Ongoing Explosion Of Lawlessness At The Justice Department

I seem to remember a time when the Justice Department of the United States was an organization that had earned a high reputation for respect of the citizenry and behaving within the law.   It's amazing how fast these things can be lost.

Buried at page A17 of the print version of today's New York Times is an article by Stephanie Clifford headlined "Secrecy Orders By Prosecutors On Subpoenas Draw Criticism."   The article reports on a recent decision by Judge Raymond Dearie of the Eastern District of New York in the case of United States v. Gigliotti, in which Dearie was highly critical of prosecutors for ignoring their constitutional obligations.  I cannot find a publicly-available version of the opinion, so I will rely on the excerpts quoted in the Times.

It seems that the government was investigating the Gigliotti family for involvement in drug dealing or other illegal activities.  On March 11, 2015, the prosecutors of the Eastern District of New York issued a subpoena seeking information from the Gigliottis' accounting firm, Zuccarello, Zerillo & Co.  Here is a copy of the cover page of the subpoena.  The cover page contains the following legend in all capital letters:

YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED NOT TO DISCLOSE THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA, AS IT MAY IMPEDE AN ONGOING INVESTIGATION.

Now, where exactly do federal prosecutors come off throwing a line like that into their subpoenas?  For those unaware, here is a brief summary of the law on this subject:  Prosecutors and members of grand juries are sworn to secrecy as to their activities, but members of the public who receive a subpoena or are otherwise asked for information are under no duty of confidentiality, and have a First Amendment right to speak as they may see fit.  The prosecutors may request citizens to keep quiet to assist the investigation, but that is only a request.

There's plenty of case law on this subject that makes it absolutely clear that the prosecutors do not have the right to direct citizens to remain silent about government investigations.  In most parts of the criminal law, Congress has not purported to legislate on this subject.  But then there is the area of so-called "National Security Letters," in which Congress by statute has purported not only to authorize the FBI, in cases involving "national security," to demand information from citizens, but also to compel the citizens to remain silent and not tell the subject or anyone else that the request has been received.  Does that sound to you like it's OK under the First Amendment?  The Second Circuit certainly didn't think so.  In a 2008 case called Doe v. Mukasey, 549 F.3d 861, the Second Circuit ruled that the statutory provisions authorizing the FBI to compel such non-disclosure were unconstitutional, and that if a citizen who received a National Security Letter declined to keep it confidential, the burden would be on the government to obtain a court order requiring confidentiality, absent which the citizen would be free to speak.

So the Gigliotti subpoena did not by any means come against a blank slate.  The prosecutors were completely aware that their "direction" to Zuccarello Zarillo was completely lawless, but they just went ahead and issued it anyway because they thought they could get away with it.  What's the chance that some little accounting firm in Queens reads all the Second Circuit opinions and knows what their rights are?

Needless to say, Judge Dearie (by the way, himself a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York -- during the Reagan administration) was not happy.  According to the Times article, Judge Dearie in October instructed the prosecutors to "explain how and why the language was added to the subpoenas."  But in response the prosecutors declined to set out "the scope of the problem or how they planned to address it," and instead merely said that the language was "inadvertent" and "improper."  Well, I can tell you the scope of the problem.  Take a look at the cover page of that subpoena.  It's their form.  In other words, they were putting this language on essentially all the subpoenas.  There was nothing "inadvertent" about this.  They were engaging in systemic intentionally lawless conduct, and now they have lied about it to a judge.

Oh, and who was the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York when this subpoena was issued back in March, and when this improper language somehow crept "inadvertently" into the Eastern District's subpoena form?  That would be Loretta Lynch.  A few weeks later, on April 23, she was confirmed as Attorney General of the United States.  Her confirmation was somewhat controversial, for reasons that included her support for Obama's immigration enforcement regime (or lack thereof), but as far as I can find, the subject of her issuing unconstitutional gag orders to the citizenry did not come up.

And in other news about the "Justice" Department, we learn from the Washington Post on November 23 that so-called "civil forfeitures" to the federal government have exploded to the point that in 2014 they exceeded all losses from burglaries in the United States.   Here is their chart:

Notice that as recently as 2008 (end of the Bush administration) asset forfeitures to the federal government were well under $2 billion annually, and only about a third as much as burglary losses.  But somehow under Obama the asset forfeitures to the federal government have exploded to well over $5 billion per year.  What's going on?  Law enforcement has turned to predation upon the citizenry, with the poor and the marginal most at risk.  From a Washington Post investigatory report in September 2014:

[A]n aggressive brand of policing [is spreading] that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes...Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.  Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms…  A thriving subculture of road officers…now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

That quote deals mostly with state and local law enforcement, but the explosion in the federal seizures shows that they are doing the same or very similar things.  Here is a summary from the Institute of Justice on the scope of the problem.  Or read my article from April 5 on how the feds systematically steal luxury cars from people who try to sell them to buyers in China.

