On the doorstep of the long U.S. political season, it’s worth pondering the significance and shelf life of several familiar political maxims. Each contains at least a grain of truth.   FIRST,  GARBAGE IN / GARBAGE OUT Everybody who understands statistics knows this maxim. There is always much more Noise than Signal in the data […]

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Official Washington has lost the plot, and I’ve never been more frightened for the future of America. No, I’m not talking about the fear of losing our democracy to authoritarian theocrats, though that remains a constant existential threat. I’m concerned that the pro-democracy “good guys” have settled into a debilitating groupthink. To use the Rumsfeldian […]

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College debt is approaching $2 trillion, more than all other types of household debt except mortgages. Fueled by tuition that exceeds $25,000 a year (room and board adds another $11,000), Federal student loan debt averages more than $37,000 among those with any student debt. Following a hiatus of more than 3 years, 45 million Americans […]

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As a citizen activist in the late 1970s and 1980s working at the Environmental Policy Institute, Robert Alvarez was among the first to document the extreme hazards of managing high concentrations of nuclear waste derived from nuclear weapons production, and as a senior appointee at the Department of Energy, he worked to prevent the department’s […]

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As one of my first tasks early in the first Clinton Administration as the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, I conducted the first (and only) asset inventory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In carrying it out, we departed from the usual reliance on DOE contractors, and established a team of federal […]

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