The Sun Will Rise Tomorrow

We all tend to look at the world in set and predetermined ways. I have always been one to examine these world views. In the past I have called them templates. Of course this tendency of mine is in itself a template. It is hard to get away from templates. 

We need to be careful we do not allow our templates to interfere and blind us to the facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts. I have long had a template that said, like the Weird Al song I put on the blog yesterday, that "Everything You Know Is Wrong." Obviously everything you know is not wrong, the sun will rise tomorrow morning. No. Wait. The sun won't rise—the earth will turn… never mind. 

It is good to look at our assumptions from time to time and see if they match reality. They may not. 

In particular starting Wednesday I will look at the templates we have with regard to the Middle East. These templates are pretty well established: Israel good, Arabs bad; Russia bad, America good; Arab dictators bad, Al Qaida good. Oh, wait, that last one does not work. Yet, this seems to be our foreign policy. America removes Arab dictators and replaces them with the Moslem Brotherhood, and then wonders why the Middle East is in chaos. 

Does our current policy with regard to the Middle East make much sense? Is Mitt Romney's desire to escalate our current war with Iran rational? Make no mistake, we are currently at war with Iran. Hopefully what I will write over the next week or so will cause you to stop using your current template, set it aside for a moment, and look at the Middle East with fresh eyes. 

Telephone Game

I remember the first time I played the telephone game. It was in the fifth grade. The beginning statement was from an ad our teacher had found. It said, "Go on a trip with Bill and Betty." I was one of the ones that changed it as it made its way across the room. I heard it wrong. It became, "Bill and Betty went on a trip." It continued on until everyone started laughing as they heard it. It had changed again. Then the final person went in front of the class and said "Bill and Betty went on a trip and kissed." He turned very red as he said it. Care to guess what his name was? Yes, there was a Betty in the class! 

As Abraham Lincoln once said, "There are a lot of fake quotes on the Internet." As the election season progresses we will see a lot of emails about the various candidates. It has already started. Obama is not too popular in certain circles. You may have noticed. I do not like him myself, but that is not the point. If you repeat a story about someone and it turns out to be untrue you have sinned. Yes, sinned. 

In the last presidential election I received a forwarded email from a friend, who alas has gradually become an acquaintance over issues like this. I forget exactly what the email said, but as soon as I read it I doubted it. I did some very simple research on Google. The email that he had forwarded about Obama was untrue. You’d think that he would have been grateful to have this pointed out so he could avoid this error in the future. I was wrong. His attitude was that while this story was untrue, others similar to it were true so it did not matter. 

To be frank, there are scriptures that indicate this is not wise. 

James 3 tells us:

Don't be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. And none of us is perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths. If you could find someone whose speech was perfectly true, you'd have a perfect person, in perfect control of life. A bit in the mouth of a horse controls the whole horse. A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it! ...

Moses tells us the same in Ex 21:1-3

"Don't pass on malicious gossip. "Don't link up with a wicked person and give corrupt testimony. Don't go along with the crowd in doing evil and don't fudge your testimony in a case just to please the crowd. And just because someone is poor, don't show favoritism in a dispute.

Or maybe this from Eph 5:3-4

Don't allow love to turn into lust, setting off a downhill slide into sexual promiscuity, filthy practices, or bullying greed. Though some tongues just love the taste of gossip, those who follow Jesus have better uses for language than that. Don't talk dirty or silly. That kind of talk doesn't fit our style. Thanksgiving is our dialect.

I know this may be overkill in terms of scriptures, but this is a crucial issue. Gossip is often mentioned in the Bible. Click here for some more examples. 

If you are going to forward an email, or share on Facebook, a little research might be in order. 

Of course we can trust Weird Al, so his advice in this this video is completely true.  

Mass Murder?

It is not easy to know how many people have been killed by governments. Here is one estimate of deaths due to government mass murders. 

•  U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths
•  China: 65 million deaths
•  Vietnam: 1 million deaths
•  North Korea: 2 million deaths
•  Cambodia: 2 million deaths
•  Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
•  Latin America: 150,000 deaths
•  Africa: 1.7 million deaths
•  Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths
•  Hitler : 21 million deaths

This list did not include Hitler, I added him from the same source later in the article. Nor does the article include the 20 to 30 million killed by American actions since WWII. Nor does the list include the unintended consequences of one author, who may have killed as many as Communist China. The author I am referring to is Rachel Carson and the book, Silent Spring. This book, more than anything else, resulted in the banning of DDT. The ban killed millions. Here is one interpretation of the ban. 

THE PERIL OF MALARIA AND THE PROMISE OF DDT 

There are some 300 to 500 million reported cases of malaria each year, 90% occurring in Africa. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about two and a half million people die of the disease each year, again, mostly in Africa, the majority of them poor children. Indeed, malaria is the second leading cause of death in Africa (after AIDS) and the number one killer of children there (with about one child being lost to malaria every thirty seconds). Many medical historians believe malaria has killed more people than any other disease in history, including the Black Plague, and may have contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Malaria was common in places as far north as Boston and England until the twentieth century. Two thirds of the world lived in malaria-ridden areas prior to the 1940s.

That devastation all but stopped during the time that DDT use was widespread, around 1950-1970. Indeed, the discovery that DDT could kill malarial mosquitoes earned Dr. Paul MŸller the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1948. DDT, a chemical pesticide synthesized by MŸller in the late 1930s, was initially used against houseflies, beetles, various farm pests, and typhus-carrying lice on the bodies of World War II soldiers and civilians. America and England soon became the major producers of the chemical, using it to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes, especially in tropical regions.

