Mitchell Resnick/Planet Pix via ZUMA

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is quite the operator. He hired a couple of his close aides from Oklahoma, and then asked the White House for permission to give them big pay raises. He was turned down. So he gave them big raises anyway:

A provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act allows the EPA administrator to hire up to 30 people into the agency, without White House or congressional approval….After the White House rejected their request, Pruitt’s team studied the particulars of the Safe Drinking Water provision, according to the source with direct knowledge of these events. By reappointing Greenwalt and Hupp under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own.

Pruitt ordered it done. Though Hupp and Greenwalt’s duties did not change, the agency began processing them for raises of $28,130 and $56,765, respectively, compared with their 2017 salaries. Less than two weeks after Pruitt had approached the White House, according to time-stamped Human Resources documents shared with The Atlantic, the paperwork was finished.

Pruitt may be one of Donald Trump’s favorites, but Trump does not like people going behind his back to do the kind of stuff that Trump himself does. Plus, this whole business with the $50/day apartment he scored from a lobbyist friend is looking worse and worse. Trump obviously doesn’t care that Pruitt is hellbent on wrecking the environment—it pisses off the liberals, so that’s fine—but one of these days Pruitt’s shenanigans are going end up on the cover of Time, and Trump will finally decide that he’s tired of being upstaged. That’s how you get fired in Trumpland.

Sure, he's still alive, but it's hard to ignore the wrinkled mien, isn't it?Sven Hoppe/DPA via ZUMA

Ross Douthat uses the big ratings debut of the Roseanne reboot to argue that baby boomers still utterly control our culture:

The same week that “Roseanne” hit it big, the number one movie in America was Spielberg’s “Ready Player One” — an aging boomer director telling a story saturated in nostalgia for the pop culture that defined his peak artistic years. And the big Easter television event was the live performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a musical that the baby boomer Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote at the tender age of 22….Now it’s just boomer culture all the way down. And since that culture is, for all its creaking repetitiousness, our only common culture at this point, it would not be surprising if we find ourselves still clinging to it even once its progenitors are gone.

You can make practically any point you want if you cherry pick a few observations and ignore everything else. Sure, there’s nostalgia for boomer-era entertainment. Why wouldn’t there be since lots of boomers are still alive? But there’s also nostalgia for I Love Lucy, and the same week that Roseanne hit it big, The Ten Commandments was on TV as usual. A couple of years ago we were all agog over a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Today we’re celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

That’s all from the generation previous to boomers. Skipping forward, the most omnipresent aspect of modern pop culture is probably the Kardashian family. The number one movie in America for this entire year has been Black Panther, directed by a 31-year-old black man. Teen culture is saturated with Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, Twilight, and a truly astonishing mountain of decidedly non-boomer dystopian fiction. Contemporary feminist and racial discourse is driven almost entirely by Gen X and younger. What’s more, contemporary cultural discourse in general is driven largely by social media, which is very much a post-boomer phenomenon.

And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the steady stream of nostalgia-based entertainment that sank into oblivion almost as soon as it was released. Remember Pan Am?

Douthat claims that “boomers, for all the destruction trailing in their wake, might be the only thing holding American culture together at this point.” Please. Like all generations, boomers continue to keep the fading echoes of their youth alive. But this hardly means that boomer culture is hegemonic. It’s not even close.

A few days ago the Nation ran a cover story titled “How Big Wireless Made Us Think That Cell Phones Are Safe.” The authors say that their article “does not argue that cell phones and other wireless technologies are necessarily dangerous; that is a matter for scientists to decide.” Rather, it’s focused on the long campaign from the cell-phone industry to downplay and cover up studies that suggested any danger.

I finally got around to reading the article this evening, and toward the end it mentioned that we were still waiting for the final report of the National Toxicology Program, a rigorous study of cancer in rats exposed to cell-phone radiation. That got me curious, so I found the final draft report, released a few weeks ago, and read through it. The study found that a very small number of male rats exposed to radiation developed malignant gliomas, though oddly, there was no dose-response effect: rats exposed to low levels of radiation developed gliomas at the same rate as those exposed to high levels. In any case, the overall effect was not statistically significant. Female rats showed no ill effects at all. The same was true for schwannoma tumors (which are often benign): male rats showed a small increase while female rats didn’t.

The report concluded that there was “some evidence” of carcinogenic activity based on the increased number of schwannomas, though it was fairly low and restricted to males. However, there was also this:

In males, survival was greater in all exposed groups compared to sham controls, though it was statistically significant only in the 1.5 and 3 W/kg groups. Survival in the sham control group was 28% compared to 48%, 62%, and 48% in the 1.5, 3, and 6 W/kg groups, respectively.

Wait. The male rats exposed to radiation lived longer? Yep. Here’s Figure 8:

By the 105th week, males exposed to the highest levels of radiation had a survival rate of about 70 percent. Those exposed to no radiation (the red dots) had a survival rate of 30 percent. Among female rats, survival rates were similar for all groups. (The chart above is for GSM phones, but the results were pretty much the same for CDMA phones.)

The authors attribute the lower survival rate of the control group to “higher severity of chronic progressive nephropathy in the kidney,” a common disease in the strain of rats used in the test. But there’s more: not only did the exposed rats have a lower severity of nephropathy, but the higher the exposure the less the nephropathy. In the discussion section, the authors say this suggests “that the decrease in chronic progressive nephropathy may have been related to cell phone RFR exposure,” possibly via “suppression of inflammatory processes through stimulation of stress response pathways.”

