The Fourth Branch

By Rich Kozlovich

Paradigms are defined in following manner.

A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

In short; it is how we look at the world. How we perceive reality. It is the basis of how we judge our actions and the actions of others.

Fully 25 percent of all federal regulations that have been passed involve environmental issues and EPA has only been in existence since 1970. Since that time we have a plethora of regulatory bodies at the state level to meet the minimum federal standards and in some states, like California, they go way beyond federal standards, and the Federal Registry increased from 62,000 pages to 75,000 pages in one three year period. President G.W. Bush passed more federal regulations than any president since Richard Nixon; and Nixon created, among other things, the EPA and OSHA.

Now we have a host of federal and state agencies, along with researchers and their universities imposing their views on society without regard to the impact of their actions. Yet we have to ask; what terrible thing happened to impose these kinds of costs and to give state and federal bureaucrats the authority to overturn the protections under the fourth amendment against unlawful search and seizure and self-incrimination under the fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

I did the research and found that this was fought up to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and it was decided that in these cases state and federal bureaucrats, and their regulations, usurp the protections “guaranteed” by the Constitution. What regulation passed by any regulator to make society safer was not already covered under criminal and civil penalties of state or federal law?

Why is it when you ask everyone if they think it is okay that they say, for the most part; yes it is necessary. Environmental paradigms have become everything! It started with Rachel Carson when she wrote Silent Spring in 1962. Her book, which was lauded and continues to be lauded, launched the modern environmental movement. Yet, almost everything she touted in her book was conjecture, prediction or lies.

Her book was never peer reviewed because it didn’t start out as a published book. I started out as excerpted installments in New Yorker magazine. That presentation was so popular the book followed, and when you read her work you can understand why.  She was a magnificent writer. I have been re-reading Silent Spring and I am now amazed at how poor her science was, in spite of the fact that her acolytes praise her as a scientist unendingly.

Her work was not science because it hadn’t been peer reviewed before publication. When it was, after the fact, it was discovered that everything she predicted failed to come true and in at least one case she knowingly and deliberately misrepresented the facts. Her book is full of anecdotal evidence (stories), which may or may not have been true, but there was no way to check it because she didn’t footnote source information for these stories. That isn’t science! She became the Mother Superior of the green movement, but in reality she was the mother of junk science.

Ultimately, this book was the justification for the formation of EPA by Richard Nixon, with the primary purpose of eliminating DDT. Everything you know about DDT is a lie. Yet the regulations and impositions continue! Now we have Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) imposing their will and jumping on the “funding” bandwagon.

In 1790 the fledgling U.S. Federal government passed the Whiskey Tax. The result was that in 1792 they had armed rebellion that President George Washington had to put down with the Federal army. Who were the biggest supporters of this bill? The whiskey distillers in the large cities! Why? Because this would give them the competitive edge they needed over the backwoods farmers who made moonshine, which was easier to transport into the towns than corn was. Far more profitable too!

Apparently having all these government imposed regulators and regulatory agencies aren’t enough to satisfy large industry. We now have regulators for hire who are just like bureaucrats; they need activity to give the impression of accomplishment. And what is the only activity we can expect from a regulator? More regulations! And more regulations and taxes put the largest companies in a position that will allow them to avoid real competition.

 Just as was the case with the Whiskey Act. Large companies and corporation love regulations and taxes. That is why they support all sorts of greenie nonsense because they believe they will profit from it and believe they will still survive, even if it is in some other form. But what about the consequences to society for adopting regulations that will restrict pesticides and pesticides applications to humanities detriment? That is the problem. These people never have to pay the consequences for their actions.

In order to generate some heterodoxy, I have four questions I would like to ask.

1. What terrible event or series of terrible events took place that would justify a SCOTUS decision that would give bureaucrats and government agencies the right to ignore the rights guaranteed under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution against illegal search and seizure and self incrimination?
2. What civil and criminal penalties in state and federal pesticide laws administrated by state and federal agencies were not already covered under criminal and civil law?
3. Have we been lied to regarding the need for all these regulations?
4. Will there ever be enough regulations?

The United States Constitution created three branches of government consisting of the Executive, the Legislative and the Judicial branches. The result of all of these regulations is that there are now actually four branches of the United States government; now we have the Bureaucracy.  After the laws are passed these people are the ones who make the rules, they change the rules, they make all the decisions as to how the laws that are passed are to be interpreted; and without consequence. Why? They never have to answer for their actions.

They were not chosen by the people; they went to college, took a test and got hired. Most of them never have done anything except go to school and go into government, which we call “public service”!

How is it that those who create jobs, meet the payrolls and create the economy that we all enjoy aren’t considered public servants, but those who do nothing except undermine those who do are?

Why in the world would we think these people could possibly have any special insights as to how the economy or anything else should work? I find it interesting that in 1900 “government spending at all levels (local, state, and federal) represented 7.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Out of that amount 66 percent occurred at the local and state levels. Local government spent 55 percent, state government spent 11 percent, and the federal government spent the remaining 34 percent.”

Did it occur to anyone to ask; do we really need all these rules and regulations? Did it occur to anyone to ask; what would happen if these bureaucracies were eliminated and these people were fired?

 Comments will not be accepted that are rude, crude, stupid or smarmy. Nor will I allow ad hominem attacks or comments from anyone who is "Anonymous”, even if they are positive!

Environmentalist fraud and manslaughter

In the name of banning DDT, GEF bureaucrats are consigning millions to death from malaria

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death.

Editor's Note:  This was origianlly published on 3/2/11

 

By Paul Driessen

Many chemotherapy drugs for treating cancer have highly unpleasant side effects—hair loss, vomiting, intense joint pain, liver damage and fetal defects, to name just a few. But anyone trying to ban the drugs would be tarred, feathered and run out of town. And rightly so.

The drugs’ benefits vastly outweigh their risks. They save lives. We need to use chemo drugs carefully, but we need to use them.

The same commonsense reasoning

The same commonsense reasoning should apply to the Third World equivalent of chemotherapy drugs: DDT and other insecticides to combat malaria. Up to half a billion people are infected annually by this vicious disease, nearly a million die, countless survivors are left with permanent brain damage, and 90% of this carnage is in sub-Saharan Africa, the most impoverished region on Earth.

These chemicals don’t cure malaria—they prevent it. Used properly, they are effective, and safe. DDT is particularly important. Sprayed once or twice a year on the inside walls of homes, DDT keeps 80% of mosquitoes from entering, irritates those that do enter, so they leave without biting, and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do this.

Even better, DDT has few adverse side effects—except minor, speculative and imaginary “risks” that are trumpeted on anti-pesticide websites. In the interest of saving lives, one would think eco activists would tone down their “ban DDT” disinformation. However, that is unlikely.

Anti-DDT fanaticism built the environmental movement, and gave it funding, power and stature it never had before. No matter how many people get sick and die because health agencies are pressured not to use DDT, or it is totally banned, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Pesticide Action Network, and allied activist groups will never reform or recant.

Government agencies—including the US Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry—will likewise continue pouring hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-DDT research, in futile attempts to prove DDT causes some sort of meaningful harm. And the malaria death toll will continue to mount.

Worse, they have now been joined by the United Nations Environment Program, Global Environment Facility and even World Health Organization Environmental Division—all of whom share the avowed goal of ending all DDT production by 2017, and banning all use of DDT in disease control by 2020.

A recent GEF “study” demonstrates how far they are willing to go, to achieve this goal, no matter how deadly it might be. The study purported to prove DDT is no longer needed and can be replaced by “integrated and environment-friendly” alternatives: for example, mosquito-repelling trees, and non-chemical control of breeding sites and areas around homes that shelter insects.

