When an English Major Becomes a Health Editor

By Alex Berezow — July 28, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

One of the biggest problems with journalism -- particularly science journalism -- is the fact that many people who practice it aren't qualified to do so. Believe it or not, being a good journalist involves more than knowing how to turn on a computer and pound away aimlessly on a keyboard.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the only requirement for some journalists. A few years ago, I was told by an editor at The Economist that they do not hire journalism majors. Instead, they hire people who studied "something real" and then are taught how to do journalism after they are hired. It's a good rule, and media outlets everywhere would be better off if they all adopted the practice.

The Guardian Blows It... Again

Recently, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article scaremongering about JUUL, a company that sells e-cigarettes that are marketed as a safer alternative to regular cigarettes. What's the problem? Apparently, some teenagers think they're cool. Therefore, JUUL is evil.

The article, written by The Guardian's health editor Sarah Boseley -- whose English degree has given her a commanding grasp of biomedical science -- declared Juul's device to be "ultra-discreet" and might "lead [non-smokers] to start smoking cigarettes." The headline blares that the UK has been told to stop e-cigarettes from taking off among kids.

Told by whom? Anti-vaping activists. The "ultra-discreet" device actually looks like a USB drive that somebody sticks in their mouth. (Yeah, that's totally discreet... because people usually suck on the end of USB drives.) And the "gateway drug" argument Ms. Boseley makes is just as bogus for e-cigarettes as it is for marijuana.

True, teenagers and non-smokers shouldn't begin vaping for the fun of it. Both JUUL and the FDA acknowledge that the devices should not be marketed to underaged people. And let's be honest: Of all the different things that teenagers could try -- from hard drugs to unprotected sex -- nicotine is rather harmless by comparison. It's not all that different from caffeine. If I had a teenager and the most rebellious act he or she did was vaping, I'd be a happy parent. Context and perspective matter.

So, what's the story here? There is no story. Ms. Boseley just gave free advertising to a bunch of activists who are religiously opposed to nicotine. In any sane world, a company that invented a device that is 95% safer than cigarettes (a figure that comes from the UK's NHS) would be hailed as a godsend.

When an English Major Becomes a Health Editor

It's troubling enough that a person who knows nothing about public health is allowed to write about it. It's far more troubling that a person who knows nothing about public health is in charge of the topic at a major international publication. So, I decided to take a look at some of the other articles this English major has published. What I found was predictable.

For instance, this: How disgraced anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield was embraced by Trump's America. The truth is that the anti-vaxxer movement began with members of the progressive left, such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Bill Maher. The demographics of the anti-vaccine movement have changed over time, but this rather inconvenient historical fact is missing from Ms. Boseley's article.

In another article, Ms. Boseley claims that the government can fix obesity, but the plan could be foiled by evil corporations. Just how evil are those corporations? Evil enough to hijack your brain with Cheetos, according to her. And she appears supportive of a rather twisted idea to put pictures of rotting teeth on sugary foods to deter people from eating them.

In other words, The Guardian has hired an English major-turned-political activist who is completely ignorant of basic science to run its health page. And the result is exactly what you'd expect: It's scientifically illiterate and politically bonkers.

Cartoon of the Day

The Paradox Of “Risk-Free”

By  Michael D. ShawMay 26, 2008 @ Health News Digest
 

This holiday weekend, the plans of many Americans were disrupted by record-high gasoline prices. Not surprisingly, hordes of politicians took advantage of a golden opportunity for publicity, and grilled oil company executives—knowing full well that they have little to do with setting crude oil prices. But if you get past the usual rhetoric, something new seems to be emerging: More folks are questioning the wisdom of a host of government policies affecting energy and the environment.
 

At the core of this inquisitive attitude is the notion that attempting to create a risk-free society poses its own set of risks, and some of these are worse than the very ones supposedly being eliminated. Or, put more concisely: there’s plenty of risk in trying to go “risk-free.”
 

While it might not actually be possible for the United States to be completely self-sufficient in energy, surely the over-regulation that has severely curtailed offshore oil drilling, and has prevented a new refinery being built here since 1976 has hardly helped. Once again, those most hurt by these policies are the poorest among us—those the Government tells us they care the most about.

