Don’t waste time or money on ‘Silent Earth’

This new book is just another junk-science screed against modern civilization and technology 

Paul Driessen

Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading Silent Earth, much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed.

Dave Goulson’s book expands on Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the USA of deadly malaria, and now protect crops that require so much land, water, work, fertilizer and energy to grow and harvest that we dare not sacrifice them to hordes of hungry insects.

Carson falsely blamed DDT for her cancer – and launched the practice of using conjecture, poetic prose, hyperbole and even fraud, instead of evidence-based science, to advance environmentalist agendas. The Environmental Defense Fund used her book to drive its campaign to ban DDT and give environmentalists “a level of authority they never had before.”

The EPA ban led to the deaths of millions of Africans and Asians from malaria, which could have been reduced dramatically by using this powerful spatial repellant in conjunction with modern insecticides and anti-malarial drugs. (See here here here and here.)

Relying mostly on inventive speculation, Goulson claims a silent spring devoid of chirping birds could soon become a silent planet devoid of insects that pollinate flowers and crops, and feed birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and (if former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has his way) billions of us humans.

It would take another book to address all the new book’s errors and problems, but here are a few.

Goulson transforms the supposed “bee-pocalypse” of a few years ago into a global apocalypse for all insects, and potentially all life on Earth. He blames modern agriculture, “greedy corporations,” free-market/personal-choice capitalism, too many humans who eat too much and live too well, urban light pollution and o course manmade climate change. Above all, he blames modern synthetic pesticides, though he does recognize that many “natural” “organic” chemicals are toxic to insects, wildlife and even humans.

Honeybee populations have been on a happy rebound for several years now, after being hit hard by Varroa destructor mites, Nosema, and other bee parasites and diseases. They were also harmed by beekeepers who tried to address these problems, but sometimes misused or overused mitacides. US Department of Agriculture surveys now show there are now over 150,000 more beehives than in 1995.

Studies in actual farmers’ fields have consistently shown no adverse effects on honeybees at the colony level from realistic exposures to neonicotinoid insecticides, one of Goulson’s primary scapegoats. In fact, bees thrive in and around neonic-treated canola, corn and other crops in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. As to wild bees, 98% don’t even pollinate agricultural crops – and the species that do are thriving, even though they have the greatest contact with neonics. That shouldn’t be surprising.

Neonicotinoids are used primarily to coat seeds. They are systemic pesticides that become part of the plant tissue and target only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages. Sulfloxaflor is similar in that regard. Both are far safer for general insect populations than older pesticides or organic farming chemicals that are applied by air, hand or truck across entire fields – and often beyond.

Goulson ignores all this and advances his central claim that populations of all insects are in precipitous decline globally. He bases that largely on a 2017 study by him and several colleagues. They assert that insect populations plummeted by over 75% during a 25-year period in several German nature reserves – then extrapolate that and a few other studies to the entire planet.

But their study didn’t track the same areas from year to year and employed traps that capture insects only while they’re flying. That misses non-flying insects and is heavily dependent on rainfall and other weather.

There’s simply no reliable evidence of a general insect decline. Indeed, some 900,000 insect species have been identified around the world, though total estimates range from 2 million to 30 million species. That and extremely limited monitoring programs make it impossible to calculate global insect population trends. Moreover, an extensive insect population study published in 2020 found no overall decline in North America, with declines in some US areas offset by increases elsewhere. The verdict is still out.

Goulson also claims modern pesticides are vastly more toxic than their predecessors. However, an Agriculture Department analysis concluded that, between 1968 and 2008, overall US pesticide toxicity plunged by 98% – while the amount of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides) applied per acre declined by 60% and pesticide persistence in soils and waters was cut in half, as farmers used different, better, more-targeted pesticides more carefully and judiciously, and employed other measures to control pests. He pillories glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, claiming the chemical is harmful to bees, has been linked to other insect and even bird declines, and causes cancer in humans. For evidence he cites the International Agency on Research and Cancer. But as I explain in a medical journal paper, IARC has strong ties to American trial lawyers who have filed multiple lawsuits over glyphosate – and the agency’s claims have been roundly contradicted by a decades-long US National Cancer Institute Agricultural Health Study – and by more than 3,300 studies around the world that support glyphosate safety. Reliance on IARC puts Goulson on very thin ice.