The $14-million study claimed that these interventions resulted in an unprecedented “63% reduction in the number of people with [malaria], without using DDT or any other type of pesticide.” However, as analyses by malaria and insecticide experts Richard Tren and Dr. Donald Roberts clearly demonstrate  (see Research and Reports  in Tropical Medicine and AEI Outlooks), the study, conclusions and policy recommendations are not merely wrong. They are deliberately misleading and fraudulent.

GEF did its 2003-2008 study in Mexico and seven Central American countries—all of which had largely ceased using DDT and other pesticides years before the GEF project. Instead of chemical sprays, these countries now employ huge numbers of chloroquine and primaquine (CQ and PQ) pills to prevent and treat malaria: 2,566 pills per diagnosed case in Mexico; 22,802 pills (!) in El Salvador; 50 to 1,319 pills per case in the other countries, according to 2004 health records.

It was these powerful drugs, not the “environment-friendly” GEF interventions, that slashed malaria rates. Indeed, they had begun to do so before GEF even arrived. This terribly inconvenient reality was further underscored by the fact that malaria rates were the same in “study” areas and “control” areas, where GEF did nothing—and that the number of malaria cases increased when the number of pills per case decreased. In other words, GEF could have gotten its same results using one bed net or one larvae-eating fish.

GEF’s fraudulent claims were then compounded by its insistence that the results and conclusions are relevant to other malaria-endemic regions. They are not. Malaria parasites in Latin American countries are Plasmodium vivax; in Africa and Southeast Asia, they are the far more virulent P. falciparum.

CQ and PQ are effective in preventing and treating vivax; they rarely prevent or cure falciparum malaria. Moreover, the eight Latin American countries have 140 million people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 800 million and a woeful medical and transportation infrastructure; Southeast Asia has 600 million people. Both have infinitely more malaria. Getting adequate medicines that work (far more expensive Artemisia-based ACT drugs) to 1.4 billion people would be a budgetary, logistical and medical impossibility.

But apparently none of these facts occurred to the bureaucrats who did this study. That’s hardly surprising, since the project was designed and directed, not by disease control experts, but by the UNEP and radical environmental groups—which also spent millions distributing and promoting the study and other anti-DDT propaganda all over the world, ensuring that they received substantial media attention.

Anti-pesticide fanatics know this “study” is fraudulent. They just have a very high tolerance for how many malaria cases, brain-damaged people and dead babies are “acceptable” or “sustainable.” They just don’t care enough to bother learning basic facts about malaria, CQ versus ACT, vivax versus falciparum. They need to get out of the malaria control policy business and let medical professionals do their jobs.

(To learn more about stopping malaria, see Tren and Roberts’ book The Excellent Powder, Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s documentary film “3 Billion and Counting,” and the website for Africa Fighting Malaria.)

The final report claims its authors submitted manuscripts to prominent peer-reviewed medical journals. However, nothing was ever published. That suggests that they lied, and never submitted any manuscripts; or they did submit papers, but the manuscripts were rejected as being shoddy, unprofessional, unscientific, or even on par with Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent vaccine-and-autism work.

To cap it all off, the bogus GEF project appears to have been conducted using funds diverted from already insufficient malaria control budgets. The GEF, UNEP, Stockholm Convention Secretariat and radical environmental groups are using money intended for malaria control to launch anti-pesticide programs in countries plagued by malaria, and gain control over public health policies, insecticides and programs.

Overall, the GEF has spent over $800 million on efforts to eliminate DDT and other “persistent organic pollutants” (POPs). It budgeted nearly $150 million in 2007 alone on its campaign to ban DDT production and use—but spent a lousy $22 million researching alternatives to DDT for vector control.

Until an equally effective and long-lasting substitute for DDT is developed—one that repels, irritates and kills mosquitoes—this vital weapon needs to remain in the disease control arsenal.

The GEF, UNEP, POPs Secretariat and WHO need to withdraw the study; discipline the people who perpetrated this fraud; retract World Health Assembly Resolution 50.13, calling for malaria-infested countries to slash their use of public health insecticides; and issue a statement making it absolutely clear that this “study” was erroneous and deceptive, and should not be considered in setting malaria policies.

Donors to the GEF and radical groups must be exposed. For activists and agencies to continue promoting this study or demand that malaria-endemic countries stop using DDT and insecticides, and adopt bogus “eco-friendly” GEF “solutions,” is gross medical malpractice—and deliberate manslaughter.

Malaria can be controlled, and even eradicated in many areas. We simply need to use every available weapon—including DDT, pesticides, nets, window screens, drugs and other interventions—in an orderly, coordinated and systematic manner; and ensure that mosquito infestations, disease outbreaks, malaria control successes and problems are monitored and evaluated accurately and honestly.

If we do that—and end the anti-pesticide hysteria—we can get the job done.


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Greenpeace Co-Founder Slams Species Extinction Scare Study as proof of how ‘peer-review process has become corrupted’ – Study ‘greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve’

Moore: 'I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999"

By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot March 4, 2011

Climate Depot Exclusive

Greenpeace Co-Founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, slammed a new study claiming a dramatic and irreversible mass species extinction. “This [journal Nature] article should never have made it through the peer-review process,” Moore told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted,” Moore, the author of the new book “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout,” added.

“The authors [of the journal Nature study] greatly underestimate the rate new species can evolve, especially when existing species are under stress. The Polar Bear evolved during the glaciation previous to the last one, just 150,000 years ago,” Moore explained.

The new alarming species mass extinction study was described in an article in Yahoo News and AFP on March 4, 2011 titled: ‘World’s sixth mass extinction may be underway: study.’ The AFP article reported: Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history, according to a paper released by the science journal Nature. Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events. But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species, and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study. [End article excerpt.]

But Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, refuted the claims of the species study. “The biggest extinction events in the human era occurred 60,000 years ago when humans arrived in Australia, 10-15,000 years ago when humans arrived in the New World, 800 years ago when humans found New Zealand, and 250 years ago when Europeans brought exotic species to the Pacific Islands such as Hawaii,” Moore explained.

“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions,” Moore explained.

“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organziation had become too radical. Moore also challenges man-made global warming fears. See: Greenpeace Co-Founder Dr. Patrick Moore Questions Man-Made Global Warming, Calls it ‘Obviously a Natural Phenomenon’

This is not the first time Moore has gone to battle over alarming claims of species extinction. In the 2000 documentary “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths”, Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.

Moore said in 2000: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary:

Environmental activist Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief was asked in the 2000 documentary if he could name any of the alleged 50,000 species that have gone extinct and he was unable.

“No, we can’t [name them], because we don’t know what those species are. But most of the species that we’re talking about in those estimates are things like insects and even microorganisms, like bacteria,” Keating explained.

UK scientist Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of Biogeography at the University of London, dismissed current species claims in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary.

“The earth has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger in size than even being contemplated today,” Stott, the author of a book on tropical rainforests, said in the 2000 documentary.

“Change is necessary to keep up with change in nature itself. In other words, change is the essence. And the idea that we can keep all species that now exist would be anti-evolutionary, anti-nature and anti the very nature of the earth in which we live,” Stott said.

Bye Bye Global Warming Movement — Welcome to the Next Eco-Scare — Species?!

Many critics of the environmental movement believe that as man-made global warming fears continue to fade scientifically and politically, species extinction will be touted as the next environmental scare. See:

Bye Bye Climate Fears? Media Says Hello to Next Eco-Scare! BBC touts report claiming ‘1/5 of world’s plants at risk of extinction’ ahead of UN Biodiversity Conference

Flashback Jan. 2010: Time for next eco-scare already?! As Global Warming Movement Collapses, Activists Already ‘Test-Marketing’ the Next Eco-Fear!

