Nutty Stuff About Greens and Cows

By Alan Caruba

If, as Earth Day approaches on April 22nd, you think you’re reading and hearing more abject nonsense and pure insanity about the environment, you’re right.

The mainstream media is set to go crazy with all manner of “Green” articles about the human assaults on the Earth that are intended to make you change your every lifestyle choice to become more “sustainable.”

The usual prophets of doom will be given prime space on opinion pages to tell us over and over that the Earth cannot possibly exist much longer if we continue to drive our cars and trucks, if we continue to heat or cool our homes and apartments, if we insist on flying anywhere for a vacation, if we do anything that might make our lives more comfortable and enjoyable.

A paroxysm of insanity always coalesces around Earth Day, but it never goes away because hundreds of thousands of people now make a living inventing statistics regarding the “carbon footprint” of everything.

They infest our colleges and university, burning through billions of dollars in government grants devoted to “climate change” and they are employed by countless “environmental” organizations that exist solely to enrich their coffers while preaching the most absurd nonsense to those who naively believe the Greens are seeking to “save the Earth.”

Climate change is one of President Obama’s priorities and it will be used to justify horrid “cap-and-trade” legislation intended to impose a tax on the use of all forms of energy. No doubt your local utility is already shelling out millions of dollars to purchase these utterly bogus “carbon credits” in order to be allowed to continue providing electricity by burning coal or having the audacity to build a nuclear plant. Coal accounts for fifty percent of the electricity we use and nuclear for twenty percent.

The other way of bankrupting America is the President’s proposed health care program that will put the government in control of the nation’s vast health care system, making us all wards of the state in order to secure any care. Comparable systems in England and Canada are nothing short of a disaster.

The ruination of the U.S. dollar is being accomplished by massive borrowing and spending programs allegedly to “stimulate” the economy when history offers ample proof that every time the government gets involved in the business, industrial or financial sector, it lays waste to it. The automotive industry is just one example.

All this is by way of my taking note of a recent Associated Press story about a U.S. dairy industry program intended to “engineer the ‘cow of the future’ to pass less gas, a project aimed at cutting the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020…”

“The cow project aims to reduce intestinal methane, the single largest component of the dairy industry’s carbon footprint” according to Thomas P. Gallagher, chief executive office of the U.S. Dairy and Dairy Management Inc’s Innovation Center in Rosemont, Illinois.

The Associated Press article informs the reader that “Greenhouse gas emissions are blamed for global warming. Cutting the dairy industry’s emissions by 25 percent would be equivalent to removing about 1.25 million passenger cars from the nation’s roads every year, Gallagher said.”

The article does not mention that there is NO global warming occurring and that reducing emissions of “intestinal methane” qualifies as one of the most stupid ideas ever produced by the Greens propagating this hoax. It does note that “The University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center estimates the dairy industry contributes less than 2 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Center does not offer any statistics regarding the greenhouse gas emissions of elephants, antelope, otters, squirrels, lions, and tigers and bears, oh my!

Tinkering with the digestive system of cows is just one aspect of the way the Greens have sought to extend their control over every aspect of food, from its production to its consumption, revealing the totalitarian nature of environmentalism.

It’s also just nuts!

Aside from the fact that the statistics cited are pure invention and fantasy, the reader is advised to understand that any mention of “greenhouse gas emissions” or “sustainability” is just another way of saying that the Greens intend to coerce everyone, including cows, into bowing down to their false gods.

If everyone involved with advancing the goals of the Greens were to be fired tomorrow and required to get real jobs, the economy would prosper beyond our wildest hopes and dreams.

The UN's Durban II Hate-Fest

By Alan Caruba

On Monday, April 20, the United Nations will convene Durban II, a conference which purports to encourage efforts to end the scourge of racism that has driven much of the history of mankind.

Like everything that emanates from that disgusting international organization, it has no intention of living up to its Declaration on Human Rights. If it did, it is unlikely that Iran’s Mamoud Ahmadinejad would receive a warm welcome, nor that Iran would have been the vice-chair of the preparatory committee led by Libya’s representative.