He’s against synthetic fertilizers (and more CO2) that help us grow far more food from much less land – because they can allegedly reduce floral diversity, make other plants less palatable for insects, pollute aquatic systems and contribute to climate change. He wants children to learn more about ecology and nature in school (presumably only his lesson plans) – and applauds the UK’s Extinction Rebellion lunatics.

These errors, omissions, exaggerations, falsifications and biases shouldn’t be surprising. A widely published biology professor, Goulson is also a trustee for Pesticide Action Network, an ideologically driven anti-pesticide organization.

Goulson’s proffered solutions to his imagined insect Armageddon are equally fanciful. While acknowledging that organic farming uses nasty chemicals and produces 80-90% lower yields than conventional modern agriculture, he wants still more organic farms – even though plowing billions more acres for the same overall crop yields would have horrific impacts on insects and wildlife.

With millions of jobs disappearing, he says the newly unemployed could work on organic farms, in backyard plots and in urban community gardens (doing stoop labor, pulling weeds and picking bugs off vegetables). Ruling elites wouldn’t do such work, of course, but we commoners should.

Amid his concerns about climate change, the author likewise ignores how industrial-scale wind turbines would splatter birds and insects, solar panels would obliterate habitats, and converting forests into wood pellets for “biofuel” electricity generation would destroy still more habitats. Mining and processing for Green New Deal metals and minerals would drastically harm people, insects and planet.

Ultimately, Goulson concludes, we need fewer people, who eat less and “switch to a predominantly vegetable diet, supplemented by small amounts of sustainably-harvested fish and grass-fed meat” (and bugs). Ruling elites once again likely exempted.

It all looks lie part of the Green warriors’ mission to stamp out prosperity as we know it.

Silent Earth will undoubtedly get rave reviews from environmentalists, leftist journalists, Big Tech, teachers unions, and the rest of the Cancel Culture. The insanity will get foisted on our children. Parents and policymakers should be wary.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many articles on the environment. 

Cartoon of the Day

 

An Example Of The Destruction In The "Reconciliation" Bill: Public Housing Bailout

September 30, 2021/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Even this late in the process, it’s still impossible for a mere member of the public to find out in much detail what all may be buried in the massive “budget reconciliation” bill now making its way through Congress. And the whole thing may yet get stopped, or substantially reduced, by the unexpected good sense of a couple of Democratic Senators (or even just one). Nevertheless, there is enough general information about what is planned by the bill’s proponents to give us some insights into the economic wreckage that could be coming if these people get their way.

Among things included within the bruited $3.5 trillion price tag (undoubtedly way understated), you likely are aware of at least some of the largest components. Included are things like large expansions of child tax credits, pre-K education subsidies, childcare subsidies, Obamacare expansion, Medicare expansion, subsidies and tax credits for useless “green” energy projects, and on and on and on. But for today I’m going to focus on just one of the many vast spending expansions, namely the proposed $80 billion for bailing out public housing.

At one time, some of us thought $80 billion was a lot of money. Now, it is just one of the smaller crumbs buried in this multi-trillion dollar behemoth.

Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute has a good summary of this item today at RealClearPolicy, in a piece titled “Democrats Want to Hand America's Failed Public Housing an $80 Billion Slush Fund.” I have written frequently about the failure of socialist-model public housing generally, and of the New York City Housing Authority in particular, and also about the remarkable way that NYCHA and other public housing entities are somehow able time and again to parlay their ongoing disastrous failure into more and more and yet more taxpayer funding. (See, e.g., here and here.) The proposed “reconciliation” bill takes this game to a whole new level. It appears that the idea is to throw some massive spending numbers in with so many other massive spending numbers that nobody will be able to focus on this one issue or to object effectively. And the public housing bureaucracies will once again be hugely rewarded for failure, indeed with a far larger bailout than ever before.

