Tag: pesticides
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The Environmental Exposures Associated with Parkinson’s Disease – And How to Avoid Them
by James Lyons-Weiler, PhD, Popular Rationalism, ©2025 (Dec. 26, 2025) — Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a chronic, progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects movement, balance, cognition, and autonomic function. With more than 10 million people affected globally and over 1 million in the United States alone, Parkinson’s has emerged as one of the most urgent public…
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Banning Modern Agriculture and High Crop Yields?
by Paul Driessen, CFACT, ©2022 (Jul. 23, 2022) — In just seven decades, America’s conventional (non-organic) farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% – while using steadily less water, fuel, fertilizer and pesticides – feeding millions more people. Among the many reasons for this miracle is their ability to control weeds that would…
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Don’t Waste Time or Money on ‘Silent Earth’
by Paul Driessen, CFACT, ©2021 (Oct. 3, 2021) — Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading Silent Earth, much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed. Dave Goulson’s book expands on Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the…
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Suspect Science Threatens US Farming – Again
by Paul Driessen, CFACT, ©2021 (Feb. 14, 2021) — Modern American agriculture has wrought miracles over the past 70 years. Conventional farm production per acre and overall nearly tripled, corn (maize) production increased 500% from 20% less land – and farmers used less water, less fuel, less fertilizer, and fewer pesticides and other chemicals for…
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Ban Neonics – Hurt Farmers and Bees
“WRONGHEADED AND COUNTERPRODUCTIVE” by Paul Driessen, ©2020 (Jul. 12, 2020) — Organic pesticides, and other organic chemicals, are more dangerous to bees … and people The honeybees, bumblebees and other little pollinators swarming over my flowers remind me what important roles they play – and how some misguided folks could inadvertently hurt them. Montgomery County,…
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Financiers of Poverty, Malnutrition and Death – Part 2
PRIVATE “PHILANTHROPIC” FOUNDATIONS KEEP AFRICAN FAMILIES DESTITUTE, MALNOURISHED, DYING EARLY by Paul Driessen, ©2020 (Apr. 22, 2020) — It’s easy to farm organically in the wealthy, advanced EU and USA, where consumers can afford much more expensive organic meats, eggs, fruits and vegetables. It’s much harder if you have to deal with the insects…
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Keeping Africa on the Brink of Starvation
UN AND EU GOVERNMENT AGENCIES – AND TAX-EXEMPT NGOs – HAVE BROUGHT A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS by Paul Driessen, CFACT, ©2020 (Feb. 23, 2020) — Billions of desert locusts have descended again on East Africa. Crawling first, then sprouting wings and flying in hungry hoards of 40-150 million or more, they are devastating crops and…
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For Bee Alarmists, Groundhog Day Comes in June
WILL ACTIVISTS FINALLY ADMIT THEIR SINS AND BREAK OUT OF THEIR PESTICIDE-BLAMING TIME LOOP? by Paul Driessen, ©2019 (Jun. 29, 2019) — Did you think Goundhog Day only comes in February? For anti-insecticide zealots and others in the environmentalist movement who’ve been preoccupied for years with bees and “colony collapse disorder,” it actually comes every…
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Sidelined Because She Rejects Radical Green Agendas?
FISH & WILDLIFE SERVICE DIRECTOR NOMINEE JOINS HUNDREDS OF OTHERS IN CONFIRMATION LIMBO by Paul Driessen, ©2019 (Apr. 6, 2019) — Aurelia Skipwith has a BS in biology from Howard University, a Master’s in molecular genetics from Purdue and a law degree from Kentucky. She has worked as a molecular analyst and sustainable agriculture partnership…
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Environmentalist Scare Stories – Never Mind!
