A Utah school teacher made his own video, in his home it appears, with a non-professional camera and crew — and it eviscerates the points Richard Eyre was trying to make in his slick, professionally-produced, commercial version.
The Truth about Cookies Utah Vouchers:
Tip of the old scrub brush to a reader and commenter named Brack.
Utah voters soundly rejected vouchers in the election November 6. Here’s my version of the story.
10 Comments | 
Education, Education quality, Education spending, Politics, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, School vouchers, Utah referendum | 
Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
We can beat malaria without DDT; we can’t beat malaria without bednets.
Editorial from BMJ (née British Medical Journal?) points out that bednets really work, and they work better when distributed free of charge. Nets cost about $5.00 each, but in nations where a good day’s pay is about $1.00, charging for them merely means they won’t be purchased and can’t be used.
Time for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, and Steve Milloy, to listen to reason, stop bashing Rachel Carson, and start fighting malaria.
Update, February 2009; the original link seems irrecoverable; see also this research, BMJ 2007;335:1023 ( 17 November), doi:10.1136/bmj.39356.574641.55 (published 16 October 2007
1 Comment | DDT, Malaria, Politics, Public education, Public health, Reason | Tagged: Africa, bednets, DDT, Malaria, Politics, Public education, Public health, Reason | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Here’s the word from Bob Parks’ great e-letter, “What’s New,”October 26, 2007 edition; I’ve highlighted some stuff:
2. ENVIRONMENT: MAJOR U.N. REPORT SAYS IT’S “UNSUSTAINABLE.” According to a story in the New York Times this morning, a report issued by the United Nations yesterday in Paris is so frightening that French President Nicolas Sarkozy immediately put $1.4 billion into new energy sources and biodiversity. Unsustainable consumption of resources and population growth is taking Earth beyond the point of no return. As an example, the report says, two and a half times as many fish are being caught as the oceans can produce in a sustainable manner. No word yet from Washington on the U.S. response. No steps taken to protect the environment will help in the long run if population continues to grow.
Denialists will start whining in just a few seconds. Three . . . two . . . one . . .
Considering the weather (everywhere), fires in California, droughts in Georgia, the Nobel Peace Prize this year, you’d think this would be front page news. Where did it run in your local paper?
Sources:
Leave a Comment » | Education, Environmental protection, Global warming, Globalization, History, Politics, Science | Tagged: Climate change, environmental disasters, oceans, Politics, sustainable harvest, UN | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Congress seriously considers changes in mining laws in the U.S. — the General Mining Act of 1872 is 135 years old with no serious changes since its passage. President Ulysses S Grant signed the law.
The law affected much of the development of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, but this issue is generally ignored. The New York Times editorial page endorses the change process in an editorial today.
Originally enacted to encourage economic development in the West, the law gives precedence above all other land uses to mining for hard-rock minerals like gold, uranium and copper. It requires no royalties from companies that mine on public lands and contains no environmental safeguards. It has left a sad legacy of abandoned mines, poisoned streams and damaged landscapes throughout the West.
Now, at last, there is real hope for reform. Representative Nick Rahall, a West Virginia Democrat who has been trying to modernize this law for two decades, has persuaded the Natural Resources Committee to approve a major rewrite.
The law is a major study in economics, government intervention and free markets. It would make a good topic for warm-ups or government intervention lesson plans in high school economics classes.
1 Comment | Economics, Environmental protection, Government, History, Law, Politics | Tagged: 1872 Mining Act, Economics, Environmental protection, Mining, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Controversy surrounds history textbooks all over the world. Texans may be a bit more sensitive to the issues while the Texas Education Agency is revising curricula, but others are even more sensitive – such as Turkey, where controversy over the Armenian Genocide threatens to derail Turkey’s 40-year project to join the European Union; Japan, where citizens and other nations protest failures to mention harms done to people by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II; and even Europe in general, where controversy surrounds efforts to find a unifying, Europe-wide culture.
History is important in our relations with other nations. With increasing globalization, it becomes ever more important that all citizens have basic understanding of their local history, their national history, and world history, if only to avoid the social faux pas in socializing with people from other nations.
The issue is hot in Japan right now. Okinawa, a formerly independent kingdom annexed by Japan in the 19th century (did you know that?), hosted the biggest protest demonstration the island prefecture has ever seen, earlier this month – a protest over the changing of a few words in Japanese school history texts, removing the responsibility for mass suicides on Okinawa from the Japanese Imperial Army.
