{"id":92,"date":"2006-03-02T21:48:09","date_gmt":"2006-03-02T21:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/02\/fema-in-space\/"},"modified":"2006-03-02T21:48:09","modified_gmt":"2006-03-02T21:48:09","slug":"fema-in-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/02\/fema-in-space\/","title":{"rendered":"FEMA in Space"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut<\/a> in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle\/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed– Gordon Watts<\/a> serves as a nice example.<\/p>\n

Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney<\/a> has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about the Republican War on Science, and it would be really nice to be able to lump the warping of NASA in with that. You could even make a decent case, without having to swing too far into tinfoil-hat territory– some of the missions that are getting dumped are Earth-focussed things that deal with climate change, while others are devoted to studying extremely distant astronomical objects related to the Big Bang model that got college dropout Geroge Deutsch’s knickers in a twist.<\/p>\n

It would be nice to believe that this was all part of a conspiracy to suppress worthwhile science, because that would mean that the Bush administration actually cared<\/strong> about science one way or another. In some pathetic co-dependent way, that would make science more meaningful, and scientists more important.<\/p>\n

Given their track record, though, I just don’t believe it. They’re fucking up NASA not because they’re disturbed by the implications of quantum mechanics and modern cosmology, but because they never got the hang of Newtonian physics, specificallly the idea that actions cause reactions, and consequences that carry forward in time. As I’ve said before<\/a>, this crowd doesn’t do policy, they do politics. If saying that we’ll land a man on Mars seems like it might play well, then they’ll pledge to put a man on Mars, and no matter if it screws up the worthwhile projects that are already going on, because Lord knows, they’re not going to commit any actual resources<\/strong> to some half-assed political initiative.<\/p>\n

(The official White House reaction to scientific complaints about this sort of thing always seems to be mild surprise that anybody took them seriously enough to start re-arranging budget priorities– it was just something the President said in a speech, after all. Nobody else pays any attention to those– why can’t these eggheads get with the program?)<\/p>\n

I’d love to believe that there was a sinister conspiracy here, but I just can’t. Their treatment of NASA is all of a piece with their treatment of port security, disaster preparedness<\/a>, war planning, government finance, and on, and on, and on…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle\/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed– Gordon Watts serves as a nice example. Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about… Continue reading FEMA in Space<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-war_on_science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}