U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Finding 1171
tree3075 writes "The LA Times is reporting that a survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has found hundreds of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists have been instructed to change findings to favor business interests. I'm not surprised anymore when I read these things."
Sad reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Now back on topic, political ingerence in science is even worse. Especially when motivated by a $$ agenda. Your career versus a should-be-protected plant? Not everyone has the courage to say 'no'... I admire this group of scientist, they had the courage to stand up. Sadly, some don't, and we'll never know it.
zerg (Score:2, Interesting)
How much longer before we find out the "Union of Concerned Scientists" is actually an Al-Qaida front organization?
A bunch of scientific hacks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Property rights are NOT a "business interest" (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Let the Bush bashing begin! (Score:2, Interesting)
But back on point, here: I didn't say I'm happy that scientists within FWS have said they've felt pressured. But, it happens. And it's not exclusively because of Bush. We have business interests - that, believe it or not, do actually contribute a lot to this country proper - that try to do what's best for themselves, and we've got idealists of all stripes who believe their agenda or torch they're carrying is the right one. But a lot of these people - on both sides - can't see the forest for the trees. Frankly, the endangered species legislation is a little overly restrictive. But wait: others will no doubt say it's nowhere near strong enough. Who's "right"? "Science"? But wait: different scientists, with different political orientations, will often interpret things in different ways. Like it or not, personal experience colors abstract areas of science as well.
Re:Another nail in the coffin of journalism. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll use my own mother as an example. She's generally a very level-headed person, but when it comes down to politics she -loves- burying her head in the sand and seeing things as a "black or white, good or evil" issue. And I suspect most mothers are the same way once they're close to sixty. The entire process the right-wing republicans have been using is to make everything a soundbite, a good vs. evil / us against them / with or against us argument. You cannot possibly tell me with a straight face that the democrats were ever this blatant, misleading or dense about anything remotely close to this kind of manipulative behavior.
The answer "But Clinton did it!" does not make it right, and on those occasions when the democrats get caught pulling this nonsense, they should get bitched out too. If anyone ever showed me evidence of them doing it on one tenth of the scale this administration's been caught in just the past -month-, I'd be one of the first ones bitching. It's just much, much easier to give the republicans a black eye for this shit because they're such masters of it. Did Clinton stand behind repeating grids of soundbite text at -every- appearance that didn't have him in front a huge flag instead? Did his administration bribe columnists to push his agenda? (If he did, please cite a Reuters/AP/UPI link so I can learn about it.)
These same people thought there were WMD's. These same people STILL fucking think they exist.
People like having things laid out for them in black and white, they don't like to think about them. Nobody wants to waste the time and energy to contemplate world affairs because they can't change them. So why worry? They put their trust in the person that makes the plainest-spoken argument, not even giving enough of a shit to think he's wrong.
Yes, there are some people out there that follow the Republican way of thought and actually give thought TO that belief. Unfortunately, what they don't do is win elections. John McCain and his type of Republican are an endangered species. The neoconservative wing has discovered how to pull all the puppets into line, and will cut loose the rogues it can't control.
Re:G.W. Bush (Score:2, Interesting)
Remind me again how our best interests are at heart whenever money is involved? Liberals aren't bad ppl, they tend to be a bit radical at times just because they're against war and exploitation, genocide, etc. It's usually not economically practical to entertain liberal idealists, but it doesn't mean they have nothing to say.
The slow downward spiral (Score:5, Interesting)
The Ostrich strikes again (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Still don't get it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why yes, yes it has: http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
Scientists??? (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess the term "scientist" lost it luster when it stopped being applied to indepedently wealthy gentlemen with curiosity about how the World works (or ones so smart that wealthy private persons just feel like funding their work) and started being applied to everyone with some education and certain level in the society. I wish we would go back to 18th century in the way we do science. Otherwise it is all fake, serving this or that special groop (whoever pays).
And yes, technically my job title is "Scientist", working for one of the big defence contractors. No, I do not do "science" in the original sense of this word. But looking back at the University life -- it was prostitution as well...
Paul B.
Nope... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do not you think that there were plenty of astroLOGISTS at the time who might have noticed that things do not exactly add up up there, but just were not interested in following THAT route? Kepler might as well decide to be one of them (and forever forgotten), in which case another bright guy with access to the same technology (best at that time) would publish the same observations.
The problem is that now almost all science is funded from "public funds", so there is really no incentive to go against what the public believes (and public ius represented by the bureocrats in Washington, you know...
Paul B.
