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Politics Is Poisoning NASA's Ability To Do Science
An anonymous reader writes: Phil Plait just published an article about how politics is interfering with NASA's ability to perform vital scientific experiments. As expected when we heard that Ted Cruz would be made head of the committee in charge of NASA's funding, the Texas senator is pushing hard for NASA to stop studying Earth itself. Plait writes, "Over the years, NASA has had to beg and scrape to get the relatively small amount of money it gets—less than half a percent of the national budget—and still manages to do great things with it. Cruz is worried NASA's focus needs to be more on space exploration. Fine. Then give them enough money to do everything in their charter: Explore space, send humans there, and study our planet. Whether you think climate change is real or not—and it is— telling NASA they should turn a blind eye to the environment of our own planet is insanity." He concludes, "[T]he politics of funding a government agency is tying NASA in knots and critically endangering its ability to explore."
If you care about our future, and especially if you live in a red state where these charlatans seem to originate, please stop voting for anti intellectual and anti science politicians. They are only doing what they perceive the electorate has sent them to Washington to do, which seems to be to put their heads in the sand and 'pray' for a 'savior'.
the EPA can worry about the environment, leave NASA to what NASA is supposed to do. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Not the climatechange administration. not the muslim outreach administration but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Please give NASA more money, but make sure it is used for space exploration as intended. I dont see why this is getting so much heat
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Neither side is pure here. I think NASA briefly said their mission was muslim outreach for example. Why would they do that? Does that have something to do with space?
Just politics.
And NASA has been staffed not just with scientists but wtih scientists that are big democrat supporters. So... guess what, the republicans are going to want to suppress them.
Same thing happened in NYC with tammany hall. Every time parties would switch, the new party would staff the city institutions with political appointees that supported that political party. Everything. Fire departments, police departments, park service, road workers, etc... just everything. Parties would switch and everyone in authority in the city would lose their job.
And that meant that in part the people that did things were often not competent because they weren't on the job that long. And also you'd get a lot of corruption because if lots of people lose their jobs when the parties switch everyone is more inclined to cheat or stuff ballot boxes.
This was ultimately dealt with to some extent by protecting certain institutions from being used that way.
But there is no such protection in Federal agencies. They get used all the time. You can't tell me that the EPA or the ATF or whatever are doing the same thing under a democrat that they'd be doing under a republican. You can't tell me that they're being run by the same sorts of people or under the same guidelines.
It swings back and forth because all these institutions are political footballs at this point.
So complain about it if you want but nothing is going to change unless that stops. And it needs to stop for BOTH sides. Not just the side you don't like. If one side can do it, then the other side can do it.
So think very carefully about what you're asking for and understand there are going to be consequences.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I don't think we can single out NASA. And it's been going on for a while, it's just the ideological agendas change over time.
At least in the 1950s-1970s, when the Interstate Commerce Commission destroyed the rail system, airlines, and road haulage industries, they were responding to politicians terrified that prices rises would upset their constituents. Now it's politicians terrified that facts might upset their constituents. Different agenda, same stupidity.
It's almost enough to make you a libertarian. Almost. Enough. But that's substituting one system that barely works for something even more stupid.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
To be fair, the EPA doesn't have the direct ability to launch cutting edge climate and atmosphere monitoring satellites. There's a lot of atmosphere science to do, and NASA is in a good position to have the (orbit based) tools and the know how to do that. The EPA is in a good position to review the science and enforce legalisation appropriately.
It's turtles all the way down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
NASA should worry more about space exploration,
the FAA should focus on commercial aviation,
the EPA should worry more about air quality,
and the NWS should worry more about the climate.
Just because something should be studied, doesn't mean every branch of government needs to be involved.
Ken
Have you tried reading National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which spells out the firs eight objectives of NASA? The first is "The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space".
Cruz is originally from Alberta so his interest in tar sands and polluting the world is pretty natural to him.
They can sell off their jet and get rid of the entourage of SUVs.
The cut off for the top 1% is an income of $34k.
Or did you mean the top 1% of just the rich people that live in the first world, because that conveniently excludes yourself from the definition?
current flagrant uses such as watering for ornamental plants or car-wash businesses.
An insignificant amount of water is used by car washes. 85% of water consumed in California is used for agriculture, where it is heavily subsidized, and the biggest use there is irrigation of pasture for cattle. If you want to conserve water, you don't ban car washes, you ban hamburgers.
