Bizarre, Environment, Politics, Society

Tomahawks Over Turtles: Congress and Obama Administration Move To Slash NOAA Budget

Wondering where the money is coming from for our three wars, including the over $1 billion for the latest war in Libya? Well, as we spend billions on the wars (including one for an oil-rich nation which has refused to re-pay any of the costs), the White House is slashing domestic programs. A good comparison is that the cost to date of the Libyan war is basically what Congress is about to cut from the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The cuts from Congress are above those asked by the Administration. Trillions of cuts are being worked out in light of budget shortfalls.

Hundreds of millions will be cut from the Joint Polar Satellite System, a reorganized satellite system and hundreds of millions more will be cut from NOAA’s Operations, Research and Facilities budget. NOAA is already a lean organization with an expanding mission. Other countries are increasing oceanic and weather monitoring to protect lives and property. However, with yet another war launched by President Obama, we can hardly be tossing away money on the environment and science while tossing cruise missiles at Tripoli.

Source: Science Mag

182 thoughts on “Tomahawks Over Turtles: Congress and Obama Administration Move To Slash NOAA Budget”

  1. I forgot to list the logical fallacy that seems to be one most often used by the trolls:

    The Nominal Fallacy

  2. Blouise, you are too kind. I do try hard to make things work rather than throw sand in the gears of civilization.

    I struggle to understand the deliberate obtuseness of those who avoid logic at all costs, and who refuse to learn by painful experience. One can only conclude they have not really suffered true pain at the hands of a cruel environment. Either that or they are just paid well by their handlers and don’t really care about the substance.

    I am afraid I may be the one who is responsible for the wild flinging of the term, “ad hominem.” I was the first to really get into the issue of logical fallacies and mentioned ad hominem attacks on several occasions. Trolls clearly do not understand what that means, as Buddha, mespo and others have pointed out repeatedly, but it has fallen on deaf ears. So far I have seen the following logical fallacies by the trolls. Not a comprehensive list, just the ones off the top of my head:

    1. Ad Hominem
    2. Failure to State
    3. Needling
    4. Argument By Laziness (Argument By Uninformed Opinion)
    5. Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension)
    6. Short Term Versus Long Term
    7. Poisoning The Well
    8. Statement Of Conversion
    9. Argument By Dismissal
    10. Begging the Question (Petitio Principii)
    11. Affirming the Consequent
    12. Appeal To Ignorance (Ad Ignorantium)
    13. Argument to Logic (Argumentum ad Logicam)
    14. Composition Fallacy
    15. Disjunctive Fallacy
    16. False Analogy
    17. Mistaking Deductive Validity for Truth
    18. Red Herring
    19. Slippery Slope (The Continuum Fallacy)
    20. tu quoque (You Too!)

    Isn’t this wild? We can add to the list as they continue to challenge logic and the laws of both physics and economics. I am sure others will come up with some I missed.

  4. kderosa

    I’m sucking up to Otteray!? You have no idea how funny that is.

    Honey, I support clear headed thinking and always listen to those who have proven their competence at advancing civilization. Quite simply, in my not so humble opinion, Otteray is an advancor (Otteray the Advancor … sounds like a good title for a movie).

    I only suck up to HenMan ’cause he truly appreciates my camel jokes … (yes, Buddha, that was a double entendre 😉 )

    Tell the dude who’s always wasted by midnight that I miss him.

  6. My statement wasn’t limited to being after the financial crisis. Had you sold securities or loaned money at anytime after Glass Seagal, you had a host of regulations to coply with.

    No the rule to be gleaned is that no one wants to lend money in this uncertain business environment.

  7. Mike Spindell, why keep on giving government more revenues when it has shown itelf unwilling to increase it’s spending to capture and exceed that revenue. We don’t have a revenue problem, revenue is at historic levels of GDP. Spending on the other hand keeps on growing and growing, far outpacing GDP.

  8. “Go try to sell some securities or loan some money to the public and see how unregulated the financial sector really is. I’ll make sure to visit you in jail with a file baked in a cake.”

    *************************
    I’m really sorry that polysyllabic words and concepts beyond eighth grade proficiency are causing you trouble. You’ve made a fine argument that, after the barn door has been nailed shut following the latest horse outbreak, it’s very hard for the horses to escape.

    By the way, I did both financial transactions after the barn door was thrown open by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and before the financial crisis. They were begging you to borrow and trade. Now after the financial crisis, it’s incredibly tough. The rule to be gleaned seems to be that even dense Republicons back their hand away from the flame after getting burned.

  9. “Yes, cut them too. We have a giant budget deficit to deal with.”

