Chevron Doctrine is Activist Insanity

By Rich Kozlovich

The Chevron Deference became doctrine as a result of a SCOTUS decision in the 1984 Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. case, "that the courts should defer to the agencies interpretations of ambiguous or unclear statute that Congress delegated to the agency to administer". After all, these agencies decisions are based on the views "experts"! 

Well,  that's now being challenged, and rightly so, and for good reason.

I'm a retired 40 year veteran of the structural pest control industry.  An exterminator!  And for many years I had the privilege of being heavily involved in my industry's affairs defending the use of pesticides, and fertilizers.   

One of the biggest scams ever pushed by the EPA to justify banning pesticides was the claims regarding pesticides and Endocrine Disruption (ED), which are more correctly termed hormonally active agents, (HAA), "substances that possess hormone-like activity."

In  May 20, 2016  Julianna LeMieux posted this article entitled,  How Do You Regulate Something That You Don’t Understand?, saying:

The debate about endocrine disruption is intense, in large part because the research is inconclusive. In turn, there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding how to regulate  the use of supposedly endocrine disrupting chemicals.  Endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDCs) are defined as having the potential to alter one or more functions of the endocrine system and cause negative effects in an organism, and/or its babies.  A new publication entitled “Scientific Issues Relevant to Setting Regulatory Criteria to Identify Endocrine Disrupting Substances in the European Union” is the latest in a long line of reports, studies and recommendations opining on the best way to identify what defines an EDC and how to deal with them.

The real problem with these "studies" are the world is full of naturally occurring endocrine disruptors, especially in the food we eat.  In his book The Really Inconvenient Truths Iain Murray states:

"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.".........

"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."

If that's the case, and it is, how can you determine if manufactured chemicals have any impact at all?  It's simple, you create mythological science.

The fact is all this got started by a piece of falsified science from Steven F. Arnold of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research who along with his gang published a study in June of 1996:

"claiming that combinations of pesticides and PCBs were up to 1,000 times more potent as endocrine disruptors than the individual chemicals alone." 

As a result the EPA managed to include into the Food Quality Protection Act an ED requirement, resulting in the loss of pesticides used effectively and safely for decades.  Then came the consequences of time.  Which is the great leveler of truth, and it turned out this study that  Carol Browner - head of EPA at the time - declared: 

"The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic chemicals may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." She went on to say: "I was astounded by the findings. Dr. Lynn Goldman, EPA pesticide chief, claimed "I just can't remember a time where I've seen data so persuasive … The results are very clean looking".  

The results were astounding?  Really?  The data persuasive and clean looking?  Really?  If that was so, then why was it no one was capable of duplicating those results, anywhere in the world.  Because according the journal Science, Arnold was found to have:

"committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials" ...[and]......"there is no original data or other corroborating evidence to support the research results and conclusions reported in the Science paper as a whole."

So, why is this important now?  Because the FQPA is still on the books, and the ED requirement remains as part of FQPA, and even after it was known to be junk science, there was a short term push at EPA to once again make ED claims against pesticides.  

This is more evidence these bureaucratic "experts" are not experts at all, and in point of fact, they're activists, and particularly environmental activists, who have no idea what they're talking about more times than not, and they don't care, and really don't care about the negative consequences of their insane decisions. 

The same was true of Colony Collapse Disorder.  I shared this article, Presidential Pollinator Protection: Myths, Facts and Hyperbole, with a prominent EPA official who shared it with his colleagues, and that was the last time we heard much from the EPA about saving the honey bees from extinction as a result of the use of pesticides. Did my article have anything to do with that?  I have no idea, but they could never say they weren't told!  

But the question that really needs answered is why is it an autodidact bugman knew all this and these bureaucrat experts didn't?  And if they don't know the facts, and don't truthfully understand what they're regulating, how can the courts justify continuing to defer to these agencies under the Chevron Doctrine?   These agency regulations are in effect laws Congress never saw and never voted on!