A story in the New York Times describes the anguish felt by Okinawans:
Brainwashed by Japanese Imperial Army soldiers into believing that victorious American troops would rape all the local women and run over the men with their tanks, Mr. Kinjo and others in his village here in Okinawa thought that suicide was their only choice. A week before American troops landed and initiated the Battle of Okinawa in March 1945, Japanese soldiers stationed in his village gave the men two hand grenades each, with instructions to hurl one at the Americans and then to kill themselves with the other.
Most of the grenades failed to explode. After watching a former district chief break off a tree branch and use it to kill his wife and children, Mr. Kinjo and his older brother followed suit.
”My older brother and I struck to death the mother who had given birth to us,” Mr. Kinjo said in an interview at the Naha Central Church, where he is the senior minister. ”I was wailing of course. We also struck to death our younger brother and sister.”
Mr. Kinjo agreed to tell his story again because the Japanese government is now denying, in new high school textbooks, that Okinawans had been coerced by Imperial troops into committing mass suicide.
The proposed changes to the school textbooks — the deletion of a subject, the change to the passive voice — amounted to just a couple of words among hundreds of pages. But the seemingly minor grammatical alterations have led to swelling anger in the Okinawa islands in Japan, cresting recently in the biggest protest here in at least 35 years and stunning the Japanese government.
How should texts deal with such issues?
China and Korea also protested the rewrite. Hot button issues involve the Japanese invasion and taking of Nanking in 1937, generally known to western historians as “the rape of Nanking;” Japanese treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs), including the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, what amounted to slave labor using POWs in Japan, and Korean women impressed into service as prostitutes to the Japanese Army, at what are euphemistically called “comfort stations.”
Texas history standards writers may benefit from taking a look at some of these other controversies, in other places. These lessons can apply to Texas and U.S. history, where Anglo and European colonist treatment of aboriginal natives is certainly an issue, but also to subjects such as biology and the treatment of evolution, health and the treatment of preventing sexually-transmitted diseases, and environmental science, and the treatment of pollution and climate change issues.
3 Comments | History, History Revisionism, Teaching, Textbook Selection, Textbooks, World War II | Tagged: Education, History, history revision, Japanese history, Politics, Textbooks, World War II | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bush administration officials make the case more powerfully that we need to resurrect the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
Bushies, going against their earlier claims that they accept that the nation needs to do something about changing climate, “eviscerated” testimony of a government official designed to protect public health. More voodoo science from Bush. According to The Carpetbagger Report:
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a Senate panel yesterday that climate change “is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans.” If that sounds a little vague and non-specific, there’s a good reason — the White House refused to let her say what she wanted to say.
Sadly, Carpetbagger Report lists several other instances in which White House officials have gutted the release of important information on global warming’s dangers.
If Osama bin Laden did something like that, we’d invade a smaller nation to stop it. Preventing Americans from being prepared for disaster is a terroristic threat under the Homeland Security Act, isn’t it? Is there a clause for citizen suits in there somewhere? Who will stand up to the abuses by George Bush?
Here’s the Washington Post story on the event. Here’s my previous post, with links to Denialism and Pharyngula, and even John Wilkins (love that picture of Snowflake!).
Hillary Clinton specifically calls for the recreation of OTA, a clue some of us politicos use to indicate she really does know what government under the Constitution should be doing. Other Democrats are friendly to the idea, but so far I’ve not heard a peep from any of the Republican presidential candidates. Orrin? What about you?
Bring back the OTA. Exorcise the demons of totalitarian Bushism.
2 Comments | Accuracy, Junk science, Politics, Research, Santayana's ghost, Science, Technology, Voodoo science, War on Science, War on Terrorism | Tagged: Bush censorship, Climate change, Junk science, Office of Technology Assessment, Politics, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Editorials in two of Utah’s second-tier daily newspapers spell out exactly why the Utah voucher proposal submitted to voters is a bad one. The Provo Daily Herald urges voters to study the voucher proposal, and then vote for it. The Logan Herald-Journal discusses a key problem for Cache Valley parents and educators, in aging buildings that are often older than the grandparents of the students, but which will cost a fortune to replace.