In all, DDT has been conservatively credited with saving some 100 million lives.

FROM DISASTER TO HOPE...AND BACK AGAIN

Europe and North America have not harbored malarial mosquitoes since the 1940s. In one of the most miraculous public health developments in history, Greece saw malaria cases drop from 1-2 million cases a year to close to zero, also thanks to DDT. Meanwhile, in India, malaria deaths went from nearly a million in 1945 to only a few thousand in 1960. In what is now Sri Lanka, malaria cases went from 2,800,000 in 1948, before the introduction of DDT, down to 17 in 1964 — then, tragically, back up to 2,500,000 by 1969, five years after DDT use was discontinued there.

No one knows how many died as the result of the banning of DDT. This article suggests that 2.5 million die every year. Over 40 years that would be 100 million deaths. That would be as much as all the deaths by government in the 20th century. Since people did die from Malaria even with the usage of DDT, this should be on the high end of deaths caused by the ban of DDT.

Here is another estimate of the death toll: 

As a result, it is estimated that between 30 million and 60 million died, most of them children. In Sri Lanka, malaria deaths went from 2.8 million in 1948 down to 17 in 1964 due to the use of DDT. They then banned DDT and by 1969, death rates were back up to 2.5 million.

Another estimate is around 50 million:

Malaria sickens an estimated 500 million people every year. It kills up to 2 million annually, half of them children, most of the rest pregnant women. Malaria sends more African children to graves than any other disease—three times as many as HIV/ AIDS, according to UNICEF. Worldwide, children die from malaria at the rate of two per minute, or 3,000 per day. That’s the equivalent of 80 fully loaded school buses plunging over a cliff every day of the year. 

How responsible was Carson for this? While I am quoting NewsMax, the piece was written by two doctors:

Ms. Rosenberg notes her surprise when she reread "Silent Spring" in preparation for writing her article: "In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of lives."

Was Carson unaware of the large number of lives saved? Or was she like the hitchhiker my mother picked up one time that said that people should be killed to make room for the animals. The town I live in, a mountain community called Idyllwild, can be a very strange place. She never picked up another hitchhiker again! We do not know what Carson thought. But one has to wonder considering books from the 60's like Famine 1975 and The Population Bomb that predicted mass deaths from overpopulation. Was the desire to increase deaths in the third world an intended or unintended side effect of the ban on DDT?  Working through my daughter's book on Rachel Carson with her, this seems unlikely. 

Emerson is often misquoted as saying that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. What he said was that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Whether it is the foolish consistency of Ayn Rand who thought that the pollution scare of the 60's and 70's was a communist plot, or the foolish consistency of banning DDT for all uses even if the results are less than satisfactory in preventing malaria deaths, it seems that a little inconsistency is called for in some cases. Banning DDT for every use but the preventing of malaria may be one of these exceptions. You can be assured that I will not be drinking a DDT cocktail anytime soon—looks very dangerous to me.

I read Bjørn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist years ago, here is how his website describes the book: 

In The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg challenges widely held beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues and documents that the global environment has actually improved. He supports his argument with over 2900 footnotes, allowing discerning readers to check his sources.  

What made Lomborg's book so interesting for me is that although he did critique the alarmism of many, he was still very concerned about the environment. Environmental rules often make a lot of sense—I would say usually make a lot of sense. These rules are why Lomborg was able to say, and extensively document, that the environment is getting better. I remember the mania of the 60's and 70's. I do not want to revisit those times. 

But I also do not want to return to the environmental practices of the 50's either. Nor do I want to support the modern conservative mania against common-sense environmental rules. No the environmental movement is not a socialist plot. Yet like any movement it is subject to excesses. 

But this leads to my dilemma and the reason I am blogging on this. My daughter just finished a book about Rachel Carson. Carson had an interesting career. She is a worthy role model for my daughter in many ways. Do I mention the possible unintended consequences of Carson's work—the death of millions? Or do I ignore it? How can I make it a teaching moment? Do I call Carson the greatest mass murderer in history? I have seen this suggested, but it does not seem correct. Stacy is 8…I think I will wait on these ideas. 

The Desert Blooms

I remember the propaganda I believed years ago. In particular it was the idea that the modern state of Israel was causing the desert to bloom. This was supposedly a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. 

Isaiah 41:18-20

I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys. I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set pines in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.

And this:

Isaiah 51:3

The Lord will surely comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins; he will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness will be found in her, thanksgiving and the sound of springs.

Has Israel has caused the desert to bloom?  The statistics do not bear this out. 

But even if Israel has made the desert bloom, and I would say Israel, to some extent, has; there is an unasked question that bears on the story of the Pima Indian. 

Again I quote from Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About it. 

With the California gold rush, the relative paradise of the Pima came to an end and, with it, their affluence. Anglo-Americans and Mexicans began settling in large numbers in the region. These newcomers—“some of the vilest specimens of humanity that the white race has produced,” wrote Russell—hunted the local game near to extinction, and diverted the Gila River water to irrigate their own fields at the expense of the Pimas’.

The Jordan ValleyA portion of the success of Arizona agriculture was based on stolen water. The unasked question when we see a blooming desert in Israel is—Where did the Israeli farmer get the water? Where did the Israeli farmer get the land? 

When we see the abysmal conditions of a Palestinian settlement camp, remember the Pima Indians and ask the important question. Who "owns" the water? If you wonder why the Moslems and Jews cannot sit down and settle their differences “like good Christians”—one answer is the issue of who controls the water. 

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