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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, September 12, 2010

DDT and the Silent Majority

By Rich Kozlovich

Many years ago (I can’t remember when I started doing this) I started what is now Green Notes. It wasn’t a “newsletter”! It was merely a list of people to whom I would send links on articles that I felt were important to many of the decision and opinion makers in our industry. In fact, many times it wasn’t even a list of articles; I would send one or two links and sometimes at multiple times during the week. I used Green Notes in the “subject” line, and that is how the name came about.

Later I started a blog called Green Notes, which I only wanted to maintain for one year, which I did. After that I restarted my mailing list.

At one point I started sending out so many that I thought it was unfair to the recipients…who I didn’t bother to ask if they wanted Green Notes or not to be sending so many e-mails to them each week.

There wasn’t any format then either, until my friend Frank Gasparini, who worked for Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment the time, called it a “newsletter” and that was pivotal for my thinking, because until then I didn’t actually see that it was a newsletter. I decided to commit myself to making this a real E-Newsletter, and one that was worth reading.   (Editor's Note:  I don't do that particular e-mail Green Notes newsletter any longer.  RK)

I started the change with this note to everyone;
There are so many great articles floating around out there that I couldn't, with good conscience, send them all piecemeal (at least without making some people mad at me) so I put together a "blog" page of what I thought to be interesting and thought provoking articles, giving everyone the opportunity to pick and choose.

There are a whole host of articles dealing with subjects of interest, which are not listed such as the Endangered Species Act, and how it has deprived property owners of use of the property they paid for and pay taxes on. I just can't send them all. The goal of all of this is to promote a new paradigm regarding environmental issues and the pesticide application industry. That paradigm is one based on science, not philosophy.

The amount of information on DDT, ozone depletion and global warming (especially global warming) is unbelievable and impossible to keep up with. I felt these articles were timely and would engage you intellectually. I hope that everyone will use what I call the Sowell Critique during this exercise, that being; what alternatives do you offer; what hard evidence do you have; how much will it cost?


Warmest Regards,
That was in February of 2007, and it was just a list of links. By July the format became very similar to what you see now. I also let those who I had been imposing on for so long know that if they didn’t want to be on my Green Notes list to let me know and I would stop sending it to them.

I only had two people ask not to be on the list. Interestingly there have been a number of people ask to be on my list who are not part of the pest control industry and will e-mail me to say how much they enjoy these efforts.

By September of 2008 the format was settled and has remained mostly unchanged, although I never stopped tweaking it.

I had been touting the DDT issue regularly, long before Green Notes became a newsletter. One editor of one of our trade journals, who is now freelancing, told me that DDT was a dead issue. I said it wasn’t to me, however I was also convinced that everyone ….. and I mean everyone….believed all the lies promulgated by Rachel Carson and her acolytes in the media and government, and with a few exceptions, that I was standing alone on this issue. I not so sure any longer!

Since this bed bug issue has become so dominant in structural pest control – and in the lives of many unfortunate people, DDT has been the rage, and the amount of people demanding its return has stunned me, in spite of the fact that DDT doesn’t kill bed bugs any longer.

Apparently this was all that it took for people to start saying how they really felt. After all of these years I should know by now that most people have no desire to be the rock in the current. Most people merely want to live their lives and will just follow the current. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t see and understand things.

The release of the documentary movie, 3 Billion and Counting, has triggered a host of web articles, and many of them stating those things that my peers thought was ridiculous when I said them a few years ago. Amazing how things can turn around. That is the value of rowing against the tide when you believe you are right; eventually the tide turns and then you are in front, and rowing against the tide puts you in great shape; in this case intellectually.

No….DDT isn’t a dead issue. It is the only issue!

All the money, influence and power the green movement has acquired has been as a direct result of their successful efforts to get DDT banned. This is the foundation of the environmental movement. If this can be uprooted then all else they promote can be called into question and people can start thinking critically about what they say, what they do and what their goals really are. And that Silent Majority is now paying attention and is being heard.



Saturday, September 11, 2010

Paul Driessen - Three Billion and Counting

By Paul Driessen

This article first appeared at here at Townhall.com. RK

We will eradicate malaria by 2010, stricken families were promised a few years ago. Well, 2010 is almost gone and, instead of eradication, we have more malaria than before, and a new target date: 2015.
Unless malaria control policies change, that date too will come and go. Billions will still be at risk of getting malaria. Hundreds of millions will continue getting the disease. Millions will die or become permanently brain-damaged. And poverty and misery will continue ravaging Third World communities.

