53 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  8. Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity.
    http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422%2813%2970278-3/abstract

  9. Re: California Dreamin’
    Thanks EDd–One of the best 60’s hits.
    Wish I was there right now!

  10. North of 60:
    Re: Chemicals
    Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT was one of the most effective methods of mosquito control. Here is a partial list of diseases carried by mosquitoes.
    West Nile virus, Saint Louis encephalitis virus, Eastern equine encephalomyelitis virus, Everglades virus, Highlands J virus, La Crosse Encephalitis virus in the United States; dengue fever, yellow fever, Ilheus virus, malaria, and filariasis in the American tropics; Rift Valley fever, Wuchereria bancrofti, Japanese Encephalitis, chikungunya, malaria and filariasis in Africa and Asia; and Murray Valley encephalitis in Australia.
    Sometimes, life is about trade offs. Guess what happened when they took DDT off the shelves?

  12. DDT was one of the most effective methods of mosquito control.
    …and now we have better methods. I live in a region where mosquitoes are prevalent, our municipality has been using very effective non-toxic biological control methods for years. Very few mosquitoes around town.
    Technology advances, we don’t put lead in gasoline or paint anymore either.

  13. In my daughter’s social studies class today (public school, British Columbia), she had to watch a documentary that described how the police in Canada are racist toward Native Indians. The Indian interviewed in the documentary said among other things “If it isn’t the blacks, it’s the First Nations”.
    That my friends, is the state of public education today in Canada.
    Kids cannot spell, cannot simplify a fraction, but they do know that the police in Canada are racist, and the Native Indians are better than us in *every* way.
    Needless to say, I set my daughter straight and gave her an eye-opening explanation of the unvarnished truth.
    But imagine how many kids just go home and never get told the truth.

  15. DDT was also great for controlling bed bugs but then leftists had their say.
    I guess the blood sucking parasites had an aversion to DDT killing off other various blood sucking parasites.

  17. It’s as easy as taking a drive through a reserve to show your kids the “indian way of knowning” which is another catch phrase in the education clap trap they use in BC now. Tell the kids to count the beer bottles on the lawns for an extra math lesson.

  18. The usual socialist parasites we’ve seen grow through academia and increasingly astroturf movements. Blasio will go down in history, along with The One.
    Have any of these people done anything useful in their life other than make poor populations hostage to their ideology? Has any of them actually, like, worked for a living?
    There is a Russian name for these people: Nomenklatura (sp?)

  22. Sure Robert, and what credibility do you bring to the discussion?
    How much of your research in this field has been published?
    You have a nicer day now.

  23. North of 60
    Say your handle wouldn’t be some kind of inadvertent reference to some kind of test, would it?
    It’s called calculated risk. Here’s a puzzler. Farmers use many kinds of products with a potentially high toxicity and yet their cancer rates are no greater than the general population. Why is that?

  25. NO60, I bring reason to it. Do not insult my intelligence. What do you bring to this debate other than Ad Hominem?
    1. “Chemicals” in the “environment” are a good “scareything” to scare the target audience, mostly suburbanites who have never seen a wild animal.
    2, There are more chemicals in the environment than we know exist; the rarer the more complex is its name, which just makes them more scary. It’s those chemtrails!
    3. The diseases mentioned are very trendy, vague, touchy-feely, middle-class, suburbanite, diseases that the people-to-be-scared are scared of. How about some more significant diseases, such as mass killers like malaria or cholera?
    4. Epidemology is a very corrupted discipline these days due to its use for ideological purposes.
    In summation:
    The scam being played by the trial lawyers and eco-profiteers is “find a chemical that sounds scary, pay for poor scientific investigation, make many sweepingly vague possibility claims and sue someone with money” using the precautionary principal as an excuse.
    Arse-holes like these would get out of the trees and tell the rest to stay in the trees as the savannah is scary-dangerous.

