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Thread: Important: whistle blown on pesticide use.

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    Default Important: whistle blown on pesticide use.

    This is important!


    A Valuable Reputation
    After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him.
    by Rachel Aviv February 10, 2014



    In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

    Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

    Hayes continued studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta representatives were following him to conferences around the world. He worried that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. He complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back of the room, taking notes. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at a different hotel each night. He was still in touch with a few Syngenta scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. To confuse them, he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while he was travelling. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents in sealed boxes. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had “risked my reputation, my name . . . some say even my life, for what I thought (and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”



    http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all
    During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

    George Orwell

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    DigitalDave (02-26-2014)

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    http://graphics8.nytimes.com/package...trazine&st=cse

    The most glaring flaw in the EPA’s analysis of the
    monitoring data for community water systems is its
    exclusive focus on long-period running averages, rather
    than peak atrazine concentrations. The EPA decided to
    focus on a 90-day running average TCT concentration
    to decide whether to order atrazine manufacturers to
    take risk mitigation measures and they ignored the
    peak concentrations of atrazine detected. However,
    the occurrence of peaks of atrazine contamination
    may be just as important as the level of contamination
    over many months. Overwhelming data described in
    this report show that amphibians raised in atrazinecontaminated
    water for days or weeks show serious and
    irreversible effects, particularly on male reproductive
    development. Because human fetuses also develop in
    a completely aquatic environment, we are naturally
    concerned about the risk of adverse human health
    effects associated with atrazine contamination. Rather
    than be concerned about finding 54 public drinking
    water systems with peak concentrations of atrazine in
    the finished water exceeding 3 ppb, the EPA ignored
    those findings and instead focused on 90-day average
    concentrations of TCT which never exceeded the
    screening level in any public water system. Relying on
    the average concentration of TCT obfuscates the real
    problem—that is, that high peak concentrations of
    atrazine are occurring in finished drinking water. (See
    box on page 16 for example.)
    Forbes Op-Ed saying Hayes is a 'junk scientist': http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentin.../08/19/1577/2/

    My Opinion:
    Seems like there is a lot going on here, and until I see something proving atrazine is not harmful, I will just stay away from it as best I can. Unfortunately, I may have no choice if it's in our drinking water. I would have hoped we erred on the side of caution... rather than try to save 6 bushels per acre of corn. I'm no fan of the EPA's stance on this.
    You Are Not So Smart Podcast - A celebration of Self-Delusion

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    Default

    Oh no.....not Obama's EPA.....not Lisa Jackson...not Gina McCarthy
    Put blame where it belongs
    ATF decided it could not regulate bump stocks during the Obama administration.
    It that time," the NRA wrote in a statement. "The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations."
    The ATF and Obama admin. ignored the NRA recommendations.


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    Default Important: whistle blown on pesticide use.

    Well what colored folks libbies can't kill off with the KKK and abortion they use the banning of DDT. Who really cares about all the dead colored folk right libbies?

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    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by DigitalDave View Post
    http://graphics8.nytimes.com/package...trazine&st=cse



    Forbes Op-Ed saying Hayes is a 'junk scientist': http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentin.../08/19/1577/2/

    My Opinion:
    Seems like there is a lot going on here, and until I see something proving atrazine is not harmful, I will just stay away from it as best I can. Unfortunately, I may have no choice if it's in our drinking water. I would have hoped we erred on the side of caution... rather than try to save 6 bushels per acre of corn. I'm no fan of the EPA's stance on this.

    Here's something of note on Mr. Entine:

    Jon Entine, "Over-Regulation Fever at the White House," Forbes (Feb. 9, 2012) (Entine is one of the people mentioned in the unsealed documents as a potential "third party" spokesperson for atrazine, as noted in the PRWatch article available here.)

    http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php...razine_Exposed

    What's scary is the lengths that the company went to demonize/discredit & ruin this guy just so they could continue to make a buck. Had it not been for a class suit, they might have gotten away with it entirely.

    Yep, we are in agreement on this regarding the EPA.
    Last edited by Taichiliberal; 02-27-2014 at 05:11 PM.
    During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

    George Orwell

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    Quote Originally Posted by NOVA View Post
    Oh no.....not Obama's EPA.....not Lisa Jackson...not Gina McCarthy
    Check the dates....The Shrub's & Obama's EPA....no one is clean on this one.
    During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

    George Orwell

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    Quote Originally Posted by Teflon Don View Post
    Well what colored folks libbies can't kill off with the KKK and abortion they use the banning of DDT. Who really cares about all the dead colored folk right libbies?

    WTF are you babbling on about now? Check the dates, ya fool.....this went on under the Shrub & Obama. Nothing in this article supports your insane rhetoric about a liberal agenda of genocide. Hell, the article is NOT race specific about the poisoning of EVERYONE'S water. That the professor happens to be black seems to have kick started your rabid racists bent. Grow up.
    During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

    George Orwell

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