COMMENTS

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THE BIG MOVE

Barring last minute technical hitches, from Monday I'll be blogging from Asian Correspondent. Beck is moving into the mainstream, WTF? Yep, there are interesting times ahead.

Update: Margo's Maid, aka Gavin Atkins of Shadowlands, is also making the move. It's good to know I won't be the only Aussie reactionary at the site.

Atkins has very bravely decided to blog under his real name; me, I'm going to stick with JF Beck.



Editing note: the superfluous "me" has been removed.

DEEP THROAT SOUNDS

Margo has amateurs; I've got a pro – ignore the gap-toothed geek at the start.

CRIKEY, THE RULES ARE DIFFERENT

PP boy Tobias Ziegler on the nastiness of Andrew Bolt, which flows on to his commenters:

[Bolt's] approach to commentary shows contempt for reasonable debate – and comments deriding the character, personality and even the appearance of people and groups who disagree with conservative positions are published but not denounced as being below the preferred level of debate. Contrary to claims of valuing open debate and disagreement, the publication of respectful disagreement at his site can be patchy – as we and our commenters have documented on this site and its predecessors. The topics and line of debate in his posts commonly focus on defining outgroups – “What is it with the Left and …”, Aboriginal enough or not Aboriginal enough?, Muslims and the problems they bring into this country, etc.

Here's an example of a "reasonable" conversation starter from Pure Poison's infamous and now gone contributor Ant Rogenous:

Clearly, The Hand that Signed the Paper’s author has no sense of humour. Which makes her views on what constitutes a humorous blog all the more laughable. Dale is disappointed that Crikey has employed a bunch of bloggers from GrodsCorp — a site she calls “very, very unfunny” and whose contributors she describes as “bullying nitwits” and “among the nastier bunches floating around the Oz interwebs”.

Yet who do we find in Dale’s blogroll? None other than bullying nitwit Tim Blair who, in collusion with some of the “Oz interwebs’” most deranged bottom-feeders (including Andrew Bolt), has spent years trying to intimidate Jeremy Sear, prying into his private life, trying to damage his career, poking fun at his divorce and so on.

Jeremy is by no means the only person Blair, his winged monkeys and the blogosphere’s biggest creeps have targeted; and, needless to say, GrodsCorp has never involved itself in anything this disgraceful — but that’s beside the point.

The point, of course, is that gnashing one’s teeth about “nastiness” and “bullying” on the same page as a Tim Blair link is breathtaking in its hypocrisy.

As far as bottom-feeders go, little-known blogger J.F. Beck was the most unctuous to weigh in to yesterday’s Pure Poison attack. Beck’s blog has for years been little more than an exercise in ingratiating himself to Tim Blair with creepy personal pot-shots Jeremy Sear and ham-fisted attacks on Antony Loewenstein. Not surprisingly for someone of Blair’s ego, it seems to have worked — the two exchange links (and cuddly emails) with almost the same loving frequency as Blair and Bolt.

I won’t bother posting a link to Beck’s site because it (like the man himself, who all those years ago stalked Jeremy until he’d uncovered his identity) truly is a steaming pile of shit. But if you really must have a look at it, you can find a link in Legal Eagle’s blogroll at (gasp!) anti-bullying-humour-authority Helen Dale’s site.

Last, and most certainly least, a pathetic bankrupt you probably don’t care about had a crack too. But the less said about him, the better.

Any disapproval from Scott Bridges? Nope:

Great post, Ant.

Gee, that sounds like an endorsement. Yet here's Bridges today:

While I agree with Bolt that publication of a comment at a blog does not necessarily indicate endorsement by the blogger, I’m a little surprised that a senior journalist and blogging veteran (a few years in the blogosphere makes you a veteran) is shocked by the realisation that bloggers tend to be associated with the comment threads they spawn. Surely he can’t be that naïve. Bolt’s critics have long pointed out the kind of rubbish that is regularly published in his comment threads and Bolt has long failed to do anything about it, so the sudden hand-wringing and soul-searching comes across as a bit disingenuous, as does the attempt to blame only “students”, “leftists trying to cause michief” and “nutters”.

