July 28, 2003
When it comes to getting people to dig into their pockets, lies and hype make for effective strategy.
Animal rights activists are masters at tapping the public through human emotion. Now we have the Malibu California Sea Shepherd Conservation Society branding Newfoundlander sealers as monsters of the most perverse breed.
Paul Watson, one of the environmentalists who also founded Greenpeace, founded the radical environmental group in 1977.
The controversy-a-minute Watson has a lot to say about a lot of things. This is what he has to say about our east coast friends: "The Newfoundland sealers have a game called head hockey, where they use a baby seal’s head instead of a puck."
John Efford, MP for Bonavista-Trinitu-Conception, said the head hockey story is unfounded.
"This is total fabrication and lies," Efford said.
There is always a method to Watson’s madness, and this time it appears to be cashing in on the anti-Olympic movement.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is planning an advertising campaign to depict seal clubbing and shooting as an Olympic event.
It seems that no one from Watson’s former home turf of Vancouver bothered to check in with him on that city’s successful Olympic bid.
The games, scheduled for February and March, coincide with the time the seal hunt begins off Canada’s East Coast.
"These dates fall at the exact time that the notoriously cruel, largest marine mammal slaughter in the world takes place on the East Coast of Canada," the Society said in a statement on its website. "The Olympics will be hosted by the province of British Columbia, where the government is calling for a slaughter of seals and sea lions."
Reg Anstey, secretary-treasurer of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers’ union, said the society’s campaign is simply an effort to raise funds.
"This group has no concept of what we do here, and they don’t really care," Anstey said.
Meanwhile, Watson, who comes from the same generation as Bridgett Bardot, could be Bardot in drag.
If the papers don't care, invent a scare
From ConsumerFreedom.com daily headlines, another gem, this one is making ordinary tap water part of the "lunatic conspiracy targets." "If you thought that a loony obsession with malevolent forces spiking our drinking water was limited to fictional characters from "Dr. Strangelove," think again. Such characters are very real--and they belong to the extreme environmental movement. National Review reports that the same crowd who brought you the entirely unfounded hysteria over Lear on apples and falsely accused biotech corn of mass-murdering monarch butterflies, is now warning of a deadly substance that nameless, faceless government officials are putting in your tap water: fluoride.
"An enviro-coalition called the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) has dedicated itself to ending "fluoridation of public water supplies worldwide." One of FAN’s founders was the late David Brower, the founder of Earth Island Institute and Friends of the Earth. Brower was executive director of the Sierra Club to boot.
"While not an official member of FAN, the Sierra Club warns that there are "valid concerns" about fluoride in water. Not to be left out, perennial presidential candidate Ralph Nader took a stance that would make the John Birch Society proud, arguing that "if the only objective" of fluoridation is to prevent tooth decay in children, "You don’t expose all people to fluoridated water." (It’s only the children, after all!)
"No matter that the fluoridation of tap water reduces tooth decay by as much as 60 percent among children, and 35 percent among adults, according to the American Dental Association (ADA). Extremists claim that fluoridation contributes to a medley of health problems, from broken bones to sterility. But the ADA and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention both state that fluoridation is "safe and effective." The American Medical Association also endorses the process.
So how come the radical greens have picked up where the John Birch Society left off? Actually, opposition to fluoridation is a no-brainer when you slavishly follow the Golden Rule of Environmentalism: The ‘Precautionary Principle’.
"In practice, the Principle means that no action should be taken that could even possibly cause health or environmental damage, no matter how remote the chances or weak the evidence.
"According to FAN, the precautionary principle dictates "that we stop putting fluoride into our drinking water…We cannot wait for everything to be proved to a certainty before we act…simply put, ‘If in doubt leave it out.’ Of course, such one-sided risk analysis ignores that fluoridation is itself a ‘precaution’ against tooth decay.
"While we appreciate the Jesse Jackson-like patter of ‘when in doubt leave it out’, we’d like to suggest a few more honest alternatives:
Meanwhile, does FAN remember what happened to the children of third world countries when hysteria saw chlorine removed from their drinking water?
Science weighs in on climate change
It’s been a tough year for junk science, the non-facts pumped out by media friends of radical environmentalists.
For the Kyoto crowd, the sky is falling.
"For most of the world’s plant life, the effect of the pace of climate change over the past two decades has been productive, according to an analysis of climate and satellite data collected between 1982 and 1999." (National Geographic News, June 2003).
The research, reported in the June 6 issue of Science, addresses the question of how global vegetation has responded to changes in precipitation, temperature, and cloud cover patterns. Such climate factors determine how vegetation grows.
Previous studies have looked at vegetation’s response to climate change at regional scales, but this is the first study to look at it from a global perspective.
"This is the first global representation of climate changes and how they might influence vegetation," said Ramakrishna Nemani, a climate change researcher at the University of Montana in Missoula, who led the study.
According to the analysis, global climate change has eased climatic constraints on plant life around the globe, allowing vegetation to increase 6 percent over the study period.
Still king of the crayon set
Environmentalist scare tactics notwithstanding, Oreo cookies are here to stay. Along with Kool-Aid, the Oreo will forever be a part of summer for kids.
Nutrition nannies were dealt a setback when a California lawyer withdrew a lawsuit to ban Oreo cookies, on the basis they are made with substances called trans fatty acids or "trans fats". So, we might add, is margarine, a product touted as better for you than butter by food cops over the last three decades.
The black and white Oreo, king of the crayon set, found itself briefly in the same rank as the fast food war zone, but survived.
Meanwhile, while save-the-environment throngs are sticking to their tofu, milk and cookies remain in the nursery.
The return of Erin Brockovich
Erin Brockovich, portrayed by Julia Roberts in a Hollywood movie named after her, may be making a return to the silver screen.
Brokovich, whose investigation into illnesses caused by contaminated water in the Mojave Desert town of Hinckley, Calif., led to a $333 million settlement in 1996 from Pacific Gas and Electric Company, has turned her attention to Beverly Hills High School.
Twenty-one former students are now plaintiffs in a Los Angeles Superior lawsuit, charging that Hodgkin’s disease and other illnesses have been the result of an oil derrick rising high above the campus of their school.
Two of the plaintiffs are already dead from cancer. Their families, and the 19 surviving former students, are suing about two dozen oil and energy companies, utilities, and subsidiaries that have operated or been partners on the site. The suit alleges wrongful death and negligence.
Lawyers involved in the case also said they expected the Beverly Hills Unified School District to be added as a defendant soon.