The ban on DDT - why you and I are complicit in the deaths of 600 people today.

I hate to get off on a rant here, but I read something about DDT the other day that really ticked me off. For those of you too young to remember, DDT was used in the 60's to get rid of mosquitos and control all kinds of insect borne diseases like malaria, dengue and others. In 1972 the head of the EPA banned it for no reason other than to look good for greens - despite the recommendation by his own scientific panel that DDT posed no threat to humans, no threat to animals and properly used, no threat to the environment. Since that time - over 95 million people have died from instect borne disease, most of them African, most of them poor, and most of them women or children under the age of 5. When Sri Lanka, under pressure from the greenies banned DDT in 1964, malaria deaths went from 29 to 500,000 in five years.

Why does this sort of thing happen? Well, it happens because you and me want to be "cool" and "hip" and "relevant". We want to be like Leo and Paris and other plastic concoctions of the pop culture far left. Why if we're not like them - and don't think like them - we're nerds, or dorks or worse - conservatives.

HL Mencken once said, "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of scientific hobgoblins - all of them imaginary."

In fact - the United Nations has even taken a position that certain chemicals have to be considered harmful for the environment, not because they have been proven bad, but because they have only been measured as beneficial.

Not only does this smack of colonialism (we white folk know far better than you backward Africans what is good for you, so don't get all uppity now!)it is probably racism of the worst kind - the kind that makes people dead simply because of their race.

The ban on DDT has killed about 600 people since you started reading this.

Do you feel particularly green at the moment, or are you, like I, ashamed of allowing these types of things to get equal air time in our schools, businesses and churches? Why not take push back just a little when the next do-gooder tells you that you need to recycle your banana peels or wash out soda bottles.

Maybe we won't be such easy pushovers next time.