DDT is still a deadly poison, and still not a panacea against malaria. It’s nice to see reason having sway, probably due to the efforts of the Gates Foundation and its allies.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
. . . and then other people who are expert in the field kick their butts.
No, I’m not talking about Al Gore. James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, recently insulted the entire continent of Africa, and a good bunch of North and South America, and western Europe. No, Dr. Watson, race is not a predictor of intelligence.
Greg Laden provides the boot action at his blog, Evolution. Bookmark it. As certain as your heritage is passed to your children by a double-helix structure in the structure of your cells, some fool will repeat Watson’s argument. Veterans of quote-mine wars warn that creationists right now are filing the statement away for use in some future debate, where they will claim falsely that “the science of genetics is evil because it promotes racism.”
See, this is how science and free discussion work: People get awards for the good ideas they have, and they pay the price for stupid ideas. Discussion, among the experts, is based on real data, real research. Ideas win when they have the data to back them up, not on the word of some authority, regardless whether the authority is well schooled, of the right or far-right political party, or supernatural.
It’s a model for our students.
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Update: Even more from Mr. Laden, as he notes in comments. You have plenty of bookmarks available, right?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
My first year in college, we spent Saturday nights watching “Emergency!” I don’t recall now whether it was on NBC or ABC, but after we saw it once, we were all hooked, Al, Ben and me.
No, it wasn’t great drama. An hour-long drama about paramedics in Los Angeles probably has a lot of potential — this wasn’t that drama. Jack Webb, of “Dragnet” fame, directed. It had a cast amazing for its “how-did-HE- get-there” quality: Bobby Troup, the jazz pianist and composer of “Route 66″ (” . . . get your kicks on . . .”) played a doctor; his wife, jazz vocalist Julie London, played a nurse. Loved Julie London. Beautiful, but she had all the acting chops of David Janssen (“the man of a thousand faces” of “The Fugitive” fame). Martin Milner was there, too — he actually starred earlier in NBC’s “Route 66” which featured Corvettes, but not Bobby Troupe’s hit song (go figure) — and so was Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth. And Robert Fuller, and Kent McCord. Whew!
For undergraduate college students, the show was a riot. We noticed early on that the script writers were defibrillator happy. Every time the paramedic truck showed up, the first thing off was the defibrillator. Heart attacks seemed to be a big problem in LA at the time — maybe Jack Webb’s own mortality subconsciously sneaking into the scripts — so the defib unit got a lot of use.
But it also came out at all the wrong times. Drowning victim? Defibrillator first, THEN artificial respiration. Poison victim? Defib. Auto accident? Defibrillate the victim, THEN worry about the spurting, arterial bleeding (if it’s spurting, is the defib necessary?). Classic kitten in the tree? Defib the tree, THAT will get that kitten down. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Imagine the United States government had an agency that was staffed with experts who were respected by scientists and policy makers of all political stripes.
Imagine this agency did studies on serious issues that would affect the nation in the future, and recommend policies that would allow our nation to take advantage of technology to promote human welfare and our economy, and that would allow our nation to resolve issues that threaten our health, domestic welfare and national security.
Imagine that, because the agency had such strong support and credibility, policy makers would enact recommendations the agency made.
Imagine!?! No, all you need to do is remember the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an arm of Congress that provided powerful information, insight and recommendations on technology policies for about two decades, from about 1974 to 1995.
Now, think about how useful it would be to have such an agency back, to advise our nation on climate change, emergency preparedness, weapons of mass destruction in the post-Soviet era, malaria eradication policies, internet safety and security, and other key issues.
The fact of the matter is that our government is currently operating without any real scientific analysis of policy. Any member can introduce whatever set of facts they want, by employing some crank think tank to cherry-pick the scientific literature to suit any ideological agenda. This is truly should be a non-partisan issue. Everybody should want the government to be operating from one set of facts, ideally facts investigated by an independent body within the congress that is fiercely non-partisan, to set the bounds of legitimate debate. Everybody should want policy and policy debates to be based upon sound scientific ground. Everybody should want evidence-based government.
