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