The Utah voucher plan is only half-vampire (blood sucking, that is; or money sucking), leaving with the public schools some of the money allocated for students who choose to leave — at least for five years. In that one regard, the Utah proposal stands a head above other voucher plans offered in the U.S.
That is not enough to make it a good proposal, however. Why?
Here are “givens” for this article, the basic set of facts we have to work from.
1. Crowding is a key problem for Utah schools. Statewide, public schools average 30 pupils per class. That’s above national norms, and twice the concentration of students that studies show make for the most effective classrooms (15 students). (A new study from the Utah Taxpayers Association, a usually credible source, shows Utah’s public school student population growing from today’s almost 550,000, to about 750,000 by 2022 — requiring more than $6 billion in new construction costs.)
2. Partly because of large families in Utah, per pupil spending ranks near the lowest in the U.S. The usual figure used in the voucher discussions in Utah is $7,500 per student per year, but I can find no source that corroborates that figure. The actual number is probably closer to $5,000 per student, but may be lower. Legislative analysts based their scrutiny of the proposal on the $7,500 figure, and for discussion purposes, that’s good enough. It won’t make any difference in the outcome. (A reader in comments on another post says the $7,500 figure comes from the Park City School District, the state’s richest — it may be high by as much as 40% for the state. Can that citation be accurate?)
3. Utah’s schools perform well above where they should be expected to perform, on the basis of number of teachers, teacher pay, and student populations. Despite crowding and shortage of money, three Utah middle schools were named among the nation’s 129 best last month. Utah students score respectably on nationally-normed tests. A high percentage of Utah students go to college. Utah parents deserve a great deal of the credit for this performance boost. Utah has for years had higher than average educational attainment. With several outstanding colleges and universities in a small state, many Utah parents have a degree or two, and they buy books, and that achievement and the drive to get education rub off on their children.
4. These problems should get worse without drastic action. Utah family size may decrease slightly, but immigration from other states adds to pupil population increases. Utah’s economy is not so outstanding that it can easily absorb significantly higher taxes to pay for schools. (See the Utah Taxpayers Association study, again.)
Those are the givens. Advocates of the voucher plan, notably people like Richard Eyre, who made a fortune investing in Kentucky Fried Chicken, and has since invested much of his time in dabblings in public policy, argue several benefits to the voucher plan:
A. Not much damage to public schools by taking money away. In fact, they argue, during the first five years, for each student who leaves a public school with a voucher, the school will keep at least $4,000 (this figure would apply only to the richest districts, if the baseline number comes from Park City as my commenter suggested). This $4,000 would be spread among the other 29 students remaining, effectively, leaving just under $140 additional money per student in the average classroom. (There are problems with this calculation, of course).
B. Public school classroom size will shrink, to the benefit of the remaining kids.
C. Public school spending can hold steady when schools fire the teachers who lose students (I assume this is a misstatement from the Eyres’ video — that instead, some savings might result from dismissal of low-performing teachers in schools where a significant portion of students leave).
D. Magically, competition will create better education.
Below the fold, I’ll tell you why the benefits will not obtain, and point out some of the dangers of pushing the whole education system over a cliff that are inherent in this scheme.
2 Comments | Economics, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Elections, History, School vouchers | Tagged: Economics, education economics, Politics, school funding, teacher motivation, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bloggers who made the Dishonor Roll for mindlessly passing along a hoax quiz designed to pillory Hillary Clinton failed to make amends. So far as I can tell, not a one has apologized for the hoax, and a couple have their backs arched to hiss that they won’t change until or unless . . . well, they say the hoax is fair.
Really? Hoaxes are good things? Politicians make fair game?
Nuts.
Part of the problem comes from the way the questions plop out at people on that quiz. Any national polling firm can give us chapter and verse on the need to phrase questions and potential answers just so, so that they do not mislead the people questioned into making an answer choice they would not normally make. Any teacher can tell you that phrasing of questions and answer choices can affect the way students perform on a test.
So, let’s rephrase the quiz. How about a hoax quiz that makes Hillary look good? I’ll wager not one of the blogs that runs the earlier hoax would dare to run this quiz:
_________________________
A little history lesson: If you don’t know the answer make your best guess. Answer all the questions before looking at the answers. Who said it?
1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”
A. Abraham Lincoln
B. Alexander Hamilton
C. Andrew Jackson
D. None of the above2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few…and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.”
