The Trump administration has sent the CDC a list of words that they are verboten … er, sorry, forbidden, not sure why I keep reverting to the language of the FATHERLAND! … anyway, words that the CDC if forbidden to use in describing their budgetary needs.
The list includes these words:
fetus
trangender
vulnerable
entitlement
diversity
evidence-based
science-based
The response from people at the CDC is, pretty much, WTF, this has never happened before, how can this be happening?
Das machen Diktatoren.
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I dont understand why a reason isnt given for this decision. A decision was made and there must be a reason for it. That reason may be sound, or absolute shite. But whatever it is,
it must, can i shout for a moment, MUST! be given when requested by those affected.
The fact that it wasnt given is a big flag that something is likely very awry.
I mean the existance of a list is a flag.
The contents ( particularly in context ) is a flag too.
But lack of an articulated reasoning is waaay
out there fluttering flag and totally against ideas of clarity and transparency.
I get this absence of explaination from my saftey dept and management quite a bit.
Its absolutely unprofessional and unethical.
Validate ya stance or policy or fuck off out of my workplace you cretins.
I wouldnt employ 95 % of yas if i owned the company.
Quick query cuz my saftey muppets refuse to answer and maybe Greg Laden mob knows.
Hypothetical 2 part product.
Part A has an SDS
Part B has an SDS
There is no SDS for A mixed with B as directed which might have completely different properties and hazards.
Indeed its very likely to have different properties and hazards, chemistry being what it is. One of the products i mix generates heat for a bit, for example.
And yet no SDS on a chemicals i work with.
Why?
It seems to me to an entirely reasonable and prudent question related to saftey.
Thanks in advance for any replies.
Interesting. If your substance is something like a two part epoxy, or a resin and a catalyst, I suppose that the assumption is that the resulting product, a polymer say, is fairly inert relative to the two starting substances, but it is still a material with properties, and you are still interacting with it. and it could be giving off monomer vapors and new reactant vapors. And if you grind the resulting material, there will be resulting particulate matter that you should have an SDS on. I don’t know. Gonna look into it.
LiD. Can you give us a hint as to the state of part A and B? Liquid, solid gas? And the resulting material?
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner. An example of a product i use is Foster 90_66 cryogenic sealant .
A and B are liquid.
( its notable for being the stickiest stuff in the known universe , second only to Chartek intumescent or it seems that way anyhow! )
I have only today learnt there is a PDS for 90 _ 66 and am gunna tell saftey muppets to send it to the workfronts.
Have a safe christmas / new years break if that is whats happening in your communities culture.
Same to all of Gregs readers .
Even you denier pricks .
Li D
Australia
As to the subject of this article. Holy crap. Trump has been hurt this week, so he is retaliating by giving himself victories against those who refuse to bow down to him. He appears to be throwing red meat to his base, probably partly in retaliation, probably partly to assure them that he is still capable of defending them. The “Christians” in his hard core base will no doubt be very pleased and soothed by this.
So the orange haired Nightmare at 20,000 feet is tearing up parts of our engine, in flight. I have a bad feeling about this.
Orange Julius is an expert sociopath. He has an excellent sense for just how much he can get away with at any given time. This may be a science expert from the “Little Dictator Kit” that he got during his upbringing. I think that this malignant narcissist would like to control everything that we say and do, and he has a long way to go, but this is a really troubling step in that direction.
Li D. Here is an example of a safety data sheet for a cured resin.
http://www.frpsolutions.com/MSDS/D9C1004629-MKT-001%20-%20Cured%20Thermoset%20Resin.PDF
So I know that these things exist. I would use the Google , go to, for instance, the manufacturer’s site, or wikipedia, and look up the properties of the reacted product. If your company is the one making parts A and B, then you may be in that twilight zone where in order to get the information you need to protect yourself and others, you might have to risk your job. That is a crappy place to be in. Money makers and entrepreneurs are reverred, and we the expendables, well, we are just that. Also, there may be little or no additional risk emitting from the finished product, in which case, your curiousity and concern might be put at ease when you find the answer. Good luck.
Trangender isn’t even a word, so I should hope that’s not an issue at CDC.
My guess is these words tend to be used to make political arguments for budgets.
Let’s see if Amtrak is forbidden from using things like ‘closing ACELA’.
“Trangender isn’t even a word”
It’s in the online edition of the Merriam-Webster, Collins, and Cambridge dictionaries, and various others.
MikeN is not an authoritative source on the English language.
I checked m-w.com, and it said no results found.
Haven’t seen any pushback from conservatives on this yet. Things like freedom of speech, science, truth, and justice really don’t seem to be very important to conservatives. They appear to be agenda driven, and the agenda is my-me-mine , screw everybody else, and smile while you are doing it.
