The Environmental Working Group seems to exist for no other reason than to scare consumers away from the products of modern technology — and to advertise on behalf of the organic food and natural products industries. Since 1993, the group has been terrorizing America about everything from apples to the zinc-oxide used in some sunscreens, and practically everything in between. And since 1995, it’s been publishing an annual “Dirty Dozen” list of fruits and vegetables the organization claims have dangerously high levels of pesticides.
When this year’s Dirty Dozen list was published in June, EWG president Ken Cook wrote that:
“Though buying organic is always the best choice, we know that sometimes people do not have access to that produce or cannot afford it.” … “Our guide helps consumers concerned about pesticides to make better choices among conventional produce, and lets them know which fruits and vegetables they may want to buy organic.”
And when last year’s study was published, an EWG press release claimed that “consumers can lower their pesticide consumption by nearly four-fifths by avoiding conventionally grown varieties of the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables.”
The fact of the matter is, the mere presence of a substance doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s present at a dangerous level. Because farmers the world over use pesticides to increase their productivity, there’s going to be trace levels of pesticides in the food we eat. And, frankly, since we don’t live in a Lake Wobegon world, where everything is better than average, some product or another has to measure highest in pesticide residues. Cleverly, EWG rarely says directly that the levels of pesticides they measure are dangerous, but they know they can count on most consumers and the media to infer that conclusion. [click to continue…]
Public Outcry Forces Rule Reversal for Massachusetts Craft Brewers
Despite the recession, one segment of the US market, at least, has been steadily growing. This sector has supplied a constant boon of jobs, tax revenue and craft beer. Yes, I’m talking about beer. While “big beer,” brands like Bud, AB-inBev and MillerCoors, have suffered right along with the rest of the economy, craft breweries have seen increasing growth in sales and profit. Much of that growth is owed to states deregulating and reforming regulations to make it easier for small breweries to enter and stay in the market. Smart lawmakers around the nation have recognized the potential tax revenue and job creating power of the booming craft beer movement and have encouraged new brewers to open operations in their state. As a result of this competition for craft breweries, states have been repealing laws that have sat virtually untouched since prohibition. Unfortunately, some states are taking steps in the wrong direction, whether in an attempt to leach money from the burgeoning market or to protect other interests. One example is the attempt made last week by the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission to enact a new licensing requirement on small brewers that would have driven them out of the market. Luckily, the move was quickly reversed in the wake of vocal opposition from around the country.
When the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission (ABCC) announced the requirement that “farmer-brewers” in the state must obtain at least 50% of their ingredients from their farms, it became apparent that such a requirement would have forced most of those brewers to obtain a different kind of license. This license would be far more expensive and make it difficult, or impossible, for small breweries to compete in a market dominated by “big beer.” [click to continue…]
Tech:
FTC Sharpens Google Probe:
“U.S. antitrust regulators are focusing their investigation of Google Inc. on key areas of its business, including its Android mobile-phone software and Web-search related services, people familiar with the probe say.”
“Absolute explosion” – How BlackBerry BBM fed the riots, says contact:
“With riots and looting breaking out all over London earlier this week, media outlets have been poring over how the violence spread. We were amongst the first to identify the BlackBerry mobile handset and its unique, private Blackberry Messaging service (BBM) as a method whereby rioters and looters, many of them teenagers, broadcast and swapped information in a way that effectively crowd-sourced the riots. Today, in 2011, the BlackBerry is by far the most popular handset amongst Britain youth.”
Global Warming / Environment / Energy:
The State of Global Change Science:
“The US attitude toward Global Change science and Global Warming (GW) science has really degenerated into a case of “us” against “them”, like most things political.”
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In a small but growing number of schools, you have to invite all the kids in your child’s class to her birthday party, even if your child doesn’t want to invite them. For example, the student handbook of the John F. Kennedy Elementary School in West Berlin, New Jersey makes this demand: “If a student is inviting his/her classmates to a party, he/she must invite all of the students in the class or all of the female students or all of the male students. When invitations are given in school, students may not arbitrarily invite or exclude classmates from parties.” These mandates may make sense to wealthy, privileged liberals with big houses, who don’t realize that a parent with a small house could not accommodate the entire class or even half of it. But there is no way I could accommodate more than a few kids at my daughter’s birthday party, since I live in a little two-bedroom house.
