Idiocracy At Work
Battle between NSF and House science committee escalates: How did it get this bad?, Science Insider
“The Republican aides were looking for anything that Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), their boss as chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, could use to support his ongoing campaign to demonstrate how the $7 billion research agency is “wasting” taxpayer dollars on frivolous or low-priority projects, particularly in the social sciences. The Democratic staffers wanted to make sure that their boss, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the panel’s senior Democrat, knew enough about each grant to rebut any criticism that Smith might levy against the research.”
David Vitter Unhappy With Ebola Aid Strategy Because It ‘Focuses On Africa’, Huffington Post
“Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) is urging his colleagues to oppose President Barack Obama’s request for $1 billion to fight the spread of Ebola, in part because the plan “focuses on Africa” instead of “our own borders.”
Given the difficulty our hospitals and health agencies are having with ebola infection control his concern is not unwarranted. Our #1 concern should be stopping it from getting a foothold HERE. Yes, we need to work in Africa as well, but first things first. And please, let’s not say silly things like limiting air travel from the region is off the table.
“Our #1 concern should be stopping it from getting a foothold HERE” is our first (but not only) concern, and the first step (but not only step) is always to control the source of the infection and break the chain. That does not preclude imperative steps of upgrading disease management here and better screening.
In a world of instant travel anywhere and everywhere, there is no “region” that can be blockaded. Hot spots will be appearing like wildfire globally.
Hammering down the active pool of infections is priority.
BTW – stopping discussion by “pre-ridiculing” other viewpoints (” And please, let’s not say silly things”) is not good practice.
“Hammering down the active pool of infections is priority.”
Yes, fully agree. But wait, there’s the crowd saying just flee, flee, stop travel, don’t go help, run for your lives! Oh well…this could take some convincing…maybe those media outlets?
This is global problem requiring coordinated (and expensive) local/global solutions (note the plural).
I find CNN in particular in their constant ratings frenzy, overheating people’s emotions.
You’re living in a densely populated city. A nasty fire breaks out in a house a couple blocks over. Do you 1) start insulating your house and watering the roof on the presumption that it will soon spread out of control, or 2) do you try to put the fire out at the source before it spreads further?
You clear the brush so it can’t cross to your place.
Ideological commitment as a “one worlder”, to be sure all suffer equally (kum-baya!) is suicide. Please don’t include me in your plans.
With 150 direct flights from west Africa a week, a flight ban would eliminate at least 45,000 vectors per week. Not doing so is idiotic.
Obama put a travel ban on Israel this summer to force them to stop defending themselves from Palestinian attacks. So apparently travel bans are deemed significant, even by this administration, if the politics are right.
How would a ban of direct flights prevent those 45,000 “vectors” from travelling via other routes? Through countries that don’t block direct flights, and to/from which the US doesn’t block travel.
If people believe they need to travel to the US, they are going to travel to the US. Even if they have to go through Canada. All you are doing is making them harder to track and monitor in order to pretend you are “doing something”.
I suspect the US will end up doing something like that, in order to “give the baby it’s blankie”, but it doesn’t make it any less pointless or counter-productive.
In dense cities, there is no brush or firebreaks. If you are happy to let an epidemic rage out of control in Africa, then you better be prepared to cut off ALL travel to the US from anywhere, because the epidemic will be everywhere else.
Limiting air travel from Liberia and Sierra Leon to the US would have little effect since the epidemic can spread by many other routes. Better isolation technology is available in the US and should be used, including NASA technology. However resources in general are limited, and can be most effectively used at the source.
So it should be easy for you to explain how that would work in practice?
The President declares a national emergency, under which FEMA, DOT and DHS can restrict or commandeer transportation. The above plus HHS can then isolate the infected and exposed etc. There are also several Presidential Executive Orders that come into play. Most of these were put in place after 9/11 to handle the aftermath of bioterror attacks, but they also apply to outbreaks. Some predate 9/11, going as gar back as 1947.
You still haven’t explained how “things like limiting air travel from the region” would work in practice to prevent infection reaching the US.
Unless you are proposing a total ban on international travel in and out of the US, closing borders, and severely limiting shipping, how will you prevent travellers from simply passing through other nations that don’t block travel to/from the affected regions, and to/from the US? Ie, I cross a land border into Senegal, take a puddle-jumper to Morocco, an international flight into western Europe, then to the US.
