stat counnnter

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Scotland Returns To The Primative

The following reminds me of the scene in Atlas Shrugged where a caravan of covered wagons comes out of the night to pull up along side the last train of civilization, the John Galt line. The lead wagoneer says his mode of transportation is "Slow, but Sure!"

From the website of Junk Science.com, Steven Milloy links to this article by John Stewart at The Scotsman.com.

Here is the main quote:

"ON A broiling afternoon recently when anyone with a reasonable excuse was
lying in the shade with a cold drink, I watched a performance in a
Perthshire field that made me as angry as I have been in my life. The
apparatus involved wasn't much to look at, consisting of ten stretchers of
the sort used by the medical corps, but covered in webbing instead of
canvas and mounted side by side on a steel frame with wheels at each end.
The whole thing was surmounted by a light steel frame supporting a canvas
awning and hitched to a tractor. I watched, at first incredulously, then
with mounting fury, as ten workers face down on the stretchers, heads
supported by a small webbing strap, were pulled slowly up the rows of an
organic vegetable field to pull weeds by hand.

This, I thought, is not so
much exploitation as degradation and a disgrace to Scottish agriculture.
To use human beings to do by hand something that horse-drawn scufflers did
a century and a half ag o, or spring tine weeders were invented to do 60
years ago, is the antithesis of everything I consider worthwhile."

If that weren't bad enough, check out the comments in favor of organic
and against modern technology in the comments section. These people
deserve to have Atlas shrug.

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