For example there is not an industry today that is not safer than it was prior to the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) in 1970. Since OSHA was created in 1970, workplace fatalities have decreased 60% despite the more than doubling of the work force. Job related injuries and illness rates have decreased by 40%. And, yes government regulation has increased.
We can also credit the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the restrictions on DDT that have brought our eagle and ospreys back from the edge of extinction as well as protecting us from its effects.
It has worked to prevent future Love Canal type environmental disasters. Government controls on nuclear power have prevented a Chernobyl disaster in this country.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Jack Keady, my former colleague at American Airlines, sent this news item:
Airline fees reach $400 mark, USA Today survey finds — The era of the $400 airline fee has arrived. For an overweight checked bag weighing 71-100 pounds, Continental Airlines is charging $400 on most international flights, and American Airlines is charging $450 on its Asian flights. United Airlines charges $400 for checking bags weighing 71-99.9 pounds on flights to another continent. Those are the most expensive fees that airlines charge fliers, a new USA Today survey of what 13 U.S. carriers charge for services available to coach passengers has found. Gary Stoller/USA Today
Buy underwear when you get there, maybe.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Oh, yeah, we know what you teachers do with your fancy laser pointers in the off-hours. When you’re not torturing your students with Death by PowerPoint, highlighting the vocabulary words, pointing out the routes on the maps, and generally making your students a little jealous of your tools, you take the lasers home to torture your kitties.
If you’re a teacher with a science bent, you might even do a little experimentation: Do cats chase green lasers, too? Blue ones? What about those filters that make starbursts, do they drive cat’s wild?
Ah, but teachers with a science bent, and access to some really big cats . . .
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It seems like just a few months ago that Kathryn the Trophy Wife™ and I honeymooned in Yellowstone National Park, for a glorious January week. On more than one occasion we had Old Faithful all to ourselves — it seemed like such an indulgence.
Seems just a few months ago, but that was before the 1988 fires, before our 1989 vacation there, before our 2004 ceremony casting the ashes of brother Jerry and his wife Barbara to the Yellowstone winds.
Will Yellowstone be there for our children, and for our grandchildren, as it has been for my lifetime? The Nature Conservancy produced a 16-minute film showing much of the glory of winter of the place, and talking about the problems.
For the deer, elk and pronghorn in and around Yellowstone National Park, surviving the winter means finding adequate food and areas with low snow accumulation. But this critical winter range is increasingly threatened by energy and residential development. At stake is the very future of the Greater Yellowstone region’s iconic wildlife. This film highlights the voices of those working together to save these magnificent herds: ranchers, conservationists, scientists and others. http://www.nature.org/yellowstone
Growing up in the Mountain West, I learned to appreciate the stark beauty of the cold northern desert — but seldom is that beauty captured on film so well as it is here. Phlogiston Media, LLC, made a remarkable, beautiful film, about a remarkable, beautiful land threatened by gritty, banal and mundane development.
This movie has been viewed only 542 times when I posted it. Spread the word, will you?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Nature Notes #16 from the good people at Yosemite National Park: Sky Islands.
Throughout the Sierra Nevada, high flat plateaus are found at elevations around twelve and thirteen thousand feet. These isolated sky islands are the home to unique plant communities that are found nowhere else.
A little sketch in her notebook, an off-the-top-of-her-head list of common phrases. Common today, but originating with William Shakespeare.
Becky's quick summary of some of the best-known phrases we use everyday, invented by Shakespeare. From Becky, age 20, in London.
Becky’s quick work caught a lot of eyes. One of NPR’s blogs brought it to my attention. English teachers, take notice (maybe someone at your school has a large format printer, and can make for you a poster . . .)
I thought I’d posted this when I first saw it in July. Can’t find it. It deserves a wider audience, I think: “The Michelle Bachmann Song” by Hockey Mama for Obama.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Short video demonstrating the Indoor Residual Spraying program in Mali, financed by funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Note there is no ban on DDT, note that fighting malaria, even with poisons for mosquitoes, requires more than just spraying poison.
