More politicization of science

'but I should think any good capitalist would know that operating under a flawed representation of reality is going to lead to failure in the long run.'

Enron.

It's nothing that beating a few people to death with the Collected Works of Ayn Rand wouldn't fix.

Bush is limited to the scientific knowledge of lobyists, the real decision makers in this country today.

I should think any good capitalist would know

The Bushies aren't capitalists. They're kleptocrats. The US is a pinata to be smashed. Anything that keeps it functioning better than a banana republic only delays the time when you and your buddies get to collect the goodies.

"...but I should think any good capitalist would know that operating under a flawed representation of reality is going to lead to failure in the long run."

You would think. However, I would posit that today's capitalists are not the capitalists of the 50s and 60s (those with fresh memories of the post-Hoover era). Long-term means nothing to them -- 'get while the gettin' is good, and damn the consequences' seems to be the new motto.

"Get while the getting' is good and damn the consequences" may be an accurate representation of reality. Perhaps today's capitalists see the unsustainability of the current state of affairs?

Seems the Bushies have impossibly high standards for scientific truth. I wonder how things would've turned out if they'd applied the same rigor to their case for the Iraq War.

Don't know if you've covered the George Deutsch story about the big bang. Here's a quote from The Reality-Based Comunity about it.

"The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the "war room" of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements.

In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word "theory" needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang is "not proven fact; it is opinion," Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, "It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

It continued: "This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most."

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And then GWB talks about the need for science education. Agreed, of course, but have a good idea where the education should start.

Jim

In my own field, Bush appointees are setting research targets that are outrageously high for continued federal funding, and at the same time promoting secrecy among researchers rather than collaboration. This is computer science, which has hardly any political relevance whatsoever. I don't think they're pro-religion or pro-business as much as they're simply anti-science.

Um, computer science does have political relavance, to the (non)dissemination of information, and the redirection of cash flow.

Oh, they're pro-religion, all right. You wouldn't believe how many computer science professionals are pro-religion, too. I found this out when I worked for the evil gummint just before the year 2000. Some of them are still waiting for Y2K to hit.

Seems the Bushies have impossibly high standards for scientific truth. I wonder how things would've turned out if they'd applied the same rigor to their case for the Iraq War.
Posted by: Gene | February 6, 2006 09:10 AM

But that would require, oh my gosh, consistency and, not again, integrity!!! Dare we hope? Naahhh!!!!

I told everyone who would listen before each of the last two elections that what was scariest about a Bush presidency would be the appointees and regulation changes that would go on beneath public scrutiny. Bush has gotten bold enough to bring much of his agenda to the forefront, but there are still a lot of devils in the details.

Don't know if you've covered the George Deutsch story about the big bang...

Poor Superman

To say Bush has a lot of nerve is irrelevant. Of course he does. Why? Because he *doesn't care* about real science or the many thousands (indeed more) throughout the past and present that have spent, and given, their lives in pursuit of things we take for granted now.

The only science him and his people care about is that which makes things and people explode. That's the only kind of science they willingly throw money at. Indeed they throw so much money at defense, that the national budget becomes less and less about the important things in life with each passing year.

I'm not surprised he has a lot of nerve. It takes a lot to go one for decades living and supporting an agenda built on false promises and non-existent realities.

as the savage, chief sealth (seattle), said long ago;

.. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

GrrlScientist

Chief Sealth did not write that. It was written more than 100 years after the old chief died. In 1972, in fact. Somehow or other it has become the mother of all urban legends here in Seattle; there are even statues to Chief Sealth which bear this quote.

with the Park Service rewriting documents to be "anti-environmental, pro-privatization and corporate use of the parks,"
I am appalled.

While I was growing up, my family took an extended camping trip every summer -- and many of those trips included stays in American National Parks. I have many happy memories of the beauty and fascination of Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountain, Mammoth Cave...oh hell, far too many to recall or list, famous and obscure. And the ethic of preservation was strongly emphasized.

Those parks are your Crown Jewels. Even as an atheist, I unhesitatingly call them holy ground: places where we can come into contact with things far beyond our short lives and small endeavours.

And now the bastards want to defile them.

I am appalled.

bummer! who did write that, then?

The Sealth speech is not really that recent an invention, since it appears in an 1887 Seattle newspaper article. However--and setting aside the "Victorian rhetorical flourishes" which abound in that version, pretty clearly added by the "translator"--nobody has been able to conclusively connect the speech published in the newspaper with any of the (various) decades-earlier (1850s) historical events at which the speech was supposedly given.

Likewise, the individual and supposed "translator" who "contributed" the speech to the paper, a Seattle-area pioneer named Dr. Smith, was not recorded as being at any of the historical events either.

A letter supposedly sent to the U.S. President by the chief, expressing similar sentiments as the speech, in similarly melodramatic Victorian-ese, has never been located.

A government archivist did some research on all of this--if you go to the U.S. archives site and search using words like Sealth and Speech, etc., you will get to his findings.

So these are late 19th C. "romantic" sentiments--rather than more recent environmental-mystical ones--that have apparently been placed in Sealth's mouth. None of this means that the elegiac sentiments are incorrect, or that Sealth couldn't have held something like them, or that he would not have been capable of composing an eloquent speech on an appropriate occasion: important tribal leaders of his time would have been practiced public speakers in their own language (in this case, a dialect of Lushootseed, the Coast Salish language spoken by the natives of Puget Sound), as well as in the Chinook jargon in which most "official" discussions between prominent Washingtonians and prominent natives would actually have taken place.

In fact, a current Coast Salish elder has "retranslated" the concepts embodied in the speech into Lushootseed, and then has translated the Lushootseed back into (much less flowery) modern English--partly as a scholarly exercise and partly to underscore that there still is a "living" Coast Salish literature.

Ooooh, way off-topic, but was that Vi Hilbert? If you have a link, I'd be interested.

Yes, it's Vi, but no I don't have a link for her version, sorry. I'll go to your blog, RavenT, and leave some info there--it may be that we can track it down without further derailing this thread!

I should add that Wikipedia's article on Chief Sealth does indicate that a "modern" version of the speech, not very closely resembling Dr. Smith's version, began circulating only in recent decades. This later version has apparently been attributed to an East Coast speechwriter and likely does have more contemporary eco motivations, as was suggested in noone inparticular's post not too far up the thread...

Raven, I put a comment up on your MLK article...

Steviepinhead

I would also refer you to; http://www.snopes.com/quotes/seattle.htm