Lost in all of the hype and hysteria and White House panels on how industry is killing bees is the last indicator species that was being doomed by non-organic pesticides: frogs. It seems like a hundred years ago but it was only last decade that a biologist in a department at Berkeley got a friend of his, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, to hand-walk a paper on frogs past peer review and into PNAS – the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper had no data but that wasn’t a problem, screenshots were apparently enough for whoever rubber-stamps articles handed to them by members of the Academy (it’s still done today – there is no way serious peer review approved a paper claiming that female-named hurricanes cause more damage because men are prejudiced against them) and because it was in PNAS, one of the most prestigious publications in the world, the environmental behemoth was mobilized, press releases went out, the New York Times dutifully rewrote them, and that got calls for the EPA to convene a special panel. Read more.