The video is in French.
539 views, September 18, 2011
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s horrifyingly ironic if you think about it: Republicans opposed expanding access to the health care system with a false claim that the Democratic plan included rationing of health care in a “death panels” clause. Completely untrue. The bill barely passed.
But did you see what happened last week at the Republican Party’s event featuring their candidates for president? Here a citizen responds to the Republicans:
In their silence, Republicans appear to support rolling back current health care, foregoing “death panels” as not harsh enough, and moving on to “let ’em all die.”
Charts in government and civics texts always amuse me for what they leave out — mostly the political machinations. Anyone who worked or works in the halls of Congress knows the process is never so clean as Bismarck pretended with his old, misattributed bon mot (actually John Godfrey Saxe, not Bismarck) (and would Bismarck be chagrined at my using a French phrase to describe his words?).
Sometimes the legislative process is a little more confusing than I’m Just a Bill. As Margaret mentioned in The Curious History of the 2011 Debt Ceiling Legislation earlier this week, sometimes the legislative process takes interesting turns. Christine also blogged about the unique situation of vehicle bills. The poster below details the various status steps legislation can take, including Introductory, Committee, Discharge, Calendar, Floor, Conference, and Presidential Steps.
For tips on THOMAS that can relate to the legislative process, you can subscribe to the RSS feed or via email alert. There is also a glossary in THOMAS to help.
Is the poster available? I asked, and got this response from Mr. Weber:
This is what it says at the bottom right of the poster:
Committee on House Administration
Wayne L. Hays, Chairman
Prepared by House Information Systems Staff
Frank B. Ryan, Director
If you can find a link to this chart that makes the wording and details legible, or if you happen to find it and can photograph it so we can read it, will you let us know here?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Image from Harper’s Magazine, September 14, 1901 -= McKinley “At the Threshold” of Martyrs’ Hall
Teachers should be mining the “On This Day” feature at the New York Times, which usually features an historic cartoon or illustration from an antique Harper’s Weekly. It is a favorite feature, to me.
his post-dated cartoon was published as President William McKinley lay dying from an assassin’s bullet. He had been shot on September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz (pronounced chol-gosh) at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The president died on September 14. Here, McKinley is led to the Hall of Martyrs by grief-stricken personifications of the North and South. Between pillars topped by busts of the two previously slain presidents, Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, the angel of death prepares to place a laurel wreath of honor upon McKinley’s head. (Images related to Garfield’s assassination also showed a reconciled North and South.)
There is much more at the Times site.
Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln, was present when McKinley was shot. Accounts I have read but not confirmed say that Robert Lincoln had been invited to attend Ford’s Theatre with his father and mother, the night his father was shot. As a member of President James Garfield’s cabinet, Robert Lincoln had been awaiting Garfield’s arrival at Union Station in Washington, D.C., when Garfield was shot.
And as a visitor in Buffalo, Robert Lincoln had as a matter of respect lined up to shake President William McKinley’s hand.
Astounding if true. Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated. Robert Lincoln was close to the first, the assassination of his father, and present for the next two. Where can we confirm that story?
McKinley’s death catapulted the do-gooder, Theodore Roosevelt, into the presidency, probably to the great chagrin of corrupt Republican politicians who had hoped that by getting him nominated to the vice presidency they could get him out of New York politics.
You may get a free copy of the 2011 U.S. Statistical Abstract, on CD.
Available January 2011
On the CD-ROM version are Excel spreadsheet files for each of the individual tables.
In many cases the files contain more detailed information than is found in the book. Also, in some cases the Excel files contain more recent and revised data that were released by the source after publication of the printed version of the Abstract. You will also find the same Adobe Acrobat files for each section which you find on this web site.
Additional information—
While supplies last, single copy FREE (one per customer) by calling Customer Services at 1-800-923-8282.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 