Hendrix provides a brief chronology of this latest round. It started with President Biden at the beginning of his term proposing an incremental $40 billion for the nation’s failed public housing authorities. But then in April Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer got into the act:

Back in April, Sen. Schumer called on President Joe Biden to double his planned spending of $40 billion on public housing — “it’s just not enough,” said Schumer more recently. He wanted all of the original money just to pay NYCHA’s repair bill. And what Schumer wants, he gets: an increase to $80 billion in spending on public housing and enormous influence on securing half of it for a NYCHA bailout.

(My emphasis.). And just how much is the NYCHA “repair bill”? Readers of my previous posts know that NYCHA has gotten itself into a very deep hole by following the unworkable socialist model, where the game is to wait until your facility falls apart and then use the disaster to put the squeeze on the politicians for a bailout. NYCHA’s grim “projects,” mostly built from the 1940s to 1970s, after decades of incompetent maintenance, have basically reached the “falling apart” state. Should you come to New York as a tourist, you will definitely want to avoid going anywhere near these hideous and dangerous places, so I’ll have to give you a picture to illustrate how unpleasant they are:

By now most all of the major building systems in nearly all of the buildings need major upgrades or replacements — plumbing, electrical, heating, roofs, façades, windows, and so forth. And by the way, none of them have building-wide air conditioning, nor is there any feasible way to provide it in these older buildings, which is why you see so many window air conditioners in the picture. (Somehow the poor have plenty of money for air conditioners.)

So how much will all of this cost the taxpayers? In 2015 the de Blasio administration put out a big Report called “NextGeneration NYCHA,” which estimated a need for some $17 billion for these capital replacements and upgrades. They have about 170,000 apartments in their projects, so that number would represent about $100,000 per apartment. But that was just the beginning. In February 2018 they put out a revised number, which was $25 billion. In December 2018 an independent entity, the Regional Plan Association, put out its own estimate of what NYCHA needed for capital upgrades, and it was now $45 billion. A budget presented by NYCHA in December 2019 then put forth a new range of estimates, including a “worst-case” scenario of some $68.5 billion by 2028. That’s the latest I can find right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the number has gone up even more since then.

At $68 billion for capital replacements and upgrades for 170,000 apartments, we’re now talking about some $400,000 per apartment. For comparison, the median sale price of a single-family home in the United States for August 2021 was $380,000 — and for that you own the place free and clear, without mortgage or need to pay rent. Also, fully half of the houses go for less. In other words, for well less than NYCHA is demanding in taxpayer bailouts, you could buy every one of the tenant families a fully-paid-up mortgage-free median single family house somewhere in the United States, and then bulldoze the horrible NYCHA projects and be done with them. That would provide all the NYCHA tenants much improved housing and for much less money. But of course it would also mean putting the entire NYCHA bureaucracy out of business, plus losing the big bloc of bought-and-paid-for Democratic votes represented by these lifetime-dependent public housing residents. Clearly, that’s not how this works.

So here is Hendrix on how the Schumer add-ons in the “reconciliation” bill would deal with the issue of capital needs of NYCHA and other public housing entities:

The Democrat’s reconciliation bill gives Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge the authority to allocate $66.5 billion in new public housing dollars however she pleases. Given its soaring repair bill, NYCHA alone could easily soak up every new discretionary dollar spent on public housing. Then there’s another $10 billion Fudge will get to spend under her agency’s “business as usual” formula plus $2.75 billion in grants under terms also set by the secretary. In short, it’s an $80 billion slush fund.

In other words, even though the cost has become completely unjustifiable and preposterous, you don’t expend one minute of energy to consider a better way to do the job for less. Instead you give the failed bureaucracy every dollar it wants, in the form of a gigantic slush fund with no strings attached, and you bury it somewhere in a multi-trillion dollar spending blowout and expect that nobody will notice how their hard-earned money is being thrown away.

