Rachel Carson, environmentalism's answer to Pol Pot.

James Dillingpole, May 28th, 2009

Yesterday would have been her 102nd birthday and I'm sorry I missed it, but my sharp-eyed fellow-traveller David Hinz at The Minority Report celebrated with a lively dance on the old fraud's grave. He doesn't mince his words: Rachel Carson - poster girl of the international eco movement - was a "mass murderer" to rival Stalin and Pol Pot.

Was she really responsible for the deaths of as many as 50 million people? That's just an estimate. What we do know is that her landmark 1962 bestseller Silent Spring - the book that set a million and one green activists on the path of eco righteousness - was responsible for the worldwide ban on the insecticide DDT, the most effective preventative against the mosquitos which spread the world's deadliest disease, Malaria. In this way countless millions of people, mostly Third World children, were condemned to death in the name of ecological correctness.

Rather as so many people do now with the global warming/climate change story, readers in the 1960s just couldn't get enough of Rachel Carson's apocalyptic predictions of man-made eco doom. There might, she claimed, be a cancer epidemic which would hit 'practically 100 per cent' of the human population; bird life would be wiped out. And all because of the evil DDT. As a result of this scare-mongering DDT was banned first by an eco-activist administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), subsequently by the UN and the World Health Organisation.

Problem was, few if any of the claims made by Carson were true. They were derived from a complete misrepresentation of research by Dr James DeWitt.

She claimed: "Dr DeWitt's now classic experiments [show] that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched."

In fact DeWitt's research had shown the exact opposite:

"DeWitt reported no significant difference in egg hatching between birds fed DDT and birds not fed DDT. Carson omitted mentioning DeWitt's report that DDT-fed pheasants hatched about 50 percent more eggs than "control" pheasants."

DDT doesn't cause cancer. (Carson blamed DDT for something that was actually, later research found, caused by aflatoxin, a toxic by-product of fungi). Nor does it damage bird reproduction. In 1971-72 an EPA judge concluded after seven months and 9,000 pages of testimony:

"DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man... DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man... The use of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

In 2006, the WHO tacitly acknowledged its mistake by partially rescinding the ban. "We must take a position based on the science and the data. One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT," said Arata Kochi of WHO.

Do the utterly misleading "extreme scenarios" posited by Rachel Carson remind you of anyone? Prince Charles, maybe? Al Gore? Dr James Hansen? No surprise if they do. Carson's bestselling brand of junk science and misanthropic, anti-capitalist doom-mongering has provided the model for the international green movement ever since.

Book Review: Silent Spring at 50

Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Hardcover) $25.95, By Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss

Click here to look inside the book.
 

This book is a "must read" for the pesticide manufacturing, distribution and application professionals ,and is the perfect book for those with an interest in the EPA and the regulatory nightmare that has been created by Silent Spring, Carson, the green movement and those who actually created the foundational logic and views of modern environmental history, because the ban on DDT was foundational to this movement.

This book will force anyone who really wants to search out the truth to think about the issues.  It also helps to know about the foundational thinkers and early writers that influenced Carson. 

I have to say this is the strangest book I have ever read on this subject.  The primary writers enlisted the efforts of a number of people who wrote with different styles and philosophies.  That can be a bit of a turn off, but in order to really appreciate what's happening in this book it is important to get past that and read this book to its conclusion.  I feel this book is that important.  

I will say this though.  The history of pesticide regulation goes back to 1910, and you will find that the manufacturers will not come out of this looking like anything except Machiavellian in their attempt to pass laws and regulations to prevent smaller companies from cutting into their margins, no matter how they attempt to frame their views.  A case of not seeing the long term consequences of unleashing the regulatory hounds.    

There is one point that some may find disturbing, and that is the issue of egg shell thinning where in Larry Katzenstein’s chapter he says that:

“Virtually everyone now agrees that DDT can harm certain bird species: its magnification up the food chain does cause thinning to occur in the eggs of raptors (including the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, and the osprey), resulting in a decline in the number of those birds."  

That's inaccurate, but the rest of the chapter is very well done, and one I enjoyed.  He also provides wonderful information on what is the primary legacy of Silent Spring imposed on the world today; The Precautionary Principle.  As I said, there are different writing styles and philosophies presented including the first chapter from a self described activist.  There is one thing they all agree on.  Silent Spring is not a scientific publication and its author was not a scientist. 