Flashback: Demoted: UN officially throws global warming under the bus: UN now says case for saving species ‘more powerful than climate change’

Flashback: Different Eco-Scare, Same Solution! UN species report ‘will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run’

Flashback: It really is ‘IPCC like!’: UN Biodiversity report ‘has multiple errors in first chapter alone’

Flashback: UN Species Scares Debunked: ‘Persistence of Species’: ‘Earth’s plant & animal species are not slip-sliding away – even slowly – into netherworld of extinction’

Flashback: UN Biodiversity Report pushes fear & new taxes: ‘It isn’t a scientific body, it exists to influence policymakers, it is being presented by fear-mongering amateurs’

Species: ‘Seal was declared extinct in 1892. So what is it doing alive and well today? Why are there thousands of Guadalupe fur seals swimming off the coast of Mexico now?’ — ‘As naturalists gladly admit, reports of the species’ demise at the end of the 19th century were premature’

Flashback: Paper: Global Warming Improves Biodiversity: ‘World likely far less diverse today than it was tens of millions of years ago, when Earth’ was like the modern tropics

More on the ‘science’ behind the extinction claims:

Flashback: U.S. Senate Report Debunks Polar Bear Extinction Fears — Canadian Inuit declare polar bears not at climate risk: ‘Polar bear population is very very healthy’ For more on Polar Bears go here.

New fish species found deep below ocean surface: ‘Creatures had never before been observed at such depths…Our findings, which revealed diverse and abundant species at depths previously thought to be void of fish’ – October 2010

False prophet Paul Ehrlich still at it: This extinction—the sixth in the 4-billion-year history of the Earth—’could be much more catastrophic than previous ones’ – Shouldn’t Ehrlich & Holdren be Happy? ‘Anything in the vicinity of the previous mass extinctions would wreck civilization’ – October 2010

‘Green’ red tape said to hinder Border Patrol; ‘takes a back seat to protecting endangered species’ – October 2010

Claim: ‘Species just can’t evolve fast enough to deal with rate of human induced change’ – Reality: ‘This isn’t exactly true’ – ‘Documented evidence of evolutionary adaptation to climate change that must have taken place very rapidly, on the order of just a few thousand years, or in a few instances in just a few decades’

Dracula fish, bald bird among strange new species- October 2010

Scientists find 200 new species in Papua New Guinea – October 2010

Study identifies more than 1 million ocean species ‘of which less than a quarter are described in the scientific literature’

‘Greenies, including global warmists, always speak with utmost certainty about their predictions of doom. However, when it comes to ‘endangered’ species (as with global warming predictions of doom), they often don’t know what they are talking about’

UN trying to promote diminishing biodiversity as the NEXT BIG CRISIS – 2010: Excerpt: ‘It is hard to make definitive statements regarding loss of diversity when science can not even tell us how many different creatures there are on the planet. Nevertheless, the UN has launched the International Year of Biodiversity, warning that the ongoing loss of species around the world is affecting human well-being…The words of Henry Louis Mencken we quoted in The Resilient Earth put it best: “The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamoring to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” This is a tactic that the UN has turned into an art form. Having succeeded with turning global warming into a “crisis” they are now giving biodiversity a go. Lack of proper science, contradictory claims by activists and experts, conflicts with the needs of average people just trying to live their lives—yes, this sounds like a UN generated, politically motivated “crisis.” After all, the bureaucrats and parasites at the UN rode the global warming gravy train for more than a quarter century. Now, with the panic over global warming all but vanished, they have started pushing a new biodiversity crisis.

Claim: ‘Control the human population to save wildlife’: ‘Called on world leaders to limit population growth in order to stop the mass extinction of species’ – ‘The human population is sowing the seeds of a mass extinction event…The fact is there is not enough space’

‘Ten years’ to solve nature crisis, UN meeting hears – 2011: ‘The UN biodiversity convention meeting has opened with warnings that the ongoing loss of nature is hurting human societies as well as the natural world… ‘We are now close to a ‘tipping point’ – that is, we are about to reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for conserving biodiversity’

‘We Are Destroying Life on Earth,’ UN Conference Claims: ‘Scientists over the past decade have identified new species at an unprecedented rate. The 2008 World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study First Contact in the Greater Mekong reported that 1,068 species were discovered or newly identified by science between 1997 and 2007 — averaging two new species a week. And the Census of Marine Life — an ambitious, 10-year project to catalog the diversity of the world’s oceans — recently concluded, having identified more than 6,000 potentially new ocean-going species.

Observations from the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published 3/17/11)

It is finally clear to me after this week’s efforts in meeting with the representatives, senators or their aides that something has been missing all along. I didn’t pick up on it before (although I have a vague memory that the National Pest Management's Executive Vice President of Legislative Affairs, Bob Rosenberg, may have mentioned this in passing and I just didn't get it) that this bed bug issue is a back burner issue for them. They aren’t being inundated by calls from their constituents about bed bugs. I don’t think that society sees this as a government issue. 

Each time this is brought up they sincerely seem mystified. They all seem to ask this question, “Yes, I have been hearing about this, what is the story?” Initially I didn’t place too much stock in the way this was asked until this week. I realize now that they have been hearing about this in the news, not from their constituents; or at the very least, not enough to make any impact. Why? Because we are failing the public!

As an industry we have pretty much been satisfied to just “fix” the problem with what tools are available. The problem we now have is that those tools aren’t readily available any longer. It is the Chernobyl paradigm. As I recall the incident, the Chernobyl plant situation wasn’t really an accident in the sense of how we view what constitutes an accident. It was done deliberately, but with unintended consequences! They apparently were removing safety factors in the plant in order to see how far they could go before it was too late. Mostly I understand the need to experiment in this manner, but they ended up going too far and found out they had gone past the point of no return.

This is exactly the situation we are in with the EPA. They keep removing products that work for unscientific and invalid reasons. Why then isn’t the public in an uproar? Because they don’t’ get it! We, as an industry haven’t brow beaten the manufacturers, the distributors, press, the universities or the researchers to start making public statements to the fact that this whole situation is a regulatory problem created by the most dangerous agency in the government to the health and well being of the American people; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  And we haven't even demanded this from our own media deliverers, nor have we devoted the money, time or talent to do so!

Dr. Jay Lehr, one of the original scientists who helped create the EPA and its foundation pieces of legislation oobserves;

Yes, science is following the government money, and it’s a problem in all industries. We’ve totally distorted science, not all of it, but certainly at the university level. They know they have to say what the government wants to hear in the grant proposal process in order to get their money. U.S. EPA rules the roost, and if they’re not out to prove or say bad things about chemicals of all kinds, they won’t likely get the money. This is all driven by the environmental advocacy groups that control U.S. EPA today. It’s a horrible thing, and what it has done to science mostly at the academic level is bad. But U.S. EPA’s goal is to remove every useful chemical from the environment. They are driven by environmental advocacy groups, who are basically Socialists wanting to destroy capitalism and progress and make us a weaker nation. It’s hard to understand their motivation but they are an unhappy bunch. Over time, I’m somewhat confident and hope that the new Congressional administration coming in will right the ship somewhat.

Why aren’t we broadcasting this to the world? Because we as an industry have failed to row against the tide with vigor!  If we are right we must not waver, we must not compromise, we must not capitulate, we must stay the course, because eventually the tide will turn and we will be in the lead. 