Chevron needs to be sent onto the ash heap of history, and the Congress needs to start doing the job they were hired to do.  While we're at it, they need to dump the EPA, and my now passed friend Dr. Jay Lehr, who was one of the founders of EPA put together a five year plan to do just that, because according to Jay, the EPA hasn't done anything worthwhile since 1980.  

To tell the truth, I'm betting that's true of the rest of the almost 450 agencies of the federal government.

A Water Rule the EPA Got Right

Contrary to reports, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of a certain herbicide allowed in drinking water. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson and others may have been taken in by left-wing propaganda on the issue.

Steve Milloy January 25th, 2020

I’m a big fan of Tucker Carlson. Like his fellow disruptor, President Trump, he’s willing to take on all sides of the establishment, Left, Right, and the deep state. And, in my opinion at least, he’s almost always right over the target.

 

But in one particular case, an issue he addressed recently—the EPA’s review of the herbicide atrazine—he hit way wide of the mark, accusing the agency of risking the public health by loosening standards for atrazine in water.

 

As editor of JunkScience.com, I’ve worked on environmental regulatory issues for three decades now. No one would accuse me of being a fan of the EPA. In fact, I’ve sued the EPA, called for reforms, and otherwise endlessly written about the agency’s willingness to throw science under the bus to achieve its often left-wing political agenda. As a member of the Trump transition team on EPA issues, I developed a long list of badly needed reforms for the agency, many of which have been instituted.

 

But that doesn’t mean that EPA always gets it wrong.

 

The agency’s position on the chemical atrazine is one instance in which—despite its track record—the regulators appear to be coming out largely in the right place. First, a few baseline facts about what EPA’s review says and doesn’t say.

 

Contrary to some reports and Tucker’s shot on atrazine, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of atrazine allowed in drinking water. These will remain exactly where they are now, which is an almost infinitesimal 3 parts per billion on a yearly average. Neither is the monitoring program coming to an end. Atrazine levels will continue to be monitored as before under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which requires testing for a large number of naturally occurring chemicals, microorganisms, and possible synthetic contaminants.

 

Here’s what’s changing: In 2003, EPA set up a separate Atrazine Monitoring Program (AMP) to more frequently sample drinking water in communities with heavy atrazine use to make sure the SDWA monitoring wasn’t missing anything. It wasn’t.

 

The AMP—which tested for both atrazine and its breakdown products—demonstrated a clear lack of health concerns. The vast majority of samples came in below 1 part per billion, none exceeded the SDWA standard, and the clear trend was declining atrazine levels over time. EPA reasonably decided that the extra monitoring wasn’t needed. The decision will be reviewed in a year.

 

In any case, monitoring will continue as always under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

 

It’s important to understand that EPA sets its limits on contaminants by building in huge safety margins. This is especially true for pesticides (herbicides are one kind of pesticide), where allowable levels are many orders of magnitude below what has been demonstrated in the lab to have “no effect.” At each point in the process, EPA assumes a “worst case” scenario and purposefully errs on the side of caution. This includes assuming maximum exposure to the most sensitive parts of the population (infants and pregnant women) and multiplying “uncertainty factors” together for any issue on which the science can’t give a definitive answer.

 

When the 3 parts per billion limit was set in the early 1990s, this created an “uncertainty” buffer, or margin, which was 1,000 times below the no-effect level. What the EPA said in its recently published review is that toxicological science has advanced considerably in the past 30 years, and that means many of the “uncertainties” the EPA built in back in 1991 are no longer uncertain and could, theoretically, be dispensed with. The EPA doesn’t say this, but if one were to calculate safety limits according to the up-to-date science, the allowable limit could easily be set above 500 parts per billion and still achieve a wide margin of safety.

 

But EPA isn’t going to do that. It’s keeping the 3 parts per billion. It works for farmers and the agency doesn’t see any compelling need to change it.

 

One could complain, perhaps, that if they were basing their regulations on the best science, they really ought to raise it; but it makes no sense to complain that EPA has done an incredibly thorough job and is accurately reporting out on their findings.

