An estimated 1.5 million people have been infected during the recent Zika Virus Outbreak in Brazil. First discovered in 1947, the Zika Virus made its way to South America, Central America and the Caribbean for the first time in 2015. With possible links to Guillain-Barré syndrome, Microcephaly and other devastating birth defects – fears around the spread of Zika have grown in recent weeks and scary news headlines reflect growing concern. From conspiracy theories around Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to demands for increased research and investment into a Zika Virus vaccine – the reactions have been rapid and startling. What is the Truth About The Zika Virus Outbreak? Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/zika-virus
Yes, once more, my friends, we are faced with the prospect of potentially imminent doom and demise.
An incessant, very dangerous, ever-increasing, growing, whining sound of whirlwind death is coming our way.
Is it a Bernie Sanders rally?
It could be.
Check your 666.
But it also might be the latest in Africa's lovely exports to the planet, known as the Zika virus.
It is something that has been reported as ever-increasing, ever-dangerous.
Is it so?
Well, you've come to the right place for the facts.
This is, in fact, the truth about the Zika virus outbreak.
Now the Zika virus, first discovered by yellow fever research institute scientists in April 1947, a caged rhesus macaque monkey in Uganda's Zika forest, was found to be infected and a second infection was discovered in a mosquito less than a year later in January 1948.
So it's not particularly new, but of course it is getting particularly new attention.
Research into a 1952 yellow fever outbreak led to the first discovery of a human Zika virus infection occurring within a Nigerian female.
Could be from eating a monkey.
I like to think it's from a mosquito bite.
Later that year, a study conducted in India showed that a quote, significant number of Indians exhibited an immune response to the virus, suggesting it had long been widespread within human populations.
Between 51 and 81 evidence of human infections with Zika virus was reported, From other African countries, such as the Central African Republic, Egypt, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda, as well as in parts of Asia, including India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.
All places that make you really, really enjoy the degree to which snow kills bacteria.
Confirmed cases of the virus were incredibly rare.
With only 14 in total since the virus was first discovered.
So not the echoes of an immune response, but actual confirmed cases, 14 since 1947.
Not exactly a desperately dangerous outbreak, but let us continue.
In April 2007, the first outbreak outside of Africa and Asia occurred in the island of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia.
I know it sounds like I'm describing something offshore from Middle Earth, but 49 confirmed cases, 59 unconfirmed cases, no hospitalizations, and no deaths.
More recently, epidemics have occurred in Polynesia, Easter Island, the Cook Islands, and New Caledonia.
In April 2015, the Zika virus reached Brazil and has spread to much of South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
Currently, an estimated 1.6 million people have been infected during this outbreak, with 1.5 million infections in Brazil alone, 1.49 of those I'm sure occurring during Carnival.
Brazil is currently set to host the Summer Olympic Games from August 5th to 21st with a gold medal in mosquito dodging, prompting fears of spreading the infection on a global scale.
Now, there hasn't been a report of a local transmission of the Zika virus within the continental United States, but there have been cases in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
So that's local to local, not just somebody who's brought the virus back from overseas.
Several infections, of course, have been reported in a few U.S. citizens who have traveled to South and Central America.
Florida Governor Rick Scott, February the 3rd, said, I am directing Surgeon General Dr.
John Armstrong to declare a public health emergency in the four counties that have individuals with the Zika virus.
Although Florida's current nine Zika cases were travel-related, we have to ensure Florida is prepared and stays ahead of the spread of the Zika virus in our state.
We know that we must be prepared for the worst, even as we hope.
For the best.
I guess he then put down his well-worn and well-thumbed book of disaster cliches.
The governor also called on the CDC to provide additional antibody tests, as currently Florida only has the capacity to test 475 people, or pretty much everybody under the age of 20 in Florida.
The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services was assigned $1.6 million in 2015 for mosquito control, or One dollar for each 12 billion mosquitoes in Florida.
It is unknown how much of that money is currently left.
On February the 8th, President Barack Obama communicated plans to ask Congress for 1.8 billion in emergency funding to combat the mosquito-borne Zika virus.
Nice to see, actually, President Obama actually asking Congress for something.
I guess he left his magic executive order pen in his other golf pants.
