"A blog I have not seen before..."

Norty norty Dafydd, have you not been reading your Trackbacks all this time?

Well this is one:

All Things Beautiful TrackBack A Challenge To The Blogosphere: 'The Ten Worst Americans' List

As a post Christmas/Hannukah Challenge, I invited the Blogosphere to name 'The Ten Worst Americans'...Dafydd @ Big Lizzards, one of my favorite Bloggers (who urgently needs a pair of glasses), has produced a list with very extensive and thoughtful explanations.

I've seen three of these lists now and they're all quite interesting. But no one has included what would be my number one and two nominees:

1. Rachel Carson.

She has the distinction of being responsible (IMHO) for more premature deaths than any other American. More than Hitler, more even than Stalin. Because of her book Silent Spring, DDT was banned world wide leading to a drastic increase in yearly malaria deaths which continues to this day.

Malaria causes 1.85 million deaths per year now, mostly in Africa, and the majority of those are children. It used to be even more. The majority of those could have been prevented by DDT.

2. Jeremy Rifkin. No single person has done more to prevent modern technology from improving the lives of the people of the world. Rifkin is a one-man Luddite revolution. He's had his greatest success in Europe where they've heeded him and banned virtually all genetically modified organisms. It's not just that they refuse to grow them there; they also refuse to import them. As a result, many third world nations, especially in Africa, refuse to grow them as well because doing so would lose them the possibility of exporting foodstuffs to Europe during good growing years.

Which means that in bad growing years they've faced widespread famine and mass starvation which could have been prevented by GMOs. Worse, they have refused to permit importation of GM grain from the US during those famines to feed their own starving people, out of fear that some of the grain would "escape" and be planted.

In the long run, it's hard to guess whether Carson or Rifkin will actually be responsible for more premature deaths overall. Carson started earlier but Rifkin's influence is broader and I would suspect he's catching up fast.

I'd switch from Kevorkian to Aldrich Ames. I sure wouldn't put assisted suicide up at that level of Ames' evil.

From:
STATEMENT OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ON THE CLANDESTINE SERVICES AND THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY ALDRICH AMES
7 December 1995
http://www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/dec95dci.html

excerpt:

Aldrich Ames' espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and Russia from April 1985 through February 1994 caused severe, wide-ranging and continuing damage to US national security interests. In addition to the points that I made in my public statement on 31 October, Ames did the following:

* In June 1985, he disclosed the identity of numerous U.S. clandestine agents in the Soviet Union, at least nine of whom were executed. These agents were at the heart of our effort to collect intelligence and counterintelligence against the Soviet Union. As a result, we lost opportunities to better understand what was going on in the Soviet Union at a crucial time in history.

* He disclosed, over the next decade, the identity of many US agents run against the Soviets, and later the Russians.

* He disclosed the techniques and methods of double agent operations, details of our clandestine trade craft, communication techniques and agent validation methods. He went to extraordinary length to learn about U.S. double agent operations and pass information on them to the Soviets.

* He disclosed details about US counterintelligence activities that not only devastated our efforts at the time, but also made us more vulnerable to KGB operations against us.

* He identified CIA and other intelligence community personnel. Ames contends that he disclosed personal information on, or the identities of, only a few American intelligence officials. We do not believe that assertion.

* He provided details of US intelligence technical collection activities and analytic techniques.

* He provided finished intelligence reports, current intelligence reporting, arms control papers, and selected Department of State and Department of Defense cables. For example, during one assignment, he gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be 15 to 20 feet high.

Alexandra van Maltzen:

...have you not been reading your Trackbacks all this time?

Well, as you'll note, the trackback didn't show up as a trackback! The only reason I already knew about it is I saw a bunch of referrals on Sitemeter, and I reasoned "say, I'll bet All Things Beautiful linked my post."

I think the technology of trackbacks is still in its infancy; there's one die-hard Big Lizards reader, Bill Faith, who has his own blog (a very good one: Small Town Veteran); he uses TypePad also, and he simply cannot make trackbacks work on Big Lizards, which frustrates us both no end. It's especially irritating because both Movable Type and TypePad are made by the same company, I believe: Six Apart. Yeesh.

A couple of days ago, Bill was mysteriously able to leave a couple of trackbacks; then equally mysteriously, he ceased being able to do so. I changed absolutely nothing in my setup during that period, and neither (I think) did he. Go figure!

I do always click on any trackback I do receive and read the entry, just out of curiosity whether I'm being praised or pilloried. So if you've been able to leave trackbacks before (that actually showed up), then I have read ATB; the problem with the Web now is that there are so many great blogs out there, it's impossible to read even a significant fraction of them!

