Insect apocalypse: Call to restrict pesticide ‘more toxic than DDT’

For a start, the toxicity of DDT has been greatly exaggerated. In large concentrations it causes adverse effects such as eggshell thinning in some birds but it is completely NON-toxic to people. Populations of many birds allegedly affected by DDT continue to decline depite the banning of DDT so that suggests that the "guilt" of DDT has been exaggerated

And the harm caused to birds has to be balanced by the benefits it has conferred on people. By destroying moquitoes, for instance, it has saved many lives that would have otherwise been lost to malaria.

In September 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared its support for the indoor use of DDT in African countries where malaria remains a major health problem, citing that benefits of the pesticide outweigh the health and environmental risks.

And DDT remains the one really effective eradicator of bedbugs

The studies below which find a diminution in some insect populations completely ignore two causes of the decline which are NOT attributable to agricultural pesticides:

1). Habitat loss. As more and more land is taken over for farming and urban use there is inevitably a loss of habitat for species previously present on that land.

2). People exert considerable effort to eradicate pest insects such as mosquitoes and flies. Other species could get caught up in that. And people are NOT going to become suddenly tolerant of mosquito bites etc

So the alleged link to neonic use is simply not established by the frequency studies set out below


Noticed fewer moths fluttering around outside lights in the evening or that butterflies seem less frequent visitors? Or that your car’s windscreen remains clearer of the haze of dead flies after a long journey than it used to? Part of the problem appears to point towards the use of a range of pesticides called neonicotinoids which Australian authorities are accused of being slow to regulate.

Ecologist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo from environmental sciences at Sydney University pulled together 100 long-term studies of the global fortunes of insects. He concluded that worldwide an average 37 per cent of species were declining, while populations of 18 per cent were increasing – those were agricultural herbivores and nuisance pests. Aquatic insect communities like mayflies, midges and sedges were even worse off: 42 per cent of species were declining and 29 per cent increasing.

The review threw up some interesting highlights. In northern NSW (Murwillumbah, north of Byron Bay), sampled for butterflies over 23 years, the overall abundance of 21 species declined by 57 per cent due to human disturbance.

Changes among 46 butterfly species in a peripheral urban landscape near Melbourne studied since 1941 found 36 to 48 per cent of species declined since 1981.

In Denmark, a small farmland area was sampled using the “windscreen splash” method between 1997 and 2017. Overall abundance of flying insects that crashed car windscreens declined 97 per cent along a 25 -kilometre road.

Sanchez-Bayo said: “In the 1990s, when I used to go to the Macquarie Marshes [north of Dubbo] to do research, as anyone who drove for a few hours to the countryside at that time would know, you had to stop to clean the windscreen. You don’t have to do that any more.

“In the case of Melbourne, the number of butterflies declined due to urbanisation, they were common years ago, but now they are just disappearing. We are talking about global declines, in Finland, Indonesia and the Amazon, everywhere. There is massive abuse with pesticides and other chemicals, fertilisers and so on which have contaminated the environment affecting mainly aquatic insects.”

One particular branch of pesticides, the neonicotinoids (also known as neonics) are used to treat seeds before planting and are claimed to increase crop yields. Scientists are now comparing neonicotinoids with DDT, of which the devastating effects on wildlife were revealed in the 1960s.

Roger Kitching, on the conservation committee of the Australian Entomological Society, says DDT affected vertebrates, particularly birds, but now, equally, insects deserve to be a major cause for concern due to their part in the food chain.

“The substitution of the range of earlier pesticides for the current generation of neonics and others is particularly bad for insect fauna,” he said. “These pesticides are systemic, that is they act from within plants, they are persistent, water-soluble and are very general in the species they target.

“When insects decline in ecosystems there are knock-on effects because of their roles as bird food, pollination vectors, plant munchers and so on – even though neonics do not impact vertebrates directly they have measurable impacts through these food-chain effects.”

In June, US ecologist Mike Miller, who works for Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, told a fly-fishing podcast that he had found neonics in randomly selected waterways throughout the state. He said a lethal dose of neonics the size of a sugar grain was enough to kill 125,000 honey bees.