The risks of going risk-free usually manifest themselves as one or more so-called “unintended consequences,” the latest versions being how using corn for fuel caused food shortages, and how environmental restrictions on Corps of Engineers’ plans for New Orleans definitely exacerbated the effects of Hurricane Katrina. However, “unintended consequences” is little more than verbal cosmetics painted on disastrously conceived policy.
 

What would the reaction be to a drunk driver claiming that killing a family of four in a catastrophic accident was an “unintended consequence” of him celebrating too much at the local tavern? What should the reaction be to millions of African deaths caused by the banning of DDT? In the latter case, the only reaction can be to bring back the chemical, and, in fact, that is happening.
 

Many examples of the negative consequences of regulatory actions could be cited, including a particular case that occurred in California a few years ago. Ethylene oxide (EtO), a vital chemical used as a sterilant in health care and other applications, is one compound the regulators love to hate, and it has been regulated beyond all reason—well past anything that could be justified scientifically. It is one of very few chemicals that has both toxic and explosive properties, that could emerge in a typical workplace, under upset conditions. Of course, with proper handling it is quite safe.
 

California regulations provide for very stringent limits on how much EtO can be exhausted to the air, such that a particular type of device must be used to treat any effluent. Unfortunately, this device contains an open flame. Yes, an open flame device is used with an explosive compound.
 

Certainly, under normal operation, the amount of EtO reaching the flame is below explosive levels. The problem is that when things go wrong, anything less than fail-safe is extremely imprudent. Because of very foolish actions by plant operators, which manually overrode a safety interlock, an explosive level of EtO did reach the flame, and a large explosion occurred. Owing to nothing more than sheer dumb luck, no one was killed.
 

Please note that the effluent treatment required by California provides only marginally better EtO removal than devices used in all other states, and absent the device, the incident would not have occurred. Was it really worth it? At the time, the whole affair seemed like a case of regulatory malfeasance, but I was to find out that no such thing exists, thanks to the landmark Supreme Court case of Dalehite v. United States, 346 U.S. 15 (1953).
 

This was the test case stemming from an April, 1947 incident, referred to as the Texas City disaster, considered the worst industrial accident in American history. A massive explosion of ammonium nitrate fertilizer—destined for relief efforts in Europe—caused 581 deaths, along with more than 5,000 injuries, and property damage leaving dozens of businesses in ruins, and 2,000 people homeless.
 

Since the entire operation was run by the Federal government, and the Feds had written all the specifications on how to handle the material, there was no argument on who was to blame. Many of the resulting lawsuits were combined into the Dalehite case, under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). Elizabeth Dalehite was the widow of Henry Dalehite, a tugboat captain killed in the explosion. In April, 1950 the district court found the US liable for a long list of negligent acts involving well over 100 agencies and their representatives.
 

Elizabeth was warned, though, that the Government might appeal, and the Supreme Court upheld the appeals court in reversing the lower court decision. In other words, the plaintiffs lost.
 

Under a rather novel theory, the Court would essentially negate the Tort Claims act with the astonishing finding that affirmed that the Feds are not liable for “negligent planning decisions” which were properly delegated to various departments and agencies. Under this reading, the FTCA exempts “failure to exercise or perform a discretionary function or duty,” and all the negligent acts in the case were discretionary in nature. Quite convenient, don’t you think?
 

The dissenting justices noted that a private individual would have been held to higher standards here than the Government. In 1955, Congress would eventually provide some compensation to the survivors, but most agreed that it was too little too late.
 

Thus, with the regulators immunized against the consequences of their actions—intended or otherwise—the public must be much more proactive. That means contacting their representatives before questionable policy plans become law.

Speaking of Supreme Court cases

By Mike Shaw June 05, 2008 @ Shaw's Eco-Logic

I received a few e-mails questioning the relevance of this posting.  Let me explain...

The lion's share of actions affecting environmental or health care policy is under the purview of the government--and most of the time that comes down to the federal government.  The previous post alluded to the fact that the regulators are immunized from the catastrophes caused by their actions, because of a horrible Supreme Court case (Dalehite v. US). 

