Engineers of humanity's development don't really mind education's poor product. Ignorant graduates as well as those who have been inculcated with the desired secular humanitarian mindset; politically correct, multicultural, and non-absolutist, are easily manipulated and engineered.
It should be apparent that more money will not appreciably improve the product. Including all levels, America probably spends around $15,000? per student per year. All kinds of superficial tinkering methods are put forward as solutions. It amounts to lipstick on a pig.
Few, if any, of the education experts propose to revert back to an philosophical foundation that has proven to work in the past. American education was once ready for prime time and prepared its students to compete successfully.
Private, parochial, and home schooling have improved the product, as have voucher systems and virtual schooling. However, these have all seen serious opposition from the experts to varying degrees. Parents, unlicensed teachers, and other non-professionals are considered incapable of adequately educating America's children. But how could that be? Parents and even grandparents have all been educated by the experts already. Public education and compulsory attendance have been the law of the land for generations. How could they be so inferior?
My own educational experience has seen both sides of the philosophical changes that move from local control toward that of state and federal centralized oversight. My three older siblings all attended 'ye olde one-room school house.' I started just after consolidation began, but the old philosophies held sway for several more years. By the time I reached the 7th grade and moved into junior high, things exponentially changed.
One good example comes from my 8th grade Spanish. My teacher required us to learn the following poem:
En este mundo traidorTranslated, that comes to:
Nada es verdad ni mentira;
Tes según el color
Del cristal con que se mira.
Ramón de Campoamor (1817-1901)
In this treacherous worldThere's some serious diversity, multi-culturalism, and non-absolutism.
Nothing is either truth or lie;
Everything depends on the color
Of the crystal that one looks through.
This was also about the time that I found and read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and was bitten by the 'pristine environment vs. evil corporate capitalism' bug. At that age and with the utopianist education pressed upon me I didn't put Carson's thesis to any measure of rigorous testing. It actually took almost 3 decades to see that there was even another side to the story.
This past Wednesday (May 27th) would have been Rachel Carson's 102nd birthday. David Hinz over on The Minority Report gives her a fitting salute.
The Minority Report would like to take this opportunity to honor the birth date of America's number one mass murderer. One hundred and two years ago today, Rachel Carson was born...Unfortunately, Rachel Carson's methodology is commonplace among the various Leftist movements in our day. It has also been effective. And like me back in the mid-60's, the road to such social engineering tactics has been paved by the modern American public education system.
That little work of fiction, which has become an anthem for the environmental lobby, single-handedly brought about the ban in this country, and throughout the world, of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT.
As a result of that DDT ban, more than 50 million people, mostly impoverished third world children, have died from Malaria.
And sadly enough, it was all a lie.
7 comments:
The Minority Report would like to take this opportunity to honor the birth date of America's number one mass murderer. One hundred and two years ago today, Rachel Carson was born...IF they had a case against Rachel Carson, why the cheap "mass murderer" argument? Rachel Carson didn't kill nearly as many people as Dick Cheney did just hunting doves. But what that over-the-top calumny tells us is the author doesn't have the facts, and hopes to poison the rhetorical well.
That little work of fiction, which has become an anthem for the environmental lobby, single-handedly brought about the ban in this country, and throughout the world, of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT.It wasn't fiction at all. There are 53 pages of citations to science journals and correspondence on the hard research that backs her book. Nor did her book bring about a ban on DDT. She didn't ask for a ban in the first place -- that would be the President's Science Advisory Council, who vetted her book, pronounced it accurate, and said she was too timid in her words against damaging pesticides. And it would be two federal courts who found DDT to be more harmful than beneficial, and would have ordered it off the market in 1970 and 1971 except for the fact that Ag and EPA still had a process going to re-evaluate the safety and labeling of the stuff. In federal court, the makers of DDT couldn't make a case that DDT was not deadly and should stop being used. Blame the DDT manufacturers if you must -- if there was no case against DDT, they must have seriously fumbled the ball.
DDT manufacturers also provided thousands of pages of testimony to EPA over several months. The EPA decision was not made in a vacuum, not made due to political pressure, and not made due to anything Silent Spring said. Richard Nixon was no Rachel Carson fan.
As a result of that DDT ban, more than 50 million people, mostly impoverished third world children, have died from Malaria.That's pure fiction. Malaria was absolutely gone from the U.S. by 1950, having been officially "beaten" in 1939. Lack of DDT in the U.S. has killed no one.
The U.S. ban on DDT did not cover any part of the third world. We continued to manufacture it for sale overseas for another dozen years (sadly, each of those plants is now a Superfund site, because the stuff is so deadly and long-lived). There has never been an absolute ban on DDT in Africa or Asia. It has been in constant use in many places -- and malaria is back in those places, too.
But we have malaria deaths down to about a million a year now, and if we believe your sources, that reduction has been done without DDT -- the same ways we beat malaria while building the Panama Canal. Either your source doesn't know what's going on, or your source has an unholy bias.
And sadly enough, it was all a lie.Let's make a deal: You cite for me any claim out of Silent Spring you think is false, I'll show you the science behind it. Give me the page numbers and the actual claims, not made up stuff. As those Nobel Prize winners working for Kennedy found in 1963, Carson's book was very, very accurate. And it still is. No research has ever contradicted a single claim in the book.
