Tuesday, March 13, 2007

EPA Cries "hear, hear!" at Bush Administration

Hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency scientists signed a petition against the recent decision to send Ken Knot Perceval, a 30-year marine biologist at the agency, to represent the United States at an upcoming international environmental studies colloquium. The petition was anonymously signed by outraged members of the scientific community using randomly-generated numerical signatures. Though top EPA administrators insist that no political pressure was responsible for their decision to designate Perceval as their representative, signatures of such illustrious environmentalists as 63085, 39745, and 41759, whose work has been widely recognized for having saved hundreds of thousands of acres of rain forest in 1994, having directed the public’s attention to such problems as dangerously concentrated levels of mercury in fish in 1996 and the menacing effects of melting polar ice caps in 1998 respectively, strongly suggest otherwise.

18564, who has been researching the effects of increasing levels of dandelion growth in our national parks since funding for his urban air quality research was cut off in 2001 calls this last Friday’s appointment of Perceval “just the latest example of the Bush Administration’s seemingly endless number of attempts to muzzle scientists in order to protect large corporations from being forced to comply with health and safety regulations.” The White House responded that this was blatantly untrue, pointing to another gag order released just yesterday and the all-but-complete erosion of all health and safety regulations making it almost impossible for corporations to even potentially consider their violation. “Are we supposed to take seriously the word of ‘scientists’ who are incapable of getting even the simplest facts straight?” opined a Bush Administration spokesman.

Ken Knot Perceval’s name first made headlines in 1966 when a court ruling in his favor forced the EPA to rescind their rejection of his job candidacy following a discrimination suit. Perceval’s attorney eloquently and effectively argued that being a deaf-mute would not prevent his client, who held a PhD in marine biology, from making significant contributions to the agency’s environmental research. Administration officials point to his long and impressive list of publications in peer-reviewed journals and his 30-year tenure of his research lab position at the EPA as evidence that the decision to designate him as official spokesman to attend the international environmental colloquium was entirely merit-based. They accused the numerical petition signers of gross disrespect for the authority of the judicial system that had enforced Perceval’s engagement at the EPA over 30 years ago, stating that the choice to sign the petition numerically was proof that they themselves knew that their protest was discriminatory and unjust.

7 comments:

Robert said...

I confess I am slightly confused by this one. I am probably being very dim as usual.

Blue Genes said...

As you are certainly not dim, this must be poorly written.

The story basically goes like this:

Bushies pick a deaf-mute scientist (Dr. Can Not Perceive All) to represent the US at an international environmental colloquium. Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency are furious at this passive aggressive, sneaky way of White House ensuring US non-participation (so that the US cannot make promises about limiting green-house gas emissions or what not). But as Bushites tend to fire non Bushites agreers on trumped up, riduculous bases they are all too afraid for their jobs to sign a petition so each scientist is assigned a random computer-generated number to add to the petition (protesting deaf-mute's assignment as our rep) in place of his/her signature. Bushites claim that the deaf-mute was chosen on merit only, based on his illustrious career, publications etc. and accuse scientists of discriminating against the handicapped.

Robert said...

On the contary, it was beautifully written, and your synopsis is as I had understood it. My comment is the poorly written one. I am not good at the written word.

I just can not believe in such a scenario in an advanced democratic country. It is Hollywood is it not. Can you run a democratic country on fear? I wonder what History will say of Mr. Bush junior?

Back in my youthful 6th form days there was a singer called Guthrie (Arlo), he sang endlessly of the dark side.."the reels of tape the Fe Bu In had on each one of us" it was quite frightening. This of course was pre Watergate.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlo_Guthrie

I met several Americans Officers in my Army service in Germany and on various courses who were great fun. They restored my faith in the sincerity of your country.

I do however think that things look rather bad at present. Our Mr. Blair at least won a large majority of seats in parliament but your guy barely scraped through the first time. What frightened us all so much was that the American people gave him a second term. Some how a good candidate must prevail next time or the very existence of Democratic Freedom in the Western World will be threatened.

I am very frightened of "Religion" too. I find little good in it these days.

What saddens me more than anything on this beautiful planet and its occupants is the terrible things we as humans have done and will not doubt continue to do in the name of God.

If you are a Christian then Christ taught us to love one another; The story of the Good Samaritan says it all.

Not to be totally naive, someone has to police this world, but wisely, learning from past mistakes (Vietnam & Suez). Recent events since 9/11 have not worked well. Have we lost the moral high ground? How do we now regain it? Not through arrogance.

With the rise of China and India as world players are the days of The North American "Empire" numbered? Will we blame its demise on Bush and Blair?

I feel a little sorry for the deaf mute though.

Blue Genes said...

No reason to feel sorry for the deaf-mute, as he is fictional (either that or I have supernatural powers to divine what has not been reported). I agree with most everything you said except that we have lost the moral high ground b/c did we ever really have it? (Genocide of native American's at the origin of my country's history, English--and all western for that matter-- imperialism...)

The first time Bush "won" in my opinion he really didn't win at all. Gore had more votes and the results coming out of Florida were ridiculous. Remember the famously confusing "butterfly ballot"? Well, several elderly (highly populated) Jewish communities had voted for a super right-wing proto-fascist evangelical by some astronomical majority. So that was definitely bogus. Georgie's brother Jeb was governor of Florida. Katherine Harris who had legal control of the Fl. election results had her campaign financed by Bush and co, etc. etc. I suspect that a lot of cheating happened in the second election as well. All sorts of stories have since come out of the woodwork. Many of the new electronic voting machines in Ohio that leave no paper trail were made by Deibolt, other very close friends of the Bush family... Either way, though, even if Kerry had really won by a slim majority (which may or may not have happened, we'll never know for sure) the fact that the race was even close is not at all justifiable. I cried all day after he was re-elected. I felt like I had just lived through the beginning of the end of my country's "pre-decadent" period. I joke about these things to diffuse the great sadness.

I have actually often framed the question of whether or not to have kids in terms of what I would be bringing them into (my shrinks tell me this is too extreme) and if this would even be morally justifiable. So for now I'm just a fictional mom sometimes (who feeds her kids ice cream for breakfast).

Robert said...

Until recently we had a "Home Secretary" (No. 4 in the Cabinet) who was, to be PC, without sight. (We are not supposed to call a spade a spade these days!)He had previously been Education Minister.

So your fictional character is not so fantastic. With Steven Hawkins (a British Scientist and TV personality) who is wheel chair bound, needs a voice box run by a computer to communicate, anything is possible these days.


With the greatest respect I was amazed by your electoral system, it seems so wide open to fraud as to be untenable. They are talking here of making our system available on line! The mind boggles. We don’t seem to be able to sort out Credit Card fraud on line so the electoral system is hardly going to be fool proof!


(BTW, the Home Office, The Home Secretary’s department, is in a terrible mess and has been described as "not fit for purpose". Streams of problems break the news almost daily.)

Robert said...

BTW you may like to listen to this which was rather revealing about the problems of Jordan with Iraqi refugees.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/6428701.stm

Robert said...

It is more than a week, perhaps you are in France.
Your blog is sadly neglected! I suppose with a title such as it is nothing is to be believed!
I am into ghosts at present. That will calm you nerves!