 

The problem is that environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have, as usual, mischaracterized the EPA’s findings and in their news releases and seemingly conflated EPA’s drinking water limits with its ecological review, which has nothing to do with human health.

 

The eco-review does, in fact, recommend raising these eco limits in light of extensive new studies, but these limits are based on the effect of atrazine on algae, which sits at the bottom of the food chain for lots of aquatic wildlife. Algae, like most other plants, engage in photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy. Atrazine works by disrupting photosynthesis in plants. Humans don’t do photosynthesis. The eco-limits don’t apply to drinking water and they will have no effect whatsoever on any human health issues.

 

If you read all this and still think the safety factors aren’t enough, think about the difference between drinking one cup of coffee, which is harmless and may possibly have positive health effects, and drinking 1,000 cups of coffee in one sitting, which would probably kill you.

 

If you’re worried about NRDC’s claims that atrazine is an “endocrine disruptor,” understand that this is only true in the sense that any food that contains naturally occurring phytoestrogens is an endocrine disruptor, including (and this is a short list) rice, beans, wheat germ, apples, carrots, coffee, tea, and—sorry to break it to you—beer. Most of these foods are thought to have positive health effects. Phytoestrogens like resveratrol and genistein—two famous “antioxidants”—are even marketed as health supplements, and there is evidence that they fight inflammation and may be protective against cancer.

 

If you still say that pesticides are yucky and you don’t want artificial chemicals in your diet, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re out of luck. All farmers who grow to scale, including organic farmers, use chemical pesticides, and they have for centuries. NRDC and EWG won’t tell you this, but organic farmers use older pesticides like sulfur, neem oil, and copper sulfate, which is highly toxic to people, plants and wildlife and is a known carcinogen. And because these “natural” chemicals are less targeted and less effective, they dump them on their fields in truly astounding quantities.

 

A final word about “big agriculture.” My first response is, “if only it still existed.” I carry no brief for ethanol mandates (which are stupid) and farm subsidies, but the political power of the “farm lobby” has become increasingly attenuated as, ironically, farming has become ever more efficient and fewer and fewer people have any direct connection to the land. If you doubt this, pick up a copy of the Des Moines Register sometime, which has effectively become an environmentalist, anti-farmer mouthpiece.

 

Meanwhile, the power of the environmentalist movement grows ever greater by the day. Many of the “nonprofit” anti-pesticide and anti-GMO groups are the same, and funded by many of the same money sources, as those that are pushing the global warming agenda, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the McArthur Foundation, as well as the organic industry and the trial bar.

 

Environmental “nonprofits” that are in part or wholly devoted to a “Green New Deal”-style attack on modern agriculture have a war chest in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year, which goes into producing nothing but environmentalist propaganda that barely disguises its true anti-capitalist, big-government agenda.

 

I’d take everything they say with a heavy helping of salt—which according to NRDC standards, is also an endocrine disruptor.

Endocrine Disruption Is A Medieval Spell in the Hands of Environmentalists

By Rich Kozlovich

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is back on the endocrine disruption (ED) bandwagon and it's important we understand the history of this issue in order to make sure more "new" science on ED's isn't being made up as was the "old" science on ED's. Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality - unless you're the EPA - then truth is meaningless. We need to get that.

In chapter one of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring she talks about some community where "a strange blight" crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community".

Then she claims there were all sorts of maladies sickening and even killing the sheep, chickens, cattle, unexplained deaths among children and adults who would suddenly sicken and die....and the birds disappeared....and the people had done it to themselves. There was only one problem with this story. That town didn't exist! She even says it doesn't exist! Then goes on to claim some of these things are happening in a lot of communities - somewhere. Yet she conveniently fails to give a name even one of those cities or towns. Why? Because these communities didn't exist!

