Hang on here. The war in Iraq is costing about $200 million per day, or a billion in less than a week. Yet George W Bush has just vetoed a bill that would give NIH an additional $1 billion per year, raising the budget from $29 billion to $30 billion.
And what does he do? He accuses Congress of being on a “spending spree.”
Here’s hoping the guy chokes on the irony.
If you can fashion irony into a pretzel, then you might be onto something.
As if science could solve problems as easily as an armoured brigade, or two, supported with attack helicopters, can?
Hey, did God tell Bush to fund science? I don’t think so.
The sheer nerve of Bush. Choke on the irony? More like being drowned by a torrential flood of it.
Please my America friends. Vote in a president that understands a bit of science. PLEASE!
Super-Scientific War!
But seriously, folks. one million for science, not one penny for idiotic CAM Quackery. (to paraphrase a 19th century politician)
A cartoon on Bush’s war.
http://fromthesalmon.com/postimages/tolesmisfollow.gif
Based on a Pete Seegar song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”.
“The big fool said to push on”
How come scientists are working on more and more nukes?
Aren’t there enough?
Aren’t atheists supposed to know better? (Remember, Dawkins tells us most scientists are atheists.)
After all, if you supply guns to waring gangs, can you claim complete innocence?
*sigh*
I’m almost finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s excellent “Forty Signs of Rain” series of novels. In it, global warming finally runs amok, floods Washington and shuts down the Gulf Stream leading to some ice age conditions. It’s the scientists as heroes all the way, with Robinson’s optimism.
The NIH even run a ghost candidate in the election, and end up a very powerful body. Good reading if Bush is grinding your gears.
Randy, to clue you in, there is a difference between scientists and technicians or engineers, who are often xians. Nukes are basically a technical problem now.
That is not to say that scientists have not contributed to war research. But scientists like Oppenheimer and Szilard had grave doubts about the use of nukes, which were developed in extraordinary circumstances. Of course there were even wingnuts back then like Edward Teller. There was even a tv debate between Teller and Szilard.
Here is another song, Pete Seegar, “Bring ‘Em Home”(and save 50-100 billion per year).
Randy:
“Scientists” do not have a hive mind.
It is true that most scientists are atheists.
It is also true that many atheists are quite happy to be developing weapons for the military.
You see, “atheist” is not a word that describes any organized entity, like a religion. Moreover, atheists do not claim any inherent moral superiority over non-atheists solely on the basis of being an atheist. That’s the kind of trick theists do. Thus, the fact that some atheists are quite happy to take Pentagon funding to build weapons has pretty much nothing to do with the question about whether the NIH should be funded at a higher level.
I don’t quite know what your point is, since you’re lashing out all over the place. But your it is worth noting that this kind of incoherent “logic” is what atheists have to deal with all the time.
Randy wrote:
How come so many theists are hell-bent on killing each other? Shouldn’t they know better? Don’t their holy texts proscribe killing?
If they stopped it, wouldn’t that end the market for nukes?
“If they stopped it, wouldn’t that end the market for nukes?”
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | November 15, 2007 6:58 AM
Considering an overwhelming majority of wars in history have been for reasons other than religion, no.
There are armies in the Bible but no NIH. It was a no-brainer.
Jeremiah 4:29 The whole city shall flee for the noise of the horsemen and bowmen; they shall go into thickets, and climb up upon the rocks: every city shall be forsaken, and not a man dwell therein.
Want to be healthy? Contact your local church elder.
James 5:14 Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord.
See? OIL!
It all makes sense now.
jew:
“Considering an overwhelming majority of wars in history have been for reasons other than religion, no.”
I think you misunderstood Ian’s comment. Whether motivated by religion, greed, or racial hatred (but I repeat myself), no war could be fought on this planet if every theist stopped participating in it.
An interesting graph from CosmicVariance on this topic:
http://cosmicvariance.com/2007/11/14/1482/
We need to diversify Halliburton and Blackwater into biotechnology.
Interesting that he didn’t veto a single spending bill with the Republican majority, and now after a paltry year in Congress, the Democrats are the ones acting like “teenagers with a credit card”????? How does he actually believe the crap that comes out of his mouth? Is there that big a disconnect between his brain and spinal cord?