    An easy solution would be to eliminate the Bush Tax Cuts for the “haves” and “have mores;” ensure that Corporations don’t use oversea tax dodges;
    tax capital gains as regular income; eliminate government handouts to corporations; have import duties aligned with those of the rest of the world;
    eliminate the wage ceiling for pay into Social Security and really segregate it from general government funds; expand medicare to the one payer system and get corporations out of the health business; end three useless
    wars and rebuild this economy. I understand there are some who might call this socialism, but they’re the ones who don’t know what socialism really is and they’re the ones who would hand this country over to the predations of Corporatists. What I propose is an old, but entirely valid concept, capitalism restrained by the government so as to really ensure a free market that is fair. Adam Smith would have approved.

  11. Go try to sell some securities or loan some money to the public and see how unregulated the financial sector really is. I’ll make sure to visit you in jail with a file baked in a cake.

    You should probably just stick to quoting people and copying/pasting definitions; you don’t sound so stupid that way because at least the underlying quote/definition makes sense even if it is irrelevant to the issue at hand. This independent thinking business, however, does not suit you.

  13. @Elaine, no one is suggesting that the financial sector was completely innocent. They certainly took advantage of a dopey regulated unregulated environment ….

  14. @Elaine, no one is suggesting that the financial sector was completely innocent. They certainly took advantage of a dopey regulated environment and were actively induced by people like Barney Frank to write loads of very risky loans and find a way to deal with the risk after the fact. They did a poor job, in some cases an illegal job, dealing with the risk part. But the fact remains, without government trying to get the financial sector to push these loans in the first place to increase poor/minority home ownership, there would be no finacial crisis today.

  15. kderosa:

    Matt Taibbi is a flake. As the article says, he may be a word smith but he really doesnt know what he is talking about.

    All preened up with $10 words but saying nothing, I now see why Elaine and others on this blog respect him.

  16. kderosa,

    In addition to Matt Taibbi’s book “Griftopia,” I’d also recommend reading Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.”

    Here’s an excerpt from a review of Lewis’s book:

    Steven Pearlstein reviews ‘The Big Short’ by Michael Lewis
    Sunday, March 14, 2010
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/12/AR2010031202291.html

    Excerpt:
    In “The Big Short,” which publishes Monday, we meet Steve Eisman, a second-generation Wall Streeter whose foul mouth and total lack of social graces made it easy for others to dismiss his relentless criticisms of the subprime mortgage industry as far back as the 1990s, when he first characterized it as nothing more than a Ponzi scheme.

    There’s Michael Burry, a physician turned stock picker with an antisocial personality (later diagnosed as Asperger’s) who becomes the first money manager to buy a credit default swap on subprime mortgage bonds.

    There’s Greg Lippmann, a prototypical bonus-grubbing Wall Street bond salesman who early on sees the potential of the subprime swaps market and becomes the leading evangelist for betting on the housing market’s collapse.

    And there’s Charlie Ledley, Jamie Mai and Ben Hockett, three young financial hustlers from Berkeley, Calif., who set up a hedge fund in a Greenwich Village art studio, go looking for a long shot and find it in supposedly AAA-rated securities cobbled together from BBB subprime junk.

    From their tales, we learn that Wall Street banks think nothing of stealing the trading strategies of their clients and peddling them to other customers. We learn that the investment bankers knew as early as 2006 about the rising default rate on subprime mortgages but engaged in elaborate ruses to hide that reality from ratings agencies and investors. We learn that when investor demand for subprime mortgages outstripped the supply, Wall Street filled the gap by creating “synthetic” mortgage-backed securities whose performance would mirror that of the real thing.

    We learn that Goldman Sachs and other banks conspired to inflate the price of mortgage-backed securities well into 2007, even when they knew the true value was falling, only marking them down in value after their own hedging strategies were in place. And we learn that top executives were largely clueless about the risks their organizations were taking.

  19. Otteray Scribe:

    I dont see kderosa changing the subject at all. He/she is merely pointing out the error in your assertion.

    While the space program and the ballistic missile program benefited from IC technology and TI and Fairchild benefited from government money, the IC would have been put to good use and did not need government money for success.

    Had the space program never happened the IC would still be a very big part of our lives.

    Government did not make the market for the IC, the IC did it all by itself.

  20. @OS, typical non-explanation explanation and then a hasty retreat.

    @Elaine. what was done with them that was wrong, other than the financial companies severely underestimating the value of the underlying collateral of the sub-prime loans and the resulting bubble that caused other non-sub-prime loans to go underwater as the market collapsed?

    CDOs are a way to reduce and spread risk around. Risk that banks were being forced to take on when they were forced to write sub-prime loans.

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