As I have said, in many ways it was the strangest book on this subject I have ever read, but also the one most thought provoking because of its depth.  It kind of reminds me of working a crossword puzzle.  You have to fit the pieces together, and this book forces you to think a bit differently, and in my opinion more effectively.

Although I underlined and highlighted heavily while reading, my regret is that I didn’t take side notes and create an extra index for easier reference.  This is a book to be studied and I may have to read it again to get the full impact. 

This book isn’t just for scholars!  It is a must read book for all those involved in any chemical industry and for those who stand against the irrational, misanthropic and morally defective green movement.   

Silent Spring: Fifty Years of Junk Science, Part III - By Rich Kozlovich Saturday, February 9, 2013 - Rachel Carson is commonly known as the mother of the environmental movement due to the publication of her book Silent Spring.  Why did this book have such an impact?  First of all, she was an exceptional writer.  Her writing skills placed her beyond the works of others of her time discussing many of the same subjects.  Originally her major in college was English, which she later changed to biology, but first and foremost she considered herself a writer.   Although classified as a scientist, she wasn’t a practicing scientist.  While “working for the U.S. Bureau of Fish and Wildlife Services in the Commerce Department, her job there was as a writer, summarizing then popularizing the work of scientists in the lab and in the field.” Before she wrote Silent Spring she was already well known for her books about the ocean.  Her personal research included “a brief and shallow dive clinging to a boat’s ladder”.  She never claimed to have been where she had not, but she wrote with a technique “guiding the reader in narrative form, observing as if with her own eyes- or the readers.” …….

From The Climate Policy Network

Silent Spring at 50

The False Alarm of Rachel Carson 

 

 This week Silent Spring will turn 50. Rachel Carson’s jeremiad against pesticides is credited by many as launching the modern environmentalist movement, and the author, who died in 1964, is being widely lauded for her efforts. In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. --Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, October 2012

Did cancer doom ever arrive? No. In Silent Spring Carson cites data showing that American farmers were then applying about 637 million pounds of pesticides to their crops. The most recent Environmental Protection Agency estimate is that farmers used 1.1 billion pounds in 2007. What happened to cancer incidence rates? According the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, age-adjusted incidence rates have been dropping for nearly two decades. Why? Largely because fewer Americans are smoking and lots of women stopped using hormone replacement therapy, which researchers have now concluded significantly increased the risk of breast cancer. --Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, October 2012

This iconic book, hardly scrutinized over the decades, substituted sensationalism for fact and apocalyptic pronouncements for genuine knowledge. Carson made little effort to provide a balanced perspective and consistently ignored key evidence that would have contradicted her work. Despite her reputation as a careful science- and fact-based writer, Carson produced a best-seller full of significant errors and sins of omission.  Carson vilified the use of DDT and other pest controls in agriculture but ignored their role in saving millions of lives worldwide from malaria, typhus, dysentery, among other diseases. Millions of deaths, and much greater human suffering, ultimately resulted from pesticide bans as part of disease-eradication campaigns. -- Roger Meiners, Master Resource, 21 September 2012

 Carson produced a best-seller full of significant errors and sins of omission. Far from being on the verge of collapse, American bird populations were, by and large, increasing at the time of Silent Spring’s publication. Although Carson was active in the Audubon Society, she ignored Audubon’s annual bird count, which had long been the best single source on bird population. Instead she relied on anecdotes claiming bird population was collapsing. It is inconceivable that Carson did not know about the annual bird count–some of which occurred in the locations she asserted were in collapse. -- Roger Meiners, Master Resource, 21 September 2012

Rachel Carson's mentor and the source for much of her case that synthetic pesticides, and DDT in particular, were devastating bird life and causing widespread cancer in people, was a fervent denier of the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer. His name was Wilhelm Hueper. An immigrant to the United States from Germany (who shook off an embarrassing but brief enthusiasm for Nazism that led him to seek a job back in Hitler's Germany) he became the first director of the environmental cancer section of the US National Cancer Institute. There he single-mindedly pursued the idea that cancer was on the increase and that the cause was largely synthetic chemicals in the environment. He encountered resistance, however, and not just from the chemical industry. Medical scientists were growing convinced that the rise of lung cancer was being caused by a rise in smoking. Hueper would have none of it. –-Matt Ridley, The Spectator, 20 September 2012 

