Contraceptive Poison

From the Population Research Institute

Filling our bodies with powerful, steroid-based hormones has never been a good idea. Spreading such hormones in nature may be an even worse one. Read about another downside of abortifacient birth control.

The environmental story of the year has come out, but the “inconvenient truth”—to borrow a phrase from Al Gore--seems to be more than most environmentalists can handle.

In 2005 biologists John Woodling and David Norris carried out a study of fish in Colorado’s Boulder Creek. What they found was highly disturbing. As reported in the pages of the Denver Post, out of 123 randomly captured fish, primarily trout, the normal 1:1 male-female balance was seriously disrupted. 101 of the fish found were female, 12 were male, and 10 were a strange, unnatural hybrid of male and female, so much so that the researchers couldn’t decide which sex to assign to them.

The cause? Woodling and Norris traced the unnatural feminization of the fish to estrogen—the female hormone—that they found in samples from Boulder Creek. The concentrations of estrogen were not large. Indeed, they were barely measurable. Yet they had a catastrophic impact on the fish population there.

Professor David Norris' study found the ratio of female to male fish downstream of the Colorado sewage plant, which is suspected to be the source of the estrogen contamination, was 8:1. The ordinary ratio is 1:1.

Where is this estrogen coming from? After further study, Woodling and Norris concluded that it is coming from human sources, primarily birth-control pills, Norplant, Depo-Provera and birth control patches that contain estrogen. These drugs and devices work by secreting massive doses—up to four hundred times the natural levels--of female hormones into a woman’s bloodstream to suppress her natural reproductive rhythm.

These hormones are not metabolized, however. Rather, they are simply excreted in her urine, which is then sent down the sewer to the local water-treatment plant. Such plants are not equipped to deal with hormones, so the “purified” water released into surrounding rivers and streams is laced with estrogen.

“It’s the first thing that I’ve seen as a scientist that really scared me,” Woodling told the Denver Post in 2005. "It's one thing to kill a river. It's another thing to kill nature. If you're messing with the hormonal balance in your aquatic community, you're going deep down. You're twiddling with how life proceeds
Given a choice between protecting the enviroment and continuing to push population control on the world, it seems that many extreme enviromentalists will choose the latter.

One would expect that environmentalists, quick to attack perceived threats to nature, would be up in arms. Yet there have been no calls to ban these hormonal pollutants, or even to install safeguards to protect the water supply. Instead, the entire environmental movement has seemingly been gripped with paralysis of the larynx.

Those few who have spoken up have blamed “estrogen mimickers,” that is, chemicals in some soaps and detergents that can fool the body into reacting as if they were estrogen. While Woodling and Norris are aware that these mimickers may be partly responsible for the freak fish they found, they are adamant that the primary cause is the profuse use of hormonal birth control methods in the Denver and Boulder area. Other studies, conducted in places as far away as Switzerland, have confirmed that the problem is widespread, and may be growing worse.

Given a choice between protecting the enviroment and continuing to push population control on the world, it seems that many extreme enviromentalists will choose the latter.

Who would be surprised at the silence from the environmentalist camp. Most radical environmentalists are pro-abortion and espouse population control. The last thing they would criticize are the contraceptive drugs that help them achieve both goals.

Yet the downside of these drugs has never been more apparent. Laissez-faire contraceptive use has given us increased promiscuity, higher rates of abortion, and dramatic health risks. Now it is becoming clear that it is slowly poisoning the environment around us as well.

Photo Of The Day

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Nanny State, USA

By Jonathan Garthwaite

This week San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic grocery bags from city supermarkets and drug stores. San Francisco generates an estimated 180 million plastic bags each year, and the city counsel wants them gone. Grocery shoppers will have to find an alternative within six months.

Reducing the number of non-biodegradable plastic bags tangled in neighborhood streets and piling up in landfills for hundreds of years is a noble undertaking, but San Francisco's government imposed bag ban is one more in a series of nanny state edicts from government upon the governed.

What's a "nanny state"? If you want a dictionary definition, "A government perceived as having excessive interest in or control over the welfare of its citizens, especially in the enforcement of extensive public health and safety regulations."

A shorter version might be: Government acting like your mommy -- like a nanny.

It happens all over the country.

San Francisco has an ordinance detailing how pet "guardians" are required to care for their dogs. Animal cruelty laws are a given but San Francisco goes a step further. Dogs in San Francisco must have clean water served in a non spill bowl in the shade. Their food must be wholesome, palatable and sufficiently nutritious. Seems like common sense, but do we need laws to dictate the size and shape of our pets' food bowls? What's the penalty for being a lackluster dog owner? One thousand and/or up to one year in jail for a third offense.