This is hilarious coming from a blogging veteran who took his blog offline so he could sanitize it by removing the more embarrassing posts and deleting all of the comments. The whole PP crew lives in a parallel reality.

Update: The Rogenous post above is pretty old; they don't do that "play the man" stuff anymore, right? Wrong:

Like his loony namesake in the US, it seems that Beck is willing to lie, distort facts, quote out of context, and throw science out the window in order to score some cheap points against environmentalists. He’s a persistent nit-picker of this blog (his own blog’s raison d’etre seems to be to monitor the typos of Pure Poison, Loewenstein and a couple of others) but his own attempt at producing a substantive argument fell into 17 shades of fail.

How am I going to be a better blogger if I'm not shown where I'm wrong? El Barbudo tries to be helpful:

THR and Tobias, let’s not forget that noted scientician Tim Blair linked approvingly to Beck’s debunked piece – and, later, Beck’s shrill attempt to “deal with DDT denialists”. His lies, as noted by THR and Tim Lambert, are of course ignored.

THR and Lambert, now there are two reliable sources. Some critical analysis from Ziegler:

Thanks for that link, El Barbudo – and I see Blair offers the level of detailed and critical analysis of the content he links to that we’ve come to expect.

It doesn’t seem to have picked up much interest from his commenters, though – “WB” has accounted for one-fifth of the comments so far, and nearly half of the comments that are there seem to have nothing to do with the topic.

More from El Barbudo:

Tobias, this is precisely why people of J.F. Beck and Tim Blair’s ilk prefer sniping and infantile smart-arsery to advancing their own arguments: whenever they attempt the latter, they get their fragile chins handed to them.

And so Tobias Ziegler manages his site in a way that encourages arguments based on stereotypes, divisiveness and personal attacks to thrive. Naughty, naughty PP boy. Anybody got a wooden spoon I can borrow?

BUNNY HEADS EXPLODED

A surplus is dealth with:

Every year, the city of Stockholm kills off thousands of rabbits in an effort to protect trees and shrubbery in the city’s extensive network of parks and green space.

Animal control authorities employ a special rifle to shoot the excess rabbits, with most of the culling taking place at dawn when the animals peek out from their holes.

And disposed of:

Last year marked a new record for Stockholm’s rabbit cull, with nearly 6,000 rabbits, mostly from Kungsholmen, being removed from Stockholm’s parks.

But rather than simply disposing of the dead rabbits, the city instead froze them for eventual transport to a special heating plant in Karlskoga in central Sweden, where the bunny bodies are then burned as a form of bioenergy.

Hey, what a good use for aborted fetuses.

CITIZENSHIP QUESTION

A letter to the Australian:

While we are talking about tougher border controls, perhaps the citizenship test can have a single yes/no question added: Do you support Jihad?

Daniel Lewis
Rushcutters Bay, NSW

Quality beats quantity every time.

PALESTINIAN PLIGHT IGNORED

Antony Loewenstein somehow overlooks the hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised Palestinians, unable to own land or vote and prohibited from working as doctors. Loewenstein overlooks this because the oppressors are Arabs, not Jews – if he wrote a book about about this he might get some genuine death threats.

PURE POISON EMBARRASSES CRIKEY YET AGAIN

Fisking is passé but PP boy Tobias Ziegler's stupidity begs to be exposed so lets take a look at a recent Ziegler comment in a PP open thread (this relates to my post here):

I notice that the Quadrant-published DDT expert has continued to run into problems with the integrity of his argument. THR wrote a second post related to the Quadrant essay, responding to the author’s hasty attempts to defend his flawed article.

There are no problems with my Quadrant article: it's 100% accurate. Both of THR's posts are exceedingly lame. (There's a new THR post, so it's now three lame posts – I'm flattered that all of his posts since 30 August are about me.)

So the next tactic is a quick attempt to move away from the original arguments and set up a new one based on this media report – this time claiming there are no studies to support the story’s suggestion of a link between DDT exposure and genital abnormalities or male fertility.

No change of focus: I stand by my Quadrant article. I blogged on the "media report" because it's an irresponsible and pathetic attempt at DDT scaremongering – people could die as a result of it. Studies may "suggest" a link between "DDT exposure and genital abnormalities [and] male fertility" but the cited studies are neither persuasive nor conclusive (more on that coming up).

