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Quote:A former head policy adviser at the Interior Department is accusing the Trump Administration of reassigning him to a lesser position for speaking out about the dangers of climate change. Joel Clement, a scientist who was director of the Interior Department's Office of Policy Analysis for much of the Obama Administration, was recently reassigned to work to an "accounting office," the agency's Office of Natural Resources and Revenue. In an op-ed published Wednesday in The Washington Post, he wrote that he believes he was retaliated against for "speaking out publicly about the dangers that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities." He says that he's turning whistleblower on an administration that "chooses silence over science."
His op-ed appears to be his first public comment since the reassignment. In it, Clement says he's hoping for a thorough investigation into the Interior Department's actions. "The threat to these Alaska Native communities is not theoretical. This is not a policy debate," he writes. "Retaliation against me for those disclosures is unlawful."
Climate Scientist Says He Was Demoted For Speaking Out On Climate Change : The Two-Way : NPR
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Quote:President Trump's nominee for the top science position at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has argued that the legalization of same-sex marriage could lead to legalized pedophilia, CNN's KFile reported on Monday. Sam Clovis made the comments on his conservative radio show and in an op-ed in a conservative blog in separate incidents ranging from 2011 to 2015, according to the news network's investigative unit.
Trump nominee: Same-sex marriage could lead to legalizing pedophilia | TheHill
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Now why would that be.. ?
Quote:Social media accounts belonging to Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), President Trump's nomination for NASA administrator, have been deleted, according to a report by CNN. A spokesperson for Bridenstine told CNN that the Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube accounts were tied to his campaign, and were deleted in response to skepticism that Bridenstine would stand by his pledge to only serve three terms in office. The removal of social media content also included the deletion of several posts from Bridenstine's congressional Facebook page and all but two radio interviews on his Soundcloud account.
Upon request, Bridenstine's spokesperson also made public several Youtube videos that had been set to private, showing the congressman's appearances and floor speeches where he frequently criticized the agenda of President Obama, CNN reports. Trump nominated Bridenstine on Friday to lead NASA. Formerly a Naval aviator, Bridenstine is a congressman from Oklahoma who has served on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Bridenstine's nomination has drawn bipartisan criticism ahead of his Senate confirmation, including both of Florida's senators, who cited concerns over the Republican's relative lack of experience and ability to remain apolitical in his new post.
Trump’s NASA pick deletes posts from social media: report | TheHill
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Affecting even Chief Justices..
Quote:The Supreme Court is currently considering a landmark case challenging partisan gerrymandering, specifically Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to draw state assembly districts so as to firmly entrench their majority. At the heart of the case is a concept called the “efficiency gap,” a simple number that political scientist Eric McGhee and law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos have devised to measure how much a given district map favors one party over the other. If the number gets too high, it’s an indication that one party has rigged the game to ensure they keep getting reelected.
Sound simple enough? Well, not to Chief Justice John Roberts, who dismissed the concept as “sociological gobbledygook” in oral arguments for the case. In that one phrase, he seemed to dismiss the very idea of using social science to try to figure out the effects of redistricting efforts. “Does this state assembly map make it nearly impossible for the opposition to retake control” is an empirical question, which needs to be answered with empirical methods. The best methods we have at the date are those of political science, sociology, and economics. Indeed, as Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan observed during arguments, the people drawing these maps are relying heavily on social scientists to more effectively rig them.
Roberts wasn’t just rebuked by his colleagues, however. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, professor of sociology at Duke and the president of the American Sociological Association, who sent an open letter to Justice Roberts excoriating him for his dismissal of sociology and social science more generally:
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“In an era when facts are often dismissed as ‘fake news,’ we are particularly concerned about a person of your stature suggesting to the public that scientific measurement is not valid or reliable and that expertise should not be trusted,” Bonilla-Silva wrote. “What you call ‘gobbledygook’ is rigorous and empirical.”