If these Trump- idiots think that clipping words and like “science-based” or “evidence based” from the vocabularies of scientists will somehow cure diseases or give them more political power, I think that they are in for a big surprise. Trump’s rabid and dim witted base may like this, but the rest of the country won’t, and I expect that the push back, as the intelligent people in the nation wake up to this, will be significant.
Trump is abusing lady liberty and we have to stop him, and stop him soon.
Re: “Haven’t seen any pushback from conservatives on this yet. Things like freedom of speech, science, truth, and justice really don’t seem to be very important to conservatives. They appear to be agenda driven, and the agenda is my-me-mine , screw everybody else, and smile while you are doing it.”
Thank you, I hope you don’t mind if I memorize this and quote to anyone I think will listen and benefit. I posted something like it elsewhere but your little gem is Lincoln’s Gettysburg address in comparison.
I am now living in a place where it seems that almost everyone I know and meet is a Republican voter — I was going to say “conservative” Republican but there don’t seem to be any other kind any more. And the word “conservative” now seems to mean “cut ’em all down,” “mine/pump it all out,” “use it all up,” etc., and “screw the consequences.”
Oh come on. We were just told above that basing things on science and evidence is simply a political move, nothing more. Why would the CDC need to reference either science or evidence anyway?
Re and : “… this has never happened before, how can this be happening?”
I know, I know: It never happened before because it never occurred to the people who would have liked to do it that the American public would stand for it. It is happening now because the election of Trump with a shitload of GOP senators and congresspeople plus the lack of any effective objection to the subsequent appointments to the cabinet and the head positions in governmental agencies showed that Americans will stand for it and many will even like it.
There is also a slight chance that this informal communication will be a little off. Okay, very slight, given the other dishonesty and crap (like the recent lifting of safeguards protecting coal miners from black lung disease) from the scum currently at the top.
Also: If I were feeling a little snarkier I’d pose the possibility that removing references to “science based” and “evidence based” (if this really occurs) would be a precursor to increasing pressure for the “alternative medicine” and other cranks (AIDS denialists, for example) to get their worthless feet in the funding door. If there is anything the people in those worlds hate more than being ignored it’s having to provide any form of evidence in support of their views.
“Transgender” is a word. Merriam-Webster has the definition, and says the first use of the word was in 1974.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transgender
Maybe MikeN was just expressing the innate conservatism which tends to resist any change in anything except financial gains and/or power over other people in the conservative’s own situation. (Some evolution-deniers/intelligent design advocates even deny that languages change in essentially unplanned ways.)
More likely is that it represents the sources examined for references. Hangout at breitbart, heritage, and other sites hosted by racists and science deniers, and you’ll find what you want
So are zombie and unicorn, among other mythical creatures.
If a science-based, publicly-funded institution can no longer use “evidence-based” and
“science-based” in preparing its budgetary documents, then what is the point of having science at all? It seems that there are two alternatives for such censorship: either,
1) the Trump administration wants to sweep objective rationality under the carpet so that it is done but neither seen nor heard, so that rational (≡ “progressive”, gasp!)) discourse does not benefit from its conduct, or
2) he Trump administration wants to kill US American rationality, progress, and all the associated social benefits that follow.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
The USA really is in trouble. And it seems that half the population is oblivious to the slaughterhouse into which they’re walking. It reminds me of Animal Farm, except that the allegory is not (entirely…) the politics of Stalinist Russia but instead a circumstance where the GOP is represented by the pigs, and the farmers are in fact an imagined bogey man. In Trump’s America though the pigs are the very bogey man that the animals fear, but they don’t recognise it even as they’re being herded into the vans to go to the knacker’s.
Fours dollar tax good, two dollars tax better…
I’ve commented several times previously about how the Handmaid’s Tale seems to have been prescient, but it’s now getting to the point that it may have been a prophetic documentary.
————————
A miscellaneous question, arising from last Friday’s pronouncement by Trump about not considering pardoning Flynn – <yet. If Flynn is pardoned and can no longer claim the Fifth because he can’t incriminate himself anymore, and if he is further questioned and asked for information but refuses to cooperate, can he then be charged at a federal level with contempt and fresh charges of obstruction? And if not (or in addition to) could he be charged with fresh state offenses of the same?
There is a plausible report now that these words were flagged because they would trigger Pavlovian responses in the Republican budget overloards, and should be avoided, not because they couldn’t actually be used. Which is not quite as bad as the original report, but this is still pretty bad. Our science committees are infested with anti-science, power hungry parasites who apparently think that they can survive quite comfortably in a world free of science and scientists, and the fact that they might have to be appeased is appalling. But as the US falls behind other nations in the STEM race, like a spent rocket booster, the damage being done to science today by Republicans will be largely to blame.
