Vaccine fearmongering and "intellectual prostitution"

By MichaelFumento

Mark Sircus, head of something called the International Medical Veritas Association, needs to learn a bit about the meaning of "Veritas." In a commentary titled "Intellectual Prostitution," he calls a whore anybody who disagrees with the proposition that childhood vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal (half of which is ethyl mercury). They're all on the take; that's the only possible explanation for their positions no matter how authoritative and detailed their arguments may be. I am one of the named prostitutes. Commenting on a column of mine that appeared in Townhall and another piece in the Wall Street Journal, our three-ring Sircus says, "Mr. Fumento's [sic], of the Hudson Institute, recently published essays on thimerosal, [which] like many of the others, were bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry so one should read his and many of the current articles proclaiming the safety of known poisons with salt."

Does he have the least evidence that I was actually paid? No. It's supposed to be guilt by association, but it turns out to not even fit that.

"When it comes to the Thimerosal [sic] debate and Fumento's opinion it is not a coincidence that the Hudson Institute [where I'm a senior fellow] is based in Indianapolis, home of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that holds the patent on Thimerosal [sic]," he writes. He also ties Dan Quayle and former OMB Director Mitch Daniels to both Lilly and Hudson.

Aside from not being able to spell "thimerosal," Sircus seems ignorant that Lilly patented the preservative in 1930 and therefore must have its rights half a century ago. Hudson is not based in Indy, but Washington, D.C. It moved a year ago, which is to say a year before I wrote my pieces. Hudson formerly received major funding not from Lilly the pharmaceutical company but from the Lilly Endowment, which truly has a Chinese wall between it and its drug company donors. In any event, the Endowment focuses heavily on Indiana projects and stopped funding Hudson when it moved.

But this isn't to say Sircus knows nothing about intellectual prostition. He makes his living running a clinic in Brazil that uses "chelation therapy," a fraud denounced by many medical organizations. Far from extracting "toxins" as claimed it merely extracts green material from the pockets of gullible parents of autistic children (and sufferers of countless other illnesses). It is the money trail behind the "vaccines cause autism" hysteria, the conspiracy behind the conspiracy theory if you will.

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"SMART GROWTH" FOUND TO BE DUMB

"Smart-growth" policies, which became popular nationwide during the 1990s, are regulations designed to reduce suburban sprawl and control growth. They encourage people to live close together within walking distance of shops and offices. One goal is to reduce the use of the automobile. Another is to create neighborhoods full of interesting "streetscapes." A third is to cluster people in high densities in order to preserve large areas of open space. Today, smart-growth policies seem to be in retreat. Setbacks have occurred in Maryland, Virginia and Oregon, and new census information suggests that the public does not really embrace the smart growth way of life.

One sign of smart growth's weakness comes from Maryland, where former Gov. Paris N. Glendening unveiled a statewide policy in 1997 to manage growth. The idea was to restrict the use of public funds for development to areas where public infrastructure was already being supplied. Counties were to submit plans to the state showing where they wanted growth to occur. These "priority funding areas" would be eligible for state infrastructure financial assistance, but projects outside these areas would not. The policy was hailed as a milestone. But as Peter Whoriskey reported last fall in a series of articles in the Washington Post, Glendening's initiative has yet to make a significant dent in Maryland's sprawling land-use patterns. "A review of key state and local planning records shows no significant shifts in Maryland's development patterns since the passage of Glendening's smart growth package," wrote Whoriskey. "Growth still takes place where there was nothing, rather than where it has gone before." ....

In addition, some local officials viewed Glendening's efforts as too much state intrusion and so they circumvented the law. Some officials designated as growth areas far more land than was needed to accommodate growth over the next two decades.

In another setback, the Virginia Supreme Court has thrown out Loudoun County's slow-growth zoning regulations, which had blocked home building in the western part of the nation's fastest-growing county. Loudoun County, on the periphery of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, has been a battlefield between the forces of development and advocates of smart growth for years. Its population almost tripled in 15 years, from 86,000 in 1990 to 248,000 in 2005. This growth spurred the election of a "smart growth" slate of officials in 1999. Traditionally, Loudoun's zoning law had required three acres for each new home built in the semirural western part of the county. The board of supervisors changed the zoning rules in January 2003 to require 10 or 20 - and in some cases 50 - acres per house, depending on the property location.

A new board elected in 2003 dismantled many of the growth curbs but left the restrictive zoning law, which faced numerous legal challenges filed by aggrieved property owners. On March 3, 2005, Virginia's highest court declared the 2003 zoning law invalid. The court did not rule on the issue of property rights but on procedural grounds. Loudoun officials, said the court, had not given proper public notice concerning the zoning hearings and had not clearly specified the boundaries of land to be rezoned. Potentially, the court ruling clears the way for more than 50,000 additional houses on the 300 square miles of western Loudoun County that had been closed to dense development.

One of the most surprising changes occurred in November 2004. By a majority of 61 percent, Oregon voters approved a ballot initiative, Measure 37. It states that the government should compensate property owners when government-imposed land-use restrictions reduce the value of their property. If the government cannot or will not pay, property owners can develop their land as they see fit. In the words of the ballot initiative, "Governments must pay owners, or forgo enforcement, when certain land use restrictions reduce property values." Because the state has set aside virtually no money to pay landowners, Measure 37, it is feared, will lead to a rash of suburban-style subdivisions outside Oregon's urban boundaries.

To be sure, anti-sprawl legislation had already lost some of its political momentum. In the early 1990s, a number of states - Florida, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi - passed property-rights laws to protect landowners from monetary losses caused by restrictive zoning. But none of these measures has had the political and psychological impact of the Oregon initiative. The Seattle Times thought Measure 37 "may have mortally wounded Oregon's strong land use planning system." Others considered it a public repudiation of the principle of growth management, a policy that Oregon pioneered 30 years ago. Smart-growth advocates fear that the new law will strengthen the property rights movement. "If it can happen in the progressive state of Oregon, it could happen in any number of other states," one planning official remarked.

More -- much more -- here




GREENIE PROGRAMS WASTE RESOURCES

Huge expenditures for little or no result

Sometimes, when Rob Cramer works in his seventh- floor office at the state Department of Administration, the lights in the room turn off. Cramer, who runs the state's inventory of 6,000 buildings for DOA, stands up and waves his hands in front of a motion sensor, and the lights flick back on. The sensor in Cramer's spacious office overlooking Lake Monona is a tiny part of the Wisconsin Energy Initiative, a nearly $100 million program started 13 years ago to install energy-saving equipment in state-owned buildings. WEI is wrapping up this year with a final energy retrofit at UW- Oshkosh.

But like the motion sensor, WEI hasn't quite worked out as planned, critics of the program say. They believe the state has spent too much money on energy-efficient lighting, temperature controls, high- efficiency motors and low-flow plumbing fixtures without gauging whether those improvements pay for themselves as promised under the program. "It's one of those programs where the intent of it is good, but nobody's monitoring it closely enough," said Tom Wright, facilities director of the Northern Wisconsin Center for the Developmentally Disabled in Chippewa Falls.

In fact, energy use in state buildings continues to rise, not decline, since WEI started. DOA figures show energy use per square foot in state buildings has risen by 11 percent in the past 13 years. The rate isn't rising as fast as per capita energy use, which increased 19.4 percent in Wisconsin from 1992 to 2003. That suggests WEI has had some success. But it has failed to reduce energy use as promised when it was launched by Gov. Tommy Thompson.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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