###

The Alar Story

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published 5/10/10

The Alar story is a most enlightening account of how abuse of bureaucratic power, scare mongering by the media, and self enrichment by the green activists can create a real mess. If you ask most people who are somewhat familiar with this story how it all got started they will tell you that it was the 60 Minutes broadcast that did it. That is inaccurate; although the 60 Minutes segment set the story on fire, if you dig deeply into the whole Alar story you find that it takes so many twists and turns that it is hard to believe; but this is how the whole thing started.

In 1982 the EPA got caught up in a superfund scandal. By March of 1983 EPA Administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford resigned after finding herself in a bureaucratic mess between the EPA and the Department of Justice in an attempt to deal with this scandal. One prominent EPA staffer was fired and others left.

What has this to do with Alar? Everything! Because of the black eye EPA received over this it was decided that something had to be done to restore their credibility to the public. So what did they do? They felt that they needed to ban something, and since anti-pesticide activists love anyone who wants to ban something, they started looking around and viola; Alar was to be the target.

Why Alar? It had been used successfully as a growth regulator to keep apples from falling off trees since 1963. In 1983 the EPA placed Alar under “special review” and in 1984 they claimed that Alar was a potential carcinogen for children because after administering massive doses of Alar to mice tests showed that that it might cause cancer. It might be noted that rodent testing as a determinate as to what is carcinogenic has come under attack from the scientific community. Although critics of this procedure don’t disavow the value of using rodent testing, they dismiss the idea that EPA should be determining what is carcinogenic based on rodent testing alone.

On August 23, 2005 the American Council on Science and Health petitioned the EPA to “eliminate "junk science" from the process by which it determines whether a substance is likely to cause cancer in humans” under the Information Quality Act (IQA), which requires the government to use the best science available. Nearly five months later the EPA responded by “claiming that their Risk Assessment Guidelines are not statements of scientific fact -- and thus not covered by the IQA -- but merely statements of EPA policy.” If their policy guidelines aren’t based on scientific fact, what are they based on? What were they based on in 1985?

The reality is that in 1985 the EPA own “Scientific Advisory Panel” concluded that the laboratory animal studies of Alar were too flawed to use.” However, the anti-chemical people became involved to “help” EPA to ban Alar, because no matter how much they studied the matter EPA couldn’t develop enough evidence to justify banning Alar.

Eventually facts and studies were irrelevant. The NRDC, through Fenton Communications, a public relations firm that seems to specialize in representing radical environmental groups, approached 60 Minutes with this unwarranted health scare.

“Following the release of a report called “Intolerable Risk” — which claimed that Alar was “the most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply” and blamed the chemical for “as many as 5,300” childhood cancer cases — Fenton and NRDC went on a five-month media blitz. The campaign kicked off with a CBS 60 Minutes feature seen by over 50 million Americans. Despite the fact that the claims were completely unfounded, hysteria set in. Apples were pulled off of grocery shelves, schools stopped serving them at lunch, and apple growers nationwide lost over $250 million.”

However, “from the standpoint of the NRDC and Fenton Communications, the campaign against Alar had been a phenomenal success. The public had been panicked, the product had been destroyed, and a major media organization, 60 minutes, had been a willing tool in carrying out the operation. Further, membership and contributions to the NRDC increased.” Worse yet, “after the election of President Clinton, the EPA ceased being an unwitting participant in the toxic scare campaign.”

“The Wall Street Journal printed one of David Fenton’s internal memos, after the Alar-on-apples scandal was publicly debunked. Here’s Fenton in his own words: “We designed [the Alar Campaign] so that revenue would flow back to the Natural Resources Defense Council from the public, and we sold this book about pesticides through a 900 number and the Donahue show. And to date there has been $700,000 in net revenue from it.”

Dr. Elizabeth Whelan states that “the Alar scare was totally without scientific merit. By the early 1990s, authorities ranging from the World Health Organization to U. S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop confirmed that there was never any health risk posed by the use of Alar. Even the late Don Hewitt, creator of 60 Minutes, told me that he regretted having done the Alar segment, but Ed Bradley, the producer of the piece, refused to retract it.”

When junk science becomes policy it is because the policy was already a conclusion in search of data. And when there is no data available… then apparently any old conclusion will do.

Chemicals and Cancer

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality!

By Rich Kozlovich

Recently the Environmental Protection Agency accepted public comments regarding Ohio’s request for an emergency Section 18 exemption for propoxur in order to help bring this plague of bed bugs under control. A letter was sent to EPA from one of the anti-pesticide groups insisting that EPA refuse this request claiming, among other things, that propoxur causes cancer; in spite of the fact that the MSDS sheet clearly states that propoxur is not carcinogenic.

In an article I saved some time back a writer outlined the three pillars of science.

• The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be—indeed, must be—corrected. .

• The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest.

• The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence.

We shall avail ourselves of these pillars to come to an understanding of the subject of chemicals and cancer. I will state this from the onset. Pesticides do not cause cancer, and that includes DDT. Science is firmly based on these three pillars; these claims about chemicals and cancer are superstition; which is based on mysticism. Let's listen to real scientists and those who have followed this issue for years.

Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, states that “In recent decades, many have claimed that cancer is rising because of increased use of human made chemicals. But if chemicals were a source of health problems, one might expect that as chemical use increased around the world, there would be a measurable adverse effect on life expectancy, cancer rates, or other illnesses. Yet in developed nations, where chemical use has greatly increased, people are living longer, healthier lives.”

In another article entitled “The True Causes of Cancer” Logomasini observes that, “Environmental activists have long claimed that man-made chemicals are causing rampant cancer rates that could be addressed only by government regulation. Accordingly, lawmakers have passed laws directing government agencies to study environmental causes of cancer, estimate the number of lives allegedly lost, and devise regulations to reduce death rates. However, lawmakers should be aware of some key problems with how this system has worked in practice. First, the claim that chemical pollution is a major cancer cause is wrong. Second, agencies have relied on faulty scientific methods that grossly overestimate potential cancer deaths from chemicals and potential lives saved by regulation. As a result, regulatory policy tends to divert billions of dollars from other life-saving uses or from other efforts to improve quality of life to pay for unproductive regulations.”

An article which appeared in the New York Post by Jeff Stier of the American Council on Science and Health entitled, “A Cancer Non-Epidemic” states; “We have an epidemic of disbelief about cancer in this country -- but it's the opposite of what you probably expect. Cancer death rates have been falling for years, and now are falling even faster. Yet it's still stories about allegedly ignored cancer threats that grab our attention. If death rates were rising, the situation would (rightly) be front-page news. But the new report by the Centers for Disease Control and the American Cancer Society notes that the rate of decline in U.S. cancer deaths has doubled. And that story got buried (A18 in The New York Times, nowhere in the Wall Street Journal). Most people will have forgotten the good news by the next time an activist group talks up "the cancer epidemic."

In 2006 this was published on the National Cancer Institute, U.S. National Institutes of Health web site. “Annual Report to the Nation Finds Cancer Death Rates Continue to Drop; Lower Cancer Rates Observed in U.S. Latino Populations -A new report from the nation's leading cancer organizations finds that Americans' risk of dying from cancer continues to drop, maintaining a trend that began in the early 1990s. However, the rate of new cancers remains stable. The "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2003, Featuring Cancer among U.S. Hispanic/Latino Populations" is published in the October 15, 2006, issue of Cancer*. The report includes comprehensive data on trends over the past several decades for all major cancers. It shows that the long-term decline in overall cancer death rates continued through 2003 for all races and both sexes combined. The declines were greater among men (1.6 percent per year from 1993 through 2003) than women (0.8 percent per year from 1992 through 2003).”