Reality and green speculatory scare mongering rarely have anything in common, and time is the great leveler of truth. As the cancer scare was running out of steam, environmentalists needed a new voodoo scare. Endocrine disruption was just the thing. The National Academy of Science more accurately refers to them as hormonally active agents" (HAAs), a term that's bound to generate anxiety.

A 1996 book called Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?--A Scientific Detective Story, caught the public's attention, especially when they called these chemical "environmental estrogens".........[that] disrupted normal hormonal processes, even at low exposure levels generally accepted as safe." According to the book mankind's future was in serious jeopardy because ED' s were going to impact our fertility, intelligence, cause attention deficit disorder and even jeopardize our survival.

According to Geoffrey C. Kabat in his book Getting Risk Right, "hormones are chemical messengers secreted by ductless glands and travel through the blood stream to affect distant organs. Hormones play a role in orchestrating the body's growth, maintaining physiologic balance, and sexual functioning and development." "Once secreted a hormone must be transported via the blood stream to the target organ by a carrier protein. Once ether it binds to a receptor and the hormone-reception unit binds to a specific region of a cell's DNA to activate particular genes."

As Michael Fumento noted in his paper " Hormonally Challenged": "Virtually any real or possible human or animal health problem may be blamed on these chemicals, including cancer, birth defects, falling sperm counts, lesbian seagulls (giving rise to the term "gender benders" for HAAs), and alligators with shrunken members", impacting all life like some medieval witch's spell in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale instead of science.

In comes Steven F. Arnold of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research who along with his gang published a study in June of 1996 "claiming that combinations of pesticides and PCBs were up to 1,000 times more potent as endocrine disruptors than the individual chemicals alone."

Carol Browner - head of EPA at the time - declared: "The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic chemicals may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." She went on to say: "I was astounded by the findings. Dr. Lynn Goldman, EPA pesticide chief, claimed "I just can't remember a time where I've seen data so persuasive … The results are very clean looking."

But time - the great leveler of truth - once again came into play. According the journal Science, Arnold was found to have "committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials." It was also found "there is no original data or other corroborating evidence to support the research results and conclusions reported in the Science paper as a whole."

Steve Milloy noted: "by August 1997, Arnold was forced to retract his study from publication. His retraction stated, "We … have not been able to reproduce the results we reported." He later added, "I can't really explain the original findings."'

Six months after the Food Quality Protection Act was enacted (which required the EPA to identify chemicals which were HAA's) it was reported there wasn't a lab anywhere in the world that could replicate the Tulane study, and it was then formally withdrawn. Now we know why — he cheated. The penalty imposed on Arnold was a five-year ban from federal grants. Although a lifetime ban and perhaps even criminal prosecution would have been more appropriate — after all, he was found guilty of "intentionally falsifying" taxpayer-funded research".

He wasn't alone by the way, there's the hermaphrodite frog study and the small phallus alligator study, but space makes it impossible to discuss them all.

Yet the endocrine disruption component of the FQPA remains requiring the EPA to identify chemicals which are considered HAA's. In 2001 they were spending 10 million dollars a year attempting to meet that requirement. But they've had trouble declaring chemicals as HAA’s. Why?

Well there's that time as the great leveler of truth problem.

I've followed this issue from the beginning and I knew the problem they were having was - and still is - separating the ED potential of synthetic chemicals versus those which are naturally occurring. And that's the rub.

In his book The Really Inconvenient Truths 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."

And what is the most potent ED the public is exposed to? Oral contraceptives! And that number is massive. Oral contraceptives are the most potent ED in the nation's waterways today. But EPA only screen and test pesticide chemicals, commercial chemicals and environmental contaminants because they claim pharmaceutical regulation is a Food and Drug Administration concern. That's an easy way for the EPA to avoid facing the fact if they "compared contraceptives and phytoestrogens these two sources would dwarf the impact of pesticides."

Solution? Repeal or seriously revise the Food Quality Protection Act, which has nothing to do with food, protection or quality. But it has had a great deal to do with creating the national bed bug plague.    And that really is a Medieval curse. 

