Posted on 06/06/2007 2:15:51 PM PDT by Constitutionalist Conservative
NASA administrator Michael Griffin made headlines last week when he told a National Public Radio interviewer he wasn't sure global warming was a problem. "All I can really do is apologize to all you guys ... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this," said Griffin.
The head of NASA told scientists and engineers that he regrets airing his personal views about global warming during a recent radio interview, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.
NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that "unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it."
"All I can really do is apologize to all you guys ... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this," he said.
Griffin made headlines last week when he told a National Public Radio interviewer he wasn't sure global warming was a problem.
"I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists," Griffin said on NPR. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."
The radio interview angered some climate scientists, who called his remarks ignorant.
An international panel this year predicted that uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions could drive up global temperatures and trigger heat waves, devastating droughts and super storms. Observations by NASA satellites show evidence of rapidly melting glaciers and shrinking of critical marine plant life due to warmer seas.
Griffin reiterated that NASA's job was to provide scientific data on global warming and leave it up to policy makers to decide what to do with it.
Griffin told JPL workers he tried to separate his opinions during the NPR interview, but that it got "lost in the shuffle."
"Doing media interviews is an art. Their goal is usually to generate controversy because it sells interviews and papers and my goal is usually to avoid controversy," he said.
pg. 346
“Now, you see, Dr. Stadler, you’re speaking as if this book were addressed to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the prestige of science. But it isn’t. It is addressed to the public. And you have always been the first to believe the public does not think... ...This book may have no philosophical value whatever, but it has a great psychological value.”
“You see, Dr. Stadler, people don’t want to think... So they’ll bless and follow anyone who gives them justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue— a highly intellectual virtue— out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness, and their guilt.”
Atlas Shrugged,
Ayn Rand
“some climate scientists called his remarks ignorant...”
and now, as i genuflect, i reflect on the words of the exalted, blessed climate scientists, and get ready to pay for carbon dispensations from the church of mother earth. amen.
Bullseye
"... has become?" It always was.
“there is a streak of fascism in the science community that gives one pause.”
the pseudo-science community, which has nothing to do with scientific inquiry, which has everything to do with radical, left-wing political movements that reject scientific inquiry, IS facism. (behind every left-wing, fascist ideology lurks a democrat guerilla who hides behind religion and whatever else that’s available to snipe at the world which despises despots.)
Well, I see reeducation camp was a rounding success.
ah, sweet reason.
Please don’t let reality get in the way of funding for NASA projects!
JUST AGREE - AND BE BORING !
JUST AGREE - AND BE DULL !
CAUSE IF YOU DON’T PUSH GLOBAL WARMING
YOUR COMFY GOVERNMENT JOB MAY JUST BE CULLED
ENVIRONAZIS, WHAT A SHOW
ENVIRONAZIS, HERE WE GO
YOU MIGHT BE HOPING THAT WE’LL GO AWAY
BUT OUR NEW RELIGION’S HERE
AND ITS HERE TO STAAAAAAAAAAY !
Griffin’s is not a special case.
Just look at how the world’s top leaders are now falling all over themselves to appear to be the most in favor of cutting GHGs.
We are ALL stuck under the influence of the leftist’s propaganda now.
June 07, 2007
Al Gore’s Hell on Earth
By Maggie Gallagher
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/06/al_gores_hell_on_earth.html
Al Gore calls it, “The Assault on Reason,” but his brand of environmentalism sounds a lot more like a new form of faith.
In his book “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore confesses that global warming: “offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission ; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose ; a shared and unifying cause ; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise ...
“When we do rise, it will fill our spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope.” When we rise, “we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.”
Transcendence, epiphany, loss of meaning, hope . No, this is not really about politics, or science either, is it, Al? Al Gore’s new role is prophet, calling us urgently to convert on carbons or perish, lest rising temperatures create Hell on Earth.
Environmentalism, as a movement, seems to breed such prophets. The mother of them all was Rachel Carson, whose 100th birthday we just finished celebrating.
“Silent Spring,” which launched modern environmentalism, began with an outright fable, a secular Eden: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” But lately, an “evil spell” threatened to “silence the rebirth of new life.” Many of Rachel Carson’s scientific claims — such as that pesticides were causing cancer — were not consistent with the scientific evidence, points out John Tierney in the science section of The New York Times this week.
In a fat, rich country like America, the kind of “chemophobia” Carson championed only led us to waste money on various kinds of nonessential cleanups.
In the developing world, the fear of DDT has led to massive human deaths from malaria over the last 40 years.
But somehow the halos on environmental prophets remain unaffected by the human destruction their dogmas wreak.
I am not qualified to evaluate the scientific case for global warming. But three things about global warming give me pause.
1. It transforms the United States, as the world’s most successful economy, into the chief evildoer in the world;
2. It justifies a massive extension of government power to regulate all aspects of our lives;
3. It makes having children a sin against the Earth. (Indeed, China recently justified its coercive one-child policy on carbon-reducing grounds.)
Arguments from nature almost never work in any other American context.
Try talking about limiting people’s sexual behavior, artificial reproduction or experiments on human embryos because “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” and see what happens.
