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USDA Scrambles To Ease Concerns After Researchers Were Ordered To Stop Publishing Publicly Funded Science (popsci.com)
Layzej writes: Popular Science reports that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now barred from communicating with the public. [And early this morning, BuzzFeed revealed that] The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has banned scientists and other employees from sharing the results of its taxpayer-funded research with the broader public. From the report: "The memo outlining these new rules has not been made public, but the ban reportedly includes everything from summaries of scientific papers to USDA-branded tweets. Scientists are still able to publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, but they are unable to talk about that research without prior consent from their agency. This is not the first time that public science has been hamstrung by a gag order. To this day, the quantity of oil spewed into the ocean during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil spill remains something of a mystery. Many of the scientists who worked on the spill were hired by BP and barred from speaking on it. But gag orders -- while always troublesome -- have usually been limited to one specific issue. Right now, the EPA and USDA have been forbidden to speak about all of their scientific research. It means that many of the kinds of stories we now cover will never see the light of day." UPDATE 1/24/17: The USDA has disavowed the memo sent to employees at its Agricultural Research Service unit. USDA's deputy administrator, Michael Young, clarified that the gag order specifically applies to policy-related statements in press releases and interviews, which need to be vetted with the secretary of agriculture. He told The Washington Post that peer-reviewed scientific papers from the unit should not be blocked, nor should food safety announcements. The Washington Post notes that "the memo's shortness and terse language seems to have exacerbated the confusion: 'Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content,' wrote ARS chief Sharon Drumm in an email to employees."
The story is exaggerated. The science blackout is not permanent. The Trump administration just need a little time to get the alternative facts ready.
There is no surprise here, it's difficult to deny scientific facts if your scientists are allowed to share actual facts.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
So then why was there no blackouts when Obama, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, etc were elected and took over? And does the context of a president that repeatedly and blatantly lies have no relevance?
A lot of things Trump does are over blown in the media when taken individually, but in the context of all that he's done, it's clear that he's actively trying to promote a false narrative, one where he is the lone holder of any 'facts' and that anything that disagrees with his all-knowing decrees are 'fake news'. If he hadn't spent the last 18 months literally saying things on camera and then lying that it happen on camera a few weeks after, it might not be such a big deal.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/six-years-of-deceit-20070628
No, this is not "fake news." It actually happened.
Even Buzzfeed mentions that the policy does not apply to peer-reviewed publications. But it's not clear what else is exempt, even with the follow-up clarifications from the USDA.
My take is that these agencies are trying to control their public messaging from a single source, and scrub anything that hints at policies from the Obama years. That's understandable, given the current White House administration's sensitivity to controlling communication. But it's still chilling nevertheless. What if researchers from these agencies speak at public conferences? Do they need pre-approval of their talks?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's not just the USDA.
It's also the EPA and the Department of the Interior. Tweets containing non-controversial scientific facts were deleted this afternoon.
http://thehill.com/policy/ener...
http://www.miamiherald.com/new...
Don't be alarmed, it is for your own good. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Our former government didn't have any problem at all with muzzling scientists, their organizations as well as defunding anybody who didn't step up to their pro-oil agenda.
Very disturbing to see an anti-science government, regardless of where it is.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You can help mirror the climate data. Go to climatemirror.org and grab the torrents, the National Land Cover Database has been completely uploaded (11GB). There's also a mailing list for further info and future efforts.
Once information is fully controlled, police activity to enforce government policy can proceed unabated with little fear of meeting organized resistance. President Trump appears to have learned quite well from history.
Maybe you don't want to face the truth, but that leaked memo was real, true and even confirmed as a USDA memo. They confirmed it, when they attempted to walk it back as badly worded!
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Tuesday that an internal email sent to staff at its Agricultural Research Service unit this week calling for a suspension of “public-facing documents,” including news releases and photos, was flawed and that new guidance has been sent out to replace it."
So yeh, a real true memo, even confirmed by the department itself.
And again, Buzzfeed CNN etc. are shown to be true sources of true news. Wait till he lifts sanctions of Russia and releases a report claiming Nato hacked the US electin not Russia, and you'll deny he's a Putin puppet too.
So then why was there no blackouts when Obama, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, etc were elected and took over? And does the context of a president that repeatedly and blatantly lies have no relevance?
A lot of things Trump does are over blown in the media when taken individually, but in the context of all that he's done, it's clear that he's actively trying to promote a false narrative, one where he is the lone holder of any 'facts' and that anything that disagrees with his all-knowing decrees are 'fake news'. If he hadn't spent the last 18 months literally saying things on camera and then lying that it happen on camera a few weeks after, it might not be such a big deal.
