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Surgeon General Describes Censorship From Bush Administration
UniversalVM writes "The NY Times is reporting that the former Surgeon General in damaging testimony given to the senate describes how he was repeatedly censored by the Bush administration while speaking out about topics such as global warming, Stem cell research and so on. The effort was to 'water down' or weaken reports on important issues to suit Republican Agenda. He describes how he attended one meeting where Global Warming was being described as a 'Liberal Agenda' and being dismissed. He tried to intervene thinking that the people there did not understand the science so he set about explaining it to them, the result? He was never invited back."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
On a more serious note, even if you think that global warming is a pile of horse manure, why would anyone object to the measures that are being suggested? Unless they owned a coal mine of course...
There's a lot of sense in heavy investment in nuclear, solar and wind power plus hybrid, diesel and electric vehicles even in a situation where the world isn't going wrong. Same with switching to CFLs and generally improving efficiency of resource usage etc... it's not like there are people who find clean air offensive... or at least I hope not.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
I'm not sure 2008 can come quickly enough.
I don't for a moment think that any of the potential presidential candidates and their future administrations will not be rife with corruption and political mumbo jumbo. However, the constant news of abuses of power and position to make hideously bad decisions has me regretting the past 7 years thoroughly.
We need Mr. T for president, or at least Secretary of Defense.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
...Bush Administration And at what point does the meter raise to impeachment of the clan?
I don't condone censorship of scientists in any way, shape or form. But why is the Surgeon General talking about global warming? He should leave that discussion to the climate experts (e.g. Jim Hansen). There are too many armchair climatologists out there, which contributes to the misunderstandings about global warming.
Look Clinton had a BJ and they tried to get him out of office. Bush has been screwing up a war form day one, went in when the evidence said no WMD's. Hell he even tried to pion sept 11 on Iraq, tho the evidence just was not there. Toss in things like the wire tapping issue where illegal wire tapping's occurred even tho getting a warrant to do it was basically a rubber stamp, and nothing happened. This is not the first time someone has said bushes gang tried to change the facts, and force bad info down on the public. In the end Bush is a oil guy, he don't care about the environment or anything, just making his own cash. Yet some how he is still in office, and Clinton who ya was not perfect almost got tossed out because of a BJ, give me a break.
> Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches.
Absolutely breathtaking!
These are the methods of a tin pot dictator, not the leader of a great and worthy nation.
That Bush & Crew would put their own puffed up egos ahead of the health and well-being of their own countrymen says it all. Sigh.
Is it fascism yet?
How does that follow? If you frequently go off on some weird ass jargon-filled tangent about some obscure scientific esoterica that no normal person would ever care about, then sure, that's going to put a crimp in your social life, because it demonstrates a lack of social skills.
But if you give a layman a reasonable overview of some issue that's actually relevant to the discussion, while restraining your tendency to sneer at stupid questions, and patronize people just because they don't already know what you're talking about, then you might find that some people are actually capable of being interested.
Feynman did a lecture series on quantum electrodynamics that was specifically geared toward people who didn't know what the hell quantum electrodynamics was. If you want to see an example of someone explaining a hard to understand topic to a bunch of people who have no background in a manner that is both accurate and entertaining, I highly recommend picking it up.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Unfortunately, when your funding is managed by a bunch of people who simply don't believe the science, and who have no interest in different points of view, you can't really succeed at this. No matter how noble a sentiment it is.
Well, 'good' policy is subjective -- if your goal is to have a policy which starts with the supposition that homosexuality is bad, or Intelligent Design is valid, or abstinence only sex education isn't an oxymoron
Not when you can convince people of such silly things as "our lives would be easier if Pi was 3". And, in the case of global warming, while there seems to be a majority of people who agree, as long as someone dissents you can claim that it's not fact, but opinion and theory and muddy the waters. An uncritical/uneducated public (who has been fed what you wanted them) won't be able to tell the difference.
Sadly, nowadays, politically inconvenient basically means you get shut down. Especially in the current administration which has the attitude that "what we say is right, no matter what the truth is". They're not interested in truth -- they're interested in their position, and pandering to their base. Reality be damned.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
- Malaria and other diseases
- heatwave deaths
- water quality
It sure would have been helpful to have talked about them over the last seven years.After World WarII, several Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Not everyone wanted to do that. Winston Churchill, for example, just wanted to execute those Nazis. But the USA insisted on fair trials, saying that it was important to establish the principle of the rule of law.
Back then, the USA had leadership that demonstrated to the world how even the most heinous crimes (particularly the Holocaust)—in which many millions of people died—can and should be handled according to law and principle.
Compare that with what George W. does today.
