DDT - Drinking the Kool-Aid

By Rich Kozlovich

Those in prominent positions who defend Rachel Carson and her acolytes are thoughtless elites who have drunk deeply of the Green Kool-Aid while living in the fever swamps of environmentalism; elitists whose minds are ablaze with enlightenment; an enlightenment that only they can fully understand. They revel in “rhetoric filled with unending deposits of spite, hyperbole, lies and odium” as if they were listening to a symphonic orchestra playing music that is filled with a grandeur and beauty that completely mesmerizes and inspires those who are capable of hearing it.

The reality is that this rhetoric, with the aid of government bureaucrats and a false media, is a symphony of discordant notes that has filled the ears, minds and emotions of the uninformed and misinformed, making it impossible for them to think clearly. Just as with bureaucracies and all their regulations, this discordant symphony constantly expands itself into issues such as animal rights, global warming, genetically modified foods, pesticides, private land ownership and hatred of the rich; destroying practical age-old traditional values, while promoting every form of radicalism as a new enlightenment. Unfortunately this is done without any penalty or consequence for them if they are wrong.

This façade of intellectual and moral superiority is actually nothing more than aesthetic snobbery that carries with it a corresponding lack of concern for the poor who suffer needlessly so their egos can be stroked and feel good about themselves, creating fervor and excitement that can only be described as religious in nature. This symphony of environmental rhetoric is their Kyrie Eleison, and these elites are the clergy and high priests of the secular religion known as environmentalism. This started with DDT and Rachel Carson.

We have come through 60 years where marching, breaking windows, burning buildings, shouting insults and chanting slogans are considered intellectual debate. We have come to accept defamation of character as an intellectual argument and that any science out of harmony with the “Litany” is the work of corrupted sycophants of big business. Unfortunately, as in the Middle Ages anyone from business, government or science who disagrees with them is a heretic who must be purged by an inquisition of condemnatory public humiliation through their acolytes in government and the main stream media. It is clear that “some things are so stupid that only an intellectual can believe them”. How will history judge the moralistic ravings of these intellectual elites? How many lives will they destroy?

"There has never been a replicated study published in a peer-reviewed journal showing harm to human health from DDT" after six decades of human exposure, Amir Attaran of the Royal Institute of International Affairs has said.

So why is DDT banned in the U.S.? Blame Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," a book published in 1962 that tried to make a case against man-made chemicals. She made the argument, which has since been discredited, that DDT ingestion caused reproduction problems in birds and caused cancer.

The EPA still lauds her as an environmental saint, in spite of all the studies that have clearly discredited almost everything she stated or claimed or predicted. EPA’s web site states:

Silent Spring played in the history of environmentalism roughly the same role that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played in the abolitionist movement. In fact, EPA today may be said without exaggeration to the extend4ed shadow of Rachel Carson. The influence of her book has brought together over 14,000 scientists, lawyers, managers, and other employees across the country to fight the good fight for “environmental protections.”


Skeptics then and now have accused Carson of shallow science, but her literary genius carried all before it.”

So it was her literary genius and not her scientific genius that did it!  At least EPA got that right.

Blame, as well, Richard Nixon and William Ruckelshaus. When judge Sweeney ruled against those wanting to ban DDT he stated that DDT wasn’t a carcinogenic, mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man and did not have a deleterious effect of wildlife. President Richard Nixon was furious and stated that he was going to do everything he could to overturn that decision. Ruckelshaus, as the first head of the Environmental Protection Agency appointed by Nixon, banned DDT even though the judge who sat through a scientific hearing on DDT — a hearing that Ruckelshaus did not attend — ruled that it should remain in use.”

Those who still defend Carson and the EPA’s decision are legion and desperate. Studies abound to prove that which is un-provable i.e., that DDT and DDE, a metabolite of DDT, is toxic to people and wildlife and causes all sorts of afflictions. One recently released study called the Pine River Statement was published in the Environmental Health Perspectives entitled, “The Pine River Statement: Human Health Consequences of DDT Use”. Fifteen scientists reviewed almost 500 papers to prove that DDT or DDE caused “cancer, diabetes, fetal underdevelopment, shortened duration of lactation, reduced child growth, reproductive problems and neurodevelopmental problems.

The case they came up with “was weak” and “in order to prove a cause and effect relationship between DDT and human health harm, certain core criteria should be met, such as strength of association, biologic credibility, and consistency with other investigations. Two other important, although sometimes considered weaker, criteria are time sequence (cause must precede effect) and a proportional dose-response relationship. None of the studies presented in the Pine River Statement satisfy these criteria. The studies are un-replicated, contradictory, or statistically insignificant.” Yet the authors conclude that the evidence they present proves that DDT “may” pose a risk to human health.

I find it amazing that they feel compelled to continue spending millions to prove DDT is so terrible. If that was actually so it would have been clear to everyone and settled by now; yet they continue…why? Because everything they have said or written about DDT is a lie and they desperately need to find a way of discrediting this banned product even now. Why? Because their cause against DDT gave them power, influence and money theyhad  never dreamed of before. If their DDT claims are lies then all the claims about all the other pesticides are also lies. and a valid case would be made that the rest of their scares are invlaid also.

Nixon wanted to get rid of DDT but he couldn’t because pesticides fell under the legislative authority of the USDA, and they didn’t agree with the idea that DDT should be eliminated. In order to strip that legislative authority from the USDA he created the EPA and appointed an underground greenie to be in charge. EPA was founded in corruption and has operated, from the very beginning, behind a curtain of lies. Nothing has changed.

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