I can't say that I expect much in the way of better behavior from Justice during the term of the current administration.  The question is, will a new administration bring about any reform, or is the formerly respected "Justice" Department now corrupted beyond hope of recovery?

Is Connecticut Self-Destructing?

Checking in on the most popular stories of the year on RealClearPolicy, I find that one of them is "Why Connecticut Is Self-Destructing," by Lewis Andrews.  The story dates from June 9.

"Self-Destructing" is a rather strong term.  Is it a fair characterization of the situation in Connecticut?  I'd say it's an exaggeration, but not by much.  Without doubt, Connecticut should serve as a warning to other states of where the blue state model of governance leads.

The immediate inspiration for Andrews' article was the passage of Connecticut's budget in June.  That budget included major tax increases, particularly on corporate entities, notably a permanent 20% surcharge on the corporate income tax and a new rule imposing taxation on corporations' foreign earnings.  According to Andrews, those changes brought Connecticut's tax burden to the third highest in the nation (although he doesn't say where he gets that figure; a Tax Foundation study from November 15 ranks Connecticut 44th of 50, or 7th worst, for "business tax climate").  The changes also brought threats to leave from several of the state's largest corporate employers, among them General Electric, Aetna and Travelers.  So far none of those has left, but then these things don't happen overnight.  So Andrews asks:

How did Connecticut, which just over two decades ago had no income tax and was widely known as "the Switzerland of New England," so quickly become the third highest-taxing state in the nation, the most indebted on a per capita basis, and, according to Barron's, the worst managed?       

Are things really that bad in Connecticut?  It's still at or near the top in the state rankings by  income.  In this ranking based on 2010 - 2013 U.S. Census data, Connecticut ranks first by per capita income (although D.C. is substantially higher) and fourth by median household income.   But its top income position has been gradually eroding.  According to data from the Connecticut Department of Labor here, the number of jobs in the state has been almost perfectly stagnant for 25 years:  1,640,000 jobs in 1990 and 1,690,000 jobs in 2015.  That would be "growth" of about 0.1% per year.  1990 would be just before the enactment of the state's first income tax in 1992.  It started at 1.5%.  Today the top rate is 6.7%, just a hair shy of New York's top rate. 

Remarkable about Connecticut is the concentration of the wealth in the New York suburbs in the southwest area of the state, and the simultaneous abject poverty of all the cities.  Among the states, Mississippi has the lowest per capita income at $20,618 (2014 data).  Here are the per capita income numbers for the main Connecticut cities:  Hartford, $16,798; Bridgeport, $19,854; New London, $21,110; Waterbury, $21,545; and New Haven, $21,789.  Whatever they are doing to ameliorate the income inequality is completely falling on its face.

So how is the new budget working out?  On November 10 the Hartford Courant reported that the tax revenue from the newly increased taxes was running some $600 million below projections (over two years), on a total annual budget of about $26 billion.  An emergency legislative session earlier this month claims to have fixed the problem, for the moment.  The big employers in Stamford all seem to be in a Perils-of-Pauline game of downsizing and/or departure.  Pitney Bowes has just sold its headquarters building and downsized its operation substantially.  The big banks with operations in Stamford, notably UBS and RBS, repeatedly threaten to close and move away, although maybe they'll stay a little while longer for a big enough bribe from the state.

Connecticut is a tremendous lost opportunity.  It has opted for high taxes and a period of gradual relative decline compared to other states.  The lost opportunity is particularly tragic for the basket case cities and their inhabitants.      

What's The "Middle Ground" On Housing Policy?

At Newsday yesterday, a guy named Ruben Navarette has one of those usual laments about the terrible partisan divide and disappearing middle ground in American politics.  His prescription: we just need to have a civil and intelligent search for "solutions":

We'd be a stronger country . . . if we demanded — from elected officials and from one another — that we all put more thought, honesty and nuance into our discussion of policy issues, instead of drawing out our perspectives in stark black-and-white terms when the world comes in shades of gray.    