Thus, those who scandalously banned DDT--possibly the single worst regulatory policy in the nation's history--are free from any accountability.   Tell that to a kid who gets busted with a few ounces of pot.

While the Framers would be shocked at the imperial power of today's Supreme Court, and certainly did not intend it to be such, the Court has become a default legislative body for virtually any cause that "escapes" the attention of Congress.  Moreover, the civics curriculum is largely hagiographic in its coverage of the Court.

Like it or not, if you have an interest in government policy, you'd better get clued into the REAL Supreme Court.

---

Over the last few weeks, I have had occasion to study a number of so-called "landmark" cases, and when you come right down to it, most of them are essentially crapola.

In Roe v. Wade, for example, no matter what side of the abortion debate you're on, you have to be struck by one very stupid thing:  If Norma McCorvey (Roe) wanted an abortion so badly, why didn't she just go to another state to get one?  It was even part of the dissent that by the time the case reached the Supremes it was moot, since the baby was already born.  Normally, test cases are not moot, and normally test cases do not occur because someone volunteers to purposely create one against their own interest!

In Dalehite v. US (the case cited in the previous posting) an entire law was invalidated on absurd grounds, mostly so that the government would not have to accept culpability.  In dissent, Robert Jackson, a justice whom I do not particularly like, was brilliant.

[Most of the reason I don't like Jackson is that he quite self-importantly ran the Nuremberg trials, which viewed objectively were nothing more than victor's justice, completely perverted by having the Russians sitting in judgment--whose atrocities were more than a match for those of the Nazis.]

Brown v. Board of Education certainly de-segregated some schools, but there was no legal theory involved, as when the same issue had come up before (Plessy v. Ferguson) the Court went the other way.  Thus, it was purely political and a function of the popular culture.  That's what is so pointless and funny about con law:  Precedent is all important except when it isn't.

AND--Marbury v Madison, the case that started the entire business of judicial review actually did so by stating that the Court had no such authority!

Of course, no one seems to mind that the greatest constitutional question of all time--whether or not states could secede--was completely ignored until after the Civil War.  But, in 1869 in yet another crummy case (Texas v. White) that relied on very shaky theory, and even then was a vigorously contested 5-3 decision, the ruling was that a state could not secede (although some exceptions were made).  As you might expect, there was nothing high-minded in the details of the case.  The Reconstruction state government of Texas was trying to get $10 million from certain individuals who had held some bonds on behalf of the Confederacy era state government.

In my experience, few lawyers--including constitutional lawyers--really know the story behind any of these cases, and simply learn their names and memorize the capsule precedent.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the case that broke FDR's National Recovery Administration:  A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935).  The plaintiffs really suffered, and the Feds, aided and abetted by much of the media, were pure scoundrels--not to mention that the laws they were trying to enforce were insanely stupid.

But, talk about drinking the Kool-Aid...

The Schechters, having their business and lives ruined by dear Franklin D., voted for him every time he ran.

Bottom line:  A "good" Supreme Court decision is one in which you agree with the political results.  There are seldom "higher principles" at work.

 

The Extinction of Honest Science

Tony Thomas

Warmists' predictions of climate doom haven't come to pass or anything like it, but give them credit for agility and perseverance in always concocting a fresh scare. The latest meme to keep grants flowing and careers on track: the purported mass die-off of species large and small.

With no significant warming for 20 years, the climate alarmists need better scares. The temperature rise of about 0.8 degC in more than 100 years is not only non-scary, it’s been immensely beneficial for feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. Now the “extreme weather” furphy is at work, with any storm or flood attributed by Al Gore and the Climate Council to fossil fuel emissions. There’s the purported “ocean acidification” but I’m yet to see evidence that it has hurt a solitary crab, let alone a species………….

There are two handy scares still slithering around: “The Anthropocene” and “The Sixth Mass Extinction”. Both are fakes. Both are foisted on kids by green/Left educators. Both require as supposed remedies a supra-national enforcement agency run by the Left/liberal crowd, along with a roll-back of capitalist progress.

Here’s an example………… To Read More.....

My Take -One of the things those who've followed all this stuff and written about it understand: There's no scare that won't be recycled by these misanthropic misfits. Once they've gotten all the money and emotion they can out of a scare that's been debunked - they merely put it on the back burner for future use - since most will have forgotten when the last time it was used it turned out to be nothing more than a "furphy". We can blame the media who should know better and government bureaucrats who do know better.