This actually causes a problem for small-timers like me who want to claw our way up into the Power Line/Instapundit stratosphere someday: with the fragmentation of the blogosphere, even with more people reading, you get fewer readers per blog. A blog can still do spectacularly well, but only by somehow coming to the attention of many, many more readers than would normally notice a new blog -- and then retaining them, of course. But that is a lot harder to do now than, say, three years ago or more, when many of the powerhouses of today started.

We latecomers -- it looks like All Things Beautiful (a blogozine?) started in July this year, and Big Lizards' first post was September 16th, 2005 -- are going to have to fight and claw our way up the ladder in a way that, to be honest about it, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit began in August 2001) and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos began in May 2002) didn't have to do: they had virtually no competition.

I can't find a Sitemeter bug on your site, so I don't know how much traffic you get; but I'm pretty sure it's considerably more than mine. And you definitely get linked more than I: your link score is 135, mine is only 93; you're about halfway up the Large Mammals category in the TTLB Ecosystem, while I'm still struggling up the Marauding Marsupials tier (I used to be a Large Mammal before the great change in formulae!)

So I'd say you're definitely doing better than I... but I still have high hopes I'll eventually move from (very low) four-figures of "circulation" to five figures -- someday. (Of course, "someday" might mean five years from now. Ouch.)

But both of us have tough rows to how even to get up to Captain's Quarters level, let alone Power Line or the gods of the blogosphere. I hope we both make it!

Dafydd

My list doesn't start until Jimmy "The Mullah" Carter...

Then comes Bill Clinton, at #2. He built a "Wall", after cutting America's Intel and Military down to the bone. He rode Reagan's economy and the DOT.coms as if he were a surfer, whilst...whilst whatever.

Carter had no clue...Clinton had many clues, closed his eyes to the facts, and took the sexual route. Clinton belongs in Prison...at best.

That's two, in a list of 100,000 *PLUS*!!!

KårmiÇømmünîs†

Where's mass murder accomplice Walter Duranty?

Jack Tanner:

Where's mass murder accomplice Walter Duranty?

Heck, I didn't even get around to listing Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I was just saying to Sachi that it took me four days to come up with a list of the ten worst Americans; but if they'd let me go with the hundred worst, I could've had that up in fifteen minutes!

The hard part was the culling.

Dafydd

Great list Daffydd..........I am so glad you included Kervorkian, bacause I forgot him........But don't you think Timothy Mcveigh and Ted Bundy need to be in the top 10?

My list would include John Gotti (as a stand in for all Mob Bosses) Lyndon Johnson (the most evil President needs to be on that list) and Janet Reno (something about her is so wrong........but then again, she is responsible for Bush's first presidency......I call it Elian's Revenge)

Great list, Dafydd. I'd not disagree with a one of your selections.

Sidebar: Dafydd, Alexandra--nice that two of the very best bloggers in the 'sphere have finally "met". And as for your respective rankings in the TTLB ecosystem, well, I'd gladly surrender my ranking to either (or both) of you, cos based on quality of content you each deserve LOTS more traffic and recognition. You each have blogs I read whenever I want a break from mindless surfing. :-)

Of course, as Dafydd points out, there are a lot of really good blogs out there and keeping up with them all is... simply impossible. I have you both in my RSS Feeds along with tons of others I speed scan daily, and I'm falling way, way behind.

THANK YOU both for all the great blog you do!

(BTW [offers up neck for the cut--heh], Dafydd, consider Lincoln. For all the good he inarguably did, he (wittingly and intentionally) sowed the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind of federal abuse of power... )

David:

(BTW [offers up neck for the cut--heh], Dafydd, consider Lincoln. For all the good he inarguably did, he (wittingly and intentionally) sowed the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind of federal abuse of power... )

Well, I tried to stay away from people who did both great good and great bad, unless (as with Benedict Arnold) the latter specifically undid the former. In Lincoln's case, he chose to preserve the Union... and the only way to do that was to fundamentally change it (read the last scene in Gore Vidal's Lincoln; we're not alone in thinking this!)

So if it were a choice between preserving the Union by federalizing it, or letting it split apart into a struggling North and an evil regime in the South, both of which would probably have collapsed within a generation -- heck, I think if that were my Hobson's Choice, I would make the same decision Lincoln made.

Dafydd

Dafydd,
Don't want to clutter up your comments here, can you send me a quick email, as I don't see your email address anywhere. Thanks

Dafydd,
Don't want to clutter up your comments here, can you send me a quick email, as I don't see your email address anywhere. Thanks.

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)

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