It’s spring, and nutcase fancies turn to thoughts of slandering Rachel Carson and making unholy noises toward environmentalists.
Here’s one nutcase who engages in that peculiar nutcase practice of completely rewriting posts of commenters — claims to be Graeme Bird; is he really running for office? His claim is that lack of DDT is causing the spread of dengue in Queensland, Australia. He won’t be swayed by reason or fact (of course — his avatar is a photo of confirmed liar Joe McCarthy). He asks “how many have died,” but is unhappy with the official answer (one, but that’s not clear — an older woman in poor health). Nor does he appear to have any sense of irony that drought-stricken Australia has a plague of mosquitoes due to recent rains. Nor does he appear to understand that dengue is an imported disease in Australia, imported by a traveler, it appears.
Australian officials ask people to drain water from pots, old tires (“tyres” downunder), rain gutters, or any other small pool, which is where the vector mosquitoes breed and mature. The nutcase appears unfamiliar with the concept of simply preventing the mosquitoes from breeding, in his rush to poison Australia. Nor do alternative effective techniques for fighting the disease appear to be on his radar.
Alas, there are a lot of these lone nutcases loose. Watch for updates here for a week or so.
- Commenter “Jake” at a Wall Street Journal site
- An odd Canadian site (another site that censors dissenting comments)
- Peter Foster hyperventilates about Al Gore, at The National Post (Canada)
- Commenters at Listverse take up the erroneous meme
- Commenters at Michelle Malkin’s site (of course — would you expect reason there?)
- Bogus science at Creative Minority Report
- Block Rants
- And, speaking of hyperventilating rants . . .
- Adirondack Musing
- Let’s not forget our old carbuncle, Steven Milloy
- Wake Community Network, with the old “genocide” hoax
- Doug Ross @ Journal, adding a 75% fact-free promise to his snark-free pledge
- Blogger News network
I wonder if it’s a virus that makes them censor any fact or opinion contrary to their own, or whether they simply are complete cranks. I mean, even Bush’s Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne got DDT right.
(Bird’s blog is on WordPress, which will automatically post a link from this post to his blog. Anyone want to wager on whether he has enough cojones to let the trackback stand?)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
So, the guy over at Adirondack Musing eventually freed my post from his “moderation,” but stripped out identification of who made the post. He probably didn’t want anyone to be able to find their way back here.
Over there, I said:
“Anonymous.” Harrumph.
See it here: https://pudsandlosers.blogspot.com/2009/03/ddt-good-and-bad.html?showComment=1238383200000#c7103980770871717816
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Right. Testicular cancer on the increase. And so they are blaming it on DDT. Whereas anyone ought to see that as evidence for the opposite point of view.
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[…] You’ll find one of the posts I mentioned at P.Z.’s house, here. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Heartland on bedbugs: DDT stupidity, all the way […]
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DDT and breast cancer:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080213193738.htm
DDT and testicular cancer:
http://men.webmd.com/news/20080428/cancer-risk-lingers-for-long-banned-ddt
http://www.oncologystat.com/news-and-viewpoints/what_patients_are_reading/DDT-related_Chemical_Linked_to_Testicular_Cancer.html
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