Live Science | Republican Fiscal Plan Could Slash Science Budgets

… Those agencies include the National Science Foundation, which funds about 20 percent of all federally supported basic research in America, and which would lose 18.8 percent of its budget, or $1 billion. The Department of Energy‘s Office of Science would be set back $835 million, or 18 percent of its budget.

Also hard-hit would be the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NOAA, which is involved in weather and climate monitoring as well as fisheries management and coastal and marine research, would lose $324 million, or 34 percent of what the Obama administration requested for its budget in 2011. NIST, which has a mission of advancing measurement science, standards and technology, would lose $207 million, almost 30 percent of its budget request.

Also facing cuts under the plan is the National Institutes of Health, which would lose 9.1 percent, or $2.9 billion of its requested 2011 budget.

Please also read Obama Calls For Historic Commitment To Science from early 2009. The door closes just as it re-opens.

Good luck with those sutainable and meaningful jobs. They’re going out of this country.

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Nothing is going to change significantly in America in the next two years, ok?

I’m a football fan, remember? The gridiron gridlock. I can already feel it.

This is why I don’t care what happened last night as long as funding cuts to education are not carried out and science classrooms remain sacrosanct and supported at the state and local levels. Look, here’s what it comes down to:

You cannot have it both ways. You want sustainable and meaningful jobs that put us back on the path to American exceptionalism? Then don’t support the hatemongers who say evolution = liberalism, even and especially if they’re in your camp. It’s not meaningless noise; that drivel eventually trickles up, it hardens into policy and our country suffers. You want oil and gas for business and transportation preferably from this nation’s natural resources and strong research into energy alternatives? Then do not consort with those who equate faith and scientific inquiry when needlessly miscalculating the age of the earth just so your party wins elections. Don’t put them in a position to dictate terms to you.

Critical thinkers are the true salvation of this nation, not blind adherents to religion and ideology disguised as fiscal conservatives. So, in the name of our near-term and long-term future, don’t use the next two years to throw the baby out with the Bush-Obama bailouts or whatever it is that angers you TODAY. Religion has no business driving state matters just as much as the state should stay out of religious affairs. Let’s keep it that way.

We“re now on our final week of the Science Bloggers for Students donation drive. Help me move America forward, help us all do something truly positive by donating to impoverished classrooms this week. By the time they reach high school, many of our kids have never even seen a microscope, hand lens or chemistry set, while elementary school students in Spain, India and China learn physics and biology and world history. Yesterday, I received this note from a science teacher in a high-poverty Baltimore classroom:

Awesome! You guys ROCK!!!! I am so looking forward to getting these supplies in my room and teaching earth science like it should be! We are going to have pictures of all the experiments and investigations I have planned with these materials. Thank you again for being there for science teachers that want … no, REQUIRE, all the opportunities that our children need to be successful in their future endeavors!

This right here is what sets us apart from the apes in the trees, not the electoral hand-wringing and poo-flinging. Enough despair. This is part of the plan. Get on it.

WSJ Speakeasy | David Simon on ˜Treme“ and Why Journalism Might Not Be Doomed (hat tip, Ray)

… Are more people likely to engage with the subject matter than journalism? Sadly, yes. That is true. If Treme runs for some time and gets out on DVD and video on demand, people will find it and maybe it’ll have an audience of 8-10 million. When I wrote a nonfiction narrative about the drug trade in Baltimore, if it had sold 100,000 hardbacks, it would be a New York Times bestseller. The economy of scale is so shockingly different that I have to acknowledge it has a greater reach than actual journalism, which is vaguely disappointing. This is a country that doesn’t read.

I love that this man has an audience and hope he has the opportunity to run Treme through five seasons. He deserves it.

During the Family Reunion / Navaratri confab a couple of weeks back, I chatted with a cousin who lives in New York, someone I haven’t seen much of over the years what with the two of us moving all over the world and America for most of our lives. Some relatives you grow up with, some you meet again as an adult on adult terms (or, in my case, the closest possible approximation of “adult”). You have to understand my cousins and I were raised in strict, orthodox-Hindu households and to stand with wine glass in hand talking with these people who look like you, in the absence of parental supervision and approval, is kinda a big deal. It’s a bigger deal when your cousin, whom you’re just getting to know again, tells you her husband and she watch Treme and The Wire and that she is head over heels in love with Zeitoun. Squeeeeee! Comparing notes and simply sharing this awesome point of commonality was the best time I had that evening, besides the impromptu party at my house later that lasted until 4AM.

Talking David Simon and his work seriously with a member of my family. Who’d’ve thunk it? Of course, this means more cool people who want to visit New Orleans with me.

Of course, this also means someone related to me will be reading Back Of Town. Oh boy.