Dear lord, when are we going to stop letting them frame the debate? We’re not anti-science; they just say we are. We’re not racist; they just say we are. We’re pro-science and pro-equality. Why do we let them frame the debate this way?

JohnJ on May 13, 2009 at 1:13 AM

A REALLY good point!

But liberal POLITICAL thinking has so dominated our education system (or what’s left of it) that CRITICAL, reality-based thinking has gone out the window–we have become a nation of sheeple, who jump on the bandwagon of every self-proclaimed “intellectual” spouting hare-brained ideas that have failed repeatedly throughout history, because few people STUDY history any more except to rewrite it, and reality-based “common sense” which rejects such ideas isn’t very common any more.

People need to wake up to the fact that what passes for “science” in the mainstream media is neither objective nor scientific. Many scientific and technical journals have been taken over by editors pushing an agenda: evolution, embryonic stem-cells, cloning, global warming, string theory, so that articles on experimental studies which contradict the editors’ OPINION are systematically rejected by “peer reviewers” regardless of scientific merit, so that the PUBLISHED articles unanimously support the editors’ OPINION. In an age of “publish or perish”, the politically-correct “scientists” get published and receive funding, and those whose findings contradict politically-correct thought run out of money.

Science is NOT speculation, of some intellectual in an ivory tower dreaming up some grandiose new theory of the universe so divorced from reality that it can never be tested. But this is what passes for “science” in popular scientific journals designed for “laymen” with no training in real science.

REAL science is actually trial and error–doing repeated experiments, reading the results of other people’s experiments, and developing theories that fit the data, and being willing to change them or abandon them if they are later proven wrong. Theory should fit real-world data, but in today’s world of “science”, data are cherry-picked and fudged to fit pre-ordained politically-correct theories, and annoying contradictory data are rejected as “outliers”.

So here is what “intellectuals” have done to “science”:

“Science” says man evolved from a primordial soup by magic, even though well-established chemistry and biology tell us that a living cell could never assemble itself from non-living matter by chance alone.

“Science” says we should destroy human embryos for stem cells, even though embryonic stem cells have NEVER cured a single disease, while adult stem-cells have had dozens of clinical successes.

“Science” tells us that certain rocks off the coast of Hawaii MUST be millions of years old due to the fossils found in them, although historians who observed them form tell us they are less than 200 years old.

“Science” tells us that carbon dioxide in the air will cause catastrophic global warming, although the Vikings settled and named Greenland and raised sheep there during the llth and 12th centuries, when CO2 levels were lower, and the Earth has cooled over the last 11 years while CO2 levels have continued to rise.

“Science” tells us we should “grow renewable fuel” by converting corn to ethanol, despite the fact that almost as much energy is burned to raise corn as is obtained from ethanol, and the world is deprived of the food value of corn in order to prevent the burning of non-comestible gasoline.

Dear liberal “intellectuals” divorced from reality in your high-falutin’ ivory towers: We conservatives are pro-science! We want REAL science, based on testable FACTS, not opinions, that serves humanity with the TRUTH. We want REAL science to burst forth past the gatekeepers in the media and “science” journals and the United Nations, to be read by a general public with eyes and minds wide open! We are NOT stupid, and we KNOW that you have manipulated the public to your false and unscientific fantasies to enrich yourselves, and the gatekeepers FEAR the TRUTH, which can set us free!

The trick is…how to we communicate the truth to a majority of voters, most of whom have little training in science?

Steve Z on May 13, 2009 at 11:13 AM