Conclusions In The Face Of Reality!

By Rich Kozlovich

My friend Maury Siskel, who signed off as Maury and Dog, was a retired scientist in Texas who passed some years ago and used to send me stuff every day. Mostly serious stuff, but occasionally he’d send a joke, a humorous story, or some cartoons - some funny and some political. The interesting thing about humorous stories is they so often reflect how we humans live our lives. Maury and Dog sent this story to me, and I think it’s reflective of why people fall for so much clabber from the world’s activists.

On the outskirts of a small town, there was a big, old pecan tree just inside the cemetery fence. One day, two boys filled up a bucketful of nuts and sat down by the tree, out of sight, and began dividing the nuts. "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me," said one boy. Several dropped and rolled down toward the fence.

Another boy came riding along the road on his bicycle. As he passed, he thought he heard voices from inside the cemetery. He slowed down to investigate. Sure enough, he heard, "One for you, one for me, one for you, one for me ...."He just knew what it was. He jumped back on his bike and rode off. Just around the bend he met an old man with a cane, hobbling along.

"Come here quick!" said the boy, "You won't believe what I heard! Satan and the Lord are down at the cemetery dividing up the souls!" The man said, "Beat it kid! Can't you see it's hard for me to walk?" When the boy insisted though, the man hobbled slowly to the cemetery. Standing by the fence they heard, "One for you, one for me. One for you, one for me." The old man whispered, "Boy, you've been tellin' me the truth. Let's see if we can see the Lord!" Shaking with fear, they peered through the fence, yet were still unable to see anything. The old man and the boy gripped the wrought iron bars of the fence tighter and tighter as they tried to get a glimpse of the Lord.

At last they heard, "One for you, one for me. That's all. Now let's go get those nuts by the fence and we'll be done...."They say the old man had the lead for a good half-mile before the kid on the bike passed him.

 

So, what’s the moral of this story? What message could I possibly take away from this? How about this!  People will fall for anything if they start out with the wrong conclusion already in their heads!

This tale has a young boy hearing an ambiguous and incomprehensible conversation and quickly arriving at a conclusion. If we conclude from this story he came from a Christian ethic we can understand his conclusion, but it was a conclusion he didn't bother to investigate. He panics and then runs off in an emotional state and involves another party, an old man. But he was just a kid you might say. True, but what really makes this story work is bringing in an old man. Someone who should have known better, and then having him fall for the same fallacious conclusion as the young boy, both becoming imbued with an irrational panic!

But what's the big deal - after all, this was just a story?  It’s not real! No, but the theme is very real! Unfortunately for humanity much of what poses as science in the real world follow the concept of this story - fallacious conclusions! Conclusions charged with emotion and filled with logical fallacies, such as:

• Anecdotal fallacy - using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound reasoning or compelling evidence.
•  Appeal to probability – is a statement that takes something for granted because it would probably be the case (or might be the case).
•  Base rate fallacy – making a probability judgment based on conditional probabilities, without taking into account the effect of prior probabilities.
• Unwarranted assumption fallacy - The fallacy of unwarranted assumption is committed when the conclusion of an argument is based on a premise (implicit or explicit) that is false or unwarranted. An assumption is unwarranted when it is false.” Much of what impacts us from scientists involved in the world of activism ends up being conclusions in search of data to promote some cause or other.

Rachel Carson promoted the idea DDT was destroying the world’s bird population in her book Silent Spring. That was a lie and she had to know it. Rachel Carson is touted as a great scientist. She wasn’t a scientist at all.  She did no research. Carson was a writer with a science degree writing for the Fish and Wildlife Service writing about the research done by others. As a result we know she had to have access to the actual bird counts performed by the Audubon Society. She had to know the bird population of North American increased dramatically during the DDT years, including the Bald Eagle. And the robin was the most populous bird in North America. In short– she deliberately lied – and the world accepted it, as did most in the scientific community. People who had to know better!

Now we've "returned to the future", with the cycle of lies constantly being repeated by activists. They claim neonicotinoid pesticides cause Colony Collapse Disorder - that's a lie. As that lie finally unfolds they shift back to the Carson premise claiming neonicotinoids are killing birds - that's a lie too. They report "declines in certain groups and species of birds" but fail to report those declines preceded the introduction of neonics by decades. They also fail to report “other birds that rely on wetlands, such as waterfowl, have been increasing over the same period.” Clearly they should know better, but academics willingly jump on board with that same pattern of lies they accepted about DDT. It would appear fifty plus years of fact based reality haven't made a dent in their willingness to draw preconceived unfounded conclusions.

Let's try and get this once and for all time, the greenies lie!   Lies of commission and lies of omission! That's why logical fallacies play such a large role in their pronouncements. In his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell said logical fallacies:

"..........are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment."

This is true of virtually every issue promoted by the anti–everything activists, along with their myrmidons in government and science. The universities are now so addicted to government grant money they can no longer to be trusted regarding anything they promote or publish.

Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the original founders of the USEPA, says:

"....science is following the government money, and it’s a problem in all industries. We’ve totally distorted science, not all of it, but certainly at the university level. They know they have to say what the government wants to hear in the grant proposal process in order to get their money.

"U.S. EPA rules the roost, and if they’re not out to prove or say bad things about chemicals of all kinds, they won’t likely get the money. This is all driven by the environmental advocacy groups that control U.S. EPA today. It’s a horrible thing, and what it has done to science mostly at the academic level is bad. But U.S. EPA’s goal is to remove every useful chemical from the environment." (Read the entire interview here. RK)

Every year Retraction Watch lists hundreds of papers that have to be retracted, and many of them due to fraud. In one period in 2012 two hundred and thirty papers were retracted out of about fifteen hundred. And those were the ones caught. It's my belief there are far more that should be retracted and aren't because of the collusion among "scientists" of like persuasion. Government grant money has made science rich. When science becomes rich it becomes politics. When politics dominates science the term scientific integrity becomes an oxymoron. 

 

For decades the left has been screaming about anthropogenic global warming, and yet every prediction they made has failed.   Bill Gates was a big promoter of that nonsense, and now he's backing away, and being attacked by the only people making money off all this climate madness, the environmentalists.   This climate cult is killing Europe, "a poverty engine that is systematically draining Europe’s industrial base in global competition", as Ursula von der Leyen takes COP30 attendees, "on a journey to fairyland -- EU-style, dreamy, green-tinted, and disconnected from reality. The Commission President declared, with evident pride, that EU member states now have a “crystal-clear commitment” to reduce CO2 emissions by 90 percent by 2040."

 

As a result of their unending embrace of this insanity European pension funds, that heavily invested in Net Zero projects are facing massive losses.  Projects that were predicted to fail by those on my side of this issue twenty years ago.  

