A group called Keep America Safe has released a video questioning the values of a number of lawyers now working in the Justice Department because of their pro bono work for Gitmo detainees. That has the lawyer community up in arms in protest. It also has the Democrats using the opportunity to sling mud at Republicans. Devin Garret describes the scene as Critics of Justice lawyers under fire.

A conservative group’s bashing of several Obama administration lawyers as the “al Qaeda Seven” has struck a nerve in the U.S. legal community, prompting even some fellow Republicans to denounce the group’s attack.

Orin Kerr and commenters at the Volokh Conspiracy show the nerve at Lawyers, Treason, and Deception: A Response to Andrew McCarthy.

The questioning is indeed a ‘guilt by association’ effort. Where the lawyers have a problem is in that the number of Al Qaeda pro bono lawyers in the Justice Department is disproportionate and the matters of detainee status and warfare are not as settled in the public mind as some lawyers may think. The lawyers see the pro bono effort as equivalent to representing indigent criminals or other citizens who need legal remedies. They have questions about whether there is a war on or not – even if the courts have pretty much said the US is indeed in a state of war. Then there is the problem of the status of the detainees which has been clouded by legal attacks and assaults that also offend much of the public.

What Keep America Safe is saying is not only that the Justice Department may have a bias when it comes to national security, the legal community needs to take a careful look at its own predispositions and biases. You can indeed go too far on well meaning do-good efforts and if you don’t understand the boundaries, they will find you.

There seems to be a movement objecting to the focus on race by the government. Scott at Powerline says We’re an American Man and cites Mark Krikorian on the point that much of the US census form is about race. The suggested solution has been picked up by many.

I Am An American — ( Census #9- check “Some other race”, write in “American.” ) citing Ace of Spades.

Shrinkwrapped suggests Sending a Message with the Census.

Tigerhawk echoes the sentiment in Civil disobedience.

Economic Expert describes the options and notes that:

Some other race was included in 2000 census for respondents who were unable to identify with the five Office of Management and Budget race categories. Respondents who provided write-in entries such as Moroccan, South African, Belizean, or a Hispanic origin (for example, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban) (or even American) are included in the “Some other race” category.

Bear Creek Ledger has its take on Census Question Number 9 – pass it on.

What will the Census Bureau do if you answer “American?” A clue is in Recommendations of the Census Bureau’s African American Advisory Committee. It looks like answers of other -> American will be assigned a slot in the defined race categories at the whim of the Bureau.

The US Census looks to be an opportunity for US citizens to express their feelings about societal segregation by race. It appears to be an opportunity that has significant appeal to many.

Toyota has been under assault about runaway cars. The assertion is that some high end Toyota cars will go full throttle all by themselves. This resulted in Congressional inquiry and ABC even aired a report purportedly showing it could happen to you.

But it turns out that (a) wide open throttle complaints have declined with the introduction of electronic throttles and (b), as Toyota says, “Electronics Don’t Rewire Themselves” as the media report did. Popular Mechanics describes how the media report was misleading.

Here’s what Gilbert had to do to make his Avalon go rogue: He had to cut open three of the six wires that travel from the pedal assembly to the engine computer. Two of the wires send the accelerator-position signals—one for each Hall-effect sensor—and one is a 5-volt power supply. Next he had to insert a specific 200-ohm resistor between the two signal wires. Finally, he had to generate a direct short between the 5-volt supply lines and the signal leads. The new wiring essentially mimicked a size-12 mashing of the pedal to the carpet and the engine went to WOT. Also, the order of the modification is important. Apply the 5-volt power lead to the wires before inserting the resistor and the computer would instead throw a fault code and go into limp mode.

Needless to say, Toyota is examining the vehicles returned to the shop that had complaints about throttle performance trying to find out what could cause the problem.

For the public, the idea that there are two independent throttle sensors should provide a clue that there is more than is readily visible. Automotive engineering pays a great deal of attention to safety, failure modes, and potential hazardous situations. The two throttle sensors don’t just duplicate their sensing, they do so in a way that allows them to be known to be different yet compared in what they say about the throttle position. After the throttle position, there are other conditions that must be met before throttle action is taken. If anything goes wrong or the various checks don’t match up, the engine check light is turned on and the vehicle is put into limp home mode. The design goal is for any failure or oddity to fail safe.