[It’s not unusual for business people to use multiple passports so they can separate their visas. Useful if you are travelling in both Iran and Israel, for example, or Ukraine and Russia. Also useful if corrupt officials steal your passport. If I knew the US was watching for travellers to/from tropical west Africa, I’d use a separate passport to travel between the US and Europe, and Europe and Africa.]
Limiting direct air travel from a particular region simply scatters the people you are worried about to other routes, and causes them to hide their origins. That actually makes it harder for you to track people of concern.
I agree with Paul that characterizing the words of others is counter-productive. Folks here have a very wide point of view, and all are free to put forward personal notions. Let the ideas fall or rise on their own merit.
The ebola virus triggers an effective immune response if the victim can be kept alive for even a week or two. Consequently a vaccine is very feasible and in fact five different potential vaccines have been developed by various researchers. The only reason we didn’t have a vaccine years ago is that no manufacturers are interested in testing and manufacturing an ebola vaccine, since there is little profit in doing so. You can only sell a one or two doses of vaccine to each person, and most of the people at risk are too poor to pay. And conservatives in Congress are even now attacking President Obama for providing aid to Africa, where people are actually dying.
http://www.theonion.com/art…
I have to agree with all the replies that we should fix the real problem as a priority at the source. Do other things too, but that is the important one.
What exactly is “idiotic” about elected officials inquiring about how taxpayer money is spent? If a particular line of federally funded research is in the public interest, let the scientific community make that case — there are plenty of media outlets to do so.
Great, we’ll let media outlets decide what constitutes good science. Why not go all the way back to the Inquisition? Poor Galileo, all he had to do was make his case before the media. He’d have been fine.
Your reading comprehension skills need some work. I said “let the scientific community make the case for their own research.” The public is funding it and they should decide (through elected representatives) how their money is spent.
How are they supposed to make their case to a scientifically illiterate House committee? Exactly who on the committee do you think has the science background to judge what is of scientific merit?
I realize that the concepts of scientific integrity and political responsibility are out of fashion, but your contempt for both accountability in public funding and the democratic process is clear.
Unfortunately political responsibility is indeed out of fashion, having been replaced by ideology and partisanship, while the unprecedented flow of money from lobbyists to legislators has severely weakened the democratic process.
The Republicans in this case are not concerned about the actual research or its scientific merit. They are simply using it as a tool to attack President Obama. In science we would call this bias. It just about guarantees you will not find the truth, because you are not seeking the truth.
What a succinct characterization of our present situation! There are many ways to describe the current malaise, but you have most-accuratly called it a lack of political responsibility.
I would add one more thing: Fear of losing one’s seat. Pols have always loved them some seats, it’s true; but nowadays there is a huge fervor in the country that counts every vote and challenges any sort of compromise. This too is lack of responsibility.
Bravo on a short and precise definition.
Yes, this is how we’ve done it forever! Congress funds the NSF, NASA, DOE, approves major projects directly and so on. The agencies establish grant guidelines to see that the money is wisely spent.
Having done all this, it’s the after the fact, ad hoc, arbitrary, and hostile insertion of individual members of congress into this process that are being objected to.
The scientific community has already weighed in on these proposals through the well-established grant proposal review process used by the NSF.
Anything Rep. Smith is doing is pure cheap politics, through which he hopes to appeal to two populations. One is the ill-informed conspiracy theory types, who can supply votes during elections. The other is the select group that benefits financially from keeping the ill-informed just as scared and ignorant as possible.
The “peer-review” process is a joke — crony colleagues back-slapping each other and log-rolling each others’ grant approvals.
Any scientist receiving taxpayer dollars should not consider it an imposition to explain the value of their work to anyone who asks.
Yes, yes, the “All scientists are corrupt meme!” In fact the NSF proposal process is extremely competitive and reviewers are checked for an immense set of potential conflicts. The main problem is that this tends to reward the more conservative proposals, and the expense of novel, but risky lines of investigation.
The peer review process actually worked fairly well back in the Clinton era, when NSF and NIH had sufficient funding so that about 30% of proposals were funded. If you were a new researcher and knew your field, and had a really good idea, and spent the requisite months sweating out a well written proposal, you had a good chance of actually being funded.
Peer-reviewed research funding through NSF and NIH has actually declined, in constant dollars, since 2000 despite the substantial increase in the GDP. As a result the percentage of proposals from new principal investigators that are not already receiving major grants has declined to an almost insignificant level.
