Month: September 2014

Elizabeth Whelan, founder of
the American Council on Science and
Health, died yesterday. Whelan had devoted her life to
combatting the misinformation and disinformation that are
all-too-often peddled by activist charlatans. I could count on her
and ACSH to steer me right when reporting on public health,
environmental, medical, and regulatory issues.

Whelan’s characteristic scientific insight is fully on display
in her co-authored 1984 Reason article, “Sweet
Truth,” which called into question the validity of animal
testing for determining the likelihood that various substances
cause cancer in human beings. She used the FDA’s attempt to ban the
sweetener saccharin to illustrate just how wrong-headed and
unscientific reliance on such tests is. After reviewing all of the
data, she concluded: “Saccharin presents a risk to humans that in
all likelihood is negligible, if not nonexistent.”

The article concluded:

In the tradition of individual rights and limited government, it
is the business of government to protect individuals from being
harmed by others. It is not the business of government to prevent
individuals from pursuing actions that may result in harms only to
themselves. Such restrictions erode freedom of choice and
individual responsibility, essential ingredients of a free
society.

Just so.

Thirty years after the FDA first tried to ban it, saccharin was

delisted in 2000 from the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s
Report on Carcinogens, where it had been listed since 1981
as a substance reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen. The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finally
got around in 2010 to agreeing to no longer list saccharin and
its salts as hazardous.

The notice
of Whelan’s death over at ACSH notes:

Beth was a giant in the annals of public health. With
postgraduate degrees from Yale and Harvard, she grew increasingly
frustrated with the discrepancy between what she knew to be
fact-based scientific truth, and the distorted information that the
public was hearing and reading from the media. Unlike many of her
colleagues, however, she resolved to do something about it. That’s
how ACSH was born.

By sheer force of will — despite her youth and inexperience with
any sort of activism —she recruited several towering figures in
epidemiology, science and public health. These included Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green
Revolution—the man who is credited with saving more lives than any
other human being— and Dr. Fredrick Stare, the founding chairman of
the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Department. Other
scientists and policy experts, now numbering close to 350, flocked
to join the nascent nonprofit’s Board of Scientific Advisors and
Policy Experts.

At the same time, she assembled and led a coterie of scientific
professionals at the ACSH headquarters in New York City. Before
long, publication after publication—all strictly devoted to the
concepts of sound science and independent peer review—began to
flow. These continue to this day. Every effort she inspired
promoted the mantra of evidence-based science, while at the same
time countering the hysteria and hyperbole spread by the media and
agenda-driven activists. Beth firmly believed that the nonsense and
destructive myths posing as science were only allowed to exist
because of what she termed “mute science”: competent, expert
scientists failing to speak up to dispute the junk science advocacy
agenda that permeated the media. Beth led the way in urging
scientists to speak out against the fallacies that are all too
pervasive in our culture.

Beth’s legacy will live on long past her all-too-brief sojourn
on Earth. Her commitment to the precepts of sound science have been
passed on to all who knew her.

She will be sorely missed.

Disclosure: I have worked on a couple of projects for ACSH in
the past, including my report,
Scrutinizing Industry-Funded Science: The Crusade Against
Conflicts of Interest.

The final installment of the Atlas Shrugged movie
trilogy opens today at theaters across the country.

Go here for the
official site and to find theaters near you.

Reason TV attended the Las Vegas premiere of Who is John
Galt? last week. Click above to watch our report from the red
carpet.

We interviewed the producer of the series, John Aglialoro, about
finishing the project, Ayn Rand’s continuing influence, and how to
beat back crony capitalism. Take a look below:

We also interviewed Harmon Kaslow, the other leader producer on
the project, about “Why the Internet Has Hollywood Very Scared.”
Watch here:

Reason‘s Brian Doherty reported from the set of “Who is
John Galt?” back in March.

Read our Ayn Rand archive here.

In January of 2009, just days after Barack Obama
had assumed the presidency, he announced his intention to pass a
massive fiscal stimulus within just a few weeks. He recognized some
resistance on the part of the public to such an ambitious plan, and
he understood it, he
said, which is “why this recovery plan will include
unprecedented measures that will allow the American people to hold
my Administration accountable.”

Among those measures would be a website to track the spending,
open to all. “Every American will be able to see how and where we
spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called
recovery.gov,” Obama said. “restoring transparency is not only the
surest way to achieve results” but also the best way to earn back
the public’s lost trust in government.”

All of this would be part of a newly invigorated effort “to root
out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our
government.”

After the passage of the stimulus, that website went live, and
for the last several years, it has provided a valuable resource to
journalists, policy analysts, critics, and supporters of the law.
But now the data is about to disappear. Unless something changes,
all of the relevant tracking information will disappear at the end
of the month, because the government is dropping its contract with
the company that manages and keeps the information.
From The Washington Post:

The data will disappear because the government board that
oversees the Web site and ensures the stimulus money is spent
properly is not renewing its license with Dun & Bradstreet, a
major U.S. financial firm that assigns an identification number to
all entities doing business with the federal government. When the
license expires at the end of this month, those identification
numbers — and other associated data — will no longer be available
to the government.

No numbers, no way to track the money….Nancy DiPaolo, chief of
congressional and intergovernmental affairs for the Recovery
Accountability and Transparency Board, said that it was not
fiscally prudent to renew the license and that the board would be
forced to take down the recipient data. The cost to renew the
license would be between $900,000 and $1.4 million.

Under the terms of its sole-source contract with the government,
Dun & Bradstreet owns the actual data on the numbers used to
identify and track contractors through the stimulus, according to
the Post. “Once the contract ends, the information must be
deleted from government databases.”

On the surface, at least, this sounds like the federal
government—and taxpayers—got taken by a contract intended to create
long-term lock-in. As with so many of the stimulus dollars it
tracked, it was money that was probably not well spent. 

Michael Hayden, former director of both the National Security
Agency and the CIA, has been offering his wisdom on warfare in
Iraq, and it’s … interesting. Hayden
told U.S. News & World Report that President
Obama’s plan to try and bomb ISIS out of Syria
instead of sending in ground troops has “all of the attraction
of casual sex.” 

A ringing endorsement, right? Wrong! Hayden is no fan of the
casual sex, and no fan Obama’s plan, which he said “seems to offer
gratification but with very little commitment.” 

“I guess he’s right,”
quipped Jessica Roy at New York. “Unlike ground
troops, drones don’t spend the night.” 

Of course it’s all fun and games until you stop and think about
the fact that this man is describing killing people as erotic
and gratifying and the failure to send American
troops to die immediately as an irresponsibility.

Hayden continued: “We need to be wary of a strategy that puts
emphasis on air power and air power alone.” If you bomb it, then
you gotta put a ring on it, obviously. 

More on Hayden’s foreign policy agenda: