Despite my attempts at zombie-slaying, the myth that Rachel Carson advocated and caused a worldwide ban on DDT, leading to the deaths of millions, keeps being reanimated. I came across an example that is interesting mainly because of its provenenance. It’s by Henry I Miller of the Hoover Institute and Gregory Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. CEI is hack central, so nothing it produces ought to surprise anyone. But Hoover boasts a Who’s Who of (what remains of) the right wing intellectual apparatus: Hnery Kissinger, Condi Rice, John Taylor and Harvey Mansfield, among many others. And Miller was apparently ” founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology”. So, the fact he can run this kind of thing is good evidence of total intellectual collapse on the right.
The two main authorities cited by Miller and Conko in their critique of Carson are “San Jose State University entomologist J. Gordon Edwards” author of “The Lies of Rachel Carson” and “Professor Robert H. White-Stevens, an agriculturist and biology professor at Rutgers University”. Unfortunately, Miller and Conko don’t reveal that Edwards’ piece was published (like much of his work on environmental issues) in the LaRouchite journal “21st Century News”. And, while describing White-Stevens academic affiliation (dating to the 1950s as far as I can tell), they don’t inform readers of the more relevant fact that, when he offered a patronising critique of “Miss Carson’s ideas”, he was a spokesman for American Cyanamid. That’s right: as refutation of Rachel Carson in 2012, this Hoover Institute Fellow is offering the PR put by a pesticide company in the 1960s, along with a screed by a far-right loony.
I suspect the reason these facts weren’t revealed is that Miller and Conko weren’t aware of them. Their piece looks to have been cobbled together from various bits of flotsam in the rightwing blogosphere.
I’d be interested to see if any of the rightwing luminaries associated with the Hoover Institute is willing either to criticise or endorse this piece. My guess is that tribal solidarity will preclude the former and residual intelligence the latter.
{ 46 comments }
Matt McKeon 08.31.14 at 11:16 am
They don’t care if its true or not. They’re past “real” and “unreal.” That’s no longer the frame of reference. Now its only “us” and “them.”
That’s why zombie DDT banning Rachel Carson will never die.
Daniel 08.31.14 at 11:58 am
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2014/08/crock-of-shock-liberal-responses-to-vibrant-depravity/#more-24539
Rotherham.
Abbe Faria 08.31.14 at 12:22 pm
“the myth that Rachel Carson advocated and caused a worldwide ban on DDT, leading to the deaths of millions, keeps being reanimated. I came across an example that is interesting mainly because of its provenenance.”
FFS JQ at no point do the authors claim there was a ww ban on DDT. They don’t even say Carson advocated a ban (if I recalled correctly she fell ill and died very soon after SS, far before things went to law), merely proselytized against DDT and raised anti-DDT sentiment.
gbh 08.31.14 at 12:38 pm
Abbe,
I am not sure which article you, or JQ, are referring to because I can’t get the link to work. But Henry Miller says this about Carson in an article I found on Hoover’s website,
“Carson’s proselytizing and advocacy led to the virtual banning of DDT and to restrictions on other chemical pesticides in spite of the fact that “Silent Spring†was replete with gross misrepresentations and scholarship so atrocious that if Carson were an academic, she would be guilty of egregious academic misconduct.”
Ronald Brak 08.31.14 at 12:51 pm
Abbe Faria, I don’t know what article you’re reading, but while I hardly have enough brain cells to rub together to keep my underpants warm, even I can pull out obvious sentences from the article that Miller and Conko wrote such as, “Carson’s disingenuous proselytizing spurred public pressure to ban DDT in many countries, with disastrous consequences: a lack of effective control of mosquitoes that carry malaria and other diseases.” And that never happened. DDT has, quite properly, never been banned for use in disease control. Of course, in order for DDT to maintain effectiveness in controlling malaria it was necessary to regulate the use of DDT in agriculture to prevent mosquitoes developing resistance and those countries that did not control the use of DDT in agriculture suffered the most from DDT resistance in their mosquito populations.