Dear EWG, Cinnamon Rolls Aren't Toxic

By Ana-Marija Dolaskie — June 2, 2017

 

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) loves ratings and listicles. Just take a look at their recent guide to the best and worst sunscreens, or their list of top pesticides consumers should avoid. But they must not love delicious baked goods, since they also go after cinnamon rolls, muffins, and donuts — and the supposed culprit isn't new nor surprising.

This time, the EWG zeroed-in on propyl parabens — derivatives of p-hydroxybenzoate — which they claim act as endocrine disrupters in humans. Endocrine disrupters is a term often used by activists when concrete scientific data fails to show a connection between chemicals and toxicity or carcinogens. The EWG even gives a detailed list of food items that contain propyl parabens, like Sara Lee's cinnamon rolls, Weight Watchers' cakes, and Weis' chocolate candies. In fact, the list is about the only thing they got right in their campaign since propyl parabens indeed are present in these foods. And for good reason.......To Read More.....

Dear EWG, Why Are You Shaking Down Companies to Get on Your 'Verified' List?

By Josh Bloom — June 1, 2017
 

We all have our strengths and weaknesses. This holds true for individuals, companies, and NGOs. Let's focus on the Environmental Working Group. Although their science is generally appalling, they sure have marketing down to an art. 

This can, in no way, be more apparent than the group's new program (scam?), which is called EWG Verified™. It's actually very clever. Let's say that you own a company whose label doesn't contain the names of enough scary sounding ingredients that are not in that product. Then how will you get people will pay extra (for no good reason) to buy what you're selling? How can you step it up? Pay off EWG, and the next thing you know—bang! You're on their list of "verified products." Cool! And if you don't, well, then you're hosed. Because you and all of the other companies that sell stuff that isn't EWG Verified™ are going to look like you're putting Sarin gas in the mouthwash. EWG is nothing if not consistent. If you look at the ingredients on it "EWG Unacceptable List," pretty much all of them either 1) cause cancer, or 2) are endocrine disruptors. .....To Read More....

It's World Homeopathy Week! All 8 Days of It

By Josh Bloom — April 10, 2017

Every now and then, people screw up. Who amongst us has never made a mistake? Even the American Council gets it wrong now and then. Yet, we are nothing if not humble. Since it's World Homeopathy Week, this provides the prefect opportunity for some self reflection and humility. Is it possible that we have been unfairly criticizing homeopathy and homeopaths all this time?

In the interest of keeping an open mind, I decided to search for evidence that might indicate that I may have been wrong all along. It was a humbling experience, but I'm glad I did it. I feel so...... cleansed. I was dumbfounded by what has been in front of my face all this time that I failed to see. Clearly, I was so arrogant and unshakeable in my belief system of traditional science that I did not give homeopathy the respect that it deserves. I feel shamed.

So, the very least I can do to atone for my sins is to present some of what I uncovered during my journey toward self-enlightenment. The evidence speaks for itself...........

Test subject #1, the (dis)honorable Mike Adams, did respond in a manner that was consistent with homeopathic science......To Read More...

Editor's Note: Mike Adams styles himself the Health Ranger.

Pesticide-Sperm Count Link Is Impotent

By Steven Milloy June 20, 2003, FOXNews.com @ Junk Science.com

“Scientists for the first time have shown a link between levels of widely used agricultural pesticides in men’s bodies and the number and quality of their sperm,” shrieked USA Today this week.

Steady, USA Today. Underwear, rather than pesticides, is a more probable explanation.

McNews had the wool pulled over its eyes by University of Missouri-Columbia eco-activist researcher Shanna Swan, who has been crusading since the mid-1990s to link pesticides with supposed reduced sperm counts.

The latest chapter in Swan’s crusade began in April when she reported that a small sample of men from Boone County, Mo., had lower sperm quality than similarly small samples of men from Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York City.

Based on further “analysis,” Swan now reports in a study published in the June 18 Environmental Health Perspectives, the 50 Missouri men had higher levels of metabolites of widely used pesticides (alachlor, diazinon, atrazine and others) in their urine than the 50 Minneapolis men.

