Slacker Monday?

As is no doubt already clear, I've been a bit busy lately and I haven't gotten up a lot of material here in the past few days. I hope to have more on psychiatry later today, but meanwhile let me rip off the Center for Science in the Public Interest which has been kind enough to put me on its "Integrity in Science Watch" mailing list. It is the fate of the blogger, especially one with a specialty, to end up on a minimum of 5,487 e-mail lists. Since I'm already on several lists for enlargement of a specific body part and people who need $2.5 discreetly transferred out of Sierra Leone, it's a lot to wade through. However, I do give this one the occasional interested glance.

CSPI has been around for 30 years now fanatically defending the purity of our precious bodily fluids, principally as they may be affected by food and water. Sometimes they seem like the environmentalist equivalent of Rev. Dimsdale, but somebody needs to stake out the border march.

A couple of notably depressing items from this week's Integrity in Science Watch:

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility gets ahold of notes from a meeting between OMB officials and pesticide industry representatives one month before the administration approved new rules which, while purporting to ban pesticide testing on pregnant women and children, actually allows it through loopholes. Excerpts from the notes:

• “Re kids—never say never” (emphasis in original);
• “Pesticides have benefits. Rule should say so. Testing, too, has benefits”; and
• “We want a rule quickly—[therefore] narrow [is] better. Don’t like being singled out but, speed is most imp.”

Then there is this one, quoting ISW: "Two of the U.S. Appeals Court judges who ruled against allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions failed to disclose on their financial statements that they attended an all-expenses-paid, six-day conference on the topic financed by the corporate-funded Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project wrote Sunday in the Washington Post. . . " We've got to do something about those activist judges.

Anyhow, it's a good project, do check it out, direct link here.