“One of those little paper sachets holds between 3 -4 grams of sugar and the comparable amount of neonics is enough to kill 600 million honey bees,” he said. “Neonics are thought to be 7000 times more toxic than DDT.”

The podcast host, fly-fishing guru Tom Rosenbauer, said: “It seems like in the past 10 years or so you hear so many fly-fishers complaining that the hatches [of insects] aren’t what they used to be. There seems to have been a dramatic decline in insects since neonics became popular.”

Miller’s comments were based on a scientific paper by ecologist Dave Goulson published a decade ago, called An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticide. Goulson, now at Sussex University, said 5 grams was enough to kill half of 1.25 billion bees and leave the other half just alive [known as an LD50 dose].

“While that figure is accurate, the levels of neonics found in the environment are pretty low and a bee would have to consume several CCs [cubic centimetres] of nectar to get a lethal dose, which it might do in its lifetime, but not in a morning,” he said. “The evidence we have is that bees are probably consuming less than a lethal dose, but that doesn’t mean that we can all breathe a sigh of relief that all is well.

“There is evidence that sub-lethal doses can seriously mess up the bees in a whole bunch of different ways – reduce their fertility, their ability to navigate and their resistance to disease. If their disease-resistance is knocked out by exposure to a pesticide, and then they are exposed to a virus transmitted by the Varroa mite, then there are many people who believe it does explain why bee colonies are collapsing.

“For an aquatic insect, you are not drinking the pesticide, you are bathing in it. The evidence is that anything over about 1 part per billion in a stream, which is the level which is commonly exceeded, it is enough to be impacting on aquatic insects when they are exposed to it 24/7.”

Asked if he felt Australia was behind other countries in regulating neonics, he added: “That would seem to be the case, the European regulators are pretty slow to act, but they thought the evidence was sufficiently compelling five years ago to act, and lots of other countries have followed suit in various ways. Within the developed world, Australia would appear to be at the tail end of the queue to do something about neonics. To ignore the evidence, I think, is probably foolish.

“There is a perception that we banned the really nasty pesticides years ago, we got rid of DDT and modern pesticides are better, but in some senses modern pesticides are much more dangerous because we have invented compounds that are far, far more poisonous to insect life, it means less of them has to go astray, into rivers or whatever, to do harm.

Australian scientists have also found imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid) in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef and the reef lagoon. Professor Michael Warne at the School of the Environment, University of Queensland in a research study of 6500 samples from 14 Great Barrier Reef catchment areas found the average concentration of imidacloprid was 0.051 µg/L (micrograms/litre) between July 2009 and June 2017. That concentration is 2.5 times higher than that found in a study of Dutch rivers, which led to an annual decrease in insectivorous bird populations of 3.5 per cent.

In a paper published a year ago, Warne wrote that within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area that imidacloprid was used to control canegrubs in sugarcane and the banana weevil borer in banana crops. He said that in a not yet published work by UQ and Department of Environment and Science suggests the risks from imidacloprid since 2017 may have stabilised or decreased, in part through education programs conducted in collaboration with some industry groups.

But he said: “There are many water samples where the concentration exceeds the proposed Australian and New Zealand water quality guideline for ecosystem protection from imidacloprid.”

Imidacloprids were restricted by the EU in 2018. In June last year, New York State moved to pass the Birds and Bees Protection Act, a first-in-the-nation bill to rein in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The Natural Resources Defence Council said in a statement: “Neonics are linked to massive bee and bird losses that impact food production, contaminate New York water and soil, and create human health concerns, especially with recent testing showing rising levels of neonics in 95+ per cent of pregnant women from New York and four other states.”

Pesticides use here is governed by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA). It updated its website page on neonicotinoids in May and lists six neonics approved for agricultural use in Australia. It published a report in 2014 and then announced a review in 2019. It states three of the six neonic pesticides used here were restricted in April 2018 in the European Union to greenhouse use only.

A spokesperson for the APVMA said in a statement: “The APVMA commenced its review of neonicotinoids in 2019 to allow for the consideration of new scientific information about risks to the environment, and to ensure safety instructions on products meet contemporary standards.