When Ahmadinejad spoke at the UN General Assembly last September, he said: “The dignity, integrity and rights of the European and American people are being played with by a small, but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a miniscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”

For Ahmadinejad, all of the Arab nations of the Middle East, and a large number of European nations, everything wrong with the world is conveniently explained by blaming the Jews. Durban I, held in South Africa, was such a hate-fest of anti-Semitism that the U.S. representatives withdrew and refused to participate.

Under the Obama administration, some of our diplomats tentatively attended planning sessions of Durban II despite knowing that it was going to be a repeat of Durban I. In doing so they signaled a degree of legitimacy for this most vile conclave. The Obama administration has decided to renew its membership in the UN Human Rights Council, something the Bush administration refused to do.

The previous UN Human Rights Commission was so vile that it had to be “reformed” into the present Council, but its membership includes the African and Asian groups, neither of which is famous for anything other than repression, corruption, and racism.

Member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference hold a majority in each of these groups, giving it the balance of power. Neither the U.S. vote, nor that of its “Western European and Others” group play any role in ameliorating the abject racism of the Council.

Durban II intends to criminalize any “defamation of Islam” based on a Pakistani proposal that only mentions Islam by name and ignores the other religions of the world such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and, of course, Judaism.

Islam regards all other faiths as “infidels” or unbelievers and the Koran explicitly says they should be subjugated and that their adherents can be killed, especially if they are Jews. It is a crime in Islamic nations to speak ill of Islam and the punishment is death. Converting to another religion will get you killed as well.

In a statement to the April 17 meeting of the preparatory committee held in Geneva, Switzerland, Anne Bayefsky of Eye on the UN, said, “The eyes of millions of victims of racism, xenophobia and intolerance are upon YOU, the representatives of states and the United Nations. And instead of hope you have given them despair. Instead of truth you have handed them diplomatic double-talk. Instead of combating anti-Semitism, you have handed them a reason for Jews to fear UN-driven hatemongering on a global scale.”

When it convenes on April 20th, the birth date of Adolph Hitler in 1889, his spirit will dominate the proceedings of Durban II. The good news is that no U.S. diplomats will attend. One hopes other nations whose people suffered and died as the result of his genocidal hatred will not attend either.

Durban II is yet another example of the Islamic jihad, its centuries old war on all other faiths. Those that deny its existance will continue to suffer its consequences.

Stop the EPA Before it Destroys America!

By Alan Caruba

If the Environmental Protection Agency were some benign government unit tucked away in the corner of some massive federal government building, we could safely conclude it was doing its job to keep the nation’s air and water clean.

It is the very antithesis of that. It is a Green Gestapo that has wreaked havoc with all aspects of the nation’s industrial and agricultural communities, run roughshod over property rights, declared puddles to be navigable waters, and removed invaluable, beneficial chemicals from use to protect the lives and property of all Americans.

In much the same way as the FBI maintains a “Ten Most Wanted” list of criminals, so does the EPA.

The EPA’s former director, Carol Browner, was recently discovered to be a commissioner in Socialist International, described by Steven Milloy of JunkScience.com as “a decidedly anti-capitalistic political cause.” Socialist International’s principles are the communist principles set forth by Karl Marx.

Browner is presently the chief White House advisor to the President on environmental issues.

The announcement that the EPA has declared carbon dioxide a “pollutant” and all so-called greenhouse gases a danger to human health and welfare now clears the way to regulate every single economic activity in the nation, most notably the emissions from automobiles.

The EPA is poised to further ruin the quintessentially American auto industry with regulatory power that will determine what kind of automobile Americans will be permitted to drive, limiting the use of internal combustion, and forcing the purchase of high cost hybrids and those run on massive batteries.

Naturally, the announcement was greeted with joy by the likes of the demented Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and a panoply of environment organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund.

The EDF hailed the announcement saying “The U.S. is taking its first steps as a nation to confront climate change.” Vickie Patton, EDF’s deputy general counsel, went on to say “Global warming threatens our health, our economy, and our children’s prosperity.”

Only there is NO global warming and there is NOTHING that the U.S. government or all the governments of all the nations of the world can do about “climate change.” This is a “threat” that does not exist!