In the meantime, wander over to the Princeton University site where the OTA’s reports are now archived (I understand the government was going to take it offline, sort of a latter-day burning of the library at Alexandria). Noodle around and look at the report titles. Notice that, though the agency was killed dead by 1995, the agency had reports on climate change. Notice that the agency was a decade or two ahead in urging policies to encourage the internet. Look at the other issues the agency dealt with, look at the legislation that resulted — and you’ll lament with me that we don’t have the agency around today, when the issues are tougher, the technology more difficult to understand, and politics more driven by rumor than fact.
Killing the OTA was the Pearl Harbor of the present war on science. It’s time we started to fight back, to take back the scientific Pacific — our nation’s future is no less in peril now from the war on science, than it was then from hostile nations.
The “Godly” mathematics curricula at a San Antonio church school, and the ridicule it’s gotten, give a glimpse behind the curtain of what could happen were the Texas State Board of Education to succumb to sectarian calls to gut evolution out of biology texts.
. . . the curricula cited above and others like them are a bit absurd, even funny. In private schools they’re none of our business. This is not so if aspects of these “creation math” curricula slip into the public schools, a prospect no doubt devoutly wished for by some.
One hopes the board will stick with letting the textbooks describe the world the Creator actually created, as opposed to a world created in the fantasies of creationists.
NOVA had a couple of good programs on Richard Feynman that I wish I had — it had never occurred to me to look at YouTube to see what people might have uploaded.
By then, of course, Feynman was one of my heroes. His stories are useful in dozens of situations — his story of joining the samba bands in Rio testify to the joy of living, and the need for doing new things. Brazil was also the place he confronted the dangers of rote learning, when students could work equations perfectly for examples in the book — which they had memorized — but they couldn’t understand real world applications, such as describing how the sunlight coming off the ocean at Ipanema was so beautiful.
Feynman wrote about creationism, and about the dangers of voodoo science, in his now-famous essay on “Cargo cult science” — it’s so famous one has difficulty tracking down the facts to confirm the story.
Feynman’s stories of his wife, and her illness, and his love for her, were also great inspirations. Romance always gets me.
I failed to track him closely enough. During the run of the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors, we had the misfortune of having scheduled a hearing in Orlando on January 30 (or maybe 29), 1986. We had hoped that the coincidental launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28 might boost our press response. Of course, the Challenger exploded. Our hearing went on as planned (we had a tough schedule to meet). The disaster affected our staff a lot, those who were in Florida, and the rest of us in Washington where many of us had been on the phone to Florida when the disaster occurred.
Feynman’s appointment to the commission studying the disaster was a brilliant move, I thought. Our schedule, unfortunately, kept me tied up on almost every day the Challenger commission met. So I never did walk the three blocks down the street to meet Feynman, thinking there would be other opportunities. He was already fatally ill. He died on February 15, 1988. I missed a chance of a lifetime.
We still have Feynman’s writings. We read the book aloud to our kids when they were younger. James, our youngest and a senior this year, read Surely You’re Joking again this summer, sort of a warmup to AP physics and his search for a college.
BBC made portions of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out available for free online. These interviews include a short video of his explaining how a scientist can perceive the beauty of a flower at many different levels, beyond the artist’s view — a testament to science as a way of knowing AND appreciating life.
The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page continues to exhibit signs of hysteria that can only be described as DDT poisoning. DDT has poisoned their view of what to do about malaria. (The article is now available by paid subscription.)
Malaria continues to rage because western nations with the resources to fight the disease spent their money on other things in the past 40 years, because the nations most affected lack the governmental adequacy or financial resources and willpower to mount effective campaigns against the disease, but mostly because malaria is a tough disease to fight.
Malaria is spread by several different species of mosquito, some of which have habits or constitutions which make mosquito eradication programs much less effective. Human malaria is really four different parasites, some of which have acquired resistance to the drugs used to fight it. The HIV/AIDS epidemics in tropical nations have not helped matters: What used to be minor cases of malaria now kill thousands who have compromised immune systems because of HIV/AIDS.
