Some Feel Good Headlines Ahead of July 4

Who needs the old comics pages when the "hard" news is so amusing?

Here are a couple of headlines that will generate a smile.

• First up:

Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency’s research campus in North Carolina are preparing to take on a new responsibility. Bring home lab rats as pets. . .

“Adopt love. Save a life,” read a poster displayed on campus last week, according to a picture obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to government workers who speak out on environmental issues. “Would you like to adopt?”

According to an email sent Tuesday by Maureen R. Gwinn, acting assistant administrator of E.P.A.’s Office of Research and Development, the program has started accepting applications, though adoptions were on a temporary hold as the agency considered the adoption criteria.

I’m sure readers (especially ‘AnthonyHatesMayo’) can provide lots of terrific punchlines for this set up.

More seriously, one wonders whether being adopted by an EPA bureaucrat isn’t worse torture than the relentless animal testing done on rats. Cue here the classic William Clark essay, “Witches, Floods, and Wonder Drugs.” Clark noted how lab rats are exploited for political purposes:

What is not a risk with a parts-per-trillion test can always be exposed to a parts-per-billion examination. If rats cope with the heaviest dose of a chemical that can be soaked into their food and water, you can always gavage them. Or try mice or rabbits. Again, the only stopping rule is discovery of the sought-for effect, or exhaustion of the investigator (or his funds). Many of the risk assessment procedures used today are logically indistinguishable from those used by the Inquisition.

• More fun news:

Harvard University would face a budget shortfall of about a billion dollars a year if President Trump follows through on all of his plans and threats spanning research funding, tax policy and student enrollment, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal. . .

A sustained shortfall of that magnitude would severely strain Harvard’s ability to manage its $6.4 billion annual operating budget. Though Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, more than 80% of the money is subject to donor restrictions, meaning it can’t be touched to patch budget gaps without inviting lawsuits.

“They’ve got enough money to keep going for a while, but eventually they’re going to have to make substantial cuts,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies education finance. “You would change the future of the institution.”

Chaser:

Brown is part of an ever-growing group of colleges forced into significant austerity measures as the Trump administration wages financial warfare on the U.S. system of scientific and scholarly research. . .