Chief Justice John Roberts is now feuding with the entire field of sociology - Vox
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Quote:That gets to the real explanation for this seemingly pointless new levy. As thoughtful proponents of the endowment tax explained off the record, they want to use fiscal policy to punish people with views they don’t like. In particular, they object to what they see as the “noxious, unflinching left-liberal ideology” promoted by places such as Yale, Princeton, and, apparently, CalTech. (What exactly makes this “ideology” so “noxious” was unspecified but it seems to include the notion that homosexuals should be treated equally under the law.) The new tax, for them, is merely the thin end of the wedge leading to full government regulation of higher education. The longer-term goal is to use state power to purge “socially harmful” ideas, perhaps along the lines of the Hungarian government’s campaign against the Central European University. The brief history of the tax bill makes it clear that elite universities were targeted because of their perceived position in the culture wars, rather than any principled belief about how best to fund the government.
The tax on university endowments is anti-intellectualism and cultural resentment masquerading as fiscal policy | FT Alphaville
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Quote:The Environmental Protection Agency under Administrator Scott Pruitt is chipping away at environmental regulations from all sides. Pruitt is rolling back rules on limiting air pollution. He is halting implementation of greenhouse gas restrictions. He is weakening enforcement against polluters. And he is stalling for time on many other responsibilities.
But deeper changes at the EPA may still be to come: eroding the foundations of the rules themselves, through restrictions on science. Since assuming control of the agency, Pruitt’s taken unprecedented steps to oust the agency’s science advisers and replace them with researchers from industry and from states that have previously sued to block environmental regulations.
While his taste for luxury air travel hogs the headlines (he’s spent $2,261 per week on travel, according to the New Republic), Pruitt is now readying a salvo to take out the underlying research for environmental regulations. According to an E&E News report, at a closed-door meeting at the Heritage Foundation earlier this month, Pruitt said he plans to change how the agency uses science to inform its work. (The EPA did not respond to a request from Vox for comment.)
Specifically, he wants to limit the types of studies the agency can use to develop policies with rules modeled on the HONEST Act, a bill championed by outgoing House science committee chair Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) to eliminate “secret science.” Pruitt takes a dim view of science in general: He doesn’t believe that humans are causing climate change, and said “[t]here aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution.” He proposed holding a prime-time climate change debate, a format ill-suited to evaluating science. (The idea was shot down by White House chief of staff John Kelly.))
The EPA needs science to make rules to protect health. Scott Pruitt wants to make that harder. - Vox
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We left out the description of the Pruitt scandals in the first part of the article as we always argued that the real scandal is what Pruitt is doing to the EPA. From The Economist:
Given all that, it is easy to overlook what Mr Pruitt is actually doing at the helm of the EPA. On April 24th he unveiled a new policy which would prohibit the agency from using studies backed by confidential data, like medical records, when drafting environmental regulations. He has removed scientists affiliated with universities from the department’s scientific advisory committees. Staff morale has plunged.
This is the culmination of a decades-long campaign against the “secret science” underpinning environmental regulation. In 1993 researchers at Harvard published the “Six Cities study”, which definitively linked air quality to premature death using confidential medical records from 8,000 people. The study prompted the first regulations on fine particulate matter issued under the Clean Air Act in 1997. Manufacturers spent millions in an effort to dispute the science and called for release of the raw data, which the researchers, bound by a confidentiality agreement, refused. Today the findings are established science—and the rules they inspired will prevent more than 230,000 early deaths by 2020. Nevertheless, Lamar Smith, a Republican congressman who chairs the science committee, has subpoenaed the EPA for the underlying Six Cities data. He has also unsuccessfully sponsored a bill, dubbed the Honest Act, which would bar the EPA from issuing any new rules based on such studies. Mr Pruitt’s recently announced proposal would sidestep Congress and impose such a policy anyway.