 Dr. Baldwin led a committee at the National Academy of Sciences studying the impact of pesticides on wildlife. In his review, he praised Ms. Carsons’s literary skills and her desire to protect nature. But, he wrote, “Mankind has been engaged in the process of upsetting the balance of nature since the dawn of civilization.” While Ms. Carson imagined life in harmony before DDT, Dr. Baldwin saw that civilization depended on farmers and doctors fighting “an unrelenting war” against insects, parasites and disease. He complained that “Silent Spring” was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a “prosecuting attorney’s impassioned plea for action.” But scientists like him were no match for Ms. Carson’s rhetoric. DDT became taboo even though there wasn’t evidence that it was carcinogenic (and subsequent studies repeatedly failed to prove harm to humans). -- John Tierney, The New York Times, 5 June 2007

A half-century ago this summer, Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring began to appear in serialized form in The New Yorker, instilling an awareness of environmental impacts in the very fabric of our culture. Silent Spring now affects everything we do, buy, eat and wear. It has also shaped how we think about technology in general and pesticides in particular, seeing them at best as necessary evils. This legacy has yielded both good and bad results. The good is that Silent Spring inspired the creation of federal regulation that subjects pesticides and new technologies to strict scientific scrutiny before they can be commercialized and used. The bad is that the demonization of agricultural technology obscures the overwhelming environmental fact of our times, that such technology — even pesticides — has been an overwhelming good for the environment and human health. --Charlie Stenholm and John Block, USA Today, 27 September 2012
 

Silent Spring: A New Book!

______

Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Hardcover) $25.95

By Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss

Click here to look inside the book.

 

Silent Spring: The Consequences of 50 Years of Junk Science!

By Rich Kozlovich Tags:  Silent Spring: 50 Years of Junk Science, Part IV: The Legacy 

This first appeared in "The Standard", the quarterly newsletter of the Ohio Pest Management Association. I didn't wish to post it until the newsletter was published. RK

This June marked the 50 anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring.” I am fascinated by how many young people don’t know about this book; and I am fascinated by how many who are impressed by it and have never read it. It also amazed me at how much Rachel Carson has been lauded publically, and yet how few people know about Norman Borlaug who saved untold millions, and because of that was probably the greatest man of the 20th century.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) lived her early years in Springdale, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, and graduated from the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania College for Women (Chatham College) in 1929. She later earned a master’s degree in zoology from John Hopkins University. She is the author of “Silent Spring” (her 4th book), published in 1962, and it is considered by some to be one of the most damaging books of the 20th century.

Her claims in this book about decreases in mammal and avian wildlife as a result of DDT were simply wrong. One of the many claims by Carson was that robins were in danger of extinction as a result of continued use of DDT. The truth was that there were more robins in the DDT era than before. And according to Audubon bird charts, there may have been as many as 47 times more. World renowned Ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson stated that the robin was the most abundant bird in North America around the same time that “Silent Spring” came out.

None of the predictions regarding cancer made by Carson ever came true. She herself died of breast cancer on April 14, 1964, at the age of 56, two years after her book came out. She did not live long enough to see real scientists using real science shred her claims. Unfortunately, this gave impetus to her unscientific statements.

Considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, her radical naturalism became the standard for the movement. She taught that the environment had done all of the shaping and directing on the Earth, and it was an act of arrogance for man to attempt to control nature. She is still lauded in various encyclopedias as a thorough, meticulous, highly qualified scientist. Those that have attacked her are presented as self serving large chemical companies. Although the chemical companies did attack her, there were also sincere, dedicated scientists such as J. Gordon Edwards who were just as concerned as Carson about large corporations and their designs on nature, and who was thrilled when her book first appeared.

The problem was in the details. Edwards also believed that “environmentalism didn’t need fraud to justify itself.” He realized as he read her book that there was information that simply wasn’t true. He noted “she was playing fast and loose with the facts.” Over the years, research on her work has shown this to be so. In spite of all the evidence showing that her work should not have been taken seriously, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Carson advocated and promoted ideas that simply were not true.

She claimed that DDT was a serious carcinogenic agent that with continued use would eventually impact almost 100% of the population. That was false! She claimed that DDT was causing egg shell thinning, and, as a result, the bird population was decreasing. That was false! She played fast and loose with the facts, and made inappropriate citations. Edwards noted that her “implication that DDT is horribly deadly is completely false. Human volunteers have ingested as much as 35 milligrams of it a day for nearly two years and suffered no adverse affects.” He went on to say, “Carson’s comparison between ‘radiation’ and common herbicides is despicable, for there is a tremendous difference between their mutagenic potentials.”