 

De Omnibus Dubitandum – Question Everything. That's my personal motto, and is supposed to be the personal motto of every scientist in the world. Well, truth is no longer the Holy Grail of science, it's grant money. So what's to be done? Society must take oversight of science into its own hands, and that oversight should include serious penalties for fraud. When fraud is exposed, as was done in the now infamous Tulane endocrine disruption study, someone should be charged criminally. In the Tulane study not one person was charged with a crime. And as far as I can tell - that never happens in science - making science a Sacred Cow! That needs to be changed!

The term "citizen scientist" came into existence in 2014 and includes anyone “whose work is characterized by a sense of responsibility to serve the best interests of the wider community" or "'a member of the general public who engages in scientific work, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions'" an amateur scientist.” That’s who we all have to become, but without allowing ourselves to be enfolded into the scientific community and used as "helpers", as is the current defining trend. 

 

If citizen science is to be effective it should be a movement of heterodoxy, having the courage to stand up to the conventional wisdom and tell the world, "you're wrong, and I'm going to tell you why!"

We cannot entrust policy promoted by “scientists”, because we know the scientific community isn't trustworthy. If we don’t stand up to be counted we will all end up like the old man and the young boy, panic stricken and running like chickens with their heads cut off, which is just what the activists want. A society that's panic stricken, ignorant and compliant to a movement that's irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.

Nothing But Nets and Lipstick on a Pig

  By Rich Kozlovich

Here's a thought from my old files, and don't even remember where it came from, but I'm posting it to use in a piece I'm working on dealing with Nothing But Nets, an anti-DDT pesticide group that has fought for decades against the use of the greatest weapon of mass survival ever developed for mankind, DDT! 

Left-wing individuals and organizations have disguised their agenda by adopting a new system of communication, one in which the crude old formulas such as “state ownership of the means of production” never appear..........the contemporary system of socialist communication to a beehive. Bees in a hive don’t “talk” to one another, but they do have an effective system of communication, and they all work toward a common goal, different bees performing different functions. “There is no need to posit an overarching conspiracy.  The world collectivist movement goes forward. None of its constituent parts — Communist, socialist, liberal — runs the whole thing; they don’t even consciously cooperate, for the most part.” But they manage never to sting one another.

But they've now changed their name to United to Beat Malaria, claiming it's a "A New Era of Nothing But Nets".  But while their site is at best ambiguous, except as a fund raising tool, I seriously doubt the only thing they changed is their name, including their stand on DDT, which brings me to this point.  Putting lipstick on a pig doesn't change it from being a pig.  They claim as a result of their efforts the rate of malaria has been cut in half, but what they fail to explain is many African nations have now reverted back to the use of DDT, and while their pesticide treated nets are a positive, their stand against DDT is a mass negative. 

• DDT and The Magic Study Machine!
• Book Review: Silent Spring at 50
• Silent Spring: The Consequences of 50 Years of Junk Science!
• Silent Spring: 50 Years of Junk Science, Part IV: The Legacy
• DDT: UN Coverup?
• DDT - Lets Have Another 10,000 Studies! 
• The Insanity Continues 
• Observations From the Back Row, 4-8-11
• DDT and the Silent Majority 
• DDT - Drinking the Kool-Aid
• The Real Face of DDT

And finally, I had the privilege of playing a very small part in the documentary 3 Billion and Counting  by Dr. Rutledge Taylor. 

• Billion and Counting and Me!

I will have more on United to Beat Malaria, and if it turns out I'm wrong, I will say so. I've alerted one of the most prolific writers and defenders of DDT in the nation, Paul Driessen, who I'm hoping will also deal with this, but make no mistake, DDT isn't a dead issue.  It's the only issue, because it's the foundational issue for the tyranny being imposed right now on the nation and the world via this false pandemic, global warming, energy, etc.  All things flow from that original ban to the tyranny we see taking place now. 

This from the World Net Daily:

To right-thinking Americans attempting to make sense of a nation seemingly gone mad, it's becoming increasingly clear that the irrational, deranged – and often demonic – leftwing political and cultural movements currently capturing the minds of millions of Americans are nothing short of full-fledged cults.

Although the high priesthood of all these leftwing religious cults – i.e., university professors, academics and other Marxist ideologues and activists – may be true believers, the people actually wielding REAL POWER do not believe any of it. To them, these leftwing cults conveniently serve to disguise and distract "the rabble" from what the leader class is REALLY up to, which is the pursuit of ever more power, wealth and glory for themselves, and a total transformation of America and the world.

All of this and much more is explored in a powerful, insightful and absolutely unique way in the latest issue of WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled "HOLY WAR: Defeating the growing cult of leftism and its total war on Christianity."

 

Children die when ‘eco-lies’ disrupt the war against mosquitoes

By Vijay Raj Jayaraj |July 15th, 2022|Environment|102 Comments @ CFACT

I am glad to be alive after a bout with dengue fever. But many across the world are not so fortunate. More than 4000 die each year due to dengue, a severe mosquito-borne disease.

It all began 10 days ago with intense fever. My body consistently clocked above 102 degrees Fahrenheit for 48 hours. Then followed severe pain in every part of the body. Once the fever and aching subsided, the second phase of the struggle began, with the blood platelet count falling dramatically.

Often, as in my case, the blood platelet count recovers on its own slowly. But in case of mismanagement, as the World Health Organization (WHO) reports, some people develop “complications associated with severe bleeding, organ impairment and/or plasma leakage.” In the worst cases, it results in death.

Contrary to expectation, the prevalence and incidence of cengue has increased in recent decades.

WHO says, “the number of dengue cases reported to WHO increased over 8 fold over the last two decades, from 505,430 cases in 2000, to over 2.4 million in 2010, and 5.2 million in 2019. Reported deaths between the year 2000 and 2015 increased from 960 to 4032, affecting mostly younger age group.”

“Before 1970,” the report went on, “only 9 countries had experienced severe dengue epidemics. The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries in the WHO regions of Africa, the Americas, the Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia and the Western Pacific.”

Why is there a dramatic increase when we have effective disease control mechanisms at our disposal? Because the application of those solutions has been hindered by environmental movements.

The increase in dengue can partially be attributed to radical environmentalists’ opposition to the most effective killer of mosquitoes, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane). The Aedes aegypti mosquito is the primary vector (carrier) of dengue. As per WHO, the mosquito is now “well adapted to urban habitats and breeds mostly in man-made containers/spaces.”  DDT remains one of the most effective deterrents of the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Thanks to Rachel Carson’s unscientific claims about DDT in her 1962 book Silent Spring, the environmental movement against DDT began with blind stupidity. In 1972, the U.S. EPA banned DDT. Then in 2004, several countries decided to ban DDT at the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Today, most arguments (and movements) against DDT can be traced back to the inspiration from this fallacious fear-mongering unscientific book and its claims on DDT.