The most cursory follow-up on the news story reveals that the lecture reported in the story is available online – complete with citations:

- Bornman, M.S., Delport, R., Becker, P., Risenga, S.S. & de Jager, C.P. 2005. Urogenital birth defects in neonates from a high-risk malaria area in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Epidemiology. (16)5. S126 – 127.

- Aneck-Hahn, Natalie H., Schulenburg, Gloria W., Bornman, Maria S., Farias, Paulina & de Jager, Christiaan. 2007. Impaired Semen Quality Associated with Environmental DDT Exposure in Young Men Living in a Malaria Area in the Limpopo Province, South Africa. Journal of Andrology, Vol. 28. No. 3: 423-434.

The cockily overconfident Ziegler – aka Toby Nutcracker – hasn't done his homework. The text of the first study amounts to only 370 words. Here are the results and conclusion in their entirety:

Results:

The maternal (n=42) mean, median and range for p,pDDE were 24.75, 3.19, 0.14 to 419.91 µg/g lipid respectively. In neonates (n=45) these values were 5.2, 1.14 and 0.03–29.82 µg/g lipid. In 2010 newborns (96.35%) no external urogenital birth defects were observed. However, in 76 (3.65%) babies abnormalities were found, of which ambiguous genitalia in 18 (0.86%) newborns raised particular concern.

Conclusion:

The concordant high prevalence of urogenital birth defects and the DDE concentrations in cord blood in neonates from a DDT-sprayed area should be regarded as a matter of extreme international concern.

Another great moment in science. Exactly what constitutes "ambiguous genitalia" is not specified: a small penis or large clitoris might qualify. In any event, the Intersex Society of North America estimates that approximately 1% of babies are born with bodies that "differ from standard male or female" so .86% in Limpopo is somewhat below expectation.

The second study Ziegler cites is inconclusive. It refers to an earlier study on urogenital defects related to DDT exposure, the earlier study concluding:

For boys in the highest category of DDE exposure compared with those in the lowest, the odds ratios were consistent with an association of modest (cryptorchidism) or moderate (polythelia) size, but in no instance was the estimate precise. Although some findings suggested a modest association of DDE with hypospadias, this depended on how exposure was represented in the models. Overall, our results were inconclusive.

Ziegler ignores the inconclusive results, finishing off:

It looks like there’s a more recent publication about the urogenital defects (in this case, extra nipples) as well. That’s about 5 minutes with Google to track the information down. This is a(nother) poor reflection on the level of intellectual rigor that can be deemed acceptable for publication in Quadrant.

At 283 words total this "study" is shorter than many abstracts. It's not scientific and provides no meaningful results, period. Ziegler has made a complete fool of himself by referring to "studies" that prove nothing. Or maybe he knows they prove nothing and was counting on no one reading them.

Quadrant might well have shown a low "level of intellectual rigor" in publishing my DDT article but Quadrant's rigor level is well above that of Crikey which allows the PP-boyz to keep getting it wrong. Another fuck-up? Just delete it.

By the way, if Ziegler wants to argue DDT, I'm happy to oblige. Come on puss, let's have a go.

Update: Numbers are usually Tim Lambert's strong point but here his arithmetic lets him down:

In his piece Beck is only able to come up with two alleged lies by Carson.

Nope, I cited one lie and two misrepresentations. This Carson lie, ignored by Lambert, on its own discredits the whole of Silent Spring:

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Eat an oleander leaf to see how dangerous natural chemicals are. Lambert first.

Update II: DDT is one of the most studied chemicals ever. The science deniers – serial liar Tim Lambert, Ed "water is carcinogenic" Darrell, email account hacker THR, PP boy Toby Nutcracker and whoever else wants to have a go – should cite some of the real studies showing conclusively that DDT is, in the quantities likely to be encountered by humans, detrimental to health. If that task is too difficult, cite some of the studies conclusively linking DDT to the decline in raptor numbers.

By the way, his repeated links to the super-popular Darryl Mason prove Nutcracker's not quite right in the head.

Update III: THR links to a BBC article and two at Lancet as his proof DDT is harmful to humans.

