"Suicide by Pseudoscience"
www.wired.com/wired/archi...06/view.html
'As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.
When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.
Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.
Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.
www.wired.com/wired/archi...06/view.html
'As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.
When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.
Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.
Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.
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Re: Politics & Science Don't Mix
Sun, June 13, 2004 - 9:52 PMbut those bubbles floating in the air, with their swirling kaleidoscope of colors, so pretty !
- + *POP* + -
. oops.