SOLID EVIDENCE SHOWS THERE IS NO “BEE-POCALYPSE,” BUT ALARMISTS ALLEGE NEW PESTICIDE THREATS by Paul Driessen, ©2018 (Jul. 29, 2018) — “Baby boomers” will remember Gilder Radner’s Saturday Night Live character from the ‘70s – Emily Litella, who would launch into hilarious rants against perceived problems, only to discover that she had completely misconstrued what…
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Luddite Eco-Imperialists Claim to be Virtuous
UBER-ORGANIC CAMPAIGN ENSHRINES PRIMITIVE AGRICULTURE AND MALNUTRITION AS HUMAN RIGHTS by Paul Driessen and David Wojick, ©2018 (Jul. 21, 2018) — Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying…
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Perverse, Conflicted Ethical Systems
RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS PUT PEOPLE LAST, AND DESTROY HABITATS AND WILDLIFE TO END FOSSIL FUELS by Paul Driessen, ©2018 (May 5, 2018) — Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and…
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Nipping a Legal Problem in the Bud
CONSULT WITH ALL AFFECTED PARTIES, TO ENSURE INFORMED ENDANGERED SPECIES AND PESTICIDE POLICIES by Paul Driessen, ©2017 (May 27, 2017) — One of my recent articles predicted that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s endangered species designation for the rusty patched bumblebee would lead to its being used to delay or block construction projects and pesticide…
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Off to a Bumbling Start at Interior
IF THIS IS THE KIND OF HOUSECLEANING AND SWAMP DRAINING WE’RE GOING TO GET, WE’RE IN REAL TROUBLE by Paul Driessen, ©2017 (Apr. 9, 2017) — Was it because there were too few senior Trump Administration officials in place to catch and stop it? Or because Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was new…
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Another Good Target for EPA Reform
EUROPE GIVES TRUMP ADMINISTRATION EXCELLENT TUTORIALS ON HOW NOT TO REGULATE PESTICIDES by Paul Driessen, ©2016 (Dec. 21, 2016) — With reform-minded folks in charge of the Executive and Legislative Branches, unelected, unaccountable, un-removable bureaucrats may soon be exerting far less power over our policies, regulations, lives and livelihoods. Energy and climate are high on…
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Roundup the Corrupt Fear Mongers
DECEIT AND COLLUSION DRIVE CAMPAIGNS TO BAN A VITAL, POPULAR, SAFE, AFFORDABLE HERBICIDE by Paul Driessen, ©2016 (Nov. 6, 2016) — Do we really need more collusion, corruption and deceit in the service of renegade regulators, organic food interests, anti-chemical activists, and policies that carry harmful or even lethal consequences? Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup,…
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What Happened on Oahu Didn’t Stay on Oahu
SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE WORK STOPPED CHOLERA – NOW IT NEEDS TO SEPARATE MYTHS, MITES AND NEONICS by Paul Driessen, ©2016 (Mar. 27, 2016) — If modern activist groups held sway in the mid-nineteenth century, countless multitudes would have died from typhoid fever and cholera. The “miasma” paradigm held that the diseases were caused by foul air arising…
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Bee Facts Changed – Green Agendas Did Not
ACTIVISTS AND WHITE HOUSE APPEAR READY TO PRESENT NEW JUSTIFICATIONS FOR UNJUSTIFIED POLICIES by Paul Driessen, ©2015 (May 16, 2015) — The White House finally appears ready to announce conclusions and policy recommendations from the Pollinator Task Force it appointed a year ago. Environmentalist groups eagerly await the decision. After clamoring and campaigning for years…
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Still More Politicized Pseudo-Science?
THE NEONICS AND HONEYBEES SAGA TAKES INTERESTING, POTENTIALLY FRAUDULENT TURN by Paul Driessen, ©2014 (Dec. 14, 2014) — Widening efforts to blame neonicotinoid pesticides for honeybee “colony collapse disorder” and other “beepocalypse” problems have taken a fascinating turn. Insisting that scientific evidence shows a clear link between neonics and honeybee population declines, EU anti-insecticide campaigners…
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The Latest Italian Job
ITALIAN FARMERS, FACING INSECT INFESTATION, PAY DEARLY FOR EUROPE’S ANTI-GM STANCE. SO DO CONSUMERS. by Mischa Popoff, ©2013 (Sep. 27, 2013) — “Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.” John Quinton, UK George Cross recipient Nowhere is the art of bureaucratic precaution…