Al Gore tries to tell you that it’s because, in this case, the religion is backed up by solid science.
I don’t think that explains it.
Science is an open, nonideological endeavor, which means scientific truths are constantly being revised.
Only some of these scientific truths end up entering the cultural bloodstream. Maggie Law: The amount of scientific evidence needed to establish a moral truth is inversely proportional to the degree to which this truth is congruent with liberalism’s moral ends.
Efforts to cut off the scientific debate and to malign the characters of nonconforming scientists are another disturbing sign.
If opposition to global warming measures is to be portrayed as an “assault on reason,” then the voices of reason who oppose them must be shut down.
The thing is, for Al Gore and his followers, global warming is just such a doggone convenient truth.
Guess: at least once every summer since Creation.
spaceflightnow.com
THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 2007
1402 GMT (10:02 a.m. EDT)
Atlantis’ fuel cells were loaded with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen reactants last night. The filling was delayed a bit due to the bad weather that passed through the Kennedy Space Center area yesterday afternoon.
The countdown is continuing toward a launch Friday at 7:38 p.m. EDT.
“We are currently tracking no significant issues on the vehicle,” says Steve Payne, NASA test director.
The weather forecast for launch time has improved to an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions. Cumulus clouds are the only concern.
Should be a LIVE THREAD soon
It’s not the science community, it’s the cult of environmentalism community, some of whom call themselves scientists, and it’s not a streak, it’s a faith based belief system of fundamental fanaticism as virulent as as that of Al Queada or the Taliban.
Quite simply, they are insane, and they will attempt to destroy anyone who disagrees with their hair brained ideas.
Correction: 'RAT politicians and their partners in deception/crime (the "properly credentialed" scientists who find the "evidence" that is "needed") use paranoid religious kooks - whether inside or outside the Gaia "Save our Mother" movement - to help them advance their money making ventures.
They laugh at the religious kooks all the way to the bank.
As Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, pointed out, "If you wanted to, say, investigate feeding habits of squirrels in Sussex today, you wouldn't present your research application as 'Feeding habits of squirrels in Sussex'. You wouldn't get the grant. If you, however, presented it as 'Feeding habits of squirrels in Sussex under the effects of global warming', money would flow.
Emotionally immature Leftist mentalities are quite accurately psychoanalyzed here:
"..I believe this underlying template of infantile illusion has a lot to do with false beliefs. Not merely false in the sense of “untrue,” because no one can know everything, and it is not possible to get through life without holding some beliefs for which there is no proof or which will later be proven wrong.
What I am talking about is not so much false beliefs as what might be called “motivated stupidity.”
These are beliefs that are not only untrue, but could not possibly be true, and yet, are embraced just as fervently as any truth. In fact, one of the giveaways that we are dealing with motivated stupidity is that these false beliefs are held onto more fervently than true beliefs, as if clinging tightly enough to an object will reinstate one's omnipotence.
I think the problem of motivated stupidity especially afflicts contemporary liberalism. President Bush is not Hitler. He is not, as Cindy Sheehan said, "the biggest terrorist in the world." The war in Iraq is not being waged for the purpose of enriching his already wealthy friends. Bush is not spying on innocent Americans. Global warming during the five years of his administration did not cause hurricane Katrina. This is not the worst economy since Herbert Hoover. President Bush is not a racist. Republicans do not want children to go hungry.
As I mentioned in a previous post, it is much more difficult to do battle with a weak mind than a strong one.
Weak thinkers embrace their false ideas in a manner disquietingly similar to religious groups who predict the second coming, or the arrival of space ships, or end of the world, but who do not modify their beliefs when the event fails to come about.
In fact, it is a well-known observation that a few >/b>of the disappointed may depart from such a group, while the majority only become more thoroughly entrenched in their belief system, defending it all the more vigorously.
These are the sad Ghost Dancers, those who believe that if we only wish more fervently, we really can alter reality. Just like an infant can do. Think of "War is Not the Answer," "Give Peace a Chance," and all the other liberal bumper stickers.
What this obviously means--obvious to a psychologist, anyway--is that the primary purpose of beliefs is not necessarily to comprehend reality. Rather, belief systems are superimposed on a deeper ground of emotional need for comfort, predictability, and meaning. There is a deep emotional need for the world to make sense, even if the explanation actually makes no sense. What sets humans apart from the animals is not just our ability to know reality, but our even more striking ability to not know it--to create patently erroneous systems of thought that we then inhabit, and which actually compromise our survival prospects.
No lion ever entertained the idea that it might be healthier to live on grasses rather than flesh. Penguins don’t decide to live near the equator, where it isn’t so cold. But the UN thinks that lots of talks and meetings will make the threat of a nuclear Iran go away. Liberals really think that Saddam and his satanic spawn would never, ever, have obtained nukes.
Only human beings can hold ideas that are completely illogical and self-defeating. In fact, there is no doubt whatsoever that the majority of beliefs human beings have held about the world down through history have been false, often ridiculously so. For example, just consider medicine. Until the early 20th century, the average visit to a doctor was likely to leave one in worse shape, not better. But useless or harmful treatments helped people cope with otherwise intolerable anxiety, and were obviously psychologically preferable to the truth: that no one knew why you were sick or how to cure you.
