BushCo continues to tell scientists what science is...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Media News: Scientists worried about Bush clampdown at publication:

The U.S. administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, documents show.

Top officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm said the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.

"This is not about stifling or suppressing our science, or politicizing our science in any way," Barbara Wainman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday.

"I don't have approval authority. What it was designed to do is to improve our product flow."

The same emphasis on "product" and "results" led to the same controls being placed before...in Stalinist Russia, which by placing the actions of scientists as subservient to a political aim (in their case, The Party), created exactly the restrictions that destroyed Russian science by turning it into nothing but an engineering firm, making devices based on scientific facts learned from Americans.  This was particularly true in biology, where repression of reality-based genetics in favor of "Lysenkoism" stonewalled Russia for 2 generations, now going on 3.  Their biology research still has never really recovered from that suppression of fact.

Science is not a "guarenteed win" game.  Knowledge simply IS because the world simply IS.  It can be nothing other than what it IS.  To restrict looking at what it IS because of "policy" is to damn science itself, and our future.  For Science to work, it DEMANDS absolute openness and freedom of communication and thought.  To restrict it to "high visibility topics" or restrict communications for "policy-sensitive" topics is to damn it, and this nation's future.

Even as it sees the end of its domination of politics, the Republican War on Science continues unabated...

PDQ Bach (and Peter Schikele) at the NSO, May 10-12

Peter Schickele will be performing with the National Symphony Orchestra along with conductor Leonard Slatkin, with a weekend of "Serious Fun", featuring humorous works with classical composers as well as an evening of PDQ Bach.