It is possible that there is a bug in the system. That would have to be one interesting bug to only show up in such very few situations. Since most of the control is in software, there would have to be a common factor in those situations that exist in no other. Might be – but odds are way out there.

Dr. Sowell laments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or— worse yet— follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

Artificial stupidity? Artificial may be the wrong word. Studious stupidity may be a bit closer to the truth.

It may be that teacher’s unions were among the first to gain significant clout. They have also been among the first under the gun with such events as the firing that hit the news in Rhode Island lately. They have also been under the gun in regards to charter schools, ‘No child left behind’ accountability measures and the growth of home schooling.

But now, other public sector unions are coming under scrutiny because they have made their members Civil Servants no more. The Washington Times book review by Jeremy Lott takes note of one example.

Mr. Greenhut does a good job of showing how California’s public employee unions have done so much to cause the state’s budget troubles by negotiating large salaries, benefits and retirement packages far out of line with state revenues. He does an even better job of showing how the unions respond when their privilege is threatened.

For instance, they managed to shoot down all of the referendums Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put on the state ballot in 2005 to get a grip on state spending.

This, in essence, is the expression of a warning that goes back to the founding fathers. The public sector has surpassed the private in terms of salaries and the benefits have never been comparable. Public sector employees have had better job security than private in recent times. A result has been that many communities are facing financial pressures. Trying to find revenue sources to pay for their employees is a big problem but even that problem looks small in comparison to the bill that is coming due in regards to pensions and retirement benefits.

Restoring the balance is likely to be a rough process.

One the one side are people without access to drugs that may help them. On the other is a government that wants to make sure that all drugs are perfectly safe. Dr. Gilbert Ross describes the assault on Avandia in this debate.

The bureaucratic agenda behind this gratuitous and unscientific attack is spelled out in the report: The authors want to create an independent drug-safety division within – but separate from – the FDA. Even though our drug regulators are the world’s most demanding, the senators and Dr. Graham want even more stringency. They have long been advocates for an even more cautious, risk-averse FDA, elevating safety above all other concerns – even at the cost of sacrificing innovative, lifesaving new drugs.

There are two trends here. One is the litigation that ensues because the ‘government’ says something isn’t safe. The other is in the growth of government.

There is already one agency involved in determining drug safety. This episode shows what happens when someone things that agency isn’t doing the job right – they suggest another agency or bureau. No wonder it is the public employee sector that is growing and that is in both quantity as well as in salary level.

Then there are the ’science’ aspects involved in the measurement and assessment of efficacy and risk. Pharmacology is in the same vein as climatology in terms of fuzziness of measure. That fuzziness of measure is a rich field of opportunity for those who want certitude and finality in outcome.

Ann Woolner provides an excellent example of the problem in Give Us a Right to Be Free of Those Who Bear Arms. The title illustrates a lack of tolerance for other people and their views. In order to support the desire to be free of certain type or class of person, that class is then assigned certain ‘bad’ behaviors.

I favor a reverse Second Amendment. It would read something like this:

“Well-regulated firearms, being necessary to the security of the states, the right of the people to be safe from gunfire as they go about their daily lives shall not be infringed.”

This should be a familiar pattern to those who understand racism. In this case, the assumption is made that the right to carry firearms means that society is subject to a lack of safety due to gunfire. The desire to be free from any risk of gunfire is laudable. It is the connection between that and the lawful carrying of firearms where the problem arises. This is analogous to expressing dislike of some racial or ethnic group and rationalizing that dislike by asserting that that group has some despicable or other bad characteristic or behavior – as a group.

If you read the opinion, you’ll see other characteristics besides this bigoted racism. There is the use of ridicule. There is the reduce to the absurd. There is a problem connecting to reality. There is fear to go with the loathing. There is the scary example implied to be the norm.

There is a constitutional concept that allows us to be free from certain people we loathe or abhor. It is the freedom of association. That, like the freedom to bear arms, requires responsibility, tolerance, and acceptance of its limitations. Many have tried to have ‘gun free’ compounds. That is their right. Where it becomes a problem is when they try to foist that value on everyone else and force them to also live in such a compound. That is the essence of modern sensibilities: we know what is good for you because it is what we like.