Re:typical Republican?!?!? Bahahahahah!!! (Score:1, Interesting)
Bill Moyers article: http://www.alternet.org/story/20666/ [alternet.org]
Re:Still don't get it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scientific honesty. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The March of Freedom (OT) (Score:2, Interesting)
Taking a psychotic, intelligent, unapologetic mass murderer with political ambitions at face value on his public propoganda? And insulting others who don't? Yes, that sounds like about the maturity I'd expect from a six-year-old.
(Sorry, couldn't resist the crack. That is one of the single worst arguments I have ever heard made on this entire topic, which attracts bad arguments from both sides like honey does flies. I guess it got modded some kind of Bizzaro World Informative?)
The L.A. Times is "Reporting" (Score:2, Interesting)
Let the Bush apologias begin! (Score:4, Interesting)
"The facts are clearly biased against President Bush"
- (paraphrase) John Stewart, The Daily Show
It's called fascism... (Score:2, Interesting)
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, "the Sixties" (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials--all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the "brownshirting" of American conservatism--a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, "Today's Conservatives are Fascists." Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of "fascism with a democratic face." His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called "The Reality of Red State Fascism," which claimed that "the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing."
I would argue that Rockwell--who makes the most systematic argument of the three--overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the '60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance--of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn't mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as "hate-filled
Re:Let the Bush bashing begin! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Another nail in the coffin of journalism. (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the debt is a bad thing, and I was always for a balanced budget. I thought we should lower Federal taxes once we got the debt until control, mainly so we could raise local taxes.
And I thought the government should stop screwing around with state issues, like the speed limit.
I wasn't entirely sure about social issues...I thought maybe Clinton was right and we needed national health care. And I always thought abortion was a stupid issue, like prostitution...all you can do is drive it underground. Even though Roe vs. Wade was the stupidest decision ever. I didn't think we needed affirmative action, but figured the whole thing was overblown.
If you'd asked me who I would have voted for if I'd been a month older for the Clinton/Dole election, I honestly don't know who I would have picked. Probably Clinton, simply because the attacks on him seemed completely irrelevant to his job performance.
The relationship between the hypothetical Republican party I was told about as a high school senior and the actual Republican party at this point is left as exercise for the reader.
Preferably one with degrees in astronomy and transfinite math.
Re:Let the Bush bashing begin! (Score:5, Interesting)
The TMO had anticipated a 10 foot or 20 slope foot exclusion along the streams, and maybe a generous kickback from the multinational that wants to cut the timber and sell the best stuff to the Japanese - who at least appreciate nice wood. The original recommendation involved maybe 50 acres of timber out of 5,000. The TMO cries real tears in the SO's office and words are heard about "tree huggers" and "owl lovers" "jobs lost" and similar nonsense. The best timber is in those corridors!!
The SO may also be, almost unavoidably HAS to be, acquaintented with the multinational reps as well. Surprisingly the directive comes down, "change the corridor to 35 feet."
The backside of the story is that since many "specialists" know how these things work, they work very hard to identify "issues" that will protect their recommendations. Consequently, the stream is good but not critical trout habitat and some accountant (not a field scientist but a real, honest to god accountant who has never ventured into the woods alone in his life) has already determined how much stream the forest can "afford" to protect. His determination was made on the basis of a dollars and cents estimate he pulled from
The biologist, knowing the dweeb who REALLY made the critical stream determination, has "fudged" the data, and another hot topic was inserted the hypothesis that creek corridor is nesting territory for spotted owls - who never harmed the biologist - but at least they'll protect his fish. When his crew is out "hoot owling" he'll be out there with a speaker system giving them something to listen and report. Most are pretty young, naieve, and honest, so he can't let them in on the secret.
The SO meanwhile knows perfectly well what's up. He recons that the entire issue is childish and that both the TMO and biologist would have been screaming just as loud regardless. He also knows the area is not pristine and that it was denuded 80 years ago, so there isn't any owl habitat really. But he does like fly fishing and plans to do some on that creek next spring now that biologist has pointed it out. So he pulls and other number out of the air, one he hopes will keep his multinational pals and the local loggers more or less happy, salt the beer of that conniving TMO, and piss on that biologist that lied about everything, all at the same time. Just maybe it'll protect the stream enough, too. Besides, he's retiring in 5 years anyway.
This has happened for years. (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in 1981, I worked at CDC. At that time, a branch became aware of a new disease that was spreading. When they approached the White house for several millions to stop the spread, they were told no. The CDC was so sure that this would be a nightmare, that they sent in some of the top guns to convince Reagan to fund it (one was a mormon bishop whose lab had won numerous awards for its' work). Of course, it was just in the gay community, and Reagan talked to his priest and came back and still said no. Obviously, this was AIDS. When my boss was asked to take on the AIDS research, he turned it down and it went to Gallo.
What I found interesting was that much of this never made the history books. We were told to just forget it. From much higher.