Not only were Carson’s claims untrue, but they have also managed to cause the deaths of thousands across the globe during the last three decades by acting as an active ideological hurdle to employing DDT to kill the deadly mosquitoes.

Some cities in India for example are influenced by the lies from her book and fail to proactively fumigate public places with DDT. Instead of using DDT as a preventive method, DDT fumigation is limited to a responsive measure, fumigating only when dengue cases occur.

And so far, we have addressed only dengue. The benefits of DDT fumigation appear far more critical if we are to consider their role in prevention of Malaria. Malaria affects 300 million people every year. The situation is far worse in the African continent, where malaria kills two children every minute. DDT can prevent the transmission of malaria by as much as 90% if employed efficiently.

I am thankful that I have recovered, and I am thankful that our government in India has not banned DDT. In fact, India is supplying DDT to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia for malaria control.

DDT is a life saver, and any country with mosquito-borne diseases should allow its use. Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948 “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods,” including mosquitoes. Let not the lies of Rachel Carson rob millions of African children of their very lives.

This article originally appeared at TownHall

Author

• Vijay Raj Jayaraj

  "Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), is an Environmental Researcher based in New Delhi, India. He served as a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of British Columbia, Canada and has worked in the fields of Conservation, Climate change and Energy."

 

Never Ending Crises and the Ban on DDT

By Rich Kozlovich

I’m a newsie. I love history, I love the news, I love the way history plays into the events taking place daily. I love the fact that I can understand the why’s and where for’s of what is happening because of my lifelong interest in history.  I find the patterns of life play out over and over again as everything is cyclical.   I find that I love talking about it to those who are also interested, and I love explaining those why’s and where for’s and the historical foundation for all that exists today. 

Over these many years I've noticed a pattern of activity that I find sort of fascinating. Scares will ebb and flow, but never really go away.  Not only do these activists not want a crisis to go to waste, they don't want crises to ever end.

Even after an issue has been raised and dealt with it is clear activists keep these issues on the back burner for future reference, as if everyone will forget what the facts actually were. And to some extent they're right, because there will always be a new crop of young misinformed and uninformed potential acolytes they can gull into the green movement especially via these propaganda factories we call universities. Young people in search of some sense of worth who's minds are still easily molded, easily coerced by the need to belong, and searching for something in which they can believe, a clear failure of religion in America, are lured into these radical secular cults.

As a result, environmentalism, which is in reality a scion of socialism, has become today’s secular religion, thus, these young believes are susceptible to the Kyrie Eleison of environmentalism.  They soon become intellectually and philosophically drunk drinking the Kool Aid and breathing the fumes from the fever swamps of environmentalism, filling them with arrogance and a sense of self-righteous indignation at the rest of the world that no amount of valid scientific information or rational observation can cure.  We now call it the Church of Wokeness.  The left is like rust, it never sleeps and it keeps turning itself into an angel of light. 

I keep hearing all sorts of claims by activists and government grant chasing “scientists” that chemicals (especially pesticides) cause cancer, autism, low sperm count and a host of other unproven scares. This has been particularly true of DDT. More outrageous claims have been made against DDT than almost any product that has ever been developed, with the possible exception of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. Do chemicals really cause a drop in sperm count? We can answer with a resounding NO!  

In 2011 the American Council on Science and Health cited a study that clearly demonstrated that fact:

“the 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991”, was wrong! They point out that the study was “heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases” at the time. “We know that the so-called decline in sperm count is just another myth promulgated by the ‘our stolen future’ crowd who say that environmental chemicals lead to infertility in men,” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “But now we have proof that’s simply not true.”

This leads us back to DDT, which was banned by the first administrator of the EPA, Bill Ruckelshaus, in 1972. And yes, it was a ban. It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban, and yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations, and yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban, "at least on paper". However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

Lower sperm count was one of the claims, and yet the generation of parents who were most heavily exposed to DDT were the parents of the baby boomers, the largest generation of kids to ever come into existence.  At the end of WWII the world's population was approximately two billion people, and it took thousands of years to accomplish that.  In a little over 75 years the world's population soared to just under eight billion people.  So much for chemicals and low sperm counts, and DDT isn't the only chemical to which they make that claim. 

But time is the great leveler of truth.

I've followed this issue from the beginning and I knew the problem the EPA was having, and tried to ignore.  In 1996 when the Food Quality Protection Act was passed the bill contained a provision requiring the EPA to identify chemicals that were hormonally active agents (HAAs), commonly known as Endocrine Disruptors (ED) .  The problem with that was the ability to separate the ED potential of synthetic chemicals versus those which are naturally occurring.   That was the rub in 1996 and still is.   In his book "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About- Because They Helped Cause Them", Iain Murray states:

"The entire theory that industrialization is causing severe endocrine disruption falls completely apart when exposures to naturally occurring endocrine modulators are taken into account. Plants naturally produce endocrine modulators called "phytoestrogens" to which human being are expose at levels that are thousands and sometimes millions of time higher than those of synthetic chemicals. Humans consume these chemicals every day without adverse effects some even contend these chemicals promote good health."

He goes on to say:

"Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in forty-three different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat. Most amusingly, soybean, that product so beloved by liberal environmentalists, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens"....."it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms."

He also notes:

"As it turns out phytoestrogens are actually much more potent than the chemicals that act like estrogens. Our friend DDT, for instance, has a relative potency to natural estrogen of 0.000001, meaning it takes one million molecules to have the same impact of one molecule of real estrogen."

Most studies are filled with weasel word and phrases. Then there are the “conclusions in search of data” studies, much like the Hungarian studies of Trajan and Kemeny published in 1969. Using only 3 ppm in the food per day this dose was fed to five generations of inbred Balb/c mice. They claimed a higher incidence of leukemia in the test subjects over the control animals. They also claimed they started with a leukemia free strain, yet there were incidents of leukemia in the controls.

So what was disturbing about this study? Other researchers working with comparable dosages with animals of any species or strain showed no incidences of cancer of any type. The skepticism warranted an investigation into this puzzle.

Although everyone agreed something went wrong in their study they couldn’t definitely point out what went wrong.  However it was shown that there were design problems in the study and there was a possibility of aflatoxin (an absolutely known carcinogen) contaminated food.

Modern studies seem to have much the same problem. Conclusions in search of data! The question I keep asking is this. If DDT was banned for scientific reasons that were obvious, factual and could be replicated, then why have they been studying it since 1972 to prove that it does all the things they claimed it did? Answer?  Because they didn't have one iota of honest research to prove their claims.

Millions have been spent on studies that have been conclusions in search of data. The mere fact so much has been spent after the ban to prove the ban on DDT was proper is a good indicator that everyone, and I mean everyone, on both sides of this issue, know the science was lacking, what was presented was weak or as in the case with Rachel Carson, invalid, and the decision to ban DDT was a political one.