For years, malaria strategies have been dominated by insecticide-treated bed nets, Artemisia-based drugs, improved diagnostics and hospitals, educational campaigns, and a fruitless search for vaccines against highly complex plasmodium parasites. All are vital, but not nearly enough.

Notably absent in all too many programs has been vector control – larvacides, insecticides and repellants, to break the malaria victim-to-mosquito-to-healthy-human transmission cycle, by reducing mosquito populations and keeping the flying killers away from people. Dr. William Gorgas employed these methods to slash malaria and yellow fever rates during construction of the Panama Canal a century ago.

They are just as essential today. But well-funded environmental pressure groups vilify, attack and stymie their use, callously causing needless tragedy and suffering.  They especially target the use of DDT.

Spraying the walls and eaves of houses once or twice a year with this powerful spatial repellant keeps 80-90% of mosquitoes from even entering a home; irritates any that do enter, so they don’t bite; and kills any that land. DDT is a long-lasting mosquito net over entire households. No other chemical, at any price, can do this. And no one (certainly not any eco pressure group) is working to develop one.

This miracle chemical had helped prevent typhus and malaria during and after World War II, and completely eradicate malaria in the United States, Canada and Europe. It was then enlisted in an effort to rid the entire world of malaria. After initial successes, DDT ran into an unexpected roadblock in 1969.

As physician Rutledge Taylor chronicles in his pull-no-punches new film, “3 Billion and Counting,” Sierra Club, Audubon Society and Environmental Defense Fund enlisted DDT in their own campaign, to get it banned. They said the chemical posed unacceptable risks to people, wildlife and the environment – and used pseudo-scientific cancer and ecological horror stories, like those in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, to spook people, politicians and bureaucrats.

Along with Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Pesticide Action Network and other eco activists, they portrayed themselves as white knight planetary guardians. Their true motives were far less virtuous. “If the environmentalists win on DDT,” EDF scientist Charles Wurster told the Seattle Times, “they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.”

In short, the war on DDT was never about protecting people or birds. It was, and is, about power, control, money and ideology – regardless of the resultant human misery, disease and death.

For the new Environmental Protection Agency, it was about power and politics. As the greens’ campaign to ban DDT intensified, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus convened a scientific panel, which held six months of hearings, compiled 9,312 pages of studies and testimony, and concluded that DDT was safe and effective and should not be banned.

Nevertheless, without attending a single hour of hearings or reading a page of the report, Ruckelshaus banned US production and use of DDT in 1972 – at a time when over 80% of the chemical was being exported for disease control. He later said his decision had nothing to do with cancer. He had a political problem, he said, and he fixed it.

Carcinogenic? The International Agency for Research on Cancer lists DDT as “possibly carcinogenic” – right up there with coffee and pickles. Among products that “definitely” cause cancer, it includes birth control pills and ethanol. Mice fed DDT got 26% fewer cancers than control mice. Another study found that DDT actually cured malignant brain tumors in rabbits. Millions of war survivors were sprayed directly on their bodies; none ever contracted cancer as a result.

Bird eggshells? The original Bitman DDT studies involved diets that were 80% deficient in calcium; when the birds were fed proper diets, there was no thinning. Audubon Society annual Christmas bird counts recorded that bald eagle populations rose from 197 in 1941 to 891 in 1960, while robins increased from 19,616 in 1941 to 928,639 in 1960 – all when DDT use in America was at its historic high.

Resistance? Mosquitoes have never become resistant to DDT’s life-saving repellency properties, but they are developing resistance to the pyrethroids used in agriculture – and bed nets.

Poisonous? People have tried to kill themselves with DDT – and failed. It’s most common replacement, parathion, killed hundreds of people, who safety experts said were too used to handling DDT. But as Dr. Wurster pointed out, it “only kills farm workers and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.”

This modern, eco-style eugenics has since been broadened to the impoverished developing world, where DDT could reduce the agony, brain damage, lost work hours, poverty and death – if it weren’t so frequently banished due to green ideologues like Wurster and the Club of Rome’s Alexander King, who worried more about over-population than human rights.

Thus the vicious cycle continues. Infected people are too sick to work, too poor to afford sprays or nets or get proper treatment. Ugandan activist Fiona Kobusingye lost her son, two sisters and four cousins to malaria. Former Black Panther Patrick O’Neal says every household in his Tanzanian village has lost at least one member of its extended family to malaria. On Sumba Island, Indonesia, one-third of all women have lost at least one child to malaria.

