Health experts eradicating malaria by re-labeling DDT as a contraceptive

"Keep DDT legal and affordable" protest in San Francisco

(Dissociated Press) Disease-control experts are using a new strategy that promises to finally eradicate malaria from the earth. Early results are very promising, with drops in malaria infection and death rates in many nations of the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Fred Brimble, director of the Malaria Eradication Project, is very hopeful:

"For forty years we've been at an impasse. Environmental groups fought us at every turn. Everytime we'd reduce malaria death rates in an impoverished country by spraying DDT and other highly effective pesticides-- the same pesticides we used to eradicate malaria in Western countries-- environmental pressure groups would descend like hyenas." Brimble noted, clearly exasperated. "They blocked our eradication programs, demanding that we abandon effective pesticides and work for "green alternatives" that only killed more people"

"But in Africa and a host of other poor areas of the world, we noticed that population control zealots-- basically the same tree-huggers who were working day and night to ban DDT-- were passing out contraceptives by the metric ton."

Brimble sighed.

"As honest scientists, we knew that no credible study had ever connected even a single human death to DDT-- despite fifty years of use and exposure of a couple billion people and the widespread spraying of millions of tons of the insecticide that has saved five hundred million lives. On the other hand, contraceptives have caused thousands of well-documented deaths, mostly from thromboembolism in young women. And unlike DDT, contraceptives are actually carcinogens, known to cause breast and cervical cancer. Yet greenies fight ferociously to ban DDT, and distribute contraceptives using shovels"

Dr. Brimble smiled.

"But then it dawned on us. If environmentalists thought the DDT was a contraceptive, they'd have an orgasm (pardon the pun). Think of it: they could spray babies away! No more "Ya gotta take this pill, even though you don't speak English and think that I'm trying to exterminate your family" or "If you don' take this, it'll will cost us more to sterilize you, you illiterate Third World breeder".

So we worked with the World Health Organization, hired some of the greenie scientists who do the usual environmental junk science, and got DDT re-classified. Heck, if enviro-loons can classify something that doesn't cause cancer as a carcinogen, then we can classify something that doesn't contracept as a contraceptive. I guess that if a truck full of DDT runs over you, you're pretty well contracepted!"

Brimble laughed quietly.

We call it "The Spray". We've used ad campaigns that work very well--

"DDT Makes Womyn Free!"

"Spray Today... Unless You're Gay!"

"DDT for Carnal Glee"

Heck, we even had greenies and population control loons protesting in San Francisco demanding that the Catholic Church pay for DDT. Sandra Fluke even testified before Congress again that she needs 1000 gallons of DDT per year, and she needs Obamacare to pay for it! Funding for DDT-as-contraceptive-- "The Spray!"-- is pouring in!"

Dr. Brimble said that as a result of the reclassification of DDT, malaria deaths around the world are plummeting.

"We've harnessed a half-century of frenetic green genocide. Green wack-a-loons have snuffed hundreds of millions of human lives. Why not enlist them to knock out a few mosquitos? Just call anything that actually helps humanity a "contraceptive" and over-population loons are on it like ants on a dropped fudgesickle. And of course DDT does eliminate "pests", just not the human kind, but the environazis are none the smarter. As long as greenies think that spraying DDT all over Africa is making fewer Africans, they're on board! If it weren't so sick, it'd be funny."

Brimble noted that it's not hard to keep the environmentalists enthused about the DDT-contraception project:

"Just last week I gave a presentation to the Sierra Club. I said that spraying over swamps and wetlands in Ghana was very effective, and that the population of pernicious disease-bearing pests were reduced by 89%. They burst into applause.

Then I realized that they thought I meant Africans."

'Innocents murdered in Connecticut. In related news...'

Belgium looks at euthanasia for minors, Alzheimer's sufferers

Belgium is considering a significant change to its decade-old euthanasia law that would allow minors and Alzheimer's sufferers to seek permission to die.

AFP - Belgium is considering a significant change to its decade-old euthanasia law that would allow minors and Alzheimer's sufferers to seek permission to die. 

The proposed changes to the law were submitted to parliament Tuesday by the Socialist party and are likely to be approved by other parties, although no date has yet been put forward for a parliamentary debate. 

"The idea is to update the law to take better account of dramatic situations and extremely harrowing cases we must find a response to," party leader Thierry Giet said. 

The draft legislation calls for "the law to be extended to minors if they are capable of discernment or affected by an incurable illness or suffering that we cannot alleviate." 

Belgium was the second country in the world after the Netherlands to legalise euthanasia in 2002 but it applies only to people over the age of 18. 

Socialist Senator Philippe Mahoux, who helped draft the proposed changes, said there had been cases of adolescents who "had the capacity to decide" their future. 

He said parliamentarians would also consider extended mercy-killing to people suffering from Alzheiner's-type illnesses. 

Euthanasia was allowed to an Alzheimer's patient for the first time in the Netherlands last year.

Exactly how does a minor or an person with Alzheimer's disease make an informed request to be killed?

Apparently ordinary comfort care-- love and analgesia and human dignity-- are not adequate responses to "dramatic situations and extremely harrowing cases."

