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terrorising humanity .....

terrorising humanity .....

‘As Jesuit schoolboys studying world history we learned that Copernicus and Galileo self-censored for many decades their proofs that the earth revolved around the sun and that a less restrained heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno, was burned alive in 1600 for the crime of sound science. With the encouragement of our professor, Father Joyce, we marveled at the capacity of human leaders to corrupt noble institutions. Lust for power had caused the Catholic hierarchy to subvert the church's most central purpose - the search for existential truths.

Today, flat-earthers within the Bush Administration - aided by right-wing allies who have produced assorted hired guns and conservative think tanks to further their goals - are engaged in a campaign to suppress science that is arguably unmatched in the Western world since the Inquisition. Sometimes, rather than suppress good science, they simply order up their own.

Meanwhile, the Bush White House is purging, censoring and blacklisting scientists and engineers whose work threatens the profits of the Administration's corporate paymasters or challenges the ideological underpinnings of their radical anti-environmental agenda. Indeed, so extreme is this campaign that more than sixty scientists, including Nobel laureates and medical experts, released a statement on February 18 that accuses the Bush Administration of deliberately distorting scientific fact "for partisan political ends."’

The Junk Science Of George W. Bush

terrorising the earth...

From the Independent

Leading Article: As we marvel at a trapped whale and a visiting shark, we plunder the seas

Published: 04 August 2007

We have a curiously inconsistent attitude toward the sea and its inhabitants, as this week has demonstrated. On one level, we are clearly fascinated by the oceans. Crowds lined Fraserburgh harbour in Scotland this week to catch a glimpse of a trapped young minke whale. The scenes were reminiscent of the frenzy of interest when a bottle-nosed whale swam up the Thames last year.

At the other end of the country, the rumours that a great white shark was patrolling the waters off Cornwall provided a dubious thrill for holidaymakers. Another ancient fish has captured scientists' imagination, too, this week, with the news that a coelacanth has been hooked in Indonesia. Scientists previously thought the fish group had died out about 70 million years ago. Finally, the Russian aquatic exploits deep beneath the North Pole piqued the public's interest, proving that there is a romance and mystery surrounding ocean exploration that has a unique ability to inspire.

But for much of the time we seem uninterested in the plight of the sea. Most news concerning our oceans is troubling these days. Cod stocks in British waters have been destroyed by intensive fishing. Fisherman are now going after deep-sea fish to maintain yields, despite the disastrous consequences of bottom-dredging for the ocean's ecology. A major study involving an international team of marine scientists warned last year that if global fisheries continue to decline at the present rate, they will be utterly wiped out by the middle of the century.

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Gus: and this does not go only for England or the Europeans... We are plundering the sea here as well, and the recent devastation of abalone in Victoria by viruses can be added to the many man made disasters...  With ships carrying bilge and ballast waters from various continents to seas on the other side of the world, then discharging anywhere near costal areas, these waters carry various viruses, animals and plants that do not belong in the local ecology... often with slow developing but quite devastating effects...