What the EPA and other elements of government can and will do is use the international “global warming” hoax to pass new laws and more regulations to destroy the economic viability of all activities that utilize energy.

Here’s why CO2 and the so-called “greenhouse” gases do not perform a “greenhouse” function. As explained by retired analytical chemist, Hans Schreuder:

“With no atmosphere at all, our moon is very hot in sunshine (over 100°C) and very cold in the shade (less than minus 150°C).”

“With earth receiving as good as the same amount of solar irradiation, our atmosphere thus acts as a cooling medium during the hours of sunshine and a blanket during the hours of darkness.”

“Global warming, global cooling and all climate change is caused by the daily revolutions of our earth around its own axis, throughout which time the varying amounts of heat gained during the day and similar variations of heat lost during the night make the weather what it is: ranging from plus 50°C to minus 50°C (even more extreme in places), unpredictable beyond a few days and at times violent or totally quiet.”

“That's quite apart from the seasonal differences caused by the annual trip around the sun and the varying distance that our planet revolves around our sun and we're not even considering even greater forces of influence.”

The entire white paper is available at http://tech-know.eu/uploads/ACCInput.pdf

Throughout its history the EPA has deliberately distorted actual science to advance its own warped “environmental” agenda. This EPA ruling permits the government to control all aspects of CO2 emissions, short of the exhalation of CO2 by human beings.

Humans emit CO2. Animals emit CO2. And energy use emits CO2.

It is not a “pollutant” or a threat to health; it is a natural gas vital to all life on Earth via the process of photosynthesis by all plant life. Without CO2 all vegetation dies and with it all animal life.

Congress has a long record of restricting access to the nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. Our “dependency”; the importation of these energy sources is entirely the result of national policies. Now add thousands of regulations on all USE of energy.

Some will mark the announcement as the beginning of the decline of the American economy, but the U.S. government has long been engaged in all manner of control over everything required for a successful economy.

What begins is the end to the abundant choices Americans have always had regarding the manufacture, distribution, and purchase of anything and everything common to our present lifestyle.

It is a cruel despotism that has been unleashed on all Americans.

Lovelock's Last Gasp: Gaia Theorist Says We're Doomed

By Alan Caruba

It is the height of vanity to think the Earth will come to an end shortly after one’s mortal life ends. Some people think that, without them, the Earth cannot survive and we call these idiots environmentalists and, sometimes, megalomaniacs.

A perfect example of this is James Lovelock, the man credited with coming up with the Gaia Theory that says the Earth is a living creature and, of course, that humans are some kind of horrid cockroach infestation that is destroying it.

Now in his 90s, Lovelock has written “The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warming.” This book is an extension of all the other astonishingly bad “science” that has brought fame and fortune to Lovelock as he and other alleged scientists began warning that “global heating may all but eliminate people from the Earth.”

Like Al Gore and James Hansen, two other prominent “global warming” charlatans, Lovelock continues to say that the Earth is warming while, for the past ten years, the meteorological satellites and other measurement instruments have reported a distinct cooling trend. At the same time, the Sun which is the primary instrument of the Earth’s climate cycles, has gone “quiet.” It is currently into one of its well known cycles of low to no sunspot activity.

At the heart of all environmentalist propaganda is the view that humans are causing “global warming” and destroying the Earth by doing things like raising crops and animal stocks to eat, using the abundant oil, natural gas, and coal sources as energy for transportation and the maintenance of our lives and industries, and generally fouling everything we touch from our rivers, oceans, land areas, and other species.

“Simply cutting back fossil-fuel burning, energy use, and the destruction of natural forests will not be a sufficient answer to global heating,” says Lovelock, oblivious to the reality of a cooling planet; one that is on the cusp of a predictable ice age since we are now about 11,500 years into an interglacial period since the last one.

Why anyone credits Lovelock with having any special knowledge or insight is beyond my understanding. He made his early reputation for his discoveries in the transfer of infectious disease and advances in the measurement of trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The man is not a climatologist or meteorologist.

Lovelock and others keep telling people that carbon dioxide will be the death of all of us, claiming erroneously that it is critical to the amount of heat that exists in the Earth’s atmosphere, but CO2 is barely 0.038 percent of the atmosphere, a very minor player that shows up in increased amounts 800 or more years after any major climate change.