A. Ronald Reagan
B. Franklin D. Roosevelt
C. Jesus
D. None of the Above3) “(We)…can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”
A. Herbert Hoover
B. Theodore Roosevelt
C. Rudolph Giuliani
D. None of the above4) “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own…in order to create this common ground.”
A. Winston Churchill
B. Sam Houston
C. Lincoln
D. None of the above5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.”
A. Ludwig von Mises
B. Milton Friedman
C. Herbert Hoover
D. None of the above6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.”
A. Alan Greenspan
B. Ben Bernanke
C. Teddy Roosevelt
D. None of the above
Answers below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | Accuracy, History, Hoaxes, Politics | Tagged: Hillary Clinton, Hoaxes, Politics, presidential campaign | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Here’s the infamous “Oreo® cookie” ad by the pro-voucher Richard and Linda Eyre, in the 30-second version:
I have a few questions for the Eyres and their Modified Vampire Voucher program:
1. Private schools are few and far between in Utah — where is a kid supposed to find a school?
2. National statistics tracked by the Department of Education show Utah at the bottom of the per-student spending list. Were Utah spending $7,500/year/student, Utah would rank comfortably near the top. Where did you get your figures for spending in Utah, and why do they differ from the national statistics?
3. Are you saying that, if vouchers cut student loads at public schools, no teachers or classrooms would be cut? I don’t see that guarantee in the law, and I’m wondering why you’re claiming something like that will occur.
4. How many kids need to leave the average public school classroom before there is a significant increase in money left over for the rest of the kids, under your formula? By “significant,” I mean at least 10% increases, or with your statistics, $750/pupil. My quick, in-my-head calculations show that, if only rich kids leave, we need to get 5 rich students , with the lowest vouchers, out of that 30-student class in order to get a significant increase in spending. That’s 17% of the students.
If 17% of the students left Utah’s public schools, how much would your program cost? How many private schools would need to be created to accommodate that percentage?
5. You say Utah spends about $7,000/student, and you suggest that Utah should be spending nearly $10,000/student. In order to get a $3,000/student increase in that classroom, you’d need to get 10 rich students to leave, or 33%. How soon do you think you can get a third of the students to leave Utah’s public schools?
6. You say teachers should lose their jobs if students leave public schools for private schools. Why? Studies show that generally it is the best students who leave public schools for private schools. If their teachers are punished . . . well, explain just what it is you really advocate?
7. When I published the research studies at the U.S. Department of Education, we published studies showing that reduction in classroom size helped student achievement — a measurable amount once classroom size got down to 18 students, and significantly once classroom size got down to 15 students per class. By your figures, we’d need to get half of all students to leave Utah’s public schools to get down to 15 kids per class — without firing any of the bad teachers. How long will it take to get that reduction? How much will it cost?
8. If we can’t get a third of all students to leave the public schools, we’re still stuck with a massive shortfall in funding. What’s your backup plan, since getting a third of all students to leave is a stupid idea with zero chance of success? When you’re done hammering at the foundations of public education, what then?
9. Do the good people at Nabisco approve of your abuse of their cookies?
Eyre’s program may look neat as Oreos, but it leaves only crumbs for the kids. Taking money out for vouchers does almost nothing to contribute to solutions for Utah’s education problems.
Below the fold: The longer version of the ad.
7 Comments | Education, Education spending, Elections, Politics, Rampant stupidity, School vouchers | Tagged: Education, Politics, school funding, Utah referendum, vouchers | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
We’re past the political equinox in the political hemisphere (not to be confused with any real equinox anywhere), and we’re coming down to silly season in the presidential race. Soon the hoax quotes will start appearing in full breeding plumage, to be beaten to death by unsuspecting candidates who wish to instill fear in voters, and by partisans who would rather give a tweak to someone they don’t like, rather than get their facts straight.
Remember when the oral faux pas of former Vice President Dan Quayle went around the internet — attributed instead to Al Gore? Yeah, that’s the sort of bird we’ll see. (To be fair, we should note that some of the Quayle quotes are invented, and they were also attributed to George W. Bush, and then to John Kerry; watch for them sometime in 2008.)
How do I know the misquote mocking birds will sing? I’ve already seen one bird, with sightings claimed by dozens of non-thinkers in the blogside. Hillary Clinton’s victory at the 2008 Democratic Convention is so much assumed that people are already staking claims on quote mines, pulling out nuggets of disinformation. In one “quiz,” quotes are listed, and the reader — that would be you or me, Dear Reader — is asked to select who might have said the disgusting thought, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Nikita Kruschev, the Devil Himself (just kidding), or “None of the above.” Each quote’ s “correct” answer is then revealed to be “none of the above,” because Hillary Clinton said it.
For those who may doubt, a date is attached to each “quote.”
You can see this one coming from miles away: Clinton’s quotes are true quote mine nuggets, ripped out of context, disguised with odd dates and no other details, and edited so a discerning reader cannot track them down to expose the fraud by the makers of the quiz (who was identified as Neal Boortz in one piece I saw but I haven’t been able to find his version).
We’ll take a more rational, hoax-debunking view below the fold. You can bet that Hillary Clinton didn’t take the Idi Amin-Stalin-Mao-Hitler view. You can take that to the bank.
32 Comments | Bad Quotes, Bogus history, Ethics, Hoaxes, Politics, Voodoo history | Tagged: dirty politics, gullible pundits, Hillary Clinton, hoax quiz, hoax quotes, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Let’s put an end to the silly “Christian nation” notion once and for all. Can we?
I am a hopeful person. Of course, I realize that it is highly unlikely we would ever be able to disabuse people of the Christian nation myth.
Okay — then let’s at least lay some facts on the table.
First, some background. John McCain, U.S. Senator from Arizona and candidate for U.S. president, granted an exclusive interview to a reporter from Belief.net. Read excerpts here.
In the interview McCain falls into the Christian nation trap:
Q: A recent poll found that 55 percent of Americans believe the U.S. Constitution establishes a Christian nation. What do you think?
A: I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation. But I say that in the broadest sense. The lady that holds her lamp beside the golden door doesn’t say, “I only welcome Christians.” We welcome the poor, the tired, the huddled masses. But when they come here they know that they are in a nation founded on Christian principles.
Second, David Kuo properly, but gingerly, takes on McCain′s argument (hooray for Belief.net).
Then, third, Rod Dreher (the Crunchy Con from the Dallas Morning News) agrees with McCain, mostly.
McCain’s blithe endorsement of this myth, based in error and continued as a political drive to shutting down democratic processes. McCain may be starting to understand some of the difficulties with this issue. His remarks are a week old, at least, and there’s been a wire story a day since then. Will it make him lean more toward taking my advice?
Below the fold, I post a few observations on why we should just forget the entire, foolish claim. Read the rest of this entry »
48 Comments | 6th Amendment, Bogus history, Books, First Amendment, Politics, Religion, Religious Freedom, Separation of church and state | Tagged: Christian nation, Christian Nation Hoax, hoax, John McCain, Law, Politics, Religion, Separation of church and state, Supreme Court | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
On the road for a day and a half. Here is an encore post from last October, an issue that remains salient, sadly, as creationists have stepped up their presence in Texas before the next round of biology textbook approvals before the Texas State Board of Education. I discuss why intelligent design should not be in science books.
Flying pig image from Flying Pig Brewery, Everett, Washington. (Late brewery? Has it closed?)
[From October 2006]: We’re talking past each other now over at Right Reason, on a thread that started out lamenting Baylor’s initial decision to deny Dr. Francis Beckwith tenure last year, but quickly changed once news got out that Beckwith’s appeal of the decision was successful.
I noted that Beckwith’s getting tenure denies ID advocates of an argument that Beckwith is being persecuted for his ID views (wholly apart from the fact that there is zero indication his views on this issue had anything to do with his tenure discussions). Of course, I was wrong there — ID advocates have since continued to claim persecution where none exists. Never let the facts get in the way of a creationism rant, is the first rule of creationism.
Discussion has since turned to the legality of teaching intelligent design in a public school science class. This is well settled law — it’s not legal, not so long as there remains no undisproven science to back ID or any other form of creationism.
Background: The Supreme Court affirmed the law in a 1987 case from Louisiana, Edwards v. Aguillard (482 U.S. 578), affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment against a state law requiring schools to teach creationism whenever evolution was covered in the curriculum. Summary judgment was issued by the district court because the issues were not materially different from those in an earlier case in Arkansas, McLean vs. Arkansas (529 F. Supp. 1255, 1266 (ED Ark. 1982)). There the court held, after trial, that there is no science in creationism that would allow it to be discussed as science in a classroom, and further that creationism is based in scripture and the advocates of creationism have religious reasons only to make such laws. (During depositions, each creationism advocate was asked, under oath, whether they knew of research that supports creationism; each answered “no.” Then they were asked where creationism comes from, and each answered that it comes from scripture. It is often noted how the testimony changes from creationists, when under oath.)