The real problem with the ban on DDT isn't the fact that we lost DDT. Why? Technically it didn’t matter (at least in the developed world) because we had a large arsenal of products to defend society’s health, food and property.

Philosophically it was devastating because it became the basis for all that has come into being since then. All those tools have come under attack, and as a result we have lost important chemistry. First it was the chlorinated hydrocarbons, then it was the organophosphates and carbamates and now the pyrethroids and rodenticides are under attack. 

But it doesn't end there.  The ban created an emotional, almost hysterical mindset, to create oversight bureaucracies, that were filled with activists and quickly became out of control creating regulations regarding the the , the Endangered Species Act, just to name a few.  Often times working in collusion with activist groups in "sue and settle" schemes to allow the courts to give them powers the Congress never intended.  

All of this goes back to the foundational thinking with ban on DDT. 

That ban laid the foundation for the emotional, financial and legislative foundation for the power these various sects of leftism, the environmental movement merely being one of them, to create an unending list of crises to disrupt the nation.  All with the goal of getting the people to turn all power over to these radicals, all in the name of safety and good health, allowing them to impose a tyrannical worldwide system of governance on the nation and the world.  The ban on DDT needs to be overturned for that reason alone.  

Let's try and understand this.  DDT isn't a dead issue.  It's a foundational issue.   

You may wish to view,

Fixing the Federal Government

By Rich Kozlovich

(Editor's Note:  I originally published this on 11/20/2016, but time has shown this needs to said again.  So, with updates I'm republishing this today.  RK)

There are so many things wrong with government it's almost impossible to know where to start. I don't envy those in the new administration who've been tasked with that job.  The backlash from the leftists in all these environmental movement, government officials, left wing activist groups, along with their hand maidens in the media has been far worse than anything thrown against Reagan.

To start with we need clarity.  It must be realized any successful modern industrial society needs energy - lots of it - cheap energy - if that society wishes to remain modern and successful.  Although I absolutely share all the concerns regarding energy and it’s production as foundational to a strong economy and sound society, I’m mostly concerned with pesticide issues, which is foundational to the green movement.  Everything started there.

If you really want to get the ball rolling - overturn the ban on DDT. That issue is foundational to the environmental movement. That’s where they got their credibility and more money and power than they ever dreamt of. Even if no one uses it, if the ban on DDT is overturned, and shown to have been a fraudulent action, then everything they’ve said is legitimately called into question.  Their success in banning DDT led to all the other actions by the green movement.

EPA has been involved in all these corrupt sue and settle deals with the activists and the courts have been party to giving them powers the Congress never intended. Investigate and prosecute any government employee that was a party to such an action under RICO. Even if the statute of limitations has run out on such investigations - there is no statute of limitations on firing people for corruption. Prosecute people like graduate student Steven Arnold involving the fraudulent endocrine disruption study out of Tulane University.   And he may have been the fall guy for bigger fish. 

However, it’s impossible to fix them because currently the EPA is so thoroughly infiltrated with environmental activists they will merely wait out any efforts to stop their corrupt practises until the administration changes and then start all over again. Congress is, on any given day, a weak sister in this battle to stop this illegal dismantling of American's Constitutional rights by government agencies under the auspices of "environmental protection".

When it comes to environmental concerns and the federal government, I’m really of the opinion for any "clean up" to be effective requires a broad broom, encompassing the EPA, Fish and Wildlife Service, Army Corp of Engineers, and the Bureau of Land Management.  We could start with adopting Jay Lehr’s five year plan to dismantle the EPA.  Jay is one of the founders of EPA and the Science Director of the Heartland Institute. 

I would like to know where in the Constitution it gives the EPA, or any government agency, more power than all the state governments and the courts of those states combined? They’ve got to be thoroughly dismantled, or at the very least de-funded to the point they are toothless. No more grant money to corrupt "scientists" promoting fallacious environmental claims such as global warming and in my industry - IPM in structural pest control.

The Institute for Energy Research released a new study that inventories these "vastly underutilized" federal assets:

Federal real property totals over 900,000 assets with a combined area of over 3 billion square feet and more than 41 million acres of land. Additionally, the federal government owns over 600 million acres of lands and minerals onshore, and owns or manages a total of approximately 755 million acres of onshore subsurface mineral estate. Offshore, the federal government owns some 1.76 billion acres of lands and mineral estate, extending out 200 nautical miles from our shores. The federal government’s total mineral estate holdings are therefore about 2.515 billion acres of lands. Thus, the federal government’s mineral estate land holdings surpass the total surface land area of the nation of Canada.

In fiscal year 2009, federal agencies reported 45,190 underutilized buildings, an increase of 1,830 underutilized buildings from the previous fiscal year. In fiscal year 2009, these underutilized buildings accounted for $1.66 billion in annual operating costs, according to the General Accounting Office (GAO). The majority of federally owned and leased space is held by the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Postal Service, and the General Services Administration (GSA). For example, the federal government’s landlord, the GSA, owns or leases 9,600 assets with more than 362 million square feet of workspace. According to the GSA, in a 2009 report, almost 40 percent of its assets were under performing. In October 2010, a congressional study evaluated the savings that could occur based on better administration of the government’s above ground assets that totaled over several hundred billion dollars.

 How much is all this worth?

IER estimated the worth of the government’s oil and gas technically recoverable resources to the economy to be $128 trillion, about 8 times our national debt. Further, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that state and national coffers could generate almost $150 billion over a 10 year period from royalties, rents, and bonuses if these resources were immediately opened to oil and gas leasing. The CBO study estimates are considered to be conservative when compared to historical data and estimates by other analysts and do not consider the earnings from taxes paid by these industries. IER estimated the government’s coal resources in the lower 48 states to be worth $22.5 trillion for a total worth to the economy of fossil fuels on federal lands of $150.5 trillion, over 9 times our national debt. Most of the coal resources in Alaska are deemed to be federally owned and are estimated to be 60 percent higher than those in the entire lower 48 states but are not included in these estimates.

Think about that!  Selling off all federal lands and all underutilized properties would actually pay off the national debt and re-fund Social Security.  What a massive fix!

Up until - I think it was 1911 - the goal of the federal government was to get federal lands into the hands of America’s citizens as fast as possible, that’s why everything East of the Mississippi River is largely privately owned and huge tracts of land West of the Mississippi is largely in the hands of the federal government.  Sell that land and there's no need for such a large agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service with their own armies.

It was around that time progressives under Teddy Roosevelt began infesting government passing the 16th and 17th amendments and creating the FED, in 1913. All foundational to the efforts by progressives (socialists) wanting to dismantle the Constitution, which both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson believed was outdated, unnecessary and an impediment to human progress - and should be replaced with "scientifically sound" administrative practises - as in Socialism,

After FDR became President he created vast government agencies under the New Deal, only it wasn't a New Deal at all - it as a re-institution of the fascist policies Woodrow Wilson imposed on the nation during WWI, which remained in effect for approximately two years after the war ended.  That didn't change until Harding became President in 1921. 

