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Senate Confirms Climate Denier With No Scientific Credentials To Head NASA (nytimes.com)
On Thursday, the Senate confirmed Trump's NASA nominee Jim Bridenstine, seven and a half months after being nominated to lead the agency. "The Senate confirmed Mr. Bridenstine, an Oklahoma congressman, as the new NASA administrator in a stark partisan vote: 50 Republicans voting for him and 47 Democrats plus two independents against," reports The New York Times. "The vote lasted more than 45 minutes as Republicans waited for Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona to cast his lot." Slashdot reader PeopleAquarium writes about some of Bridenstine's anti-LGBT and non-scientific views: Bridenstine ran a planetarium once, and peddled a debunked argument made by climate change skeptics, claiming that global temperatures "stopped rising 10 years ago." He said "the people of Oklahoma are ready to accept" an apology from then-President Barack Obama for what Bridenstine called a "gross misallocation" of funds for climate change research instead of weather forecasting. In further news, our rockets will now be coal powered, and gay people aren't allowed in space.
Are we going to have 'morality police' roaming around, like in Iran, arresting people who don't prescribe to a specific set of beliefs?
Yes. If you don't stand up to them, then yes. That's exactly what you will have.
"Putting in someone whose primary qualifications are political rather than scientific is very suboptimal;"
That seems to be a logical assertion, but I'm not sure it's proved to be true.
Putting former astronauts and scientists in charge HASN'T seemed to have caused NASA to flourish, has it? Maybe because these individuals *didn't* understand the *politics* necessary to succeed in the intensely political atmosphere of Washington DC?
I mean, the NASA admin isn't designing space craft and piloting rockets: he or she is a BUREAUCRAT, begging other bureaucrats for money and other resources. Seems like a position where a politician might be more successful.
-Styopa
Basically - no. We can test for a Santa Claus, since pretty much everything about the man says he physically manifests himself, slides down chimneys, and places presents under Christmas trees around the world.
Not my Santa. He's metaphysical. The presents get delivered but parents often take credit for them. Some other believers claim that Santa actually acts through the parents, guiding their actions; I do not agree with those heathens, though.
Now, how about a metaphysical higher power, that influences our emotions and impulses, who will only be seen after you are already dead?
If nobody sees him until after they're dead, then basically anyone who claims to know that he exists (let alone know anything about what he is like, or what he wants) is just making shit up.
No tangible interference in the physical domain to document, strictly an emotive, internal "nudge" - the source of conscience, for example? How do you test for that?
That's up to those claiming that it exists; in science we go with the null hypothesis. Why would you believe something which you not only have no evidence of, but also cannot ever find evidence of?
There are a near infinity of things which people can invent out of whole cloth and which you cannot test for. If your position is that we should believe everything until it is proven false then you are at best gullible. How exactly you've managed to convince yourself that "real scientists" have to believe things which they have no evidence of ... that's truly mindboggling.