President Barack Obama said, the good news is that this is not like Ebola.
People don't die of Zika.
A lot of people get it and don't even know they have it.
It's something we have to take seriously.
Now, Zika is a disease caused by the, as you can imagine, aptly named Zika virus that is primarily spread through the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito, the same mosquitoes that spread chikungunya, dengue, and malaria.
The infection can also be spread through blood transfusion, sparking fears of blood bank contamination, given the limited knowledge about the virus.
After infection, it takes approximately a week for Zika to clear from the blood.
Now, while knowledge in this area is fairly limited and cases are rare, the infection has also been shown to be sexually transmittable from men to women so far within humans as the virus has been discovered in sperm from infected males.
Now of course there is no cure for the Zika disease at present and no vaccine to prevent you from getting it.
It is also suspected that Zika can spread through contact with infected saliva or urine, but limited data is available on such transmissions, although raves, I'm sure, are being checked.
Only about one in five people who get infected with the Zika virus ever show any symptoms whatsoever.
The most common symptoms are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis, or red eyes.
Zika itself is not life-threatening.
If the infected person becomes symptomatic, again, only one in five symptoms typically last from two to seven days after being bitten by an infected mosquito.
The outbreak in Brazil led to reports of Guillain-Parré syndrome and pregnant women giving birth to babies with abnormally small brains, a condition known as microcephaly.
An infected pregnant mother can transmit the virus to her baby during pregnancy or at birth.
Guillain-Barre syndrome, GBS, is a rare disorder where a person's own immune system damages the nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis.
Now, symptoms can last for weeks or even several months, and while most people recover from GBS, some have permanent damage and rare deaths have also been reported, which is of course not the same as confirmed.
It is unknown if Zika virus infection causes GBS, but a link is currently suspected.
Microcephaly is a condition where a baby's head and brain are much smaller than normal.
In addition to the condition being life-threatening, babies with microcephaly can also have a range of other problems, including seizures, developmental delays, intellectual disabilities, voting for Bernie Sanders, movement and balance issues, difficulty feeding and swallowing, hearing and vision, loss, and more.
Microcephaly is not a common condition in the U.S. It's estimated that it only occurs in 2 to 12 babies per 10,000 births.
In Brazil, as of late January, of the 4,180 reported microcephaly cases, 270 have been confirmed, 462 thrown out.
Of these, only six of the confirmed cases have been linked to Zika so far.
So the causality is sketchy at best.
Now, just as a reminder, I'm no medical expert.
The sources for all of this are below.
Please delve into and dive into more of the details of this Zika virus as you see fit.
Now, it should also be noted that Toxoplasmosis has also been linked to microcephaly and recent studies have found that in Brazil up to 50% of elementary school children and 50 to 80% of women of childbearing age have been exposed to the Toxoplasma gandhi parasite.
We talked about this in the Gene Wars presentation.
It's a weird kind of parasite.
What it does is it attacks the brain of mice, making mice unafraid of cats, which is how it spreads to cats because they don't run away from cats and the cats eat them and they can be transmitted to people after that.
Now, since mosquitoes are known to spread diseases, a truly horrifying cavalcade of diseases, a true tsunami of mortality, so to speak, many options to control the mosquito population has been explored, including genetic modification of mosquitoes to greatly reduce the survivability of offspring.
Following the Zika virus headlines, some claims blaming genetically modified mosquitoes for the virus quickly spread online despite what could charitably be called a distinct lack of evidence.
Now, Oxitec is the company that's been working on this.
They have a small-scale genetically modified mosquito trials that have occurred in Brazil, Panama, Malaysia, and the Cayman Islands within the last several years.
But, of course, the Zika virus has been around since 1947.
I guess a couple of years after a Democrat in the White House started doing some genetic mutations on Japanese people, but a long time before any mosquitoes were put into this category.
Recent Oxitec trials have shown that the relevant mosquito populations were reduced between 85% to 96% within several months of release.
So basically it just makes the mosquitoes sterile.
It does not turn them into orc arrow bioweapons or anything like that.
According to Notre Dame Biological Sciences Professor Alex Perkins, Chief of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Division at the University of Utah, Dr.
