The 737 Max is grounded

The U.S. has joined many other countries in grounding the 737 Max jet after two crashes killing a total of 346 people in 5 months. I often wonder why some lives are worth more than others. Half a million people, mostly brown and black, are killed each year by malaria, by mosquitoes, which could be controlled with DDT until a vaccine is found or appropriate sanitation developed to fight insect resistance. But no. Rachel Carson who was not a scientist writes a book 56 years ago, Americans get excited about "saving the environment" and in turn cause more Africans to die than all the Atlantic slave trade. Millions more are crippled for life. And counting the other vector borne diseases including Chikungunya, Zika, Dengue, West Nile Virus, and Yellow Fever, the annual death toll is 700,000.

Even this puff piece by pbs shows the dire predictions made at the time by scientists have come true. Claiming that resistance is the problem, is in part a problem. What if they hadn't killed off millions in the 80s and 90s? Environmentalists/climate cults will block any new pesticides that are effective using the same excuses, in my opinion.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/Rachel-carson-malaria-and-silent-spring/

Happy Earth Day. . . Sucker

Earth Day is the highest holy day of the Climate Change/Global Warming religion. A modern day faith for pagans whose chant is, "I'm spiritual, but not religious." It was established in 1970, the same year that DDT was officially declared off limits, sacrificing to the new gods millions of brown and black children from malaria in developing countries. One of the saints of this new 20th c. religion is Rachel Carson; Al Gore used to be high priest, but not sure if his stock is still high. 46 years later and there still isn't a good replacement for DDT, but you keep buying and donating those bed nets to make yourself feel better. When Zika lands in DC, or the Attorney General gets dengue, someone may just have a change of heart about DDT. And that smartest politician of all times, Republican Richard Nixon, saw the response of the gullible to the first Earth Day, and used it to develop another huge bureaucracy from 15 other agencies, calling it the Environmental Protection Agency. Now only the government is allowed to pollute water.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/07/climate_change_hysteria_and_the_madness_of_crowds.html

"The World Health Organization (WHO) credits DDT with saving anywhere from 50 million to a 100 million lives by preventing the spread of malaria. There were sharp drops in malaria cases reported in parts of Europe, India, and the U.S. following World War II according to WHO. In fact, malaria was virtually banished in the U.S. thanks to DDT, government studies show. Unfortunately, DDT was later banned as a result of unfounded hysteria allowing malaria to spread in developing parts of the world where about 50 million children succumbed to the disease."
 http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/kevin-mooney/2008/10/07/human-cost-global-warming-hysteria-subject-new-documentary

 http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/26/silent-spring-turns-50-this-week

Happy Earth Day

Here in Columbus we're in winter recovery mode--green grass and beautiful flowers everywhere. And the winter debris. Today I'll drive to the west side for my volunteer job and I'll pass through some light industrial and "emerging" neighborhoods. I'll see people walking to the bus stops along roads with no sidewalks and a few who appear to be homeless. The grass and easements around the fast food businesses, gas stations, lumber outlets, and car lots will be pristine. The city of Columbus with responsibility for the exits, overpasses and other easements has a lot of work to do. Plastic bags, trash, newspapers, bottles. Do your part. It's Earth Day, a good time to clean up your own messes.

On Earth Day when we remember Rachel Carson whose poorly researched book contributed to the deaths of millions of Africans. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/earth/05tier.html…

One of the founders of Earth Day, Ira Einhorn,  in 1970 murdered his girl friend.  He was on the run for 23 years, but is in jail now. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42711922/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/earth-day-co-founder-killed-composted-girlfriend/

The residue of Silent Spring is still killing

Worried about Ebola?  Malaria will probably kill more while you’re reading this than the current Ebola epidemic.

“Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.”  http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2010/02/16/the-green-death/

All methods of disease control eventually lose their effectiveness, so don’t send me progressive, liberal and greenie links,  but this was ripped out of the tool box of things that worked 50 years ago freeing Africans from a terrible scourge.  Millions have died or been crippled, and the victims are left with bed nets and local spraying of ponds and homes (and who knows what is in that brew). What works, really works quickly, is building hysteria over diseases that may not ever harm us, or not looking at all for the causes of the current illness sending children to the hospital coinciding with an unprecedented number of illegal immigrant children being spread around the country.

http://www.nature.com/news/ebola-outbreak-shuts-down-malaria-control-efforts-1.16029

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/26/malaria-deaths-ebola-diarrhea-pneumonia_n_5886652.html

Rachel Carson’s legacy for the poor and dark skinned

The legacy of Rachel Carson [her book Silent Spring launched the modern environmentalist movement 51years ago] is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors. This remains one of the monumental human tragedies of the last century." What are the trade offs for American's poor and low income with Obama's new oppressive EPA regulations?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/

 

http://cei.org/news-releases/new-study-rachel-carson-was-wrong?

A high tech net for volunteers

I hope everyone contributing to buy nets and t-shirts noticed the article about malaria in today's Wall St. Journal. It's about high tech epidemiology and volunteers who help with malaria vaccine modeling. The simulations could take months or years as millions die or become disabled by a disease that about 30 years ago had practically been conquered. That is until Rachel Carson told about her vision of a silent spring, and DDT as a killer of mosquitoes that spread the disease was essentially taken off the market. In its place we have bed nets and local spraying, and do-gooders buying orange t-shirts and having basketball games and bake sales to feel like they're doing something. Meanwhile, millions of children, mostly black and brown, mostly poor, mostly not using bed-nets because they aren't accessible, are dying.

So while they slice and dice the genes of the female mosquito becoming famous for writing articles in peer review journals, they can only hope for that enzyme that will cure the disease. But doesn't volunteering just feel so good? Isn't that what counts? The feeling, not the results?

DDT is no panacea

and is not always appropriate for every exotic disease, but neither does it kill millions of people every year the way the environmentalists do. Yes, people die when politics gets in the way of saving lives. I urge you to read the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Health Policy Outlook No. 14, November 2007 "The rise, fall, rise, and imminent fall of DDT."

The modern environmental movement began with concerns about DDT. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring questioned the effect that synthetic chemicals were having on the environment. Her argument was that DDT and its metabolites make bird eggshells thinner, leading to egg breakage and embryo death. Carson postulated that DDT would therefore severely harm bird reproduction, leading to her theoretical "silent spring." She also implied that DDT was a human carcinogen by telling anecdotal stories of individuals dying of cancer after using DDT.[19] . . .p.3

The delisting of DDT as the method of choice in many countries was a direct result of Ms. Carson's book and resulted in years of death and injury of millions, mostly in Africa. DDT was reintroduced in South Africa in 2000, and in just one year malaria cases fell nearly 80% in one of the hardest hit provinces. In 2006, malaria cases in that province were approximately 97% befow the high of 41,786 in 2000. Zambia too had great success when a private mining company restarted a malaria program reducing malaria incidence by 50%. But that's all about to change. Environmentalists are again raising their voices exaggeratimg the dangers.

Bias in the academic literature is accelerating. A recent article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases alleges that superior methods for malaria control exist--without providing a single reference for this claim.[52] The authors claim that DDT represents a public health hazard by citing two studies that, according to a 1995 WHO technical report, do not provide "convincing evidence of adverse effects of DDT exposure as a result of indoor residual spraying."[53] Furthermore, the authors misrepresent those defending the use of DDT. They claim that supporters view DDT as a "panacea"--dogmatically promoting it at every opportunity--yet they do not provide any evidence to back up their opinion. . . p.7

DDT has a better record than any other intervention. Every day people die. Someday another method might be developed. But meanwhile, environmentalists might be killing the very people who could do the research.

Chikungunya Fever and Elephantiasis

Thanks to Rachel Carson and her misguided, unscientific book Silent Spring, these two diseases continue to cripple and kill millions in developing countries, after having been virtually wiped out in the 1960s and 1970s. They used to be controlled by DDT. Chikungunya, a virus spread by mosquitoes, means "bent over and unable to walk upright" has turned up now in the Ravenna area of Italy. It is endemic in some areas of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. It is spread by mosquitoes.


