weird science by l neil smith posted by cathy smith for l neil smith weird science everyone knows how to tell when a politician is lying his lips move what may not be equally obvious is that there are politicians and then there are politicians and that the phrase political science is subject to more than one interpretation years ago we heard how scientists were worried that a new ice age might be coming and later on that nuclear winter smoke and dust thrown into the atmosphere by full scale international unpleasantness was a possibility something like that may even have killed the dinosaurs what we didn t hear was that no actual data supported any of this that real world events the burning of kuwaiti oil fields tended to discredit it that mostly it was propaganda meant to weaken values that made america the most successful culture in history and that the dinosaurs probably died of something like the plague when continents drifted together exposing them to new germs we miss a lot like this unless we listen closely prince william sound site of the famous oil spill and mount st helen s weren t supposed to recover from their respective disasters for at least years that turned out not to be true although you d never know it from watching network nightly news or cnn it doesn t fit their agenda to inform us that the earth is vast and resilient and that nature is rougher on herself than we could ever be but for once the media aren t entirely to blame as ignorant of science as they are of everything they trust scientists to unscrew the inscrutable the trouble is that today s scientists have agendas of their own nobody in government that wellspring of scientific wherewithal is going to offer grants to an investigator who states truthfully that there is no respectable evidence for global warming the money and power for bureaucrats and politicians lie in mass transit and they hate the automobile blamed as a major cause of the mythical crisis as a source of privacy and freedom they find intolerable the same appears true of acid rain a deliberate hoax cooked up by the environmental protection agency which hates private industrial capitalism almost as much as it does your car and foisted on real scientists through trickery which has depended on specialists in different fields not talking to each other much the list goes on always with a common disreputable thread ozone depletion for which evidence is even more suspect and contradictory than for acid rain or global warming is no more than a last desperate attempt to indict private capitalism in an era when state central planning and the command economy have failed and can only find this final withered leg to teeter on decades of anti nuclear alarmism resting on foundations of myth and panic mongering have failed to erase the fact that nuclear power is the safest cleanest most efficient source of energy known to mankind and more to the point that the greater amount of energy there is available to any individual in society the freer that individual and his society become honest studies on the effects of individual gun ownership and self defense on crime conducted by investigators who began as ideological opponents to those concepts but which show massive reductions in the latter to be the result of the former have been suppressed most recently by the california state government and what the media didn t say about recent epa discoveries on the effect of secondhand smoking is that although some harm to non smokers may have been detected it was less by an order or two of magnitude than that associated with frying bacon a couple times a week or keeping a pet bird it s enough to make you wonder whether there was ever anything to the claim that smoking causes cancer that of course is the real threat represented by politically correct science the world is a dangerous place it would be nice to know the hazards i ve never believed smoking to be a healthy practice but given a lack of credibility on the part of today s science how am i to decide what to do about it nicotine is highly addictive to that much i can attest from experience yet the stress of quitting may be riskier than to continue there isn t any way to tell thanks to the corrupting influence of government money on the scientific establishment two centuries ago the founding fathers spared us certain agonies to which every other nation in the world has been subject at one time or another by creating a legal barrier between politics and religion each time some short sighted individual or group has tried to lower the barrier most recently over the issue of abortion blood real human blood hot and smoking in the street has wound up being shed real human blood is being shed over scientific issues as people s lives are ruined through the loss to agencies like the epa of livelihood or property it may have taken a lifetime to accumulate to diseases caused by toxins associated with burning fossil fuels for electrical power or thanks to bans on things like cyclamates when they die from the effects of obesity what we need now if we hope to survive as a civilization for two more centuries is another barrier a constitutional separation of state and science including medicine knowledge is valuable real science won t languish for lack of funding the money will simply come from contributors unwilling to pay for lies and everyone will benefit l neil smith author the probability broach the crystal empire henry martyn and forthcoming pallas lever action bbs fidonet libertarian second amendment caucus nra life member my opinions are of course my own