Well, Ruben, the problem here is that the other half of us don't buy the idea that the government can solve every human problem if it just puts enough smart people on the job of finding the "solution" and throws enough money in the right direction.  To take two big scourges that the government is endlessly trying to fix with programs and spending -- poverty and homelessness -- the evidence would seem to be rather strong that all government efforts to "solve" these problems only make them worse.  No amount of "thought, honesty, and nuance" is going to change that.

For today let's take Ruben's call to "thought, honesty, and nuance" and apply it to government policy for dealing with the homeless.  Here in New York, the administration of Mayor de Blasio has the idea that the cause of homelessness is lack of sufficient affordable housing, which can be fixed by the government subsidizing and/or mandating the provision of apartments at far-below-market rents.  And yet, New York for around 80 years has been ground zero for affordable and subsidized housing initiatives, not to mention rent control, and somehow the number of homeless never goes down and housing becomes more and more expensive relative to other cities.

Back in 2002 when prior Mayor Bloomberg took office, the City had a policy of giving priority in subsidized public housing to those who had become homeless and entered the shelter system.  Bloomberg and his people became convinced that that policy was giving an incentive to many people to declare themselves homeless in order to jump a long waiting list to get into the public housing.  So in 2005 the Bloomberg administration reversed the policy of giving priority in public housing to the homeless.  That brought withering criticism from homeless advocates, notably something called the Coalition for the Homeless, which called the idea that people would enter the homeless shelter system in order to jump the subsidized housing queue a "zombie lie."   Here is their advocacy piece from March 2014, at the beginning of the de Blasio administration:

In the area of homeless policy in New York City, there is no more persistent “zombie lie” than the notion that providing housing subsidies – in particular, priority referrals for federal housing programs like public housing or Section 8 vouchers – leads to a surge in families entering the homeless shelter system. . . .  [T]his “zombie lie” was long espoused by Bloomberg administration officials to defend their elimination of housing aid for homeless children and families.    

How's that for withering scorn?  After a few months, in July 2014 de Blasio and his people succumbed to the advocacy and reinstated the policy of public housing priority for shelter residents.  Did it work out?  A year and a half into the new policy and the local papers are filled with stories of the surge in homelessness and the new homeless "crisis."  The New York Post has had one article after another on the subject throughout the fall, for example here and here.  And yes, the New York Times has been unable to avoid noticing.  From October 26, "Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness":

The number of people entering city shelters has increased under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and when they enter the system, people are staying longer, striking markers of a crisis that has forced its way to the top of the mayor’s agenda.  As of Thursday, 57,448 people — more than 40 percent of them children — were sleeping in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services. . . .        

The 57,000 shelter residents are up from a figure in the mid-30,000s during the Bloomberg tenure.  On December 17 the Times reported that Mayor de Blasio, after insisting for months that nothing was amiss, had finally announced new measures to combat the "homelessness crisis."

But then, even those 60,000 +/- shelter residents are just the tip of the iceberg of New York's population dependent on government handouts for their housing.  The numbers are staggering.  According to the Metropolitan Council on Housing here, New York has almost 180,000 subsidized low-income NYCHA apartments; almost 100,000 "portable" Section vouchers; another 90,000 "project-based" Section 8 vouchers; another 140,000 so-called "Mitchell-Lama" subsidized apartments; and about 1 million private-owned but "rent-regulated" apartments.  And yet somehow the "affordability" crisis and the "homelessness" crisis persist. 

So does Mr. Navarette actually believe that all it will take is a "thoughtful, honest and nuanced" discussion to figure out the one more program that will finally fix this?  On the other side they are advocating to just dismantle the entire mess.  Is there really a middle ground?

Are Most Published Scientific Research Findings False?

Readers interested in the subject of science versus consensus and orthodoxy enforcement might enjoy the article "Broken Science" by Ronald Bailey appearing in the current (February 2016) print edition of Reason Magazine.  (Here is the link for reason.com.  The article doesn't seem to be at the online site yet, although I assume it will show up within a few days.)

Bailey delves in some depth into the subject of the remarkable amount of published scientific research that cannot later be replicated and ultimately turns out to be wrong.  How much?  As much as half or more.  Citing extensive evidence of pervasive failed replication and/or complete falsification of previously published research results, Bailey reasonably asks whether "science" is "broken." 

