Grizzly Groundswell

This guy should really get out of the bathtub.

His recent diatribe pointing at me and calling me ‘crazy’ is here. I answered in comments, but thought I’d turn it into a post. See if you can find a shred of empirical evidence or data or scientific citations here.

Sometimes, when people make gross errors, they get caught. They apologize, or they mumble, and they move on.

That wouldn’t be this guy, though.

A few times, when people make gross errors, they revel in it. Rather than admit the error, they make it again. They say it wasn’t an error. They repeat it, time and again, as if two wrongs make a right, or as if 126 wrongs make a right.

He’s describing his own behavior: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. He’s living fully into the definition of insanity, and taking a page from Lenin: A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

The guy in the bathtub is going to have to do better than this:

We caught Caosblog repeating some bad stuff about Rachel Carson, and false, good stuff about DDT, and false claims that eagles were not endangered by DDT. We called ‘em on it.

ooooh. “caught Caosblog.” Wow how official of him. Repeating some “bad stuff“. He doesn’t specify what that ‘bad stuff’ is, though. And…”we”? It makes him sound like more than one person. Just who exactly is with him in that bathtub? “False claims that eagles were not endangered”? I see no proof otherwise at this post, or any of the other blogs that make the same assertions. There are no links to ‘reason and evidence’ there.

Whoooee! This is the result.

He points at caosblog’s index.

If there is anything crazy and mean about Rachel Carson, it’s probably in that list. If there is any wild and insane claim about the safety of DDT, it’s in that list.

Okay, ‘if there is anything crazy and mean about Rachel Carson, it’s probably in that list.’ But there is no specificity as to what is ‘crazy and mean’, or what is ‘wild and insane’.

He makes some wild sweeping generalizations, but has made no point yet with ‘reason and evidence’.

This is someone who clearly doesn’t understand the rules set forth in front of 8th grade debate teams. Attack the point, not the person. Back yourself up with facts. But in the bathtub, there aren’t any facts, and the method of debate is ad hominem attack. Because when you sing in the bathroom, your voice sounds pretty good.

If there were any accurate information, it would be a miracle.

Take a look at the miracle here and here. Notice the links to facts and evidence. Notice the scientists cited. The fact that this fellow doesn’t know how to do that doesn’t reflect very well on his ability to ‘reason’, or his ability to weigh scentific evidence against hysterical environmental political hyperbole.

(Well, actually there’s some good information in the National Geographic story about malaria, but I doubt the blog writer bothered to read it.)

Yes, I read it, maybe if he did, he would have noticed that the graphic on this post quotes from it, as well. It would seem to me that the guy in the bathtub is the one who has a problem with reading and citing sources.

Leftists seem to point a finger at other people for the behaviors they themselves demonstrate, and expect nobody to notice.

The blog links to all the Lyndon Larouche crazies, all the tobacco lobbyist crazies, and acts as if such manure is golden.

Right. Now we’ve arrived at the heart of the matter; “all the tobacco lobbyist crazies” and “all the Lyndon Larouche crazies”. But he doesn’t provide evidence as to who or what these entities are. Both are mysterious and vague generalizations. Everyone’s crazy and mean but the guy in the bathtub calling other people names.

From Wikipedia:

*(Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922 in Rochester, New Hampshire) is an American economist, philosopher, political activist, and founder of several political organizations in the United States and elsewhere, jointly referred to as the LaRouche movement. He is known as a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run in eight elections since 1976, once as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and seven times as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.There are sharply contrasting views of LaRouche. His supporters regard him as a brilliant and original thinker, whereas critics have variously seen him as a conspiracy theorist, an anti-Semite, or the leader of a political cult[1][2] The Heritage Foundation has said that he “leads what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history.) Lyndon Larouche, Wikipedia.Certainly the guy in the bathtub is deranged if he thinks drawing a link between this blog and Lyndon Larouche makes any sense. Larouche doesn’t fit within my ideological philosophy, nor have I linked to anything having to do with him…until he brought it up just now.This is kind of an interesting approach, I think. Smearing someone by association with someone I’ve never referred to or spoken of….who’s a fascist-type democrat.LaRouche was defended by Ramsey Clark (former U.S. Attorney General during the Lyndon Johnson Whitehouse and defending attorney for Saddam Hussein) because of mail fraud and tax code violations.

Has Larouche taken a stand against Rachel Carson? I haven’t seen any evidence of that. Maybe the Larouche statement might have stemmed from the weird post published at this blog about Rachel Carson. Crooked Timber talks about the Republican War on Science, but I haven’t seen any leftist quoting scientists when they do their environmental activist smears.

Very little of it is close to accurate. Most of the material so far out to lunch, it’s not even wrong.

huh?

The person who runs the blog sent me an e-mail saying my comments are no longer welcome there, because of the tone of my remarks. Too many links to too much refutation of blog’s points, I gather — too much real information!

That’s a lie. Everything I said, I said in the comments section; and the advice to him was to refrain from ad hominem attacks and present facts and evidence. As this post at his blog demonstrates, the man in the bathtub doesn’t have any.