And I’m sure you’re aware that the isn’t isn’t about the exact nature of the lies they they are spreading, whether they are peddling the world wide lie or the sub-world wide lie. The issue is that they are peddling lies. Even I can tell that and I’m an idiot.
djr 08.31.14 at 12:59 pm
Abbe, last week you told us that “ban” and “restrict” were interchangeable terms, now you’re arguing that because DDT can be used following restrictions in certain places that a term like “worldwide ban” is clearly wrong?
The other key quote from the Forbes article is: “The legacy of Rachel Carson is that tens of millions of human lives – mostly children in poor, tropical countries – have been traded for the possibility of slightly improved fertility in raptors.”
James Wimberley 08.31.14 at 1:59 pm
Provenance. As in, “stolen by Nazi goons from property of Jewish banker in Paris in 1942, stored in Austrian salt mine, looted by US Army soldiers in 1945, discovered in attic of ex-sergeant’s house in Wichita after his death in 1978, sold at Sotheby’s in 1981 for $7.3m to oil tycoon’s museum in Fort Worth, recovered by heirs of Jewish banker after a decade of litigation in Germany, Switzerland and US in 1990”, etc.
Abbe Faria 08.31.14 at 3:01 pm
“I am not sure which article you, or JQ, are referring to because I can’t get the link to work.”
This one: http://www.forbes.com/sites/henrymiller/2012/09/05/rachel-carsons-deadly-fantasies/
‘”Carson’s disingenuous proselytizing spurred public pressure to ban DDT in many countries…†And that never happened. DDT has, quite properly, never been banned for use in disease control.’
It did happen, M&C are correct that DDT has been banned (for all purposes including disease control) in many countries, see Brazil. JQ has two points, there is no compete worldwide prohibition on DDT and Carson didn’t advocate for one, both are correct. However, reading the article you find that M&C always use language that falls short of either of these claims (saying correctly that there were local bans plural and that Carson merely proselytized against DDT). That’s why I objected.
“last week you told us that “ban†and “restrict†were interchangeable terms, now you’re arguing that because DDT can be used following restrictions in certain places that a term like “worldwide ban†is clearly wrong?”
I don’t want to hash this out, because I’m not sure we can come to a contructive agreement. However, M&C do not claim a ban by JQs meaning of the term (as discussed previously).
P.S. Actually, I’m still right and you guys are still wrong. By your weird useage statements like “methamphetamine has never been banned” is correct as you can get it on prescription and “anti-personnel landmines have never been banned” is correct since the, um, Land Mine Ban Treaty falls short of a total global ban. Obviously the word carries different implications in normal use
Matt McKeon 08.31.14 at 3:47 pm
It doesn’t matter what Rachel Carson actually wrote or what actual influence it had on the use of DDT. This isn’t argument or discourse or debate.
The people paying the bills at the National Review or other conservative organs don’t want environmental regulation because it hurts the bottom line. Rachel Carson is an iconic figure. She must be destroyed. That is why we see the over the top rhetoric quoted in post 4 and 6. The people at National Review don’t give a goddamn how many African kids die, or if Rachel Carson or the environmental movement had anything to do with it. Some of them might be true believers, but that doesn’t matter either.
djr 08.31.14 at 3:58 pm
Abbe, you’re right that M&C avoid stating that there is a total worldwide ban on DDT, so a careful reading of the article could leave the reader free of this error. However, they are clearly trying to blur the line: phrases in the article include “led to bans in most of the world”, “before it was banned in the United States”, “public pressure to ban DDT in many countries, with disastrous consequences”, “four decades since the first bans of DDT”, “the regulators who banned DDT”, “with DDT unavailable”, etc. (The not-actually-banned information is kept in asides like “as it is used in a handful of African and Asian countries even today”.)
It’s dogwhistle politics, not science, that spreads zombie myths.
