A few things have crossed my radar in the past day or two involving the disinformation campaign being waged by our federal government that have caused me to growl.
The first …
As the New York Times reported two days ago …
“An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.”
The man, Indur M. Goklany, is a deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies.
“He also instructed department scientists to add that rising carbon dioxide — the main force driving global warming — is beneficial because it “may increase plant water use efficiency” and “lengthen the agricultural growing season.” Both assertions misrepresent the scientific consensus that, overall, climate change will result in severe disruptions to global agriculture and significant reductions in crop yields.”
Mr. Goklany recieves funding from the Heartland Instiute for his work on “Climate Change Reconsidered” reports, according to internal budget and strategy documents form the Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank. He has written a variety of articles for the Heartland Institute, such as …
- CARBON DIOXIDE: The good news
- UNHEALTHY EXAGGERATION: The WHO report on climate change
- Humanity Unbound: How Fossil Fuels Saved Humanity from Nature and Nature from Humanity
And it is on his advice that our government is making decisions that affect our very lives!
The second …
This one isn’t new, but further convinces me we cannot believe a word that comes out of this administration or any of its agencies pertains to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This one is about censorship.
Turns out that in 2017, the ‘Trump administration’ gave the CDC a set of words that are forbidden to be used by the agency. The words?
- Vulnerable
- Entitlement
- Diversity
- Transgender
- Fetus
- Evidence-based
- Science-based
You see where this one is going, right? The CDC is under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), a misnomer in the Trump regime if ever I heard one. And HHS is under Alex Azar who, until signing on with the Trumptanic in 2017, was President of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly and Company, one of the Big Pharma that is keeping the price of prescription medications exponentially higher in the U.S. than in most other countries. Mr. Azar is a strong critic of the Affordable Care Act, is staunchly anti-abortion, has claimed that the coronavirus isn’t a significant threat to the U.S. (159 cases, 11 deaths as of this writing), and is a contributor to the re-election campaign of Mitch McConnell. That last one should tell you everything you need to know about Mr. Azar. This man is not for the health of the nation, but for his own profit!
HHS has also removed information that outlined federal services that are available for LGBT people and their families, including how they can adopt and receive help if they are the victims of sex trafficking.
And now, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director for National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that the agency stopped sharing data on the number of people tested for coronavirus.
And the third …
The administration has formally revised a proposal that would significantly restrict the type of research that can be used to draft environmental and public health regulations. What this means is that it would let the federal government dismiss or downplay some of the most important environmental research of the past decades. If said research relies in part on the medical records of specific individuals whose health problems, or death, were attributable to climate change in some way, then unless the providers of the data are willing to make public those health records, complete with names, and other personal data, the government will disregard the research.
What it means is that the EPA can cherry-pick the scientific data they choose to use, disregarding some for … basically whatever reason they choose. What it means is that … as in my first example, the government can disregard legitimate science and opt, instead, for the opinion of the man who says that carbon emissions are a good thing for the planet and that the research of other organizations are either exaggerated or false. What it means is that We the People are being lied to about climate change and other environmental concerns by a group of thugs and yes-men that Trump has hand-picked to do his bidding.
Folks, we cannot have censorship of this sort in our federal agencies. We cannot tolerate federal agencies changing data to cover the truth with lies. We cannot! This is not yet a dictatorship, though it surely feels like we are on the brink of it. This is still, at least in theory, a democratic republic and the people have the right to know the facts, the truth. We earn that right through our participation in government and by our tax contributions, which seem to be being largely wasted on human scum like Alex Azar, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump and many, many more!
Donald Trump used to tell the masses at his rallies that he was going to “drain the swamp”. DRAIN THE SWAMP??? There are more nasty creatures in the ‘swamp’ that is the Trump administration than in any other previous administration, bar none, and Donald Trump is the worst of the worst. Everything I’ve read or researched tells me there is not one single cabinet member who has a shred of integrity. None. We are flying blind, because we are being told what the fat ‘man’ in the Oval Office wants us to hear and nothing more. This must stop!!!
Robert Mueller is the person most qualified to have led this investigation. He is a man of good conscience (a word vastly misunderstood in the Trump administration), and a man of ethics. Personal feelings aside, we knew from the start that he could be trusted to do the right thing. For nearly two years we have patiently waited. As I often told friends who wanted to rush the process … it is a very tangled web and it will take time to sort through all the filthy filaments. And so … we waited … mostly with patience, for the outcome would surely justify the wait.
While we keep watching the circus playing out before our eyes, the clown with the funny hair and weird makeup who keeps tweeting mindless inanities, things are happening in our government. Things that will have an effect on our health, our freedom of press, our very lives.
Why, you ask? In late December, amid the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Interior, currently under the direction of Acting Secretary David Bernhardt, proposed changes that would make it harder for the public and media to obtain records of agency dealings. According to The Guardian (you don’t find these things in U.S. news) …
Filosofa's Word 