Bjorn Lomborg in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, notes that if you were to compare the cancer rates and demographics from the turn of the last century to the turn of this century you would see two startling statistics. In the early 1900's few people smoked and few people lived to be over sixty five, which is why sixty five was chosen as the retirement age for Social Security purposes.

When the Chesterfield Girl died of lung cancer in 1992, Pulitzer Prize winning nationally syndicated columnist George Will wrote an article about it.

He recited an account where “at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis in 1919, a doctor summoned some medical students to an autopsy, saying the patient’s disease was so rare that most of the students would never see it again. It was lung cancer.”

Cancer is mostly an affliction of smokers and the aged. Yet we see the cancer rates dropping and we have a lot of smokers and a lot of over sixty five people. It those two demographics were taken out of the modern equation the drop in cancer rates would even more impressive.

“Dr. Bruce Ames is the recipient of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Prize and of the Tyler Prize for environmental achievement. He has served on the National Cancer Institute board of directors, and he's a member of the National Academy of Sciences” found through his research that naturally occurring chemicals, when fed in extremely high doses to test animals, were as likely to test carcinogenic as synthetic chemicals produced by chemical companies.

“At one time, he was the darling of the environmental movement. But now, the members of that movement have turned on him with a vengeance, accusing him of aiding and abetting "Corporate America," although he accepts no money other than his university salary”. Unfortunately his conclusion “was a very politically incorrect conclusion.” Ames said that, “The environmentalist activists, ‘have a religion’ that says that corporations are behind an exploding epidemic of cancer.”

This idea that “a rodent is a little man” became a valuable weapon for environmental activists and in 1958 the Delaney Clause required the Food and Drug Administration to ban any substance that cause cancer in animals….even when fed doses that could never be reached in a person’s lifetime of massive everyday use. In short, Delaney outlined the idea that if a substance causes cancer at any level, it causes cancer at every level. This is not science. Until then it was clearly understood that the dose makes the poison. At some point the molecular load of any substance becomes too small to impact cells. This “any dose is deadly” mentality lingers in spite of the fact that toxicologists disagree.

In 2005 the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) petitioned the EPA to “eliminate "junk science" from the process by which it determines whether a substance is likely to cause cancer in humans.”

“The petition, filed on behalf of ACSH by the Washington Legal Foundation (WLF), a public interest law firm, argues that current EPA guidelines violate the Information Quality Act (IQA) -- the law that requires the federal government to ensure the "equality, objectivity, utility, and integrity" of information it dispenses to the public.”

“Specifically, EPA routinely declares chemicals "carcinogens" -- implying a likelihood of a health threat to humans -- based solely on the creation of tumors in lab rodents by the administration of super high doses irrelevant to ordinary human exposure levels. Furthermore, effects in a single species may not be applicable to another species (rat tests do not even reliably predict effects in mice, which are closely related to rats, let alone effects in humans), though similar effects in multiple species might be an indicator of a genuine problem.”

Bruce Ames notes that “there are major problems with this procedure.

• One, animals aren't necessarily the best stand-ins for humans. In fact, 30% of the time, a chemical that causes cancer in mice won't do so in rats and vice versa, even though these species are much closer to each other than they are to humans.

• For another, the dose given the animals is on average almost 400,000 times the dose that the Environmental Protection Agency tries to protect humans against.”

The ACSH went on to “request that EPA eliminate statements that indicate that a substance may properly be labeled a "likely" human carcinogen based solely or primarily on the results of animal studies. Such statements are scientifically unsound, argues the petition, which notes that the great majority of toxicologists share that assessment.”

EPA continually dodged this by extending their deadline for responding. Finally five months later they claimed that their “Risk Assessment Guidelines are not statements of scientific fact -- and thus not covered by the IQA -- but merely statements of EPA policy.” My question was then and still is; if EPA policy isn’t based on science, then what is it based on?

I think Dr. Elizabeth Whelan answers this best. “This is a free country, and we all have the right to be guided by superstitions, no matter how nonsensical; for example, my mother still forbids me to open an umbrella in her apartment. But we should no longer tolerate the mindless regulatory ritual of banning useful, safe chemicals "at the drop of a rat."

Sources:
1. Leaders & Success: Bruce Ames, by Michael Fumento
2. Cancer Trends , and, The True Causes of Cancer, by Angela Logomasini
3. A Cancer Non-Epidemic, and, We Should Expect More from the EPA, by Jeff Stier, Esq.
4. Annual Report to the Nation Finds Cancer Death Rates Continue to Drop; Lower Cancer Rates Observed in U.S. Latino Populations - National Cancer Institute, U.S. National Institutes of Health.
5. The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg

This originally appeared in the May Issue of the Ohio Pest Management's quarterly newsletter, The Standard. RK

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Roasted Bedbugs and Old Memories

By Harry Katz

While my short term memory today is bad, I can still recall the acrid smell of roasting bedbugs in bedsprings with a candle when I was a youngster in the 1920’s. Candling bedsprings was what my mom learned when she lived in Russia at the turn of the century. We also put bottle caps filled with an oil of some type under the bed legs.

Many years later, in the 1940’s, when I was an exterminator (no “pest controllers” or “pest management” people then), bedbugs were endemic with the general public. The bugs were picked up in cloak rooms at school, at work, in theater seats, streetcar seats, etc, etc. Pyrethrum sprays, oil based, were available--no residuals, no EPA.

While treating a housing development, I once found a bedbug that was twice the normal size. I gave it to my friend Arnold Mallis in his Gulf Oil lab at nearby Harmarville, PA, who sent it to his friend Dr. L.Usinger in CA. Sure enough it was a bedbug based on the chromosomal pattern. Dr. Usinger wrote asking for more specimens. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any more so apparently I did too good of a job and as a result I potentially missed out on having a strain of bedbugs named after me. See Mallis’ Handbook on Pest Control, 7th Edition, p324.

Before the BC (Before Carson) Era, mostly oil based DDT and pyrethrum sprays were marketed in stores for bedbugs. Pest controllers, however, used a variety of toxicants. NPCA recommended 2% malathion for DDT resistant bedbugs. Others recommended diazinon, lindane,, methoxychlor, thanite, even deldrin. All cautioned not to spray the mattress. I used lindane at 0.1% with pyrethrums to kill the DDT resistant bedbugs. I got best control by using the dust made by mixing two desiccants, silica aerogel with diatomaceous earth. The DE tamed down the fluffy silica aerogel. I don’t know if the labels would permit this today, but this was permitted then. I sprinkled three tablespoons of the dust on the mattress, and lifted the sheet to distribute the dust. This is an excellent residual to control the emerging nymphs from the eggs laid in the mattress tufts. Heat from the body speeds the hatching time. I used the DDT spray in baseboards, wall crevices, perimeter, bed stands, furniture near the bed. (Never on the mattresses or sofas.)

If propoxur aerosol was available now for bedbugs, as it is available for other crawling insects, we would indeed have an excellent addition to our arsenal to control the bedbug, but not on mattresses or sofas. By today’s standards, our industry practices in the early days were primitive. I vividly recall ads with “Confidential Service” in phone books. Some talked about ‘secret formulas’. One promoted his barium carbonate rat bait as a virus. Some PCOs deliberately left streaks of sodium fluoride on the basement walls, and a smelly pesticide to prove that they did something, otherwise they would not get paid.

In the 50’s, several men died when they ate bread at a Salvation Army free food shelter in Pittsburgh, PA. The baker mistook white sodium fluoride for a bread ingredient. That is when the first law regulating pesticides was passed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture: sodium fluoride products had to be colored blue. I recall one old timer brought me an insect to identify. It was a subterranean termite. Another old timer became bald when he inhaled fumes from a solution of thallium sulphate that he was cooking with bait for rats. These excesses ended to a large extent because of Rachel Carson’s epic book, Silent Spring, which was a major motivating force behind the creation of the modern environmental movement, and caused the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency which promulgated regulations that were necessary to place controls on the sale and use of toxicants.