  26. Leftist Spiegel: Ich Bin Ein Kaput.
    …-
    “SPIEGEL International in 2014: A Note from the Editors”
    “Dear Readers,
    For almost 10 years now, SPIEGEL International has offered news, features and opinions from Germany in English, including the very best journalism from Europe’s leading newsmagazine, DER SPIEGEL. Over the years, we brought you the WikiLeaks exposés, NSA spying revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden and some of the most insightful reporting available on Germany and Europe.
    Recently, as many of you have noticed, and indeed written in to ask us about, the number of stories posted to the site each day has been reduced. At SPIEGEL International, we face many of the same economic pressures most leading media outlets are struggling with these days. This has forced us to evaluate how we can reduce the size of the website and still offer the most relevant, poignant stories possible in the future.
    Tough times or not, SPIEGEL International intends to keep on publishing the best of its world-class journalism in English each week.”
    http://www.spiegel.de/international/a-note-from-the-editors-a-954935.html

  27. Robert,
    re, our resident troll, North of 60.
    Save your energy.
    As with the troll ‘ok’ in the past, when you see one of his posts, skip over it.

  28. If the chemical analysis are over?
    One of my students- I know’, I know’..
    Studied the water samples near,
    and within one mile of a septic tank storage site.
    She then went back and looked at the Cancer deaths in that area.
    300 percent higher than the normal population not near that site..
    So I would ass-u-me even other deaths as well.
    My theory,
    don’t live near a guy that stores septic tank shit..

  32. Mao Stlong* Lepolt.
    You like Mao’s Cancer Industry?
    …-
    “Rates of Lung Cancer Rising Steeply in Smoggy Beijing”
    http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-28/rates-of-lung-cancer-rising-steeply-in-smoggy-beijing#r=hpt-fs
    …-
    “China’s Exports Unexpectedly Decline in Blow to Confidence”
    “Distortions in the data from the Lunar New Year holiday and fake invoicing that inflated numbers last year make it harder to assess the true picture.”
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-08/china-feb-exports-unexpectedly-fall-18-1-imports-rise-10-1-.html
    *Liberal Justine’s favourite dictator.

  34. Maybe Ukrainian Prime Minister Yatzenyuk can give Premier Redford some travel advice on how to fly coach.
    http://avherald.com/h?article=4710362f&opt=0
    “Belgian Police reported that an anonymous phone call was received indicating that a terror act against OS-354 was pending. The crew was contacted but indicated that everything on board was normal, hence the flight was continued to Vienna where the aircraft taxied to the planned park position.”
    I wonder if the anonymous caller had a Russian accent. But maybe they mistook the flight for something else as stolen Austrian passports seem all the rage today http://news.yahoo.com/austrian-not-malaysia-plane-passport-stolen-foreign-ministry-152724256–sector.html

  35. @EBD: “But is all of this really true?” Best line in the article! IMO it’s just made up hocky puck. Meaningless.

  36. A flight captain commented:
    These passports were stolen in August, 2013,
    not last week,
    computers do keep track, and all that..

  37. AGW-Neo Progress Report.
    …-
    “Hybrid chickadees move north with warmer weather
    Cornell University”
    “The new study finds that this hybrid zone, a convenient reference point for scientists tracking environmental changes, has moved northward at a rate of 0.7 mile per year over the last decade. That’s fast enough that the researchers added an extra study site partway through their project.”
    http://www.futurity.org/hybrid-chickadees-common-temperatures-rise/
    …-
    “NOAA: US Cold records outnumber warm records 66 to 1 in the last 7 days”
    “And nearly 3 to 1 in the last 30 days, and over 2 to 1 in 2014
    From NOAA/NCDC: U.S. Records Summary”
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/08/noaa-us-cold-records-outnumber-warm-records-66-to-1-in-the-last-7-days/#more-104684

  39. Farmers use many kinds of products with a potentially high toxicity and yet their cancer rates are no greater than the general population. Why is that? posted by nold
    It would appear you are misinformed.
    “However, compared with the general population, the rates for certain diseases, including some types of cancer, appear to be higher among agricultural workers, which may be related to exposures that are common in their work environments. For example, farming communities have higher rates of leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and soft tissue sarcoma, as well as cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain, and prostate.”
    http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/ahs

  40. ” What do you bring to this debate other than Ad Hominem?
    Posted by: Robert of Ottawa
    I bring referenced sources for my opinions, what do you bring other than your unsupported opinion?