Captain Unelected is a plethodontid salamander. No lungs, no gills, no choking. Except if you cover him in gold, James-Bond-style.
LOL! But it’s more parsimonious to assume that the brezel never existed, and that Fearless Flightsuit just drunk himself under the table.
And regarding comment 7: I don’t make nukes. Neither does PZ. I bet nobody here does. You aren’t talking to the right people.
¡Ay!
Rāmen!!!
Captain Unelected is a plethodontid salamander. No lungs, no gills, no choking. Except if you cover him in gold, James-Bond-style.
LOL! But it’s more parsimonious to assume that the brezel never existed, and that Fearless Flightsuit just drunk himself under the table.
And regarding comment 7: I don’t make nukes. Neither does PZ. I bet nobody here does. You aren’t talking to the right people.
¡Ay!
Rāmen!!!
I think something even sadder is that this is the administration that managed to lose (as in unable to account for its physical location or who it was given to) 5+ BILLION dollars in Iraq! That’s a sixth of the total NIH budget!
Fiscal irresponsibility is investing poorly and lose a large sum of money. Sheer incompetence is just shipping cash to a foreign country and not paying any attention to it for a while.
No, that’s not incompetence. It’s corruption. The money is going to the people who put Bush in power.
Look, I’m all for the general maxim that, given a choice between using incompetence or malevolence as a description for the underlying cause for something happening, one should almost always choose incompetence. But until we understand that what the Bush administration has been doing is not incompetence, we will not really understand the magnitude of their crimes against the nation.
They can only be understood to be incompetent if you accept the notion that they’ve actually been trying to accomplish all the things they have been pretending to try to accomplish. But when you see that they are not trying to run the government well, but rather to run it poorly, then “incompetence” loses its explanatory power.
I mean, it’s one thing to say that they are “incompetent” at winning the so-called “war on terror”. But when billions of dollars disappear? That’s not incompetence, any more than incompetence has led to terrabytes of White House emails mysteriously disappearing. Anybody who takes a bundle of cash and straps it to a pallet to be flown to Iraq knows that the purpose of that cash is to disappear without a trace. People who want money to be traceable don’t ship it around as a pile of cash.
And to add insult to injury…Bush along with John Kline and Michelle Bachmann are voting against a highway funding bill that is 5.5 billion over budget…while our bridges are falling down.
Bush, Kline and Bachmann are the national security risk.
Or at least is prepared to listen to those who do.
He is a fucktard!!!
It’s just too painful. The man who took us from the biggest budget surplus to the third largest budget deficit in his first couple of years, with a Republican Congress at his feet, accusing Democrats of irresponsible spending. . .I don’t think we even need to get into the details of how, or why, or how much money went where for our irony meters to become steaming hunks of slag, warning buzzers weakly whining their last.
The NIH makes nukes?!? CRAP! I gotta get outta here…
Speaking of the budget, I heard a rumor that they’re thinking of eliminating the estate tax on the grounds that it hurts family businesses. Does anyone know whether that is true?
Next they’ll be instating the feudal system. I’m sure there’s a way to spin it so that the feudal system “protects families.”
Ah, but what portion of the DoD budget is used for research grants?
Bah, I’m glad he vetoed it. That $1 bil should be going to the NSF instead.
But someone more in the know might help me, here. Isn’t it true that the largest spending budgets in history have all come during the Bush administration?
“I think you misunderstood Ian’s comment. Whether motivated by religion, greed, or racial hatred (but I repeat myself), no war could be fought on this planet if every theist stopped participating in it.”
No, I don’t believe I misunderstood Ian’s comment. His comment implied that if theists would stop being so hell bent on killing each other there might not be any need for nukes. This is incorrect because theists being hell bent on killing each other has caused very few wars in history. If I am wrong in my interpretation let Ian comment on my response and point out my misunderstanding.
This being said I do not disagree with what PZ is saying here. I believe that the NIH is an excellent investment of our tax dollars, a much better investment than the Iraq war.
Did Bush veto a bill that would give NIH an extra $1B, or a gargantuan spending bill with (supposedly) more then 2,000 earmarks that had somewhere embedded in it $1B for the NIH?
C’mon people, let’s not stoop to Republican levels (wah! Kerry voted against our troops 16 times! wah!) Remember the line-item veto? We need line-item voting all-around, so they can stop playing these games like 6-year olds.