The problem with much of the climate change alarmism is one of matching what has been measured to what is attributed to that measure. The Reference Frame takes note in A toad of truth: golden toads not killed by GW

The very idea that global warming causes any of these things is utterly ludicrous. If you want to kill a toad, you must give it a poison or shoot it or something like that. You can’t do it by raising the temperature by half a degree. There exists a long list of 690+ consequences of global warming, with links to the media.

Things just don’t match up. You can’t reliably find the temperature in your yard to within a fraction of a degree much less its average temperature much less any impact on the flora and fauna due to that sort of change. Yet, we hear often and repeated nearly every day about some unusual, usually disastrous, event being caused by human caused climate change. That is the fundamental conundrum.

Climate research isn’t the only field suffering from misplaced expectations and outcomes. Johb Timmer says We’re so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong at ars technica and describes inherent problems encountered when trying to make conclusions about phenomena that has many inputs and much complexity.

The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)
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in the mean time, Shaffer seemed to suggest that we simply have to recognize the problem and communicate it with the public, so that people don’t leap to health conclusions each time a new population study gets published. Medical researchers recognize the value of replication, and they don’t start writing prescriptions based on the latest gene expression study—they wait for the individual genes to be validated. As we wait for any sort of reform to arrive, caution, and explaining to the public the reasons for this caution, seems like the best we can do.

At least in medicine there is whiplash as there are many different studies that reach conflicting conclusions. That is a contrast to the monolithic climate research output. Which is better?

The CSM illustrates how true believers can rationalize – and marginalize – those whose views they do not understand. The opinion is War over the Arctic? Global warming skeptics distract us from security risks. The thesis is that anyone skeptical of AGW is distracted from national security issues.

The first claim asserted as authoritarian is that the Arctic ice is melting. Heubert is quoted to affirm that the Arctic has lost 40% of its icecap since 1995. “It is not a matter of if, but when, the ice will be gone,” he said. This particular conclusion is elevated from the opinion of a scientist to a matter of absolute fact. That is then extrapolated to arrive at the idea that “Expected melting of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean means greatly expanded access to increasingly scarce fossil fuels. It also means tensions over Arctic real estate.”

Then there is the straw man: “Partially because of years of climate change denial, “the United States remains largely asleep at the wheel,” according to a Foreign Affairs article last March by Scott Borgerson.” This gets supported by assumptions about the character of the lay public:

“Most Americans have no clue the United States is an Arctic nation,” said US Coast Guard Rear Adm. Gene Brooks. Such ignorance carries a heavy price. Yet broader public ignorance about climate change is the goal of some skeptics and deniers. It wasn’t that long ago when cigarette manufacturers told Congress that nicotine wasn’t addictive, or when Detroit’s auto moguls insisted that seat belts were a bad idea. Responsible dissent is one thing. But defiance of facts on the ground that imperil US national and energy security is quite another. Says Brooks: “The age of the Arctic is upon us.”

i.e. if you don’t agree with me, you are stupid and ignorant. You have no clue as to reality. You are in denial and morally equivalent to other despicable groups of people who took ignorant viewpoints.

Just because you won’t get sold a bill of goods does not mean you are in denial. The fact of the matter is that the allegations of denial have more behaviors in consonance with projection than do their subject with irrational rejection of false claims.

The facts is that there is no evidence that the icecap is suffering anything other than nominal variation (and it has recovered its extent in recent years), Skepticism of alarmist claims is appropriate and necessary as a part of education of others and confirmation of ideas. It is entirely reasonable to express skepticism such as “you want me to believe what is a result of a one degree change in climate over my lifetime?” There is a proportionality problem here that is not being addressed.

Another technique often seen in many of the modern ideological debates is that of trying to maintain the offense. This means finding ways to deal with an attack. An example is reported by the Guardian in US Senate’s top climate sceptic accused of waging ‘McCarthyite witch-hunt’. Senator Inhofe has called for a criminal investigation into the actions of 17 scientists who had communications in the collection that became public last fall.

“I think this is like a drag net, just to try and catch everyone whose name happens to be on this list. It’s guilt by association and I thought those days were over 50 years ago,” said Michael Oppenheimer, of Princeton University, who is on the list of 17 scientists. “It looks like a McCarthyite tactic: pull in anyone who had anything to do with anyone because they happened to converse with some by email, and threaten them with criminal activity.”

