Being Eaten By Dogs Or Lice

The name for fear of heights is acrophobia, what should be the best name (besides aggressive ignorance) for fear of science? How about uggianaqtuq? Read on, you'll see.

When the only way for the right wing to avoid established findings is to repress them, we are so in the soup. Seems the Smithsonian is having to 'modify' its exhibit descriptions in its Antartica display so that they don't go upside of Sen. Ted Stevens.

Apologies to Barry from Alaska, but the effects of the midnight sun seem to be fulltime lunacy.

"There are some things we can't do easily because we're in the political limelight. We have to walk a difficult line."

Fitzhugh added that the scientists knew they needed to avoid upsetting lawmakers such as Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who is a skeptic about human causes of climate change. "He's out there, we know he's out there, but it hasn't influenced what we've done."
snip)
Igor Krupnik, a Smithsonian scientist who reviewed the initial statement, called it a "very good start," but said it was important to find "a new title (or better title)." He suggested one based on a University of Colorado researcher's
interview of an Inuit tribesman who had referred to Arctic weather as uggianaqtuq, which she interpreted to mean "you are not yourself."

Smithsonian researchers changed the title later in the summer of 2003 to "The Arctic: A Friend Acting Strange," and later the last word became "Strangely." That title also was almost jettisoned when a linguistic expert questioned the translation, saying uggianaqtuq really means "being eaten by dogs or lice."

Okay, who could resist noting that our scientific community seems to be being eaten by dogs or lice, it would make a great name for the exhibit.

Global warming is a threat to the business community because it will mean a change in their direct line to profits from public consumptionism. There will be an attack on dealing with it from their hired scientists, all acting as if the money of the moment is worth selling off our future as a world. It's the way the American natives must have felt seeing their buffalo all killed off and their plains plowed under.

The world is 'ending' in another way today, and it's tempting to see the right wing's opposition to science as their intentional bringing on of the End Times. I prefer to think that it's more of the kind of irrational sticking to bad traditions that caused a Saudi Arabian court to send a victim of gang rape to prison.

The Smithsonian, of course, is perenially called down to testify to Congress to keep its funding coming. Wish it were publically funded and didn't have to do that.