Elephantiasis is caused by a parasitic worm, and affects more than 120 million people in 80 countries, and more than 40 million of them are severely incapacitated and disfigured by the diseases. A team of scientists seem to be close to mapping the genome of the worm. [both stories from JAMA, October 17, 2007]

"Some of the diseases controlled by DDT included typhus, plague, malaria, yellow fever, sleeping sickness elephantiasis, leishmanisasis, river blindness, Oroya fever, other fevers and dysentery (transmitted by domestic flies). Many kinds of animals were protected by DDT from envenomization and parasitism by arthropods. It also killed blood-sucking parasites of birds, thereby reducing deaths from avian malaria, encephalitis, and Newcastle disease. It also prevented the deaths of hundreds of millions of forest trees, by killing the caterpillars of the gypsy moths, Tussock moths, and other forest insects. In killing insects which destroyed crops, food shortages have been minimized and food prices held relatively affordable.

Millions of trees were lost during the infestations of the gypsy moth and Tussock moths. Greens predictably opposed the use of DDT to save these trees. Political correctness and loyalty to their causes must never be challenged. The same crowd which once refused to save trees now supports saving the trees, the planting of trees, without embarrassment, without noticing the double standards." Hawaii Reporter

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Al Gore and the piece prize

The Canadian Press reports:

“Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jointly won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for fighting it.

Gore, who won an Academy Award earlier this year for his film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," had been widely tipped to win the prize.

He said that global warming was not a political issue but a worldwide crisis.”

Al Gore is a big fan of Rachel Carson, who whipped up another crisis 40 years ago--the long term effects of DDT on the environment. The woman has probably killed more Africans than the 17th and 18th century slave trade. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them." Before Silent Spring, malaria was on the run. The debilitating effects of this disease help keep Africa in poverty.

"Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all," declared then-Vice President Albert Gore in his introduction to the 1994 edition of Silent Spring. The foreword to the 25th anniversary edition accurately declared, "It led to environmental legislation at every level of government." Now Gore can guarantee that the poor of the third world will never be competitive or catch up by keeping them barefoot but green. American businesses jumped on the green bus, they're rolling and are already making huge profits--how will Africa and Asia ever compete?

That Rachel Carson didn’t tell the truth about cancer in children (rate has not changed over many decades, but other deaths (polio, pneumonia, birth defects) went down skewing comparisons with other illnesses like cancer) is probably not her fault. She wasn’t a trained scientist. And neither is Al. Environmentalists don’t want to see that the EPA banning DDT killed or disabled millions of Africans--for what? So church groups can donate insecticide treated nets (would you sleep under one?) and wear orange t-shirts with slogans.



And now we have Growbal Warming.

See Silent Spring turns 40

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Crow droppings #3

Sheryl Crow now says it was a joke, but at least it got people talking about global warming. When I first heard it, I thought she was joking. Then I realized liberals have no sense of humor, no irony, nor does it bother them to set rules and standards for others which they never intend to follow (Barbra Striesand's SUVs, Rosie O'Donnell's potty mouth discussing appropriate behavior or gun control, et al) because they have wealth and employ a lot of people who tend to their every personal and transportation need.

I think Sheryl's joke backfired. It did get everyone talking, yes, even other liberals, but about how silly some of the global warming advocates are. Now if we could just get people to wise up about lightbulbs, bio-fuel, and weather patterns over time maybe we won't have to suffer from more disastrous outcomes like the Carson-induced malaria deaths.

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Is Al Gore the new Rachel Carson?

Were you surprised that the Christian Science Monitor declared Al Gore "the Rachel Carson of global warming?" [Story was in Wall Street Journal by Katherine Mangu-Ward] I was stunned. This should be an insult, a death blow to his movement. Do the editors not know? More Africans have died of malaria since the 1970s when her book was read by do-gooders and entertainers who then lobbied and protested DDT off the market than were killed in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Malaria was all but defeated. They aren't apparently being killed by the increased use of pesticides to deal with the resurgence of mosquitoes, although that can't be too healthy either. Then when I checked Amazon.com I see that he wrote an introduction to a new edition of one of her books, so I guess he just doesn't care about black and brown people, to turn on a phrase of a well-known comedian.

Now, through Al Gore's misinformation and whipped up hysteria, the West will be shutting down factories and mines in developing countries, even as we try to find places (outside our own country) to manufacture energy saving lightbulbs that contain mercury. And then the food stuffs we might have sent them to keep their poor babies alive (assuming we don't send in medical teams to abort them), we'll be burning in our SUVs.

I don't think this is good for your movement, Al.