Especially after the Arkansas trial, it was clear that in order to get creationism into the textbooks, creationists would have to hit the laboratories and the field to do some science to back their claims. Oddly, they have staunchly avoided doing any such work, instead claiming victimhood, usually on religious grounds. To the extent ID differs from all other forms of creationism, the applicability of the law to ID was affirmed late last year in the Pennsylvania case, Kitzmiller v. Dover.
58 Comments | Bill of Rights, Biology, Bogus history, Charles Darwin, Creationism, Hoaxes, Intelligent Design, Textbook Selection, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Bill of Rights, Biology, Creationism, Curricula, Evolution, Hoaxes, Intelligent Design, Politics, Religion, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Little Miss Attila explains the politics of DDT, how the hysteria is driven by a lobbying group.
Good history, if you’re new to the issue.
Leave a Comment » | DDT, Politics, War on Science | Tagged: DDT, environment, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
For U.S. students there is an uncomfortable nexus between mythology of the Arthurian style legend, Biblical mythology and history, and British history that fascinates me. The Stone of Destiny has a provenance stretching back 5,000 years to the Jewish patriarch Jacob, and which features a blog by one of the last men to steal the stone — with several stops along the way to open the story to trickery, hoaxes and uncertainty. It’s a fabulous story that too few people know.
And, as I noted, one of the last men to steal the thing is blogging away on politics today — on the topic of Iraq and how we treat our veterans, for example. Is history great, or what?
This is a long way of getting to recommending Ian Hamilton’s blog for an interesting read, which we’ll do below the fold, after a bit of history.
16 Comments | History, Hoaxes, Icons of history, Politics, Santayana's ghost, War | Tagged: History, Hoaxes, Ian Hamilton, Icons of History, Politics, Santayan's Ghost, Stone of Destiny, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Critics of Rachel Carson and sponsors of the anti-science, anti-environmentalist campaign to bring back DDT as a major killer, frequently misinform in very selective ways. For example, they like to mention DDT’s role in causing human cancers, because, they claim Rachel Carson was dead wrong about that link. Therefore, they say, DDT is a nice chemical and bans should be lifted.
In reality, carcinogenicity played a very small role in banning DDT. DDT was banned because it kills indiscriminately, killing beneficial insects along with the bad, killing untargeted species, like songbirds, along with the insect targets; and DDT was banned because once released into the wild, it is very long-lived, and its ultimate destructive effects cannot be known or controlled — though some harms, such as the devestation of America’s birds of prey, are extremely well documented.
Similarly, the anti-science crowd doesn’t like to talk about the third big area where DDT produces harms: Hormone disruption. In fact, Steven Milloy’s “100 things you should know about DDT” at the site that peddles junk science, JunkScience.com, does not even contain the word “hormone.”
They play down the fact that DDT and its by-products disrupt reproductive processes, and sometimes disrupt and deform reproductive organs, of nearly every animal it touches. They don’t want you to know about the hormonal effects of DDT and its breakdown products.
So, they never mention books like the National Academy of Sciences’ compilation of the harms of such chemicals, Hormonally Active Agents in the Environment.
Milloy will misquote the NAS when NAS mentions slightly the benefits of DDT; Milloy will not quote NAS when they cite the dangers of DDT. So this book on hormonally active agents, which mentions DDT specifically in 16 chapters for a total of 309 times, will never be mentioned in a discussion of DDT’s dangers — unless you bring it up.
Go see what the book says in the Executive Summary. If you debate the anti-Rachel Carson crowd, use this book frequently — they will have no answers.
And, Sen. Tom Coburn, are you listening? Since when do your constituents want you to defend a chemical which will ruin their farm animals, and especially the ducks they want to hunt? It’s time to quit trying to tarnish the memory of Rachel Carson, Sen. Coburn, and let that post office in Pennsylvania be named after her.
2 Comments | DDT, Environmental protection, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Accuracy, DDT, Endocrine Disruption, Environmental protection, Junk science, Politics, Propaganda, Rachel Carson, Rampant stupidity, Science, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 