Though the Venezuelan government expelled a Spanish diplomat for saying so, when 
Luis Herrero criticised the kaiser of Caracas and the extended polls on the question of removing term limits for Chavez and his stooges in the government. Herrero called Hugo Chavez a dictator, which is a little bit like calling a dandy a popinjay, and that was verboten in the “glorious” socialist workers’ “paradise” of Venezuela. The expulsion was couched in typically Orwellian and communist terms, to sound like the exact opposite of its real message.
“In line with instructions from the electoral power and guaranteeing the customary respect of human rights, European deputy Luis Herrero has been invited to leave the country,” said a statement from the foreign ministry.
Tomorrow the future of struggling oil giant Venezuela is up for vote. The people of Venezuela will have a chance to vote for or against Chavez’s intention to stay in office for the rest of his life. This is good news as far as it goes. Who will vote, who will count the votes, and whether they will be counted truthfully, is not quite so good. Channel News Asia writes:
“If I get aid from the opposition, I’ll vote ‘No’. If I don’t, I’ll vote ‘Yes’ on Sunday,” shouted Amparo Perez, a resident of the biggest Caracas slum, over singing campaigners in a rubbish-strewn street.
The unemployed 37-year-old said she had for four years sought funding from the government of President Hugo Chavez for a project to help poor families.
“We haven’t got anything,” Perez said.
Along with a group of friends, Perez now seeks aid from the district’s new opposition mayor. If he declines, they say they will protest by voting ‘Yes’ for Chavez.
Though students successfully opposed his earlier attempt in 2007 to repeal term limits, this time their efforts are struggling under ferocious propaganda and intimidation. Two Vatican offices in Caracas have been attacked with tear-gas, a synagogue was desecrated by gunmen, the Caracas City Hall and four other city buildings have been seized by anti-liberal Chavista agitators, and a cultural center was ransacked. This article in the Belfast Telegraph offers a good overview of the problems with Venezuela, which are fueled by virulent class warfare egged on by Chavez and his Marxist, useful idiot comrades.
* * *
Well, that’s Venezuela and I live in the US. They are not quite the same, but with the personality cult under The One, The Messiah, Lord Barack Obama the Most Merciful how long before we have our own Chavista revanchists in the US?
The road to serfdom starts with central planning of the sort that has blasted into the American economy since September 2008, and that only got worse with the passing of the porkulus last night. The US is headed for worse economic times, for restrictions of free speech for reasons of “localism,” “hate speech,” “multiculturalism,” and “victims rights,” for the restriction of gun rights through punitive taxation, for the restriction of religion in public life, for fewer property rights for home- and business-owners.
Let us not fail to seize our own chance to expel our own incipient dictator when 2012 comes around. In the meantime, his socialist stooges have to go starting in 2009 and 2010.
Technorati Tags: Tyranny, Socialism, Fascism, Politics, Obama, Hugo Chavez
The founder of MicroSoft loosed a jar full of mosquitos in a talk at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference (TED) today while talking about the death toll due to malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. Of course he thinks it’s a good idea to spend $10 per mosquito net in order to give people an imperfect barrier against mosquitos, instead of spending a few cents per house to spray the inside of a one-room mud-brick house with DDT and keep mosquitos (and other nasty creepy crawlies) dead instead of biting people. It’s harmless to people. Limited spraying like this does not get into the water supply in any significant way. The problem with DDT came when it was massively sprayed and slopped all over the place, not when it was used in quantities sufficient to rid homes and backyards near malarial swamps of their mosquitos.
Malaria kills a million people every year, and numbers are rising. Keep this in mind as you think about the falsified scientific experiments on egg thickness.
Even this pro-bug and thus anti-DDT entomologist admits that DDT was a useful part of a malaria-prevention effort in Eritrea in 2006, and that DDT can be an effective part of a complete anti-malaria health strategy. I note that one of her objections to DDT use is the following.
countries choosing to use DDT may face sanctions on agricultural products from the EU. We don’t want to hurt the growing economies of Africa by clinging to an old solution.
Rather than a proof of the unsuitability of DDT, this merely underlines the problem with demonizing solutions, even partial solutions, to a serious problem. The EU needs to repeal the regulations that prevent Africa from exporting food to Europe. That is surely the real reasoning behind the anti-DDT food importation rules, to protect jobs of French farmers at the expense of African farmers, who need insecticides such as DDT in their homes if not in their fields.
Let me quote the WHO’s announcement that it was restoring DDT to its anti-malaria tool set.
I asked my staff; I asked malaria experts around the world: “Are we using every possible weapon to fight this disease?” It became apparent that we were not. One powerful weapon against malaria was not being deployed. In a battle to save the lives of nearly one million children ever year – most of them in Africa – the world was reluctant to spray the inside of houses and huts with insecticides; especially with a highly effective insecticide known as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or “DDT.”
Even though indoor spraying with DDT and other insecticides had been remarkably effective preventing malaria sickness and death where used, this strategy seemed to have been abandoned by most countries nearly 30 years ago. By the early 1980s, WHO was no longer actively promoting it.
Some people told me that there was a good reason why its wide scale use had been phased out. I was told the practice was unsafe for humans, birds, fish and wildlife; that the use of DDT in the United States in the 1950s had led to the near extinction of the bald eagle. I was told that indoor spraying with DDT was “politically unpopular.”
But I believe that public health policies must be based on the science and the data, not on conventional wisdom or politics. As we examined the issue, we found that the scientific and programmatic evidence told a different story: We found that:
- One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual house spraying, as it has proven to be just as cost effective as other malaria prevention measures.
- Of the dozen insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT.
- DDT presents no health risk when used properly indoors. Well-managed indoor spraying programmes using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or to humans.
That is why today, after this reevaluation, the World Health Organization is announcing that indoor residual spraying with DDT and other insecticides will again play a major role in its efforts to fight the disease.
I suspect much of the debate boils down to the insoluble difference between those who value human life above insects and those who do not. I realize that insects outmass humanity, outmass mammalia, and outmass vertebrates on Earth. That does not mean we need to lie down and become bug food. DDT can help people lie down and not become bug food. It’s hard to see how anyone who believes in the principle of protecting human life would be against it, once the experimental facts about its efficacy and safety are known. Given this, it is important that DDT is made legal in the US again, because of the tremendous signal this would send to the rest of the world. Though the US doesn’t suffer from malaria today, the malarial swamps in the southern US are called malarial swamps for a reason. And by reintroducing DDT to the US, in uses where it is valuable, we can save lives tomorrow in Africa and Asia.
Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Environmentalism, Health, DDT, Malaria, Mosquitos