Swan concluded: “This is the first population-study to demonstrate links between specific biomarkers of environmental exposures and biomarkers of male reproduction in humans. Given the current widespread use of these pesticides, if further study confirms these findings, the implications for public health and agricultural practice could be considerable.”

Doubtful.

In the first place, I’m not quite sure what the dreaded “implications” of Swan’s data are since all men in the study were fertile. They were, in fact, the partners of pregnant women recruited at prenatal clinics.

Secondly, there’s no known biological support for Swan’s idea that pesticides affect sperm quality. Tests do not indicate that alachlor, diazinon and atrazine, for example, produce toxic effects in the reproductive systems of laboratory animals.

A reproductive biologist from the Environmental Protection Agency told USA Today that rodent studies suggest that even the highest pesticide levels found in Swan’s subjects would have been too low to affect sperm quality.

And just because the Missouri men had lower sperm counts and higher pesticide exposure than the Minneapolis men doesn’t automatically mean that pesticides have anything to do with sperm production.

A University of Virginia fertility expert told The Associated Press that he was skeptical of the findings because of the lack of historical documentation of the effect of toxins on sperm.

Sperm counts are known to vary geographically. There is no certain explanation for the phenomenon, although some studies indicate that men in colder regions seem to have higher sperm counts than men in warmer areas.

And it’s really not surprising that men from the agricultural Boone County, Mo., would have more pesticide exposure than an urban area such as Minneapolis.

Swan’s data simply aren’t unexpected and her tenuous conclusions aren’t surprising given her track record of eco-activist, anti-pesticide “research.”

Though anti-pesticide activists have tried for years to link pesticides with declining sperm counts, one key fact stands in their way — there’s no evidence that sperm counts are even declining, much less that pesticides are involved.

In 1999, researchers published in the Journal of Urology a review of all 29 studies from 1938 to 1996 reporting semen analyses of fertile men. They concluded, “there appears to be no significant change in sperm counts in the U.S. during the last 60 years.”

Sperm counts and quality depend on many factors. One that Swan overlooked in her study was the effect of tight-fitting underwear.

In 1996, Dutch researchers reported in the British medical journal The Lancet the results of their study of the effect of underwear on sperm quality and quantity.

They reported that men who wore tight-fitting underwear produced 50 percent less sperm than men who wore loose-fitting underwear. Sperm motility was reduced by two-thirds among the men who wore tight-fitting underwear.

Maybe the Missouri men in Swan’s study wore tighter underwear than their Minneapolis counterparts. I don’t know. Neither does Swan — she didn’t check.

I do know that Swan has absolutely no evidence that implicates pesticides and exculpates all other potential factors. Regardless of the explanation for Swan’s reported observations, sperm quality differences apparently did not affect anyone’s fertility.

Perhaps it’s time for Swan to spend time reconsidering the quality of her crusade.

Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author ofJunk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

Nature editorial ‘exploits public anxiety’ on endocrine disruptors

Geoffrey Kabat | Genetic Literacy Project

In December 2016, the European Union member states will vote on proposed legislation that would mandate an ambitious program to identify and regulate “endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in the environment. On November 22, the journal Nature carried an editorial entitled “Stand firm on hormone disruptors” by NYU pediatrician Leonardo Trasande. Rather than laying out the scientific issues relevant to consideration of the problem of chemicals in the environment and their effects on the general population, the editorial indulges in far-reaching speculation.

In his second sentence, referring to EDCs, Trasande writes, “These chemicals are everywhere – in food, personal-care products, electronics and furniture – and are widely detected in human blood and urine at levels known to affect health.”  He then goes on to state that the proposed regulation resulting in “removal of these pesticides could prevent autism and loss of cognition, which have been linked to exposure in utero.” And he claims that the annual costs associated with health effects from exposure to EDCs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. and Europe.

