, 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) published a revised definition of “waters of the United States” or WOTUS. 88 FR 61964. To conform with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Sackett v. EPA, 143 S. Ct. 1322 (2023) ruling, the agencies made various changes including the removal of the “significant nexus” standard and amending the definition of “adjacent.” The new rule went into effect September 8, 2023. Because the revision was required to make the Rule comply with the Sackett decision, no notice and opportunity for public comment was necessary.

If we persist in relying on laws to govern increasing amounts of the behavior of real and legal persons, we need to increase the rate at which full legal coverage of all systems' components is rapidly attained or significantly slow socio-economic and technical change.

Or, we could start electing more competent, less obnoxious legislators and judges, but that would require a more competent, less obnoxious electorate, but that would require significant improvements in our education system and less book burning and home schooling and parents who want kids to grow up “just like them.”

Meanwhile, greenhouse gases keep increasing. Weather becomes more volatile. The 6th extinction continues. The 1% and their corporations keep most of us at each other’s throats while we blame each other and the “gummint” for our problems. Is this really the best we can do?

Failures in Infinitives

By Bernadette Mayer

why am i doing this? Failure

to keep my work in order so as

to be able to find things

to paint the house

to earn enough money to live on

to reorganize the house so as

to be able to paint the house &

to be able to find things and

earn enough money so as

to be able to put books together

to publish works and books

to have time

to answer mail & phone calls

to wash the windows

to make the kitchen better to work in

to have the money to buy a simple radio

to listen to while working in the kitchen

to know enough to do grownups work in the world

to transcend my attitude

to an enforced poverty

to be able to expect my checks

to arrive on time in the mail

to not always expect that they will not

to forget my mother's attitudes on humility or

to continue

to assume them without suffering

to forget how my mother taunted my father

about money, my sister about i cant say it

failure to forget mother and father enough

to be older, to forget them

to forget my obsessive uncle

to remember them some other way

to remember their bigotry accurately

to cease to dream about lions which always is

to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion's mouth

to assuage its anger, this is not a failure

to notice that's how they were; failure

to repot the plants

to be neat

to create & maintain clear surfaces

to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down

and not a table

to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk

to listen to more popular music

to learn the lyrics

to not need money so as

to be able to write all the time

to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills

to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as

to be free of expecting care; failure

to love objects

to find them valuable in any way; failure

to preserve objects

to buy them and

to now let them fall by the wayside; failure

to think of poems as objects

to think of the body as an object; failure

to believe; failure

to know nothing; failure

to know everything; failure

to remember how to spell failure; failure

to believe the dictionary & that there is anything

to teach; failure

to teach properly; failure

to believe in teaching

to just think that everybody knows everything

which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure

to see not everyone believes this knowing and

to think we cannot last till the success of knowing

to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes

to write a thousand poems in an hour

to do an epic, open the unwashed window

to let in you know who and

to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns

to just let us know, we will

to paint your ceilings & walls for free

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.