  41. About 2 months ago ,I put my name on the Liberal e-mail list.Since that time I receive an e-mail or two a day.
    They have doubled their efforts lately, I now get about 3 or 4 a day asking for $3, and the message is getting tackier.
    ” Since we started fundraising Sunday to make this our best first quarter ever, something extraordinary has happened.
    You have shown so much energy and enthusiasm — exactly like we saw at the convention in Montreal. Justin will be so proud.
    Still the Conservatives have never raised less than $4-million in the first quarter. So we must each pitch in — and if the information below is correct, we have still not heard from you! ”
    So, for only $3, I can make Justin proud (wherever he may be), and relieve any guilt that I may have over not being a Liberal donor.
    Hmmm …. no,I don’t think so.

  42. David in Michigan (10;38 AM), the part I found most interesting, and most corroborative of the theory, was the separated-at-birth identical-twin studies, which are incredibly useful in the context of the “nature vs. nurture” dispute. The results of some of these studies (including those that measure IQ by race) can be quite politically incorrect, but they’re not “made-up hockey puck.”
    Regarding the correlation between genetics and political leanings (liberal vs. conservative) —

    As Hibbing et al. explain, the evidence suggests that around 40 percent of the variation in political beliefs is ultimately rooted in DNA. The studies that form the basis for this conclusion use a simple but powerful paradigm: they examine the differences between pairs of monozygotic (“identical”) twins and pairs of dizygotic (“fraternal”) twins when it comes to political views. Again and again, the identical twins, who share 100 percent of their DNA, also share much more of their politics.

    One can, of course, always say that the researchers are lying about the results, but the results of other identical twin studies show the preponderance of heritable attributes. Things like eye-contact time tendencies, IQ, food preferences, risk taking/aversion, volubility, etc., etc., are often so close in separated-at-birth identical twins as to be uncanny, when you consider that they were raised in different parts of the country and in different home environments.
    I don’t find it hard to believe that the ability/tendency to feel disgust (one of the traits mentioned in the review) is heritable, or that this tendency/ability would be correlated with conservative leanings; conservatives certainly seem to be more disgusted by sexual profligacy (or the sight of it), for example, than liberals, who tend more to enjoy it, or at least be indifferent to it.
    Attendance or non-attendance at Gay Pride parades, for example, is certainly political, but it’s also a reflection of how one feels at a gut level about such behaviour/displays; I think any instinctive reaction one way or another is at least in part heritable.

  45. From Forbes
    “Superstition and darkness now spur spurious concerns about many products and technologies, including vaccines, nuclear power, pesticides, genetically engineered foods, and chemicals found in an array of consumer products”

  46. North of 60
    Why didn’t you use the complete quote from your own link?
    “Farmers in many countries, including the United States, have lower overall death rates and cancer rates than the general population”

  48. The Worry Way AGW-Neo Progress Report.
    Is Calgary OK? RSVP.
    …-
    “The group the ‘Right Climate Stuff’ says there no need to worry about catastrophic global warming”
    “New Study; Earth is Safe From ‘Global Warming’ Say the Men Who Put Man on the Moon
    The planet is not in danger of catastrophic man made global warming.”
    http://wattsupwiththat.com/
    …-
    “Calgary mom finds possible ‘ice fracture’ that rumbled north Calgary”
    http://www.calgaryherald.com/Calgary+finds+possible+fracture+that+rumbled+north+Calgary/9596357/story.html

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