Andrew Pavler said, There is no evidence that genetically modified mosquitoes have a role in the outbreak, but we wouldn't need the insects to have an outbreak.
Oxitec CEO Hayden Perry said, quote, It's simply untrue.
All vector control solutions, insecticides, traps, and, quote, sterile mosquitoes get deployed in areas with a high incidence of disease to help stop the spread of the disease at its source.
The fewer the mosquitoes, the lower the risk of disease.
Our approach has proven to be more effective than the alternatives with a lower environmental impact.
Indiana University Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research Fellow Emilio Ferrara on the spread of false information, quote, Fear has a role.
If I read something that leverages my fears, my judgment would be obfuscated.
And I could be more prone to spread facts that are obviously wrong under the pressure of these feelings.
I guess in particular to people who don't know what the word obfuscated means.
California Institute for Technology Biology Professor Bruce Hay, quote, Oxitec's technology can be scaled up.
It is largely a question of money, will, and a lack of fear about something new.
I think of Oxitec's technology as akin to the invention of the seatbelt.
Seatbelts are a really simple, pretty much foolproof way of preventing death.
They won't prevent every death, but the mechanism of action is so well understood that there is simply no biologically plausible mechanism by which it could go wrong.
In the same way, Oxitec mosquitoes won't eradicate every mosquito, but nor will there be any unpredictable side effects.
University of California Professor Anthony James quote, both Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are not native to the Americas, so eliminating them is a form of bioremediation.
Gene-driven technologies are the best and safest chance of getting elimination with the fewest anticipated non-target effects and are a realistic solution for targeting specific problems.
University of California Professor Gregory Lanzaro, quote, Secondly,
a Egypti is not native to the New World and it seems the environment here did just fine before this mosquito was introduced by man from Africa.
The recent Zika virus is another modern reminder of the tens of millions of needless deaths brought about by environmentalist propaganda, which Starting from the 1960s led to the ban of the pesticide dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane otherwise known as DDT. Ah!
Run screaming!
It's DDT! No, no, no!
Let me make the case.
DDT is incredibly effective at reducing mosquito populations and thus illnesses like malaria which are spread through mosquito bites.
DDT's insecticidal properties were discovered by Paul Hermann Muller in 1939, earning him the 1948 Nobel Prize in Medicine for providing an inexpensive and highly effective way of combating disease.
Joni Muller, this one's for you.
In 1955, the World Health Organization launched a global campaign to use DDT to fight malaria in developing nations.
As a result of the campaign, malaria was eradicated by 1967 from all developed countries where the disease was endemic, and large areas of tropical Asia and Latin America were freed from the risk of infection.
In 1970, the National Academy of Sciences reported, quote, To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase in agricultural productivity while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps scrub typhus and malaria.
Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.
So, let that just roll around in your brain a little bit.
Prevented 500 million deaths.
500 million deaths prevented by DDT. The World Health Organization issued a statement in 1969, quote, DDT has been the main agent in eradicating malaria and thus has saved at least two billion people in the world without causing the loss of a single life by poisoning from DDT alone.
It went on to state, quote, It is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the spray men or among the inhabitants of the spray areas, which numbered 130,000 and 535 million respectively at the peak of the campaign.
So just take a moment to process that, if you will, my friends.
This is truly astounding, given the propaganda that you and I were force-fed about DDT. 130,000 men out there spraying DDT day in, day out.
Not only did none of them die from DDT, there weren't even any symptoms of illness, nor were there symptoms of illness, let alone deaths, among the 535 million people inhabiting the areas being sprayed at the peak of the campaign against The mosquito.
Mosquito is a mass murderer.
The mosquito is just the slaughter of economies, the death of culture, and it tends to be the mass, virtually genocidal slaughter of a lot of black people, of course, in the third world, a lot of brown people, and I guess for the white people who haven't had these kinds of illnesses for a couple of generations,
Seems to be not only easy to forget, but kind of easy to thump your chest about your environmental heroism while standing on the bodies, the ever-mounting and increasing bodies, of a large number of, well, let's just say, foreigners.
So let's take a couple of case studies in Zanzibar.
They started spraying DDT in 1958.
This was at a time when malaria plagued 70% of the population.
Fast forward six years, frequency Had dropped to 5%.