Unfortunately, Rachel Carson's methodology is commonplace among the various Leftist movements in our day. It has also been effective. And like me back in the mid-60's, the road to such social engineering tactics has been paved by the modern American public education system.Well, let's hope her methodology becomes more commonplace. It saved the American symbol, the bald eagle, and osprey, and peregrine falcons, and brown pelicans, just to name four critters that were nearly wiped out by DDT. Her suggestion we rely less on poisons and more on smarts was a great one, and it has spawned a whole new industry in organic farming.
Or are you one of them commies who wanted the bald eagle gone? Surely not!
The Minority Report doesn't take corrections well, do they. Not easy to get a correction post up on that place.
People who fear open discussion maybe shouldn't say what they don't know.
Ed,
We're on.
First, however, I would like to point out that your comment skirted two major parts of The Minority Report article. One was Carson's claimed erroneous use of Dr. James DeWitt's research. (That's exactly the type of contradiction that you are asking me to provide.) The second is the testimony and ruling by the EPA administrative law judge.
Please speak to those two claims directly.
The explanation of how Gordon Edwards and Stephen Milloy make false claims about DeWitt's work is easy. Carson was a friend of DeWitt, and she got it right. Gordon Edwards had to edit DeWitt's work to make it appear she got it wrong.
I've detailed the story here:
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/100-things-about-ddt-dissecting-10/
Pay particular attention to the comments, especially those by Jonathan Buhs, a scientist who worked with and wrote about DeWitt:
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2007/11/08/100-things-about-ddt-dissecting-10/#comment-45205
Generally, lying about what a researcher said is bad form. Claims like Edwards' done in federal research would be subject to prison time.
Sweeney's work next.
Edmund Sweeney did not exhonerate DDT in any fashion. His decision was that a new label proposed by manufacturers which imposed tough limitations on DDT use, met the legal requirements under the law, considering how Sweeney's hearings had noted that DDT was extremely damaging to wildlife. DDT manufacturers probably hoped that their switch, in the middle of the hearings, might get them off the hook, knowing that if DDT were left on the market, people would keep on using it as they had been and the money would still flow.
One of the issues, then, was what EPA had to do to protect wildlife. Sweeney ruled, under the old Agriculture department rules (he had come from Ag when the responsibility was moved to EPA), that the new label was legal, and EPA could do no more.
Ruckelshaus had been in on the arguments in the two federal courts previously. He knew that the courts read the law differently than Sweeney did. The law imposed a duty on EPA to act to protect wildlife. If the hearing record did not show that the new label would do the trick -- and there is no hint of that in the record -- then the tougher action could be required by the courts. Since both courts had already concluded that a ban on broadcast use in agriculture was necessary, it would have been pointless to do any less.
Ruckleshaus, citing the information Sweeney had carefully piled up, put a ban on agricultural use, broadcast spraying of DDT for cotton and other interests where other pesticides were available.
Was he unjustified? Under the Administrative Procedures Act and administrative law, no agency may take such an action without a hefty record of science to back the action. DDT manufacturers sued to overturn the ban, and they lost in summary judgment (as I recall) -- so devastating to their case they did not appeal it further. The courts ruled that the record was crystal clear that DDT is dangerous and cannot be controlled in the wild.
I wrote about the case, and a bit more, here:
http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2008/02/18/greshams-law-ddt-disinformation-crowds-out-facts/
You'd do well to read Jim Easter's take on it -- he's the guy who tracked down the complete hearing record and got it made available again:
http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/?p=62
Bottom line: Carson was dead right on the science. Still.
Just in case someone is too lazy to head over to Jim Easter's site, I think it's important to highlight his concluding paragraphs on the Sweeney materials:[quote]Even in the one arena where the DDT ban was argued to be unbearably burdensome, its use was already declining, the hearing examiner recommended that it be reduced further in favor of alternative methods, and in the event, the ban’s effects were easily absorbed. Well, then — did it have any impact that we should care about?
Glad you asked.
Returning to Steven Milloy’s DDT FAQ, cited above, we find a pearl. Robert Desowitz’ The Malaria Capers is quoted (#8):
“There is persuasive evidence that antimalarial operations did not produce mosquito resistance to DDT. That crime, and in a very real sense it was a crime, can be laid to the intemperate and inappropriate use of DDT by farmers, especially cotton growers. They used the insecticide at levels that would accelerate, if not actually induce, the selection of a resistant population of mosquitoes.”
That’s right. The 1972 DDT ban did nothing to restrict the chemical’s use against malaria, but had the effect of eliminating the single most intense source of selection pressure for insecticide resistance in mosquitos. As the rest of the world followed suit in restricting agricultural use of DDT, the spread of resistance was slowed dramatically or stopped.
By this single action, William Ruckelshaus — and, credit where it’s due, Rachel Carson — may well have saved millions of lives.
Steven Milloy is invited to add that to the DDT FAQ any time it’s convenient.[end quote]
Ed,
Thanks for coming back and responding.
Lots of material to work through.
I have a lot of skepticism for what is called science these days, especially when it leads to 'heroic' political action. It often ceases to be science.
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