“Based on the statutory timeframes, the review is due to be completed in August 2023. The APVMA anticipates publication of proposed regulatory decisions during 2024 and has assigned additional resources to chemical review activities, including the use of external scientific reviewers to progress reviews as rapidly as possible.” However, there has been no update to the statement last May.

The authority was subject of a damning independent report in July which said it was “concerning that a number of chemical reviews have been ongoing for over 20 years”. It said the APVMA appeared reluctant to take compliance and enforcement action against industry.

Recent changes to the APVMA’s staff profile following the relocation of its offices from Canberra to Armidale in 2019, “has most likely impacted corporate knowledge, workload, and work capacity. Only a small proportion of previous APVMA staff relocated”.

Sanchez-Bayo said the APVMA was way behind schedule. “We are behind in many ways and how long it will take them to come up with a final decision we don’t know,” he said. “It is under-resourced and behind the times.

“My understanding is that the APVMA does not have enough staff, they are not properly trained in these issues, there has been a lot of turnover in the last few years. They are not producing the results they are expected to produce.”

Eddie Tsyrlin, a freshwater ecologist and waterbug taxonomist, estimates that as many as to 2000 species of freshwater invertebrates could have already been lost.

“The Ecological Safety section of Safety Data Sheet [for neonics] states that ‘these chemicals are very toxic to aquatic organisms, may cause long-term adverse effects to the aquatic environment’.
“For the adequate protection of Australian fish and invertebrates, testing needs to be done on pollution-sensitive and common species of freshwater invertebrates occurring in streams as well as in still waters. These could be mayfly and stonefly nymphs and sensitive species of midges.”

https://www.smh.com.au/national/insect-apocalypse-call-to-restrict-pesticide-more-toxic-than-ddt-20230630-p5dknk.html

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‘It’s hot in summer’: Councils laughable excuse for cancelling Australia Day tradition

More than 80 councils have cancelled traditional Australia Day citizenship ceremonies out of respect for Indigenous people.

A decision by some of the 81 councils to move the dates of citizenship ceremonies away from January 26 due to “heat” has come under fire, being labelled a “cop-out”.

On Wednesday, City of Sydney councillor and president of the Australian Local Government Association, Linda Scott, said the decision was brought on by heat for some councils.

“I’ve heard from councils who said that sometimes they don’t have citizens to be made on Australia Day, sometimes the heat is a problem,” she told 2GB on Wednesday.

However, many are moving the ceremonies just days either side of Australia Day – a national celebration becoming increasingly contentious.

“For many different reasons, councils have outlined their challenges in holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day, but there’s 537 councils; they’re all very different,” Cr Scott added.

“And many of them, of course, still take great pride in holding their citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day.”

Cr Scott’s response to the move has drawn backlash from those looking to preserve the national January 26 celebration.

2GB’s Mark Levy, standing in for Ben Fordham, immediately labelled the assertion that some councils were moving ceremonies due to heat “rubbish” and “wokeism”.

“Last year it was four councils; this year it’s 81 councils, all because Anthony Albanese and his government got rid of the rule that was put in place by the Morison government for councils to have their citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day,” Levy said.

“Why are they trying to divide the nation when we are trying to unite Australia? It’s a cop-out.”

Levy raised the issue and Ms Scott’s heat “excuse” again on Thursday morning’s program while talking to Indigenous No campaigner Warren Mundine, who also laughed off the assertion.

“That’s hilarious … Welcome to Australia, it’s hot in summer,” he laughed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

“It’s supposed to be a day to bring us all together, but these councils and other people – they don’t care.”

In 2022, only four councils across Australia chose not to hold Australia Day citizenship ceremonies — three in Melbourne and the City of Sydney.

But a year later, it was revealed that 81 councils will not hold citizenship ­ceremonies on January 26.

The change follows a decision by the Albanese government in December 2022 to revoke a rule that would effectively force local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day.

Prime Minister Albanese had said even though the government had given councils a choice, they should continue to conduct them, pledging: “I support Australia Day.”

He rejected charges from the opposition that his government was determined to kill Australia Day, firmly saying: “There are no changes here”.

Sydney Mayor Clover Moore has led the charge against celebrating Australia Day at a local government level, describing the day as “painful” for many.

Cr Moore said the City of Sydney will be holding ceremonies on January 29 instead, in line with the new government code, just as they did this year.