Those agencies created by FDR were run by many of the people who worked for Wilson, and were heavily infiltrated by Stalinist agents, communists, socialists and fellow travelers.  Although the Soviet Union and Stalin are gone, those people are still there.  They may have different bodies and different faces, but they're there with the same mentality, the same spirit and the same treasonous mentality.  They've got to be dismantled.

That can be initiated by reviewing all environment laws, starting with the National Environment Policy Act of 1969, but especially the Endangered Species Act. 

Review - defund - dismantle - return power to the states.  It's my opinion that can only be done if must repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments and add a 28th amendment to put age and term limits and restrictions on the federal judiciary, and the Congress. 

That's the only solution.

This is For Jenni

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published in 2011.  RK)

Occasionally when talking to people about pesticides and chemicals in general I find that some have some knowledge about studies that make all sorts of claims. The reality is that 10,000 poorly designed studies with weak associations filled with weasel words and assumptions (and possibly outright fraud such as the Tulane endocrine disruption study)  amount to nothing more than “conclusions in search of data”; and they are not worth one well designed study that is “data in search of a conclusion”. In short….they lie. Lies of commission and lies of omission.

As my friend Dr. Jay Lehr says; they don’t get government grant money unless they give these people what they want. Government grant money has turned the term “scientific integrity” into an oxymoron. When science gets rich, it gets political!

There are a number of articles I wish to highlight in this post dealing with two issues. Pesticides and IQ, and pesticides and endocrine disruption. In the developed world, where pesticides were used the most IQ's went up over the last fifty years.  As for sperm count issues; the knock on DDT was that it causes a loss of sperm count.  Even if this was true, it doesn’t seem to much matter even if it was true, because the generation most heavily exposed to DDT was also the generation that created the baby boomers.

At the end of WWII the world’s population numbered around two billion people, and it took thousands of years to accomplish that. The world’s population has soared to almost seven billion in less that seventy five years.   The reality is this; everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality.

Dr. Gil Ross, M.D. of the American Council on Science and Health recently wrote an article called, “Better Living Through Chemistry (If Permitted)”, Ross states:

“The overwhelming body of scientific evidence supports the safety of myriad chemicals in use today. A fusillade of recent items by the New York Times, US News, CNN, and others purports to show how certain common pesticides lead to reduced IQs among children of women exposed to these chemicals while pregnant.” 

He goes on to say:

“Dismayed, I carefully went over the paper that lies at the ground zero of the media frenzy. It is a study of the organophosphate (OP) class of pesticides by a group of researchers based at the University of California at Berkeley and led by Brenda Eskenazi.”

Furthermore, he says:

“Analogously, pesticides kill pests—insects, weeds, fungi—and increase crop yields and the safety of our food. Yet the anti-pesticide, anti-chemical, anti-technology crowd says the opposite.” “These same “friends of the earth” oppose genetically modified (or biotech) agriculture, again for no science-based reason. This technology is another potential method to increase production of desperately needed staple crops—yet the opposition stems from a fear of “frankenfoods,” despite these crops’ demonstrated safety over the past 15-plus years—echoing the never-ending crusade against DDT”

Ross notes:

“It was a sign of things to come, as the EPA expanded its search for “toxic” problems to fix—even if it had to invent them. Now the law of diminishing returns has set in: fewer serious (or even real) problems to fix, so the search for “toxins” to justify the huge EPA budget has become increasingly desperate. Is this know-nothing obstructionism what being “earth-friendly” means today?”

I keep hearing all sorts of claims by activists and government grant chasing “scientists” that chemicals (especially pesticides) cause cancer, autism, low sperm count and a host of other unproven scares. This has been particularly true of DDT. More outrageous claims have been made against DDT than almost any product that has ever been developed, with the possible exception of bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates. As for claims that there has been a drop in sperm count over these many decades. Gil posted an article dealing with this issue.

The American Council on Science and Health cited a study that clearly demonstrated:

“the 1992 study by a group of Danish researchers that claimed sperm counts declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1991”, was wrong! They point out that the study was “heavily criticized for its many flaws, methodological problems, and biases” at the time.  

“We know that the so-called decline in sperm count is just another myth promulgated by the ‘our stolen future’ crowd who say that environmental chemicals lead to infertility in men,” says the American Council on Science and Health's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “But now we have proof that’s simply not true.”  

Michael Fumento also addressed, “Our Stolen Future” in an article in 1999 entitled, Hormonally Challenged.

So, do chemicals really cause a drop in sperm count? Although it was obvious for years all these claims were junk science, we can finally answer with an absolute and resounding - NO!

 

Unfounded fears about synthetic pesticides

By Steve Goreham November 15th, 2018 Environment 0 Comments @ CFACT

Our modern society suffers from “chemophobia,” a fear of industrially-made chemicals. Synthetic pesticides, used to control insects, rodents, and weeds and to boost crop yields, are a major concern for many people. But the evidence shows that everyday exposure to synthetic pesticides is negligible and that widespread pesticide fears are unfounded.

Farmers have long sought to reduce damage from agricultural pests. Sulfur compounds were used as pesticides by the Sumerians as early as 4,500 years ago. Ancient Persia used a powder of pyrethrum, derived from dried chrysanthemum flowers, as an insecticide. Pyrethrum remains a frequently used natural pesticide. But modern chemical pesticides are labeled unsustainable and are widely feared by the public.

In her 1962 best-selling book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson leveled an attack on agricultural pesticides that continues today, stating :

"Since the mid-1940s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modern vernacular as ‘pests’ … Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”

Carson’s book targeted the widespread spraying of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), an effective pesticide against malarial mosquitoes, typhus-carrying lice, farm pests, and other insects. Carson falsely claimed that DDT was killing birds and causing cancer in humans.

Due to a rising tide of public concern, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned DDT use in 1972, followed by bans in most developed countries. DDT bans are blamed for triggering a malaria resurgence and millions of deaths in developing nations over following decades.

But DDT use was not found to be harmful to people, and with the possible exception of the thinning of raptor egg shells, no environmental impacts from DDT have been identified. In 2006, the World Health Organization lifted its ban on DDT and authorized indoor spraying of DDT to control malaria. Nevertheless, because of Carson’s book and fears promoted by environmental groups, synthetic pesticides are wrongly blamed for a wide range of human health problems.

Pesticides are poison. At high levels of exposure, pesticides can be harmful to people and associated with cancer, genetic and reproductive issues, nervous system damage, and skin damage.

