This one comes from Massachusetts:
[A]ny child who has a meal in day care or is in care for more than four hours will be required to brush their teeth, according to the Department of Early Education and Care.
Regulators, perhaps recognizing the rule’s almost literal paternalism, are allowing parents to opt out if they wish.
I’m researching right now to see if day care providers are required by law to make sure the children in their charge eat their vegetables.
(Hat tip: Fran Smith)
A pithy column in Foreign Policy by the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger says that ”twice-fooled” Democrats, who have been “BTUed” by two Democratic administrations, “are unlikely to sign up for more of the same in the next Congress” (cap-and-trade being the regulatory form of a BTU tax on carbon-based energy).
The phrase “BTUed” calls to mind Paul Simon’s great ’60s cut-the-hype, get-out-of-my-face folk anthem, A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission), and inspired me to attempt a bit of musical parody. Here it is, with apologies to Rhymin’ Simon:
I been Al Gore’d and Yvo de Boer’d.
I been Rajendra Pauchauri’d and regulatory’d.
I been UN’d and CRU’d till I’m blind.
I been Climategated and often hated
Called a skeptic ‘cause I follow the data
That’s what real science is about, well, never mind!
I been BTU’d and cap-and-traded.
I been Hockey Sticked, Hide-the-Decline-Tricked.
Well, I paid all the taxes I want to pay.
And I learned to doubt by debating these louts,
And offsets don’t mean no regrets,
So I blog about Gorethodoxy each day.
The greens are rejoicing today because the Food and Drug Administration has softened its stance on the safety of Bisphenol A, a chemical used in the production food packaging and containers, such as baby bottles. Humans consume trace amounts of BPA in food products, but there is no direct evidence of any human health problems after decades of use.
For years, FDA has reported that BPA levels were too low to pose any significant health problems to humans. Scientific reviews around the (EU, Japan, Canada) world have drawn the same conclusion. Now FDA says it wants more study and might want to regulate in the future. But the science hasn’t changed–just the politics. Unfortunately, in today’s world, fear mongering and hype is more powerful than science.
So exactly what did FDA report this week? They “reviewed the research” and are suddenly more wary about the substance because of conclusions drawn in a 2008 National Toxicology Program report about BPA impacts on rodents. The agency notes that it could not find any direct evidence of problems among humans. It expressed minimal to negligible concern for almost all potential BPA risk factors. It expressed “some concern” in one area because some studies showed associations indicating that bisphenol A “can cause changes in the brain and behavior” and have “effects on the prostate gland” of laboratory animals. The NTP expressed “some concern” that associations between BPA and rodent development may indicate possible impacts on the development of children and human fetuses. NTP called for more research before such concerns could be dismissed.
Yet those concerns are drawn from rodent studies that have largely been dismissed around the world (as well as by FDA) as not particularly relevant or adequate for drawing conclusions. The NTP report noted: “These studies in laboratory animals provide only limited evidence for adverse effects on development and more research is needed to better understand their implications for human health.”
It is difficult to believe that FDA has suddenly found these studies compelling on scientific grounds. Instead, it appears the studies’ limitations are now being overlooked to justify a political agenda. FDA will now likely spend millions of taxpayer dollars to study this issue, but it is unlikely to find anything new. But whatever they find, you can be sure they will use it as an excuse to expand their regulatory power.
Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott and the American Spectator’s Joseph Lawler assemble to bring you Episode 77 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We explore the Massachusetts Senate race, Google vs. China on web censorship, the debate over global warming in Detroit, the cost of doing business in Venezuela and the inspiring philanthropic response to the humanitarian crisis in Haiti.
Steve Forbes gave a very good talk today, on the topic of his new book (co-authored with Elizabeth Ames), How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy. Just as importantly, though, he also explained how it was the undermining of capitalism by persistent government intervention that brought us to the current financial crisis. He singled out a few specific reasons.
First, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates too low for too long. This created what Forbes termed, the “fuel” for the housing bubble, which would not have occurred — or at least not grown into the enormous problem it did — had the Fed not flooded the economy with “liquidity.” I have long believed this, and several pundits have argued in favor of this view, but it was good seeing someone couch the problem of excess in the money supply in the context of a larger pattern of government intervention. I especially liked his analogy of currency to time: If the number of minutes in an hour were to constantly change, we’d soon see derivatives and hedging strategies for time, just to keep track of how many hours we’ve worked.
Second, the bubble was further exacerbated by the moral hazard created by the guarantee of unnecessarily risky loans afforded by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Third, mark-to-market accounting forced companies to value their assets as if they were day-traders. This inflated asset values at the top of the market, and depressed them when the market went down. This effect was so extreme that it created paper losses for firms that had a positive cash flow.
So how to move away from these problems toward a more prosperous future? Quite simply, government should get out of the way of the productive sector. Specifically, he said, government should focus on securing the rule of law and sound money, as well as facilitating the ease of doing business by removing barriers to entrepreneurs starting new business. (Thanks to Myron Ebell for his input in this post.)
For more on mark-to-market accounting, see here.
For more on Fannie and Freddie, see here (page 4).
Dr. Rob Bradley, CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, documents in Political Capitalism how fraud and corruption at Enron were the inevitable consequence of a business strategy emphasizing the political pursuit of market-rigging regulations as a strategy to reap windfall profits and grow market share.
Enron, for example, was a key lobbyist for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty calculated to increase demand for Enron’s services as a natural gas distributor, renewable energy seller, and cap-and-trade broker.
Today at MasterResource, the free-market energy blog, Bradley reveals that Enron also spearheaded the push for renewable energy mandates that made Texas the leading windpower state in the country.
Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years and frequently clashed with senior management over its infatuation with get-rich-quick green energy schemes. “Oh how sad I am that Enron purchased Zond [Corporation, a struggling wind energy company] and did so much to enable the artificial windpower boom in Texas and United States,” he writes.
In response to my Philadelphia Inquirer piece “Swine Flu Epidemic Ends with a Whimper,” predictably public health community members have squealed that the only reason the disease proved so mild is because of their own Herculean efforts. I saw the same thing with heterosexual AIDS and SARS. So it was that Steven J. Barrer, M.D. wrote to the newspaper:
Michael Fumento’s assertion that the swine flu epidemic predicted for this flu season was a medical scandal ignores the enormous effort of the country’s public-health sector to mitigate the potential seriousness of this disease.
Vaccine production was accelerated, public education was aggressive, and awareness was heightened worldwide. Every physician I know made an effort to educate patients. Fumento also belittles simple efforts such as hand sanitizer, but that, and frequent hand-washing, muffling sneezes in your arm rather than hand, and minimizing casual physical contact, are widely credited with reducing the spread of contagious disease.
They are among the efforts hospitals are using, successfully, to reduce their infection rates.
Diseases don’t go away. We just get better at dealing with them. I consider the mildness of this flu season a stunning public-health success.
Yet as my piece noted the epidemic peaked in mid-October, before anybody was vaccinated. It also observed that Australia and New Zealand had remarkably mild epidemics that ended before any vaccine was available.
Hand sanitizer and handwashing appears to have no impact on the spread of flu, as this article discusses. I found a recent medical journal article claiming to show that it does help, but when you actually look at their data you see they provided good evidence that it does not. If that’s the best they can do, it tells you something.
Handwashing was basically thrown at the public as a talisman and because, lacking a vaccine, the public health community and especially the CDC felt it had to offer something for the public to do, even if it was worthless. (Also, handwashing does protect against colds and food poisoning.)
In light of this, it’s hard to see how mealy-mouthed terms like “aggressiveness” and “awareness” played any role. The simple fact, as I took great pains to note, is that swine flu has a vastly milder impact on the immune system than seasonal flu. I’ve even explained why, that we’ve been exposed to H1N1 viruses as part of the seasonal flu since 1997. That also explains why children are disproportionately affected. Where did I first write this? In the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
So that’s it. End of ball game. The WHO knew the score when it declared its pandemic. And doctors like Barrer could have known this because they had access to the same medical literature that I had access to in which fatality rates were compared – and he had access to my previous Philly Inquirer piece that also discussed these rates. I did Barrer’s research for him.
