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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, September 23, 2016

Reform of "Toxic Substance" Rules Could Increase Health Risks

Angela Logomasini

Several years ago, the chemical industry joined forces with certain environmental groups to push reform to the federal Toxic Substances Control Act, which passed into law this year. Although it was not unwarranted for safety reasons (as I detailed before), TSCA reform has granted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) greater power to remove chemicals from the market.The drumbeat for chemical bans started quickly after President Obama signed TSCA into law last June. Activist groups have apparently placed asbestos high on their list of chemicals they want banned under the new law, and they’re likely to succeed.

It’s certainly true that asbestos fibers pose cancer and other health risks, particularly fibers of amphibole asbestos, which are relatively long and thin and easily embed in human tissue. The type of asbestos used today in the United States is mostly chrysotile asbestos, which is less dangerous because its fibers are shorter and thicker and don’t embed in tissue as easily. Still, all asbestos fibers pose risks that must be managed. [For more details see the American Council on Science and Health’s helpful paper on asbestos risk.].....To Read More.....

Thursday, September 22, 2016

We Shouldn't Give Away the Internet to Authoritarian Regimes

Sen. Mike Lee /   @ Daily Signal

If we rush this transition and it is a failure, it will be nearly impossible to get the internet back from the authoritarian regimes that are pushing for more control.

The essence of human freedom, of civilization itself, is cooperation: cooperation between friends and family; businesses and customers; entrepreneurs and employees.

History and human experience teach that humans cooperate best when they do so voluntarily, without government coercion. That is why I fully support the eventual transition of control over the internet from the Department of Commerce and to a private entity.

But I also worry that President Barack Obama is hastily rushing the current transfer of power to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which could make it easier for the United Nations to take over the internet.

Today, the internet is so vast and ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine it existing in any other form.

But for the first few decades of the internet’s existence, the basic roadmap for navigating the internet—the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the system that allocates and records the unique numerical addresses to computers—was managed by just one man on a voluntary basis.

In 1998, the Commerce Department began contracting with ICANN, a California nonprofit corporation, to take over management of IANA and the internet’s domain name system. For the most part, the Commerce Department has allowed ICANN to govern itself, but it has always maintained the authority to pull the nonprofit’s contract, which allowed the federal government to ensure that its contracting partner did not stray from its original mission.

But some governments do not like ICANN’s current hands-off approach to internet regulation. They want more control over how internet traffic is managed and what domain names are allowed to exist.
If we rush this transition and ICANN fails, it will be nearly impossible to get the internet back from the authoritarian regimes that are pushing for more control.
Just five years after ICANN was created, the United Nations established a Working Group on Internet Governance “to investigate and make proposals for action … on the governance of Internet.” And in 2012 at the World Conference on International Telecommunications, several authoritarian regimes—including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia—called for the “sovereign right” of governments to “establish and implement public policy, including international policy, on matters of Internet governance.”

The United States firmly resisted these calls for more international control over the internet until 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked details of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, which led the Obama administration to believe it could not maintain international support for the current system. So in March 2014, the Commerce Department announced it would be fully transferring the internet’s names and numbers functions to ICANN. In other words, the federal government would relinquish its leverage over ICANN by giving up its ability to renew—or threaten to cancel—ICANN’s contract.

Normally, I would applaud the loss of federal government leverage over a private entity. But in this case, there are some ominous signs that ICANN is not ready for the role it is about to take on.
ICANN is currently involved in litigation over alleged improper interference from governments who objected to how the organization awarded the .africa domain name. And the organization was recently admonished by an independent review panel for making decisions that were “cavalier” and “simply not credible” in relation to an application for domain names.

Also, it is unclear whether the new bylaws ICANN is set to adopt for the transition will be strong enough to prevent Russia and China from exerting more control over internet governance.
For these reasons, I am working closely with Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other senators to delay the final transfer of internet governance to ICANN. There is no reason this transfer has to happen this year. There is no reason not to allow ICANN to work through its new governance structure on a trial basis for two years so we can make sure it will run smoothly and in a truly independent manner.

If we rush this transition and ICANN fails, it will be nearly impossible to get the internet back from the authoritarian regimes that are pushing for more control.

That is simply not a risk we can take.

Freedom fighter Ted Cruz leads charge to save the internet from liberal censors

“The Internet is one of the most revolutionary forces ever unleashed on the world.”

By Chris Pandolfo

In his opening remarks for Wednesday’s Senate subcommittee hearing on protecting internet freedom, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 97%) gave a rousing defense of internet freedom, warning that transitioning oversight of the internet to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) could put the freedom at risk......


 

The danger, Sen. Cruz points out, is that by trading the United States government’s “historic guardianship” of the internet to ICANN, First Amendment protections afforded to the Web will be removed, potentially placing censorship power into the hands of a global, multi-national corporation with limited oversight. - To Read More....