Hospitals in far too many nations are overwhelmed with malaria patients, and unable to provide care for many who could be saved. Most of those who die every year could live, with better distribution of health care, and with better prevention.
A few people have been afflicted with what can only be described as a different problem: DDT poisoning. Their views of malaria and what we need to do to fight the disease are poisoned by their anti-science political views. For at least five years there has been a nasty, persistent campaign to impugn “environmentalists” and Rachel Carson, claiming that DDT is the answer to all the world’s malaria woes. Though DDT has been available to fight malaria since 1946, these people complain that bans on spraying crops have discouraged the use of DDT against malaria, fatally.
Below the fold I’ll fisk the short piece from yesterday’s WSJ. It’s difficult to keep ahead of hoaxers, though — today they’ve got another call for DDT use, this time to fight West Nile Virus. Ironically, West Nile is most deadly against several species of bird, some of which are acutely subject to death by DDT.
. . . that will drive the “mainstream media (MSM)” critics to distraction. Are we sure it’s a good idea to let Rupert Murdoch own the Wall Street Journal?
Remember the fuss over Jet Pilot Action Figure Bush’s “package”? Damn fool didn’t loosen his straps before getting out of the jet. Nobody else on the deck had his crotch trussed up like a Christmas goose; and to them, he looked like a rookie idiot. But Chris Matthews practically had an orgasm on-air while watching him prance and strut.) The fact that so many mainstream and conservative media guys are suckered by this posturing shows that they don’t really have a clue about what a Real Man looks like — though, somewhere deep down inside, they’re pretty sure they don’t qualify. That’s why they’re so easily wowed by men who can put on the costume and make it look good.
But they’re even more easily cowed by men who can actually fill the boots. John Kerry. John McCain. Colin Powell. Bill Clinton. (You don’t have to agree with their politics; but nobody can say these men haven’t comfortably worn the full measure of male power and responsibility for some critical stretch of their lives.) Like little boys, the media guys are so awed by the outward forms of masculinity that they eagerly make a fetish out of them; but they also actively fear and resent men who display the authentic internal goods that make an honest-to-God man. These guys’ very presence incites such a strong sense of personal inadequacy that the Boys On The Bus can only resort to attacking them in ways that are openly calculated to feminize them — that is, to bring them down to their own level. He look French. He’s whipped by his powerful wife. He’s preoccupied with his hair. Translation: This guy has more balls and more maturity than we do — and we need to take him down before everybody figures out how inadequate that makes us feel.
And this:
. . . the first rule of real macho was that those who possess it never need to prove it to anyone. If you have to prove it or put it out on display, you don’t have it in the first place. And if you are intimidated by seeing it in others, you aren’t even in the ballpark. The truth of that should come home to all of us every time we hear an MSM or conservative talking head going on in breathless awe about some public figure’s “manhood,” or asking leering, creepy questions about other people’s sex lives.
In a time when we need thought leaders who can help us sort out the issues and navigate the national crisis, we’ve got a media staffed by sniggering, leering first-graders who exhibit every regressive intellectual, moral, emotional, and sexual characteristic of right-wing authoritarian followers. It’s time to clean house — and to demand new media voices who aren’t in business to make fun of the grownups, or shamed by people who show the attributes of true maturity and power. It’s time to send the scared little boys home, and put some authentic adults in charge.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
We are plagued by industries set up to deny reality. It’s impossible to discuss public policy without smashing into organizations set up specifically to question history and hard science, and plant seeds of doubt in the minds of the public about the way things really are. When my job was to fight them, with essentially no budget, as late as 1985 there was a well-funded lobby in Washington that cranked out weekly “news” and opinion columns for smaller and less discriminating news outlets like weekly papers and local television stations, extolling the virtues of tobacco and claiming that no scientist had any real evidence that smoking is unhealthy.
A lot of those disinformation artists have moved on — not to the Soviet Union, since it collapsed and took most its propaganda machine with it — to denial of reality on global warming, evolutionary biology, pesticides and chemicals, and a host of other issues.
