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De Omnibus Dubitandum!
We need to question everything because everything we are told
should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality
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Quote of the Day - "When they tell me I'm terminal, I'll look for a quack." ~ Murray Rothbard
From DDT to Dursban
By Henry Payne
Greens can take a bow: Bedbugs are back with a vengeance. Responding to the biggest bedbug outbreak since World War II, the Environmental Protection Agency hosted its first-ever “bedbug summit” Tuesday outside Washington to address a widening public outcry. Some of the most vulnerable communities are inner cities like Detroit, and the major culprit, as it turns out, was the summit host.
Nine years ago, the zealots at Bill Clinton’s EPA banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos (to widespread media and environmentalist hosannas), the most commonly available household product in the world to address bedbugs, cockroaches, and other nuisances. Better known by its trade name, Dursban, chlorpyrifos had been available for 30 years in some 800 products in 88 countries around the world.
But despite widespread protest in the scientific community, EPA Chief Carol Browner erased Dursban from the shelves. “EPA has gone to great lengths to present a highly conservative, worst case, hypothetical risk based in large part on dubious extrapolations . . . and exaggerated risk estimates,” said Michigan State University toxicologist J. I. Goodman in a typical response.
Horrifyingly, Ground Baby Pills Are a Real Thing
Alexander Abad-Santos
In news that will make you want to shut the blinds, go back to bed until next week ... there's disturbing news out of South Korea that since August, officials have found over 17,000 pills filled with human flesh, in particular the placentas and ground up bodies of dead Chinese babies.
Might a little hypocrisy actually be good for society?
By Kelvin Childs
As Washington Post op-ed columnist William Raspberry sees it, the demise of hypocrisy has led to the demise of society. "Speakers and moralists have conspired to give hypocrisy a bad name," ……___"We're still paying the price for the abandonment of the practice of hypocrisy, in everything from family breakdown to drug-spawned crime to the shortsighted selfishness that threatens to erode our institutions, wreck our economy and topple the pillars of our society" ….
"Hypocrisy recognizes that the erosion of standards hurts everybody,….It accepts the sanctity of ethical standards, even while violating them. It says, 'What I'm doing is wrong, therefore I must not do it too often; I must pretend I'm not doing it at all; and I must take care not to be found out.'"…He called standards "an electrified fence that describes the limits of acceptable behavior." People are always tempted to cross the fence, but doing so, he said, "thrills and shocks" us back into line.
My Take – I actually remember reading this article by Raspberry….and if I remember it correctly the title was…”There is something to be said for hypocrisy”. My first disgusted thought was; what in the world could be said for hypocrisy? After I read the article I followed Raspberry’s articles from that time on. You can’t be a hypocrite unless you have rules. We have few hypocrites these days. As the values of the churches deteriorate we have far fewer believers these days also. Is it any wonder that the people fail to believe when the actions and philosophies of these churches spiritual leaders clearly show that neither do they believe either? These questions remain though. Is that an excuse for not believing? Is that an excuse for not having values? Is that an excuse for the downward spiraling societal values? Is that an excuse for not doing right? Is that an excuse for not knowing what is right?
The goal of the Progressive movement from the French Revolution till today was to make the state the final arbiter of all morality. That could only be accomplished by undermining the Judaic/Christian moral ethic, undermining the moral foundation of religion an undermining parental authority. All the things Hitler, Stalin and all the other socialists’ monsters of the 20th century worked and strove for. Did anyone think this was all their own ideas? No….the names and places change, but the philosophy remains using the same terminology, the same tactics, and the same goals and yet society is unaware of the danger. The patterns repeat. We need to get that…there really isn’t anything new under the sun, and your ignorance is necessary for their success. We really need to get that!
Environmental groups collecting millions from federal agencies they sue, studies show
By Joshua Rhett Miller
Deep-pocketed environmental groups are collecting millions of dollars from the federal agencies they regularly sue under a little-known federal law, and the government is not even keeping track of the payouts, according to two new studies.
