Republicans who cut science budgets are not stupid. They're malicious. Goal: official ignorance

[riversedge]

It is beyond stupid--it is morally wrong that this is happening!


https://www.readfulapp.com/site/AllVoices?item=554aaed86dc7e7a94fde8ee5


Republicans who cut science budgets are not stupid. They're malicious. Goal: official ignorance
feeds.dailykos.com 7 hours ago



?1413821779
Somebody needs to wipe the climate-change-denying smile off Lamar Smith's mug.


The story about Republicans in committee axing big hunks of government science budgets sparked a deluge of social media and other commentary last week. Here's Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker:

Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget. “Earth science, of course, includes climate science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is also on the committee, noted. (Smith said that the White House’s NASA budget request favored the earth sciences “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”) Johnson tried to get the cuts eliminated from the bill, but her proposed amendment was rejected. Defunding NASA’s earth-science program takes willed ignorance one giant leap further. It means that not only will climate studies be ignored; some potentially useful data won’t even be collected.

The vote brought howls of protest from NASA itself and from wider earth-science circles. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement saying that the bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate.” In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Meteorological Association, said that he could not sleep after hearing about the vote. “None of us has a ‘vacation planet’ we can go to for the weekend, so I argue that NASA’s mission to study planet Earth should be a ‘no-brainer,’ ” he wrote.

As Kolbert notes, the committee had previously whacked significant amounts from the budgets for the National Science Foundation’s geosciences program and Department of Energy's new energy sources program.

It's always tempting to label the politicians who take such actions buffoons, dingbats, dolts, dullards, dunces, know-nothings, simpletons, numskulls, morons, blockheads, harebrains, lamebrains or just plain brainless..................

[elleng]

1. Yes indeed,

and have been for years. Rover wanted them to be ignorant church goers, and that's what they are.

[okaawhatever]

2. K & R nt

[Rod Beauvex]

3. Never attribute to stupidty...

...that which can be explained by malice.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. And yet when it comes to education the only thing the Democrats will oppose the Republicans on

is putting creationism in the classroom. Letting corporate test companies profit while our teachers and children are punished and stagnant budgeting don't seem to be a problem to Democrats.

[riversedge]

5. As usual -money speaks