An inquiry is being called “guilt by association” and subjecting ‘honest researchers’ to “inquisitions.” The attacks on these poor scientists who dared to participate in communications that the Institute of Physics described as a perversion of science are considered to be a “coordinated attack” on the ideology of AGW. The whitewash investigations done by peers and colleagues are cited to illustrate just how underhanded these new calls for investigation must be. There is worry about how a Senator is using the power of his office to intimidate and harass.

The fact remains, as an inquiry in Great Britain concluded, there was indeed illegal activity. That inquiry said the only saving grace was that the obfuscation took enough time to allow the transgression to escape the statute of limitations by a quirk of the law. This initial review only illustrates that the stakes are very high. That is why it is necessary to use any method to impugn and disparage questions about the behavior involved as protecting the perversions of the process is a protection of self.

One of the phenomena that has become rather visible in the climate argument is about leadership. What happens is a standard logical fallacy. It assigns a fringe viewpoint as mainstream and uses that to typify the adherents to the viewpoint. Rick Moran demonstrates this in describing Al Gore’s recent op-ed.

Every time I read an amateur climate skeptic referring to the recent blizzards or cold temps as “proof” that global warming is a fraud, I cringe.

Here, it is a rationalization of the climate skeptic community and not a castigation as would be used from someone on the other side of the argument. The point is, though, that both sides have adherents who use this particular sort of logic. To ‘blame’ such logic on one group or another does not serve any purpose.

In order to make a point with more weight, it is the position of the leaders in a point of view that should be used to establish norms, not the fringe. Whether the issue is a stance on climate or on terrorism or on torture or on health care or whatever, integrity is best served by using more accurate representations.

SWAT – special weapons and tactics team ideas grew out of anti-terrorism efforts in the 70’s. It is about using overwhelming force in police work when there is a perceived threat.

a tactic more appropriate to soldiers on an actual battlefield. The mentality has no place on public streets, where it places “officer safety” above the duty to protect the innocent. This impression is reinforced when the officers and officials behind the raids are not held to account when things go tragically wrong.

Richard Diamond takes note of this growing paramilitarization in civil police forces at the Washington Times: Demilitarizing local police and provides examples of its consequences.

At one level, there is an effort to criminalize terrorism. On another, it is to make the police a military force. The issue is not simply one of ‘over there’ versus ‘my neighborhood.’ It is one of values. Does the agent of the state have more value than that of a citizen? Do we distinguish between citizens in their own environment and foreign nationals? Do the police, as agents of the state, deserve special privileges denied to citizens?

Would this case “Spur the needed adjustment in priorities away from the militarized attitudes and lack of accountability that fosters an “us versus them” divide between police and public. Such a change is needed for law enforcement to regain the trust and respect the profession once had in the community.” – or will it require yet another tragedy?

Jennifer Rubin says Yoo gets the last word. The source is Yoo’s response in the WSJ to the efforts to taint any and all parties on the ‘wrong side’ of the torture debate. The persecution by investigation is a tactic being used in modern politics in a way that has diminished its proper value as a means of dealing with corruption and misbehavior. Harassment using any tool as a political weapon degrades and demeans politics and creates long term implications. Whether it is Governor Palin and endless groundless ethics complaints or Mr. Yoo in a DOJ investigation about an opinion or even the medical liability lawsuit or other consumer ‘get rich quick via the court system’ schemes, we all pay the price.

this is not simply about the persecution of two fine lawyers. It’s not even about the untold damage done to the Justice Department, which may find it difficult to find top-flight attorneys willing to stake their careers and savings by rolling the dice that some future administration won’t second-guess and investigate them. No, as Yoo points out, it’s about stopping the Justice Department from actively interfering with the serious business of the fighting a war against Islamic terrorists.

These are tactics that are used when the established and accepted tactics don’t achieve desired outcomes. Those other tactics involve the time and effort to make a case that will sway sufficient voters to make desired choices and sufficient time and persistence to overcome the protections against abuse built into the system. So far, the protections have held. For modern politics, though, that only means that those protections must be worn away and diminished. That is why you hear legislators talking about changing the rules of procedure, debate about executive powers, judicial oligarchy and USOC vacancies, transparency, and bi-partisanship labels.

Hang on to your shorts!