If you have read my post from a few days ago on the scientific method, you know my answer.  No, this does not indicate that science is broken.  It is in the nature of science that huge numbers of hypotheses that seem brilliant and reasonable and intuitive and obviously true turn out to be false.  Science is not a process of "proof" of hypotheses, but rather a process of sequential falsification of some hypotheses in favor of better hypotheses.  Publication is just an indication that a hypothesis has survived an initial round of testing, inevitably by the very people who posed the hypothesis in the first place and therefore have a strong interest that the hypothesis should turn out to be right.  Even after initial publication of favorable results, every hypothesis should still be taken with a huge grain of salt; and, after multiple independent replications, a hypothesis should still be taken with a somewhat diminished but still substantial grain of salt.  Eventually most hypotheses -- and, given enough time, maybe all -- will fall, in some cases to a slightly improved hypothesis, in other cases to a completely different hypothesis, and in many cases to the dreaded "null hypothesis."

Bailey begins by citing the famous 2005 PLOS Medicine article by Stanford statistician John Ioannidis titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."  

Ioannidis showed, for instance, that about one-third of the results of highly cited original clinical research studies were shown to be wrong or exaggerated by subsequent research.  "For many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias," he argued.  Today, he says science is still wracked by the reproducibility problem: "In several fields, it is likely that most published research is still false."

After that article was published, many criticized Ioannidis for exaggerating his own results; but Bailey cites multiple subsequent efforts that have repeatedly shown stunning rates of non-replicability of published results:

In 2012, researchers at the pharmaceutical company Amgen reported in Nature that they were able to replicate the findings of only six out of 53 (11 percent) landmark published preclinical cancer studies. . . .  In 2011, researchers at Bayer Healthcare reported that they could not replicate 43 of the 67 published preclinical studies that the company had been relying on to develop cancer and cardiovascular treatments and diagnostics. . . .  Ioannidis estimates that "in biomedical sciences, non-replication rates that have been described range from more than 90 percent for observational associations (e.g., nutrient X causes cancer Y), to 75-90 percent for preclinical research (trying to find new drug targets)" . . . .  In August, Science reported that only one-third of 100 psychological studies published in three leading psychology journals could be adequately replicated.  In October, a panel of senior researchers convened by the British Academy of Medical Sciences (BAMS) issued a major report on research reproducibility indicating that the false discovery rate in some areas of biomedicine could be as high as 69 percent.

If you ask me, all of this is totally normal and to be expected.  This is not an indication that science is "broken," but is rather the very nature of how science works.  I just have two questions: (1) Why does the news service in the elevator at my office building in Manhattan breathlessly report literally every newly-published piece of research in the field of bio-medicine as if it is likely to be true (e.g., people who drink green tea are 17% less likely to develop colon cancer!! people who eat tomatoes are 23% less likely to get breast cancer!! etc., etc.)? Don't they know that almost all of this stuff will ultimately prove to be wrong? and (2) Why is the field of climate science immune to the process of hypothesis falsification that is the essence of the scientific method in all other fields claiming the mantle of the term "science"?  

Markets Serve A Purpose

Regular readers here know well of the unfolding disaster of New York's vast socialist-model public housing empire known as the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.  In a post back in May, I compiled data on NYCHA's catastrophic financial state from a report put out by the de Blasio administration titled NextGeneration NYCHA.  The problems include: multi-hundred million dollars of admitted annual operating losses; rent collections that cover barely a third of operating expenses and nothing at all for capital improvements or property taxes; an annual federal operating subsidy of over $2 billion, which effectively hides that the real operating deficit of the projects far exceeds $2 billion per year; $16+ billion of unmet capital needs, and no source of money to fund that gap; and a complete lack of any plan to fix the financial crisis other than transferring many NYCHA expenses off its budget and into other places in the $70+ billion City budget where they can be hidden outside of public view.

Well, you will be glad to know that in an op-ed in today's Crain's New York Business, philanthropist Laurie Tisch is announcing the latest initiative to turn things around, which is -- to establish farms on otherwise-underused NYCHA real estate.

You wouldn’t expect to find a vegetable farm at a public housing development in New York City. But a one-acre farm at Red Hook Houses—the first-ever large farm on New York City Housing Authority property—is growing cabbage, collard greens, butternut squash and basil. Soon, new urban farms will sprout on five more NYCHA properties in Brownsville and Canarsie in Brooklyn, East Harlem, the Bronx and Staten Island.

These new farms will increase access to fresh produce in communities with high levels of poverty, food insecurity and diet-related diseases, while also serving as hubs for education, community engagement, and job training for residents. The workers will be supplied by Green City Force, a nationally recognized AmeriCorps program that recruits and trains 18- to 24-year-old NYCHA residents and pays them to work on environmental sustainability and energy-efficiency programs at Housing Authority sites. These young people gain rigorous job training and career planning support that propels them into jobs.

Really, you can't make this up.  Of course this is a "public-private partnership" with the full backing of the de Blasio administration.  Indeed, according to Tisch, the initiative is part of de Blasio's "Building Healthy Communities" program. 

