CLARICE FELDMAN: This week in the War On Science.
Archive for 2013
January 6, 2013
AT AMAZON, it’s the Grocery & Gourmet Food Outlet Sale.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: What Is The Best Way To Treat Diabetes?
IF YOU’RE DRIVING DRUNK, don’t post it on Facebook.
HIRING: Job Applicants’ “Cultural Fit” Can Trump Qualifications. “The phrase ‘cultural fit’ may summon up obnoxious images of old boys clubs and social connections, but it’s a powerful buzzword among human resources professionals. A cooperative, creative atmosphere can make workdays more tolerable and head off problems before they begin.”
Well, that was probably true in the days of old boys’ clubs, too.
BEST COUNTRY TO RETIRE TO: Ecuador?
HOW TO BUILD an indestructible snow fort.
IN THE MAIL: From Vox Day, A Throne of Bones. Also from Thomas Sawyer, The Two-State Solution for America.
CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: Week Nine — In Which We See Results.
COVERUP FAILS: Fracking Safe in NY State, Says Leaked Report. “Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider ‘did not think it should be kept secret’ and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times.”
Remember when the authorities used to cover up dangers? Now they’re covering up news that fracking is safe, because that harms their political agenda.
Still: “This is very good news. Contrary to green fears that fracking is a mortal danger to both humans and the environment, this report finds exactly the opposite, arguing that fracking “can be done safely within the regulatory system that the state has been developing for several years.” With the environmental concerns largely settled, the ground is now set for New York to claim its share of the energy revolution and the jobs and industry that come with it.”
Except that the Greens are still complaining. They’re science-deniers. It’s a Green War On Science!
UPDATE: A reader emails:
You know who John Hanger is, right? Former DEP secretary for PA governor Ed Rendell. The greenies loved his nomination as secretary, until he and Rendell got fracking going. He and Rendell are probably the two biggest fracking supporters in the Democratic party, and they’re liberals. Fracking is a huge success in PA.
The Ds constantly complain that Republicans aren’t stepping across the aisle and compromising, but they, strangely, never seem to offer up this as an example of Democrats doing it as a way to shame the Rs. I wonder why. Maybe it’s because Rendell and Hanger picked the wrong issue and left the party reservation.
Probably.
PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: “Of the 300 or so six figure deals that were reported to them in 2012, 45 were from books that started off self-published.”
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BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Rule of Lawlessness.
ANOTHER BRILLIANT “GREEN” INITIATIVE FAILS: Whoops—’Cash for Clunkers’ Actually Hurt the Environment.
SHOCKER: Pew Study: MSNBC Really Is More Partisan Than Fox. “ON MSNBC, the ratio of negative to positive stories on GOP candidate Mitt Romney was 71 to 3. That’s not a news channel. That’s a propaganda machine, and owner Comcast should probably change Phil Griffin’s title from president to high minister of information, or something equally befitting the work of a party propagandist hack in a totalitarian regime. . . . I thought show host Sean Hannity of Fox News defined party propagandist. But while his channel was bad, it wasn’t as bad-boy biased as MSNBC.” Interesting to see such strong language in the Baltimore Sun.
JUSTICE IN OBAMA’S AMERICA: “It’s one thing if a bank is too big to fail, so the government has to save it if it’s in danger of going under. It’s another if the bank is too big to be brought to justice, so the government can’t even make it obey the laws while it goes about its immortal way. That seems to have been the case recently with HSBC.”
Well, when laws are for the little people, too big to prosecute becomes perfectly expectable. Just ask David Gregory.
JOHN FUND: E-mail Scandal at the EPA: The Obama administration embraces secrecy and stonewalling.
It’s not uncommon for government officials to have private e-mail accounts. But federal law has set up several barriers to prevent officials from using non-official or secret e-mail addresses to conduct business and then conceal the contents of those accounts from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Politico reports that the EPA was supposed to ensure that anyone requesting Jackson’s e-mails under FOIA would also have access to communications from “Richard Windsor.” “But the system is far from foolproof,” it dryly notes.
When the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market group, came up empty on its FOIA requests for Jackson’s e-mails relating to her anti-coal efforts, it was told by an EPA whistleblower that she was using “Richard Windsor” and other aliases to coordinate with outside anti-coal groups and engage in other activity she wouldn’t want to come to light.