Barry 08.31.14 at 4:37 pm
John, you are citing the presence of Condi Rice and Henry Kissinger to *oppose* the idea that the Hoover Institute is not an intellectual brothel?
Barry 08.31.14 at 4:38 pm
(crap) to oppose the idea that it *is*.
John Quiggin 08.31.14 at 6:33 pm
Link fixed now, sorry about that
John Quiggin 08.31.14 at 6:53 pm
I suppose some progress is being made in that Miller and Conko (writing in 2012) are, as Abbe Faria points out, careful to preserve deniability. Obviously, that makes them worse than the typical ignorant rightwinger to whom they are appealing, who actually believes the 1990s version of the myth, in which Rachel Carson personally banned DDT. Such a person, as M&C are surely aware would read the article as confirming what they always knew.
cassander 08.31.14 at 10:01 pm
>It doesn’t matter what Rachel Carson actually wrote or what actual influence it had on the use of DDT. This isn’t argument or discourse or debate. The people paying the bills at the National Review or other conservative organs don’t want environmental regulation because it hurts the bottom line
Very rarely do I see someone state “the facts don’t matter what’s important is my moral crusade” so openly. How one can be proud of holding this position is beyond me, but I suppose the world has never lacked for would be inquisitors.
Sandwichman 08.31.14 at 10:31 pm
Robert White-Stevens (you MUST view the video: http://www.t3licensing.com/license/clip/1B17784_0006.do !):
Rush Limbaugh:
Sandwichman 08.31.14 at 10:35 pm
The old word for these kinds of blatant lies was “whopper” but Burger King expropriated it (in more ways than one?). I propose a new word nowiffe (acronym for no word in French for entrepreneur). There is no whiff of a “grain of truth” in the claims.
maidhc 08.31.14 at 11:07 pm
Santa Clara County, where both the Hoover Institution and San Jose State University are located, sprayed a large area for mosquitoes just a couple of weeks ago (because of West Nile virus). Not using DDT, of course.
Helen 08.31.14 at 11:39 pm
Don’t you just love the use of “proselytising” to describe a female scientist arguing from observed data?
Shorter Faria and Miller: I “argue” “rationally”, you “proselytise”.
js. 08.31.14 at 11:56 pm
cassander @15:
You need to brush up your reading comprehension skills. The comment you’re responding to is pretty clearly saying that it doesn’t matter “to the people paying the bills at” etc. what Carson wrote.
John Holbo 09.01.14 at 12:06 am
Abbe Faria, in light of concessions like this one …
“JQ has two points, there is no compete worldwide prohibition on DDT and Carson didn’t advocate for one, both are correct. However, reading the article you find that M&C always use language that falls short of either of these claims (saying correctly that there were local bans plural and that Carson merely proselytized against DDT). That’s why I objected.”
… I think you really owe JQ an apology for this, from the previous thread:
“I’ve lost a lot of respect for you in this thread, I used to think you were honest but simply ignorant of the facts, now it’s becoming increasingly obvious you’re fully aware and calculatedly misleading people.”
You are not only retracting the accusation that Quiggin is misleading people, I take it, but shifting to the defense of Conko and Miller on the grounds that it’s ok to mislead people, so long as you do so in a calculated way (reserving a sense in which what you are saying is true, even though you know readers can be expected to take what you say in a different sense.) Or do you deny that the Conko and Miller piece is basically misleading?
It seems pretty misleading to me, in light of the set of facts that seem now to be generally agreed in this thread, including by you.
William Timberman 09.01.14 at 12:08 am
First they banned our slave pens, now they’re trying to ban our DDT. Aux armes, citoyens! (No, wait a minute, that’s French. Can’t have that.)
vinteuil 09.01.14 at 1:22 am
@jq
“…the typical ignorant rightwinger…actually believes [that] Rachel Carson personally banned DDT.”
JQ, you know about as much about the “right wing” in the USA today as a pig knows about oranges.