But, as with all natural or synthetic chemicals, the dose makes the poison. Paracelsus, a Swiss physician of the 1500s, is regarded as the father of modern toxicology. He stated, “All substances are poison. There is none which is not a poison. The right dose makes the difference between a poison and a remedy.” Even sunlight and water are poisons in high doses. The good news is that, for the average person, synthetic pesticides are encountered at far below harmful levels.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) analyzes samples from thousands of foods each year to detect synthetic pesticide residues. Laboratory methods detect residues down to low parts-per-billion levels. In 2016, the USDA collected and tested 10,365 samples from dairy products, fruits, and vegetables. Over 99.5 percent of the samples had synthetic pesticide levels below limits set by the EPA.

US and European pesticide safety levels are set at extremely low levels of exposure, typically 100 times below the no observed adverse effect level found in laboratory experiments with animals. Limits for pesticides in water are yet hundreds of times lower than food-limit levels. Food and water in developed nations today is remarkably free of synthetic pesticides.

Through great marketing efforts, “natural” agricultural techniques have become favorites, while “processed” or “synthetic” methods are rejected. Organic fertilizer, or horse manure, is promoted as superior to chemically-processed nitrogen fertilizer. But the chemical composition of a material is the important factor, not whether it is “natural.” Natural and synthetic pesticides are an excellent example.

The vast majority of pesticides that humans ingest are natural, produced by plants. Natural pesticides include aflatoxin, nicotine, pyrethrum, and strychnine. Plants produce pesticides to deter insects and rodent predators. Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California estimated that 99.99 percent of pesticides in our diet are from plants. Only 0.01 percent of dietary pesticides are synthetic pesticides produced by industry that Rachel Carson so feared.

Caffeine is an insecticide. A single cup of coffee contains natural pesticides equal in weight to a full year’s consumption of synthetic pesticides. This does not mean that coffee is hazardous, only that dietary fears about synthetic pesticides are irrational.

One of the early concerns about DDT and some other organochloride pesticides was their tendency to persist in the environment. DDT is fat soluble and can accumulate in the tissues of birds and animals.

But newer pesticides are designed to quickly break down in farm fields to minimize any long-term environmental impact. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp, breaks down within a few weeks of application. In addition, bioengineered crops are designed to allow less pesticide to be used while increasing agricultural yields.

Only a few members of society need to take proper precautions regarding synthetic pesticides. These are people manufacturing or applying pesticides that may be exposed to high doses of the chemicals.

So enjoy your coffee and the abundant foods produced by modern agriculture. But don’t sweat the pesticides.

US and European pesticide safety levels are set at extremely low levels of exposure, typically 100 times below the no observed adverse effect level found in laboratory experiments with animals. Limits for pesticides in water are yet hundreds of times lower than food-limit levels. Food and water in developed nations today is remarkably free of synthetic pesticides.

 Through great marketing efforts, “natural” agricultural techniques have become favorites, while “processed” or “synthetic” methods are rejected. Organic fertilizer, or horse manure, is promoted as superior to chemically-processed nitrogen fertilizer. But the chemical composition of a material is the important factor, not whether it is “natural.” Natural and synthetic pesticides are an excellent example.

The vast majority of pesticides that humans ingest are natural, produced by plants. Natural pesticides include aflatoxin, nicotine, pyrethrum, and strychnine. Plants produce pesticides to deter insects and rodent predators. Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California estimated that 99.99 percent of pesticides in our diet are from plants. Only 0.01 percent of dietary pesticides are synthetic pesticides produced by industry that Rachel Carson so feared.

Caffeine is an insecticide. A single cup of coffee contains natural pesticides equal in weight to a full year’s consumption of synthetic pesticides. This does not mean that coffee is hazardous, only that dietary fears about synthetic pesticides are irrational.

One of the early concerns about DDT and some other organochloride pesticides was their tendency to persist in the environment. DDT is fat soluble and can accumulate in the tissues of birds and animals.

But newer pesticides are designed to quickly break down in farm fields to minimize any long-term environmental impact. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp, breaks down within a few weeks of application. In addition, bioengineered crops are designed to allow less pesticide to be used while increasing agricultural yields.

Only a few members of society need to take proper precautions regarding synthetic pesticides. These are people manufacturing or applying pesticides that may be exposed to high doses of the chemicals.

 So enjoy your coffee and the abundant foods produced by modern agriculture. But don’t sweat the pesticides

 

We Were Winning the War Against Malaria

In the early 1970s malaria was all but eliminated by DDT.

Regarding Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan’s “How Long Till the Final World Malaria Day?” (op-ed, April 25): Dr. Narasimhan conveniently omits the fact that in the early 1970s malaria was all but eliminated by one of the most important pesticides ever invented—DDT. While study after study proved DDT to be effective in eliminating the malaria-carrying mosquito, the EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, chose to ignore the opinions of his own study group and ruled against the continued use of DDT.

The world followed and the exponential increase of malaria deaths followed around the world. Environmental groups cheered as the disease once again got out of control in the 1980s. Books like Rachel Carson’s flawed “Silent Spring” talked of thinning bird eggshells and increased bird mortality. Audubon bird-count records proved the opposite, and the eggshell studies were in fact of caged birds deprived of calcium in their diets.

Novartis surely will profit from continued efforts to control malaria through methods that will never equal what was already being accomplished by DDT. J. Gordon Edwards, who was the world’s leading expert on malaria and DDT in the 1970s, must be turning over in his grave.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D. The Heartland Institute Arlington Heights, Ill.

This appeared as letter to the Wall Street Journal.  I wish to thank Jay for alerting me.

What natural disasters should teach us ​

Hurricanes, landslides and other disasters show Africans why we need fossil fuels

Steven Lyazi

I express my deepest sympathies to the people in the Caribbean and United States who have been impacted by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. The loss of life was tragic but has thankfully been much lower than in many previous storms. Buildings are stronger, people get warned in time to get out, and they have vehicles to get to safer places until the storms pass.

I also send my sincere sympathies to my fellow Ugandans who have been affected by terrible landslides in eastern Uganda, near Kenya. Natural disasters often strike us hard. Sometimes it is long droughts that dry up our crops and kill many cattle. This year it is torrential rains and landslides.

This time we were lucky. The collapsing hillsides destroyed three villages, but thankfully it was daytime and people were outside. They lost their homes, cattle and ripened crops, but not their families. A horrendous mudslide in the same mountainous area in 2010 buried 350 parents and children under 40 feet of mud and rock.

People there have been cutting down trees for decades – for fuel, lumber and to grow crops. Now no roots hold the hills together when it rains. More cracks have appeared in the hills, so more slides are likely. But people don’t want to leave their lands, and they’re not planting new trees either.

Some people are ignoring all this history and the human roles in causing these “natural” disasters. They are blaming the rains and mudslides on global warming, climate change and the fossil fuels that modern industrialized countries burn to provide modern homes, travels and living standards.