Bolton on Internet Handover: ‘Within Ten Years, the Internet as We Know It Will End’

by John Hayward

On Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton predicted that the impending transfer of Internet domain control from American supervision to an international body will mean the end of the Internet “as we know it.” Speaking to Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, Bolton explained that we should be “very concerned” about the transfer from “a national-security perspective.”....... I will predict right here: within 10 years it will come under the control of the United Nations,...........“What we’ve gotten out of the Internet, under the shelter of a private American organization that contracts with the Commerce Department, [is] one of the few cases that I can think of in our history where we’ve had that kind of government involvement without regulation and interference,” said Bolton........Bolton called the Internet handover “a mistake of such colossal proportions that you would have thought we’d have a huge debate about it in this country.”..........To Read More....

Reading is Fundamental

Dear Friends,

Those of us who are old enough will remember when the phrase, "Reading is Fundamental", was used extensively to encourage reading among the young....and probably everone else too.  I don't see it used any longer and that's disapointing because as a society we seem to read less than ever and understand less than ever while adamantly embracing the conclusions of our ignorance, which constitutes stupid - and stupid can't be fixed because stupid people refuse to learn, and that includes a great many over educated under smart people.   

However - ignorance only means we don't know.  Ignorance is fixable - all we have to do is be willing to find out what the facts really are.   And that starts with a good history lesson - none of which can be found in America's schools or universities. 

Over the years I foolishly thought just because I read something or knew something - everyone knew it also - and I didn't understand why they didn't come to my conclusions.  Talk about dumb! 

That's not the way the universe works.  Some people read and some people don't.   Some think deeply, some don't.  Some people watched Fred Friendly's Ethics in America series and .... well.... most didn't have a clue what I was talking about, and the rest only thought they might have heard about it - and they were a very small minority.  And I was stunned!

The fact of the matter is - some people are interested and some people aren't.  I hate doing mechanical work - others think that's the greatest thing since New York style cheesecake.   But - that's the way it is! 

However, that shouldn't mean abandoning the goal of encouraging everyone  to read books - articles aren't enough - we need books for depth.   Just discussing what you've read is an encouragement, and even if they don't read - at least people will get the knowledge through you. 

I don't buy into some of the views in some of the books listed here.  As example - Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  He's a loon - a frightening loon - but Hillary, Obama and a great many on the left in powerful positions are deciples of Alinsky.  We need to know what the other side says if we're to be able to overcome those views.  We need to be in this arena if we're to be worthwhile leaders of our industry. 

So, by way of encouragement to those who might be willing to jump into this arena I'm posting the last 50 books I've read over the last few years.

Best wishes,

Rich Kozlovich
  1. Are Children More Vulnerable to Environmental Chemicals? Scientific and Regulatory Issues in Perspective, American Council on Science and Health
  2. America's War on “Carcinogens”, Reassessing the Use of Animal Tests To Predict Human Cancer Risk, American Council on Science and Health (Editor's Note:  This no longer appears to be available in book form, but the link is to a PDF of the book.  This is a must read!  RK)
  3. Ecological Sanity, by Claus and Bolander
  4. The Excellent Powder, DDT's Political and Scientific History, by Donald Roberts, Rchard Tren with Roger Bate and Jennifer Zambone
  5. Intellectuals and Society, by Thomas Sowell
  6. Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs of Albert Speer
  7. A Man of Letters, by Thomas Sowell
  8. Interpreting the Precautionary Principle, by Tim O'Riordan and James Cameron
  9. Silent Spring at 50, The False Crisis of Rachel Carson, Edited by Roger Meiners, Peirre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss
  10. Stalin's Secret Agents, The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein
  11. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
  12. Silencing Science, by Steven Milloy and Michael Gouch (Editor's Note:  This is a booklet, so I don't know why the price is so high, so explore the "See Buying Options" link.   

DDT: UN Cover Up?

By Rich Kozlovich  (Originally published Friday, February 3, 2012, updated 6/16/16)

 Steve Milloy recently posted this article, "Appalling: UN severely underestimates malaria deaths, says study" on February 2, 2012. Steve goes on to say; "Has the World Health Organization been covering up genocide? According to a new study in The Lancet, the WHO has underestimated malaria deaths in children (aged 5 and under) by 475% and total deaths by 89%." As bemoaned in The Lancet‘s editorial.
This week we publish surprising and, on the face of it, disturbing findings. According to Christopher Murray and colleagues at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle, there were 1.24 million deaths (95% uncertainty interval 0.93–1.69 million) from malaria worldwide in 2010—around twice the figure of 655000 estimated by WHO for the same year. How should the malaria community interpret this finding? Before we answer that question, we need to look beneath the surface of this striking overall mortality figure....... Click for the Lancet study.  Click for the Lancet editorial.
Should we think that the most corrupt organization the world has ever known; an organization that is filled with influential green NGO's; would lie? I certainly do. For the last few years we keep hearing the greenie fellow travelers declaring that bed nets are doing the job. Everything is OK. We don't need DDT to save people. Especially since DDT kills birds and it causes________! Well, just keep filling in that blank until your fingers get numb, because according to the green misanthropes there is no end to the dangers DDT represents, while failing to tell the world the truth about the very real danger malaria represents.

