Sherry Chandler » 2006 » February » 04
says GWB. But no human and animal hybrids, thank you. And no thinking outside the box. For example, you may have heard that NASA’s top climate scientist says he was “threatened with ‘dire consequences’ if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.” Now other NASA scientists are beginning to speak up. From the NYTimes:
Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen’s case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency.
They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies.
In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word “theory” after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times.
…
The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the “war room” of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen’s public statements.
In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word “theory” needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.”
It continued: “This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.”
The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing “Big Bang theory.” Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch’s boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents.
Links thanks to The Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo.
[Follow-up: Did you note that the guy pushing NASA around was 24 years old? Like all those young Republican loyalists sent to transform Iraq under Paul Bremer. That worked out real well.]
This post was written by sherry
The other day I ran into a long-time acquaintance. I can’t call her an “old acquaintance” because she’s probably twenty years my junior. I’m the old acquaintance here. As I was soon led to understand.
After a few minutes, our talk turned to retirement, as it so often does among employees of the University of Kentucky. I said I wanted to work a few more years because my husband and I have a number of improvements we want to make to the house (I subtly didn’t mention the roof) before we get too old to go up and down the basement stairs to kick the old furnace into life.
My friend gave me a keen look. “How old are you?” she asked.
“I’ll be sixty-one in a couple of weeks,” I said.
“Well,” she said, after thinking about that a few seconds, “at least you’re still active. ”
And so, my year of being sixty draws to an end.
So, too, ends my first year of blogging. I celebrate that with a little sprucing up, as you can see. Some new paint, a little dust knocked out of the carpets.
I’ve learned much in the last year, not the least of which is that the old template was just a little too Byzantine for easy maintainence. It was fun, though, and I thank Armando Feler for the use of his photographic portrait. It was taken at The Jazz Factory in winter of 2004/2005.
The photo here was taken at the Guild Fair in Berea on a typically rainy day in October 1998. My thanks to James Burgett for advice about how to spruce it up and make it presentable.
Time to do a little retrospective, but I’ve never been all that good at paying attention to web stats and stuff. Much depends on how the counts are made, which reinforces my distrust of numbers. Someplace between 40 and 50 people come visit me every day. As blogs go, that’s very obscure. But it’s pretty good for a poet. And I think – I flatter myself – that number is probably a low count of my readership, because I suspect that a lot of folk don’t come every single day. After all, I’m not giving you breaking news here.
One of the most surprising things I’ve learned is that, though the posts appear to recede down the page and disappear, they do not, in fact, ever really go away and from time to time I’ll get a response to something I put on the blog weeks ago and have already forgotten about. So with Marian Bijlenga’s Written Weed and the DeZurik Sisters. Folk drop by those posts every now and then. And if I were a smart music publisher, I might think of re-releasing the DeZuriks.
Poppysmatus and I have made about 600 posts in 17 categories. Poppysmatus loves Catullus. I can’t stay away from politics.
I heard somewhere that if you stay at this a year, you’ll keep it up. Looks like I’m in. I have always liked to write letters. Born out of time that way. So this is my letter to the world. Hope you continue to enjoy reading it.
THIS is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed 5
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
— Emily Dickinson
This post was written by sherry