The BBC article shows that more DDT results in improved mental performance:

Children exposed to the pesticide DDT while in the womb experience development problems, researchers say.

The team also found that the longer babies were breastfed for, the better they scored on the developmental tests - even though they would have been exposed to DDT through the milk.

Lancet one looks at long term occupational exposure and is irrelevant to everyone not working in the manufacturing of DDT. In any event the results presented in the abstract are nonspecific.

Lancet two says DDT might be harmful and should be studied further.

Update IV: A smear job from John Quiggin –everyone not regarding Rachel Carson as a saint has been deluded by the "second-hand propaganda of a nut group [Lyndon LaRouche], recycled by the tobacco industry." Quiggin attempts to discredit J Gordon Edwards' 5,300 word fisking of Silent Spring not by addressing the content but rather by attacking the site of publication, a Lyndon LaRouche affiliate.

Quiggin should do the right thing by his readers in pointing out where Edwards is wrong about Silent Spring.


What is it with the left and this ongoing denial of science?

NOT ZIONISTS, JEWS

A 4,600 word Johann Hari terrorism piece mentions Jews four times. How does Antony Loewenstein read this?

Jewish murderers, a perspective

No wonder the guy's a best-selling author.

CASTER SEMENYA, DDT VICTIM?

A very scary prediction:

South Africa's use of the pesticide DDT for malaria control in the Limpopo River basin is likely to lead to an increase in babies being born with deformed sex organs or being born with both male and female genitalia.

This is the view of former CSIR scientist Anthony Turton, who delivered a lecture on the "Crisis in our Rivers" when he was awarded the Habitat Council's Conservation Award in the city on Saturday.

Caster Semenya was born and raised in Limpopo province. More from Turton:

We know from published peer-reviewed research that a high correlation exists between the application of DDT as a (malarial) control measure and the birth of babies with deformed genitalia, either being born with both male and female organs, or with abnormalities associated with what we can broadly call gender-defining organs, and we also know this is affecting male fertility.

The common denominator is the Limpopo area and abnormalities associated with gender arising from endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as the use of DDT to control malaria ... This means a national propensity to androgyny for future generations, specifically if they were conceived in areas of high risk such as the Limpopo River basin.

Turton's scientific specialty? Political science. So here we have an environmentalist in the Rachel Carson mold using bogus science in hope of creating an hysterical anti-DDT backlash – there is no better way to scare parents than to make them think having thier houses sprayed for mosquitoes will wreck their babies' genitals, obliquely using Caster Semenya as an example. It's both irresponsible and pathetic.

Update: I can find no studies linking DDT exposure to androgyny: anyone finding such a study should post the information in comments so I can update. Studies linking DDT to genital malformations are contradictory so the juries still out on that.

Anyway, I'm reasonably aware of alleged DDT related health issues and can't recall anyone other than Turton linking DDT to androgyny. Just coincidentally Caster Semenya's apparently indeterminate gender recently got lots of play in the media, especially in South Africa. Semenya was born and raised in Limpopo province.

Now we have Turton specifying that Limpopoans are especially vulnerable to DDT induced androgyny. Whereas he doesn't refer to Semenya by name, he's obviously trying to create a mental link between Semenya's apparently indeterminate sexuality and DDT's alleged ability to cause androgynous defects in babies.

BREAK IT AND DIE

The clean up procedure for a dropped incandescent light globe: Use your fingers to pick up the bigger bits – careful, don't cut yourself – and throw them in the nearest rubbish bin. Dustbuster up the smaller fragments.

The suggested clean up for a broken environmentally friendly compact fluorescent globe:

Leave the room

Remove people and pets from the room and keep them out of the room during the clean-up process.

Avoid stepping on any broken glass.

Ventilation

Ventilate the room for at least 15 minutes prior to starting clean-up by opening windows and doors to the outdoors. This will ensure that mercury vapour levels are reduced before you start cleaning.

Clean-up Directions for Hard and Carpeted Surfaces

Do not use a vacuum to clean up the initial breakage, as it will spread the mercury vapour and dust throughout the area and may contaminate the vacuum.

Wear disposable gloves, if available, to avoid direct contact with mercury and to prevent cuts.