So there is something about human beings that makes them uniquely susceptible to bad ideas. Therefore, it would appear to be axiomatic that there must be something about bad ideas that is paradoxically adaptive. But adaptive to what? Clearly, they are adaptive to internal reality, to the emotional needs and anxieties of the person who holds them.
Leftists don't really want Bush to be Hitler. They need him to be. Desperately.
As uncomfortable as it is, it is far preferable to being left alone with their own internal infantile anxieties, with nowhere to project them.
The psychoanalyst Winnicott made the apt observation that "there is no such thing as an infant," at least from the infant's point of view, since the infant is unable to clearly distinguish itself from the mother.
What this means is that human beings are fundamentally a group animal, not just in a social sense, but at the core of our very being. We all harbor the unconscious residue of an infantile matrix out of which our individuality only later emerges. In developmental psychology, this process is known as "individuation," and there are many things that can go wrong on the journey from infantile symbiosis to individuation and mature independence.
One of the things that frequently goes awry is that the drive toward individuation is overcome by the opposite, regressive pull toward fusion and dependence (in its healthy form, this drive to merger allows us, for example, to fall in love). Becoming independent is fraught with anxiety, and can trigger a host of emotional problems in someone with a history of insecure, traumatic, or ambivalent attachment.
A casual survey of history reveals that human beings are a deeply troubled species. Arthur Koestler observed that we err in placing all of the blame on human greed, selfishness, and assertiveness--that is, excess individualism.
Rather, he pointed out that the amount of crime committed for personal motives is inconsequential compared to that committed by large populations--that is, groups--in a completely self-transcendent manner on behalf of religion or ideology, king or country. The Islamists are a case in point. Suicide bombers obviously do not selfishly kill for personal gain, but selflessly to advance the cause of their group.
Therefore, as Koestler writes, "the historical record confronts us with the paradox that the tragedy of man originates not in an excess of individual self-assertiveness," but in a malfunction of the affiliative, group tendencies of our species.
Koestler also had the intuition that this had something to do with an excessive "need to belong" triggered by infantile experience, leading to an unquestioned identification with the group, a suspension of critical thinking about the group's beliefs, and a trancelike submission to powerful parental substitute.
As Adam Smith knew, individuals may be selfish, but they are also self-interested. This makes them rational, predictable, and comprehensible.
On the other hand, no one knows how to deal with the individual who has given over his identity to the group.
Such a person does not possess an individual mind, but a group mind which is not critical, rational, or predictable.
As such, they may react violently to any kind of threat, not just a physical threat, but any questioning of their worldview.
A harmless wimp may be transformed into a beast of depravity by identifying with the powerful group, tribe, clan, party or religion.
Leftists such as Cindy Sheehan routinely accuse the United States of being the most selfish and individualistic nation on the planet.
Interestingly, this may explain why the United States is, by a wide margin, the greatest force for good the world has ever known.
In contrast, countries that have attempted to dissolve individual identity by promoting a regressive merger with the nation/group have been a source of unqualified evil: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, communist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, and now Islamofascism.
For that matter, look at the infantile selfishness we see in the recent French rioting.
They are essentially rioting to maintain the prerogatives of His Majesty the Baby, who must be loved and cared for unconditionally. You do not fire a baby when he is bad. You don't even punish him. In fact, you have no expectations of him at all.
European style socalism does the same thing for adults, creating a giant nursery in which the conditions of infancy are perpetuated.
In their imagination, angry babies can "fire" the parents that frustrate their omnipotence. But then you have a problem: for the infant still requires grown-ups to fund and implement the nursery. I don't think the Europediocracy will like it when Muslims gain control of the nursery.
This actually constitutes a large part of the "war on terror": trying, for example, in Iraq, to bring individuation and psychological maturity to a people who have known only infantile merger with the tribe, faith, or "strong man."
The task is made all the more difficult as a result of the approximately fifty percent of Americans who are merged together in their own infantile group fantasy of eternal suckling on the inexhaustible teat of mommy government: "Don't bother me, I'm eating." ....." ~ Robert W.Godwin, Ph.D -- a clinical psychologist whose interdisciplinary work has focused on the relationship between contemporary psychoanalysis, chaos theory, and quantum physics.
bttt
Thanks!
Yeah, anybody can google a Periodic Table and figure out why we use Helium in the Goodyear Blimp, not carbon dioxide .................. FRegards
Sweetie, you have given me an idea - Thanks!
The typical liberal action-action is to create slogans and bumper stickers that condense their beliefs into simple sentences that the sheeple can easily read and digest.
Based on their silly belief that CO2, methane, et al, are somehow rising up to create the 'greenhouse' effect, here's a short one:
Even the 'true-believers' would understand the insanity of the slogan, and from then on, they'd have a mental image of the Goodyear Blimp laying on its' side on the ground, stuck in their little pinheads.
Then again, some of the maroons might actually campaign for it! There could be more fakes started - CO2-powered elevators, maybe. Stay well, Babe ................... FRegards
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