NRO has the story Aloha Segregation:

A bill expected to pass the House today with overwhelming Democratic support would accomplish something peculiar for a liberal republic in the 21st century: It would partly disenfranchise a portion of one state’s residents, create a parallel government for those meeting a legislated criterion of ethnic purity, and would portend the transfer of public assets, land, and political power from those who fail to satisfy the standard of ethnic purity to those who do. For these reasons and many more, the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act richly deserves opposition.

It appears that the idea stems, in part, from the tribal reservations that are allowed to exist in the United States. The distinction is that those tribal reservations are the result of negotiations with defined political entities whereas the Hawaiian proposal is strictly ethnic.

Even if there had been a kind of collective ethnic sovereignty exercised by native Hawaiians, that sovereignty has long been extinguished: Sovereignty is a political fact, not a racial fact. The United States cannot enter into a relationship with the Hawaiian sovereign because no such sovereign exists. And it would take an odd and overgenerous reading of the Interstate Commerce Clause to imagine that Congress has the power to create a sovereign foreign nation through a legislative act.

The accommodations of the United States to its conquered peoples is one of the interesting contrasts the to allegations of imperialism. The real question is that of cultural incorporation. This has often happened in conquered lands by the need of the conquered peoples to survive – think of the French influence in England for an example. In the modern culture of the United States, it appears that this lesson of history is being set aside and the focus is on rendering cultures asunder rather than building them together.

It is an AP report at PhysOrg. Study: Warming to bring stronger hurricanes. The picture is a house with the roof ripped off by Hurricane Charley. The warning is dire: global warming will cause more disastrous hurricanes and the science is settled. “Outside experts praised the work.”

They just can’t help it. Scientists who worry about the public image of science should take heed.

The qualifiers are in the story if you look for them. — “But they say there’s not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.” — “The evidence is not strong enough that we could make some kind of statement” along those lines, Knutson said.

Then there’s the attempt to minimize and rationalize criticisms.

Lately, the IPCC series of reports on warming has been criticized for errors. Emanuel said the international climate panel gave “an accurate summary of science that existed at that point.”

The defense runs deep. They just can’t help it. Global Warming. Doom. Gloom. Disaster, Consensus. All from a single report. Does a scientists need to worry about his profession?

Jeremy Block provides a response to George Will and others who have noted the dissonance between claims predicting global catastrophe and the evidence at hand. It is if Block was looking in the mirror …

Those three words ‘he is wrong.’ are what first comes to mind as any self-respecting scientist reads his column. However, being based in logic and evidence, saying ‘he is wrong’ isn’t as alluring a narrative as a skilled rhetorician like Mr. Will can spin. It is, however, based in reality and supported by facts.

In order to come up with this flat out assertion, Block creates quite a long list of dismissing rather egregious phenomena. Whether is is a Peace Price to one who has done nothing (by Nobel Committee admission) to earn it to many reports claiming ‘peer review’ report that end up being from advocacy groups and outright wrong, to problems with data management, the simple three word conclusion Block seems to think is obvious seems to be rather hyperbolic itself.

The real problem is that there are many whose depth in examining ideas is as shallow as Brock’s and they will sympathize with his knee jerk reaction. There is a need to look in the mirror and examine one’s own ideas before attacking those of others.

Science News reports on a problem. Climate science: Credibility at risk, scientists say . “events have marred the reputations of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and perhaps science generally.”

The “Climate-gate emails” and concerns over Himalayan glacial-melt data in a 2007 IPCC report together served as “sort of a wake-up call,” McCarthy said. But a wake-up call that he and others initially all but ignored.

Why ignored? In part it may be that they don’t understand what it is that is actually causing a problem. The ‘community’ only saw some “bumbling behavior by well meaning, if overworked, scientists.” The brouhaha was blamed on people who were not grounded in science, especially climate science. The problem is seen as a PR problem. That perception in the climate research community may be changing but that change is taking its time and it will take its toll.

Procedures exist to minimize the likelihood that weak or unvetted data are used or that their strength is exaggerated. External reviewers are supposed to pore over the details and point to questionable statements or data. And in the case of the Himalayan glacier-melt statements, McCarthy said that the reviewers did highlight apparent problems. These challenges were simply ignored.

Not only was there the attempt to ignore problems, there were also behaviors closer to the problem.