After DDT was banned, case prevalence rose to between 50 and 60%.
70%?
DDT comes in, goes down to 5%.
They banned DDT, goes back to 50 to 60%.
In Venezuela, 1943, malaria cases 817,115.
That's when they first started using DDT. By 1958, There were only 800.
So from 817,000 and change down to 800.
In the 1950s annual malaria cases in Nepal totaled 2 million, 2 million a year with a 10% mortality rate.
Life expectancy in Nepal in the 1950s was 28 years.
So you can't build a civilization, you can't have an economy, you can't do anything other than survive, half starve and bury your dead.
Life expectancy, 28 years, 2 million cases a year in Nepal.
By 1968, there were how many?
2 million?
No.
2,468 cases and life expectancy had gone from 28 years to 42.3 years in 1970.
Officials in Nepal credited DDT alone.
There was a pilot study in Uganda conducted in 1959.
Malaria case prevalence in a high risk area of 22.7% and it dropped to just 0.5% in 10 months of using DDT. In surrounding variable risk areas, the rate declined from 12.5% of malaria cases prevalence to 0%.
Taiwan reduced its number of cases from more than one million in 1945 to nine in 1969, and has effectively eliminated many of the diseases from the island.
These are real people, real lives, real children, real parents, heartbroken, with an ever-stretching line of little white crosses behind their shacks, which will remain shacks until disease is taken care of, which it was being taken care of Until Rachel Carson and Joni Mitchell.
Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring launched widespread public concern.
Well, yeah.
Hysteria, more likely.
It claimed that wildlife could be hypothetically eliminated by the pesticide and suggested that DDT was responsible for the thinning of bald eagle eggshells.
Which could lead to their extinction.
Now, biology professor Robert H. White Stevens said, quote, If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the Earth.
In 1992, entomologist J. Gordon Edwards wrote, The Lies of Rachel Carson, a point-by-point refutation of the claims made in Silent Spring, noting, quote, It simply dawned on me that Rachel Carson was not interested in the truth about pesticides and that I was being duped along with millions of other Americans.
Now, we're not going to go through all the rebuttals.
The link to his...
The refutation of Silent Spring is in the notes below.
You can go through it point by point if you want.
But this book launched the modern environmentalist movement.
It's one thing to actually live in the squalid, rat-fested, disease-ridden armpit of the planet known as nature in its natural state.
It's quite another thing to sit in your air-conditioned Office, look at Ansel Adams' pictures and think that nature is wonderful.
Nature is wonderful when it's chained and bound and gagged by mankind.
Otherwise, it'll kill you as soon as look at you.
Now, as a result of this environmentalist hysteria created by the book, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency convened scientific hearings in 1971, which went on for seven months, included 125 expert witnesses and generated 9,362 pages of testimony, still shorter than a modern trade deal.
Now, we've read all of these in great detail.
We haven't read all of these in great detail, but...
We did look up the conclusion.
The conclusion is this, quote, DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic.
Mutagenic, of course, is that.
Teratogenic is creating mutations through reproduction.
So DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man, and these uses of DDT do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or SGRN organisms.
So, it seems pretty safe.
There is, of course, the half-billion lives that it saved during the time when it was deployed in the Third World, thus leading them perhaps a little closer to the First World.
But environmentalist hysteria and population control reared their ugly heads.
Nixon, who of course started the EPA, was a big fan of population control.
And not just in Cambodia.
Two months after these hearings, 125 experts, 9,000 plus pages.
Two months after the hearings concluded, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, who had never attended even a single day of the EPA hearings and by his own admission had never read any of the transcripts, overruled the conclusion of the hearings and banned DDT. There are people out on the planet who have a lot of blood in their hands.
I'll let you come to your own conclusions about this fellow.
Ruckelhaus later noted, quote, The ultimate judgment on DDT remains political.
Decisions by the government involving the use of toxic substances are political with a small p.
In the case of pesticides in our country, the power to make this judgment has been delegated to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
I would hope that there'd be some science involved.
Saying it's political with a small p doesn't really help.
It doesn't matter if it's political with a big p, four m's in a silent q, it doesn't matter.
Hopefully it would be scientific and medical.