EDF and EPA lied. Millions of children died. How convenient, then, that UN Environment Program’s Nick Nutter can deadpan, “when someone here dies from malaria, they say God has taken them” – not baby-killing policies. How convenient that Al Gore can blame malaria on manmade global warming.
This is environmental justice? The kind championed by President Obama and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson? Eco activist groups get billions. The world’s poor get disease and death. And EPA and the greens want to be put in charge of our energy, economy, jobs, living standards and lives.

How inconvenient for them when folks like Dr. Rutledge raise questions they really don’t want to address. No wonder Ruckelshaus, Pesticide Action Network, USAID and EPA refused to grant him interviews. Stephanie from Pesticide Action did want to know who was funding the film. But when Dr. Rutledge said he was, she ended the conversation, without mentioning who funds PAN. (The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation, among others.)

Three billion humans dead so far from malaria … and counting. And green ideologues work tirelessly to ensure that the callous, needless global death toll continues to rise.

See this film. Tell your friends about it. Bring it to your college, club and local theater. It will make your blood boil, and change your perspectives forever about DDT and the radical environmental movement


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Monday, September 6, 2010

Pest Control – Back to the Future!

By Rich Kozlovich

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C. S. Lewis

Recently I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is outraged that we are attempting to bring propoxur back for bed bug control. He is also outraged at those who are working to do this, which also includes me by the way. I asked why?

His point is that we were going into the past and not into the future. We need to go forward! We were going backward, not forward when we do this type of thing. “Who wants to start using this stuff and then have it hanging over our heads?” I would assume that last part was based on EPA’s recent determination that propoxur was too toxic to use around children, without any real science behind it. Since EPA changed the safety factor from 100 fold to 1000 fold it makes it far easier to declare anything too toxic if they wish to, in spite of the fact that propoxur, also known as Baygon, was used by the general public for over twenty years.

He isn’t alone either. This isn’t an uncommon theme in our industry. Twenty five years ago this would have never occurred, but we have been psychologically prepared to accept this kind of thinking by a constant drumbeat of irrational environmentalism by the greenies, the Environmental Protection Agency, their acolytes in the media, and a host of owners, managers, Ph.D.’s involved with our industry and trainers that are from a different generation. They are much more easily swayed by the environmental litany.

He made it clear that he was willing to stand up in opposition against anyone attempting to bring old products back. I told him that he would then be wrong, and I will say this; anyone who agrees with him is also wrong. I know, I know…I’m right and the world is wrong! Yes…exactly!

Do we think we are going backward in progress if we resort to old technology if that old technology works versus new technology that is failing the nation? When the new technology doesn’t work, or doesn’t work well, should we cling to it with a religious passion because it’s modern and new while refusing to use what works simply because it’s old?

Thirty years ago when I first came into the pest control industry cockroaches were the number one problem in commercial accounts, especially restaurants, bars and apartments. I can honestly say that the majority of these places had roaches. What to do? I really hate being ignorant so I read everything I could get my hands on about roach control. About that time there was a great deal of talk about boric acid in the trade journals. I asked one of my bosses what he thought about it. He smiled, in that self assured way when someone is dealing with an idiot child and said; “that’s old technology” and walked away.

Well, since I was so ignorant I was prepared to try anything that might work. I used it in spite of his lack of enthusiasm and got results in accounts that had been having roach problems for a long time. Being in my early 30’s and having come off a job that required a great deal of physical work I was in great shape, and I didn’t mind crawling or climbing into anything anywhere to get the job done. I got results mostly because I was too ignorant to know any better. I just didn’t know that this wasn’t how it was supposed to be done. I went back to the future…..but I got the job done.

Some weeks later he came back from the Ohio Pest Control Association’s Summer Meeting and informed me that boric acid is all they were talking about for roach control. Why? Because it worked! It was back to the future for everyone at this company, and those who wouldn’t make the adjustment eventually left.

I also made a bunch of money selling roach work in accounts where so many others were failing to get control; at least until the synthetic pyrethroids exploded on the market. After resistance developed in these products we had roach baits that were introduced; and roach work has never been as profitable since. Once again; chemistry that worked was the answer.