Scoop or sweep up the broken pieces and debris with two pieces of stiff paper or cardboard. Do not use a broom.

Use sticky tape, such as duct tape or masking tape, to pick up any remaining fine glass or powder.

Wipe the area with a damp paper towel, cloth or disposable wet wipe to remove any residual particles.

Place the broken glass and clean-up materials in a glass container with a tight fitting lid to further minimize the release of mercury vapour.

Carpeting - Steps to Take After the Initial Clean-up

If the rug is removable, take it outside, shake and air it out for as long as is practical.

The first time you vacuum on installed carpet after the clean-up, shut the door to the room or close off the area as much as possible and ventilate the room in which the lamp was broken by opening the windows and doors to the outside. When the vacuuming is done, remove the bag, wipe the vacuum with a damp paper towel, cloth or disposable wet wipe, and then place the vacuum bag and paper towel in a sealed plastic bag outside. In the case of a canister vacuum, wipe the canister out with a wet paper towel and dispose of the towel as outlined above. Continue to ventilate the room for 15 minutes once the vacuuming is completed.

Disposal

Immediately place waste material outside of the building in a protected area away from children.

Dispose of the waste at a household hazardous waste location as soon as possible. Check with local, provincial, or territorial authorities about the requirements for recycling and for the location of household hazardous waste depots or pick-up.

Do not dispose of the waste in your household trash.

For further information on disposal, please contact Environment Canada.

Washing

Wash your hands after storing and disposing of waste.

Additional Information

Remove and install the CFL by handling only the base of the lamp to prevent any unnecessary pressure on the glass that may cause it to break.

Consider using a drop cloth when replacing a CFL to minimize the chance of breakage should the lamp fall or to protect the flooring and assist in clean-up should the bulb drop and break.

Store fluorescent lamps in containers that prevent them from breaking, such as in their original packaging.

Consider avoiding the use of CFLs in areas where the lamps may be easily broken.


Hell, it would easier to move house.

CIGARETTES DANGEROUS

The West Australian government aims to ban the sale of dangerous weapons – swords, crossbows, machetes and even some fishing knives – to minors. Here's the police minister's reasoning on the fishing knife ban:

Some fishing knives are huge and more dangerous than a packet of cigarettes to some kids...

Any day now a WA kid brandishing a pack of Winfields will rob a cutlery shop.

STAY SHARP

The Furi pro knife sharpener quickly and easily gets knives razor sharp; I have a bald patch on my arm to prove it. Don't know how long the edge lasts but it doesn't really matter because it's so easy to use.

TIM BLAIR SCREWS UP

Blair jumped the gun in awarding Damian Lataan the title "stupidest person on the internet". I've never announced it publicly but for a while now I've regarded Ed Darrell as the stupidest of the stupid for claiming water is carcinogenic. Amazingly, THR has out-stupided Darrell:

Well, it seems the primary source for Beck's claim that a splash of ddt is safer than a morning coffee is one Bruce Ames, whose work (the ''Ames test') has been to prove that tobacco causes no harm.

~

Obviously, this product isn't safe for use in developed countries, but Beck is quite happy for the children of poor nations to die if it helps to discredit an environmentalist somewhere, anywhere.

Truth be known, I don't think anyone with the brain power to blog, albeit limited, could believe that, so the guy must be acting dumb. Anyway, here goes.

I didn't say "that a splash of ddt is safer than a morning coffee", and neither did Bruce Ames. Ames' point is that the danger to human health from pesticide residues in food is overstated.

According to Wikipedia:

The Ames test is a biological assay to assess the mutagenic potential of chemical compounds. A positive test indicates that the chemical might act as a carcinogen...

Bruce Ames has not used the Ames test in attempting to "prove that tobacco causes no harm". Here's Ames' view (bold in original):

The three main causes of cancer are smoking, dietary imbalances (excess fat and calories; inadequate intake of fruits, vegetables, fiber, and calcium), and chronic infections leading to chronic inflammation (hepatitis B and C viruses, Helicobacter pylori infection, schistosomiasis, etc.). Chronic inflammation is a major cause of cancer in the world because it releases powerful oxidants which both stimulate cell division and are mutagens.