She said ceremonies formerly held on January 26 in the City of Sydney had low turnouts of only 10-15 people, while their new January 29 date is expected to see 160 people become Australian citizens.

According to TheDaily Telegraph, the surge in council’s choosing not to mark the country’s national day prompted accusations from opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan that the Albanese government “is laying the groundwork” for its abolition.

Ms Moore also put her full support behind changing the date of Australia Day, claiming that “the date of a national celebration should not be on Invasion Day”.

However, some councils are reported blowback.

Bundaberg councillor Greg Barnes told The Courier Mail the revelation the region had moved the date prompted fury among locals, with residents voicing their opposition to the move at a public appearance on Saturday morning.

Mr Barnes said he got “absolutely hammered” by residents about the issue, and insisted the ceremony will be held the day before January 26 to allow all councillors to attend the event.

He said he was supportive of the national celebration, declaring: “Australia Day to me is Australia Day”.

Rockhampton Mayor Tony Williams said his council also planned to hold the ceremony the evening before to avoid severe heat at outdoor events, citing an instance at last year’s Australia Day where an attendee suffered heat stroke.

He also insisted the decision was unrelated to Indigenous concerns, saying “that wasn’t part of the thinking”.

https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/its-hot-in-summer-councils-laughable-excuse-for-cancelling-australia-day-tradition/news-story/37ef04c14c1ca5d92cb460984755d6a9

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How the ABC welcomed the New Year

The defining event of 2023 was the defeat of Labor’s Voice to Parliament. While this was a source of great satisfaction to the 61 per cent of the population that voted ‘no’ that resounding majority almost certainly didn’t include anyone at the national broadcaster.

Still in high dudgeon at being forced to submit to the indignity of abiding by the democratically expressed will of the people, the ABC and the City of Sydney council seemed to have decided to turn New Year’s Eve into a dirge for the dead Voice.

The evening started on a sombre note with a smoking ceremony on a boat appropriately named Tribal Warrior and of course there was a ‘Welcome to Country’. (It might be a new year but it’s the same old ABC.)

The council renamed the 9 pm children’s fireworks ‘Calling Country’. To get into the spirit, the ABC featured a First Nations hip hop ‘supergroup’ called 3% because Aboriginals represent 3 per cent of the population. Three per cent also seemed to represent the level of positive feedback the group received after singing a song about the Voice that castigated Australians for voting ‘no’, called them ‘sick’, and said the country was going ‘backward’. It also included family-friendly lyrics such as ‘You can suck my Moby D**k’ which, at the last minute was changed to ‘You can sink this Moby ship’.

No wonder the audience was confused. ‘What on earth was that’ asked one puzzled viewer who concluded that the ABC had ‘managed to make their coverage even worse this year’.

‘Who at ABC Australia thought it was a good idea to put an awful rap group on before the early kids fireworks and then spend a large chunk of the fireworks just showing projections on the Bridge,’ wondered another viewer. The projections featured ‘referendum-type messages’ wrote an angry parent. The lyrics included, ‘They stole the land in the name of their kings’ and ‘They locked us up and they threw away the key’.

‘The illegal fireworks in my suburb are more entertaining’ wrote an exasperated viewer.

The performance by the electro-pop band Confidence Man also fell short of audience expectations. According to Triple J, Confidence Man set up a club in their backyard called ‘The F*ck Bunker’ and recorded a ‘J Lo slut jam’ called ‘Toy Boy’. The key lyrics were, ‘Rub you down in butter and I serve you on a plate / They say there are seven wonders but my toy boy makes it eight.’ The ABC thought this an appropriate choice for an audience that included a large number of under-12-year-olds. The viewers were not impressed.

‘What is this sh*te…’ asked one. ‘Why are these dopes even bothering, if they are straight out lip-synching horribly,’ said a second. ‘Is this a Rock Eisteddfod secondary school national comp?’ chimed in a third.’Is that Sacha Baron Cohen punking us’ wondered a fourth.‘It’s like a year six talent quest performance,’ said a fifth. The definitive judgment was: ‘This techno, synth, prancing, fake, lip syncing, narcissistic, vacuous crap is f*k*n dreadful!!! Throw them in the harbour!’

