James Lewis points out the similarities between Stalinism and the "Environmental Movement" in a piece in the American Thinker today entitled
Stalinism is Back. A quote to set the stage:
Green Stalinism is what we are seeing today, but the color is purely decorative. It has nothing to do with real environmentalism; after all, Eco-Icon Rachel Carson got DDT outlawed on totally phony evidence, thereby saving hundreds of millions of tsetse flies in Africa at the cost of millions of African children. How is that for really evil racism? How many deadly flies would you trade for the life of a child? Maybe that's what environmentalism really comes down to, but in that case, how do you tell eco-freaks from Stalinists or Hitlerites? You shall know them by their deeds, and their deeds show no difference. The whole intention behind Fraudenhagen was to impoverish the West and to hold back the developing world from creating prosperity for its people. Even Stalin destroyed Soviet agriculture only inadvertently. These folks want to do it with malice aforethought.
Of course, the hallmark of the original Stalinism was that it was a rare case of the international conspiracy. So this makes perfect sense:
What makes Green Stalinism more than a mob fad, and more than Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, is that it shows every sign of international collusion in fraud, data manipulation, and hundreds of billions of dollars of carbon credit bribes and payoffs. The media have been mired hopelessly in this cesspit for a long, long time. To their eternal shame, so has the scientific establishment, including the great science journals -- like Nature, which was founded by Isaac Newton, and Science, established to rival Nature for publishing first-class science. Scientific American used to be a fine, credible journal, but now it is disgusting. National Geographic used to be wonderful, but it has become poisoned beyond retrieval. Need we say anything about the unspeakable BBC, the mafia-like New York Times, and the macaca-dropping Washington Post? This is all corruption -- the deepest betrayal of the role of independent media in a democratic land.
Mr. Lewis' call, therefore, for investigations and possible trials, sounds a little like revenge. Maybe, but I honestly feel that unless we have investigations, and prosecutions of at least the most egregious actors in this conspiracy, we won't be rid of it. But we must be rid of it. We can not let these people simply go underground for a few years, until we all forget, then come back on the scene with a new version. Unfortunately, these peoples reputations must be ruined for at least a generation in order to protect the rest of us from them. They must be seen to be punished in order to show the world that what they did truly was heinous. Otherwise, they will just come back later, as Paul Erhlich has continually done over the years.
For the Fraudocrats things can only go down from here, because tens of millions of technically savvy people around the world now have access to the HadCRU emails and computer files -- 162 Megabytes of them. They have only begun to work through the computer code. If the crooks responsible are prosecuted, as Lord Monckton has demanded, the evidence for fraud, theft of government property, and conspiracy to defraud hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Carbon Credits will be right in front of the public. The scientific community often boasts about its ability to detect and punish frauds; well, here is a real chance to prove it.
Paul Driessen also has something to say on the topic in an article at Townhall.com today entitled
Taxpayer Robbery Gate. Driessen's venting of spleen is a little more focused on Senator Barbara Boxer's part in trying to divert attention away from the Climategate scandal. Here's a quote:
Senator Barbara Boxer is an exception. Not only does she ignore the obvious. She is doing her best to divert attention from the scandal, circle the alarmist wagons, cover up the fraud, obstruct justice – and ram through yet another legislative power grab.
“This isn’t Climategate,” the California Democrat insists. “It’s email theft gate.” The problem isn’t the fraud; it’s that a hacker or whistleblower revealed the fraud.
Wrong, Senator. It’s not theft gate. It’s Taxpayer Robbery Gate.
We, the taxpayers, We the people – paid for this “research.” We paid billions of dollars for it – and providing the data, computer codes and analytical methods is a condition of the employment and research grants for these scientists. The work belongs to us. We own it.
So, there's the place to start, if anyone has the political will to do something.
How about trials for people who tell tales about environmentalism, about people who hurl the label "Stalinism" without thought, attribution, or concern for the facts?
ReplyDelete1. "Stalinism" has nothing green about it. "Green Stalinism" is like saying "Stalinist capitalism" -- it's a completely nonsensical phrase. Conservation arose in capitalist, western and industrial nations, funded by the uber-capitalists, even the robber barons. Protection of the land is a democratic exercise, contrary to Stalin's brands of politics and economics. Stalin may have been the greatest environmental criminal of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries -- maybe of all time.
On the other hand, Stalin's tactics of attacking scientists, claiming the scientists had unsavory political views, is a tool of the anti-environmental movement. Consider the false claims that Rachel Carson "banned" DDT, and that this non-existent ban led to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people. Pure Lysenkoism, pure Stalinist political character assassination.
2. Rachel Carson didn't call for DDT to be outlawed, and never worked for such a goal.
3. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, forged new ground in science journalism. She provided more than 50 pages of citations to science studies. No science claim she made in the book has ever been rebutted, let alone refuted. Her warnings about DDT effects on birds stand as a monument to prescient science: Since 1962, more than 1,000 studies have been published in peer-review journals on the science questions raised by Carson. Each and every one of those studies verified what Carson wrote, or found that Carson was too conservative in stating the case against DDT. Eggshell thinning nearly wiped out major avian raptors in North America. There is a reason that the headlines said in 2008 that the ban on DDT saved the bald eagle, as that bird was removed from the endangered species list. The author here pretends that none of those hundreds of stories exist.