Of course, we have another disaster brewing with "Mad Cow"/Scrappies/CWD/KJD. It is thought that these are the same prion in different animals. But this admin is ignoring due to the possibility of hurting cattle export for the large agri companies (esp in Texas).
Many Leaders today, have hidden agendas. You need to be sure that it is in our best interest.
Three kinds of goverment funded science (Score:3, Interesting)
The first is done by the fixed grants to the universities, going to teachers/researchers with tenure, who can research any subject they want. There is so little of this left that it is probably insignificant.
The second is more or less generic grants everybody can seek. Probably similar to the NSF. We can not choose what we want to research, we send in proposals within the scope of the grant, and some get funded, presumably based on scientific merit. But we can publish any results, subject only to the traditional peer-review by journals. This is where the largest share of research today happens.
The third is the research insititutions who are directly part of the various branches of government. Research there are directly related to specific tasks required by the department. Researchers are not asked to lie, but results that does not support the policy of the government are not published, and the summary and consclusion of published reports are written "politically", and sometimes contradict the scientific meat of the reports. But journalists doesn't speak science, so the contradiction is seldom discovered.
Privately funded research are mostly similar to category three.
US versus reason (Score:3, Interesting)
As if, as if this label excuses anybody to use his/her (godgiven?) brains and run back to daddy Bush or mummy Kerry.
While it is true that in certain key area's the Democrats in the US are every bit as ugly as the Republicans - who at least do it in the open - that doesn't mean all is said or all is excused.
The land of the free doesn't seem to offer much debate culture. Everything is instantly polarized, categorized and thus excused from further intelligent debate, because "Liberal Liberal - Communist Communist - Unbeliever Unbeliever -
Anyway in this case some scientists from an organization with more democratic roots than republican roots say worriesome things.
What? They CAN'T BE TRUE because of their alleged political agenda?
The opposite however is very plausible I presume, that a government that has a history of noncooperation, changing the facts and bending the media by methods that are frowned upon by every side of any spectrum DOES NOT however interfere in the scientific process.
Right. I think I'll go with the side of the actual scientists who're reporting facts that can be verified here and there before shouting foul.
But hey, you know, if that gets to you, just shout "Liberal Liberal" a few times. I'm sure you'll feel better in no time.
note: the term liberal means conservative right-ish bastard where I come from, so it indeed is slightly insulting...
Anyone notice... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Only one thing left to do (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree, democracy works on the Mickey Mouse principle, there are plenty of other parties to vote for, some far left, some far right and some a little bit more centre. All the people have to do is give one of them a chance. Animal Farm is a good example of how a party gets used to power and starts abusing it: ALL political parties will suffer from this and lets face it, the Republicans and Democrats are the most abusive, bent, power-hungry sickos in the US political spectrum, simply because they have had centuries of power between them, when it all boils down to it, neither of them have the best interests of their country at heart.
You must keep pruning the tree of politics to remove the bad branches so new ones can grow. Democracy is the pruning tool.
Re:Interesting that I DO agree with your points... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, you are wrong. Very, very wrong. Take a look at federal superfund sites sometime. Or where environmental cleanups are taking place. You will find a heck of a lot of them that occur on land owned by corporations. Companies are perfectly happy to "ruin" land they intend to keep. Sure, it may not be intentional but it still happens.
They just tend not to clean it up until it affects the public at large. Or they want to sell the land. Or it gives them a bad image.
"People value what's theirs. All it takes is to look at any public park and see the trash blowing through it (often dumped within feet of a trash can). Yet these same people who will toss a burger wrapper out of their car at 60mph will be just as likely to go home and obsessively groom their lawns and maintain their homes."
Do they? I mean, I can show you private property that looks worse that a landfill. The tragedy of the commons is real. But don't pretend that people don't crap in their own backyards just because it fits in with a personal agenda or worldview.
We don't have a better environment that the old Soviet Union because of private land ownership. We have it because we are more prosperous. We have it because we actually follow laws that we pass. This may be related to private land ownership-but does not necessarily follow from it.
Re:Let the Bush bashing begin! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Let the Bush bashing begin! (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that the U.S. version of "extreme left" (which to the rest of the world is actually a tad right of center) or are they actually communists who use violence to further their agenda (what a leftist extremist actually is)?
Re:Oh No!! (Score:2, Interesting)
The Union of Concerned Scientitsts (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't take this story at face value, since the UoCS has a history or taking a position and then "proving" the validity the their position with data that was either very selective or just plain fabricated
Given the past exploits of the UoCS, it is quite possible that the pool of respondants was tweaked by throwing out enough negative responses to create the desired end result.
The only thing I would take seriously from these guys, is a treatise on how to lie with statistics