Moreover, there have been periods in the Earth’s past when there was a lot more CO2 and, not surprisingly, forests, jungles, and all manner of vegetation were even more abundant than now. Dinosaurs grew to huge sizes thanks to the rich diet available or by dining off of the herbivores. And then they went extinct. No one suggests they died from an excess of CO2 in the environment.

The essential problem with Lovelock’s theories about carbon dioxide and global warming is that they lack any scientific merit. The other problem is that environmentalists and politicians worldwide have latched onto them as a means to exert total control over the lives of everyone on Earth.

If Lovelock were just an obscure scientist raving about the end of the world in some English pub, we could happily ignore him, but he is one of the founders of the movement that has been taken up by the United Nations and implemented in various ways by nations that have wasted billions on so-called “clean energy” such as wind and solar energy, biofuels like ethanol, and the set-aside of vast areas of America to ensure that millions of tons of coal cannot be mined, nor billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas tapped for our use.

Always, at the heart of Lovelock’s and environmentalist programs is the view that humans are to blame for the Earth’s extraordinary, chaotic, and uncontrollable climate systems.

Lovelock despairs that “No voluntary human act can reduce our numbers fast enough even to slow climate change. Merely by existing, people and their dependent animals are responsible for more than ten times the greenhouse gas emissions of all the airline travel in the world.”

Lovelock thinks it was “brave” for ten thousand people to make the long journey to Bali, the site of the last United Nations climate control conference, but says that “As we hold our meetings and talk of stewardship, Gaia still moves step by step toward the hot state…” No, Jim, Gaia—Earth—is cooling, not heating. That invalidates all the rest of the gibberish in his latest book and the lies President Obama and others keep telling about global warming.

When it comes to the Earth, Lovelock says that it has “not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are at our own risk. That way of thinking makes clear that we have no special human rights; we are merely one of the partner species in the great enterprise of Gaia. We are creatures of Darwinian evolution, a transient species with a limited lifespan, as were all our numerous distant ancestors.”

Unlike other “transient species”, however, the human one has organized itself into complex societies that permit it to use energy sources to build vast cities, developed transportation that move millions around the globe every day, have communications systems that allow people to address all manner of needs and problems, created agricultural systems that feed six billion people every day, discovered how to eliminate or cure diseases that threaten our lives, and also found time to create music, drama, and literature that enhances our lives.

All this has occurred in the very brief period of about ten thousand years from the days the first humans stood upright, banded together in families, tribes, and nations, and about five thousand years ago began to devote most of our time to looting, pillaging and killing one another with greater efficiency.

Lovelock is now closing in on his own mortality and the odds are that he will join the many other prophets of doom who despise their own species while worshipping an Earth that constantly reminds us all with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, droughts, ice ages, and other natural calamities that we are not in charge of anything.

Tax Day, Tea Party Day

By Alan Caruba

Growing up as the son of a Certified Public Accountant and, later, as the brother of a CPA, the talk around the dinner table was frequently about taxes and the Internal Revenue Service. Being quite young at the time, the minutia of the discussion escaped me, but I came away with a strong sense of how the IRS could wreak havoc in the lives and enterprises of clients who had run afoul of its impenetrable regulations.

These days the Tax Code of the United States is so huge and being added to on a daily basis that it is impossible for anyone to understand, but one need only understand that those like the current Secretary of the Treasury and other appointees of the Obama administration understood the need to avoid paying the full amount of what was due until or unless they were caught.

Cheating on one’s taxes has achieved a perverse patriotic status given the way the federal government redistributes the revenue via a Congress that exists only to pass multi-billion dollar spending bills with thousands of “earmarks” that are intended to ensure their reelection in their districts or states.

Moreover, the federal government has completely ignored the U.S. Constitution that forbids “bailouts” that disburse funds from the public treasury to private enterprises.

James Dale Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union and the author of several books on the way the government both collects and disburses tax revenue said “The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.”