I’m not sure what we should make of this. The peer review of the report was held last week, and the review panels voted to accept the conclusions of the study. However, there doesn’t seem to have been any discussion of the higher survival rates of male rats exposed to radiation. How peculiar.

Jaap Arriens

How many people have had their personal information compromised by Facebook? Here’s how the estimates have changed over time starting from early March:

• 270 thousand
• 50 million
• 87 million
• 2 billion

Meh. What’s a factor of 10,000 between friends? And make no mistake: we are all friends now, whether we want to be or not.

ABC News reports that President Trump may ask Congress to use its recission authority to slash some of the programs in the $1.3 trillion spending bill it passed a couple of weeks ago:

Trump has been talking with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., about the plan over the past couple of days, according to an aide to the House leader who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks….The idea emerged as lawmakers get hammered back home for the $1.3 trillion spending package that, while beefing up funds for the military, also increases spending on transportation, child care and other domestic programs in a compromise with Democrats that Trump derided as a “waste” and “giveaways.”

….[McCarthy’s spokesman] didn’t specify how much spending could be rescinded or in what categories. But Trump would likely seek to focus on domestic spending he has attacked in recent tweets.

If Trump actually goes through with this, I have no doubt that his request will be focused primarily on poor people. A recission bill requires a majority vote in the Senate, which means that Republicans have to stay united to pass it. Aside from spending on poor people, I’m not sure there’s anything else that they hate almost unanimously.

The big problem, of course, is that plenty of people in the Senate made commitments to Democrats on the spending bill. If they break those commitments, how will they ever get agreement on a budget in the future? For this reason, I think that passage in the Senate is pretty unlikely.

Family week reaches hump day with this pick from my mother. It’s a picture of a Dublin streetlight at dusk. However, the pinkish cast to the light is solely the result of Photoshop.¹ Please don’t visit Dublin and then get mad when night falls and the streetlights are just plain old white, like they are everywhere else.

¹Why did I do this? Because I felt like it. What other excuse do great artists need?

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

I think I’ve now read upwards of a dozen articles about whether Amazon pays a fair rate for shipping its packages via the post office. It’s insane. The journalists of America are apparently required to write detailed explainers about every single stupid thing that Donald Trump tweets. They do this even when they know that Trump is motivated solely by personal animus, not by any serious policy preference.

Here is everything you need to know in 100 words. In every business, there are centralized departments—factories, billing, computer services, etc.—that are used by lots of different product lines. The cost of these common services has to be allocated across different products, and the post office is no different. It has lots of costs—trucks, planes, distribution centers—that are used by all their product lines: first class mail, priority mail, packages, etc. The question is: are they allocating these costs properly to their package business? If their allocation is low, they can charge less for package delivery while still making it look like they’re turning a profit.

That’s it. It’s a technical question of cost accounting, and as I can tell you from personal experience, every product manager lobbies creatively to get their allocations as low as possible. The Postal Regulatory Commission believes the current allocations are OK, but if you put your mind to it you can come up with nearly any allocation formula you want. As it turns out, some guys from Citigroup did exactly that and came up with a higher allocation formula for packages. This allowed them to predict that USPS package charges would eventually have to go up and therefore FedEx would get more business, which made FedEx a great buying opportunity. Given the history of Wall Street firms finding creative ways to hype their stock picks, you may decide for yourself whether to believe this.

As for Trump, who cares? He saw this on Fox News and tossed off a tweet because he hates Jeff Bezos. Why does he hate Bezos? Because Bezos (a) really is a self-made billionaire, and (b) he owns the Washington Post. Everybody knows this. Can we all stop pretending that cost accounting for the USPS package delivery business is a genuine story that we should all be concerned about?

From 1963 to 1966 Gallup asked Americans what they thought of Martin Luther King Jr. on a scale of -5 to +5. I’ve renormed this to a more common 0-10 scale:

By 1966, King’s average rating had fallen to 3.5. Even if you exclude the large number of stone racists who gave him a zero, he only scored a 5.4. He was not an especially popular figure.

In 2011, Gallup polled King again using their old scale. By then he was beloved, scoring 8.7 no matter how you count. Even the stone racists had given up. Practically no one rated him less than a 7.

It’s always easier to love someone when he’s no longer around to make trouble, isn’t it?

Elementary and high school teachers are striking in several states over low pay and attacks on their benefits. Here’s an excerpt from an EPI report showing the pay of public school teachers over the past four decades. Bottom line: Pay has stagnated since the mid-90s and has declined by 5 percent since 2010.

From the Washington Post:

President Trump has instructed military leaders to prepare to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, but has not set a date for them to do so….The president said that the U.S. mission would not extend beyond the destruction of the Islamic State, and that he expects other countries, particularly wealthy Arab states in the region, to pick up the task of paying for reconstruction of stabilized areas, including sending their own troops, if necessary.

I haven’t been following the details of the fighting in Syria for the past few months, but my tentative reaction is that this is a good thing if Trump follows up. Next up: does Trump have the balls to withdraw from Afghanistan too?

Come what may, it’s past time for American troops to get out of the Middle East. We’re creating more problems than we’re solving.