July 13, 2012, 5:24 pm
By Peter Wood
The dreadful scandal at Penn State reached another level on July 12, with the 250-page report of former FBI director Louis Freeh to the university’s board of trustees, culminating a seven-month independent investigation. The report makes clear the complicity of senior officials at the university in covering up convicted child molester and former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assaults on children. The officials include head football coach, the late Joe Paterno, university president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, university vice president Gary Schultz, and university police chief Thomas Harmon, all of whom knew enough of the facts to act but who chose instead to turn a blind eye to Sandusky’s concurrent career as a child molester.
The officials chose to pursue a cover up, according to Freeh, because of their fear of bad publicity.
That probably…
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August 4, 2011, 12:07 pm
By Innovations
John R. Mashey, Ph.D., vice president of technology at Techviser, and Robert S. Coleman, professor of chemistry at Ohio State University:
Anthropologist Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, published “Bottling Up Global Warming Skepticism” on Innovations, followed by “Climate Thuggery.” The first mentioned a 3-week-old Science profile of Mashey’s efforts to defend climate scientists from political attacks.
Wood’s article misused the platform of CHE. Its relevance to the concerns of CHE was minimal. It had little purpose but to damage the reputation of one of us, John Mashey, and the climate scientist Michael Mann, whom Wood has often denigrated elsewhere. The political false-association tactics were obvious. Climate scientists are under incessant attack, a fact strongly decried the day before Wood’s article by the AAAS Board. The muddy …
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July 29, 2011, 10:04 am
By Peter Wood
Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a valid scientific theory? Is it well supported by the empirical data or is it mostly an artifact of computer modeling? I don’t have answers to these questions. I stand, rather, on the side of those who favor rigorous scientific inquiry, transparency, and openness. I am not a climate scientist, but neither do I cede the whole matter of answering such questions to the designated experts. Good science doesn’t limit itself to the views of narrow-cast specialists. Valid observations, corrective criticism, competing hypotheses, and rigorous testing can and often do arise from other sources.
It surprises me, however, that proponents of AGW, or what might be called the climate orthodoxy section of AGW theory, often respond to criticism and dissent with a kind of fury. Far from welcoming discussion, they seek to suppress it. In doing so they…
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June 30, 2011, 4:23 pm
By Peter Wood
At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of. He shrewdly traded some trash for a peddler’s wagon full of green bottles. Then he opened a lottery, sold a thousand tickets, and handed out the empty bottles as prizes.
Barnum eventually grew rich with his museum, his circus, and his spectacular coup in bringing the singer Jenny Lind to America, but he longed for something else. As his biographer Neil Harris put it, Barnum sought “approbation”—
Swindlers had existed for a long time, but none had the effrontery to call themselves philanthropists or to make money from revelations of their own cunning and deceit.
The public loved his spectacles but a certain class of people deplored his ethics.
I am not sure why contemporary higher education hasn’t more forthrightly claimed P.T. Barnum as its true progenitor. His influence surely outshines Thomas Jefferson, Mark Hopkins,…
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