The Crazy Leading the Blind
No, I'm not talking about people who believe that other people have a duty to accept being discriminated against and profiled and brutalized by the police and bombed and besieged into starvation for generations without ever getting angry and responding in kind, this time.
This is in response to recent (for some time now, over a year) but increasing revelations that the US govt is in the business of suppressing and altering scientific data and silencing scientists who say things counter to the Hegemony's wishes. (And then lying about it.)
Because the mere fact that the glaciers have shrunk so far in Alaska (and elsewhere) that tourists can no longer see them from the visitor centers built for the purpose is meaningless data. Lies of the liberal media. And all the rest of it, satellite photos, animal and plant species shifts, over a century of carefully-monitored meteorological observations, core samples and tree rings going back thousands and tens of thousands of years, none of it matters to the sellers of oil and gas and the manufacturers of cheap stuff, who blithely shrug off the extinction of species with no apparent realization that the species you extinguish could be your own.
--Yes, it's a bit of a shocker that even the Big Bang is too radical an idea for these Theocons and their minions, and even more of a shocker that NASA management would go along with it - but when Party Orthodox is all that matters and that's what administrators are hired based on, really we shouldn't be too surprised. Paging Dr. Lysenko, Dr. Lysenko to the front desk...
But the snark that someone made in a comment I read, that no wonder then that we lost two shuttles, is not entirely correct. The disasters covered entirely different NASA administration teams, appointed across many years, and bespeak a much wider and more systematic problem, one found all across the country: the willingness to let optimism based on no facts, and submission to authority figures, override common sense. That is a problem not divisible by political party or anything else - the ship of fools is never underbooked. It becomes more evident more quickly, with certain engineering ventures, because metal and gravity and gas do not get hoodwinked by human wishthink, unfortunately for us.
But when all else fails, blame it on - who else? - Evil Liberals... After all, it's been working for the Hegemony for generations to turn the mob against its adversaries!
And there is something that can be swayed by wishful thinking and lies and the half-truths and ommissions that are worse than lies.
I guess it was about that too, after all.
See also, "Fixing the Widgets", Sept. 1, 2003.
This is in response to recent (for some time now, over a year) but increasing revelations that the US govt is in the business of suppressing and altering scientific data and silencing scientists who say things counter to the Hegemony's wishes. (And then lying about it.)
Because the mere fact that the glaciers have shrunk so far in Alaska (and elsewhere) that tourists can no longer see them from the visitor centers built for the purpose is meaningless data. Lies of the liberal media. And all the rest of it, satellite photos, animal and plant species shifts, over a century of carefully-monitored meteorological observations, core samples and tree rings going back thousands and tens of thousands of years, none of it matters to the sellers of oil and gas and the manufacturers of cheap stuff, who blithely shrug off the extinction of species with no apparent realization that the species you extinguish could be your own.
--Yes, it's a bit of a shocker that even the Big Bang is too radical an idea for these Theocons and their minions, and even more of a shocker that NASA management would go along with it - but when Party Orthodox is all that matters and that's what administrators are hired based on, really we shouldn't be too surprised. Paging Dr. Lysenko, Dr. Lysenko to the front desk...
But the snark that someone made in a comment I read, that no wonder then that we lost two shuttles, is not entirely correct. The disasters covered entirely different NASA administration teams, appointed across many years, and bespeak a much wider and more systematic problem, one found all across the country: the willingness to let optimism based on no facts, and submission to authority figures, override common sense. That is a problem not divisible by political party or anything else - the ship of fools is never underbooked. It becomes more evident more quickly, with certain engineering ventures, because metal and gravity and gas do not get hoodwinked by human wishthink, unfortunately for us.
But when all else fails, blame it on - who else? - Evil Liberals... After all, it's been working for the Hegemony for generations to turn the mob against its adversaries!
And there is something that can be swayed by wishful thinking and lies and the half-truths and ommissions that are worse than lies.
I guess it was about that too, after all.
See also, "Fixing the Widgets", Sept. 1, 2003.