These false claims are intended to divert us from real problems. They are intended to justify demands and campaigns that Ugandans and other Africans should rely on a few wind turbines and solar panels and should never use oil, natural gas or coal to provide cheap, reliable and plentiful energy so that we can live more like Americans or Europeans.

These people want to become our Jesus, and save us from “global warming disasters,” by keeping us poor and at the mercy of Mother Nature. Former vice president Mr. Al Gore said manmade global warming has increased the number and strength of tornadoes and hurricanes, Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier would disappear by 2016, and Arctic summers would be ice-free as soon as 2014.

None of this happened. So he just changed the year when the disasters will hit. Mr. Gore declares in his film that “it is right to save humanity.” Yes, it is and I support that with no argument.

But I would suggest that he and his friends begin by injecting their own billions of dollars into fossil fuels and nuclear energy to create jobs around the world, help us build modern homes, uplift economies so that people can live a self-sustainable life, and get rid of the diseases that are killing us.

He needs to stop trying to scare us by spreading false gospels about mankind and fossil fuels. He needs to stop trying to save humanity from movie disasters, when we face real disasters. He needs to stop making us rely on renewable energy, while he continues to have many big homes, drive around in big cars and fly in private jets all over the world.

Just in the last 25 years, fossil fuels have helped over 1.5 billion people in developing nations get electricity and escape deprivation, starvation, and lung and intestinal diseases that used to kill them and their children. But Africa, India and Asia still have vast regions that need to be electrified. More than a billion people in those regions still do not enjoy the wonderful blessings that electricity brings.

These places need more coal, gas and nuclear power plants. Thankfully they are building them, no matter what Mr. Gore and his radical friends say. Mr. Gore and his friends have fancy homes with every modern technology that electricity can bring. They have cars and modern hospitals.

My family in Kampala has a few of these things – a few lights and a radio, small stove and not even a little refrigerator. I just got a used computer that a friend sent me from the United States. Someday we would like a television and a normal sized refrigerator, like what we see in Europe and the States. Can we dream that someday we will have air conditioning?

Can the people in eastern Uganda dream of a time when they can rebuild their homes with more than mud and sticks? And actually have electricity, lights, refrigerators and stoves?

Radical Al Gore, renewable energy cheerleaders and climate activists have sweet homes and nice cars, jets and trains to take them anywhere they want to go 24/7. They cannot even come close to understanding how it feels to live in darkness, drink dirty water, and have no medicine except herbs and the grace of God when they get sick from malaria and other diseases they have never even heard of. They cannot imagine not being able to have a cold drink or hot coffee when they want one.

But they tell us we should be happy to enjoy the tiny improvements we might get from wind and solar power, as an “acceptable” and “preferred” and “sustainable” alternative to really better lives.

I have said this in my past articles, and I will still say it again. In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 700 million people still cook with wood, charcoal and animal dung, Hundreds of millions get horribly sick every year – and thousands die every year from lung and intestinal diseases, because we have to breathe smoke from open fires and don’t have refrigeration, clean water and safe food. Hundreds of millions are starving and malnourished, and try to survive on a few dollars a day.

Mr. Al Gore, how many dollars do you “survive” on per day? How many homes and refrigerators do you have? Can your refrigerators hold more than a few vegetables and a few bottles of milk or water?

To use the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, our impoverished masses simply want to take their rightful, God-given places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Instead, we are being told “that wouldn’t be sustainable.” We are being told that improving our health, living standards and life spans is less important than avoiding the forthcoming climate cataclysm that Mr. Gore and his movies and computer models say will happen if we Africans modernize with fossil fuels.

These claims – and the false solutions to make-believe problems sometime in our future – ignore the real disasters and deaths that face us right now, every day of the year. They are intended to divert us from the better lives and sweet homes we dream of. They are intended to make Mr. Gore and his friends and the radical cheerleaders feel like they are saving Africans and our planet, while in reality they are killing millions of us every year.

Right this very minute, climate alarmists are blaming hurricanes and landside on fossil fuels. While they enjoy fancy homes, cozy beds and sofas, heating and air conditioning that keep them comfortable all year round, televisions and Alexa music, air travel whenever they want to go somewhere – they tell us Africans we should be happy and content with our “simple lives.” They tell us we should keep our oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy underground and untouched.

This is disgraceful. It is unacceptable. We will no longer tolerate it.

Alexander King was the co-founder of the Club of Rome, which wrote The Limits to Growth book. During World War II, he organized production of a new insecticide and gave it the name DDT. The chemical saved the lives of thousands of Allied troops in the Far East. It was also used to stop typhus epidemics in Europe after the war.

But later on he said: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem. Of course, I can’t play God on that one.”

But King and his followers did play God. They got DDT banned and even blocked its use in preventing malaria for decades. Millions of African parents and children died. Now his descendants want to keep us from using fossil fuels. Where is the justice and humanity in any of this?

Steven Lyazi is a student and worker in Kampala, Uganda. He served as special assistant to Congress of Racial Equality-Uganda director Cyril Boynes, until Mr. Boynes’ death in January 2015. He plans to attend college and help his country and Africa get the energy and other modern technologies they need.

USNAS Estimates DDT Saved 500 Milion Lives Before it was Banned

By Art Robinson

Readers of Access to Energy have repeatedly, over the past decade, been reminded of a terrible and tragic circumstance: Somewhere on the Earth, on average every 12 seconds, a child dies of DDT-preventable malaria.

The United States National Academy of Sciences estimated that DDT saved 500 million lives before it was banned. The discoverer of DDT was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Then came Silent Spring — a book filled with deliberate falsehoods and blatantly marketed unreasoning and unjustified fear. The burgeoning enviro movement chose these lies for one of their first big campaigns. This campaign coincided with the rise of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was in search of a big win with which to promote itself. The EPA studied the subject and its own scientific review board reported that – DDT is harmless to the environment and is a very beneficial substance that should not be banned.

Politics prevailed, however, over reason. DDT was banned, and the U.S. government spread that ban throughout the world by tying it to all sorts of international programs.........To Read More....

Enemies of humanity

Mosquitoes and uncaring environmental activists perpetuate poverty, disease and death

Steven Lyazi

After being infected again with malaria last July, I spent almost a month in a Kampala hospital. Paying for my treatment was extremely difficult, as it is for most Ugandan and African families. I was lucky I could scrape the money together. Many families cannot afford proper treatment.

Where and how can they get the money to go back to the hospital again and again, every time a family member gets malaria, when they also need food, clothes and so many other things – or malaria makes them so sick that they can’t work for weeks or even months? Many parents can do nothing except watch their loved ones die in agony, and then give them a simple burial.
 