Finally, diseases obviously do just go away. Every year, in countries with or with flu vaccine, in times before vaccines existed, influenza has struck, crested, and then faded away. What did medical science do to make the Spanish flu disappear in 1919?
Public health has done many wonderful things in this country. How much do you worry about smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, yellow fever, or any number of other diseases that used to sweep through this country periodically like a scythe? But the swine flu hoax is a serious black eye – as was hetero AIDS, SARS, and most recently avian flu – and no amount of wriggling and rationalization will change that.
The Italian government is considering making it illegal for its citizens to post videos on the Internet without a license.
The free speech implications are obvious. But could the proposal also be a move to restrict unwanted economic competition against Italy’s state-dominated media?
Hidden within the latest edition of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FluView was this sentence: “The proportion of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza was below the epidemic threshold.”
That’s right: The great American swine flu epidemic – which led to two proclaimed national emergencies and thousands of spooky news stories – has ended with a whimper.
Read about it in my new Philadelphia Inquirer article.
CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the Weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
January 15, 2010
>>FCC ‘Net Neutrality’ Rules Endanger an Open Internet
CEI’s Wayne Crews filed a public comment against the FCC’s plans to regulate the net. “The FCC seems to be forgetting that not every network has been built yet, and tomorrow’s networks and business models need not resemble those that prevail today,” says Crews. Read the full comment here.
>>Shaping the Debate
As-salt on Science
Dan Compton’s op-ed in the New York Post
Secret Science from the CIA?
William Yeatman’s op-ed in the Washington Times
Does Climate Science Justify Fuel Hikes?
Myron Ebell’s citation in the Detroit News
>>Best of the Blogs
Experts Question Enormous Cost and Constitutionality of Healthcare Legislation
by Hans Bader
The health care legislation backed by the president and congressional leaders will increase Americans’ health care costs by more than $200 billion, concludes an expert at the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Earlier, Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a lawyer, argued that the “individual mandate” in the health care bill legislation, which forces people to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum likewise is questioning whether it is constitutional to force people to do so.
Obama Bank “Responsibility Fee” Is Destructive, Hypocritical and Likely Unconstitutional
by John Berlau
The so-called Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee is a tax in search of a target. Today, the President declared, “We want our money back.” Yet his proposed tax on financial institutions with assets of $50 billion or more would be levied on the banks that paid back the bailout money – with interest – and on institutions that may not have even taken TARP funds, while most likely exempting Fannie, Freddie and the car companies that still owe billions upon billions to taxpayers.
Public Health Establishment Takes Credit for Mildness of Swine Flu Season
by Michael Fumento
Inevitably when pandemic doom fails to pan out, whether it be heterosexual AIDS, SARS, avian flu, or anything else the public health establishment that panicked everyone will claim that the only reason their predictions didn’t prevail was fast action on their part. So it was inevitable with swine flu, as we’re told in an article with the sub-headline: “If You Warn of An H1N1 Epidemic But Stop It, Do You Get Credit?” Professor Robert Field of the Drexel University School of Public Health tells ABC News online that his poor fellows were, as the piece put it, “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” According to the story, with the subtitle of “Public health officials faced a tough choice in May and June,” “to some extent, we may be seeing a milder epidemic than we feared because of the vaccine and other measures people are taking” says Field.
>>LibertyWeek Podcast
Episode 76: How Healthy is Health Care?
This week, guest-host host Jeremy Lott from the Capital Research Center grills The American Spectator’s Phil Klein about the politics behind the health care bill, including how next week’s special election in Massachusetts might affect the final product. Special guest Ryan Young weighs in on the return of global cooling. Next up are how well the government’s job creation efforts aren’t going, and Sen. Harry Reid’s embarrassing remarks about President Obama.
>>Support CEI
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