What is the evidence for Trasande’s and other advocates’ claim that EDCs are having detectable and widespread effects on public health from maladies of unknown etiology?  Rather than engaging in speculation, a number of crucial points need to be made.......To Read More....

So you want an “endocrine disruptor?” Look no further than GNC

Posted on July 18, 2013 by admin

Endocrine-disruptor—we at ACSH have been fighting an uphill battle against this pseudo-scientific term for years.  According to radical environmental groups and others with similar anti-chemical agendas, we are being bathed in these things and they are doing serious, chronic harm to all of us.

“Nonsense,” says ACSH’s Dr. Josh Bloom. “Those with a stake in keeping America in a panic (and pushing their own “chemical-free” agendas) use this term with impunity.”

Here’s what it really means: There are multiple chemicals, both endogenous (in the body) and drugs, that bind to hormone receptors in the body and elicit pharmacological effects. Two common examples are hormone replacement therapy (used for menopausal symptoms) and estrogen blockers, such as tamoxifen, which is used to treat certain types of breast cancer. They don’t “disrupt” anything. They work by a known mechanism and do what they are supposed to do.  Yet, the term is thrown around carelessly to include anything that may bind to a hormone receptor—no matter how weakly….ToRead More….

Observations From the Back Row

The Dose Makes The Poison

Paracelsus to parascience: the environmental cancer distraction

Bruce N. Ames, Lois Swirsky Gold

Academia Nuts: The Left's Bias Against Conservatives Is Real - Education: A new study finds leftist bias all too real in academic hiring. Campus radicals not only run colleges but admit they discriminate against conservatives. So much for "tolerance." Why should voters foot the bill for this? Looking at just one branch of social science, researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands found that almost a third of social psychologists — nearly all of whom are leftists — admitted in a survey they'd discriminate against conservatives in hiring decisions and grant proposals….. This isn't exactly earth-shaking news, of course. Everyone knows leftists control universities with no accountability. It does raise questions, however, because higher education has grown bloated and the public is picking up an ever more onerous tab.

Parasite responsible for shrimp sex-change problem, says scientists - A gender-bending parasite has been discovered which is believed to be responsible for turning male shrimps and other crustaceans into females.....

My Take - As you read this you will see that they just can't help but blame modern chemistry in some form.

Balkan drought highlights years of farm neglect - As crops wilt and die in the Balkans, farmers struck down by a particularly harsh drought this year are ruing the region's failure to upgrade irrigation networks and invest in a long-term agricultural strategy. Hot, dry weather in eastern and southern Europe has piled pressure on world grain markets already reeling from huge drought damage in the United States. The toll in Bosnia, where surface soil temperatures in the south have hit 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit), is estimated at almost $1 billion - a huge blow to a country where the farming sector accounts for 20 percent of employment and about 10 percent of economic output. The cost to neighboring Serbia, where agriculture last year accounted for about 12 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), is around $2 billion, and up to $250 million in Croatia, where yields have also been halved….

My Take – This is what happens when we abandon common sense or we adopt socialism as a ruling concept. The reality is that people froze to death in Eastern Europe when they had a terribly cold winter and now they will certainly have serious economic issues because of the stupidity of central planning schemes that never worked. One thing for sure; this is what would occur worldwide the world adopts greenies policies. Dystopia!

Busted! Leaked emails snag global-warming alarmists - 'Skeptics will be all over us – the world is really cooling' - While NASA climate alarmist James Hansen insists record summer heat and drought are caused by man-made global warming, leaked internal emails from just three summers ago reveal that he and his colleagues expressed alarm that the planet was inexplicably … cooling.....In an Oct. 12, 2009, email to Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, fellow warming alarmist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., asked, “Where the heck is global warming?” ....“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”.....Ignoring the record-breaking 2009 cooling period, Hansen recently argued that the evidence for human-made global warming is “overwhelming.” “We can say with high confidence that such extreme anomalies would not have occurred in the absence of global warming,” he said. Left unexplained, however, is the 2009 cooling anomaly..........