We truly grew as an industry and I believe that requiring companies to be tested and licensed brought this about. However, we have to remember that the first licensing was not introduced into the pest control industry by the EPA. Testing and licensing was first introduced into pest control in cities like Cleveland, Ohio by the pest control industry itself, years before the EPA.

In her book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson described how a Penn State Researcher lost the sight of one eye while experimenting with the first batch of chlordane (1068) that was produced. She neglected to mention that the offending contaminant had been removed from the chlordane before it was marketed.

I also recall my friend Carroll Weil telling me that he was appointed to Congress’ MRAK Commission to investigate demands to outlaw DDT. Carroll was President of the Toxicological Society of America and a Fellow at the prestigious Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, PA. He found that the data which the Committee used was badly flawed. The mice that they used for testing were specially bred to develop tumors . Even a benign tumor is reason to cancel a registration of a pesticide with the USDA. Carroll argued with the anti DDT members until late in the night. Finally, they said they would publish an addendum, and he capitulated, making it unanimous. Because the United States cancelled DDT registration, it was not available anywhere. Millions of natives in Third World countries died from malaria because they were not able to spray a few ounces of DDT solution on inside of their huts. Rachel Carson wrote the book to save the lives of many people from deadly toxicants. An unintended consequence was the death of millions to malaria.

At a hearing before an EPA appointed Judge to determine the future of DDT registration, after hearing lengthy talks by top scientists for many days, the Judge ruled that there was not sufficient reason to cancel the registration. Despite this, the head of the EPA, Ruckelshaus, ruled that DDT was in fact a carcinogen, overruling his own Administrative Law Judge.

This originally appeared in the May Issue of the Ohio Pest Management's quarterly newsletter, The Standard. RK

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The strange history of DDT

This post is from Shaw's Eco-Logic 

If you've ever wondered how a chemical that earned the 1948 Nobel Prize could get blacklisted two decades later, you have to read The Excellent Powder: DDT's Political and Scientific History. Authors Donald Roberts and Richard Tren, of the group Africa Fighting Malaria, have done a superb job, and have somehow made the book suitable for the techie and layperson alike.

You'll read about the incredible junk science put forth by St. Rachel Carson, and the shameless posturing against this compound by elite journals such as Science. Meanwhile, millions of Africans were dying, but according to evil hacks like Paul Ehrlich, that was just fine.

If banning DDT is what founded the modern environmental movement, then it was founded on a gigantic lie. Read my book review in Health News Digest.

In anticipation of the e-mails: She is "Saint" Rachel since even though most Greens with a science background now acknowledge that her anti-DDT screed was complete nonsense, she has attained such iconic status that it doesn't matter. Yes, yes, I realize that the use of "Saint" is theologically incorrect, as all canonizations are infallible and go through an extensive vetting process, which our secular Saint Rachel did not—until it was too late.

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World Bank incompetence and malpractice

Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes gave me permission to publish this in 2006 and all the information contained here-in is relative to that date.


by Fiona Kobusingye-Boynes

Date: June 16, 2006

Fiona Kobusingye speaks from horrible personal experience about the disease that has killed six members of her family and snuffs out the lives of a million Africans every year. It is so tragic, and so unnecessary. We could end this suffering and death, if we used every available weapon to stop malaria – not just insecticide-treated bednets, but insecticides, too, especially DDT. But politicians, environmental activists and bureaucrats promote programs that don’t work, tell Africans they mustn’t use DDT, and falsify data to make it look like their incompetent programs are working. The World Bank is a major offender. It should get out of malaria control – and do what it was created to do.

I have been struck down by malaria dozens of times. The vomiting, high fevers, dehydration, headaches, joint pain and disorientation were beyond belief.

If doctors hadn’t helped me even when I couldn’t pay, I would have been dead long ago – like my son, two sisters and three nephews, all victims of this vicious disease. Like the husbands and children of women who work with me, making beautiful purses to earn money for malaria medicines. Like 50 of the 500 orphan children who attended the school that my husband and I help sponsor – all dead in a single year!

It is an unspeakable tragedy. Malaria infects 400 million Africans every year, leaving them unable to work, attend school, cultivate fields, care for their families or build our nations. It costs Uganda over US$700 million annually in lost productivity, millions of hours spent caring for sick children and parents, countless potential Einsteins, Beethovens and Martin Luther Kings.

We could end this suffering and death, if we use every available weapon – not just insecticide-treated bednets, but insecticides, too, especially DDT. Unfortunately, too many politicians, environmental activists and bureaucrats promote programs that don’t work and tell Africans they can’t use DDT, which keeps deadly anopheles mosquitoes out of our homes for six months or more, with just one spraying on their inside walls.

Thankfully, President Bush and the U.S. Congress and Agency for International Development have begun spending more money – and using DDT and other insecticides in Uganda, Tanzania and Angola. Other agencies are also revising their policies and programs. But one is dragging its feet.

Six years ago, the World Bank promised to spend $300-500 million on malaria control in Africa. However, according to a study in The Lancet, the Bank has bungled the job.

The malaria experts who conducted the study said the Bank actually spent perhaps $100 million worldwide, and cut the number of recipient countries in half, and claimed progress where there was none. By counting eight months as a year, the Bank made it look like its programs had suddenly slashed malaria cases by 60% in Brazil. Refusing to provide evidence to support claims that are sharply contradicted by other data, it also said Bank programs had “dramatically” reduced India’s malaria deaths in just one year.

It refuses to spend Bank money on DDT in Eritrea, where thousands die from malaria every year, even though this chemical has reduced malaria by 75% in at least four African countries.

The Bank bought 100 million doses of chloroquine for use in India, where this drug fails to work 15-45% of the time – and children die as a result. Just imagine the malpractice charges and criminal indictments that would result if doctors did something like that in the United States. World Bank staff then argued that “chloroquine is 10-20 times cheaper” than Artemisia-based combination drugs – when even Bank documents specifically acknowledge that “artemisinin-based drugs are the only first-line anti-malarial drugs appropriate for widespread use that still work against chloroquine-resistant malaria parasites.”

The study also states that the Bank eliminated its entire malaria staff, but says it now has “three full-time professionals working on malaria” – for all of sub-Saharan Africa! This is completely inadequate and does nothing to alter the incompetent policies that continue to sicken and kill Africans.

Another study found that indoor spraying with DDT slashed malaria rates by nearly 75% in just a few years in Madagascar’s highlands. Indoor DDT spraying, combined with insecticide-treated curtains had similar results elsewhere in the country. Despite this life-saving success, the World Bank and Roll Back Malaria have pressured Madagascar to “progressively phase out DDT” and replace it with an “environmentally friendly” insecticide, even though no chemical has yet been found that is nearly as effective as DDT. I can only conclude that, in their minds, environmental considerations and “international criticism” about DDT take precedence over African lives.

Against all this and more damning evidence, the Bank’s Lancet response asserts that its “approach is driven by results.” Just imagine what would happen to doctors and corporate CEOs who got such “results.”

The Bank’s Lancet response did get one thing right. It said that, compared to the Global Fund for the Prevention of Malaria, Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, the Bank has a “comparative advantage in development economics, financing … capacity building and … implementation support.”

Put another way, the Global Fund is more competent than the Bank in disease control, and more transparent about its funding and results. It has superior staff, policies, programs and therapies. And it gives grants, which are attractive to African countries already saddled with debt – instead of loans like the Bank does.