The first A in NASA stands for Aeronautics. If you're going to do aeronautics you need to know about the medium you are flying through. In the 1958 act that created NASA the first objective is: "Expansion of human knowledge of the Earth, the atmosphere and space". Also artificial satellites are now an integral part of studying the Earth. I think it's kind of hard for NASA to not be involved to some extent in all of the things you list.
In short, nothing in science proves the earth is older than 10,000 year old. In only proves that it could be older and doesn't need the creation explanation. Or in other words, you cannot disprove that a supernatural being supernaturally created things with the appearance of a natural beginning simply for our understanding.
You fundamentally fail to understand science, "sumdumass". No hypothesis is ever proven right in science. It simply offers testable hypotheses that would falsify it, and then when such discoveries are made, survives the new information unchanged. When a hypothesis survives enough of these attempts, scientists will call it a theory, and start to believe it to be true.
The problem with the "God planted the dinosaur bones (and the light of the universe, and stratification in sediments, radioactive dating, and the tens of thousands of interlocking details that show us how long the earth has been around, etc., etc., etc.)" idea, is that it offers no falsifiable predictions. There is literally no fact that an adherent to one of these belief systems would accept as proof it is incorrect. All of these ideas stem from magical thinking, and so, in the immortal words of Wolfgang Pauli, they're not only not right, they're "not even wrong".
That is not science. And it is absurd to pretend as such.
(Alas, your attitude is quite common among the religious right and a tiny sprinkling of the kook left, which is a big reason why politics is doing such a disservice to science.)
Explain anti vaxxers
Anti-vaxxers are spread pretty evenly across the political spectrum. In fact a study published in December 2014 found that conservative Republicans are very slightly more likely to hold anti-vax views than liberal Democrats. You can see the pretty graph here.
"An insignificant amount of water is used by car washes."
You're absolutely right. Even back in the 1970's when I worked for a carwash, we recycled something around 80% of our grey-water. And that was in Washington state with no water shortages (at that time....anyway). I would imagine it has improved significantly since that time.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
The earth being less than 10,000 years old is not anti science.
It's not even wrong.
The nature of science is not to have all the answers, but to *look for* answers. The best science starts off with the attitude of Socrates: "I don't know". The precise problem with Ted Cruz, and other anti-science politicians like him, is that he knows the answer, and doesn't want scientists looking for it. If he really believed climate change was not real, he would want to INCREASE NASA's budget, to find out the truth. The most despicable thing, transparent in his actions, is that he KNOWS the truth, he is baldly LYING about it, and he cares more about his personal glorification than he cares about the future of the country.
Do you realize that many of those California counties with the lowest vaccination rates are solidly GOP, compare your map with this one.
In reality to settle it we'd need some serious cross tabs on questions that have never seemed to been asked together. However, I still remain confident that 80% is an gross exaggeration and I would win any bet on it.
Indeed. Going by cumulative CO2 emissions since industrialization, US + EU contributed the bulk of the load (US + EU - 51%, China - 9%, India – 3%). So, by the logic of DigiShaman logic, and I fully agree with it when taken in a nation-state sense, the bulk of the burden must be borne by wealthy elite: Citizens of US and EU.
Only if you pretend that the cost of living is the same everywhere.
AFAIK what he's pointing out is that NASA was chartered to explore space
Oh, yeah?
The National Aeronautics and Space Act
SUBCHAPTER I--SHORT TITLE, DECLARATION OF POLICY, AND DEFINITIONS
Sec. 20102. Congressional declaration of policy and purpose
(d) Objectives of Aeronautical and Space Activities.--The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The problem with that study is that it focuses on the HPV vaccine, where the conservative based objections revolve around the believe that giving the vaccine is akin to tacit approval of teenage sex (not dissimilar to the conservative objection to safe sex campaigns).
It is not an anti-science view, in that they believe that the vaccine does, in fact, prevent HPV transmission, and they do not believe in totally debunked theories such as the MMR/autism link. It does not appear that the survey attempted to break out the resistance to, say the MMR vaccine, which is clearly based on junk/psuedo science stoked by the Lancet article, versus Guardacil, where the resistance is based on moral objections.
I think one of the biggest problems that our modern democracies face is the confusion between science and morality. These are orthogonal bases but more and more they are being conflated into a single dimension where pro-science == moral and anti-science == immoral. There are lots of people who are anti-evolution, anti-climate change, yet perfectly good and decent people, and there are lots of people who are big supporters of all fields of scientific endeavors who are complete a$$holes. And they both have things to say, and in a democracy, get to have a voice in our joint decisionmaking process called politics. To paraphrase Churchill, it sucks but it's better than the alternative.