1. Chicago City Wire called us for scientific insight on a recent proposal to ban good pesticides in order to protect bees. Except bees aren't actually dying. Sure, there was a blip in 2006 but there have been periodic mass die-offs of bees since record-keeping began in the 900 AD time frame. Since then, numbers are higher than ever. Even overwinter losses this year, which is predictably when a lot of bees die, saw the fewest losses since surveys have existed.
“They want Illinois to be for neonics what Vermont was for GMOs: a PR stunt,” I told them. “If you dunk anything in a bucket of goop, of course it will have an effect, but neonics replaced broad-spectrum pesticides. They are on seeds and can't possibly harm bees. It's shocking that anyone who understands science or claims to care about the environment would want to go back to mass spraying in the areas this bill covers. But that is what would happen.”
Environmentalists and the politicians they lobby: Ruining the environment since forever.
2. Le Monde, the newspaper it's hard to believe is still a newspaper because it's basically yellow journalism for fringe political groups, printed an absolute train wreck of an activist hit piece and included us. Their pseudo-journalists claim we - and apparently all of you - are part of a well-known propaganda campaign to undermine IARC and Chris Portier, whom it considers a titan of respectability and ethics despite the fact that he never disclosed he had a giant conflict of interest.
They claim we are against IARC. How odd.
If these pseudojournalists had done any research they would know that the founding Director of IARC, John Higginson, was one of our Trustees.
He ran IARC when it was in the business of finding carcinogens, not inventing them, the way Chris Portier does now. Not only would he be aghast at the sloppy, politically-motivated work of IARC today, he would fire Portier after asking the obvious question; why is anyone with corporate funding too "conflicted" to be on an IARC working group but Portier getting paid by Environmental Defense Fund is just fine? Well, that's because Portier wrote the rules to exempt himself.
The only thing that will give me more pride than being attacked by political activists in Le Monde is if Russia Today, the propaganda arm of the Kremlin, also carries it. They haven't gone after us to help the "useful idiots" in the environmental movement in a week or so. So I sent the article to Gary Ruskin of US Right To Know and asked him to pass it along to any friends he might have there. Under one of his many email aliases, of course.
3. On The Blaze network, Stu Burguiere, host of "The Wonderful World of Stu" program, wants the audience to feel like they are in the middle of a conversation, even if the guest is remote, so he uses psychology and visual technology to make people part of the action.
So when our Dr. Alex Berezow was on the program remotely, here is how Stu made things feel intimate - and it's more proof of how important information can be humorous too:
4. At a meeting of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths our Medical Director Dr. Jamie Wells talked issues with the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths founder and former American Council on Science and Health trustee Betsy McCaughey, Ph.D., who was also former Lt. Governor of New York State. The topic: How to deal with preventing the spread of superbugs.
5. In National Pain Report, American Council on Science and Health advisor Red Lawhern tells the FDA to beware of sound-bite solutions to the triangle of chronic pain, addiction and policy.
6. In Project Syndicate, a lesson in how sloppy the work of some economics academics is.
Nothing is more pointless and out-of-touch than far too many academic economists. And the fact that a politically partisan academic can't see that, for the developing world, solar power is not viable (it's not even viable here) and dismisses evidence it does not work as the claims of a "a pro-petrochemical industry group" (what does that even mean? I know what the words mean, and in his word salad they must seem truthy to other virtue-signaling idealists, but to rational people it's just dumb) is simply shoddy. It's the kind of thing environmental bloggers write after spending give seconds on Google University.
Honestly, pro-petrochemical or protochemical industry, whatever you are, if you send us a check, I will cash it. Just like American Heart Association, United Way, Mother Jones, Sourcewatch or US Right To Know will. And they all will. Guaranteed.
To Professor Klees, I issue the same challenge I present to all activists pretending to write serious articles - you put up $1,000 in a tax-deductible donation as collateral. If you can show one of my employees is on the take from an "industry group", I will fire them on Facebook Live. If you can't, you write the $1,000 off of your taxes and apologize in writing.
To-date, despite having repeated this challenge hundreds of times, I have not had a single taker. Not Gary Ruskin, though he claims we are such when he is sending his press releases to Russia Today and Truth Out and other groups politically sympathetic to his desire to undermine American science, not Mother Jones, not even the entire overpaid staff at New York University's Journalism Department (protojournalism?) has showed up to put their data where their anti-science politics are.
7. Finally, since legislation over pesticides is being heavily lobbied for in Illinois, another journalist at Chicago City Wire asked for some science context.
I assured their audience the people were safe, the critters were safe. We had 8 years of EPA being told to conduct multiple special scientific panels on pesticides, they even had to take down papers where they cleared pesticides of being harmful, so we know EPA is not on the side of corporations.
"The EPA gets a bad rep for being too political, but their pesticides group is one of the best in the world,” I told their journalist. “There aren’t going to be any threats for humans. People have been trained to be chemophobes; 'chemical' is now a bad word."