Two years prior, at an August 31, 1970 U.S. Court of Appeals hearing, Ruckelshaus said, quote, DDT has an amazing, an exemplary record of safe use, does not cause a toxic response in man or other animals, and is not harmful.
Carcinogenic claims regarding DDT are unproven speculation.
So that's what he said earlier.
Huge amounts of testimony.
Seven months, 9,000 plus pages.
Then he just bans it anyway.
Why?
What changed?
Well, this guy had a new relationship with the Environmental Defense Fund and others in the Green Movement.
Now, for what it's worth, the Royal House was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
In November 2015, because black lives matter!
So this decision to ban DDT impacted many developing nations.
Foreign aid was made dependent on not using any pesticide that was banned in the United States.
People say, well, you know, it was banned in the US, but how does that affect Africa?
Well, it affects it quite a lot.
The developed world has poured trillions of dollars into the coffers of dictatorships in the third world because, you know, it's really hard to sell weapons to people who don't have a lot of money, so you give them foreign aid so that they can buy your weapons and then you can be shocked that the world is violent.
So this ban spread around the world fairly quickly.
So DDT was banned across the world due to political pressure, fear-mongering, the usual environmental scares, you know, basically just a bunch of commies.
Their environmentalism is basically just a watermelon It's green on the outside, it's red on the inside.
So malaria and other mosquito-borne illness rates predictably soared.
Hey look, third world people aren't competing for our jobs anymore because they're coughing up a lung and burying their children.
In Brazil, DDT was last used in 1995.
It was banned for agricultural use in 1985, then banned for public health use in 1998.
And both production and trade are currently prohibited in the country because DDT Really, really bad.
Now, according to the World Health Organization, malaria kills nearly half a million people each year, mostly children, and leads to serious illness in more than 200 million people annually.
You get that?
That's a billion people every five years who get seriously ill because of just malaria, not counting all of the other joyful illnesses spread by our little friends with the wine.
I'm not talking about Leonardo DiCaprio.
90% of malaria's victims live in Africa, the majority of children under the age of five, and one estimate shows that one in 20 African children dies from malaria.
Hey, you're having trouble joining The 21st century, well, there's a lot of green activists in your way who desperately seem to, a lot of them, want the world's population to be reduced, sadly not starting with themselves.
Chairman of the Malaria Foundation International, Dr.
Wenceslaus Kilama, quote, The malaria epidemic is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day Alexandra King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, apparently named after one world conqueror and a class of royalty, said, My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use.
In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria.
But at the same time, the birth rate had doubled.
So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight, it had greatly added to the population problem.
Too many dark people, that is me now, too many dark people aren't dying.
I think that's terrible.
Here in Rome, CDC director Dr.
Tom Frieden, quote, The fact is that DDT was widely used 50 years ago and virtually eliminated this mosquito from the Americas.
But DDT was also widely used in agriculture, got into the environment, and had serious problems in the environment for many species.
It remains in the body for a long time.
We're looking at safer, more effective ways to kill mosquitoes.
You know what else remains in the body for quite a long time?
The dirt and worms that come in when you're dead and buried because you died from malaria.
There's no proof here.
Epidemiologist Lynn Goldman, quote, using DDT now would result in exposure to local populations for decades.
In fact, DDE, a breakdown product from DDT, is still detected in the blood of a majority of Americans even though DDT was banned in the US about 40 years ago.
Hey, you know one thing that's happened with Americans over the last 40 years?
Life expectancy has increased.
Note, this does not apply to people in Disneyland drinking soda from bottles strapped to the side of their hats.
Entomology Professor Jeffrey Scott, quote, I don't think anybody would survive the political fallout of trying to bring DDT back.
It's got religious zeal to it some camps.
Executive Director of Beyond Pesticides, Jay Feldman.
The concern we have is that in combating an immediate public health threat with DDT, we create a greater long-term public health problem.
Half a billion people alive and would have otherwise died.
I think they're okay with possible problems.
Maybe unproven a long way down the road.
Entomology professor Jonathan Sheffey, quote, Once in someone's body, it can take decades to eliminate it.
DDT also crosses the placenta and is found in breast milk, so developing fetuses and children will be exposed if their mothers are exposed.
