Google puts up specialized artwork known as “Google Doodles” on their homepage, to mark various occasions. Sometimes, they get criticized for letting major holidays slip past without commemoration. They didn’t do anything for Memorial Day until angry users shamed them into adding a little American flag and yellow ribbon to their standard homepage logo, late in the afternoon.
However, the day after Memorial Day, Google threw up a full-blown Doodle of custom artwork to mark an occasion they clearly thought was far more important than Memorial Day: the 107th birthday of Rachel Carson, a liar and environmentalist hysteric who killed millions of people with a book.
That book was called “Silent Spring,” and it was sort of a dry run for the politicized junk science we’ve grown accustomed to today. It was a beta test for global warming hysteria, providing a template for environmentalist radicals to follow, and an early “success” for them to celebrate.
Over 60 million innocent people paid for that “success” with their lives. Carson used manipulated data and false claims to portray the pesticide DDT as an unbearable threat to nature, a toxic chemical that would wipe out various bird species by causing their eggs to have abnormally thin shells. It wasn’t true — her claims could not withstand scientific analysis. Even using amounts of pesticide a hundred times higher than anything that would ever be encountered in nature, biologists could not reproduce the thin egg shells Carson warned about. She was even wrong about the populations of the bird species she said were on the verge of extinction. The Environmental Protection Agency reviewed her work in the 1970s and concluded DDT should not be banned.
But she went even further, claiming in her book that DDT threatened the survival of every living creature on Earth. A big, evil corporation stood to lose millions under a ban, so anyone who spoke up for DDT was dismissed as a corporate stooge. The EPA administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled his own agency to impose a ban.
And millions of people died as a result, because DDT was the only effective way to control the population of malarial mosquitoes. Malaria ran wild in Africa without it. The Western world did OK, because DDT has already wiped out the transmission system for malaria before the ban.
The mythology of Carson and “Silent Spring” is protected by popular culture, because they understand the danger of admitting she was wrong, her book was deliberately false, and the “fix” for the problem she wrote about filled a sea of body bags. We don’t want kids hearing the real story of “Silent Spring” and having dark thoughts about today’s hyper-politicized phony “settled science” of climate change, do we? But at least people like Google could spare us the hideous insult of commemorating a monstrous fraud like Rachel Carson, with a picture that makes her look like a noble and innocent champion of the Earth.
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