Today we have a plethora of techniques and tools that can get rid of bed bugs. We have dry heat, steam heat, hand removal, traps, dusting techniques and procedures, vacuum cleaners designed for pest control and some chemistry that is only partially effective; and this is what makes the whole procedure partially effective. It is true that dry heat will kill everything in a building, but the expense is out of the reach of most Americans and there is no way of preventing a re-infestation with this program. We are in much the same situation as I was in thirty years ago with cockroaches. Not having the right chemistry was failing the nation, so we went back to the future and used boric acid. Bed bugs are spreading rapidly over the nation because current bed bug procedures aren't working for the nation, and for the same reason; we don’t have the right chemistry available.

Our job is more than a job. It is a mission. We are part of the public health service (whether they like to admit it or not) that stands between society and disaster. We are part of that thin gray line that stands on the wall and says, “no one will harm you on my watch”. If we are to succeed in our mission to protect society we must be effective in our treatments! If that means going back to old technology, then that is what we must do. It isn’t our job to be progressive, whatever that may mean, it our job to be effective!

There was a great old movie called “People Will Talk” with Cary Grant portraying a character called Dr. Noah Praetorius. He followed a relatively simple personal philosophy regarding medical treatments for the sick and suffering; “I’m in favor of using whatever makes sick people well”. One of his colleagues had him brought up before a faculty board to answer charges about his qualifications as a doctor. Dr. Praetorius answered one question my simply saying "I made sick people well”.

We need to properly define this issue. It isn’t about science, it isn’t about money; it’s about results, and it is a moral issue. By ridding properties of pest infestations we make sick buildings healthy, and I don’t care what we have to use to do it. I am prepared to use anything that makes sick buildings well! I am more than willing to go back to the future if that’s what’s necessary.

The answer to bed bugs in 1946 was effective, inexpensive chemistry that was available to everyone. If that isn’t the answer in 2010 then there will be no answer.


Comments will not be accepted that are rude, crude, stupid or smarmy. Nor will I allow ad hominem attacks or comments from anyone who is "Anonymous”, even if they are positive!

Nazi Dreams were Green Dreams

By Alan Caruba  (This article first appeared in Alan's blog, Warning Signs,  here!)

The gates of Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp
In a week when Jews will celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the New Year--5771, the connection between the Nazi’s rebellion against the Judeo-Christian worldview and the present-day ideology that drives the environmental movement needs to be exposed.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and elsewhere around the world, driven in part by the Islamic hatred of Jews, but also reflected in the liberal antipathy to corporations and the financial community, often portrayed as “Jewish bankers”, as history’s favorite scapegoat for economic problems. The situation mirrors Germany in the 1930s.

Few know of the connection, but it is spelled out in “Nazi Oaks” by R. Mark Musser ($12.75, Advantage Books, softcover, via Amazon.com ) (You may wish to follow the link to a review of this book at the end of this article. RK ). Thanks to his research we learn that “the highway to modern environmentalism passed through Nazi Germany. By 1935, the Third Reich was the greenest regime on the planet.”

“It is no coincidence that sweeping Nazi environmental legislation preceded the racially charged anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws.”

In the decades during which I have seen the rise of the environmental movement in America I have also seen its inherent totalitarian drive to not merely alter society, but to completely control the lives of all Americans. It is fundamentally an attack on the American credo of individual freedom and it has become commonplace to suggest that environmentalism has become a pseudo-religion.

Mark Musser is a 1989 graduate from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, widely regarded as one of the premier environmental institutions in the nation. In 1994, he received a Master of Divinity from Western Seminary in Portland and, for seven years, was a missionary in Belarus and the Ukraine. He is currently a pastor.

The history spelled out in Musser’s book needs to be understood in terms of what is occurring in America today. The title of the book comes from the fact that, “With the oak tree being such a powerful symbol of German nationalism and the German natural landscape, Hitler had oaks planted all over the Reich in hundreds of towns and villages.” The practice was dubbed by Nazi environmentalists as “concordant with the spirit of the Fuhrer.”

Just as America is passing through a period of economic stress, the Nazis in the 1930s sought to tap into the German psyche and a “return to nature” myth was seen as a unifying measure. The same regime that would later create the means to systematically kill Europe’s Jews shared a lot in common with any number of present-day environmentalist leaders and academics.

Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is on record saying, “Christianity is our foe. If animal rights is to succeed, we must destroy the Judeo-Christian Religious tradition.”

Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the United Nations Environmental Program, said, “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our duty to bring that about?” When you contemplate the many measures taken by the U.S. government against the mining of coal, the drilling for oil, and even the shutdown of a nuclear waste repository, is it not obvious that denying America the energy it requires is one way to destroy its economy?