FYI: A "furphy" is an Aussie slang word for a rumor, or an erroneous or improbable story, but usually claimed to be absolute fact". 

Environmentalist scare stories – Never mind!

Solid evidence shows there is no “bee-pocalypse,” but alarmists allege new pesticide threats

Paul Driessen

“Baby boomers” will remember Gilder Radner’s Saturday Night Live character from the ‘70s – Emily Litella, who would launch into hilarious rants against perceived problems, only to discover that she had completely misconstrued what she was fuming about.

“What’s all this fuss about endangered feces?” she asked in one. “How can you possibly run out of such a thing?” Then, after Jane Curtain interrupted to tell her “It’s endangered species,” she meekly responded with what became the iconic denouement of the era: “Ohhhh. Never mind.”

The Sierra Club and “invertebrate-protecting” Xerces Society recently had their own Emily Litella moment, over an issue they both have been hyperventilating about for years: endangered bees. For over half a decade, both organizations have been raising alarms about the imminent extinction of honeybees and, more recently, wild bees – allegedly due to the widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides.

These are advanced-technology crop protection compounds, originally developed and registered as “reduced-risk” pesticides. Applied mostly as seed treatments, neonicotinoids get taken up into the tissue of crop plants, where they control pests that feed on and destroy the crops, while minimizing insecticide exposure to animals, humans and beneficial species like bees.

But not according to the Sierra Club! It campaigned incessantly for years on the claim that neonicotinoids would drive honeybees into extinction. For instance, in March 2015 the Sierra Club of Canada launched a nationwide “Protect the Pollinators Tour,”  as part of its #SaveTheBees project.

“Ironically, the justification for this chemical madness is the same desire to produce enough food to feed everyone,” it said. “The chemical industry wants us to believe we have no choice; it’s their way or the highway. But the science tells us otherwise – that farmers don’t need these chemicals at all! The science also tells us we’re not just killing bees and pollinators, but other insects too. And we’re also killing birds and aquatic life. The scientists tell us we could be creating a Second Silent Spring. It’s madness."

A year later, the Maryland Sierra Club did its own fulminating, urging the state’s legislature to pass a “Pollinator Protection Act. “Help STOP Pollinator Deaths from Neonic Pesticides!” it exhorted.

“Toxic Neonic pesticides kill and harm bees and other pollinators, like butterflies and birds. Continued, unchecked use poses a serious threat to our food supply, public health and environment. Ask lawmakers to help keep Maryland pollinators safe and healthy – by curbing consumer use of toxic pesticides.”

In December 2016, the Sierra Club was out raising more money by sounding phony alarms about Trump appointees “denying the science” that supposedly links neonic pesticides to alleged bee declines"

“Bees had a devastating year. 44% of colonies killed.… And Bayer and Syngenta are still flooding our land with bee-killing toxic ‘neonic’ pesticides – now among the most widely used crop sprays in the country. Now, Myron Ebell – Donald Trump’s pick to lead the EPA transition team – denies the science that links neonics and bee death….”

Why would they make such false claims? Well, as Sierra Club officer Bruce Hamilton once admitted: “It’s what works. It builds the Sierra Club. The fate of the Earth depends on whether people open that envelope and send in that check” (or click on the ever-present online Donate Now button).

However, a few weeks ago, a Sierra Club blog post started singing a different tune:

“‘Save the bees’ is a rallying cry we’ve been hearing for years now…. But honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While diseases, parasites and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century. ‘Honeybees are not going to go extinct,’ says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society. ‘We have more honeybee hives than we’ve ever had, and that’s simply because we manage honeybees. Conserving honeybees to save pollinators is like conserving chickens to save birds … [since] honeybees are not all that different from livestock.”

So, Never mind. Finally, after all these years, the Sierra Club (and Xerces Society) admit that honeybees are not going extinct. It would appear as well that neonic pesticides can’t be causing a honeybee apocalypse – because there isn’t one!

