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 
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.  

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 (303) 493-6674, FIDOnet: 1:306/31.4
Libertarian Second Amendment Caucus
NRA Life Member