In one chilling way in particular, the hatred of the human race, does the environmental movement reflect the Nazi’s merciless destruction, not only of Jews, but of millions of others consigned to its concentration camps and the relentless killing wherever they sought conquest.

This is why the Club of Rome could say, “The earth has a cancer and the cancer is Man.” How does this differ from Hitler’s many expressions of hatred for Jews and others, Africans and Asians that he deemed to be “sub-human”?

This is the naked face of environmentalism.

Remember, too, this did not happen a long time ago. The “greatest generation”, some of whom still live, fought the Nazi regime a scant seventy years ago.

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic warns that “it should be clear by now to everyone that environmental activism is becoming a general ideology about humans, about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a ‘noble’ idea.”

Couple that with a torrent of falsified “science” and you have the modern environmental movement.

The single greatest threat to freedom in America is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current efforts to acquire the authority to regulate a gas that is responsible along with oxygen for all life on Earth, carbon dioxide (CO2).

If the EPA gets that control, it will be able to determine every aspect of life in America because it is the use of electricity, industrial and all other machine-based technology that generates carbon dioxide.

And it is the Big Lie that CO2 is causing global warming that is being used to justify the agency’s quest. There is no global warming. The Earth is in a natural cooling cycle.

The Nazi regime was made up of animal rights advocates, environmentalists, and vegetarians, of which Hitler was all three.

And it led ultimately to mass murder.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Nazi Oaks Book Review


Comments will not be accepted that are rude, crude, stupid or smarmy. Nor will I allow ad hominem attacks or comments from anyone who is "Anonymous”, even if they are positive!
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Saturday, September 4, 2010

Harvard vs. University of Virginia…not even close!

By Charles Battig, M.D.


Has Global Warming Made Scientific Integrity an Oxymoron?

I  first discovered this at Greenie Watch and have since learned that his comments also appeared in the Letters to the Editor section of the Wall Street Journal on Friday, September 3, 2010.  I would like to thank Dr. Battig for allowing me to reproduce his comments.  He originally posted this on his site, Climate Reality on August 31st, 2010.  Dr. Bettig has strong views regarding the need for scientific integrity and has posted other comments regarding this particular issue in an article titled, Why is UVa Hiding M.Mann Behind a Legal Smoke Screen? (published in the Charlottesville “THE HOOK” on June 24, 2010.)  RK

An insight into the apparent difference in how "scientific misconduct" at Harvard University is handled, and how it has been handled at Penn State and the University of Virginia in the matter of climatologist Michael Mann is now available.

Harvard professor of psychology Marc Hauser was found "solely responsible for eight instances of scientific misconduct" involving the "data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results" according to the August 20, 2010 statement by Harvard dean Michael D. Smith. This finding was issued based on a faculty investigating committee study. The report noted that it began with an "inquiry phase" in response to "allegations of scientific misconduct." It seems that there were allegations of "monkey business" in his research on monkey cognition. Three papers by Hauser, presumably peer reviewed, will need to be corrected or retracted according to Dean Smith. The academic fate of the professor is yet to be decided.

In contrast, the two reviews of the behavior of climatologist M. Mann at Penn State seemed primarily focused on his data housekeeping habits and openness to sharing his data and analysis methodology. He was found to have acted within the "accepted practices within the scientific community for proposing, conducting, or reporting research." The issues of data acquisition and analysis validity were not pursued; the number of awards and publications Mann received was cited as evidence of the validity of his work.

At the University of Virginia an "inquiry phase", such as noted in the Harvard protocol, was initiated by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli into the possible misuse of public funds by Mann in his pursuit of employment by the University and his use of such funds in his research activities there. Virginia state law gives wide discretion to the AG in the initiation of investigations into suspected misuse of state funds. This request was met with claims of impingement on sacred academic freedom, and chilling the environment for academic research in general by the university and its various supporters. Rather than welcome the chance to dispel the suspicion of scientific misconduct and protect its academic reputation, the university enlisted a high powered D.C. legal team to fight the AG request in court.

While this legal process plays out, the court of public opinion must wonder why the openness and direct dealing with such allegations exhibited by Harvard is not the model for the University of Virginia. Harvard is shown to be a scientifically open and self policing university; UVa is hiding behind its self -righteous claims of academic freedom and legal barricades. Whose research will the public more likely trust?

Dr.  Charles Battig is President, Piedmont Chapter of Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, Charlottesville, VA


Comments will not be accepted that are rude, crude, stupid or smarmy. Nor will I allow ad hominem attacks or comments from anyone who is "Anonymous”, even if they are positive!



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