The present financial crisis is based entirely on government mandates that required banks and mortgage firms to make bad home loans to people who would, in a previous era, never have qualified to receive them and then used government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to purchase those bad loans.

They, in turn, “securitized” them and sold them to insurance, banking and investment houses that fell victim to what is arguably an insane policy based entirely on the liberal belief that everyone has “a right” to live in their own home even if they could not afford it.

Americans gathered in the hundreds of thousands from coast to coast on April 15, the day taxes are due, to protest not just the manner in which the financial crisis was brought about, but to protest the present plans of the Obama administration to carry out the warning Davidson issued.

“Tea Parties” are named for the best known tax protest in pre-Revolutionary, colonial America against those imposed by England, demanding “No taxation without representation.”

The harsh reality of our present times is that Americans have no representation in either Congress or the White House.

The will of the people is being trampled upon by extreme left-wing ideologues that ginned up and then used the fatigue and disapproval of enough Americans for the previous Bush administration to acquire power.

Forgotten amidst this is the fact that many conservatives protested the Bush initiatives ranging from No Child Left Behind to a proposed amnesty for illegal aliens, to the failure of the former President to veto any spending bill for six of the eight years he held the office.

We have arrived at a point where citizens must organize and gather in meetings around the nation to demand to be heard. My fear, however, is that the Democrat controlled Congress and, most certainly, President Obama has no intention to listen or respond to the will of the people.

Driven by the belief that the federal government alone knows best and aided by the way the individual, sovereign powers of the states has been steadily eroded by federal programs that can threaten to withhold funding vital to their needs, the liberals in charge know they must impoverish Americans in order to make them entirely dependent on the central government.

It is no accident, as commentator Paul Driessen points out, that that the current indebtedness imposed on Americans through spending and taxation “is more accrued debt than 43 previous administrations combined, and it doesn’t include the cost of servicing this debt or the U.S. share of the $1.1 trillion ‘global stimulus’ devised by the Group of 20, to be administered by professional spenders at the International Monetary Fund.”

Looming in the near future is a “climate change” bill that would impose a “cap and trade” government auction of “carbon credits” that U.S. industries and businesses would be required to purchase. Every business enterprise would have to spend millions to acquire these credits in order to use energy to produce the goods that constitute the wealth they generate for investors, employees, and the economy in general. The cost of these credits would be passed onto consumers.

There is no “climate change” crisis that can or should be addressed by the U.S. government. The Earth is not warming. It has, for a decade, been cooling. This is due in part from reduced solar activity in the form of cyclical reductions in magnetic storms known as sunspots.

The alleged “global warming” has been exposed as a huge hoax perpetrated on an international basis to enrich the United Nations while positioning it to become a global government.

The Obama administration is engaged in a vast effort to deny the expansion and development of the energy sources America needs as its population increases and it is doing so under the false flag of “climate change.”

No amount of “clean energy”, solar and wind, will ever substitute for oil, natural gas, and coal. Vast reserves of these energy sources exist and it is the U.S. government that refuses to permit access to them. So-called clean energy constitutes barely one percent of the energy used by the nation.

The debt imposed by Obama administration initiatives is deliberate. It cannot be blamed on the previous Bush administration.

The lies being told daily by President Obama and the collusion of Democrats controlling the Congress are the single greatest danger facing the nation.

One can only hope that the Tea Parties held on Tax Day mark a massive push-back against a plot to impose an unconstitutional and un-American effort to render Americans too poor, too dependent, too weary to fight back.

The future of the United States of America literally hangs in the balance.

EPA Holds a Bed Bug "Summit"

By Alan Caruba

I know the media and, by extension, everyone else is focused on April 15 as the day tax returns must be filed, but there is another event going on in Washington that is not likely to get much attention.

It is a two-day, April 14-15 Bed Bug Summit being held by the Environmental Protection Agency to address the nationwide infestations of bed bugs. One of the reasons this nasty little pest has burst upon the scene goes back to the banning of DDT by the EPA.

By the end of the 1950s, bed bugs were no longer a significant pest problem. Bed bugs had been so thoroughly eliminated by pest management professionals that a new generation of them had never seen one or had any idea how to combat them. Of the many insect pest species, bed bugs are among the most difficult to eliminate.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” got the anti-pesticide panic going by defaming DDT. Not only was it banned here, but also worldwide. The ban has since led to millions of needless deaths in malarial regions like Africa.