But in the eco-alarmism world, every silver cloud has a dark lining! This time, it’s wild bees, also called “native” bees, whose allegedly looming demise is the imminent ecological cataclysm du jour.

Honeybees are not native to North America; they were first brought here by colonists in 1622. Now – according to the Sierra Club anyway – these non-native bees pose a threat to wild bees and other native pollinators. New research, it says, “shows managed honeybees can negatively impact native bees.”

Varroa mites, deformed wing virus and other problems from commercial hives (the real causes of honeybee declines in recent years) “can be transferred to wild species when populations feed from the same flowers.” In fact, the rusty patched bumblebee, “which was listed as endangered in early 2017 after declining more than 90 percent over the last decade, may owe that disappearance to diseases spread by commercial bees.” And the RPB is not the only threatened or endangered wild bee species.

Many native bees – of which there are over 20,000 species globally, in various sizes, shapes and colors – “are experiencing incredible losses,” says a Sierra Club blog. “Of the nearly 4,000 native bee species in the United States alone, four native bumblebee species have declined 96 percent in the last 20 years, and three others are believed to have gone extinct. In the last 100 years, 50 percent of Midwestern native bee species disappeared from their historic ranges.”

Now the blog doesn’t claim all these supposed wild bee declines are due to neonic exposure. At least it doesn’t say so just yet, leaving that inference to your imagination. However, the Sierra Club is likely just as wrong about wild bee species being in trouble, as it was during its previous years of railing about the causes and reality of honeybees going extinct.

First, the overwhelming majority of wild bee species, at least in North America, never get any exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides, because they are desert species – with habitats typically tens or hundreds of miles away from croplands.

Second, the overwhelming majority of those wild bee species are specialists. They feed exclusively on the pollen and/or nectar of one or a very few plant species – and their life-cycles are tied inextricably to the flowering cycle of the (mainly desert) plants they pollinate.

They typically emerge from the ground prompted by the same natural signals (rains) that awaken the cacti and other plants. They then live just long enough to produce larvae and stock the larval nests with food (pollen and/or nectar) from the plants they pollinate before they die. This cycle is completed in days – and pesticide exposure is virtually impossible given the environments where it takes place.

All this is not to say that wild bees don’t play any role in crop pollination. Some do.

However, 59 scientists published a three-year study  in Nature, concluding that only 2% of wild bee species provide “almost 80% of the wild bee crop pollination.” They also found that “the species currently contributing most to pollination service delivery are generally regionally common species, whereas threatened species contribute little, particularly in the most agriculturally productive areas.”

In other words, the handful of wild bee species that contribute the lion’s share of wild bee crop pollination – and thus are most exposed to neonic and other pesticides – are abundant and not threatened or at risk, certainly not from pesticide exposure.

This jibes with the observations by Sam Droege, the U.S. Geologic Survey’s wild bee expert whose surveys indicate that most wild bee species are doing just fine.

It’s encouraging that the Sierra Club and Xerces Society have finally acknowledged that the “honeybee apocalypse” – which they used for years to demonize neonic manufacturers and raise millions of dollars – was pure fiction. Eventually, perhaps, we hope (fat chance) they’ll admit their exaggerated claims and half-truths about wild bees are equally phony and misleading.

It’s a real pity that so much public hysteria – and pressure on politicians and regulators to combat fictitious bee problems – was generated in the process. That was especially true in Europe, where regulators gave in to agitator pressure and misrepresentations, and banned neonics this year. Now farmers will have to spray crops with pesticides that really are harmful to bees, or will lose more to voracious insects.

Environmental activists always claim to be pushing for better public policies, to “Save the Earth.” Misdiagnosing and misrepresenting non-existent ecological crises is precisely the road to the hell of bad public policy. And it’s not always paved with good intentions.

At least when it comes to claims about another “bee-pocalypse,” it’s time to say, Never mind.

Paul Driessen is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books and articles on energy, climate change and environmental activism.

China Exposes the Recycling Scam's Dirty Secret

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 11 Comments Wednesday, July 25, 2018 @ Sultan Knish Blog

The huge dirty secret of recycling was also one of the world’s worst polluters. 

Every branch of government from Washington D.C. to your local town council had spent a fortune convincing people that recycling is a magical process that turns your old pizza boxes into new pizza boxes while creating those imaginary “green jobs” in the community. The reality was a lot dirtier.