Sharp argued that “openness, transparency and collective scrutiny of data are the best ways to ensure that errors or fraud are discovered and corrected.” … Without openness in the collection and handling of data, Sharp said, people will have no way of ensuring the accuracy or validity of data. But access requires more than just handing over collections of numbers, computer files or photos. Sharp said it may also require providing “metadata” – ancillary information, such as precise descriptions of the equipment used to collect data, the computer programs used to process information, or the filters used to enhance or extract information.

That, in turn, gets its rationalizations.

Indeed, Cicerone charged, some climate scientists “are now receiving requests that are bordering on harassment.” They’re being asked, he said, for all of the data that went into a publication, sometimes in addition to all data analyses, all equations used in interpretations, detailed descriptions of all statistical techniques, all computer programs used – even access to any physical samples. These are fishing expeditions. And the demands they make, he said, often “are simply not feasible or are too costly.”

Oh, the poor dears! They are being asked to come clean with what the basic values of science says should be on the surface. This is much like a science student being asked to turn in his lab notebook and expecting credibility with a ‘my dog ate it’ excuse. What does the teacher do when the student starts making accusations of “harassment” because the teacher expects the student to meet basic requirements? These guys are professors. They should be setting the example of the right way to do it, not the way students use to avoid responsibility for their actions.

So. What now? Well, let’s do another “climate-integrity summit where the research community rolls out an action plan.” Note the irony. The focus isn’t on transparency, fixing problems with data, resolving questions, and other standard science stuff, it is on creating a panel to study the PR problem. The time that such diversions could calm the public may have changed. It may just be that a tide is turning and the expectation for proper science is becoming impatient.

Overworked? For those billions in government grant money? Harassed? just because they are asked to show their work? — oh those poor dears, they suffer so much …

Dr. Sanity has a warning:

Watch for new, improved environmental fantasies to be foisted on the public, evan as the old one’s are exposed as distortions and delusions. This is easy to do, since the real goal of these fantasies are not really about helping humans–or the planet; they are rationalizations to exert control and dominance.

It is The Green Death that prompted this warning. That essay takes a look at a 1962 eviro-movement screed that resulted in many deaths. Silent Spring didn’t intentionally seek to cause widespread human suffering, but those who bought its story and eliminate a human pollution turned loose a malaria epidemic that has, by some estimates, caused more than sixty million deaths and much suffering.

The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst.

These sorts of ‘man is evil’ and will doom the planet prognosticating depends upon a gullibility.

Another way Silent Spring forecast the global-warming fraud was its insistence that readers ignore the simple evidence of reality around them.

Whether or not such prophets of doom are in it for power and glory, an ideological bent, or some other need of the self, the issue is that there are many who pick up the mantra and follow along without any skepticism, consideration of implications, or integrity in the matter. Therein is the problem to address. Some have thought education might be the answer but education is often turning into a following indoctrination. That must break or society will continue to cause much harm, death, impoverishment, and other human tragedy.

The moneyed interests are often used to impugn those who do not believe properly. Tom Bethell notes that money is indeed an issue but not necessarily as often accused. Indeed, it is the accusers rather than the accused who have questions to answer when it comes to financial matters (ht Orrin Judd). It is A Disgrace to Science.

It is also where other major fields of science stand today—at the mercy of a contrived consensus.
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Government funding has been the major subversive force. If you read Science, as I do, you see that the issue the magazine cares about above all others, and editorializes about week after week, is funding. Government funding. The constant concern about money means that Science and other journals feel obliged to keep up a drumbeat of articles that sustain the mood of crisis surrounding a given issue. Climate change is the leading illustration today, but there are others.
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COULD SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHY oil company money corrupts and government money does not? The government has now spent about $25 billion of our money in promoting climate scares. Oil companies have been reduced, pathetically, to telling us how “green” they are.

Since WW II, science has become a major governmental enterprise. That war marks the shift of funding for research from private to public sources. The reason for that shift was, to some extent, that research inquiries became large scale and needed capital and other resources that were not readily available in the private sector. The change in funding also changed the focus from research that would support innovation and invention towards research for altruistic or ideological ends.

Climate and weather research has been marked by the quest for ever larger (and more expensive) computers. Its original impetus for improving commerce efficiency and safety has changed to that of saving mankind from himself. Saving mankind is a thesis that can generate public money and that tends to distort the traditional goals of scientific activity.