Bed bugs are common in other nations that are less attentive to insect pest eradication and with the rise of international travel they hopped a ride to the United States via the luggage of foreign tourists and Americans returning home from traveling abroad. They began showing up initially a few years ago in hotels and resorts frequented by travelers as well as the homes of Americans who had been overseas.

Had the EPA not banned DDT in 1972 it is very likely there would be no significant bed bug problem here in the United States.

As the EPA put it at the time, “The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three decades of application during which time the once-popular chemical was used to control insect pests on crop and forest lands, around homes and gardens, and for industrial and commercial purposes.”

This has been a chronic problem with the EPA. It tends to create or exacerbate more problems than it solves.

The agency banned Chlordane in the 1980s; it was one of the most effective and successful termiticides ever invented. Pest controllers used to pump it into the ground around a home and it would stay there for a half century as a chemical fence against termites seeking access through foundations or getting close enough to build a mud tunnel to get inside a home. Termites are responsible for an estimated five billion dollars damage annually, more than all the fires and floods combined.

In 1998, Harry Katz, a pest management expert, noted that “Many studies were made of chlordane’s effect on humans. The World Health Organization reports about a study in 1981 in which mortality of 782 workers who manufactured chlordane and heptachlor for up to 20 years showed no increase in cancer in comparison to normal death figures. In another study by Wang and MacMahon in 1980, all cancer deaths were lower than expected. In a follow-up study in 1982, the two Harvard researchers looked again at the mortality rates of termite control technicians and found there was no significant increase of cancer cases.”

These and other bans almost always come down to a political and/or ideological decision. The science regarding such bans rarely represents any real or significant threat unless perhaps someone literally drinks the stuff from the bottle!

The EPA has a registration process for new pesticides (and renewal of older ones) that literally costs chemical producers millions of dollars before a pesticide can be registered for use either exclusively by pest management professionals and specific to particular pest species, or made available off the shelf to the public.

During the Clinton administration, Carol Browner, then the EPA Director and now the environmental advisor to President Obama, announced the restricted use of one of the most effective pesticides against a whole range of insect pests, Dursban, and removed it from use by consumers who had been using it successfully for decades to rid homes, dorm rooms, offices and everywhere else of cockroaches, spiders, ants, mosquitoes, etc.

Browner said the Agency was "shutting off the manufacture of this chemical” according to the Associated Press, but anti-pesticide fanatics complained that the EPA action did not recall the product already on store shelves. The EPA saw no problem allowing the use of Dursban to continue as an agricultural application to protect food crops against insect predators.

The primary reason given for the Dursban ban was that the action was taken to protect children from exposure. Any time you hear it’s “for the children” that’s a sure sign there is little real science-based justification.

The EPA effectively banned a pesticide called “Ficam”, a remarkable product that eliminated a wide range of insect pests and was applied with nothing more toxic than water. By demanding that the product go through the multi-million dollar registration process again, the EPA drove it from the marketplace when the manufacturer decided it wasn’t worth it.

These bans are almost always based on the ideology that pesticides are a threat to humans and other species like birds or fish. When properly applied pesticides are only a threat to insect pests that have, for millennia, transmitted diseases to humans.

In parts of Central and South America today, people are dying of Dengue fever and a nasty disease called Chagas. In the United States Lyme Disease, transmitted by ticks, continues to afflict people. By contrast, a pesticide-based campaign against West Nile Fever, transmitted by mosquitoes, has proven effective.

There is a reason your favorite supermarket or restaurant is not home to insect and rodent pests. It is because professionals using pesticides keep it pest free. There isn’t a school, a hospital, or any other public facility that is not kept pest free in the same way. Usually the work is done at night so as not to disturb the delicate sensibility of the very people being protected.

For two days the EPA will listen to testimony about the bed bug problem afflicting the nation. They could have saved themselves the time, effort, and cost involved by simply adopting a more science-based attitude toward pesticides, but that is not going to happen so long as the ideologues and other scare mongers are in charge.