And so the evening plodded on.

Singer Angie McMahon told the families that ‘Palestinians should be free’ but viewers were more interested in being free of Angie.

‘Get Angie McMahon, the wannabe activist, OFF!!! ’, wrote one. ‘What a disgrace!! Political activism everywhere,’ commented another. ‘Whatever happened to a fun night out for all without a painful political statements,’ lamented a third.

‘It’s nothing but government propaganda and full of the woke agenda. No thanks. The greatest waste of taxpayer money. #Defund ABC,’ demanded a fourth.

The sneaking suspicion that the ABC was deliberately ruining the evening occurred to more than one person. ‘Is ABC trying to put us to sleep?!? I’ve heard better music at a funeral’ wrote a despairing viewer. ‘At the rate we are going, I think everyone is going to fall asleep and miss the fireworks this year,’ said another. ‘Worst NYE broadcast ever, turned that crap off. ABC what a joke and whoever organised the whole NYE fireworks it’s the worst I’ve ever witnessed. Turned it off immediately once I realised it was just another woke st*tshow,’ fumed a third. ‘Seriously, what is going on,’ asked MicStaman. ‘I found a button on my remote that makes this concert bearable. It’s called the mute button.’

If this wasn’t enough to put a dampener on your evening, the fun-loving clerics in western Sydney slammed New Year’s Eve as a ‘celebration of foreskin’. Yes, you read that right. Abu Ousayd gave a sermon at Bankstown’s Al Madina Dawah Centre on Friday, in which he claimed that New Year’s Day was a ‘day of circumcision’.

‘I’m sorry to say this but you are celebrating a piece of foreskin’ he explained fastidiously. ‘How low can the Muslim community stoop that we are celebrating a piece of flesh that is cut and thrown away,’ he asked. ‘Flocking to watch the fireworks, staying up until midnight in the city. The infidels on New Year’s Eve turn and kiss each other at midnight… keep away from them!’ he warned.

Footage also emerged of another Sydney cleric, sheikh Ahmed Zoud, who delivered a 35-minute anti-Semitic tirade at Lakemba’s As-Sunnah mosque on December 22, on ‘the truth of the Jews’. ‘The most important characteristic of the Jews,’ he said ‘is that they are thirsty for bloodshed… Another characteristic of Jews is betrayal and treachery, an inherent trait… The Jews (will always) remain the Jews, the days nor years change them’.

With sermons like these being delivered on a regular basis in Australian mosques, no one should be surprised that two Australian brothers who were killed by Israeli air strikes in southern Lebanon turned out to be Hezbollah jihadists. The ABC, of course, was the last station to twig that the brothers were not tourists but terrorists.

We should also not be surprised intelligence agencies fear that more Australians will follow in the brothers’ footsteps and that they fear there are plans for violent attacks in Australia inspired by the war in Gaza.

So, while the government pursues its agenda of censoring its political opponents and anyone else that challenges its narrative, and the woke cancel anyone of whom they disapprove, no one cares or dares to silence the anti-Semitic, anti-Western vitriol that is spouted with impunity in Australian mosques by terrorist sympathisers.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/unhappy-woke-new-year

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Time you’re told the truth about the economy

You cannot suddenly print a heap of new money without devaluing all money. That is inflation, that is high prices and that is the doing of governments

The Prime Minister held his first media conference for the year on Wednesday, flagging cost-of-living relief for Australians doing it tough. They are doing it tough because of unnecessarily high inflation, which isn’t coming down nearly quickly enough.

Failures of fiscal and monetary policy settings sit alongside economic reform neglect. Unfortunately, the PM’s solution to their woes will elongate the high inflationary times we’re living through, reducing the chances of interest rate cuts this year.

While Anthony Albanese deployed rhetoric to stipulate that he didn’t want to stoke inflation when providing cost-of-living relief, anyone with the most basic understanding of economics knows that’s all but impossible. The PM said people are “feeling pressure as a result of global inflation”. Global inflation? Actually, inflation is back under control in most like-for-like nations around the world. Here, however, it is too high, at 5.4 per cent. That’s because of domestic policy settings, which we will return to shortly.

