Guess what folks, employees in an agency of the federal government now have to follow some rules, which in certain cases make little-to-no sense at all. Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.
The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA’s activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.
“Almost nobody at NASA does classified work,” says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. “I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us.”
Yup, throughout modern history enormous, leviathan government agencies have imposed rules on the people who work for them, rules that run contrary to common sense, or to the notions of lots of people about the way things ought to work. Through all the decades hearing about such boondoggles, I had no idea President Bush was responsible for all the red tape, or that it was being wielded to put a choke-hold on global warming alarmist research.
Why, now that you point it out to me, it makes perfect sense.
I got my own idea of what this is about. The latest “Everyone Else Is Linking It, I Might As Well Too” story on global warming, of which you and I could have read just about anywhere yesterday (but my hat tip goes to Buck), does sufficient damage to the Chicken Little dogma that you just knew a backlash was inevitable.
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the “consensus view,” defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes’ work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte recently updated this research. Using the same database and search terms as Oreskes, he examined all papers published from 2004 to February 2007. The results have been submitted to the journal Energy and Environment, of which DailyTech has obtained a pre-publication copy. The figures are surprising.
Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers “implicit” endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no “consensus.”
The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the “primary” cause of warming, but it doesn’t require any belief or support for “catastrophic” global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.
One out of 528.
That came out on a WEDNESDAY.
This National Agency Check stuff — being breathlessly reported for the benefit of a paranoid-liberal readership that has never heard of NAC before and suspects Bush skullduggery anytime they encounter something they don’t understand — came out on a THURSDAY.
Wednesday…Thursday. Discharge, ricochet. Action, reaction. Push-me, pull-you. Once again, the global warming mindset tries like the dickens to look like “science,” and ends up looking more like a religion. I’m not the first to point it out, and I won’t be the last.
As for Bush Derangement Syndrome, in three decades it will look just like pet rocks and mutton-chop sideburns do today.
Some of us refuse to act this way. When we’re told we’re “supposed to” do something, we want to know why. We don’t do this so we can be seen acting smarmy; we do this because it makes sense. When we buy things that require assembly, we (within reason) throw away the instructions as part of the first step. In short, we trust our ability to think rationally. To play chess with life…if you are hip with that metaphor. We figure that ability, and the using of it, are indispensable parts of our purpose on this planet.
The Best Sentence I’ve Read Lately Award today goes to 
CUCKODOX (n.) : A male movie character whose wife or girlfriend cheats on him. In spite of this, the producers of the movie fully intend that you somehow sympathize with the slut who started sleeping with someone else without leaking to her main man a single syllable about any reservations she might have had about their relationship. He is a rustic construct representing nothing more complex than simplistic rules, tradition, convention, all with an air of stuffy patriarchal mildew. A portmanteau of “cuckold” and “orthodox.” As a fictitious character, he is inserted into the story for the purpose of representing a value or system of values, and the rival for his affections is also inserted to represent a system of values and not much more. His role is to impose traditional rules of behavior on his sweetheart, and to be dumped by her once a more exciting and unkempt stud comes along, who is almost always from a lower economic class.
This is somewhat parallel to, and perhaps identical to, the 
So I think an important battle has been lost here. You can say some incredibly vicious things about President Bush now, and about Republicans in general, and still be widely perceived as a pleasant person saying pleasant things. To inject some logic into such a dialog, is something you can’t do without being perceived as some kind of a nasty little butt hole. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. The retail establishment I visited, after all, is unionized…which is going to have a big effect on things. You go on one of those six-times-a-day smoking breaks, you get tired of making idle chit-chat about the weather, the next subject is politics. And so reality takes a back seat, as you manufacture lots of make-believe codswallop so you can do some bitching.
I had to save this article from 
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So this Jay Zagorsky guy out in Ohio, we learn via USA Today, is doing a study that says