New York City decided its citizens were too lazy to read food labels or to eat well and enacted a ban on trans fats from restaurants and vendors. Scientific research may back up assertions that trans fats are unhealthy, but so is half of everything in New York City. Are cheese fries OK to eat now? Of course not.

Cities like Washington, D.C., ban hand-held cell phones while driving when no data exists that using a cell phone while driving is more dangerous than using a hands-free unit. It's only a matter of time before the city council decides to mandate our hands be placed at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel for the sake of public safety.

City governments go from banning smoking in city buildings one day to banning smoking on the sidewalks the next. Several states are working on bans that prohibit driving while smoking if anyone under 18 is in the car. There's no question that secondhand smoke is harmful, but where is the appropriate limit for governmental intrusion into an individual's privacy? Is it really our intention to turn our already stretched-thin police departments into junior high hall monitors checking under restroom stalls for smokers?

And while you're not smoking on the sidewalks, you might also want to make sure you're not listening to an iPod when crossing the street in New York City, where some legislators are considering the need to ban earbuds. Their reason? Because three recent deaths were caused by distracted pedestrians. New York State Sen. Carl Kruger who spearheaded the effort claimed that "some type of electronic device was to blame." The iPod made me do it is the excuse of the moment, I guess.

A California assemblywoman proposed banning parents from spanking their children. The Texas governor proposed requiring all sixth-grade girls get a vaccine for the sexually transmitted HPV virus. And the list doesn't end there.

Nanny state laws and regulations are popping up all over the place. Government officials -- perhaps with too much free time -- can't stop themselves from brainstorming new and improved ways to protect us and coddle us through life.

They serve only to make government officials feel good that they are doing something about a problem and taking good care of their citizens -- like children. Shouldn't we expect more of ourselves and better from our elected officials?

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Al Gore eat your heart out!

The Growth Of A 21st Century Fascism

The Growth of a 21st Century Fascism
By David Strom


A new fascist movement is on the rise, and proponents of individual liberty are losing ground.

Left-wingers often accuse conservatives of being fascists, but the reality is that fascism is simply another form of collectivism, like socialism and communism. The differences, such as they exist, are marginal between these collectivist ideologies when viewed from the perspective of Liberalism. Fascism idolizes the state, socialists idolize “society” and communists idolize “humanity” as a whole.

What holds these ideologies together is much stronger than what divides them: they are all dedicated to the proposition that the rights and desires of individuals are properly subsumed by the needs of the whole. Individualism is selfishness, rights are collective, and the “good” of the whole is the true measure of society.

Collectivism has been like a chronic disease in the body politic ever since the birth of Liberal Individualism in the 18th Century. For Locke, there was Rousseau. The American Revolution contrasted with the French Revolution and its guillotine. America had George Washington and Europe had Napoleon. Lincoln saved the Union as Marx was promoting Communism in Europe. . For the last 300 years we in the Western world have been living in the midst of a struggle between the forces of Liberal individualism and the forces of collectivism.

Communism and fascism dominated much of 20th Century history as the alternative to Liberal individualism and free markets. Democratic socialism is still eating away at European societies, which grow poorer and more sclerotic every year as they continue to declare the superiority of their model to American individualism.

Even here in America, the home of Liberal individualism, there is a constant assault on individual liberty. The steady growth of economic regulations, income redistribution, speech codes (New York just banned the use of a racial slur in public!), the ever growing tax code, and ridiculous limits to what we can eat, drink, or smoke.

Still, compared to most of the developed world, American is remarkably free for the moment. And that’s a nagging problem for the believers in collectivism.

So today we are witnessing the rise of a new version of the same old collectivist ideal; instead of the State or Humanity being elevated above individualism, it’s an idealized version of the environment or the “Earth.” Call it Nature, call it Gaia, or even call it Climate, the ideologists of collectivism are just trying to sell us a new reason to subsume our individual liberty to a collectivist whole.

The “crisis” of global climate change is a ridiculous on its face. The very concept is bizarre and illogical, if for no other reason than simply because there is not a default “standard” climate to compare any particular momentary climate state to. Compared to what, exactly?

Today’s climate is quite different from that of even a few hundred years ago, and once you go back a few thousand years—a blink of the eye in the lifespan of the earth—much of the earth that is farmland and cities was buried under thousands of feet of ice. If you could run the history of earth’s climate as a movie, it would be a constantly changing before your eyes. No one minute looking much like the next. Different climate, different species, even different arrangements of continents and oceans would dominate at any given moment.