She states on pages 50-51 that: “Arsenic, the environmental substance most clearly established as causing cancer in man, is involved in two historic cases in which polluted water supplies caused widespread occurrence of cancer.” According to Edwards, “I have seen no proof that arsenic causes cancer in humans, and it is known to occur naturally in most kinds of shellfish and other marine life. And, if she were really concerned about public health, Carson should have rejoiced to see that relatively harmless insecticides like DDT were capable of replacing arsenicals and other poisonous inorganic materials!”

I was born in 1946, and just like Carson, I grew up in southwest Pennsylvania. I can understand Carson’s fears for the environment. The effects on the local environment from pollution emanating from coal mines, steel mills and coke ovens in those days would make anyone concerned. Believe me when I tell you that you haven’t seen water pollution until you see a sulfur creek, or air pollution until you have see an old time coke oven. This is still no excuse for dishonesty.

What have been the consequences of these five decades of junk science? Her book launched the modern green movement and also marked the toleration and encouragement of scientists to misrepresent the facts. In the book “Ecological Sanity” published in 1972 by Clause and Bolander, they outline how this early this started, promoting a green agenda that not only lingers, but has become a major source of income for the research universities, making the term ‘scientific integrity’ an oxymoron. In the 50 years since “Silent Spring” was first published, it has become obvious that ‘science’ via media attention generates government grant money, clouding their judgment, impugning their integrity beyond repair.

Despite all the efforts to show that Carson was misrepresenting the facts, and that her references were tainted and completely unsupportive of her views, this was an issue that was not going away because it was a philosophical issue, not a scientific one. This was demonstrated by the 1972 EPA hearings based on science that was shown to be fraudulent, including the fraudulent claims that DDT caused egg shell thinning based on an the obscure study by Dr. James Dewitt of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, claiming that DDT caused less eggs to hatch. “However the actual study showed that despite feeding quail 3,000 times the daily human intake of DDT, their eggs did not hatch significantly less than the control group. The same study done with pheasants showed that the survival rate of hatchlings of DDT feed pheasants actually increased. This is exactly the opposite of what Rachel Carson wrote.” The only studies that showed a decrease in egg shell thickness occurred when they withheld calcium from the diet of the birds being tested.

Judge Edward Sweeney was the magistrate appointed by EPA to be the hearing examiner and after 9,000 pages of testimony he determined that DDT should not be banned. This was a decision that was overruled by the first director of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus. When the decision was appealed, he appointed himself as the appeals judge, setting a disreputable pattern of dishonesty that has been apparent ever since.

What has been the result? Between 700,000 and 1 million people, mostly children, die every year from malaria; and this doesn’t include the other insect borne diseases. Carson was an amazing writer, and that is what carried her to the top, not her science; and most certainly not her compassion for humanity. Carson could vividly describe the death of a bird she believed was killed by a pesticide, but nowhere does she describe the “deaths of any of the people who were dying of malaria, yellow fever, plague, sleeping sickness, or other diseases that are transmitted by insects. Her propaganda in Silent Spring contributed greatly to the banning of insecticides that were capable of preventing human deaths.” Surely, she had to be aware. Surely, she didn’t care.

This book and the ban on DDT are foundational to the very existence of the environmental movement because they never dreamed of the power and money that would come their way as a result of the ban. Currently the environmental movement takes in more money than 60 of the world’s nations. No trade association can stand against them financially.

This started a movement of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) that have accrued untold power with regulators and legislators world over. They have even gotten the major chemical companies to fund them, publically support them on many levels including their fraudulent claims about Global Warming, The Montreal Protocol, and a host of other central planning schemes promoted under the guise of environmental protection.

The effect has been to confuse the leaders of industry, the public and public officials. We in pest control have now been infiltrated and corrupted in our thinking. We have lost sight of who and what we are, what is real, what is fact, what is fiction, and what is right and what is wrong. As I look over the web sites of the other state associations, I am absolutely appalled that they are so hot to go green, and yet have no idea what that really means; nor do they seem to be aware of the fraudulent origins of the green movement; yet proudly promoting it with a stench of self-righteousness.