In the interest of full disclosure, years ago I used to do public relations for “Ficam” and I continue to provide PR services to my state pest management association. For nearly four decades, I have known dozens of pest management professionals who take justified pride in keeping the homes, offices, and businesses of their clients pest-free.

On Not Understanding Capitalism or Liberalism

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago, Rasmussen Reports conducted a national telephone survey and asked “American adults” if they believe capitalism is “better” than socialism. I found it disturbing that only 53% responded that they did.

That is a very bare majority of Americans who think capitalism is a better economic system than one essentially controlled by unelected bureaucrats, no matter where it’s found.

Fully 20% thought socialism is better and 27% weren’t sure.

It turns out that age has a lot to do with your attitude about capitalism. Adults under 30 were evenly divided. “Thirty-somethings,” Rasmussen reported, “are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.”

Republicans by a margin of 11-to-1 favor capitalism. Democrats are more closely divided with just 39% favoring capitalism, while 30% favored socialism. Among those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% preferred capitalism while 21% favored socialism.

I have no proof of this, but I suspect that most Americans would have some measure of difficulty defining the differences between capitalism and socialism. One of my favorite definitions is by Winston Churchill who said that “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Back in the 1940s, Norman Thomas, a U.S. Socialist Party candidate for President, said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But, under the name of ‘liberalism’, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without ever knowing how it happened.”

If Thomas were alive today, he would no doubt take a great deal of pleasure in Social Security, Medicare, and other “entitlement” programs that constitute a third or more of the nation’s annual budget. They are not voluntary.

The problem all such programs are encountering is that they are going broke. As the demographics of the nation change, we are running out of a younger, working population for the support of older ones. Europe has long since arrived at this point.

The irony is, of course, that capitalism is the only system that has a built-in motivation (called risk) for people to start new businesses, employ others, and strive to grow and succeed. America is one long story of such entrepreneurship, of venture capital looking for the next new idea, new product, or new service.

Capitalism also caters to the most inherent attribute of humans; greed. What is always overlooked, however, is the way wealth, once acquired, finds expression in philanthropy. Countless worthy causes in the arts, health, scholarships, aid to the less fortunate, et cetera, flourish because of private giving. And there is much to be said for inheritance; the right to pass on one’s wealth and property to one’s family.

Thus socialism is counter-intuitive to how humans organize themselves, their lives, and their societies.

As former President Ronald Reagan put it, “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose.”

As we close in on April 15, the date your income tax payment is due, the power of governmental coercion becomes quite evident. It is also the day this year that nearly two thousand “Tea parties” will be held around the nation to protest the tripling of the nation’s deficit, the proposed increases in taxation, along with the wastefulness of so much of what passes for government spending.

The Unconstitutionality of “Bailouts”

There needs to be another item on the Tea Party agenda. It is the fact that the “bailout” monies disbursed to General Motors and to a variety of banking, investment, and the huge AIG insurance company are totally in violation of the U.S. Constitution that forbids government choosing what enterprises will be allowed to continue or fail.

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano warns against this in his most recent book, “The Revenge of Dred Scott.”

“The Constitution does not repose in the Congress the power to bail out individuals or private industry; Bailouts violate the equal protection doctrine because the Congress can’t fairly pick and choose whom to bail out and who to let expire; they violate the General Welfare Clause because they benefit only a small group and not the general public; they violate the Due Process Clause because they interfere with contracts already entered into; and they turn the public treasury into a public trough.”

Now consider this: This year’s bailout, stimulus, and other spending binges have obligated future generations of Americans to $12.8 TRILLION in debt, according to a recent Bloomberg study. Meanwhile, Congress and the Obama administration are poised to impose a bogus “climate change” program that could cost $3 trillion and regulate every aspect of our lives.

America is at a critical turning point and it must, if it is to have any future whatever, turn away from this profligate and very liberal use of the public treasury, combined with the baseless “cap-and-trade” program of carbon credits that will cripple what economy is left.

Socialism aka liberalism, as it is currently being put into effect by the Congress and the White House, prevents the failures that are necessary for the correction of bad management and bad judgment.