"The Internet: Fun While It Lasted" by James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal, January 22,1997, p A14, reports that the Clintons have "assembled a crack team of civil servants, carefully selected and armed with broad rule-making expertise. Their mission: Regulate the Internet." This "interagency task force" is headed by none other than Ira Magaziner. As Freeman puts it: "If you've been waiting for a signal that it's time to dump technology stocks, your wait may be over."
The Clintons have been keeping Magaziner out of sight ever since he and Hillary's Health Care Task Force and the 1,400 page plan he authored to regulate the health care industry crashed and burned. Federal Judge Royce Lambert suggested that the Justice Department consider prosecuting Magaziner for perjury during that escapade.
"Radiation Threatens Mars Delay" in Nature 385, p $2 January 1997, brings word that a manned mission to Mars will need to be delayed another 25 years while bureaucrats study the possible effects of radiation on humans during the trip. This adds decades of wonderful multibillion dollar paper shuffling onto the project. As usual, our government has identified a worthwhile project and is now distorting it into an excuse for vast amounts of peripheral spending.
If they use the no-threshold linear hypothesis, this could be drawn out for generations. If intergalactic cosmic rays are absorbed to a significant extent by the human body, then they can be equally well absorbed by appropri- ately shielding small sections of the space vehicle to serve as protective hide-outs for passengers when needed. We expect that, if current knowledge of the risks and uncertainties were fully explained to poten- tial travelers, there would be no shortage of volunteers for the trip.
"The Academic Fad That Gave Us Ebonics" by Tom Loveless in The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 1997, p A14, explains that "Ebonics is solidly in the mainstream of modem educational thought. It shares with constructivism the same relativism, the same reluctance to let students know when they are wrong." I would also add that it is racist to the core. The only blacks who will benefit from ebonics are political agitators. For the students, it is just one more step along the modem liberal path toward the permanent second-class citizenship that usually results from poor education.