Somehow, somewhere along the line, science allowed itself to be bought through sponsorship of research, and then politicized through endorsement of certain political agendas which were suggested to be incarnations of scientific truth. Now, science itself is sullied, and is forever going to be caught in this battle between special interest groups vying for control of an oblivious electorate.
I think Lou Dobbs said it well:
With the electorate asserting a strong impulse to be independent, and with populism exerting a significant influence in the 2006 midterm elections, there is a possibility that all of those incumbents in the House and Senate may have to consider the possibility of actually having to represent their constituents and the popular will, rather than corporate America, socio-ethnic special interest groups and the tens of thousands of lobbyists who represent every interest but that of the common good and the nation.
Lou Dobbs - July 11, 2007
He's talking about government in general, but the same could be applied to science and even large parts of the computer industry. If science wants to have respect again, it needs to get rid of the perception that loyalties and bribes have made it a partisan football.
technical writing / development
Yeah, all those climatologists are really liars. What do they know? A small number of inactive researchers, oil company shills and White Office spokespeople weigh a lot more than the climatological community.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This sounds like something a Marketing Executive would say- "Make sure you mention the brand as many times as possible."
And that, friends, is how W got elected, and how every other president we ever have will get elected... through superior marketing.
Because some of us, deep down, believe that with hard work, determination, and a little luck, we just might be the lucky guy stealing BILLIONS of dollars someday. I think many Americans, your correspondent not included, see such a transaction as nothing more than a prerogative of one in power. To the victor go the spoils; of course, George and Dick are certainly testing the extremes of the principle.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I disagree. I've had plenty of jobs where I didn't agree with management's policies. Some of them I even did things that were distasteful to me, such as pressuring customers for profitable add-ons or giving the partially bogus company response to a valid complaint. Depending on how much I needed the job and how good the job was, I've done things that were unquestionably wrong. It was easier to live with since it wasn't my decision, since my supervisor was forcing my hand, since the alternative was unemployment.
I don't do these things anymore, but there's no certainty that I won't have to again. If the tech sector collapses again and I find myself doing tech support again (Please, no! not a 3rd time!) I may well find myself in that unpleasant situation again. And who knows, if I luck into a situation where I'm making millions I might hesitate to let my scruples ruin an otherwise good thing.
What I'm saying is this: Here is a man in the most high-profile position possible in his line of work. He can make a difference within the boundaries set for him. If he stands up for his beliefs, the administration will simply replace him with a less competent and more pliable subject. How does that help the public? And it sure hurts the individual. I don't think anyone can judge his actions unless they've been in a similar situation and done the "right thing," besides the fact that I don't think the ethical choice is clear.
Sometimes you can do more good as a reluctant part of the problem than you can as a noble but sidelined martyr.
Man, you really need that seminar!
In the spirit of the Godwin's Law meme, I suggest a new meme for use on slashdot.
The law states: As a discussion addressing the topic of the Bush administration grows in size, the probability of comparing the Clinton administration activities to excuse Bush administration activities grows to one.
Following the traditional use of Godwin's law, I suggest that any mention of the Clinton administration when discussion the Bush administration results in automatic loss of the debate for the person bringing up the Clinton administration.
I also suggest that person have their head examined and study the process of logic. Repeat after me friends: Past mistakes do NOT excuse current mistakes.
As an aside, it's sad that we have to define these types of laws, and that our public education system does not encourage the type of thinking where everyone shares this mentality. Us vs Them groupthink is very damaging to any society.
The problem is not with Americans--you'll note that somewhere in the neighborhood of 78% of them are displeased with George II. The problem, I'm afraid, is a number of traits of the American electoral system.
1) Plurality voting (and stacked plurality voting, even worse) essentially guarantees having only two parties, and that those two parties will actually be very structurally similar to one another. Of necessity, the two parties differ only minorly on a few of their positions, and any third party cannot be adequately served by the electoral system. Third-party candidates in fact act only as spoilers for the major-party candidate who is closer to their positions, and thus there is a strong disincentive for them to even try.
2) Gerrymandering has successfully been used to turn the overwhelming majority of legislative positions into "safe seats". ie, that that party which will win that seat is absolutely certain. This means that the only real election of significance is the primary that will choose the particular member of that party who gets the seat. Given that primaries are voted in only by members of that party, this means that the most extreme and partisan candidates are the ones who have the greatest chance of success.
3) Legislation that passes with 50%+1 of congressional support is exactly as much a law as legislation that passes with 100% support. This, unfortunately, incentivises those two parties being an intentionally divisive as possible. Reaching across the aisle and finding compromises does not strengthen your bill, it only weakens your ability to campaign as an extremist next time around. Legislation is therefore frequently given radioactive riders that make it intentionally diffcult for members of the opposing party to support it. For example, the bill that created the Department of Homeland Security was intentionally saddled with some aggressive union-busting provisions, to discourage Democrat legislators from voting for it; this allowed Republicans to brand Democrats as anti-security, and served their purposes far better than actual bipartisan cooperation would have.
Unfortuately, changing these fairly fundamental structural things about the American electoral and legislative systems would require action by exactly the set of people who have figured out how to profit from the current broken systems. So we're deadlocked.
But Feynman was gifted when it came to that sort of thing, the ice water / o-ring demonstration to Congress being another beautiful example.
I think the problem our former Surgeon General ran into was both that he didn't have Feynman's skills and that his audience not only didn't care about the science in question but they were actively seeking ways to discredit it.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Erm.
(And I don't even know what's meant by "unnatural" here--that's not the sort of word that would make sense in a scientific hypothesis. If you mean "occurs in nature"--since when are people not part of nature? Or is it just homosexuals that aren't part of nature? (That'd be circular reasoning if I've ever heard any.) And if by "natural" you mean "occurs in animals other than humans"--lots of other animals have homosexual sex.)
So, yes, the statement that "homosexual intercourse" is "unhealthy and unnatural" suggests someone that puts their personal prejudices ahead of any sort of clear-headed thinking about health.
Yes, all that construction around the ocean based measuring equipment has to skew the results. Also, all that urban sprawl in the 10's of thousands of ft range is really messing up the measurements of the weather balloons. Did you think that only one set of data is used in these models? Do you understand how modeling works?
Can someone explain to all the fish of the sea that we need them to stop building next to our ocean based equipment? And those damn avian cranes are starting to pop our balloons!
Here in Chicago, our 'official' temperature monitoring station WAS in the downtown area, and then was moved to the airport at a much later point, considerably outside of the urban heat island effect. This now results in the first frost of the year coming considerably earlier than it does in downtown. So, in this case, if its warmer NOW, then there are some serious problems with that theory you put forward that need to be explained.
There is also the slightly awkward fact that this 'argument' is actually PROVING what it claims to be dis-proving. That man-made effects are changing the environment and climate. Where exactly do you think that additional heat from the construction is going?
Campaign funding is unfortunately a whole different set of problems. The incredible power of advertising is something that the US's architects never considered, so the structure of the government does not deal with it well. And while I'm flattered, I don't think I have any great insight into the solutions to that problem.
The problems I enumerated would be largely addressed by moving to a better voting methodology. Plurality voting does a terrible job of expressing the will of the electorate, and, just like layering lossy compression, stacking multiple plurality votes only gets worse. By the time we've made it through gerrymandering, primaries, general elections, and the electoral college, the outcome bears very little relationship to the general desires of voters.
Two substantially better systems are approval voting (in which you vote yes or no on every candidate, and whomever gets the most yesses wins) or a Borda count (in which you rank candidates in your order of preference, and the candidate with the highest total ranking wins). Both of these allow voters to express their desires much more concretely, including allowing a vote for a third-party candidate to be meaningful and not threaten the success of a still-acceptable and more viable candidate. So everyone really could vote meaningfully for Nader or Perot without taking votes away from Bush or Gore, for example.
I wish I could dig it up, but around 2001 I saw a study in which someone had attempted to reconstruct from polling data what the outcome of the 2000 presidential election would have been if either of these methods had been in place. And the answer was that we would fairly likely have elected John McCain.
Now, I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than George W. Bush.
The reason this is interesting is that if you asked a Bush voter for their opinion on this outcome, a lot of them would say something like, "I'm not a huge McCain fan. I disagree with him about some significant issues. But I am confident that he would be a much better choice for the job than Al Gore."
A candidate who is everybody's second choice is a much better electee than a candidate who is 50% of voters' first choice and 50% of voters' over-my-dead-body choice.
Ah, so you're one of those. Link to an article where mainstream science, or Al Gore for that matter, said global warming would "jeapardize the existence of man." You're creating a classic strawman argument. By pretending that the scientists investigating global warming are all alarmist hand-wavers, you have identified what your "research" consisted of. You read a bunch of conservative talking points saying that "alarmist" scientists think that global warming will wipe out all life, and since it won't, we can't trust them. But that isn't the mainstream scientific position, and anyone who has "researched" this would know that.
Do you also feel qualified to "research" the germ theory and weigh in with your insights? How damned arrogant can you really be? Can I do a bit of reading in my study, ponder a bit, and just expect to wash away plate tectonics, the heliocentric model of the solar system, the germ theory, the atomic theory, or other mainstream scientific theories? No, and only an arrogant ass would think that their opinion, based on a bit of half-assed "research" on conservative blogs, was more informed that the entire damned scientific community. Could you possibly have a higher opinion of yourself?