Simply put, there is no permanent “state of Nature.” Nature, Climate, the Earth, or “climate”—whatever you want to call it—is not some permanent unchanging ideal. It’s so dynamic that even in the span of a few years or decades changes can render a landscape unrecognizable, fundamentally altered.

“Climate change” is not something induced by human beings or a “crisis” to be avoided; it is simply the reality of living on earth. To the extent that human activities may contribute to climate variability, the same can be said of termites, trees, and even the slow action of plate tectonics. It’s true, but what’s your point? Literally everything changes the state of the earth, all the time. Fighting change is like fighting gravity; good luck! Call me when you succeed.

The steady drumbeat of fear mongering has nothing to do with a “crisis” of climate change, because climate change is not a crisis. It was reality before human beings existed, and will be long after we are all buried.

However, it has everything to do with promoting the solution to the crisis of climate change: the demotion of individualism and liberty and the promotion of collective solutions and collectivism in general.

The “solution” to the climate change “crisis” is exactly the same “solution” that was proposed to solve the “population bomb” crisis in the 70’s. It’s the same solution that was proposed to solve the “crisis” of capitalist “exploitation.” It’s always the same collectivist solution, whatever the “crisis:” the relinquishing of individual rights in order to promote the greater good.

We are told that combating the “crisis” of global climate change will require a wholesale revision of how we live. We will need to live “sustainable” lifestyles, as if there could be such a thing in a constantly changing world. (Imagine trying to sustain any lifestyle for more than a few decades; we call such sustainability “stagnation.”)

In reality “sustainable” is just another word for “controlled.” And controlled by whom? Not by you. In a “sustainable” economy everything would be controlled by the same elite who pushed collectivism on you in the first place. The people who warned you about the crisis are the very people who you need to follow in order to solve it.

In today’s rebirth of fascism the leaders of tomorrow are the academic-media-political elite who run the major Universities, the government bureaucracies, and of course the all important media.

The elite is those who know better than you what is good for you.

It may sound alarmist to decry a new birth of fascism. After all, we are hardly talking about an impending coup or anything like that.

But actually I am worried that it is already too late to start fighting back.

The ranks of academia are already being scrubbed of global warming “skeptics,” who are derided as “deniers.” The American Meteorological Society is already being encouraged to decertify meteorologists who don’t believe in global warming. Nuremberg-style trials for global warming “deniers” have already been proposed. And US Senators from both the Republican and Democratic Party have actively campaigned—successfully I might add—to prevent some private enterprises from contributing to organizations which oppose global warming alarmism.

The campaign to suppress debate on the global climate “crisis” is well on its way to succeeding. The “consensus” that a crisis exists is being built right now.

And once there is “consensus” that a crisis is upon us, how can we effectively defend individual liberty? Individual liberty is being portrayed as simply a right to destroy the environment. Can anybody have a “right” to destroy the environment? Goodbye liberty.

No, it’s not too early to worry about the creeping 21st Century fascism; instead, I worry it is already too late to beat it back.

Gorespell!

Maggie's Farm has a great piece about AlGore.

-Day by day
-Day by day
-Oh Dear Al
-Three things I pray
-To see thee more clearly (You’re getting global looking yourself)
-Love thee more dearly (Dear Leader of our cult)
-Follow thee more nearly (In a private jet all the way, baby)

It just gets better from here.

The Climate Police

There's a new website for those who don't believe all the global warming hype. Joseph Conklin has recently started climatepolice.com. The stated mission from their site is:

Climatepolice.com is dedicated to promoting an open exchange and dialog on climate change. To achieve that goal, research and articles with alternate views on climate change will be the primary sources of news and information on this site. We will not include any news or information with sensationalist claims; only sources with sound scientific evidence or research will be used.

Sounds like a great way to get some real objectivity in this very controversial topic.

Global Warming...A Complete Lie?

Dr. Tim Ball, a climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg and chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project is convinced global warming is nothing more than a bill of goods being sold to us for political gain.

What would happen if tomorrow we were told that, after all, the Earth is flat? It would probably be the most important piece of news in the media and would generate a lot of debate. So why is it that when scientists who have studied the Global Warming phenomenon for years say that humans are not the cause nobody listens? Why does no one acknowledge that the Emperor has no clothes on?

Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science. We are wasting time, energy and trillions of dollars while creating unnecessary fear and consternation over an issue with no scientific justification. For example, Environment Canada brags about spending $3.7 billion in the last five years dealing with climate change almost all on propaganda trying to defend an indefensible scientific position while at the same time closing weather stations and failing to meet legislated pollution targets.

He lays out the rest in this article. The desmog blog has more.