If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. Yes, 19 million people watched the “Live Earth” concerts last month, titans of corporate America are calling for laws mandating greenhouse cuts, “green” magazines fill newsstands, and the film based on Al Gore’s best-selling book, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Oscar. But outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion.
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”
Whose voice do you hear, really, when you read material that is supposed to be spoken by God? Morgan Freeman is a popular choice — he’s played God at least twice now, racing George Burns for the title of having played God most often in a movie. James Earl Jones?
Statue of Rep. Barbara Jordan at the Austin, Texas airport that bears her name. Photo by Meghan Lamberti, via Accenture.com
For substance as well as tone, I nominate Barbara Jordan’s as the voice you should hear.
When Max Sherman called me to tell me that Barbara was dying and wanted me to speak at this service, I had been reading a story in that morning’s New York Times about the discovery of forty billion new galaxies deep in the inner sanctum of the universe. Forty billion new galaxies to go with the ten billion we already knew about. As I put the phone down, I thought: it will take an infinite cosmic vista to accommodate a soul this great. The universe has been getting ready for her.
Now, at last, she has an amplifying system equal to that voice. As we gather in her memory, I can imagine the cadences of her eloquence echoing at the speed of light past orbiting planets and pulsars, past black holes and white dwarfs and hundreds of millions of sun-like stars, until the whole cosmic spectrum stretching out to the far fringes of space towards the very origins of time resonates to her presence.
Virgotext carried a series of posts earlier in the year, commemorating what would have been Jordan’s 71st birthday on February 21. (Virgotext also pointed me to the Moyers quote, above.)
Now, when the nation seriously ponders impeachment of a president, for the third time in just over a generation, Ms. Jordan’s words have more salience, urgency, and wisdom. It’s a good time to revisit Barbara Jordan’s wisdom, in the series of posts at Virgotext.
The rest of the hearing remarks are all here. It’s a longer clip than the others but honestly, there is not a good place to cut it.
This is Barbara Jordan on the killing floor.
This was a woman who understands history, who illustrates time and again that we are, with every action, with every syllable, cutting the past away from the present.
She never mentions Nixon by name. There is the Constitution. There is the office of the Presidency. But Richard Nixon the president has already ceased to exist. By the time she finishes speaking, he is history.
Rep. Barbara Jordan sitting calmly among tension, at a House Committee meeting (probably House Judiciary Committee in 1974).
Update 2019: Here is the full audio of Barbara Jordan’s speech. It is still salient, and if you listen to it you will understand better what is going on in Congress today.
Rosten is probably most famous for the introduction he once gave to the comedian W. C. Fields, a spur-of-the-moment bon mots that so exactly described Fields comedian persona that it is often listed as a line Fields himself wrote: “Any man who hates dogs and children can’t be all bad.”
That story also tells us that Rosten looks at Adam Smith coolly, through no rose-colored glass.
It is a clumsy, sprawling, elephantine book. The facts are suffocating, the digressions interminable, the pace as maddening as the title is uninviting: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. But it is one of the towering achievements of the human mind: a masterwork of observation and analysis, of ingenious correlations, inspired theorizings, and the most persistent and powerful cerebration. Delightful ironies break through its stodgy surface:
“The late resolution of the Quakers [to free] their Negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great …”
“The chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches.”
“To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising customers [is] unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
So comprehensive is its range, so perceptive its probings, that it can dance, within one conceptual scheme, from the diamond mines of Golconda to the price of Chinese silver in Peru; from the fisheries of Holland to the plight of Irish prostitutes in London. It links a thousand apparently unrelated oddities into unexpected chains of consequence. And the brilliance of its intelligence “lights up the mosaic of detail,” says Schumpeter, “heating the facts until they glow.” Sometimes.
Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 – not as a textbook, but as a polemical cannon aimed at governments that were subsidizing and protecting their merchants, their farmers, their manufacturers, against “unfair” competition, at home or from imports. Smith set out to demolish the mercantilist theory from which those politics flowed. He challenged the powerful interests who were profiting from unfree markets, collusive prices, tariffs and subsidies, and obsolete ways of producing things.