Far too many people still die from malaria every year in Africa, the vast majority of them women and children. Too many more die from lung and intestinal diseases, because we don’t have electricity, natural gas, clean water, or decent modern homes, clinics and hospitals.
 

Malaria also makes many people so weak that they die from other diseases that people in Europe and the United States rarely even hear about, like chronic dysentery. It saps people’s strength for years and leaves them with severe liver and kidney damage. Cerebral malaria causes lifelong learning and memory problems.
 

All these diseases create enormous barriers to Africa’s economic growth. They drain our national healthcare budgets and deepen our poverty. Malaria control and treatment alone cost Africa over $12 billion annually. Uganda alone spends $11 million a year fighting it. The disease drains an estimated $100 billion every year from the African economy.
 

Malaria also hits India and other countries really hard. The World Health Organization (WHO) says it drains India’s economy of as much as $2 billion every year. Billions in wages are lost, because people die or are absent from work, have low productivity due to fatigue, and have to spend so much on bed nets, insecticides, bug repellants, medicines, treatments and hospital care.
 

Terrible roads mean that, even when AIDS and other drugs are shipped to African countries, few people receive them. Many sit in warehouses until their expiration date passes, and then those expired drugs get sold on the black market. People buy them, and die. Other times, they take drugs until they feel better, and then sell the rest of the prescription. Then a more deadly, resistant malaria comes back and makes them even worse.
 

And yet global green campaigners endlessly spend money trying to prevent Africans from using fossil fuels, promoting renewable energy and trying to sell us little solar ovens. But this great generosity does nothing to address the horrible realities of people dying now – day after day, year after year. Greens worry constantly about Africans being exposed to insecticides. We worry about dying from malaria.
 

We don’t need enemies of humanity. What we need is financial and political support to conquer malaria, lung diseases and intestinal parasites. We need clean water and affordable, reliable electricity in our villages and cities. We need modern hospitals.
 

We need environmental activists to realize how important fossil fuels and hydroelectric plants are to having decent, healthy living standards, lights, computers, the internet, clean hospitals, clean water, and everything else modern countries have.
 

We need them to support us Africans in preventing malaria in the first place – which means we need more than bed nets. We need campaigners to recognize that we have the same rights as people in modern, rich, industrialized countries to decent living standards and modern technology.
 

Malaria viruses are constantly mutating, making available treatments less effective. Many families cannot afford the drugs, and many of the drugs are fake, just packaged to look like the real thing. People spend money on them, they don’t help at all, and people die.
 

The WHO says over 3 billion people around the world are still at risk of getting malaria. In 2015, there were 212 million cases of malaria and 438,000 people died, the vast majority of them in Africa.
 

Many of these illnesses and deaths could be prevented if just a few simple steps were taken right now, especially by allowing and encouraging countries to use preventive measures that work, like DDT.
 

So many people have access to medical care only on an irregular basis. Others have never learned how to take proper care of themselves or their children. But the most fundamental problem is malaria-carrying mosquitoes that are the source of our biggest scourge. And there is a readily available life-saving solution – DDT and other pesticides to kill mosquitoes and keep them out of our homes.
 

To me, there is simply no substitute for DDT. It is the most affordable, longest lasting, most effective mosquito repellant in existence. Sprayed in tiny amounts on the walls of traditional homes, just once or twice a year, DDT repels mosquitoes from the entire house, kills any that land on walls, and perplexes or irritates any that are not killed or repelled, so their urge to bite is gone.
 

Other pesticides that some activists say we can use are not as appropriate, or they are up to six times more expensive than DDT, or they have to be sprayed much more often. Every dollar spent this way is a dollar that’s unavailable for safe drinking water, electricity and other critical needs. 
 

DDT for indoor residual spraying programs is rejected because it is supposedly dangerous to the environment and might be detected in our blood or on agricultural products. We use it carefully, it is less dangerous than other pesticides, and being able to detect it does not mean it is a risk to anyone. No one has ever died from it, and it can help prevent malaria and other diseases that ruin our lives and kill us. 
 

Where DDT is used in the developing world, malaria cases and deaths often drop by 80% or more. Where it is not used, people die. If we can prevent malaria and other insect-carried diseases in the first place, we won’t have so many people sick and out of work. Families won’t have to spend their savings on treatment. Doctors and nurses won’t be overwhelmed, and will have the time and resources to address other health problems. It’s that simple.
 

But too many politicians and activists have made it impossible to prevent the disease by killing and repelling mosquitoes. They constantly oppose DDT use and insist that developing countries rely on insecticide-treated bed nets, larvae-eating fish and other strategies that are simply inadequate.

Malaria is no longer a killer in western countries – because they used DDT to help eradicate the disease decades ago. That may be a key reason as why many well-off westerners talk about environmental considerations being supreme, and tell Africans and other third world countries not to use pesticides because of supposed health risks and environmental damage.
 

Malaria also has nothing to do with global warming. It existed for centuries in northern Europe and even in Siberia. The same mosquito species still live there. They just don’t carry malaria anymore, and so cannot transmit it to people. That’s what we want to do in Africa.
 

Americans would never tolerate being told they could not protect their children – or that they should rely on bed nets or wait more long years for new drug treatments or magic mosquitoes that cannot carry malaria. But Africans are repeatedly told we have to be content with exactly these limited safeguards, while parents and children get sick and die. That is inhumane and imperialistic.
 

If wealthy nations and NGOs really want to help developing nations, they should support fossil fuel power plants for reliable, affordable electricity. They should support DDT as an important part of the solution to eradicate this serial killer, so that Africans can work, spend less on malaria, have more money for other healthcare and family needs, and develop as much as rich nations have.

 

Steven Lyazi is a student and worker in Kampala, Uganda. He served as special assistant to Congress of Racial Equality-Uganda director Cyril Boynes, until Mr. Boynes’ death in January 2015. He plans to attend college and help his country and Africa get the energy and other modern technologies they need.


A few thoughts from Paul Driessen a frequent Paradigms and Demographics contributor. - Steven Lyazi, my young friend in Uganda, had another brush with malaria a few weeks ago. He writes about it in his latest article, and offers his thoughts on African versus environmentalist priorities.

Malaria drains some $100 billion a year from African economies, he notes, and kills over 400,000 people a year, mostly in Africa. “And yet,” he says, “global green campaigners endlessly spend money trying to prevent Africans from using fossil fuels, promoting renewable energy and trying to sell us little solar ovens.

But this great generosity does nothing to address the horrible realities of people dying now – day after day, year after year. Greens worry constantly about Africans being exposed to insecticides. We worry about dying from malaria.”

Thank you for posting his article, quoting from it, forwarding it to your friends and colleagues – and helping to change the mindsets that continue to hold Africa back, by imposing harmful policies on countries that are trying to end killer diseases and raise living standards to what Americans and Europeans enjoyed 50 to 100 years ago.

Paul