Meanwhile, just a few points, both old and new, on how totally disastrous NYCHA’s failure has been:

• From the Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2018, “Anger as New York City Public Housing Residents Go Without Heat, Hot Water.”: “More than 143,000, or 80%, of New York City’s 175,000 public housing apartments have been without heat or hot water at times this winter, city officials said Tuesday. Tempers flared over widespread heat and hot water outages in New York City public housing at an unusually contentious City Council hearing. Some residents were in tears. . . . Residents have been left without heat sporadically throughout the winter, on average for two days at a time, according to city officials. The outages, which the city has blamed on aging boilers, have affected more than 320,000 people.” From City Councilman Ritchie Torres on then-NYCHA head Shola Olatoye: ““She has haplessly presided over a humanitarian crisis.”

• From the New York Post, March 17, 2018: “As Politico reported last week embattled city Housing Authority chief Shola Olatoye has been trying to win more labor flexibility, albeit with no backup from City Hall. Soon after taking over in 2014, she sought common-sense changes to work rules that have maintenance staff and other skilled workers on the job exclusively from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday. But the Teamsters vetoed her plan for staggered shifts. One result is the agency’s huge overtime bill, which (for example) leaves its plumbers as some of the very highest-paid city employees — five of the top 10 OT earners these last two years. The 2016 overtime king was NYCHA plumber Vincenzo Giurbino, who took home an added $228,000 atop his $141,152 base salary.”

• From Hendrix at RealClearPolicy today: “The pandemic highlights NYCHA’s long history of harming the health and safety of its residents. Just this month, New York City public health officials admitted that NYCHA residents are dying from Covid-19 at nearly twice the city rate. “The pandemic has trapped many poor New Yorkers in miserable living conditions in the city’s public housing system,” observed The New York Times. It turns out that one of the deadliest places to be in New York City during a pandemic is in a New York City Housing Authority apartment.”

• Also from Hendrix today: “[J]ust this week, Brooklyn’s District Attorney charged nine NYCHA contractors with bribery over the authority’s no-bid contracts. ‘We have every reason to believe that there are other superintendents being offered bribes,’ said DA Eric Gonzalez. Despite record levels of funding, ‘New York’s public housing isn’t getting better,’ admitted The New York Times. Sometimes more money means more problems. There’s an ‘ecosystem of people willing to make and take bribes at NYCHA,’ found the Brooklyn DA.”

One could go on indefinitely with this. The crime rate in all categories is also a multiple at NYCHA projects as elsewhere in the City. And I should also mention that the progressives in Congress want not only to bail out the existing failed public housing, but also to lift all restrictions on building more, and put up yet more funding for that. It will be just one more step toward the utopian world of perfect justice and fairness that they are planning for us. More and more taxpayer money for greater and greater failure and outright corruption.

 

The Government Is Not Your Friend, No Matter What Politicians Tell You

October 1, 2021 By Vince Coyner

Reagan once said: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." He was right, the government’s not your friend and it most certainly isn’t here to help you.

The dirty little secret about government is that its purpose is not really to make the lives of citizens better but, rather, to accumulate power at the expense of citizens. Not sure about that? Ask yourself, how many government agencies have put themselves out of a job because they succeeded? There’re a few that technology left behind, like the Steamboat Inspection Service; others that served their purpose, like the Defense Homes Corporation; while others were merged into other agencies like the General Land Office, subsumed into the Department of Interior. In our history, there have been fewer than 100 federal agencies that have actually been shuttered, and most of those existed in the early 20th century to deal with the Depression or the two world wars.

 According to the Federal Register, the federal government has 457 different agencies. That’s 457 agencies covering virtually every aspect of American’s lives, most of which are staffed by unelected bureaucrats, all of whom spend your money and many of whom write regulations that carry the force of law which the government’s police power enforces. This includes everything from the State Department to the Geographic Names Board to the International Broadcasting Board to the ATF.

And that 457 is misleading. While it includes a dozen organizations tied to Defense, there are dozens more agencies that come under it that are not listed in the Federal Register such as the DoD Education Activity or the Office of Naval Research. Wikipedia lists a more realistic, but still lacking, 1,500...........Sadly, America has become so detached from our Constitution that 90% of what our government does is unconstitutional............To Read More...

 

 

Our Porcine Two-Legged Wokeists

  By Victor Davis Hanson September 29, 2021

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

—George Orwell, Animal Farm

What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?  

Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000 a ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well attended to by masked Morlock servants.

Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?

For answers about these hypocritical wokeists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, Animal Farm, an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers. 

The antihuman animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).

Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged piggish revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life. 

The Marxist co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.

Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant garde hectoring. 

What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the National Anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports. 

Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps. 

Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness—in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods. 

Our other elite wokeists navigating around the revolution are even more cynical. The corporate and Wall Street capitalists feel that a little virtue signaling, showy diversity coordinators, and woke advertising will more or less buy off the latest version of Al-Sharpton-like shake-down artists. 

Then there are the trimmers and enablers. These are the wealthy, rich, and professional classes. They feel—in the abstract—absolutely terrible about inequality, but hardly enough in the concrete to mix with the unwashed. 

For them, wokeism is like party membership in the late ethically bankrupt Soviet Union. It is necessary for peace of mind and good income, but otherwise not an obstacle for the continuance of the privileged, comfortable life. 

The more TV news hosts rant about “systemic” this and “supremacy” that, and the more college presidents write stern penance memos to their faculty about “that’s not who we are,” and all the more they feel not just good about themselves, but relieved of any real obligation to live and socialize with the Other. 

As for the self-declared non-white Other, wokeism is also a top-down revolution of celebrities, intellectuals, actors, activists, academics, grifters, lawyers, and the upper-middle-class and rich. And they are not calling for a Marshall Plan to bring classical education to the inner city. They themselves have little desire to move into the hood or spread their wealth. They rarely mentor others on their shrewd capitalist expertise that made themselves rich. 

They are far more cynical than that. The regrettable violence of the street, the 120 days of 2020 looting, death, and arson are the levers of the woke professionals. They fight with the various tribes of the same class and mindset over the slices of the same coveted elite pies. But they bring to the scrap the unspoken cudgel that without greater non-white de facto quotas in comic books, TV commercials, Ivy-League faculties and students, symphonies, and sit-coms, then “systemic racism” could once again ignite downtown Portland or Seattle or Baltimore. 

Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi—and their supposedly unwoke, but similarly rich and privileged enemies, “It was impossible to say which was which.”

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

 

Biden's Insane Pick of the Day: Tracy Stone-Manning Bureau of Land Management (BLM)

Pollak: Democrats Can’t Complain About Capitol Riot After Confirming Alleged Terrorist to Lead 

 

Tracy Stone-Manning, an alleged ecoterrorist, to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in President Joe Biden’s administration.  As Breitbart News reported, in 1989:

[Stone-Manning] mailed a letter to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of John P. Blount, an individual in her “circle of friends,” crudely alerting federal authorities that trees in Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest that were scheduled to be cut down had been sabotaged with metal spikes to prevent them from being harvested. Tree spiking, as this form of sabotage is called, is both a crime and, according to the FBI’s definition, an act of ecoterrorism...........

In exchange for immunity, Stone-Manning testified in the 1993 trial against Blount, who was convicted for the tree spiking crime and sentenced to 17 months in prison.

Stone-Manning has repeatedly maintained her innocence in the ecoterrorist plot, saying she delivered the letter out of concern that someone would get hurt and that she did not actually know if trees had been spiked. Details that emerged during her nomination process, however, brought new context to the tree spiking chain of events that were damning for Stone-Manning...........After being lectured for months about the supposed “domestic terrorists” in the ranks of Trump supporters, we now have an alleged domestic terrorist at the highest level of government, with the approval of the Democratic Party (and the media).............To Read More....

Quote of the Day

Does it matter that our artistic culture is so bereft of greatness? It is not possible to measure the effect, but as Einstein said, not all that can be measured is important, and not all that is important can be measured. The purpose of society is not to produce great art, and yet a society that fails to do so will subsequently be thought the poorer for not having done so. There is no grandeur to it, only a dull, insipid, and uninspiring utilitarianism, however great its technical achievements. We may be able to communicate faster, more easily, and with more people than ever before—but we have nothing to communicate. - Empty Frames, by Theodore Dalrymple