Many of these bossy rules dictating who kids can invite to their own birthday parties are based on the weird idea that inviting only popular children is a form of bullying. Using politically-correct psychobabble about “power relationships,” some psychologists have sought to redefine bullying to include wielding “popularity,” not just violence. For example, a recent survey by a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, Dewey Cornell, defined bullying as “the use of one’s strength or popularity to injure, threaten or embarrass another person on purpose,” and defined it to include “verbal” or “social” behavior, not just “physical” assaults and intimidation. So if you are “embarrassed” by a “popular” person you can accuse them of bullying. Still worse is the nobully.com web site, which defines even “eye rolling” as a form of bullying, so if you roll your eyes at a jerk, they can accuse you of “bullying.” As someone who experienced real, violent bullying as a child, I think these overbroad definitions of bullying trivialize actual bullying.
This mindset is typical of the current Administration, which issued a letter to school officials in October 2010 that falsely implied that bullying is already banned by federal law (contrary to federal court rulings), and defined bullying in ways that would violate free speech and disregard basic principles of federalism.
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College tuition has gotten so high that coeds are selling sex to pay for their inflated tuitions, and a professor recently suggested that students sell their kidneys.
But higher education isn’t worth what it used to be. A credit rating agency, Moody’s, is now warning student borrowers that college may not be worth the money for some majors. As Reason Magazine notes, a higher education bubble looms:
A growing chorus of economists and educators think that the higher education industry will be America’s next bubble. Easy credit, high tuition, and poor job prospects have resulted in growing delinquency and default rates on nearly $1 trillion worth of private and federally subsidized loans. Now the ratings agency Moody’s has weighed in with a chilling diagnosis: “Unless students limit their debt burdens, choose fields of study that are in demand, and successfully complete their degrees on time, they will find themselves in worse financial positions and unable to earn the projected income that justified taking out their loans in the first place.”
Two law schools are being sued for fraudulent placement data in class-action lawsuits. Law school tuition has gone up 1000 percent since 1960 in real terms, even as law schools teach students few practical skills and little real-world knowledge of the law. A tenured law professor at a well-ranked law school admits that law school is a “scam” and that his faculty colleagues are “overpaid,” “inadequate teachers,” many of whom work just a few hours a day.
Due to market distortions like the proliferation of unnecessary state licensing requirements that require useless paper credentials, and financial aid that directly encourages colleges to raise tuition, colleges can raise tuition year after year, consuming a larger and larger fraction of the increased lifetime earnings students hope to obtain by going to college.
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Missouri has a new law that bans teachers from becoming Facebook friends with any current or former student. The goal is to prevent inappropriate teacher-student relationships.
There are several points to make here. The first is that this is what parenting writer Lenore Skenazy calls “worst first” thinking. It’s rooted in black swan bias, a cognitive defect in the human brain that overestimates the frequency of rare but horrifying risks. Black swan bias has led to, among other things, the creation of the TSA.
Here, the concern is pedophilia. Statistically, it is extremely rare. But it is so horrifying that legislators and the parents who vote for them take precautions completely out of proportion to the actual threat. They assume the worst first. Ready, FIRE!, aim. [click to continue…]
“Disease does not discriminate, but apparently Medicaid coverage does. A 26-year-old South Carolina tile-layer has found himself with breast cancer and out of luck for one reason: He is a man. While breast cancer affects an estimated 2,000 men annually, Medicaid does not cover treatment of the disease in men,” reports the Daily Caller. “The South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said that the discriminatory policy lies with the federal government. ‘We are again urging CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services] to reconsider,’ the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. ‘It’s a very clear example of how overly rigid federal regulations don’t serve the interests of the people we’re supposed to be helping.’”
The man with cancer, Raymond Johnson, is hardly an anomaly. There have been high-profile cases of men with breast cancer, like former Senator Ed Brooke (R-Mass.), the first popularly-elected black U.S. Senator. But the federal geniuses who are taking over our healthcare system don’t seem to read the paper. [click to continue…]
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