The American Spectator

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(Page 6 of 11)

Farmers who grew for the juice market did not spend money on Alar, a finishing product. The amount of Alar in apple juice at the time was in the parts per trillion. You'd have to drink an Atlantic Ocean of apple juice to get an exposure to Alar that would have made you slightly nauseated, even if you weighed five pounds.

The combination of people being bad at math and lacking common sense had terrible consequences, sadly not just for shareholders of Uniroyal, the manufacturer of Alar. Hundreds of small "mom and pop" farms in the states of Washington and Oregon went belly-up on the Alar scare. In addition, the small local banks that served these farmers as customers also had a few failures and near-failures. The economic wreckage was horrible.

I wrote my report, but no one ever read it. None of the media ever called me about my findings, always preferring another quote from some lunkhead at the NRDC. It was my first experience of Washington zeitgeist over reason, and left me cynical indeed about the cesspool on the Potomac.

I remember going to cocktail parties for months all over town and explaining to doe-eyed earnest young women over and over again that it was okay to give their pre-school students apple juice. But I was met with 100% open hostility and mistrust because the television reporter had said otherwise. Arguing from facts only raised incomprehension because the chain of logic was not reducible to the triumvirate sound bite Hrab identified: "apples, children, cancer." It was just horrible to keep discovering people you thought were otherwise intelligent could be so damn dumb. It was even worse when you were a bachelor trying to find dates. "Who is that guy?" "Some creep who want to kill our four year olds with apples. Keep away."

Since the NRDC held up the children as their "victim," I will respond in kind. For more than two years parents wrongly substituted less nutritious products for healthy apple juice when making choices for their children's diets. We are speaking of marginal health benefits in the aggregate here (I can't help this, I am an economist), but it still was a sub-optimal choice based on incorrect information and mis-handicapping of risks. Children would have been healthier drinking apple juice, and the NRDC is responsible for the diminution of their lives because of their spurious report.

I just pulled out a file copy of my report, and I think about those small independent farmers that had to sell out their apple orchards to a juice conglomerate at fire-sale prices and start life over again as someone's employee. All this after struggling to build a business, and following the part of the American dream of being their own boss and growing a product that is so innocent and so good for you, and for children too. They got whacked by the thugs at the NRDC just as thoroughly as by any hit man.

There is a word to describe those who lie. There is a word to describe those who do harm to the honest and the hardworking. There is a word to describe people who exploit innocent children. There is a word to describe those who mislead the simple. There is a word to describe those who commit a sin of omission by not finding out the truth and instead repeat lies. That word is: evil.

p>The people at the National Resources Defense Council and Fenton Communications who engineered the Alar scare are evil. There is just no other word to describe them. br> -- James N. Ward br> Paris, France /p> p> CALLING JIM RUSSMANN br> Re: The Washington Prowler's

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