> personal attacks such as "shill"...

> Is the other side not a shill also when 
> thier funding comes from sources 
> that support their position?

This seems like a fair question, but it attempts to create a false
equivalence.  One cannot shill for the environment or health, one can only
"shill" for a product that is sold.  Most often, the product is harmful to
people or the environment in some way, so it needs to be "defended" by
shills, or to at least confuse matters, which is fairly easy when most
people don't even read much, let alone have a solid grasp of the math and
statistical concepts that are the structural underpinnings of what we call
"fact".

>> Major USRTK Donors
>> Organic Consumers Association: $442,500
>> Dr. Bronner's Family Foundation: $108,000
>> CrossFit Foundation: $50,000 
>> Panta Rhea Foundation: $20.000
>> Westreich Foundation: $17,500

>> Some would and do say Ruskin is a shill for these guys.

No, no one has ever said that.  The listed foundations all support consumer
and environmental/health awareness and activism, but there is nothing being
sold by these groups or the recipients of their funding, so there is no
shilling being done. "US Right To Know" (USRTK) simply works to expose the
corporate money that funds the burgeoning network of people striving to
appear non-partisan and impartial while defending tobacco, fossil fuels, the
agricultural-chemical complex, even nuclear power in the face of overtly bad
things like mutant frogs, major hurricanes/tropical storms well before
"hurricane season", and bee kills from the planting of seed corn.

To diagram how this sort of thing works, most of us remember the slow drip,
drip, drip of facts that came out around the Clothianidin and Thiamethoxam
bee kills, first, in Germany, and then also in the USA.  At the time of the
German (2008) kills, we were told that this could never happen here, as the
adhesive used in Germany was different, and in the USA, the pesticides
stayed firmly attached to the seed corn.  When the Italians reported the
same problem, and stated that it was both widespread and persistent, the
excuse offered was that the Italian beekeepers were cashing in on a
government insurance program and were collecting payments by blaming
clothianidin for varroa-related deadouts.

But then, the same thing was found to happen here in the USA.  The pesticide
would not stay on the seeds, creating some short-range "toxic dust cloud"
events.  Suddenly, the makers of seed-drills were called to account for
pointing their exhaust vents upward rather than downward, and farmers were
advised to not plant corn on windy days, as if they had the luxury of
waiting to plant.

But the bottom line here was that even a very basic and simple defect in a
mass-produced product was obscured with denials and misdirection.  The
simple fact is that a pesticide applied to a seed with adhesive should stay
on the seed, not create the same problems of "drift" that spraying causes.
The basic "advance" with systemics is that they do not cause problems for
anyone downwind, so if your systemic causes problems for people downwind, it
is a defective product, and needs to be either re-engineered or withdrawn,
moreso when the clothianidin is very very persistent "in the environment",
having a half-life of 148 to 1,155 days, causing multi-season and multi-year
contamination.  The simple act of placing some hives downwind of a cornfield
had to be performed within the context of a peer-reviewed study to not be
dismissed out of hand as the lunatic rantings of presumed-incompetent
beekeepers, despite the prior data collected and published in Europe.

So, the four years of delay between the Germany incidents in 2008, and the
2012 publication of the Krupke/Hunt Purdue U paper directly resulted from
misinformation being presented as if it were fact.  As usual, the plight of
bees and beekeepers was and is a tiny detail, the far more substantial
impact being on water and things that live in the water.

But the corrosive nature of shilling is that it forces even very simple
things to be presented only in full-blown peer-reviewed publication, and
even then quibbles with the study.  The hazard for researchers who undertake
such work is that they are subjected to vicious personal attacks, a
specialty of Entine, who is only one of a chorus of people whose business is
denial.  The other hazard is that they spend their time and money on simply
refuting the lies of the shills, not on actually advancing our knowledge in
any way.

The basic problem is that it is very hard to make a profit from keeping the
environment free of toxic stuff, and there are lots of very easy ways to
profit by externalizing what should be costs of a product on the environment
(and the citizenry) as a whole, so there is a lot more money to fund denial
than to fund dispassionate inquiry into facts.  
	
The good news is that people tend to want to buy stuff, even at much higher
prices, that can be proven to be ethically-produced, so non-GMO,
no-added-hormones, antibiotic-free food sells much better than food that
cannot make those claims.  (Of course, we still need some science now and
again, as there is a class of product that, for example, claims "USDA
Organic certification" for food from China, or otherwise consists of 100%
pure, unadulterated, pro-biotic, crystal-energized, wild-caught,
blood-diamond free, feng shui observant, free-range, biodynamic, moonbeam
nonsense in an attempt to exploit the situation.)

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