All of America’s industries, including trash sorting, had been outsourced to China.

And recycling is just a fancy lefty way of saying "trash." All that recycling, which children in progressive communities are taught to sort as the closest thing to a religious ritual, was really being dumped by the ton on dirty ships and sent over to China. We weren’t recycling it. The Chinese were.

But now China is banning foreign recycling because it’s bad for the environment.

Even the Communists got tired of sorting through the trash of American socialists. The recycling scam shipped garbage on dirty ships for dirty industries while pretending that they’re clean and green.

There was never anything clean about it. And only the money it brought in was green.

Now the recycling party’s over. Plastic recycling imports were banned early this year. Even fiber has trouble getting in to the People’s Republic. China’s mixed paper standards mean that most of the recycled cardboard and paper no longer passes muster. Instead it’s piling up in the United States.

The recycling scam used to be an easy trade. China shipped its cheap products made from recycled American junk and scrap here. The empty vessels used to dump Chinese junk products on America were then filled up with tons of recycling for the return trip back to China at minimal cost.

We sent them junk, they sent us junk. As the trade deficit grew, recycling was one of its many parasites.

But China is out of the recycling dump business. And the recycling business depended on it. No other market pays what it did. And no other country has the industrial scale to handle this much recycled trash. The American market is flooded with recycling that no one wants and trash prices have imploded.

And that’s having an immediate impact on the progressive recycling programs in the United States.

California’s trash is going right back to landfills. 62% of exported materials used to go to China. But no more. California’s Department of Resources Recycling sent a letter cautioning that the “economics of recycling” had become “unfavorable” thus “challenging what recycling means to Californians.”

It also warned recycling facilities that, “public health and safety should be their number one priority”.

In Massachusetts, mountains of trash recycling are piling up and there’s talk that trucks may stop picking it up. In Pennsylvania, a "recycling crisis created by China" was blamed for a refusal to accept paper. In Seattle and Phoenix, recycling is going into landfills. Fees are going up in Portland. In Pasco, recycling was abandoned before its start. In a Kansas City plant, one out of four items is going into a landfill. In Sacramento, where all of California’s recycling rules are made, most recyclables no longer are.

Fort Worth’s recycling brought in nearly a million last year. Now, it’s expected to cost $1.6 million.

Recology used to be the epitome of the reinvented garbage hauler, merging San Francisco urban politics with progressive PR about ending waste. But zero landfill talk has given way to a blunter reality, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”

Environmental regulations had already turned garbage collection in California into an expensive disaster, but this is an entirely unprecedented mess complete with mountains of trash and mountains of bills.

Recycling has become economically unsustainable, but that doesn’t mean it’s going away.

There’s too much money in environmental scams. And recycling is the biggest of them. The China crisis is being met with the three R’s of progressive policymaking; rent-seeking, regulations and robbery.

Some homeowners are already seeing higher trash collection fees. Those will only get worse. Especially on the West Coast where the China option helped dull the painful costs of recycling. But the costs will hit everyone as politicians resort to mandating higher levels of recycled content in everyday products.

Want to sell soda, tissues or milk? Pay the politically connected recycling companies for the privilege of using their trash. As recycling costs go up, content mandates will force companies to create an artificial market. And the costs will be passed along to consumers who will have to pay more for everything.

Like higher trash fees, tightened recycling regulations have also only begun to arrive. If you live in a blue state or city, expect to spend a lot more time sorting your trash, cleaning your cans and removing plastic from your envelopes so that they meet China’s new high standards for imported trash.

China will no longer be sorting American trash. So progressives have decided that you will.

We hear about the jobs that Americans won’t do. But this is a job that the Chinese won’t do. And that Americans will be forced to do for free. As China becomes more capitalist, America turns Communist.

Or as a video on the Recology site prompts, “How to be a better recycle because China demands it.”

Environmentalist municipalities have already begun rolling out condescending campaigns berating homeowners for their foolish and lazy recycling practices. ‘Wishcycling’ is a charmless portmanteau you will see more of. But what it really means is that homeowners who are already being taxed to death are being hectored by the environmental activists they subsidize who have never worked a day in their lives.