Instead of pretending to be a disease expert, the Bank should focus on its comparative advantages. It should build new hospitals and clinics, get them electricity and clean water, support Global Fund malaria programs, and provide stipends for doctors and nurses, to keep them from leaving Africa for countries where salaries are higher, and obstacles less overwhelming. Let the Global Fund handle malaria control.

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz has an opportunity to change this dismal situation, end the Bank’s shamefully defective malaria programs, refocus it to what it does best, improve healthcare delivery, and save lives.

I’m not a doctor or politician. I’m just an African woman with a dream: that we finally end a disease that is wiping out the future of Africa – our precious children. I truly hope Mr. Wolfowitz will rise to the occasion.

Long Range Planning, My Commentary

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published 6/2/2010)

I know that I am really dating myself, but when I was a kid my grandfather used to love to watch a weekly news show called The Ev and Charlie Show.  It was a bit like Crossfire, except that they understood the concept of good manners.

Everett Dirkson was a gravelly voiced smooth tongued Senator from Illinois who died in 1969.  He made a statement that is still one of the most famous and much quoted statements when it comes to government taxing and spending. He said:  “A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Dirkson was considered a conservative when it came to fiscal matters, but a liberal when it came to social matters and yet voted consistently to expand regulations. It makes one wonder how anyone can be intellectually honest and think that expanding the size of government and increasing regulations will cost less money, or be spent more wisely on more regulations. Perhaps the statement he should have posed is this:  A few regulations here and a few regulations there and the first thing you know you have tyranny.

It is clear that there are many who have two clearly divergent opinions on the same subject in their heads at the same time and believe they are both correct. Is it any wonder we have so many in the pest control industry think that IPM or Green Pest Control is a good thing? Is it any wonder that so many in pest control believe the Montreal Protocol is based on real science, and believe that the Kyoto Accords are about global warming and not global governance? Worse yet, we have many that believe going along and getting along with the activists will be good for our industry. Talk about having two diametrically opposing views in one’s head at the same time and believing they are both correct, this is certainly the case.

In an article by Bjorn Lomborg regarding regulations, legislators, science and activists he states:

“Among many activists, regulators and legislators, there is a pervasive myth that a little over-regulation never hurt anybody. But a "little" here and a "little" there adds up. The reality is that today regulation exacts societal costs whose magnitude is almost unimaginable. According to a recent analysis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, U.S. regulatory costs in 2005 were approximately $1.13 trillion, equal to almost half of all of the government's discretionary, entitlement and interest spending ($2.47 trillion), and much larger than the sum of all corporate pre-tax profits -- $874 billion. 

 To paraphrase Mr. Lomborg; much of the expenditure on regulation is ill-spent on the most expensive cures that do the least good.”

Enormous amounts of money are being wasted on expensive worthless regulations; and efforts to implement IPM and Green Pest Control are among them. We won’t have to wonder and worry about how much longer this will go on though. The money is fast running out.

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Long Range Planning

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published 6/3/10)

I get a kick out of the talking heads on TV who demand that “something must be done now”! Whether it is Hurricane Katrina or the BP oil catastrophe, I think it’s clear that there doesn’t seem to any coherent plans to handle much of what goes on in life; whether it’s in our private lives, government or business, because life is so complicated.

Even when plans are prepared far in advance they are often managed so incompetently that you come away with the conclusion that maybe it would have been better if everyone just played it by ear and saved a lot of money. And the further down the road the planning is from the crisis that it was supposed to contain the probability that it will carried out competently is even less likely. The original planners aren’t there any longer. The “institutional memory” and the insights are gone; and quite frankly, things change.

I have found that when the originators of any system are out of the picture it leaves a hole of understanding that is filled with the views, values, concepts and conclusions of others...who may not have the same values as those who created the system.

I believe the primary problem is having and defining goals. This is the key to any kind of planning activity. Goals are broken down into three categories.

• Short term goals,
• Medium range goals.
• Long range goals.

What determines what a short term goal is? This can be as short a time as in the next 5 minutes or as long as 1 or 2 years. Often what defines a short-term goal is what the medium range and long-range goals are.

Ordinarily I would keep short range goals within two years, medium range goals from 2 to 5 years and long range goals is anything beyond 5 years.

How does one see past 5 years? Anything past your next footstep is speculative. The farther down the road you go the more speculative it becomes. The only way to plan that far ahead is to have a vision as to what you want and how you want to get there. The vision is the touchstone that keeps you on track. Call it “your truth” if you will. Events will naturally change the planning all along the way. This requires adaptability. The ability to alter goals and plans that have seemingly been well laid is the key to surviving until the vision comes to fruition.

Long range planning requires long range vision. This can only be obtained through a thorough knowledge of the subject matter. Having a wide range of knowledge and wisdom is important to tie these things together. Experience in life along with the historical events, along with the consequences of those events is one of the great creators of vision. People throughout the centuries have one thing in common; they are people! People all through the centuries and are pretty much motivated by the same things. These are lessons that can’t be ignored and must be used as a basis for any planning activity including in our private lives.

This requires a depth of thinking. Thinking about great many things (small as well as large) over a long period of time trains the mind. This process goes on automatically. The brain is designed to find patterns. Gathering, storing, filing, analyzing and cross referencing without any real conscious effort on our part, some have this ability better than others, but this ability exists in everyone; but it must be exercised. If we train our mind by thinking deeply on a great many subjects - lo and behold - we get those flashes of insight. How did that happen?

Eventually we will have a brain full of seemingly disparate and useless information that will come together into some cohesive form. The brain, being designed to find patterns, found that last bit of information that allowed it fill in the missing gaps and organize the information properly. A bit here, a bit there and then all of a sudden… SHAZAM... the answer!

• Wisdom is the application of knowledge and understanding. What are the differences?
• Knowledge is easily understood, it is just data although this is where the work really begins.
• Understanding is more complex. To acquire understanding it requires us to meditate and think in an attempt to put all the knowledge together into some coherent pattern in an attempt to see what it all means.
• Wisdom however, is the hardest quality of them all. All the heavy mental lifting has been done acquiring all of that knowledge and diligently meditating and thinking to acquire understanding. Why then is wisdom the hardest? It requires application. Having knowledge and understanding is of no value if it isn’t applied.
• That means someone has to do something.

The chemical industries need to understand that we need to stop appeasing those who despise us. If we as an industry are going to stand up to the forces allied against us, we must develop a common vision. That is the rub. We don’t see the world in the same way. As an example;

• Do we all agree that we need IPM or Green Pest Control?
• Do we all agree what they actually are?
• Do we all agree that they are good for pest control?
• Do we all agree that pesticides do more good than harm or is it visa versa or that IPM or Green Pest Control is better or worse for the public?
• Do we all agree on the direction of pragmatism (also known as appeasement) the industry is taking with EPA and the environmental movement?
• Do we all agree that the universities and extension departments are in harmony with the pest control industry? This includes the large universities we have been in alliance with in past years.
• Do we all really believe that the environmental activists and their allies in government and the media are willing to stop at anything less the total elimination of pesticides, the companies that manufacture them and those that apply them?
• Do we all believe that if we give them what they want everything will work out to our benefit in some Pollyanna way we can’t understand now?
• Do we all believe that what we have been doing over the last 60 years has been beneficial or harmful to the public?
• How many of us think that those in the pesticide manufacturing and application industries should be suing the EPA to force them to prove their decisions are based on actual science and that suppositions are not science?

We can’t even agree on these ten fundamental questions! How are we going to plan for the future of our industry when we don’t seem to even understand who our enemies are? If we are going to start thinking long range, we had better get a realistic vision and not some ethereal Pollyanna feel good attitude that will get us sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism.

