Reject Environmentalism, Not DDT

Gungas reasons for pulling out this discussion every couple of weeks are tied to a simplistic view of most sciences.

Okay, fellas, if you condemn the snake for lack of a biological background, perhaps you should also mention that you don't have one either. As a veterinarian with thirty years of practice under my belt,

What was not reveals until much later was the fact that ALL the control rats in the experiment that resulted in the drug ban died before the experimental rats developed tumors.

The worse news is that political agendas drive much of today's environmental science,

I greatly fear that EarthFirst!, PETA, the Sierra Club, and a plethora of other urban-based organizations will continue to hold sway over decisions that should be made by those who actually have some idea of the science behind sound conservation.

I, for one, would suggest that people cease referring to themselves as "environmentalists" and make the clarification as to whether they support "conservation" or "preservation".

As a final note I'll point out that my one wish in this matter is that this issue be decided on science. Not emotional pleas.

90,000,000 human lives...90,000,000 human lives.

Most of the 90,000,000 lives in question were black and brown, which might explain some of it. Envirowhacks don't seem to view non-whites as counting for terribly much.

The author is an archivist at the Ayn Rand institute, the associate producer of an Oscar-nominated documentary about Rand, and obviously a keeper of the flame. Thus Mr. Britting has little to say about the romantic entanglements, more Peyton Place than Galt's Gulch, that devastated Rand's circle in later years.

Most notably, Rand had an affair with her chosen intellectual heir, Nathaniel Brandon. While both Rand's husband and the wife of the intellectual heir agreed (sort of) to this arrangement, it added further emotional complications to what was, given Rand's prominence, a surprisingly hermetic, claustrophobic little world, one best described in "The Passion of Ayn Rand" (Bantam Dell) - the compelling, and sympathetic, biography of Rand written by, yes, the intellectual heir's ex-wife.

As I said, Peyton Place.

Closed, neurotic environments filled with true believers are the hallmark of a cult, and there's a good case to be made that that's exactly what Rand was running. Take a look at the way in which she treated her acolytes: angry excommunications, overbearing diktats, dramatic interventions, and, disappointing in one who preached self-determination, rather too much fuhrer prinzip.

The cult-or-not controversy goes unmentioned in Mr. Britting's book. What a reader will find, particularly in the excellent selection of illustrations, is a real sense of how Rand's life related to her novels. One glance at her Hollywood-handsome husband, and the rugged succession of steely supermen who dominate her fiction make more sense ("All my heroes will always be reflections of Frank").

Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for - as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd).

Likewise, her sometimes-overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud.