TIM LAMBERT'S INDY MEDIA DDT "EXPERT"

Tim Lambert recently "debunked" some DDT myths by excerpting and linking to self-taught Indy Media bed bug "expert" Brent Herbert. Lambert trying to pass off Herbert as a reputable source is not unexpected: he's had to look out of the mainstream for his DDT stories, having trashed Nature Medicine's Apoorva Mandavilli and the World Health Organization's Arata Kochi.

Lambert's Indy Media DDT "expert" has posted a follow-up piece claiming his earlier piece prompted an anti-free-speech conspiracy:

I have done my own google news search, and found, much to my shocked surprise, that every single pro DDT story has now been pulled off the web. He reports that he found eight stories. Now only three remain, only one of which is pro-DDT. So I see that people have been busy pulling those stories, since they obviously were embarrassed by my post on Indymedia. Never let it be said that one person cannot make a difference, or that Indymedia does not matter, since apparently it does.

A commenter expands on the evil conspiracy:

It is interesting to note that, even though we have a pesticide resistant bed bug on the loose in the country, there are no media stories to be found when one does a search for the news about the pesticide resistant bed bug. You get zero results when you do a news search.

Now one must ask why this is true and one must also ask what this means. Why avoid an obvious angle on the story?

The answer is that the media is itself a large multinational corporation, and the chemical industry is a large corporate interest as well, and so therefore no news can come through to us until it has first been run through a giant corporate sieve. For this reason the media reports that 'no one knows why suddenly we have a spreading plague of bed bugs.' This is strange. Should not someone be asking questions so that we can find out why this is so, for to every question there is an answer.

There is no conspiracy, of course. These two loons are simply ignorant of Google News's policy of listing current stories for only 30 days before removing them: the oldish stories they looked for weren't maliciously purged; they were rotated into the archive. Duh.

Such are the sources relied on by computer technician Tim Lambert -- bear this in mind if you're ever tempted to take him seriously.