                                                                        ***

France is getting impatient with the weak and dying, too:

Report recommends France legalize 'accelerated deaths' 

AFP - France should allow doctors to "accelerate the coming of death" for terminally ill patients, a report to President Francois Hollande recommended Tuesday. 

Hollande referred the report to a national council on medical ethics which will examine the precise circumstances under which such steps could be authorised with a view to producing draft legislation by June 2013. 

"The existing legislation does not meet the legitimate concerns expressed by people who are gravely and incurably ill," Hollande said

The French report sounds a bit less-- how to say it-- Teutonic than the Belgian snuff-fest. The authors of the report explicitly condemn active euthanasia, but such condemnations, in my view, are often a patina of humanism that covers a much darker agenda. The report does endorse 'withdrawal of nourishment', which is just murder by starvation and dehydration of a handicapped person.

And precisely what starving someone to death has to do with a report on 'medical care' is not specified. I must have missed the classes on "how to deliberately starve patients" in med school. Glad I missed it. The practical exam would have been particularly unpleasant.

Connecticut. Belgium. France. 2012 is closing out to be a banner year for the Culture of Death.  

Make sure you're sitting down for this one...

California, the land of the “tolerant,” recently has become the land of censorship and oppression, thanks to its passage of SB 1172. Set to go into effect Jan. 1, this new law bans anyone under the age of 18 from receiving licensed counseling that in any way steers them away from same-sex attraction, including away from sexual acts. 

Under SB 1172, if a 14-year-old is fearful or depressed because of some feelings of same-sex attraction, he could not request any counseling that would help him understand and minimize those feelings. Soon, only counseling affirming same-sex attraction and behaviors will be allowed in California. Parental wishes regarding the kind of counseling their child needs are irrelevant under this statute. Religious youths will be unable to receive any reparative counseling from their clergy who are licensed counselors. In fact, all licensed counselors or psychiatrists are explicitly censored from providing reparative counseling, despite a professional assessment that such counseling is critical to their patient.

So if you're a licensed therapist in California, and a parent brings his kid into your office, and the kid and the parent request psychological counseling to steer the child away from homosexual acts, you break the law if you counsel the child to overcome his same sex attraction.

The law has already been signed by Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown, and is scheduled to go into effect in California January 1st. 

Forget about the First Amendment issue. Forget privacy issues between therapist and patient. Forget even about common decency-- trying to help a kid who wants help to steer away from a life of perversion and sin and disease. Obviously this law violates every applicable Constitutional and moral principle you can think of.

This is what it means: the LGBT agenda is evil and totalitarian to the bone, and the fact that this law can pass a legislature quietly, without inciting massive outrage and defiance, means that we as a nation are much further down the road to Hell than we realize. 

Greenies think that school massacres are sooo.. clever and funny!

Remember this? From the radical environmentalists' "10:10 No Pressure" global warming ad campaign last year:



Hilarious.

One can make a quite straighforward connection between the anti-human fanaticism of radical environmentalism and the pervasive degradation of innocent human life on display in such horrors as those in Newtown, Connecticut.

But it's easier if the greenies themselves make the connection for you.

HT: Real Science

On gun-control, Liberals ask themselves: 'is it futile enough'?

(Dissociated Press) Following the horror in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Liberals across the country have been quietly soul-searching.

Sam Lansing, director of the California advocacy group "Liberals Who Just Say No to Guns Especially if They're Scary-looking", explained his qualms to this reporter:

"This is not an easy time for us" said Lansing, gazing out his window overlooking San Francisco Bay. "We Liberals have always prided ourselves on pointless policies that make us feel good." 

Lansing looked up, his eyes shining.

"We are concerned that this tragedy might bring even Liberals to act against mass shootings in a way that would be effective. Like providing security for our school children, like we provide security for our legislatures and our elites. But we Liberals must remember who we are, remember our heritage." 

"We Liberals have always asked ourselves, when deciding on a policy-- 'is it futile enough?'"

Lansing paused, and continued.

"The whole proud history of Liberal advocacy for the past half-century can be summed up in one word: 

Abject futility. 

We Liberals fought crime in the 60's and 70's by freeing criminals and handcuffing law enforcement and judges. It made us feel good about ourselves."

"We fought poor housing by razing traditional and reasonably safe neighborhoods and erecting massive concrete crime-infested housing projects. We were so concerned, so socially engaged..."

"We fought poverty by paying poor but intact families welfare checks if and only if no one in the family worked and the fathers abandoned the family. We destroyed tens of millions of poor but stable families. But we felt so good about ourselves..."

Now we are faced with a horrendous tragedy In Connecticut. If we are to keep to Liberalism's proud tradition, we must ask ourselves: is the solution we propose futile enough? Is it pointless and self-serving? Will it make us feel good, irrespective of its effect on the victims? Will our solutions do for gun violence what our solutions did for crime and bad housing and poverty?"

Whether or not Liberals can maintain their unblemished record of social devastation through policy futility, Lansing emphasized that Liberalism is the only choice for smart people who are nice.