FYI: the typical ignorant rightwinger in the USA today has never heard of Rachel Carson, but generally (and stupidly) agrees with her on environmental issues – ’cause that’s all they’ve ever heard about on TV.
It’s only about 1% of 1% who take any interest whatsoever in the DDT issue – which is a bit more complex than you care to admit.
Well, you’ve got ideological turf to protect.. I can understand that.
Matt McKeon 09.01.14 at 5:32 am
js at 20.
Exactly right.
John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 7:25 am
@23 Like Abbe Faria, you’re a recent French immigrant, I assume from your pseudonym. So let me explain some basics. Rightwingers generally prefer to get their TV news from Fox. For years, their “science” correspondent was Steven Milloy, a leading propagator of the DDT genocide (his word, not mine) myth and, of course, a secret shill for the tobacco industry. Search the archives any rightwing site you like on DDT and you’ll find the same stuff.
Fox and Milloy pushed the myth as hard as they could, until it finally collapsed under the weight of repeated refutation and exposure of tobacco ties. Since Milloy left the scene (I believe he’s now working for a law firm that represents corporate polluters) that’s gradually petered out, and there are even some straight news stories about DDT.
So, I guess if your acquaintance with the political right in the US (and Australia, where we get the same stuff) goes back less than 5 years, you might get that impression. But you’d be wrong.
Sancho 09.01.14 at 1:34 pm
Well done, Quiggin. Played right into Prince Phillip’s hands.
roger gathman 09.01.14 at 6:03 pm
You know, it isn’t as if we don’t have a history of mosquito eradication to hand, which is about how the state sponsored program of DDT spraying (which rigorously ignored objections by private property owners, by the way) succeeded for a time, but then failed – due to that other bugaboo of the right, Darwinian evolution. For those interested in the reality of the DDT issue, I’d suggest Michael D’Antonio’s book, Mosquito, the story of man’s deadliest foe. Let me quote from the Malcolm Gladwell review:
“What DDT could not do, however, was eradicate malaria entirely. How could you effectively spray eighty per cent of homes in the Amazonian jungle, where communities are spread over hundreds of thousands of highly treacherous acres? Sub-Saharan Africa, the most malarious place on earth, presented such a daunting logistical challenge that the eradication campaign never really got under way there. And, even in countries that seemed highly amenable to spraying, problems arose. “The rich had houses that they didn’t want to be sprayed, and they were giving bribes,†says Socrates Litsios, who was a scientist with the W.H.O. for many years and is now a historian of the period. “The inspectors would try to double their spraying in the morning so they wouldn’t have to carry around the heavy tanks all day, and as a result houses in the afternoon would get less coverage. And there were many instances of corruption with insecticides, because they were worth so much on the black market. People would apply diluted sprays even when they knew they were worthless.†Typical of the logistical difficulties is what happened to the campaign in Malaysia. In Malaysian villages, the roofs of the houses were a thatch of palm fronds called atap. They were expensive to construct, and usually lasted five years. But within two years of DDT spraying the roofs started to fall down. As it happened, the atap is eaten by caterpillar larvae, which in turn are normally kept in check by parasitic wasps. But the DDT repelled the wasps, leaving the larvae free to devour the atap. “Then the Malaysians started to complain about bedbugs, and it turns out what normally happens is that ants like to eat bedbug larvae,†McWilson Warren said. “But the ants were being killed by the DDT and the bedbugs weren’t–they were pretty resistant to it. So now you had a bedbug problem.†He went on, “The DDT spray teams would go into villages, and no one would be at home and the doors would be locked and you couldn’t spray the house. And, understand, for that campaign to work almost every house had to be sprayed. You had to have eighty-per-cent coverage. I remember there was a malaria meeting in ’62 in Saigon, and the Malaysians were saying that they could not eradicate malaria. It was not possible. And everyone was arguing with them, and they were saying, ‘Look, it’s not going to work.’ And if Malaysia couldn’t do it–and Malaysia was one of the most sophisticated places in the region–who could?â€
