Tuesday, August 31, 2010

BUGS. The Ole Perfesser hears about the resurgence of bedbugs, and blames Obama:
"...The reasonable course, Dr. Goddard said, is to recognize that we are, in effect, back in the 1920s ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite’ era. People should be aware, but not panicky.”

They told me if I voted for John McCain, America would be taken back to the 1920s. And they were right!
He also quotes a reader:
What a horribly defeatist article. The “future is grim” and we are “back in the ’20’s ” with no proffered solutions? Parsing the lines, apparently there are some pesticides that work, but we are not told what they are. I guess we are supposed to not ask questions and suffer through this plague. This is a perfect metaphor for the Obama age.
These guys suffer badly from Susan Smith Syndrome.

Public service department: The Perfesser has in the past declared DDT is a cure for bedbugs ("Bringing back DDT would solve this problem"); here he lets a quote from the Times about DDT hang without comment. Confusion on this issue is sometimes found on political sites where commenters try to spread the word that Rachel Carson, in addition to being a mass murderer, condemned us all to life with bedbugs.

So let's hand it off to the folks at New York vs. Bed Bugs (h/t reader Hob), who know what they're talking about:
In a March 2008 Bedbugger interview, Texas A & M research scientist James W. Austin noted the continued resistance to DDT (emphasis added):
While screening multiple populations of bed bugs against various insecticides we have found virtually all populations were 100% resistant to DDT. This is not a surprise given that the first observances of DDT resistance were noted almost 50 years ago. It is a little surprising that they continue to be so completely resistant to DDT.
It's not just about global warming denialism -- conservatives treat science like they treat everything else: As an occasion to work on their lying skills.

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