When we adopt a green agenda in structural pest control it means that we are agreeing that everything we have done over the last 60 years has been wrong, that what we have done has been detrimental to the environment and humanity. Yet, we are living longer, healthier lives than ever in human history. The world’s population was two billion people at the end of WWII, and it took thousands of years to get to that number. The world’s population has soared to seven billion in less than 75 years. How did that happen if all the synthetic chemicals we are exposed to are so deadly, as the green movement would have everyone believe?

Technology and environmental care go hand in hand. The poor undeveloped and under developed countries can’t afford the costs of the kind of care the developed nations deliver. Yet the green movement stands against development and true to the radical ‘back to nature’ paradigm promoted by Rachel Carson.

Norman Borlaug was the creator of the Green Revolution, which increased food productivity to fantastic rates saving untold millions from starvation worldwide. Rachel Carson started a movement that killed untold millions thus far and will continue to kill untold millions into the foreseeable future. Carson is lauded, and her lies are taught in our schools as true environmental science. Norman Borlaug is largely unknown. If Rachel Carson was a great scientist; then Adolph Hitler was a misunderstood visionary.

The result of 50 years of Carson’s junk science? We have lost our minds!

Editor’s note: In the coming months I will be addressing claims made by Carson in more detail. In the next issue of The Standard I will address the claims regarding raptors, including bald eagles. Starting this month I have been featuring articles featuring the issues that are foundational to the green movement called, Project: Green Foundations. In the coming months I will link articles that need to be addressed because of the misinformation presented therein. This is the one fact that everyone must come to grips with in order to understand how the green movement undermines us with our values.

Socialism in the late 1800's and early 1900's didn't play well with Americans because European socialism is atheistic in nature. As a result they became the Progressive Movement and the binding force was religion, believing that socialism was the practical application of Judaic/Christian ethic. After WWII the binding force was psychology. If you didn't accept their views you were crazy...and only those around my age can remember that scam. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the icon of socialism, they only had one card to really play as trump; Environmentalism!

Environmentalism is the step child of socialism, the spear point of policy and the binding force of the worldwide socialist movement whose goal is a worldwide socialist government under the auspices of the United Nations, as is clearly shown by the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. We really do need to get that! Once that is understood everything I will publish regarding the "foundational" things of the green movement can be properly understood.

# # #

Just a Thought or Two

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 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. 

However, I find that there are times when the news exhausts me. I find it frustrating, I find the people irritating, I find the way they twist things to their own benefit at the expense of others outrages me. The news just plain exhausts me. Nonetheless I still attempt to stay on top of things because I feel that somehow I am letting my readers down if I don’t. Surprised? It’s a bit of a surprise to me also. I guess when I started this blogging stuff I didn’t really think it out and I just never expected to have a following. Yet in the last year the number of hits, and the number of readers from around the world, has jumped dramatically.

These last two months have seen a change in the ranking for what countries are hitting Paradigms and Demographics. The all time top ten are:

United States, Germany, Russia, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Australia, Slovenia, India, Netherlands.

Last month Russia surged past the United Kingdom and this month surged past Canada, and is climbing on Germany rapidly. I don’t know what is attracting so many Russia readers, but my Russian readers also hit “The Rules” more than any other country other than the U.S. by a substantial percentage. This week I am seeing a number of hits coming from mainland China, from which I normally get very few. This week’s top ten included Ukraine, China and Finland, and Ukraine was in the top ten for the month, followed by Russia and France in spots two and three for the month.

At the beginning I found all of this to be of nothing more than passing interest to me. However, starting last year I noticed a pattern in some of the posts and the number of hits coming from some countries. Finland, Japan and Slovenia were hitting the blog strongly on a number of occasions and the posts most hit involved the failure of solar energy. I began to think that was significant. 

Then I posted a number of articles on fracking, which were being strongly hit and at the same time Bulgaria began taking a serious interest in my blog. Was there a correlation? About two weeks later I read that there was a movement in Bulgaria demanding that the government abandon their failed energy policies and start fracking. That was this winter when people in Eastern Europe froze to death because there was insufficient energy available. Did my posts in some very small way have anything to do with that? One can only hope.

Paradigms and Demographics is my second blog. The first was called Green Notes and was primarily directed to the pest control industry. That was a great learning experience for me for a number of reasons.