The consequences could be severe. The EPA cites 50,000 studies each year. The costs of redacting data that might identify people before publication could amount to $100m per year, according to an estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, crowding out an already squeezed research budget. Air-quality rules and pesticide limits rely on analyses of confidential medical records—which Mr Pruitt may now label as suspect and try to undo. The new policy is a costly solution in search of a problem. It is outlandish to think that scientists are engaged in a vast conspiracy to exaggerate the health consequences of water and air pollution using fabricated data. It is less likely still that a member of the public browsing through the agency’s website would discover the fraud that had eluded peer reviewers. Some critics have credibly claimed that the EPA inflates the benefits of environment rules and downplays the costs. But the agency already publishes the details of its maths in the form of regulatory impact analyses, often hundreds of pages long, which are available for public scrutiny. Replicability and transparency are vital to science. But, as 985 scientists wrote in a letter to Mr Pruitt, the proposed restrictions are “phoney issues that weaponise ‘transparency’ to facilitate political interference in science-based decision-making, rather than genuinely address either.”
Mr Pruitt has already barred university scientists who receive federal grants from the EPA, as many leading researchers do, from sitting on boards advising the agency, on the ground of conflict of interest. He has no such qualms about scientists who work for industries regulated by the EPA, such as chemical manufacturers and coal producers. The result is that the number of university scientists on the boards has fallen by half, while the number from regulated industries or consulting companies has increased threefold. Michael Honeycutt, the new chief science adviser, has claimed that the dangers of mercury and ozone are exaggerated, and that “some studies even suggest that PM [particulate matter] makes you live longer”. Deborah Swackhamer, a professor of environmental policy, was demoted as head of the Board of Scientific Counsellors in favour of Paul Gilman, an executive at Covanta, a large waste-management firm.
Career staffers, usually do-gooder types, are dejected about Mr Pruitt, who has steadfastly committed himself to undoing as many Obama-era environmental regulations as he can. He has also proposed punishing budget cuts to the EPA, lopping off a quarter of its funding, though Congress has not yet agreed. More than 200 scientists left the agency in 2017; seven were hired. Three scientists were barred from speaking at a conference in October, and references to “global warming”, “fossil fuels” and “climate change” have been buried on the agency’s website. As a result of all this, the number of EPA employees has shrunk to the lowest level in decades. Other staffers are content to wait and outlast Mr Pruitt. “Career staff continue to keep our nose to the grindstone—with proper personal protective equipment and particulate controls,” jokes one bureaucrat.
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Completely discredited in Europe, receiving a warm welcome in Trump's America..
Quote:There cannot be many doctors as thoroughly discredited and ostracised as Andrew Wakefield has been in the UK who are subsequently seen smiling at the inauguration ball of a US president and later discovered to be dating the Australian model Elle Macpherson. But there he is. Wakefield was all but drummed out of Britain. The gastroenterologist lost his job, had his scientific paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism retracted by medical journal the Lancet and, in 2010, was struck off the medical register. He disappeared to the US and it was assumed he had gone to ground, having lost all credibility. He was a spent force, even though his name was often in the air as the anti-MMR views he seeded around the world led to many parents shunning the vaccine and outbreaks of measles wherever anyone had heard Wakefield’s creed. It was known he was in Texas with those who shared his views on vaccines and conspiracy. But he was not a public figure. Until Donald Trump was elected US president of the United States. Under an anti-establishment presidency, the anti-vaccine crusader, whose views appear to have become all the more entrenched by his drubbing at the hands of eminent scientists around the world, is back in the limelight and his new visibility could give his arguments even more currency. At one of President Trump’s inaugural balls in January last year, he was quoted as contemplating the overthrow of the (pro-vaccine) US medical establishment in words that brought to mind Trump himself. “What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – a huge shakeup. We need that to change dramatically.”
That same month, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jnr announced that he would be heading up a new federal panel on vaccine safety convened by Trump. It didn’t happen, but the possibility sent shivers through the medical world. This week, it became clear that Wakefield has been accepted by celebrity-smitten US society. Separated from Carmel, the wife who was staunchly at his side throughout the UK debacle, he is now dating Elle Macpherson, a supermodel with her own nutrition brand. He was photographed this week kissing her on an organic farm in Miami. In fact, Wakefield never did run and hide. From the very beginning, he had supporters who hailed him as a hero victimised by the medical establishment in the UK which, they believed, was in hock to big pharma. The perpetual cry of the anti-vaxxers is that you can’t trust the drug industry – which is only interested in profits and not people – to tell you the truth.
