So I'll reply here. I am afraid that if I start a new thread about my experiences at the March, the mods will just close it and point to this thread.
So I'll save some time and put my report here.
This is my friend. He's a PhD research chemist. The Lego Minifig there is General Leia Organia and the fingers are mine. I'm a PhD Information
Scientist (if you haven't figured that one out yet.) The sign says it all for him - the Trump admin is demanding that certain topics not be published
(or given to the public.) We're scientists. We say that our research SHOULD be given to the public and to fellow scientists and that subject and
scope should NOT be controlled by a pack of lame-brains who don't know the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods and when to apply
them.
(ahem) ... and now that I've gotten that out of my system...
You might not want our papers or research or data, but other scientists do and being able to talk about it and exchange data and methods and so forth
is the best way to advance science around the world.
Here's an analogy: Imagine that science is an old-fashioned telephone system for a country. What we want to be able to do is pick up our
science-phone in Scienceville and call across the country to talk science to someone in SciencePlaya. Policies restricting us would be like having an
FBI agent sitting at each phone to make sure you didn't talk about things like... a tornado hit your town, for instance. In some cases the policies
would mean that an entire Sciencetown is cut off from the rest of the country -- well, not exactly cut off because you CAN get the data if you pay the
corporations that own it (and the cost of getting your hands on this research can be sky-high.
Without government grant programs, universities can't maintain labs to do research.
So that means that all the science will come from companies (like the pharmaceutical industry) and corporations. The rest will be just whatever we
can afford to do out of pocket and with smaller grants from foundations like Rockefeller.
And of (sarcasm) COURSE (/sarcasm) you can trust corporations to fairly and honestly report even results that are not in their favor.
Trump doesn't have a science adviser (yet) but at this rate, it's likely to be someone like the owner of a football team or a big industrialist who
wouldn't know a neutron from a neuron.
There's another march next week - I won't come to DC again (really, two trips a year are all I can afford since I'm a retiree living on a pension.) I
will go to a local march, though.
So you'll see us all again and again over the next four years. Research is long, tedious, often boring, and demands a lot of patience and takes a lot
of time. So we're used to playing the long game. Meanwhile, my observations on what made these marches successful and what strategies worked best
will be going as a white paper to my local State Representative and to certain other groups who might find it useful.