Well, by inflation alone, that statement is true #28. But if you do account for inflation, then yes… Bush has spent more than any President before him. Moreover, he has spent it fighting an illegal war to make his VP rich, the royal family of Saudi Arabia rich, and countless other old white men. I think I read that the war will end up costing about 2 Trillion dollars, or ~$8,000 per U.S. Citizen. I don’t remember signing up to fund a holy war. Where do I get my refund?
Irony meter? Irony meter?? After 7 years, someone has an intact working irony meter. Hell, the metal globules of mine vaporized back in ’03. Lets see (in no particular order): fund the war, pseudoscience by the Army corps of Engineers, fund the war, religious foolery instead of funding family planning initiatives, fund the war, US infrastructure collapse, fund the war, stonewall on global climate initiatives, fund the war, veto health care for the disadvantaged, fund the war, ‘misplace’ billions, fund the war, suborn the nations justice system, fund the war, condone torture, fund the war, anyone visit a FEMA trailer in New Orleans, fund the war, no child left behind- they all are, fund the war, stem cell research or NIH budget- what has research ever done for me, fund the war which he chose to start because ‘He tried to kill my daddy.’ Who can have an intact irony meter???
Pablo –
Yup.
Can you imagine what the US republicans would be saying if Clinton had-
(a) Had 9/11 happen on his watch,
(b) Spent like a drunken sailor and run quite fantastic budget deficits,
(c) Started a war on false pretenses and gotten into a complete quagmire
(d) Done the whole ‘patriot act’ thing.
(e) Lost most of a major US city (NOLA)
They’d be foaming at the mouth so much there would be a drowning risk..
“Speaking of the budget, I heard a rumor that they’re thinking of eliminating the estate tax on the grounds that it hurts family businesses. Does anyone know whether that is true?”
The estate tax has already been scaled back at the federal level so that the first million in assets aren’t taxed at all. From there on up, it’s a sliding scale.
I think the reichwing called it the “death tax.”
Is it “War or Science” or “War on Science”? But don’t worry, judging by the results of Bush’s other wars, a war on science will probably create more scientists in the end.
Yes, he vetoed a bill with lots of other stuff in it…like more money for roads and bridges and general infrastructure, you know, the stuff that is collapsing around us.
You’re right. It was probably unfair to title this “War or science?” It would have been more accurate to call it “War or America?”
Wuh?
{Louis wakes up}
War on America? Sounds like fun…oh wait, we win by default, we have the Dutch and they have the best weed.
But seriously:
I’m with Mothra. The only intact irony meters I have left I carefully stashed in a top secret bunker under the White House that’s prepared for George Bush in case of an attack on US soil. It’s the only place sheided sufficiently (and at the eye of the irony storm) to allow an irony meter to survive.
How’s THAT for ironic?
{sound of irony meters evaporating}
DAMN!
Louis
Of course, the whole “borrow and spend” policies of the Republicans go back to Reagan, the other supposed “conservative” who balooned the budget to previously unknown levels. But hey, as long as you have tax cuts, who cares, right?
The difference between “borrow and spend” republicans and “tax and spend” democrats is that at least the democrats try to have the money to pay for their spending. Call me crazy, but growing up I always thought that “don’t buy what you can’t afford to pay for” was one of those, “fiscal responsibility” issues that conservatives like to sing about. Maxing out the credit card bill is about the furthest thing from “fiscal responsibility” than one can get.
Here’s hoping the guy chokes on the irony.
..or a pretzel, or a hairball, or vomit…hell, anything
Warren Buffet titled it the Death Present. He’s got it right.
I get so incredibly pissed when when I think about how Bush doesn’t want to fund anything but the War and Fatih Based Inistives.
He really doesn’t fucking care about the american people or the future.
Imagine what we could fund with all the money being pissed away in Iraq.
National healthcare. Rebuilding the country. Providing a college education or job training to everyone who wants it. Medical research. Renweable energy. Public transportation. Better public schools.
But the dickwad in the White House is a fucking nightmare. He’s a conservative prick.
The county had turned into a bunch of babies that don’t understand basic economics.