How disgraced anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield was embraced by Trump's America | Society | The Guardian
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Quote:Donald Trump’s administration is cutting programs scientists say are proven to protect Americans, from pollution safeguards to teen pregnancy prevention and healthier school lunches, with effects that could last for years. Experts who have worked in the federal government under Republicans and Democrats say both have sometimes put politics ahead of science but none have done so as blatantly as Trump. And they warn the consequences could continue long into the future. “It’s as egregious as I’ve ever seen it, starting from the very top with the president just denying the existence of science, manipulating the system on behalf of special interests,” said the former surgeon general Richard Carmona, who testified to Congress that the George W Bush administration pushed him to weaken or suppress public health findings. Trump’s high-profile denial of manmade climate change has occasionally overshadowed the many other ways his agencies are contradicting established research.
The agriculture department last month rolled back standards for schools to serve more whole grains, less salt and non-fat flavored milk. Department officials claimed schools struggled with the programs because students wouldn’t eat healthier foods. But research found the food changes didn’t deter students from getting lunch and didn’t cause more plate waste. And the healthier food requirements were projected to be effective: one study estimated they couldprevent 1.8 million cases of childhood obesity over a decade..
The Trump administration is also cutting short evidence-based grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs, favoring curriculum focused on abstinence instead, despite a large body of research that shows abstinence-only programs don’t work. A 2007 evaluation of four federal abstinence programs found that they had no impact on sexual activity or rates of unprotected sex among teens.
Sara Flowers, the vice-president of education for Planned Parenthood, said the majority of the programs previously funded demonstrated young people changed their behavior in at least one of five categories: delaying sex, reducing sexual partners, increasing contraceptive use, reducing rates of sexually transmitted infections or reducing rates of pregnancy. “The administration is really not using science. The administration is really using ideology, and those are very different,” Flowers said. “This [program] has been rigorously tested by experts and vetted and analyzed.”
Climate change and environmental science have also been at the forefront of the battle between science and the Trump administration. Power plant and car standards are being rolled back, as are pesticide restrictions and wildlife protections. The Trump administration has ignored climate scientists’ warnings that rising temperatures and more extreme weather will hurt the US economy and risk lives. The interior department initially sought to remove referencesto manmade climate change in a report about how sea-level rise might flood national parks.
One of the first major decisions by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was to forego a ban on the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which is associated with developmental delays and health problems in children and has sickened farm workers. Judges ordered the EPA to bar the substance, citing the science that shows it is dangerous. The agency is appealing the case. Agency officials have also made fundamental changes to how the federal government weighs environmental and health research. The former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt barred scientists working with EPA grants from serving on the science advisory panels that help shape policies. Instead, industries and states now have more sway over those boards.
Trump's war on science: how the US is putting politics above evidence | US news | The Guardian
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We don't want any independent experts..
Quote:The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is moving expert economists and researchers whose work challenges President Trump's policies out of Washington D.C., Politico reported Wednesday. Almost all researchers who work on the economic effects of climate change, trade policy and food stamps in the agency are being moved out of the capital in what they described to Politico as a political crackdown. Employees of the USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) were reportedly told last year by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue that most of the agency would be relocated outside the capital.
On March 5, the department began notifying people who were allowed to stay in Washington but didn’t provide a comprehensive list, only telling employees in person whether they had made the cut. Current and former employees independently made a list, covering all 279 people on staff, which reportedly found that 76 are being allowed to stay in the capital. The current and former employees told Politico the specialties of those being asked to move correspond closely to the areas where economic assessments often clash with Trump's policies, including tax policies, climate change and farms.
USDA relocates expert economists, researchers who challenge Trump policies: report | TheHill
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