We Are the World’s Healthiest Chemophobes

By Rich Kozlovich (Originally published 6/2/10)

There is a report published a few years ago called Making Sense of Chemical Stories,  which attempts to point out some very basic concepts that most people are not grasping about chemicals.  We need to see things clearly and not through a telescope of activism which makes it impossible to see the whole picture.  We live in a world where pollution has become “the cause” for celebrities of every ilk. Movies, television and sports notables will come out and take a position on subjects of which they know little or nothing about. We have been inundated by so many articles and television shows regarding chemicals that we in the developed world (which owes so much to chemicals) have become chemophobic.

Malaria in the developed world is thought of as being impossible. Why? DDT largely eliminated it in developed countries! Our economy, which supports a life style that most would not be willing to give up, came about as a result of an innovative chemical industry. Our ability to feed ourselves, and huge portions of the rest of the world, is a direct result of that research. Research that resulted in the Green Revolution, for which Norman Borlaug was largely responsible, literally saved millions of lives with extensive use of high yield varieties of crops, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Chemistry!

During my young years it was not uncommon for mothers to take their dry foods such as pasta, rice and beans and dump them into a boiling pot of water and wait with a strainer to filter out the dead bugs that would float to the top. We would be outraged now if that happened. The chemical industry provided the answers for that. Pesticides were developed that gave us not only abundant foods, but mostly pest free foods.

Why then do we strive to be kept away from “that stuff”? Why do we have the attitude that all manufactured chemicals must be avoided at any cost? The universe (that includes us by the way) is made up of chemicals. I see advertisements that claim something is chemical free. If it is chemical free it doesn’t exist. We can’t survive without them because we are them. In fact Americans live longer, healthier lives than Americans have ever lived as a result of our chemical rich society and environment.

I have great cartoon in my computer that shows two cavemen sitting in a cave and one of them says, “Something is just not right. Our air is clean, our water is pure, we get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free range, and yet nobody lives past 30.”

In 1840 when everything was “natural” the average life span was approximately 40. Today, when everything that is important in our lives was created by manufactured chemicals the average life span is about 80. What part of that is so hard to grasp? We live longer as a direct result of those chemicals and it is obvious that these chemicals, when properly used, are not damaging the environment or us, no matter what the activists say, the BP oil spill notwithstanding.

A cup of coffee contains 11 chemicals that are considered carcinogenic. You will be exposed to more carcinogens in that one cup of coffee than all the carcinogenic potential of all of the pesticide residue on all of the food you will eat in one year.

City councils all over the country have taken up the cause of banning potentially harmful substances that have already been tested, regulated and approved for use by the Environmental Protection Agency. We have to ask; why they have decided to take up this task? Is it because they spent three hundred million on research and came to a different conclusion than did the EPA? Is it because these city councils are filled with toxicologists and chemists who looked at the original research and decided that the scientists who performed the research were lackeys of the chemical companies and their work should be dismissed? Or is it perhaps a case of merely taking the word of anti-chemical activists who may have even less scientific acumen and less qualified to determine the worth of these products than these local politicians. Then again, they may even number themselves among them. Try and picture a society that would elect all of their officials from the Sierra Club or PETA.

A city council in California wanted to ban dihydrogen monoxide because it burns human tissue in its gaseous state and prolonged use in its solid state could cause severe tissue damage. What is dihydrogen monoxide? Water! Were they embarrassed when they found out what it actually was? Probably not, after all, their intentions were good. I would rather their actions were correct.

The EPA is spending a fortune to promote IPM and Green Pest Control. The School Environmental Protection Act (SEPA) has been introduced and re-introduced in Congress. Why? Because they “know” so many things that simply aren’t true and they have the power and money to promote these untruths. Name one thing you know for sure about IPM. You can’t. It is indefinable and Green Pest Control is even worse. Everyone has his own ideas about IPM. Such foolishness is seen for what is worth in the third world where children are dying because of a lack of pesticides.  Is it our desire to become one with the third world? The actions of anti-pesticide activists indicate that is exactly what they want, and EPA is part and parcel of this outcome.

When we read labels at the grocery store it gives the impression we are being poisoned because we clearly don’t understand the chemical terms. Whether chemicals are naturally occurring or manufactured they have been given names and reading those names do not give most of us any clue as to whether they are safe or not. In short, we don’t know what is good or what is bad. DDT has saved more lives than any chemical naturally occurring or otherwise in human history, and yet we hear how terrible it is. And I will state this again. Everything everyone “knows” about DDT is a lie. Those who actually read books about the “research” done by Rachel Carson realize that she was not a great scientist. She was a great writer, but it turned out to be science fiction.

(I would like to recommend reading Klaus and Bolander’s 1972 issue of “Ecological Sanity” and Roberts and Tren’s “The Excellent Powder, DDT’s Political and Scientific History”, which just came out. )

If we actually look at the facts we will find that most of what comes from the greenies is a lie. Not necessarily lies of commission, which they are guilty of, but mostly lies of omission. The end result is the same. For them to satisfy their egos and enact their entire slate of feel good policies people must die. Why? Because their policies kill people! We have the evidence of science and the truth of history, which proves it beyond any shadow of a doubt. The “conventional wisdom” of the activists was nothing more than the “philosophical flavor of the day”, and has not become traditional wisdom. Wisdom becomes traditional when it stands the test of time.

Greenie wisdom has not stood against the march of time or the uncovering of the facts, that is why they have to move from one "crisis" to another.  Something must always be on a back burner for them to exploit because it soon becomes obvious that the latest one is a lie, such as anthropogenic climate change AKA Global Warming.   No matter how many times a lie is told (even if everyone believes the lie) it will never become the truth! As Benjamin Franklin said, “truth will very patiently wait for us”. What is of concern is how much damage will be done until we find it. The world has suffered upwards of 90 million deaths from malaria and upwards of 13 billion unnecessary cases as a result of banning DDT in 1972. How much patience can the world afford while truth waits for us?

Recently there appeared a CNN special report called “Toxic America” which falsely claimed “that trace levels of environmental chemicals are causing myriad disease in America, from cancer to diabetes and more. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan from the American Council on Science and Health stated “It was worse than I could have imagine. “ She went on to say that “The most shocking part of it was that they recruited people from certain towns who thought that they were harmed by chemicals, and brought them all together to talk about how dangerous these substances are.” ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross agreed with Whelan saying that, “Their segment about so-called ‘toxic towns’ was bizarrely unscientific. When a physician bills himself as an expert and gathers people in a room who believe they were sickened by chemicals, taking a show of hands to see who believes they were harmed, there’s no scientific basis to that whatsoever.”

These "chemical scare” specials from the media are a no win situation for real scientists unless the entire scientific community stands up and condemns them. The emotional drama of parents who have lost children to cancer, and who believer trace chemical elements are reasonable for their death, will be so emotionally overwhelming to any viewing audience that no matter how accurately you present the actual science and no matter how logical your arguments are; emotions will triumph over actual science every time. And our corrupt media and the green movement knows it.

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to reality. At the end of WWII the world’s population was approximately 2 billion people. Currently we have about 6.7 billion. It took thousands of years to get to 2 billion and yet in less than 75 years we have soared to 6.7 billion and we live in a chemical rich society. When tested, our bodies will show over 2 hundred different chemicals produced by the chemical companies…and we live longer healthier lives than ever in human history. Somewhere there is a serious disconnect between what we see going on in reality and what we are being told. Is it possible that what we are being told is merely the propaganda of an irrational and misanthropic movement with an agenda? Could be!

This additional link was posted 6/8/2010.  Please read my next post Facts Versus Fears: DDT