The six health workers — five nurses and one physician — accused and convicted and sentenced to death for practices that passed HIV/AIDS to hundreds of Libyan children in a series of trials devoid of evidence, reason and justice — are home in Bulgaria today.
SOFIA, Bulgaria (AP) — Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were pardoned by President Georgi Parvanov upon their arrival in Sofia on Tuesday after spending 8 1/2 years in prison in Libya.
The medics, who were sentenced to life in prison for allegedly contaminating children with the AIDS virus, arrived on a plane with French first lady Cecilia Sarkozy and the EU’s commissioner for foreign affairs, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
The six came down the steps from the airplane and were welcomed on the tarmac by family members who hugged them, one lifting the Palestinian doctor off the ground.
They were given bouquets of flowers, and Bulgaria’s president and prime minister were on hand, greeting the nurses and Sarkozy, who had been part of the delegation that negotiated the group’s return.
Their defense had been that the contamination of tools used in the hospital caused the infections before the six arrived to help out. Before the second trial, an international team of scientists tracked mutations and the evolution of the viruses in each victim, and produced DNA evidence that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the infections had occurred prior to any of the six arriving in Libya. The evidence was not granted credence by Libya’s courts, and the six were reconvicted and resentenced. Their release was negotiated only after European sources created a fund to handsomely compensate the victims’ families.
Alas, the motto could work as well for people who understand science, who understand chemistry and biology, and who urge sanity in discussions about DDT, malaria prevention and control, and Rachel Carson.
DDT sprayed on a crowded beach -- photo from an unidentified 1950s publication. Caption in the photo: "This machine is spreading a kind of fog of DDT spray to see if it will kill the mosquitoes and other insects on the beach. Outdoors, the spray soon spreads and does not harm people."
The meme that “Rachel Carson caused millions of deaths” and prompted the disappearance of DDT is factually in error, but popular, and still spreading. It doesn’t help that there are well-funded groups that work hard to spread the disinformation.
As Ben Franklin noted, in a fair fight, truth wins. The difficulty is that the fight for truth about DDT and Rachel Carson has never been fair, and the anti-sense forces have a 25-year head start on wise people like Bug Girl, Deltoid, Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, and even dunderheads like me.
How widespread is the damage? Well, how many editorial pieces were there slamming Rachel Carson, falsely, on the event of the 100th anniversary of her birth? Has Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., lifted his holds on naming a post office for her?
The damage continues to spread.
For example, these blogs have fallen victim to the malaria/DDT/Rachel Carson hoax:
h. Even Nobel Prize winning economists and distinguished federal judges get sucked into the vortex of specious information if they are not scrupulously careful — as Becker and Posner did here, and again here. (See final installment,too.)
And even while fighting ignorance and generally rebutting the wild claims about Rachel Carson, even Cecil Adams at Straight Dope gets suckered in by some of the myths. (In “moderate amounts,” DDT concentrates up to 10 million times in the wild, poisoning birds of prey and predator fishes, especially; DDT is deadly to mosquito-eating birds and bats, and pest-eating lizards; EPA’s hearings on DDT were overwhelmingly in favor of banning the substance — a court suit cited EPA for not moving fast enough to ban such a dangerous substance, and evidence in such trials is not made up; the cause of egg-shell thinning in birds is pretty solidly established to be DDT and its breakdown substances, only the exact process is not well understood; the international treaty against POPs has a specific out-clause for DDT to be used to prevent malaria; and so on).
So, there’s a lot of work to be done, and little time. Stay tuned.
Immigrants’ Contribution to Economic Growth “The pace of recent U.S. economic growth would have been impossible without immigration. Since 1990, immigrants have contributed to job growth in three main ways: They fill an increasing share of jobs overall, they take jobs in labor-scarce regions, and they fill the types of jobs native workers often shun. The foreign-born make up only 11.3 percent of the U.S. population and 14 percent of the labor force. But amazingly, the flow of foreign-born is so large that immigrants currently account for a larger share of labor force growth than natives (Chart 1).”
Foreign-born share of U.S. Labor Force and Labor Force Growth; Orrenius, Dallas FRB
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