War spending is throwing money down a hole. Spending on our country and our infrastructure is investing in the future. We’re going to have to pay for the war with taxes eventually. It’s just so stupid.
It’s really fucking simple. Why doesn’t anyone say it?
All this has gone way past irony. Bush is little more than an animated sack of talking shit. He’s not “stupid” – he’s a foolish egomaniac with no regard for truth or reason. His accusations of partisan politics and fiscal irresponsibility made against the Dems defies description or rational analysis. He is sadly lacking in integrity at all levels of public and political discourse. I’m not in any hurry to watch my life tick away, but January ’09 can’t come soon enough.
Guess I was worked up… lots of typos. Uhg.
So true, Stevie. People have been saying it, though. America-hating terrorist-sympathizers like you, me, Krugman and Dowd, PZ and most of the commenters here, uh… you know. The unpatriotic, cowardly, godless liberals who don’t believe we have to spend untold billions of dollars in Iraq (and compromise some Constitutionally-guaranteed liberties) to “protect our freedom” here.
Uh… does anyone else smell smoke? Dang it!
Jessica asked how “He” could believe what he was saying.
He does not have to believe what he is saying, the point is that “We” believe what he is saying. So he can say anything he wants, like any good conman, what ever will get the “mark” to trust just long enough to get to the agreement, to sign right here, to give them the money. Any thing works lies, half truths distractions, deflection, false accusations, blaming the other guy first for the things you are doing. Using what ever he can to make the sale. The flatearthers use the same tactics to advance their ideas and agenda.
It is the only thing you can do when what you are advocating is illegal or irrational.
Jessica asked how “He” could believe what he was saying.
He does not have to believe what he is saying, the point is that “We” believe what he is saying. So he can say anything he wants, like any good conman, what ever will get the “mark” to trust just long enough to get to the agreement, to sign right here, to give them the money. Any thing works lies, half truths distractions, deflection, false accusations, blaming the other guy first for the things you are doing. Using what ever he can to make the sale. The flatearthers use the same tactics to advance their ideas and agenda.
It is the only thing you can do when what you are advocating is illegal or irrational.
I’ve said it before: this has been the most corrupt Presidential administration in the history of the United States of America. None can come close; we have set a new standard.
Our national reputation lies in tatters. We openly practice political torture. We blatantly suppress basic freedoms. We hand trillions of dollars to cronies and shills. And still it goes on, because the opposition lacks the nerve to fight this crooked would-be dictator.
This will be the legacy that G.W. Bush hands down to the ages; that on his watch, America proved to the entire world that its pious pronouncements about freedom and democracy meant nothing.
I hear the blue whales are upset and they know how to “fashion irony into a pretzel,” as NC John says.
War lines the pockets of those with short-sighted ignorance. Learning suffers these fools.
letter from the blue whales
LOL!
And I mean it. I have trained to laugh soundlessly. I laughed out loud, shriekingly. I fear my neighbors behind the centimeter-thin walls (and perhaps above me, too) will come and ask what’s up.
The Return of the Freudian Typo: Arabic fatih = conqueror.
LOL!
And I mean it. I have trained to laugh soundlessly. I laughed out loud, shriekingly. I fear my neighbors behind the centimeter-thin walls (and perhaps above me, too) will come and ask what’s up.
The Return of the Freudian Typo: Arabic fatih = conqueror.
Speaking of the budget, I heard a rumor that they’re thinking of eliminating the estate tax on the grounds that it hurts family businesses. Does anyone know whether that is true?
No.
Bernarda (#9, #9, #9…) wrote: Randy, to clue you in, there is a difference between scientists and technicians or engineers, who are often xians. Nukes are basically a technical problem now.
OK, Bernarda, I’ll bite. What’s the difference between a scientist and a technician? Also, do you have any data to support your assertion that technicians are often xians? What’s the percentage threshold for “often?” Is this a global statement, or are you referring only to technicians in the US?
You know, I think we’re going about this all wrong.
What we need to do is all get together and pray. Figure out a time — say, noon on Sunday, CST — and pray for a larger science budget.
Just go out to your front door and pray for increased science funding. If we all do it really loudly at the same time, it’ll work.
I mean, prayer has a really high success rate, right?
(Just so we’re all clear, I’m being sarcastic. You’re welcome.)