Kepone

Chlordecone / Kepone 3D by GYassineMrabetTalk

Over on Facebook I see that Sara Tagay, a Kurdistan Freedom Fighter, has 'liked' a post. The post includes some pictures of dead men, presumably ISIS soldiers. Most (all?) of the comments are in Arabic, but there is a translate button. The first translated comment looks like this:

مصير كل من يبيع نساء الكورد The fate of both sell women chlordecone

OK, that's weird. It's a machine translation so it's not perfect, but you don't get a word like chlordecone because of a typo. That's pretty specific. But what the heck is chlordecone? Turns out it's a really nasty insecticide. It was so bad that "In 1975 Governor Mills Godwin Jr. shut down the James River to fishing for 100 miles, from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay."

The stuff is persistent. It has a half life of about 600 years. A worldwide ban was set up in 2009. Banana growers in the French Antilles were using it up until 1993.

This is the kind of shit that gives big chemical corporations like Allied Signal,  the LifeSciences Product Company and, of course, Monsanto a bad name.

The world is really run by some remarkably stupid, vicious, short-sighted, people.