• One, I learned how to do it. 
• Two, I initially spent a huge number of hours trying to find the right sites with trustworthy information. As time went by I found ways to shorten this process and those that could be trusted, which made everything go faster and I could spend more time on each topic. 
• Three, I got a bunch of stuff out of my system. 

As one friend of mine said; “I liked what you had to say, but it appeared to me that you were venting.” Since I fancy myself as a rational thinker; and since venting wasn’t by goal; I took umbrage at that. At least until I went back and re-read my posts. He was right, and it altered my writing to a large degree. Since I am not a professional writer, I struggle to word things properly and still write with passion. I tend to temper the passion better now, but since I am saying things that aren’t popular in many circles, including the pesticide applications industries, I still get accused of ‘demagogic ranting’.

It is strange that I never hear that charge for the outrageous claims made by greenies and all of their acolytes, in spite of the fact that virtually everything they say is highly emotional, speculative, deliberately false, wrong and for the most part; scare mongering. Time has shown that leftism; including environmentalism; almost has a monopoly on being wrong, especially in their predictions about the future.

Has everyone read Silent Spring? Take a look at the names of the chapters and tell me those titles aren’t scare mongering emotional triggers!

• Chapter 3 - Elixirs of Death.
• Chapter 7 - Needless Havoc.
• Chapter 8 - And No Birds Sing.
• Chapter 9 - Rivers of Death.
• Chapter 11 - Beyond the Dreams of the Borgias.
• Chapter 12 - The Human Price
  

Carson set the pattern that all greenies have followed ever since. It has always fascinated me that by taking an opposing position, and showing why I oppose some greenie or leftist ‘solution’ or other, it becomes ‘demagogic ranting’ by those whose positions I oppose. While speculative twattle and misinformation, and claims which turn out to be false from the greenies is considered by them to be rational and well reasoned ‘science’. This is followed by an unending demand that we adopt some policy that is clearly irrational and misanthropic…and that we must “do it now, don’t wait” otherwise the world is doomed because we are at the ‘tipping point’ of disaster. It amazes me how many tipping points we have passed already and yet they still continue to spew out the same twattle.

What they are really saying is; make it policy before someone looks too closely at the speculative twattle they are attempting to foist in the public. Because once it becomes policy it is almost impossible to overturn no matter how much information comes out later, and the ban on DDT, the Endangered Species Act, the Montreal Protocol, the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts are perfect examples. What sane person doesn't want clean water and air? What sane person wants to see whole species deliberately slaughtered and wiped out? None! And that is the problem with these laws. What the Congress was voting for and the greenies long term goals were two different things. Except in the case of a few, the application of so many of the well-intentioned environmental laws has been used in ways that legislators never dreamed.

Paradigms and Demographics started as an anti-green blog. As time went by I realized that it was impossible to talk about green issues without talking about leftist issues. Why? Because environmentalism has become the step child of socialism, and it is now its primary tool in socialist attempts to impose a worldwide socialist government under the auspices of the United Nations, the most corrupt and incompetent organization the world has ever known. So I decided to change this from an anti-green blog to a pro-humanity blog, which is impossible to do without discussing leftist actions, goals and the history of socialism. Not to mention the insane misanthropy they have imposed on the people of the world whenever they have been in charge.

We need to get this. Between the socialist monsters of the 20th century (fascism and communism are socialist concepts, just different sides of the same coin) and the environmentalists, they have been responsible for the unnecessary deaths of over 200 million people, and the unnecessary suffering of billions more over the last almost 100 years.

Since socialism is basically atheistic; their stated goal is to overturn religious authority and parental authority in order for the state is to be the final moral authority on all things. And people are going along with this insanity. Has someone missed the fact that historically they have been willing to murder tens of millions of their own citizens; have degraded their citizens into mindless serfs constantly in fear for their lives; have been responsible for more death, destruction and devastation than any movement in human history; why would anyone believe anything they and their various movements, including environmentalism, have to say?

So, why do we listen to these people? The answer is simple. The world have been completely fooled by the main stream media’s lies. Lies of omission and lies of commission ….and I’m not all that crazy about Fox News either. I think O’Reilly is a phony, I think the worst thing that ever happened to Hannity is that Comb left the show and he became too cute by half….and it bothers me when someone who professes to be a conservative thinks of Bob Beckel as a good friend.

Most of the talking heads are not worth listening to and shows like The Five are only worthwhile because it has Bob Beckel on it. And the reason for that is that is because he is the clearest example of what is wrong with the left. Most of the people who profess to be on the right on that show must never have read a history book or studied logic. I find it too cute by the other half.