Malaria has killed more people over the centuries than all other diseases combined. Why is that so hard to get? I can answer that! Because those who should be telling the world the truth, such as the U.N., the media, those activists who claim to be concerned about people’s health and all the leaders of every institution in the world are simply not doing so. It happened because as Viv Forbes says; “The public has been misled by an unholy alliance of environmental scaremongers, funds-seeking academics, sensation-seeking media, vote-seeking politicians and profit-seeking vested interests.”
 
Why?

The answer is the green movement is so rich and so influential no trade organization or politician can stand against them. How did that happen? Their success came in the banning of DDT in the United States. This gave them money and influence that they never had before. The ban is foundational to everything they stand for and everything they have. The death of millions and the suffering and misery of billions is meaningless to them. Lies about malaria sufferers and the very real value that DDT represents in alleviating their suffering are repeated unendingly.  No matter how many times the truth is told it is impossible to overcome the daily drumbeat from people who pound out greenie propaganda from so many public sources.

We know that malaria is still a major disaster in many parts of the world. We know that DDT plays a major role in reducing the impact of that human disaster. We know the greenies will do everything in their power to stop DDT from being used. We know from their own statements they are irrational and misanthropic. We know one of their goals is to seriously reduce the world's population. We know they don't really care about the children because the children of the world suffer most from their policies. When the greenies say that we need to adopt their programs because "it's for the children" we need to stop and look very closely because most of what they have done has been "to the children". Now we know there is more to this story than has been told, and the UN has once again been found wanting in integrity. That's history, and that history is incontestable!

So why do we listen to them?

Trump opposes plan for U.S. to cede internet oversight

By Dustin Volz

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump opposes a long-planned transition of oversight of the internet's technical management from the U.S. government to a global community of stakeholders, his campaign said in a statement on Wednesday.

Congress should block the handover, scheduled to occur on Oct. 1, "or internet freedom will be lost for good, since there will be no way to make it great again once it is lost," Stephen Miller, national policy director for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a former presidential primary foe of Trump's who has refused to endorse the real estate developer, has led a movement in congress to block the transition, arguing it could cede control of the internet itself to authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and threaten online freedom......To Read More....

My Take - Quoted are "technical experts" who claim these are baseless scares, and efforts by Cruz will be "undermining U.S. credibility in future international negotiations over internet standards and security."  What nonsense!  We're supposed to be worried that liars, murders, tyrants and communists won't take us seriously? They've got to be kidding....right?  Orwellian! 

Let's ask - Is the system we're using now broken?  Everyone say it isn't.  If it's not broke what are we wanting to fix?  If it isn't broken why would we want to turn it over the the most incompetent, corrupt repressive people in the planet....and I include the U.N. which will most certainly take it over, corrupt it and charge fees for using it.  Provided you're acceptable to them of course. 

This is a threat far larger than anything I can imagine because no matter how badly things are going in every other endeavor, having access to the truth is far more important.  Because truth lends definition to every issue and that's what gives us the clarity to make good decisions....and the see through the fog of Orwellian clabber being spewed out by anarchists, leftists, and tyrants. 

Do we really believe these tyrants want to control the internet to keep it free?  Yes, actually - free of anything they don't like.  This blog is now being blocked by China and Russia, and now I'm seem to be blocked by Ukraine.  If those countries were still hitting this blog as they were at their peak numbers I would have almost twice as many hits as I'm getting now on a daily basis.  If these people take it over this will be standard practice all over the world.  And yet the business community, including the media are virtually silent on this.  Why?

 We've lost our minds!

Saturday, September 10, 2016

October 1, 2016: Another Day That Will Live in Infamy

By Rich Kozlovich

I've been amazed at the lack of coverage of an event that will take place on this on October first of this year. I didn't expect anything from the mainstream media since they're part of the conspiracy.....and yes.....I said conspiracy. It's always been an amazement to me how many people snicker at the idea of a conspiracy, unless of course it's a vast right wing conspiracy, then it's perfectly intelligent and rational to self-righteously nod in agreement.

However, for many of us who've been reading history books for all of our lives - and I've been doing that for most of my 70 years - we've learned -  everything really is a conspiracy! 

All of my friends used to laugh at me when I would say this, but that's pretty much stopped. Why? Because they know I believe it and I have more than enough information to justify that statement.

Remember - there's a difference between a conspiracy theorist and someone who believes in conspiracies.  A conspiracy theorist needs conspiracies to explain things they don't understand.  A person who believes in conspiracies understand how conspiracies bring things into reality.

So what is so important about October 1, 2016?  The internet will no longer be under the control of the United States. 
If the NPMA leadership is aware of this I would like to think they would be against it and would encourage all of it's members and member associations to work at stopping this! 

Since reading is fundamental, I would like to encourage everyone to buy and read the following books
Tell me the history....the whole history....and I will give you the answer.