Month: August 2014

The University of Michigan is
spending millions of dollars to spiff up its Ross School of
Business—a building that is already among the most opulent school
facilities in the country, having been renovated less than a decade
ago. But a historic tree stands in the way of the construction
project, so university officials have budgeted $400,000 to relocate
the 200-year-old bur oak.

Consultants give it a 70-80 percent chance of surviving the
move, according to the
Ann Arbor News:

Workers dug a four-foot-wide trench and will place steel beams
more than four feet below the tree’s base. Lifting devices will be
used break the the roots from the ground in order for it to be
unearthed. The tree will then be loaded onto a flat bed and
transferred less than a football field’s distance away from its
current location.

Jenny Cooper, a graduate student at the business school and
U-M’s School of Natural Resources, is one of 291 students, faculty
and staff who signed a petition urging the school to save the
tree.

“As I see it, the rationale for preserving the (legacy bur oak)
tree is about history, tradition, pride and respect,” she told The
Ann Arbor News in a previous interview. “The tree is a symbol of
strength and resilience and far predates the university as part of
the landscape.”

By the way, it should be noted that neither students nor
taxpayers are directly covering the cost of the project, which is
being paid for by billionaire philanthropist Stephen Ross, for whom
the building is named. Ross has given hundreds of millions of
dollars to the important cause of fancier buildings at UM,
including $200 million in 2013 for the Business School and athletic
facilities.

Ross can spend his money however he likes, of course. However, I
can’t help but wonder whether the students of this public
institution would have been better served by a generous
contribution to the university’s general fund—and an accompanying
tuition decrease. According to reports, UM fundraisers solicited
Ross for the latest donation; they came to him, in other words.
$200 million would have gone a long way toward halting the upward
spiral of tuition prices at UM, but I guess that didn’t come up in
the conversation? (“Thanks for transforming our Business School
into a spaceport, Mr. Ross; now let’s turn our attention to the
thousands of students who can no longer afford to attend UM, a
public university that exists for the primary purpose of educating
the children of Michigan residents.”)

Good news for the tree, though.

Tensions are high between the U.S. and Russia,
and President Barack Obama didn’t do anything to ease that this
weekend by belittling Russia with some questionable claims.

In an interview with The Economist this
weekend, Obama shirked any blame for crumbling U.S.-Russian
relations and segued into downplaying the other nation’s global
significance. To back this up he
said:

Immigrants aren’t rushing to Moscow in search of opportunity.
The life expectancy of the Russian male is around 60 years old. The
population is shrinking.

Not one of these sentences is true. Writing for Forbes,
Mark Adomanis, an evenhanded American expert on Russian affairs,
points out the “pretty startling amount of factual inaccuracy.” He

debunks them in turn:

One of the first things that anyone notices when they are in
Moscow is the enormous number of immigrants
from Central Asia. Probably the single most noteworthy and
inescapable feature of modern Russian life is the prevalence of
hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have already
rushed to Moscow “in search of opportunity.” It’s impossible to
miss them.

This is corroborated by both official Russian government
statistics and the work of its domestic political opponents.

With a dollop of snark, Adomanis explains that “life
expectancy… isn’t a subject of conjuncture or obscure
philosophical inquiry, it is a number that is very easily found on
the public-facing website
of the Russian state statistics service.” And again, Obama is
wrong:

In 2013, the average male life expectancy in Russia was a little
bit above 65 (technically it was 65.14). When Obama says that life
expectancy is “around 60″ he’s off by about 8 percent. With a
similar margin of error we could say that Barack Obama is the 41st
president of the United States, that he won 47 percent of the vote
in the 2012 presidential election, and that he was born in 1957.
Eight percent is a margin of error that people rarely feel
confident using, because it very quickly makes you sound rather
ill-informed and ignorant.

Regarding the population, Adomanis suggests that “US political
elite almost always make huge mistakes when talking about it,” as
“Russia’s
population is not shrinking, it is growing.” And it has been
every year since 2009.

It’s bizarre that Obama criticized Russia on these fronts when
there’s plenty of legitimate issues – like Moscow’s crackdown
on civil rights, the
pro-Western political opposition, and
independent media – that he could have addressed instead.

These, of course, don’t have much bearing on the war Russia is

waging against Ukrainian sovereignty or the
mass killing of civilians on a Malaysian plane, but whether
it’s due to a lazy team of fact-checkers or deliberate rah-rah
nationalism to boost the U.S. by comparison, dubious talking points
don’t help the Obama administration resolve the current crises.
Hearing the president say “Russia doesn’t make anything” will only
inflame anti-American sentiment among Russian civilians, thereby
reinforcing Putin’s own ballooning cushion of popular
support. And, there’s need for healthy debate about the U.S.’s

actions against the Kremlin throughout this war, but by
spouting some easily-debunked information, Obama effectively
invites skepticism of the accuracy of other White House claims
about Russia. 

I’m sure none of you would want to emulate Donald Trump,
but just in case you’re tempted to follow
his lead and freak out about the Ebola patients coming to the
U.S. for treatment, here’s Danielle N. Lee to
talk some sense into you:

It is a frightening prospect to
have a disease with a 80-90 percent mortality rate so
close to home. People are concerned
that once Ebola arrives in the US, people here will get sick
and the disease will spread.

There are two things, however, that are important for everyone
to understand.

First, Ebola
is already here in the US. Scientists have been studying
the disease in well-secured laboratories for years, and there has
been no trouble.

In other words, there have been no new cases or incidences of
Ebola from these previous exposures to Ebola and related viral
hemorrhagic fever diseases.

Second, Ebola is actually very hard to contract….[C]ontracting
Ebola involves coming into direct contact with an infected person’s
body fluids, namely blood and feces. Caretakers such as relatives
and medical staff are at high risk of becoming infected. Otherwise,
the chances of anyone else in the community contracting Ebola is
practically zero. Transmission can be avoided by wearing protective
clothing and gloves, washing your hands, and avoiding physical
contact with individuals who are sick.

Read the rest
here.

I’m sure none of you would want to emulate Donald Trump,
but just in case you’re tempted to follow
his lead and freak out about the Ebola patients coming to the
U.S. for treatment, here’s Danielle N. Lee to
talk some sense into you:

It is a frightening prospect to
have a disease with a 80-90 percent mortality rate so
close to home. People are concerned
that once Ebola arrives in the US, people here will get sick
and the disease will spread.

There are two things, however, that are important for everyone
to understand.

First, Ebola
is already here in the US. Scientists have been studying
the disease in well-secured laboratories for years, and there has
been no trouble.

In other words, there have been no new cases or incidences of
Ebola from these previous exposures to Ebola and related viral
hemorrhagic fever diseases.

Second, Ebola is actually very hard to contract….[C]ontracting
Ebola involves coming into direct contact with an infected person’s
body fluids, namely blood and feces. Caretakers such as relatives
and medical staff are at high risk of becoming infected. Otherwise,
the chances of anyone else in the community contracting Ebola is
practically zero. Transmission can be avoided by wearing protective
clothing and gloves, washing your hands, and avoiding physical
contact with individuals who are sick.

Read the rest
here.

Obamacare imposes government mandates on
individuals, employers, insurance companies, and more. Are mandates
for doctors next? A. Barton Hinkle examines the erosion of
individual choice and responsibility in a system that is becoming
increasingly collectivized.

View this article.

“The Fight Against California’s Electric Skateboard Ban” is the
latest video from Reason TV. Watch above or click on the link below
for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and
more Reason TV clips.

View this article.