one day they'll stop surprising me...

so u know that thing with Cooney changing the global warming reports, chris mooney has more ("There should be a special circle in hell for people who mess with scientific data.")

i dont really wanna discuss the specifics, they're kinda scream-at-your-computer angerfying to be of much interest, but i wanted to focus on a few related issues.

firstly, the good news is that the whole concept of science hasnt yet been corrupted yet, and neither have the agencies. its just one guy at the top who can brazenly swing the pen to change the results. sometimes when im feeling generous, i can imagine the possibility that there really was 'groupthink' at the cia, and there may have been invisible incremental changes to the intelligence all the way up the chain, and that maybe, just maybe, it was an institutional failure and that maybe noone was truly, specifically culpable. i guess all im acknowledging is the potential for organisational failure. no biggy. but when you see the primary evidence on this global warming thing, you realise that theres no need to corrupt the institution, all you need is one person at the top. say, a 'slam dunk' tenet. so the good news is that maybe not all the govt institutions are corrupt. the bad news is that the quality of the institution doesnt seem to matter, they just need to have one corrupt fucker cavalierly swinging a pen at the top and they can get the answer they want.

the second point is that if we step back a moment from mere trivialities like whether we were lied to war, and how many people died, and whether something subjective like how far intelligence was stretched. Here in these piltz documents we see the exact same process of altering the message of the content - but this time there are billions (?) of lives on the line instead of hundreds of thousands, and this time we are dealing with the overwhelming consensus of scientists, rather than the dodgy 'coalition' of 'analysts', and yet we see the same result, without the slightest regard for fact, or for cost. its quite remarkable. power corrupts and all that. do they even blink when they do it? is there any shame?

thirdly, Cooney got bribed oops employed by exxon within days of him resigning. you'd think theyd at least hold their breath for a month. there simply isnt any shame. but i didnt wanna get sucked into the details...

#4. and this is probably the most important. if this behaviour is occuring on issues such as global warming, backed up by lots of science, with an incredible cost, then which domains are impervious? literally none. take for example the 911 commission - which was all based on written translations of testimony by ksm and massoui (sp?) and others who may or may not have been tortured and were certainly without lawyers.

i know theres nothing new with them lying about stuff, or about them being bought and sold, but theres something about seeing the flagrant disregard, in print, about some important stuff.

one day they'll stop surprising me...