At the same time, in certain areas DDT began to lose its potency. DDT kills by attacking a mosquito’s nervous system, affecting the nerve cells so that they keep firing and the insect goes into a spasm, lurching, shuddering, and twitching before it dies. But in every population of mosquitoes there are a handful with a random genetic mutation that renders DDT nontoxic–that prevents it from binding to nerve endings. When mass spraying starts, those genetic outliers are too rare to matter. But, as time goes on, they are the only mosquitoes still breeding, and entire new generations of insects become resistant. In Greece, in the late nineteen-forties, for example, a malariologist noticed Anopheles sacharovi mosquitoes flying around a room that had been sprayed with DDT. In time, resistance began to emerge in areas where spraying was heaviest. To the malaria warriors, it was a shock. “Why should they have known?†Janet Hemingway, an expert in DDT resistance at the University of Wales in Cardiff, says. “It was the first synthetic insecticide. They just assumed that it would keep on working, and that the insects couldn’t do much about it.†Soper and the malariologist Paul Russell, who was his great ally, responded by pushing for an all-out war on malaria. We had to use DDT, they argued, or lose it. “If countries, due to lack of funds, have to proceed slowly, resistance is almost certain to appear and eradication will become economically impossible,†Russell wrote in a 1956 report. “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE because DDT resistance has appeared in six or seven years.†But, with the administrative and logistical problems posed by the goal of eighty-per-cent coverage, that deadline proved impossible to meet.”
Rachel Carson was heroic. And mostly correct. Where she wasn’t correct was in speculations about the carcinogenic dimension of the chemicals she opposed – but then again, we still don’t know much about the mix of chemicals and its somatic effects on the human body, for the simple reason that testing is done on individual chemicals.
The funny thing about the rightwing yobs, when it comes to the environment, is that they take a position very much endorsed by the Soviet Union up to and past Chernobyl. Luckily, environmentalists in the US have had some success. Of course, not enough.
Is Rachel Carson on a stamp yet? She should be, so that one can use those stamps to mail any correspondence to the Hoover institute.
John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 6:33 pm
@Sancho The Windsors are everywhere!
vinteuil 09.01.14 at 7:55 pm
@25
No, jq. “Rightwingers” (i.e., the people who mostly vote Republican) do not “prefer to get their TV news from Fox,” any more than Leftwingers (i.e., the people who mostly vote Democrat) prefer to get their TV news from ABC, or CBS, or NBC, or CNN, or MSNBC, or CNBC, or the New York Times, or the Washington Post, or USA Today, or…whatever.
They generally prefer to get no news at all.
JimV 09.01.14 at 9:14 pm
@AF:
“By your weird useage statements like “methamphetamine has never been banned†is correct as you can get it on prescription …”
The analogy with DDT is in fact fairly good. Methamphetamine when made and sold illegally (e.g., crystal meth) for the purpose of getting high is banned. Methamphetamine prescribed by a licensed doctor for medical use and sold by a pharmacy is not banned. Similarly DDT has been banned in some places for agricultural use and not banned in most places for anti-malarial use. How is this weird rather than standard, dictionary usage?
Sasha Clarkson 09.01.14 at 10:49 pm
The intellectual laziness of the authors is really shocking.
I think today’s Tom Tomorrow cartoon is quite apposite to this story.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/01/1325422/-Cartoon-Reality-collapse
John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 10:50 pm
@29 “Rightwingers†(i.e., the people who mostly vote Republican) do not “prefer to get their TV news from Fox,†… They generally prefer to get no news at all.
This is interesting: A totally new delusional rightwing talking point. I’ll try facts, but I don’t suppose this will work. According to this survey, three quarters of Americans get news daily (statistical hint: three quarters is more than half, so terms such as “most” can be used). Majorities in all age groups follow national political news, and the most preferred single source is 24 hour news channels
http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/personal-news-cycle/
Unsurprisingly, conservative Republicans prefer Fox
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118066/brookings-survey-fox-news-home-most-conservative-republicans
I await your retraction (just joking!)