"We Liberals gave America its inner cities-- Detroit, and D.C. and New Orleans and Newark. We gave you the South Side of Chicago and Watts. America's inner cities are the fruit of Liberal governance. You've trusted us to stop gun violence for the past 50 years."

 "Why not trust us now?"

Private gun ownership around the world

Here's a link providing a nice compilation of per capita gun ownership around the world.

A few high gun-crime countries have high rates of private gun ownership (like the US), but many low-gun crime countries have high rates of private ownership (Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, Austria, Germany, Iceland, Oman, Bahrain, New Zealand, ...). It's noteworthy that in many of the very high gun-ownership countries with low gun-crime rates most of the guns privately owned are rifles-- almost certainly largely of the semi-automatic type, which are very common hunting and sporting rifles. The widespread availability of semi-automatic rifles in these low gun-nations (in Switzerland all able-bodied males are required to have assault rifles in their homes) refutes the gun control lobby's claim that the availability of such weapons is a major cause of gun crime.

Two clear trends emerge from the data.

First, most of the 'gun control utopias' cited by gun control advocates (e.g Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, etc) actually have very high private gun ownership rates-- in the top 10% of the world.

Because those countries also have substantial gun control of pistols, most of their privately held guns are rifles, many of which would be semi-automatic.

Second, it seems to me that a glance at the top 10% of private gun ownership and the bottom 10% of gun ownership show a rather significant disparity in political freedom. There is a clear trend: more private gun ownership, more political freedom.

So when you look at the data, instead of the moral preening, private gun ownership doesn't seem to correlate with gun violence, but does correlate with political freedom.

Consider:

Mexico has perhaps the most stringent gun control laws in the world-- all private sales of guns are banned. Its rate of private gun ownership is one-sixth that of the US, and is one half that of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Austria, and Germany.

Is gun crime a problem in Mexico? 

"What Can We Do to Stop Massacres?"

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic:

The massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, has caused many people, including people at the White House, to say that this is not the day to talk about gun policy. This day is obviously for mourning the dead, but I don't understand why we shouldn't talk about the conditions that lead to these sorts of shootings. I wrote about this issue in the current issue of The Atlantic (you can read the story here), and I want to quickly make a few points drawn from that longer article.

1) This is a gun country. We are saturated with guns. There are as many as 300 million guns in circulation today (the majority owned legally, but many not) and more than 4 million new guns come onto the market each year. To talk about eradicating guns, especially given what the Supreme Court has said about the individual right to gun-ownership, is futile.

2) There are, however, some gun control laws that could be strengthened. The so-called gun-show loophole (which is not a loophole at all -- 40 percent of all guns sold in America legally are sold without benefit of a federal background check) should be closed. Background checks are no panacea -- many of our country's recent mass-shooters had no previous criminal records, and had not been previously adjudicated mentally ill -- but they would certainly stop some people from buying weapons.

3) We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons. This is crucially important, but very difficult, because it would require the cooperation of the medical community -- of psychiatrists, therapists, school counselors and the like -- and the privacy issues (among other issues) are enormous. But: It has to be made more difficult for sociopaths, psychopaths and the otherwise violently mentally-ill (who, in total, make up a small portion of the mentally ill population) to buy weapons.

4) People should have the ability to defend themselves. Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others (read The Atlantic article to see how one armed school administrator stopped a mass shooting in Pearl Mississippi). I don't know anything more than anyone else about the shooting in Connecticut at the moment, but it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

5) All of this is tragic. As I wrote in The Atlantic, Canada, which has a low-rate of gun ownership and strict gun laws, seems like a pretty nice place sometimes.

Please read Goldberg's other article in The Atlantic as well.

I pretty much agree. I have no problem with background checks-- they make sense-- but they don't and won't do much good. Crazies who break laws against murder will break laws against obtaining guns without going through a background check. Believing that gun control will mass shooters is like believing that more laws against double-parking will stop truck bombers.

There is no realistic (and constitutional) way to reliably prevent homicidal psychos from getting guns or to reliably institutionalize homocidal psychos who will commit such crimes. Mass shootings are horrendous but exceedingly rare, the perpetrators have characteristics of millions of Americans (loners, video games afficionatos, goths), and there are hundreds of millions of guns extant that aren't going away regardless of what (unconstitutional) gun control laws we enact.

The only realistic way to stop mass shootings is to give people the ability to defend themselves. In some situations, that means (a few) victims being personally armed. In other situations, that means armed professional security. Mass shootings occur almost without exception in gun-free zones. Schools are gun-free zones, obviously, and the movie theatre in Colorado was a gun-free zone (the theatre chain's policy), malls are gun-free zones, and even Ft. Hood was a gun-free zone (soldiers were not allowed to carry weapons on base, unless involved in a training exercise).

Gun-free zones attract mass shooters. Flames attract moths. It ain't rocket science.


N.B. I should note that Goldberg has a short memory regarding the 'Canadian gun-free paradise'. He forgets the massacre of 14 women-- specifically targeted because they were women-- at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Hardly a testament to a "pretty nice" gun-free place, unless you're the shooter.