SILENT SPRING‘S 50-YEAR HISTORY OF SELECTIVE DATA: “Rachel Carson, more than any other person, created the politicized science that afflicts today’s public policy debates,” Ronald Bailey writes at Reason today:

Rachel Carson’s jeremiad against pesticides is credited by many as launching the modern environmentalist movement, and the author, who died in 1964, is being widely lauded for her efforts. “She was the very first person to knock some of the shine off of modernity,” says environmentalist Bill McKibben in a New York Times Magazine article from this past Sunday.

And she’d be far from the last, as so much of today’s “liberalism” particularly the flavor that’s pumped out the Times, is, ironically, a sustained assault on modernity.

RELATED: Raaaaacist! If you really do believe in your heart of heart that half the country is racist, as Mark Steyn catches a HuffPo contributor professing, and not just using trying to score cheap rhetorical points, then you’re also tacitly admitting that the entire mid-century arc of American liberalism, from Truman desegregating the Army, to MLK and the Great Society to Hollywood’s middlebrow period of teaching racial tolerance in the 1960s is a failure.

Or you could simply be a member of the Paranoid Center.

(If you missed my interview with Steyn last week on After America, click here.)