Since Google happens to be my home page, guess what I saw upon turning on my computer yesterday.
So, just to be clear, when you’ve succeeded in making yourself responsible for a number of premature deaths that exceeds the combination of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Zedong, and Che Guevara, combined, you are lionized by the political left as someone who really cared about saving the planet. Is it just me, or is anyone else getting sick and tired of the moral high ground being automatically granted to these people simply because they’ve proven themselves adept at selling their image of caring to the informationally challenged.
For years, I’ve heard the following truism stated in different ways. “People tend to judge themselves by their intentions, and others by their actions.” The most frustrating corollary to that is the version embodied by the political left. When ever threatened with an accounting of the results of their policies, the refrain of, “but our intentions were pure, or benevolent, or good,” will be sounded from the rooftops of what ever platform can be found. Minimum wage causes a crushing spike in unemployment, most severely affecting those on the bottom of the economic ladder? Don’t blame the left for pushing it through, they after all only had the best intentions for those poor unfortunate jobless members of the lowest economic strata. Social Welfare programs causing a half century long societal destruction of our once vibrant urban areas? Don’t hold the political left accountable for inflicting those policies upon those blighted inhabitants of the inner city, after all, the people pimping those programs were only doing so out of a deep and genuine care for the victims of them. Who needs to actually study economics in a serious manner when you can just read the daily talking points memo and argue via bullet point?
Now, before you members in good standing of the Peoples Democratic Movement get yourselves into full out lather mode, I do not believe that Rachel Carson was evil incarnate. That title is reserved for those who continued to pimp out her books once they were discredited so thoroughly, which they’ve been for a very long time now.
Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass “biocide.” She warned that one of the most common American birds, the robin, was “on the verge of extinction” — an especially odd claim given the large numbers of robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book.
….. She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before “Silent Spring,” and it kept falling in the rest of the century.
Rachel Carson, as near as I can tell, truly believed in what she was doing. Her sincerity is not in question, only her methodology. Looking at the title of her book, “Silent Spring,” alone should have been the only clue necessary as to the scientific validity of her findings. That is the title of a book designed to invoke an emotional connection and response, and not one that is filled with wonkish nerdy scientific theory, research, and conclusion. But one can not blame Carson alone, after all, she wrote it 52 years ago, and despite the frightful subsequent consequences felt almost immediately after using it as the bludgeon to ban DDT, only today in 2014, has the world at large started to take the steps to bring back the use of that life saving chemical, which by the way is happening at a much slower pace than the world’s banning of it.
Here’s another link to more links debunking Carson’s Book. My personal favorite is the 1992 Study by San Jose State Entomologist J. Gordon Edwards, a member of just about every environut group it’s possible to join in California, that said basically not one piece of Carson’s work was in any way accurate or even in keeping with sound scientific methodology. My beef is with the hoards of followers past the first debunking of Carson’s fantasy that continued using her work to pimp out the idea that the only way to save the environment is once again, adopting Socialism and giving up on the greedy notion of self interest and personal prosperity.
When you get past the hysteria of environmentalism, nothing else remains from the religion, and yes it’s a religion, except for the horrific subsequent consequences. What we have in America is not a gap between those with wealth and those without. Our major problem is a gap between those who suffer consequences and those who do not. DDT eradicated Malaria, Typhoid, and Bed Bugs. The effects of those three things can be realized not by looking at the people still alive here in America, since in accordance with Frederic Bastiat’s seen versus unseen, people who didn’t die are seldom noticed by those wishing to tug at heart strings. For a clearer picture of the positive effects of DDT, look instead to Africa, where about 1 Million people each year die prematurely due to Malaria, Typhus, or infection caused by Bed Bug infestation. While Rachel Carson may not have foreseen this as the ultimate conclusion of her shoddy work, certainly any who have followed her path since can not claim the same innocence. At some point in time, no matter how well intentioned or sincere someone is, when the results of those policies inflicted are quite clearly making every problem one professes to care about worse, putting an end to those policies must become at the very least, a serious consideration.
The death toll in Africa so far that can be directly attributed to Rachel Carson’s book now stands at 52 Million souls, many of them children. The political left will sob like banshees when they tell some tale of want and woe involving one singular person, and yet won’t bat an eyelash at the mass genocide created by the enactment of their inhumane policies. Since I’ve personally caught many of them telling tall tales in regards to those anecdotal stories of victims of falling sky, I’ve become somewhat immune to them. This is something on a much grander scale however, and its validity has been well documented over the years. Where are the banners, folk songs, and hash tags, for those who’ve suffered the consequences of liberal intervention in the third world?
That’s the true tragedy of the whole thing. The members of the political left are never going to suffer the consequences of what they inflict upon the rest of us. They’ll tell us all happily about how it’s all for our own good. They’ll smile and tell us how they really do care about us, and this is why we should just abdicate the entirety of our decision making to them, and that when we give up our basic freedoms and greedy desire for prosperity, they’ll be able to provide us with all we need. When the dust settles and their policies end, as they always do, in the complete conversion of the middle class into just another piece of the massive underclass, embroiled in total misery, imposed upon a society where the population is peopled with subjects and not citizens, we’ll learn that once again they’ve managed to exempt themselves from that misery.
We here in America don’t have to worry about trite little things like Malaria, Typhus, Bed Bugs, (although those little critters have started a comeback recently,) or national famine, so it’s easier to pretend to care while we claim that doing the things which cause these hardships are actually helping in some way. Others are not so lucky. 52 Million is a lot of people, and as far as mass carnage is concerned, it is in fact tops on that list. That is Rachel Carson’s legacy, and suspiciously went without mention in Google’s celebration of her accomplishments. I just felt that this needed to be mentioned, so that the record might be set straight.