Ms. Tisch appears to be one of those well-intentioned but completely uninformed New Yorkers with more money than she knows what to do with.  She acquired her wealth by inheritance from her father, Preston Robert Tisch, who was a principal in Loews Corporation and an owner of the New York Giants football team.

I wonder if Ms. Tisch or anybody in the de Blasio administration might stop for a moment to ask why there are no farms in New York City on private land.  It's not too hard to figure out.  The reason is that the land is way too expensive to make it possible to farm profitably.  Here are some listings for land for sale in Brooklyn.  It's $10 million per acre and up.  And by the way, there's no such thing as a full contiguous acre.  Mostly it goes by tenths and even hundredths of an acre.  In Sullivan County -- less than 100 miles away -- you can get land for $4000 - 5000 per acre in multi-hundred acre parcels. 

But since the NYCHA land is publicly owned in a socialist-model arrangement, we can pretend it's free!  At huge effort we have provided the people with $100 tomatoes and $200 squashes, and then suppressed the costs through public ownership so that nobody realizes how completely nonsensical this is.

Meanwhile, of course, we have what is officially designated as a "crisis" of lack of affordable housing.  But instead of using that underused NYCHA land in Brooklyn for more housing, where it might actually make sense economically, we'll require developers to provide "affordable" apartments on land in Manhattan that costs not $10 million per acre, but more like $100 million.  It's how North Korea and Cuba found the route to starvation.  In New York, the great and the good think that it all makes perfect sense.

Consensus Science And Orthodoxy Enforcement

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the basics of the scientific method.  Not that I came up with this; it's just the basic stuff everybody learns (or should learn) in junior high school.  Essentially, the idea is that every hypothesis is open for challenge by all comers at all times, and when observation or experiment contradicts a hypothesis, then that hypothesis is wrong and must be rejected.

But then there's the small problem that arises when accumulating data contradict some scientific hypothesis on which a lot of careers and funding and public policy have already been built.  The acute version of this problem occurs when a hypothesis has become official scientific dogma and is currently in use by some powerful government bureaucracy to enhance its power and advance its preferred policy agenda.  All of a sudden the problem is not so small to the people whose funding, status, perks and careers are on the line.  And thus we find in the community calling themselves "scientists" people in positions of high power and prestige who in fact are the opposite of scientists, and who have taken on the role of enforcing orthodoxy and suppressing contrary evidence in service of pre-established public policy agendas.  This may be anti-science, but it turns out it's a good way to get yourself lots of fancy titles, awards, grants, perks, and compensation.

Which brings me to the story of Marcia McNutt.  Dr. McNutt is the Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine, one of those premier peer-reviewed scientific journals that a budding scientist absolutely must get published in to rise out of obscurity and become someone in the field.  Currently Dr. McNutt has been nominated to be the next head of the National Academy of Sciences.  There is no other candidate.  Here is a picture of Dr. McNutt:

Yesterday I received a copy of an extraordinary email on the subject of Dr. McNutt authored by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.   The email was sent by Wood to the membership of the National Association of Scholars, and a full version of it appears on their website.    Mr. Wood raises serious issues of what he terms "threats to the integrity of science" arising during Dr. McNutt's tenure at Science.  Essentially the issue boils down to McNutt turning Science from a organ of science into a tool of orthodoxy enforcement. 

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge.  The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.  Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . .  Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing.         

Wood treats three particular controversies in detail.  In each case the hypothesis in question is a main underpinning of government regulatory and/or environmental policy in some respect.  In each case the hypothesis has come into serious question based on observation and data that appear to contradict it.  In each case McNutt has used her role as Editor-in-Chief of Science to make sure that no paper presenting evidence contrary to the hypothesis can see the light of day.  I will quote Wood extensively on each of the three controversies.  You can then judge for yourself:

1.  The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation.  The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.  This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers.  These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary.  In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it.  However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence.  Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed.  This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies.  The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2.  Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality.  Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established an national regulation based on this claim.  Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA.  The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence.  This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans.  The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this, however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any dissenting views.  One can be a strong supporter of the consensus model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this controversy.  Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous evidence.  The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl paper and McNutt editorials can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf.

So how does a Marcia McNutt come to be the unopposed shoo-in candidate to head the National Academy of Sciences?  My hypothesis is that those promoting her candidacy know that she can be counted on to protect any important orthodoxy from serious challenge.  This is one hypothesis I'd like to see proved wrong; but don't count on it.