Agreed. That trump is not just blatantly lying but doing his damnest to make it so truth itself can be crushed and that all reasonable voices to the otherwise are silenced is scary as hell. The man forced his press secretary to lie his arse off, then his chief stooge tried to explain it, as if she was being the reasonable one as alternative facts. We cannot. We must not normalize this blatant propaganda. We made fun of Bagdad Bob, well guess what, we just elected one. I'm reminded of the lyrics from a song from Evita.
"CHE What's new Buenos Aires? Your nation, which a few years ago had the second largest gold reserves in the world, is bankrupt! A country which grew up and grew rich on beef is rationing it! La Prensa, one of the few newspapers which dares to oppose Peronism, has been silenced, and so have all other reasonable voices! I'll tell you what's new Buenos Aires!"
We cannot let truth remain a casuality, for if that is the new status quo, we might as well call the experiment of America a failure, for a democratic republic cannot possibly choose decent leaders based on lies.
The other thing he did today was to start banning entry from certain Muslim countries, as if some magical process he comes up with is going to create the illusive terrorist detector radar. In some ways I half wonder if the lies were not a way to try to hide this kind of news in the noise. Terrorists will not destroy us as a country, but those like Trump might just manage it.
Dictators and communists usually want to block information. America is now in a state of emergency.
Couple that with Trump's stated goal of eliminating the EPA entirely
Can you provide a quote for that?
Q: Would you cut departments?
TRUMP: Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations.
Q: Who's going to protect the environment?
TRUMP: We'll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can't destroy businesses.
Source: Fox News Sunday 2015 Coverage of 2016 presidential hopefuls , Oct 18, 2015
Slashdot changed the headline to reflect the new statement made by the USDA's deputy administrator. A statement which is, frankly, backpedaling. When the original order was "Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents." the submitted headline was accurate, albeit overly specific.
I'm sorry, what's the confusion here? Trump said he wanted to cut the EPA. That is exactly like saying that he wants to eliminate the EPA. Do you not know what the word cut means?
The original order was a memo not made public. We don't know what the original order was.
The interviewer clearly thought that he meant to eliminate it entirely, and then in response to being questioned on that he says "We can leave a little bit." That's a conciliatory statement. He's not hellbent on destroying every last shred of the EPA, but he stated a preference to do so.
Further: "leaving a little bit" does not make for an effective regulatory body. Even if there does remain a shred of EPA left after all of this is said and done, the original point of this thread, namely that this gag order is a genuine cause for concern, remains true.
Che Guevara was a serial killer. A really creepy, scary individual.
There is a reason they drummed him out of Cuba after the revolution. They could only take things so far. Even Castro had limits.
Please explain how one publishes scientific information without publishing documents?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Move to China and choke on the smog and die of poison in the food.
I like my clean America
That, and save billions. For example, the EPA air rules cost $11.3 billion, saved $55–146 billion annually, including 6,800 to 17,000 lives. From 1990 to 2020, that's an expected $65 billion spent to save $2 trillion.
The White House's Office of Management and Budget found that the annual benefits of major federal rules over a decade ranged between $193 billion to $800 billion, with costs of only $57 billion to $84 billion (EPA air regulations were the greatest source of these benefits). Google cache link, because Trump deleted the original.
Can you give an example - one example - of this "shitposting" by workers at these agencies? Can you even point to anything remotely partisan in any of the tweets that were deleted?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Found the archived OMB report.
You mean "part of the article". Because it goes on to say:
Per usual, Trump supporter misrepresents an article. Film at 11.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I give it about six months before he does something that steps on your toes and makes you one of those people. Trump is a bit of a blunt instrument as seen with this and the hiring freeze (does that freeze include cronies of his appointments to go on their personal staff? No? I thought not).
It is a defining attribute of the authoritarian that they will, soon enough, try to define reality itself by their words. Literature is filled with authors reminding us of just how common this is. In Orwell's 1984 Winston Smith remarks that "Freedom is being able to say that 2 and 2 make 4" and, later, as he is being tortured the party officer declares that "2 and 2 is 5 if we say it is". A not dissimilar scene in Star Trek The Next Generation had Picard being tortured by Cardassian Madred, who would, constantly, show him 4 blinking lights and insist that Picard say there are 5, promising to end his torture when Picard denies reality. At the end of the episode, as the rescued Picard stumbles away, he cannot help but turn back toward his torturer and defiantly declare: "There are 4 lights!".