Speaking of accurate, drawing a parallel that makes some kind of sense would be a start. The message I sent consisted of four words in the subject line, “thanks but no thanks.”

Based on what we have seen thus far, what can we conclude? He doesn’t back himself up with empirical evidence, or link to a source, he lies about the content of an email I supposedly sent, calls people names and still hasn’t quoted any ‘reason or evidence’.

DDT poisoning clearly is damaging, with effects far beyond anything Rachel Carson ever predicted.

Clearly damaging? To what? To whom? We don’t know because the guy in the bathtub doesn’t know, either. Has he read Rachel Carson’s book? We don’t know that, either. It would seem he doesn’t like to read very much; he just likes to fling poo.

This is the venal, vicious spirit that Sen. Tom Coburn defends with his hold in the U.S. Senate on honors for Mrs. Carson. This is the spirit with which the anti-Rachel Carson movement rails at environmentalists about malaria in Africa, while holding back funding for anti-malaria projects in Africa.

Ahh. Now the motivation behind the smear is revealed. The problem is-he doesn’t know science. The guy in the bathtub has a problem with - Senator Tom Coburn linking to Rachel Was Wrong. I’ve seen that trick before. He draws the first parallel that makes any sense, lumping me in with Tom Coburn because leftist sites have said it. So my linking to Rachel Was Wrong, while he completely ignores everything else I’ve presented in terms of facts and links, is what makes me ‘crazy’.

How interesting. Does he say what is wrong with the facts presented at “Rachel Was Wrong”? No.

Could he have a problem with Africans pleading for the lives of their dying suffering children? Or that the website shows pictures of African children who’ve lost their lives to malaria? Maybe that’s because he would rather let people die than allow DDT use to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Woody Allen had a line in Annie Hall that may be appropriate: “There’s nothing wrong with you that couldn’t be cured with Prozac and a polo mallet.”

The Woody Allen line is the only quote he has here. It strikes me funny that a guy who disagrees with me would promote the idea of drugging someone up and hitting them with a hammer in response. That’s the prescriptive cure for someone holding a conservative anti-DDT or anti-global warming viewpoint from a leftist.

Entomology is the study of insects; a mosquito is an insect; I quote Dr. Edwards, an entomologist, who testified against DDT at the EPA hearings back in the day. Ornithology is the study of birds, I’ve quoted studies on birds by ornithologists about bird populations and eggshell thickness. He has nothing in his posts from any scientists that I can see, just sweeping generalizations because someone linked to Rachel Was Wrong, ignoring the facts about Carson’s presumptions and the devastating human toll that’s resulted.

There is nothing to help us understand his position from a scientific point of view. And that’s probably because science isn’t driving his view; politics and other leftist websites are. This is typical of environmentalists today. Did I mention that one of the reasons Patrick Moore quit Greenpeace because of their radical politics?’

Moore, who has an honours degree in forest biology and a PhD in ecology, says he left Greenpeace when “I was an international director, one of five. My fellow international directors had no science education.

Sounds like the bathtub guy doesn’t have any, either.

Most of them were political activists or entrepreneur environmentalists, for want of a better word, and they decided we should start a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. I said, ‘Chlorine is one of the elements in the periodic table. I don’t think that’s in our jurisdiction.’ And they said, ‘No, this is a good campaign. Chlorine is the devil’s element, and it works really well for fund-raising and media and everything.’“I said, ‘Just a minute, 75 per cent of our medicines are based on chlorine chemistry, and adding chlorine to drinking water was the single biggest advance in the history of public health, and the best way to deliver that slightly chlorinated drinking water to the general public is in a PVC pipe. So give me a break. I cannot go along with this. You guys make a list of the chlorine compounds that you don’t like and we’ll look at them one by one like any regulatory agency would do, but you can’t just condemn chlorine. We put it in swimming pools so that people don’t get cholera and tetanus.’ “The others weren’t persuaded. Moore says: “That was the beginning of my having to leave the organisation that I helped found.”That’s political activism, based on a stupidity that is beyond rationalization. Environmentalism is an activism that endangers people; and is not science.Then bathtubboy pulls out the hilarious part:

Reason and evidence won’t do it now. When someone starts out arguing that eagles were not threatened with extinction by the poison that a thousand studies verified was doing them in, you can’t reason them back to reality.

Dr. J. Gordon Edwards: Activists blamed DDT for the disappearance of great birds such as the bald eagle and peregrine falcon. Supposedly, the insecticide harmed bird reproduction by thinning egg shells.But the bald eagle and peregrine falcon were hunted to near extinction decades before DDT was first used in the U.S.Many human and environmental stressors can contribute to thin egg shells. Laboratory experiments purporting to link DDT with egg shell thinning involved massive doses of the chemical, far in excess of what occurred in the wild.Moreover, bald eagle and falcon populations were already rebounding during the peak years of DDT use - thanks to laws limiting their hunting.REASON AND EVIDENCE, he says. So where is it?