John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 11:06 pm
@30 Indeed. And of course, when writing for the general public rather than in the shorthand of blog comments, Tim Lambert and I have always been careful to write “DDT has never been banned in antimalarial use”.
To be even more boringly clear, it is, of course, true that most national governments don’t choose to use DDT in antimalarial programs any more. It’s a persistent poison after all, and there are much better alternatives in most cases. But it’s cheap, which is important for poor countries, and there are cases (eg South Africa) where the alternatives have been subject to resistance.
As Abbe Faria has mentioned quite a few times, Brazil is among the countries that have stopped using DDT. More precisely, Brazil replaced a failed eradication program based on DDT with an integrated strategy. The key result “The number of hospitalizations due to malaria in the Brazilian Amazon dropped from 53,450 in 1994 to 18,037 in 2000 and 4,442 in 2009 as did the number of registered deaths attributed to the disease (from 897 in 1984 to 58 in 2009) as well as the fatality rate (from 0.038% in 2000 to 0.013% in 2009).”
http://www.malariajournal.com/content/9/1/115
Sasha Clarkson 09.01.14 at 11:20 pm
@28 JQ “Windsors” are a myth, if you look at Chazza’s antecedents for the last 300 years, the house is a rebranding of mergers of brands including Braunschweig-Lüneburg-Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Brandenburg-Ansbach, Saxe-Gotha, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Oldenburg-Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, Württemberg-Teck, Bowes-Lyon and Oldenburg-Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (itself rebranded as Battenberg).
John Quiggin 09.01.14 at 11:28 pm
There must be some lizardoid aliens in there somewhere!
On a vaguely related theme, I used to live in Townsville, North Queensland, which included the oddly-named (Belgium not being a major source of immigration) suburb “Belgian Gardens”. It turned out that, until 1914, it was called “German Gardens”, reflecting the presence German market gardeners.
bad Jim 09.02.14 at 8:05 am
Insects are icky. So are bacteria. Eradicate them!
We can’t, though. It’s not just that it’s impossible, which it is, but it’s also a really bad idea.
Right now we’re struggling with honey bee colony collapse disorder, a threat to major crops, possibly due to the use of pesticides formerly considered innocuous. We’re also confronted with the consequences of antibiotics that destroy so many bacteria that some patients are incapable of metabolizing their intake, and whose lives can be saved by an infusion from trustworthy excreta.
We’d prefer to think that we’re something special, God-created, independent of every other life form, but we’re inescapably stuck in a sticky, messy web of interdependence with everything that revolts us.
ZM 09.02.14 at 8:21 am
Sasha Clarkson,
The naming is just because the English sur naming method is sexist so the house name changes to go with the male name even when the royalty is transmitted by the female bloodline. Then they changed to Windsor to distance the house from Germany. If you go by bloodline and keep the women’s maiden house names, then it is still the house of Stuart through issue of Elizabeth the winter queen of Bohemia, daughter of James VI and I . It is just anti-womanism and anti-stuartism to say anything else. Our Queen in Australia is her direct descendent.
Sasha Clarkson 09.02.14 at 10:32 am
ZM – ha ha! Apart from the minescule-to-zero genetic contribution of the Stuarts to the present royal house, if one WERE to look at the female line, Elizabeth the Winter Queen was daughter of Anne of Denmark, and hence an Oldenburg too, though not a Sonderburg-Glücksburg. In fact, her ancestry was also very German.
Of course, if one really cared about genetics as suitability for high office (which I don’t), one would go with the female line all the time, as maternity, historically, was much surer than paternity! ;)
Ironically, there may (depending upon the genetic throws of the dice) be much more Stuart in William and his offspring, because two of Diana’s ancestors were bastards of Charles II (via Barbara Villiers and Louise de Kérouaille), and another was a bastard of his brother James II via Marlborough’s sister Arabella.