Past occupational exposures might cause about 2% of current human cancer, a major part being asbestos exposure in smokers, and industrial or synthetic chemical pollution causes less than 0.1 %, in my view. The age-adjusted cancer death rate in the U.S. for all cancers combined (excluding those attributable to smoking) has been remaining steady since 1950, while life expectancy increases every year.

We are the healthiest we have ever been in human history.

Trying to link DDT with being pro-tobacco is straight out of the Quiggin/Lambert playbook. It's bullshit.

The Beck-is-happy-to-see-kids-killed-by-DDT is also bullshit. No chemical insecticide is without risk – it's a matter of weighing the risks against the benefits. Manufacturers voluntarily took Bendiocarb off the US market primarily because of the risk to children. Bendiocarb is still on the list of WHO recommended indoor insecticides for developing country use, however. Thus by THR's insane logic the WHO is actively trying to kill the children of poor nations.

Idiot.

Update: The earlier stupidity from THR was just a warmup – check out this comedy gold. Loewenstein, Lataan and Darrell are geniuses by comparison. Can it get any stupider? Stay tuned.


Editing note: Bendiocarb was misspelled, twice. Corrected.

GREEN WITH RAGE

According to researchers at the University of Toronto "buying green can be a license for bad behaviour" (emphasis in original):

"People do not make decisions in a vacuum; their decisions are embedded in a history of behaviors. Across three studies we consider pro-social and ethical decision-making in the context of past consumer behaviors and demonstrate that the halo associated with green consumerism has to be taken with reservations. While mere exposure to green products can have a positive societal effect by inducing pro-social and ethical acts, purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors."

The Guardian picks up the story:

Green is good. You think before you print; you buy your organic whatever; you sort-of sympathise with the bumper sticker injunction to "live simply so that others may simply live". It might not be as cheap or as easy – but it's the right thing to do. Isn't it?

Well, consider this: a person who makes the decent, green choice is much more likely to behave badly afterwards, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.

The study isn't attacked; it's used to bolster the argument for greater government intervention:

What the findings show is that expecting people to always make the right choices is unrealistic. The fight against climate change could require greater conscription than we are willing to admit.

Andrew Bolt provides a slightly different view:

Why greens can’t be trusted

Green activism always struck me as a no-sweat morality, in which you got the moral kudos for demanding that others make the sacrifices. So no surprise here:

Psychologists in Canada have revealed new research suggesting that people who become eco-conscious “green consumers” are “more likely to steal and lie” than others.

The new study comes from professor Nina Mazar of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and her colleague Chen-Bo Zhong.

“Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers,” begins the statement from the university. “Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up ‘moral credentials’ in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.”

Jeremy Sear, his brain possibly subconsciously linking his Greenness to "questionable behaviour", goes into full on rant mode (my bold):

You’d think that the effort [above] from Andy would be so far beneath contempt and beyond parody that it a response would be superfluous. And it would be – if it weren’t the case that a major news media organisation insists on publishing it.

And all it takes to get Andrew Bolt to accuse people with opposing political views of being “untrustworthy” is ninety students in Toronto participating in a dodgy experiment that doesn’t actually support his allegation (for starters, far from being “green activists”, the group that “lied” hadn’t actually chosen to buy “green” products, but instead had just been allocated to that side – they were no more “green” than Andrew Bolt). But he won’t care. He’s not even pretending to debate opponents on the argument now – he’s just calling them names. Serious, nasty names.

You wouldn’t think that a media organisation that wants to be taken seriously would publish this worthless, spiteful garbage.

Unless I've missed something somewhere, Bolt didn't do any name calling.

But Jeremy does make a valid point: if Crikey and Pure Poison aim to be taken seriously, they should stop publishing "worthless, spiteful garbage."

TIM LAMBERT STILL WRONG ABOUT DDT

Eritrea's WHO sponsored anti-malaria program has exceeded expectations, at least partly because it's one of the few countries that continues to use DDT for indoor spraying. Back in 2005 computer programmer Tim Lambert noted the success of Eritrea's anti-malaria program, erroneously attributing this to the fact that Eritrea had "stopped using DDT". Lambert is not a reliable source of information on the fight against malaria, or anything else for that matter.

