Mission Redacted
You may remember when NASA scientist James Hansen went public last January with the claim that he was being muzzled by the space agency's PR apparatchiks. At the time, New York Times science correspondent Andrew Revkin reported that:
In several interviews ... Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."Not anymore it doesn't. Revkin reported last week that:
The statement was reportedly altered without consulting with the agency's 19,000 employees. A flak-catcher for the agency told the Times that change had nothing to do with Dr. Hansen's use of the phrase. Purely coincidental.In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet" deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is "to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
And there you have it. Straight from the Ministry of Truth.
3 Comments:
totally whack!!
Found this on the George Orwell Wikipedia link, thought it was somehow apt:
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."
I wish I could get more upset about this kind of thing, but I think I have what the Onion called "outrage fatigue."
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