After CEI filed suit, the Justice Department last month reluctantly agreed to produce 12,000 “Richard Windsor” e-mails. The first batch is set to be released on January 14. CEI employees told me they expect the e-mails will be heavily redacted to obscure their content, but that House committees headed by Representative Darrell Issa of California and Representative Fred Upton of Michigan will launch probes that will ultimately bring all of the e-mails to light.
Indeed, Representative Upton has written to the EPA demanding to know whether the use of alias e-mail accounts “has in any way affected the transparency of the agency’s activities or the quality or completeness of information provided” to Congress. In response, the office of the EPA’s inspector general has announced that it will investigate to see if “EPA follows applicable laws and regulations when using private and alias e-mail accounts to conduct official business.”
It clearly hasn’t always in the past. In 2000, Clinton EPA administrator Carol Browner responded to a Landmark Legal Foundation FOIA lawsuit by claiming that she didn’t use her government computer for e-mail. But Browner then ordered the hard drive on the computer to be reformatted and all backup tapes destroyed, just hours after a federal judge ordered her agency to preserve all agency e-mails. . . .
Mark Tapscott, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner, has long chronicled how government officials evade laws designed to enhance transparency. He points out that such evasion is rampant because enforcement of FOIA laws rarely occurs. “Nobody in government has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA,” he points out.
Laws are for the little people.
January 5, 2013
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Is the Key to Financial Success . . . if you’re a college president, that is.
According to an analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education, in the 2011 fiscal year, 132 presidents of public colleges and universities made $344,000 or more — the income level that marks the divide between the bottom 99 percent and the top 1 percent. Private-college presidents raked in even more: 208 made $344,000 or more in 2010, with 36 of those making $1 million or more.
It’s no surprise that college presidents are receiving top dollar: More and more, a year’s college tuition is exceeding the annual salary that a student can expect to make in the first few years after graduation. (And that assumes the student can even snag a job requiring a college degree in this dismal economy.)
At New York City’s New School, for instance, then-president (and now failed Nebraska Senate candidate) Bob Kerrey made $3 million in 2010. Students entering the college this fall will pay a steep $38,000 in tuition. (And that’s before room and board.) It’s the same story at other colleges. At Washington University of St. Louis, where the tuition is now $44,000, chancellor Mark Stephen Wrighton made around $2.3 million. At Vanderbilt University (tuition: $42,000), chancellor Nicholas Zeppos made $2.2 million, while at Columbia University (tuition: $47,000), president Lee Bollinger made $1.9 million.
It’s generally less profitable to be the president of a public university, but many of their paychecks would still look pretty darn good to any member of the 99 percent.
Plus: “Why pick on these presidents? Well, for one thing, while the Occupy movement camped out on Wall Street, participants seemed driven in large part by frustration over onerous student loans. (If they had been upset over the mortgage crisis, their choice of locale would have made more sense.) . . . The Occupiers were right to notice that college is becoming a larger and larger financial burden for the middle class. It’s too bad they didn’t turn their focus to the members of the 1 percent who could really change that.”
They need to do some remedial reading.
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SO THIS PIECE IN FORBES DECLARING “UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR” AS THE LEAST STRESSFUL JOB OF 2013 got a lot of pushback, including a response from my hyper-productive historian brother.
To some degree, I think it depends on what you mean by stress. When I left law practice for law teaching, I was shocked to discover that the number of hours I worked actually went up the first year. That’s probably not true now, because I can write a law review article or prep for a class much more efficiently, but I still spend a lot of time working.
Nonetheless, what professors do have — over lawyers, at least — is control. Even that first year, I noticed that difference. I read about an experiment once that I think explains it: If you give rats random electric shocks, they get all kinds of stress symptoms like ulcers, high blood pressure, etc. Give them a button that will keep them from being shocked for a few minutes, or lessen the intensity of the shocks, and those symptoms fade, even if they wind up getting just as many shocks per day, because they have some degree of control over what happens.
When you’re a lawyer, or in many other jobs, you don’t have much control over the stresses in your life. As a professor, you have a lot more. That’s perhaps a distinction between “work” and “stress” that is worth bearing in mind in considering all sorts of jobs.
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Daniel Drezner. “There’s something vaguely comic about everyone trying to brag about how stressful their job is. Personally, I blame television. Shows like ER, The West Wing, and Scandal have glamorized the notion that killer jobs are friggin’ awesome and super-sexy. You know what’s really awesome? Doing your job so well that you can relax on a regular basis.”
WHY THE ANTI-SOPA COALITION DISSOLVED.