Will all of that save the recycling scam?

No, but it won’t matter. Most homeowners have no idea how much of their recyclables go into landfills anyway. The dirty business of municipal waste contracts will continue on uninterrupted. The extra fees and costs will be another one of the left’s thousand cuts that are bleeding the middle class to death.

Homeowners will be taxed harder so that crony cash can flow to even bigger recycling operations. You will pay more for everything you buy to subsidize politically connected, but uneconomical enterprises.

Recycling is not a reality, but an idea. Like Communism, it can never be achieved, but must be aspired to.

Smaller towns and cities will be forced to dump their recycling programs. And more conservative areas will be dissuaded from getting on board as the profit margins from recycling turn into pools of red ink. But blue states and cities will never abandon recycling. And if Washington D.C. goes blue again, the dictates of crony socialism and green fanaticism will roll out new compulsory standards nationwide.

Recycling is in crisis. But the environmental scam is too big to fail.

The ships carrying most of the blue state and city “green” trash will no longer be allowed into China. But there are other countries and continents desperate enough to take their socialist trash.

The dirty secret of recycling is that it depended on the willingness of Third World countries to greenwash our trash so that progressives could pretend that their moral garbage was saving the planet.

The smaller countries of Southeast Asia don’t have the capacity to take up China’s slack, but the People’s Republic has progressively been colonizing Africa. Some African countries were already being used to recycle and dump e-waste. The shipping won’t be as cheap, but recycling’s next stop is likely to be Africa where environmentalists will turn it into a trash heap… to protect the environment.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the following link.

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CRISPR-Created Foods are Different than GMOs. It's Wrong for Anti-GMO Activists to Pretend They're Not.

By Chuck Dinerstein — April 3, 2018

Monsanto, perhaps to rebrand itself, and certainly to remain a leader in agricultural biotech has helped establish and fund Pairwise Plants a start-up using CRISPR-Cas9 technologies to modify seeds. They have given the new company money and their vice-president of global biotechnology to head the start-up, so this is a strategic business move not simply hedging their bets. This is important because CRISPR-Cas9 may genetically modify a crop, but it doesn’t necessarily result in a genetically modified organism, the dreaded GMO. To understand how that can be, we need to understand both genetic modification and federal regulations.

Mutagenesis...........To Read More....

Wind Energy and National Security

This is about major breaking US national security news — that is almost entirely unreported.

By John Droz Jr.

This a well-known, accurate observation: “The person who wishes to keep his respect for laws and sausages should not see how either is made.”

This was very much on display recently with the machinations going on with the annual US federal legislation for our military: the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). To understand the disturbing decisions made, some background as to how we got to where we are today is needed. (FYI the guilty parties here want you to skip this part, as they do NOT want citizens to have any real understanding of this issue!)

It would be nice to be able to convey this whole story in a single sound-byte sentence, but that’s not possible. If you care about US national security, it is essential to understand some related information. I’ll summarize it as simply as I can. Let me know any further info needed…

Point #1: There has been several years of conflict between military operations (in the US and elsewhere) and industrial wind energy. This is for multiple reasons, ranging from radar interference, to tall structures obstructing low-level flight paths, to specialized cases (like deteriorating the exceptionally important ROTHR facility).

Point #2: Initially the Commanding Officers (COs) of affected military facilities simply voiced their objections, and in most cases the proposed offending wind project was not approved.

Point #3: As sensible as this might seem, it was totally unacceptable to the powerful wind industry lobbyists, and some of their well-connected supporters. Their plan was to get military base COs basically out of the equation — while giving the public the impression that military concerns were being fully considered. That might seem like a tall order, but we’re dealing with some superior slicksters here. Their ingenious and deceptive end result was to create the DoD Wind Siting Clearinghouse.

Point #4: The Clearinghouse was all about expanding US industrial wind energy, not protecting US military or our national security. To pull this off, the rules and regulations for the Clearinghouse were essentially written by wind lobbyists, and the initial people in charge were unabashed wind energy promoters. (Upon retiring, the first person to head the Clearinghouse was quickly hired as a wind energy lobbyist — you can’t make this stuff up!)