I find the only two news people I enjoy listening to are Bob Bennett and Dennis Prager. Both of whom I have disagreed with, but both are at least unfailingly polite to their guests and don’t talk down to their audience. Michael Medved is so wrong so often his arrogance is intolerable. As for Rush….even when I agree with him….which is most of the time…I just can’t stand too much of Rush. As for the leftists talkers….who cares? Listen to one and just turn on the tape recorder, because that is what will be regurgitated by each and every one of them.

As I said….just a thought or two.

The 50th Anniversary of "Silent Spring": A Lethal Legacy

By Alan Caruba

This first appeared here. I wish to thank Alan for allowing me to reprint his works. I would also like to encourage everyone who hasn't read Silent Spring to check it out of the library (Don't buy it. I hate to see money go to whomever is the beneficiary of this work) and read it with an eye to accurate and validly presented science. I am working on an article now dealing with this and hope to have it completed over the weekend. I read Silent Spring many years ago and was impressed. I re-read it two years ago and wondered what was wrong with my mind back then.   The EPA calls her a great scientist who won through against her detractors with her great writing ability. In that they were right....she was a magnificent writer.....but she can only be described by non-ideologues as a poor scientist.

Real scientists, such as Norman Borlaug are hardly known to the general public and he saved untold millions of lives with his work on the Green Revolution. Rachel Carson is the mother of junk science and it can be reasonably claimed that she must bear a large share of the responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of tens of millions and the hundreds of millions who have been sickened with insect borne diseases as a result of the ban on DDT.   Yet she is known and lauded far and wide. As Viv Forbes says about Global Warming; "The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests." The same is true about Silent Spring and the corresponding ban on DDT. RK

There are books that have doomed millions to death. “Das Capital” by Karl Marx kicked off the worst economic system of the modern era, claiming the lives of millions of Russians and Chinese, along with others in the process.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” mobilized Nazi Germany, led to World War Two in Europe, and was responsible for the deliberate killing of six million Jews and another five million Christians in its concentration camps, not counting the millions more in war dead. The Nazi leaders were ardent environmentalists.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson; a book that is credited with giving rise to the environmental movement in general and, in particular, America’s unfounded fears of pesticides, especially DDT.

Eight years would pass between its publication and the first Earth Day in 1970 that mobilized the beginning of the environmental movement by putting government muscle behind it with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson” ($25.95, Cato Institute) has a publication date in September, but given the June 20-12 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, it is particularly timely. Its chapters had titles like “Elixirs of Death”, “Needless Havoc”, and “Rivers of Death.” What their content lacked was real science and real facts.

DDT was already famous for protecting human health along with a whole range of agricultural chemicals that protected crops against the depredation of insects, rodents and weeds. The book has rightly been condemned for the deaths—literally millions—that have resulted since the 1972 U.S. ban of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency. It “was firmly and repeatedly warned by public health officials of the United States, the World Health Organization, and the Pan American Health Organization of disastrous consequences of a DDT ban.”

Even today, the EPA either manufactures or ignores evidence to justify its regulations.

Its inventor, Dr. Paul Muller, received a Nobel Prize in 1948 in recognition of the role DDT played in saving hundreds of thousands of lives of troops fighting the Axis in World War Two and the survivors of the Nazi death camps. It killed the insects that spread Typhus and other diseases. It did so without any evidence of the bogus threat of cancer that Carson advanced.

Nine contributors to “Silent Spring at 50” make a powerful case for the harm Carson’s obsessive fear of what were widely known to be beneficial chemicals. The book is a classic example of bogus science combined with deliberate lies to frighten people. That has always been the modus operendi of the environmental movement.

“Carson would have known of the great public health achievements of DDT and that it was saving lives,” writes Donald R. Roberts and Richard Tren, the authors of one chapter. “Indeed she describes some of the programs in “Silent Spring.” But the bulk of the book is a singular attack on DDT and other insecticides with scarcely any recognition of their actual and potential benefits.”

In the first chapter of “Silent Spring”, titled “A Fable for Tomorrow”, Carson invents a town so poisoned by insecticides that no birds sing there, having all been wiped out. It is pure fiction. Subsequent studies have demonstrated that the die-off she described has never happened. Years of bird counts refute that charge. Indeed, agricultural pesticides had initially been regulated by Congress in 1910 and generations of farmers took care to avoid contaminating their crops for obvious reasons.