Rachel Carson was right. Her evidence was rock solid.
4. DDT spraying (against malaria) was slowed in the middle 1960s -- years before the U.S. ban on DDT. Mosquitoes in Africa became resistant and immune to DDT. How racist is it to suggest that Africans should waste money spraying poison that won't help them?
5. DDT has never been banned outright in Africa. The U.S. "ban" kept manufacturing going to export DDT to Africa. DDT was available, and cheap. Africans did not use it because it was inappropropriate or ineffetive. How racist is it to suggest that Africans didn't use DDT though they knew it would save their children? Africans are not stupid.
6. How do you tell eco-freaks from Stalinites and Hitlerites? It's easy: The eco-freaks say "save the people, save the land, save the resources." Hitlerites and Stalinites say "spray poison, lots of poison."
7. Beating malaria requires that we build health care delivery systems in Africa and Asia. Spraying DDT won't do that, and advocacy of DDT spraying tends to frustrate fundraising efforts to save Africans from malaria.
What do you want to do, save Africans from malaria, or make cheap and inaccurate political screeds against good scientists who are dead and can't defend themselves?
A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds, in Africa. You can complain about Rachel Carson, or you can act to save a child, and tip your hat to Rachel Carson. You choose.
"So, there's the place to start, if anyone has the political will to do something."
ReplyDeleteTrue enough, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting.
Mr. Darrell,
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by, and offering comments on my blog. I am sure my readers will find a different take on things of interest.
I would note that your second paragraph conflates two very separate issues. The "environmental movement" I am talking about is not the same thing as what you describe with "Conservation arose in capitalist, western and industrial nations, funded by the uber-capitalists, even the robber barons. Protection of the land is a democratic exercise, contrary to Stalin's brands of politics and economics." I agree, and have said that God expects us to be good stewards of the earth. The "environmental movement," in my opinion, has been hijacked by Communists and latter day Malthusians who are trying to achieve an agenda quite different from the traditional goals of clean water and clean air. To the extent that this agenda is international and represents a conspiracy, I think calling these people "Green Stalinists" is not too extreme. I would also note that there have been calls to put climate skeptics on trial, with nobody saying that was too much. What do you think we should do with fraudsters like Michael Mann or Phil Jones?
As for Rachel Carson, and the book "Silent Spring," to the extent it made people more skeptical of some claims about chemical usage, I applaud it. But there were some factual errors, whether innocent or not, that had they been known, might have changed the outcome of DDT. It is examples like I am about to give that cause people to say that some of what she wrote were half truths: Quoting here from Steven Milloy "Carson wrote "Dr. DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control"" birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs." Had she reported the full measure of DeWitt's findings, people might well have yawned. So, instead, she wrote a very scary book that got a lot of people upset and alarmed, the truth be damned. If that is the kind of ground breaking journalism you refer to, it is not new at all. That is just the old yellow journalism making a comeback.
Regards,
PolyKahr
I had a longer response, but lost it with a glitch on my end.
ReplyDeleteLet me take a few moments to point out that what you cite from Steven Milloy is pure bunk. I have read DeWitt's report, and Milloy misquotes DeWitt. Worse, he misquotes Carson's book (there are several million copies of it out there -- did he think no one would look?).
It's laid out completely, here:
"100 Things About DDT: Dissecting #10"
Be sure to see the comments from Jonathan Buhs, who wrote the book about DeWitt's research.
In short, Milloy misrepresents what Carson wrote, but he grossly misstates what the research said. DeWitt noted in most cases, DDT-fed birds had below-par hatches. He did have a couple of cases in which the hatch rate was pretty good however, and Milloy uses those as his rebuttal to Carson. What Milloy did not tell you (don't blame, blame him), is that Milloy cut the quote from DeWitt at the point that DeWitt noted that, although the hatch rate was good, 'all the chicks died within a few days.'
Carson was right: DDT was damaging the reproduction of birds. Adult birds could often survive doses of the poison -- it takes a huge dose to be acutely fatal -- but the effects on the eggs were deadly. During the 1950s, especially with large predators like the bald eagle, it was noted that there were few or no new young birds. Birds that matured couldn't make eggs. Those few that actually laid eggs had the chicks die, usually before hatching, but sometimes within a few days of hatching.
That's what DeWitt's research shows (don't take my word for it -- go to the library and get a copy). Milloy states it differently, wrongly.
Milloy commits fraud. It's academic fraud, and there are no criminal penalties so long as he doesn't claim those writings in applying for federal grants, or in doing federal research, but Milloy doesn't do research. He's a tobacco company lobbyist.
I won't hold it against you that you cite fraudulent research. You didn't know until now.
But please, do not make bizarre claims about "Stalinist greens" when you cite completely false, fraud reports to support your side.
And now I wonder: Have you failed to check out your other sources as badly as you failed to check out Milloy and his false charges against Carson?