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Originally Posted by OccultHawk
From about two weeks ago:
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Climate science denier appointed to top position at NOAA
David Legates, a longtime climate change skeptic, has been appointed by the Trump administration to help run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency charged with producing "much of the climate research funded" by the government, The Washington Post reports.
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Today:
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The chief of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fired the agency’s acting chief scientist after the latter asked Donald Trump’s appointees to acknowledge NOAA’s scientific integrity policy, The New York Times reports. Craig McLean, the acting chief scientist at NOAA, sent an email last month to several new employees at NOAA who had been installed by the Trump administration requesting their acknowledgement of the agency’s rules that prohibit changing research and data to fit a political agenda. Dr. Erik Noble, the newly appointed NOAA chief of staff and a former White House policy adviser, wrote back, “Respectfully, by what authority are you sending this to me?” McLean said that his job as acting chief scientist entailed maintaining ethics across NOAA. Noble responded the next day, “You no longer serve as the acting chief scientist for NOAA. Thank you for your service.” In McLean’s stead, Noble hired Ryan Maue, a former researcher for a libertarian think tank. Maue has previously said scientists have made overly dire predictions about climate change.
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Hurricanes are hoax! Fake news!
I know this old but it’s still astonishing. He extends the cone with a magic marker.
I honestly believe any previous president would have been impeached and removed from office on the grounds of incompetence and mental instability for that. With Trump it was like a half day news cycle. If Trump is re-elected I bet they’ll stop tracking hurricanes altogether. People on the Gulf Coast will claim hurricanes aren’t real even after their homes are destroyed. Think that’s ridiculous? We have people here who have lost a parent to covid and still call it a hoax. That’s the truth. |
I totally agree with your sense of outrage here, OH. It's bewildering to me what Trump can get away with on the two fronts you mention:-
I. blatant, provable public lying On this topic, I read something about how the USSR operated in Stalin's era: that the point of Stalin's lies was not to get people to believe them, but that Stalin was saying, "This is how powerful I am; I can lie like this and there is no-one to stop me." And here's a description of Stalin's personality that sounds strangely familiar:
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Stalin was ruthless,[780] temperamentally cruel,[781] and ...He lacked compassion,[782].He was capable of self-righteous indignation,[785] and was resentful,[786] vindictive,[787] and vengeful, holding onto grievances against others for many years.[788]... he was also suspicious and conspiratorial, prone to believing that people were plotting against him and that there were vast international conspiracies behind acts of dissent.[789] He never attended torture sessions or executions,[790] although Robert Service (biographer) thought Stalin "derived deep satisfaction" from degrading and humiliating people and keeping even close associates in a state of "unrelieved fear".[716] Service suggested he had a paranoid or sociopathic personality disorder.[762]
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II. Destroying the credibility of public agencies. The CDC, DOJ and NOAA have turned out to be so vulnerable when exposed to the simple process of putting a Trump guy in charge. Their reputations are now in shreds, and that item about McLean losing his job for insisting on scientific integrity is particularly chilling. It's happening now, people! Trump is waging war on the Scientific Method, which is what led us out of the dark ages into what we proudly consider the age of Enlightenment. Trump and his enablers are now turning back the clock, so we can expect this upcoming announcement from NOAA: During a recent storm, Satan came to earth and inseminated Joe Biden - that's how he won Georgia.