The anniversary of the book’s publication is relevant to everyone today, even those born since the DDT ban. The coast-to-coast plague of bedbugs that has occurred in the past decade and continues today could have been eliminated if DDT was still in use. The mainstream media reported the plague, but never mentioned this salient fact, nor the fact that the EPA has just one pesticide registered for use against bedbugs and routinely refused to allow licensed pest control professionals to use it.

Carson kicked off “the precautionary principle” cited by environmental groups and government agencies that, in effect, leaves the public defenseless against the health threats that Mother Nature provides in the form of insects and rodents known to spread disease, or mold-contaminants such as aflatoxin, many times more toxic than the fumigant that was banned to control it.

Malaria, once on the brink of being eliminated, has long since made resurgence since the ban of DDT, although some nations most affected by the disease have received permission to use it.

That is Rachel Carson’s true and lethal legacy.

It is why so much of what the environmental movement advocates, from the United Nations to non-governmental-organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and dozens of others always seems to end up killing people in the name of saving the Earth.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

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“What’s Bugging You?”

By Harry L Katz, Board Certified Entomologist
Column for CVE Reporter for Sept 09

(Harry Katz is in his 90's now and is still a legendary defender of the pest control industry. Harry is probably the last of the old guard; those who were in leadership roles when all of this came into being. I would like to thank Harry for giving me permission to post his articles and for the interesting conversations about those days and the people involved. Harry and his peers were the giants of our industry whose shoulders we stand on today. RK)

Fear of pesticides is evident in the calls that I get for help with pest control problems. There is a good reason. Some fifty years ago, toxic materials were used indiscriminately by exterminators and the public. I recall a tragic even in the 1940’s in Pittsburgh, PA. A chef in the Salvation Army soup kitchen mistook white sodium fluoride roach powder for baking soda. Several men died. Congress then passed the first pesticide regulatory bill making sodium fluoride colored blue.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was enacted after Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring” in 1962. EPA regulated the labeling and sale of all pesticides, providing an exaggerated margin of safety for the public. With elegant language, she painted a bleak future for the environment, citing disastrous examples of pesticide poisoning. One case that she cited was how a Penn State researcher lost the sight of one eye after testing the first batch of chlordane that was made. She neglected to report that the Velsicol Corp was able to remove the offending contaminant before marketing the product.

Clearly, Rachel Carson wrote the book to alert the public and to save lives. Unwittingly, her book may have contributed to the deaths of millions in the third world. In 1948, one country, Ceylon, had 2, 800, 000 cases of malaria. In 1962, after DDT was used, only 31 cases were reported. When DDT was banned in 1968, the number jumped to 1, 000.000, and in 1969 jumped to 2,500,000 (p69, “Toxic Terror” by Dr Elizabeth Whelan).

In 1969, my friend in Pittsburgh, PA, Carroll Weil, was appointed to the MRAK commission to investigate Rachel Carson’s demand to outlaw DDT. Carroll was the President of the Toxicological Society of America and a Fellow at the prestigious Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, PA. After reviewing all the data submitted on the procedures that were used to test DDT as a carcinogen, he found them to be faulty and refused to make the committee decision to ban DDT unanimous. After arguing late into the night, the committee promised to publish his addendum in a minority report. He then agreed to make it unanimous and that proved to be the death knell for millions in third world countries. Only 3 ounces of DDT solution sprayed on the interior walls of the huts would have greatly reduced malaria deaths.

Shortly after “Silent Spring” was published, a California exterminator, R.B. Loibl, pulled a publicity stunt. Fully aware of the possible hazards of DDT, he got his physician to measure out 10 ml of DDT solution which he and his wife voluntarily ingested for 90 days. He was monitored closely and there were no apparent repercussions. A year later, I met him at a convention of the National Pest Control Association. He was dancing with his wife after dinner on the closing day, even with impaired leg…a condition he had had for many years.

The Century Village caller had asked me if he should clean up the area where the pest management serviceman had sprayed. I told him that there could be immature cockroaches emerging from a hidden egg capsule. The film of dried-up toxicant could kill them , along with any new invasion of ants or other crawling insects.

Bottom line: There should be no fear from the use of pesticides, if the directions on the label are carefully followed.