Perverting science for politics

[Happy Monkey]

Whether it is valuable depends on whether your underlying goal is to promote health, or promote alternative medicine.

[TheMercenary]

Sort of preverted science, mildly related thread drift. Interesting never the less.

US nuclear relic found in bottle

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7918618.stm

[TheMercenary]

I don't support the double standard.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I don't support the double standard.

I don't support the future. I hate the future. Rotten bastards will eventually invent a time machine, but do they ever come back and visit their great-great-great-great-great grandaddy TGRR? No. Ungrateful bastards.

Burn the joint down, and leave the disrespectful little turds a used-up cinder.

[classicman]

Bumpity bump.

Panel: Gov't thwarted worst-case scenario on spill

The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been.

That finding comes from a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in history.

In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well.

BP estimated the worse scenario to be a leak of 2.5 million gallons per day. The government, meanwhile, was telling the public the well was releasing 210,000 gallons per day - a figure that later grew closer to BP's figure.

from AP via Yahoo
Apparently the R's aren't the only ones...

[xoxoxoBruce]

What is the point of ballyhooing the worst case scenario?
That's usually used to...
1- promote action by someone to respond to the threat. The threat was already being responded to.

2- some sort of political gain, by distorting reality, while assigning blame. I don't think that's NOAA's game.

2- draw attention to oneself, as in listen to me, I know best. Possible, due to inter-agency rivalry?

It sounds to me like NOAA was playing TV weatherman, it's coming and it could be really bad. Even though worse case almost never happens.

If you have a problem you should do the best you can to solve it, which is what they did, rather than run around pointlessly, like Chicken Little, which does absolutely no good.

[TheMercenary]

It also sounds like the Obamay Administration and their cronies are no different than Bush, they purposefully withheld critical info about the spill to effect public opinion when in fact they knew the info they were telling the public or withholding was BS. Now they have been busted by their own commission.

In effect, they lied. Again.

[classicman]

Its not ballyhooing, its telling the truth. It seems they intentionally didn't. Why block the effort to tell the truth?

In four papers issued by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, commission investigators fault the administration for giving too much credence to initial estimates that just 1,000 barrels of oil a day were flowing from the ruptured BP PLC well, and for later allowing political concerns to drive decisions such as how to deploy people and material—such as oil-containing boom—to contain the spreading oil.

Bold mine

[xoxoxoBruce]

Bullshit, it's not the truth. Worst case scenario is a guess how bad it could get if a lot of variables went a certain way. If your shoe catches fire, the worst case scenario is you'll end up as a pile of ashes, but that is very unlikely unless a lot of unlikely shit happens. NOAA didn't know what would happen, nobody knew, not even BP.

It was BP's responsibility to clean it up, not the governments. The government stepped in when BP failed to do that fast enough.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And given the technical difficulties of the job, I'll publicly doubt it made a difference in speed of fixing.

[TheMercenary]

Well this was interesting to read:

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed.

Sure, he meant well, but as Reuters reported, Gore also said, "One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...ke_108085.html

[glatt]

Interesting that he would admit that out loud. I guess he's never going to run for office again, so it doesn't matter.

I've always thought those small early primary states have way more influence than they should.

[Lamplighter]

It's not just Gore that made some bad decisions about 1st generation ethanol.

There were cautions expressed to the growers about the
financial risks involved in buying into local corn->alcohol facilities...
and although the demand for EtOH would be going up,
the economies of scale were such that small plants would not be financially viable.
Some of the growers did not pay enough attention.

[xoxoxoBruce]

It was a bad idea from the gitgo.

[classicman]

At least he admitted his mistake. Thats more than most of them.