WEIRD SCIENCE

                            WEIRD SCIENCE

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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.  

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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.  

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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 

practices 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.  

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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 

100 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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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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.  

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L. Neil Smith

Author:  THE PROBABILITY BROACH, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE, HENRY MARTYN, 

and (forthcoming) PALLAS

LEVER ACTION BBS (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet: 1:306/31.4

Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus

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