So this is the context in which we should see Donald Trump starting his term with flagrantly lying about a number everybody can see is wrong - insisting that the populace accept the truth to be, whatever he desires it to be.
This is not just a dishonest politician lying - this is a politician who has declared war on truth itself, and there is no more authoritarian thing than that. This is what dictatorship looks like.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If declaring your inauguration day a "national day of patriotic devotion" was not seriously out of the ordinary then the US would have had one of those for 300 years.
Could you GET a more Banana Republic move ? All he is missing is the Khaki-Uniform with the dozens of medals and the beret. He already has the cigars.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
" The Trump administration just need a little time to get the alternative facts ready."
The Ministry of Truth is responsible for those.
Yup, This is how it started in Russia. Many people seem confused as to why would they deny something as obvious as the size of the inauguration crowds for example that's easily proven false? Well, it has 3 important effects on american public discourse and media:
1. Establishing a norm with the press: they will be told things that are obviously wrong and they will have no opportunity to ask questions. That way, they will be grateful if they get anything more at any press conference.
2. Increasing the separation between Trump's base (1/3 of the population) from everybody else (the remaining 2/3). By being told something that is obviously wrong - that there is no evidence for and all evidence against, that anybody with eyes can see is wrong - they are forced to pick whether they are going to believe Trump or their lying eyes. The gamble here - likely to pay off - is that they will believe Trump. This means that they will regard media outlets that report the truth as "fake news" (because otherwise they'd be forced to confront their cognitive dissonance.)
3. Creating a sense of uncertainty about whether facts are knowable, among a certain chunk of the population (which is a taking a page from the Kremlin, for whom this is their preferred disinformation tactic). A third of the population will say "clearly the White House is lying," a third will say "if Trump says it, it must be true," and the remaining third will say "gosh, I guess this is unknowable." The idea isn't to convince these people of untrue things, it's to fatigue them, so that they will stay out of the political process entirely, regarding the truth as just too difficult to determine.
This is laying important groundwork for the months ahead. If Trump's White House is willing to lie about something as obviously, unquestionably fake as the crowds at the inauguration, just imagine what else they'll lie about. In particular, things that the public cannot possibly verify the truth of. This allows them to eventually say anything to the public, and this should be worrisome to Americans regardless of who you voted because this is how totalitarian states get started.
He's setting up his Pravda and being quite upfront about it.
He's still making the claim that 3 million 'fake voters' voted for Hillary to lose him the popular vote. There's no evidence for this, none whatsoever, anywhere. Yet the defense given reads like this::
So to him. He only knows. Truth is what he believes it to be. Where have I read this before?
-1984
I'm not american, but all I can say to Americans is: don't fall for this. Don't let the man divide you even further against yourself and monopolize the truth. You've seen how well that has gone in Russia, a
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
While I checked for "funny" comments, I wasn't expecting to find any, and I don't think this insightful comment was modded correctly... Then again, we're in a post-truth #PresidentTweety world now, so maybe we're post-funny, too. What used to be parody is now just different facts.
You thought there was only ONE reality and one set of facts? You must be nuts!
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Is it really surprising to anyone that with a major change of control in the US, that departments want to keep a tighter rain on anything that could look like
policy statements for a while? Would seem to be pretty sensible really.
Maybe this is the norm in other countries but isn't in the US for quite some decades. Politicians have been quite civilized in leaving publicly funded research out of politics. Very few such agencies cared about administration change beyond the variations in upcoming budgets (multi year budgets are also not messed with after approval by prior congresses; unlike in other fields).
Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content.
It is easy to get confused by that writing if, you know, understand English.
It's fine. The coasts will always be fine. We have the strongest and most sustainable economies. It's not a coincidence that the counties that went Democrat make up 64 percent of the economy. Trump will cut a bunch of federal funding and programs that help poor people in the "taker" states that receive more federal money than they give (hint: almost all Republican), and Democratic states will replace the cut programs with their own at the state level. You guys wanted more power to the states, right? Now see how that works out for you.
Republicans are dividing the country without realizing that their part of the country is rapidly becoming irrelevant. There's also the fact that Democrats won every state but Kentucky in the under 30 vote so eventually all of you backwards idiots are going to just die out. Looking forward to that.
You know that Evita is a fictional play, right? And also that the Che in that play is not Che Guevara... That quote is basically from Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Reality is anti-Trump. He's pushing the standard alt-right view that his lies should be considered valid opinions. His opinion is that more people came to his inauguration, and that's as valid as any fact and should be reported such.