Point #5: Not surprisingly, numerous conflicts continued to exist between wind energy and the US military. The public has little awareness of these due to backroom, classified agreements made. The wind industry took advantage of this lack of knowledge, repeatedly trumpeting that everything was peachy. For those who didn’t bother to closely look behind the curtain, it may well have seemed to be.

Point #6: Effectively what happened was that military defenders had to now look for some protection from state level legislation. Of course the wind lobby has infiltrated state politics as well, so this was no easy solution. That said there have been some major victories — e.g. Texas passing S277 and North Carolina passing a two year statewide moratorium (see here, Part XIII) while they did an investigation of the wind energy interference matter.

Point #7: Ultimately, though, the defense of our military, and our national security, is a federal matter. Towards that end, earlier this year I sent to some key legislators an outline of this problem, which included three (3) simple but effective solutions to this serious matter (at the end). I was hoping that they would be incorporated into the current year NDAA.

Point #8: Both the House and Senate committees involved with the NDAA actually did specifically endorse one of my three recommendations. The current wind industry written Clearinghouse rules basically say that to reject a proposed wind project, that there has to be substantial proof that it is a major national security risk. This has to be then endorsed by the DoD Secretary. Of course this is one of several things intended to fool the public (and legislator not paying close attention): it sounds good, but it’s actually worthless. In other words, the bar was purposefully set absurdly high, so that it was almost impossible to turn down a proposed wind project — and in fact only one has been so terminated via the Clearinghouse process over many years now.

Point #9: One of my three recommendations was to fix the rules so that if a wind project could be reasonably shown to threaten the lives of our military personnel, that this would be an acceptable justification to deny it a permit to be built. It was gratifying to see that BOTH the House and Senate committees reviewing the NDAA, approved changing the Clearinghouse rules, to add words to that effect. Excellent!

Point #10: However, a few days ago, for some inexplicable reason, this extremely important change was extracted from the NDAA legislation! A very experienced DC lobbyist told me that he could not recall a single case ever, where an important provision agreed to by both House and Senate committees, was then removed from the legislation. The question to ask our federal legislators: is promoting wind energy really more important than protecting the lives of our military?

Point #11: Probably due to guilt for this egregious lapse of responsibility, our esteemed legislators then added a new provision to the NDAA: Section 318 (page 179). Basically it authorizes the DoD to engage the National Weather Service (NWS) to do a study about the impact of wind turbines on weather radars and military operations. Once again the intent here seems to be to convey the illusion that we are serious about our military and our national security, and that something meaningful is being done.

Point #12: Of course the devil is in the details. This amounts to kicking the can into the ditch. Nothing in the study is about protecting the lives of pilots from wind turbine obstructions. Nothing in the study is about assessing the impact of wind turbines on navigation radar. Nothing in the study is about protecting the exceptionally important ROTHR facility. Furthermore, who knows what will happen when the study is finished? In the meantime our military and national security is being compromised.

Point #13: What’s really disturbing is that plenty of good reports have already been generated on this issue. For example, Here is a detailed NWS explanation of the problem. For example, earlier this year the NWS wrote a blistering report about how wind development in upstate NY was compromising FIVE (5) different important NEXRAD radar facilities! For example, Fort Drum issued this official statement about wind energy interference. What else do legislators need to know? Oh, they want more pertinent studies? How about: this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. We already have studies up the wazoo. We already know what the problems are and what some good solutions are.

Point #14: The reason we are procrastinating, is that the wind industry has done a superior job in creating the hallucination that wind energy is a societal benefit. The fact is that industrial wind energy is a technical, economic and environmental net liability. Once that understanding is fully absorbed, no reasonable legislator would agree to sacrifice our military or national security for such a detriment.

Point #15: The bottom line here is that the protection of our military (and our national security) is being compromised by powerful special-interest lobbyists. Our legislators are talking-the-talk, but not walking-the-walk.

That our legislators would accept a trade-off that wind energy promotion takes precedence over the lives of our military personnel, is a good indication of how badly this situation has deteriorated, and how much special-interest lobbyists are running the government, and our lives. (For more info on that, see here.) 

US citizens should contact their federal representatives and insist that the NDAA to be properly fixed, today