If the government spent as much time working to solve national problems as it does spinning falsities, voters might have more respect for the job they currently aren’t doing.

Choose your country of comparison: Canada’s inflation rate is 3.1 per cent; in the United States it is also 3.1 per cent. The UK is 3.9 per cent, Germany 3.2 per cent, France 3.5 per cent.

Across Europe, inflation averages just 2.4 per cent. With my Dutch heritage, I’ll throw in The Netherlands too, at 1.6 per cent.

Closer to home it’s 2.6 per cent in Indonesia, 2.8 per cent in Japan, 3.2 per cent in South Korea and 3.6 per cent in Singapore.

Having read all these figures, that are within or close to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s target range of 2-3 per cent, where does the Prime Minister get off claiming Australia’s 5.4 per cent inflation rate is part of a “global inflation” problem? It was a problem overseas, but not anymore.

Remember when unions, the Greens and even some Labor MPs lampooned former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe for putting interest rates up too quickly in a bid to get inflation under control? There were calls for him to resign and be replaced (which he ultimately was) – and even for government intervention.

The economic ignoramuses were enjoying their full moon, at the urging behind the scenes of some ministers who really should know better.

The false rhetoric the PM deployed in his first media conference for 2024 is all about deflecting blame for the economic pain Australians are going through, as the nation battles stubbornly high inflation which is in fact primarily a result of domestic factors. The (mis)use of spin is also a portent of what’s to come this year. While Albanese ruled out an election in 2024 that doesn’t mean we won’t endure a year-long election campaign ahead of an early election next year, turning this year’s May budget into an election budget.

Australia’s high inflation problems are being fuelled by wages growth (in some sectors), budget profligacy (which is only going to get worse in an election year) and industrial relations laws, which won’t be fit for purpose when the economy eventually slows. They will instead contribute to higher unemployment.

Back-slapping about a balanced budget also ignores the structural deficit and baked-in spending from the pandemic years. Neither side of politics was prepared to slice into pathological overspending, which has been a key factor stoking inflation.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers even gloated about somewhat anaemic economic growth figures in the back half of last year, calling them “steady and sturdy”. The nation may not be in a technical recession right now, but that’s only because half a million new migrants arrived in a single calendar year. On a per capita basis, we’re already in recession, making it a high inflation per capital recession. Not the sort of combination any politician should be proud of, nor an easy sell at an election. No wonder voters are ­beginning to question the government’s economic management credentials.

Perhaps the PM wasn’t being deliberately misleading and deceptive with his global inflation furphy. He might not realise what the inflation rates abroad really are now. Or he might have simply been comparing us to, say, Argentina and Turkey, both of which are caught in hyper-inflation cycles. Our inflation rate looks good in such company. But I suspect no one in the government wants to compare us with Turkey, much less Argentina: basket case economies to be sure.

False rhetoric has always been a feature of politics, but it needs to be called out. Our problems are home grown and therefore are capable of being corrected with domestic policy decision making. If only the political class of today had the reforming courage of generations past.

For that to happen, substance will need to trump the superficial, which means the cabinet must lift its game. By supporting wage rises only hand in glove with productivity improvements. Otherwise, inflation will be entrenched, eroding any wages rises and then some.

Stage three income tax cuts have already been legislated, but when they take effect halfway into this year, they will certainly be inflationary. Addressing the stifling impact of bracket creep is the greater evil needing treatment, because sky high taxes on human capital reduce labour market productivity. Luckily, there are plenty of ways for a reforming government to concurrently ameliorate the inflationary impact of stage three: via GST reform, rent and wealth taxes, and fixing the tax and transfer failures within the federation. Unluckily, this government won’t do that.

The problems don’t end there. Growing the size of government doesn’t sustain a modern economy in and of itself; private sector growth does that. Big government is possible only if it supports a vibrant private sector economy that pays for it. Via policy settings that reflect our social liberal capitalist construct rather than run counter to it. Profits aren’t evil, as long as taxation settings are appropriately structured and enforced. That requires heady reform, which happens only when politicians do more than plod. Unfortunately, there are more plodders than performers in parliament these days.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/time-youre-told-the-truth-about-the-economy/news-story/63e3be2278deccaa85138cedbae7dacd

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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