John Quiggin 09.02.14 at 11:23 am
I love CT. From DDT to matrilineal descent and the Battle of White Mountain in two or three easy steps.
ZM 09.02.14 at 12:08 pm
Sasha Clarkson,
You are completely wrong. I will now take you through the Stuart lineage of our Royal family, and it is this lineage that is the royal lineage, not any of the other houses – they just got their names in because Stuart women married them as I mentioned.
James Stuart (VI) of Scotland became James I of England after Elizabeth I (House of Tudor ) died without heir
… I will leave out everything with parliament beheading King Charles and go to mention that the parliament and John Locke then connived to say James VII and II abdicated despite him not having abdicated and did the irregular thing of saying there were two monarchs on the throne William of Orange and his wife the unfilial daughter of the King, Mary Stuart. They died without heirs, the other King’s daughter became Queen Anne. She died without heirs too. The parliament was unfairly anti-Catholic, because they preferred an Anglican Church they could lord it over, so they searched around mightily for another non-catholic heir, which was quite difficult since the Stuart’s were quite a Catholic family overall.
Now we come to George I – his royal bloodline comes from his mother Sophia, who got her royal bloodline from her mother, Elizabeth Stuart of Scotland, Winter Queen of Bohemia, and daughter of James Stuart, VI of Scotland and I of England. As I mentioned, they had different house names because they had to take their husband’s names upon marriage because in a country where the parliament beheads and fakes abdications of kings patriarchy runs much stronger than monarchism.
After George I was his son George II – so the royal blood went by the male line and no house name changes were needed due to sexism. George IIs son Frederick died before him, and upon the King’s death his grandson, son of Frederick, became King George III. He became Ill and his son became regent then King George IV, upon his death his brother became King William IV. all this royalty is still from the Stuart bloodline, as you can tell.
Now we get to a woman again, Queen Victoria became Queen after the death of KingWilliam IV. She was the daughter of Edward, another son of George III. Her son became King Edward VII, then he abdicated, then her other son became King George V.
After his death his daughter became Queen Elizabeth II who is our current Queen, descended from James Stuart VI and I through his daughter Elizabeth who was the target of the gunpowder plotters, remembered on bonfire night, who hoped to assassinate her father and make her a young Queen and bring her up Catholic.
MPAVictoria 09.02.14 at 1:03 pm
“Is Rachel Carson on a stamp yet? She should be, so that one can use those stamps to mail any correspondence to the Hoover institute.”
I love this idea…
J Thomas 09.02.14 at 1:17 pm
Is Rachel Carson on a stamp yet? She should be, so that one can use those stamps to mail any correspondence to the Hoover institute.
http://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Carson-Cent-Postage-Stamps/dp/B007T7WE88
17 cents, 1981.
No longer. It could be done but it looks expensive.
Sherparick 09.02.14 at 1:50 pm
If we go by matrilineal descent, Elisabeth of York, Henry VII’s Queen and Henry VIII’s mother, was also the mother of Margaret, wife of James IV of Scotland, and through her the Great-Great Grandmother of James VI/I. So then we could say the Plantagenets are still ruling England (but hopeful soon not Scotland!) http://www.britroyals.com/plantagenet.htm
Great posts JQ on the Rachel Carson libeling campaign.
ZM 09.02.14 at 2:26 pm
I suppose you could go back to calling them the House of Wessex, that would be pleasantly Thomas Hardyesque. I cannot find what house Cerdic the founder of the kingdom and house of Wessex was in before he founded Wessex, since Kenneth Sisam showed Woden was not right, so Wessex has to be the end of going back.
vinteuil 09.03.14 at 12:41 am
@32: pathetic. Me as a source of right-wing talking points? Surely not even you can believe anything quite *that* stupid.
Eli Rabett 09.04.14 at 1:32 am
Tobacco is indeed the original sin
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