Lawrence Solomon: Censored science
True to form, the overwhelming majority of press outlets failed to report the juiciest global-warming gossip of the week — a change of heart on the issue by one of the world’s most celebrated environmentalists. Also true to form, the press failed to report the most profound science story of the week — a startling theory that not only absolves humans of blame in global warming but sheds light on another taboo subject: shortcomings in Darwin’s theory of evolution……. So, why, when Lovelock this week recanted his past views on global warming as being “alarmist,” did virtually every major news outlet on the planet ignore his change of heart? It wasn’t because he minced his words: “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago,” he admitted, adding that temperatures haven’t increased as expected over the last 12 years. “There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”
The European Central Bank vs. Reality
By Matthew Melchiorre
The four-year charade of central bank bailouts is starting to come undone. Reacting to rising European bond yields in a Saturday meeting with world leaders, U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to "aggressively" support Europe's insolvency as its various countries try to "stay ahead of markets." Blind to the sinking ship upon which he stands, he threatens to take everyone down with him by clinging to the false hope of monetary stimulus. Europe's problem is the same as the U.S.'s - insolvency. The past 17 years have seen the greatest expansion of global credit in the history of the world. But this didn't happen because the world economy became more prosperous. While the world was sleeping, central bankers around the globe have been printing money to fuel the booms of the past two decades. The inevitable result will be an even greater bust than the current one………
Student Loans Drive Up Tuition, Create Demographic Time Bomb and Higher-Education Bubble
by Hans Bader
Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes in the New York Post about how student loan programs have contributed to skyrocketing debt and rising defaults: The student-debt problem is that too many students are borrowing too much money to finance educations that won’t earn them enough to repay the loans. This leads to misery. A recent Wall Street Journal story noted that many students are postponing marriage, children and home-buying because of the difficulty — in some cases, the impossibility — of keeping up student-loan payments. This is bad for them and the economy, because they won’t be available to soak up the excess houses built during the housing bubble, which also was fueled by cheap government loans. If they postpone having kids, fewer taxpayers will exist to fund Social Security and other programs in a few decades…. Although 37 million adults owe student loans, only 39 percent are actually paying down balances. Some 5.4 million have at least one loan past due; loans totaling $270 billion are at least 30 days delinquent. These numbers are likely to climb in coming months and years as US job-creation remains stagnant
UK aid helps to fund forced sterilisation of India's poor
Money from the Department for International Development has helped pay for a controversial programme that has led to miscarriages and even deaths after botched operation. - Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men, the Observer has learned. Many have died as a result of botched operations, while others have been left bleeding and in agony. A number of pregnant women selected for sterilisation suffered miscarriages and lost their babies……Activists say that it is India's poor – and particularly tribal people – who are most frequently targeted and who are most vulnerable to pressure to be sterilised. They claim that people have been threatened with losing their ration cards if they do not undergo operations, or bribed with as little as 600 rupees (£7.34) and a sari. Some states run lotteries in which people can win cars and fridges if they agree to be sterilised.
Eco Crowd Growing Desperate—and Dangerous
The climate scaremongers are losing the public relations battle on global warming—and it’s driving them absolutely batty. Take eco-warrior Steve Zwick. Writing for FORBES Zwick calls on so-called “climate deniers” to be treated like war criminals:
Making Extinction Claims Come True? Wildllife Services’ deadly force opens Pandora’s box of environmental problems
By Tom Knudson
Here, in rugged terrain owned by the American public, a little-known federal agency called Wildlife Services has waged an eight-year war against predators to try to help an iconic Western big-game species: mule deer. With rifles, snares and aerial gunning, employees have killed 967 coyotes and 45 mountain lions at a cost of about $550,000. But like a mirage, the dream of protecting deer by killing predators has not materialized. "It didn't make a difference," said Kelley Stewart, a large-mammal ecologist at the University of Nevada, Reno.
For decades, Wildlife Services, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has specialized in trapping, poisoning and shooting predators in large numbers, largely to protect livestock and, more recently, big game. Now such killing is coming under fire from scientists, former employees and others who say it often doesn't work and can set off a chain reaction of unintended, often negative consequences.
Does global warming cause extreme weather?
By Howard Richman and Raymond Richman
Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory supporters are in the midst of a big propaganda campaign leading to a global "Connect the Dots" day on May 5. Their goal is to convince the public that recent extreme weather events are due to global warming and that global warming is man-made.
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