Although there is some uncertainty, the potential impacts of DDT on human health, wildlife, and the ecology are real.
Okay, the word real and the word potential are not synonyms.
A potential threat is not the same as a real threat.
As recently as September 2006, the World Health Organization declared its support for the indoor use of DDT in African countries, where malaria remains a major health problem.
The World Health Organization said the benefits of the pesticide outweighed the health and environmental risks, but their pleas fell on deaf ears.
Analyst Nizam Ahmad, quote, The resurgence of a disease that was almost eradicated many years ago is a case study in the danger of putting concern for nature above concern for people.
Former United States Surgeon General Harold M. Koenig Rachel Carson and those who joined her in the crusade against DDT have contributed to millions of preventable deaths.
Used responsibly, DDT can be quite safe for man and the environment.
Most politicians today are more concerned about getting re-elected rather than doing what is right.
Many of them have very poor scientific backgrounds and do not understand the impact of the policy decisions they are making and are not able to teach their constituents that there will be severe consequences to their decisions.
These poor public policies are being implemented because it is easier for politicians to go along with the noise coming from the hysterics rather than to learn the whole story And educate the general electorate that there are ways agents like DDT can be used safely.
Banning DDT worldwide is beyond ignorance.
It is just plain stupid.
Very, very rough estimates.
Between 20 and 50 million deaths have occurred due to the banning of DDT. So look, I mean, here in the West, We got safe from disease!
We used DDT, we eliminated it, you know, like the way that we went through the rather smoky bacon-flavored industrial revolution and now want to ban other people from burning fossil fuels.
So we got past that particular pass, we crossed that Rubicon, we threaded that needle, and now we're on the other side and we're safe from most of these diseases.
But that's not the case in the third world.
This pathological altruism where all you want to do is give yourself a double hernia by patting yourself on the back for your moral highness and moral perfection and I ban DDT, it's bad for people.
This is pathological.
You're just chasing the dopamine of moral self-congratulation.
You're not actually out there trying to do good for people.
These people in the third world need, in my opinion, this Pesticide to get rid of these mosquitoes that are currently holding them back in Stone Age circumstances.
And pouring all the money in the world into these countries without dealing with the disease problem is to me a complete waste of time and energy.
Worse than that.
Look, Richard Nixon, a lot of people in the 60s and 70s, Richard Nixon in particular, was an outspoken advocate of depopulation measures.
It's not an accident that three years after This stuff happened.
You got Roe v Wade and the legalization of abortion.
Zero population growth.
It was a big thing when I was growing up.
Of course the best contraception is industrialization, which you're not going to have in these third world conditions.
It also shows you the degree to which foreign aid is a dictatorship.
Foreign aid allows foreign governments to be dependent not on their own people, so they're actually responsive to their own people.
It allows governments to be dependent on aid from the first world.
It's a great way of sending The money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
And the degree to which it dictates policy overseas is horrendous.
It is a massive bribe which has resulted in the destruction of so many third world economies and the almost virtually complete separation of political responsibility to any of your constituents because you don't get your money from taxes you get it from foreign government so that's who you care about and if they say ban DDT too bad you ban DDT too bad for your local population you're not dependent on them anyway it also makes of course governments a massive prize to be gained by a wide variety of warlords all climbing over each other's backs using usually Western or at least First
world sold weapons to themselves to get a hold of the price of third world governments because of the amount of foreign aid pouring in.
And it does, of course, smack quite a little bit.
I hate to use the R word, but it's hard to avoid it.
It does smack quite a little bit of racism.
I mean, can you imagine if there was some epidemic running through a first world country, running through England or Canada or America, And there was a spray that could eliminate it within 10 months.
But there were some questions about its health effects decades down the road.
They'd use it.
Of course they would.
And the degree to which These deaths of black people and brown people overseas don't show up on the radar because everybody's worried about the bald eagle.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm thoroughly vested in the survivability and flourishing of bald life forms, but this is not the way that we go about actually helping the world.
This hysteria, which has been repeated over and over and over again in the environmental movement, has to stop.
We have to push back with the facts.
We have to push back with the outrage.
And we have to start demanding That the environmental movement start to take responsibility and ownership for the bodies its moral posturing has produced, which outrank many of the wars combined in the 20th century.