When some government agency published facts that contradict him, those have equal weight to mere opinions and government workers shouldn't express opinions.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm waiting for the coasts to start demanding the red interior start paying their own way. But then we'll all be paying dearly when the national debt balloons to Trumpian proportions. It will be the biggest, most lovely debt we've ever had.
That's the great thing about representative government - you do have the possibility to question him through your duly elected Congressional delegation. And, as it turns out, the Congress has the ability to put the President's balls in a fiscal vise should he start doing things that the nation doesn't like.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The article is not to be trusted.
You are fake news claiming fake news claiming fake news claiming fake news.
It's fake news claims all the way down.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So then why was there no blackouts when Obama, Bush, Clinton, the other Bush, etc were elected and took over?
Twitter was founded in 2006 and IPO'd in 2013. It was not in widespread use w/in gov't until Obama's second term.
As for stifling other forms of communication, it was not until recently (i.e., under Obama) that federal agencies issued communication through informal channels, like personal statements or press releases not filtered through an official agency communications director. Federal agencies are also far more politicized ideologically under Obama then they were under previous administrations.
The temporary “stand down” order seems to address imposing some manner of coherence and message discipline so that each agency can speak w/ a single official voice rather than have partisan dissenters undermine policy via unauthorized communiques, like the anonymous coward quoted in the ProPublica article (referenced in the HuffPo article cited in the PopSci article referred to in the Slashdot summary). The worst offenders appear to be the far-left agitators w/in the EPA, HHS/NIH, USDA and the National Park Service, all of which have been told to cut it out until new cabinet picks can take the reins. This especially applies to rogue tweets and other social media releases on official agency accounts issued since Inauguration Day.
There is enough far-left hyperventilation being perpetuated already w/o operatives inside federal agencies pretending to be whistleblowers who are actually just bitter opponents of administrative executive decisions they wish to subvert or conspire to undermine. Working for the fed means you can lose funding on a moment's notice for purely political reasons. If you don't like that, then don't rely on federal funding. Academia had to learn that hard lesson when DARPA funding started drying up under Clinton due to the so-called “cold war peace dividend”, for example.
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Please explain how one publishes scientific information without publishing documents?
You hand it to a politician, who yellow lines the parts that do not align with party policy You remove the parts that are not true because the truth has been set by party policy, and if the politician ends up finding the now policy confirming paper acceptable, it gets published.
I have a strong suspicion that in science departments all over the country, that they are making backups to be hidden from the new age of alternative truth we have entered. Kind of like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault for science data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
Because this too shall pass. Ages of alternative facts come and go. Ages of politics determining the laws of physics will come and go. We don't hear much of Lysenkoism these days, though it was once official Soviet Union policy.
I suspect that at this time that physics will be ignored and all research into the greenhouse effect will be suppressed, that creationism will rear it's head again, and a lot of heath science will be suppressed as well.
And? Well these are the times we live in. Scientists are a different breed. An example is in WW2, oddly enough - in Leningrad - 12 scientists chose to slowly starve to death rather than eat the seeds of their seed bank. http://www.popsci.com/science/...
All in all, if The new Politicians see fit to kill me for my views on physics, if the greenhouse effect and my support of it, or any of my other science views that have been banned by policy make me too dangerous to allow to live - then I shall die. Hopefully they are smart enough to know that suppression and killing tend to make truth stronger than policy. I have my grave doubts though.
Because all of this shall pass.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
From TFA: "The original email, sent Jan. 23, said: "Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content." I believe this is what you're referring to.
Also from TFA:
USDA officials said that after the email was sent, acting USDA Deputy Secretary Michael L. Young sent out a three-page memo to USDA agency department heads and other key agency officials outlining the interim procedures staff should follow.
A copy of the interim procedures memo, dated Jan. 23 and seen by Reuters, shows many of the steps reflect either the same or similar measures taken by the previous administration. Reuters also saw a memo, dated Jan. 22, 2009, that was sent to agency officials by former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The 2017 memo, however, differs in two main areas.
It centralizes the agency’s media inquiries and social media presence through the Office of the Secretary. As part of that, the memo asks USDA agencies to “review their websites, blog posts and other social media and, consistent with direction you will receive from the Office of Communication, remove references to policy priorities and initiatives of the previous Administration.”
I suppose you think the FDA, FCC, SEC, FTC, USDA, and OSHA are also useless relics and do nothing to protect Americans. You clearly have no idea of the apocalyptic wasteland that America would be without these regulating bodies.