I agree scientists receiving taxpayer dollars should be prepared to justify their work. For peer-reviewed research this is always done first in the research proposal. Unfortunately the anti-science members dominating Congress seldom read the proposals except to find something to attack. They know _before_ they read the proposal that they are against it, because it is being funded by the Obama administration.
Can they even understand them>
The congressional aids scanning the proposals have no interest whatever in the science. They are looking for “sound bites”, often single words, that can be used to attack President Obama. So their concern is how a single word or short phrase can be used as a pejorative to sway public opinion. And knowing their political base, they are pretty good at finding words that can be used as weapons.
I KNOW, right? Same with those highway workers! Stand up strength, dude, and explain to me, your BOSS, just why you are wasting so much form board oil!”
This is not new. Anybody else here old enough to remember Bill Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Award? There’s a fairly even handed description here:
http://www.the-scientist.co…
And a plum quote from the aforementioned piece: Proxmire thought SETI research should be “for a few million light years.”
Ahem. Where to even start?
Isn’t that the point of the NSF peer review committee? They represent the public interest by choosing the most meritorious research to fund, and are accountable to congressional oversight in terms of their diligence and competence. If politicians on either side try to end-run that process, we get less value for money, because the politicians aren’t experts on evaluating grant proposals.
I look at it like fund managers. Their expertise is in allocating capital. You put money in your 401(k) or whatever and you don’t vote for what stock the fund buys. They take a fee for running the fund, and that fee is you paying them because they can do the better job.
Semi-related to this is that scrutinising costs at this level is a lousy use of time. $7 billion is 0.2% of the federal budget. It’s better for politicians to spend their time optimising the really big things – Social Security, Defense, Medicare/Medicaid and Treasury Dept. Much more scope to change how much the government spends.
Huge changes have been made in the NSF process, in part due to new leadership. Francis Cordova has made sweeping changes. And she has an inspirational personal story. Our funs are in very good hands at NSF.
Just need more of it.
Imagine how much good-will would come around the world had the US spend $1Trillion on schools and roads>
Sorry. I digress in to a fantasy land where we finally learn that it’s easier to make friends than fight wars.
A random reader…
http://scienceblogs.com/ins…
http://mic.com/articles/410…
http://www.bloombergview.co…
http://billmoyers.com/2014/…
http://atheism.about.com/od…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012…
http://speakingofresearch.c…
It gets this way, the idiocy of Representative Smith (Republican, TX), when a power base forms of wealthy, powerful business contributors primarily interested in being able to further their power to do as they like. To do as they like, powerful businesses need (1) a weak government, (2) weak institutions and (3) some supportive, or at least easily duped, portion of the general populace.
The fight against the NSF is a fight along all these fronts. This is all about being anti-government in general, in so far as the end-goal is to reduce one more governmental agencies budget. If it wasn’t the NSF in the cross hairs today, it would be some other agency tomorrow (with the exception of the military). It is also about being anti-science, useful in assuring all scientists and scientific institutions in general lose credibility, so as to be ignored by the general populace. This is especially important as the scientific establishment pursues climate change science, which business’s see as limiting their ability to do as they please with the planet. Lastly, the attack is pro-ignorance, helping get that voter base riled up that is easily manipulated amidst a complex and changing world.
CDC budget rose from 5.8 billion in 2003 to 6.8 billion in 2014.
They used $110 million to build a fancy new headquarters and fitness center for employees. $10 million for furniture alone, including $200K for light shows, saunas and zero-gravity mood chairs at the Atlanta facility
The “Arlen Specter Headquarters” is named after the chairman of the CDC’s appropriation’s committee. Clear enough?
They spent $1.7 million on a Hollywood liaison.
The CDC Stop-AIDS Project included a four-part erotic writing workshop, practical tips for friendly relations with prostitutes, and a “bar night” for HIV positive men. Sounds like a novel way to control disease.
Could go on for pages with details of what your money has been wasted on …
Please provide your sources. According to American Institute of Architecture the building cost $62M and is unusually energy efficient. http://info.aia.org/aiarchi…
I’d like to have some background on your info too.
Cue dramatic music: *B’AAAAAAAA!!!*
“NNNNNOOObody expects a House Committee Inquisition!!!”
–(couldn’t help myself, Keith… that pict just cried out for a caption)