Letters to the editor Sept. 23

Use of neonics

Imagine driving to your local grocery store and suddenly feeling hopelessly lost. You don’t know where you are or where to go. Finding the grocery store is no longer a possibility. The way home is a mystery.

This is the effect that toxic pesticides called neonicotinoids — or neonics — have on bees.

Neonics, which are nerve agents, poison bees’ nervous systems. Exposure to highly toxic pesticides in nectar and pollen interferes with bees’ internal radar, preventing them from foraging and returning safely to their hives. Other studies show that neonics impair bees’ ability to learn, reproduce and fight infections. Neonics are a major culprit in colony collapse disorder -- a phenomenon that has wiped out over 10 million bee hives since 2006.

Large-scale bee deaths threaten our entire ecosystem. There are over 250,000 species of flowering plants and trees that rely on bees. Hive collapse threatens the survival of plants — and the animals that rely on those plants as a food source — a pattern that disrupts the entire food chain.

But it’s not too late for the bees. Together, we can raise awareness and effect change.

States like Maryland, Connecticut and Vermont have listened and passed laws banning consumer use of neonics. Now I’m asking for your help extending this ban across every state. Through education and communication, maybe we could get the same ban across all of Montana.

—Marc Chamberlin, Bigfork

Lyin’ Joe Biden

Presidential candidate Joe Biden is a serial plagiarizer and prevaricator.

Such dishonorable conduct aborted his prior presidential bid. But that hasn’t slowed Old-Joe down. His biggest and most malevolent deceit? It concerns the 2017 Charlottesville’s tragedy. Biden said that President Trump called white-supremacists and neo-Nazis “very fine people.” But Trump never said that. In fact, he has expressly denounced “racism” as “evil” and explicitly condemned the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate-groups...”

But Joe still won’t let go of his favorite falsehood. Charlottesville was about a statue of Robert E. Lee. On one side there were protesters demanding its removal because, they claimed, it represented slavery and racism while opposing counter-protesters argued that the statue was of great historical and cultural value and should stay. Those were the two “sides” that Trump was referring to.

The symbolism of Lee’s statue was just too compelling for out-of-town extremists to ignore. And radical riff-raff who were mortal enemies invaded the city. On the right, there were white-nationalists and neo-Nazis. And, on the left, there were Antifa and Black Lives Matter. They were invading rabble-rousers bent on violence. And bloody clashes ensued.

From this dreadful affair, the left craftily fabricated a bald-faced-fraud. Regarding the memorial dispute, the president had stated that there were “very fine people on both sides.” He was referring to the peaceful home-crowd of pro and con statue-factions, not to the foreign fringe-elements, the violent gatecrashers.

But the lying-left purposely ignored all that and pushed their completely counterfeit claim that Trump called neo-Nazis and white-supremacists “very fine people.” Leftists follows Lenin’s maxim that: “A leftist says whatever is necessary to gain power!” And that’s exactly what Joe’s doing by repeatedly telling a Lie so brazen that it would make poor Pinocchio blush. But not Lyin’ Joe Biden.

—Dave Hadly, Kalispell