Update: A group of DDT "experts" take time out from their hectic schedules – THR trying to work out Iain Hall's new passwords; Jeremy Sear obsessing about his kittehs, hair dye and Andrew Bolt; Toaf commenting at lefty blogs; and Tim Lambert telling whopping great lies about damn near everything – to critique my Quadrant article. They are unimpressed.

Lambert, the left's go to guy for misinformation on Rachel Carson and DDT, reckons I lied in writing this:

Carson’s introduction to chapter three (Elixirs of Death):

"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death."

Several pages later upping the fear factor:

"All of this has come about because of the sudden rise and prodigious growth of an industry for the production of man-made or synthetic chemicals with insecticidal properties. This industry is a child of the Second World War. In the course of developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were found to be lethal to insects."

The first synthetic insecticide on Carson’s list: DDT.

The accuracy of my quoting can be easily verified by checking Amazon's searchable Silent Spring page. The quote establishing the link between chemical warfare agents and synthetic insecticides is on page 16. The first synthetic insecticide mentioned thereafter is DDT (on page 18). Only after establishing the false impression in readers' minds that DDT is a product of weapons research does Carson note (page 20) that DDT was first synthesized in 1874 but its insecticidal properties not discovered until 1939.

If Carson truly wanted to inform her readers she would have explained that the organochlorine insecticides (including DDT) do not derive from chemical weapons research. Only on page 28 does Carson note that organophososphate insecticides are related to the so called nerve gases. But here again Carson misleads, this time by omission:

The origin of these insecticides has a certain ironic significance. Although some of the chemicals themselves – organic esters of phosphoric acid – had been known for many years, their insecticidal properties remained to be discovered by a German chemist, Gerhard Schrader, in the late 1930's. Almost immediately the German government recognized the value of these same chemicals as new and devastating weapons in man's war on his own kind, and the work on them was declared secret. Some became the deadly nerve gases. Others, of closely allied structure, became insecticides.

Germans. Deadly gas. You know, Zyklon B, used by the Germans to kill millions of Jews, gypsies and other "undesirables". Wrong. Zyklon B releases hydrogen cyanide, a chemical ubiquitous in nature. Silent Spring is full of such bunkum.

THR reckons I claimed "coffee is worse for you than pesticide". Uh no, Bruce Ames, unlike Carson a real scientist, in 1997 wrote:

There are over 1000 chemicals reported in a cup of coffee. Only 26 have been tested in animal cancer tests and more than half are rodent carcinogens; there are still a thousand chemicals left to test. The amount of potentially carcinogenic pesticide residues consumed in a year is less than the amount known of rodent carcinogens in a cup of coffee.

Ames apparently knows his stuff:

His research focuses on cancer and aging and he has authored over 500 scientific publications. He is among the few hundred most-cited scientists in all fields.

A ranking of the carcinogenic potential of various natural and synthetic chemicals is here. Lefties might want to avoid clicking that link; it's to research conducted at that hotbed of conservative misinformation, the University of California, Berkeley.

Jeremy Sear, Pure Poison's whiniest whiner (although Dave Gaukroker is contesting for the title), pithily observes:

Ouch. That was embarrassing for "JF".

He should stick to sniping anonymously at other bloggers and their partners.

Stick to what you're good at, mate.

Gee, I can't remember the last time I posted anything anonymously. Perhaps Jeremy can refresh my memory.

Finally, yes Toaf I own a copy of Silent Spring and have read it. You?

Update II: Not content with sliming me at a fringe left blog that gets even less traffic than I do, Lambert has formally Lamberted me at Dulltard. Yikes!

Maybe Lambert could also find time to correct some of his past lies.

LANGUAGE LOEWIED

Cryptic Antony Loewenstein blog posts:

Jews and Arabs may soon start talking the Seinfeld way

You scratch our criminal, Israeli backs and we’ll touch yours

Israel is like any other state, only claims to be democratic

Let the Palestinian people breath, so Abbas must go

Washington is not the future over oil

My head hurts.

SPRING SPRUNG

Quadrant online has published a piece I wrote on the anti-DDT, anti-chemical exaggerations and lies foisted on the public by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring, the environmentalists' bible. Read it here.