Regarding dystopian futures: My eyes are currently on the alt- right and their acceleration into mainstream politics. Trump should be impeached for mainstreaming people into the national scene like MIller, Gorka, and Bannon, and the Republican party should be made to suffer for allowing these guys and various other candy coated nazis to flourish.
My question now is…is the almost global emergence of disease colonies of fascist nationalism being planned from a central group of wealthy or powerful people? ( the tin foil hat hypothesis). Or, is this the natural expression of the frustrations of millions of poorlly educated people who have little or no power in the world, and who are easy prey for demagogues selling them a bill of goods?
The two are not mutually exclusive. George Orwell was well aware of the ‘happy’ symbiosis between them…
It is both. The poorly educated and the narrowly educated are being manipulated by the worst elements of the media through organs owned by billionaire tax avoiders who have interests in keeping the status quo, which is the continued increase in inequality as the one percent, and the one percent of the one percent move ever further away along the financial, property and proprietorial wealth continuums.
The multitude of schemes whereby the top sector can enrich themselves at the expense of all others, and the environment, continue to increase. Financial deregulation (Thatcher/Reagan) deliberately led to degradation of working conditions with the results we see now. The extreme cuts to the social support required for a healthy economy especially in education and in libraries are looking like deliberate policy, to ensure social engineering can continue without lots of uppity educated prolls spoiling the party.
Meanwhile those prolls can be kept anaesthetised by streaming movies, ‘celebrity’ game shows and Strictly Come Dancing with the results of these becoming news items — the media feeding on itself.
The normal channels of valuable information have become clogged with inanity and sketchily presented items of real news which are increasingly few and far between.
One only has to have been following the antics of members of the press and government on the Brexit issue on this side of the pond to realise the incapability of politicians in power to use it with honesty and discretion. This was further underlined by the clear social divides spotlighted by the Grenfell Tower blaze and the lack of action and empathy from the political classes at government and local levels.
Until wealth inequality and the artificial constructs that are promoting it are tackled there will be little change for the better.
Those in the UK, and interested elsewhere can discover some of why we are here in this mess by reading these titles, presented as cover images in three columns repeated across the page four times (A4 landscape) for printing, slicing and use as book marks:
http://lionels.orpheusweb.co.uk/MorePics6/SocioEcon.jpg
Re: “… the continued increase in inequality as the one percent, and the one percent of the one percent move ever further away along the financial, property and proprietorial wealth continuums.”
And we’re not even getting the free bread and circuses that the Roman prolls got during the Late Republic and Empire days.
Sometimes when I reflect on the (growing) disparity between the rich and the poor I use the analogy of (the thermodynaimics underlying) sand (wealth/resources) in a sand box. When conditions are just so (the right amount of moisture for example), a small group of people can pile the sand high into one corner, leaving the rest of the surface area of the box (equivalent to the overall population) bare or barely covered by sand. At some point conditions will change though (a little bit of drying out…) and the pile will come crashing down. If it had been left more evenly distributed across the box, in smaller, more equitable piles, the collapse would have been less, or entirely avoided.
Or one can turn to Douglas Adams and his telephone cleaning technicians. The upper class sought to remove the disparaged (useless, as they saw it) middle class, and consequently suffered from the unforeseen result.
Today’s Trump tax bill is the definitive nail in the coffin for the USA. It will tip the balance so far to instability that the country will not recover, and even if the decent takes decades the USA is a declining empire. The only way that it could possibly now compete against the assention of China and Russia would be to press the red button, and hope that America smokes less in the ruins than do the other nations.
Short of that extreme measure it will evaporate into the sunset of insignificance as the rest of the world recoils in horror and distaste from the rabid self-serving conservatism of the Trump/GOP brand of facism. That stain will not be washed away by a change of government, should that even happen – the taint is indelible.
I’m curious – which blogs do the US Americans here consider give the best-investigated and most cutting-edge coverage of US politics?
Bernard J.
That’s a very good question. I haven’t found a good one stop shop. Magazines: The Atlantic has a pretty good reputation for rigor, but I haven’t looked too closely at it. Foreign Affairs seems to have some good stuff. Sometimes they post non-paywalled articles.
Most sites have weaknesses in one area or an other. There’s a lot of weird apologetics for Putin out there, for example. And of course everyone has bad hair days.
Not a blog, but check out NPR radio, particularly “The 1A” (ref to 1st amendment) which replaced “The Diane Show”. Pretty well moderated guests, discussions, and audience participation. Multiple avenues for participation…
https://the1a.org/
They have podcasts and probably transcripts for some shows…
I tune in when I get tired of yelling at the TV and want to yell at the radio for a while.
Also:
http://www.politifact.com/
(with links to other fact checking sites)
PBS:
– Frontline
and sometimes
– Independent Lens