So, I am back.  I intend to keep only to technical issues because a) I
have so little time now and b) it is useless to try to convince useful
idiots like <SNIP/> that they should wake up and smell the coffee (or
bomb material.)  :-)

Yep Denys shows that he is a true politician or used car-salesman.
FLIP-FLOPPING around.

He's good in his technicalk issues but otherwise .... (that I keep to
myself which he doesn't and that says it all)

a Michael ;-)


On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 08:22:49 -0500, Denys Beauchemin
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>In February, Wirt posted a message which started:
>More complaints from the know-nothing, liberal elite.
>
>"Preeminent Scientists Protest Bush Administration's Misuse Of Science."
>
>I offer the following article in response to Wirt, who once again called
>it right.  His article was indeed from the know-nothing, liberal elite.
>
>Denys
>
>Science Wars by Lowell Ponte.
>
>AMERICA IS TODAY FIGHTING TWO WARS, NOT ONE.  In addition to the war on
>terrorism, we are locked in a civil war over the nature and future of
>our society.
>
>As the Chinese military philosopher Sun-tzu spelled out 23 centuries ago
>in his classic The Art of War, such warfare is not confined to a distant
>battlefield. It is all-encompassing and pervades every aspect of our
>lives. It is fought in the classroom, with teachers subtly taking sides
>in what they teach. It is fought through the bias of reporters, actors,
>singers, preachers, activists for seemingly-unconnected causes,
>merchants, scholars and, of course, politicians.
>
>And as David Horowitz so rightly makes clear in his 2000 classic The Art
>of Political War, the Left in America is attacking on all these fronts
>in what is "Culture War" and more. If the Right fails to confront and
>defeat our enemies on all these battlefields, the America of Jefferson,
>Washington and Franklin could be destroyed.
>
>Politics, in other words, is not limited to the debates of lawmakers nor
>to elections in which the public votes every two years. Politics is now
>all-pervasive, injecting itself and playing an often-destructive role in
>areas of life we used to believe were a-political, clean and objective.
>
>Science, for example, once appeared to be the pure pursuit of truth and
>knowledge by priest-like men and women dressed in white garments.
>
>But last week two small groups of these priests - one from the Union of
>Concerned Scientists (UCS), the other from the less strident National
>Research Council (NRC) - launched transparently-political attacks on
>President George W. Bush.
>
>Sigmund Freud first coined the psychoanalytic term "projection" to
>describe those who accuse others of what they themselves do. A thief,
>for example, will tend to see others around him as thieves. And so it
>was that these two politicized groups accused President Bush of
>injecting "politics" into American science.
>
>Science, you need to understand, is in America today a mostly-socialist
>institution - and one of the most "politicized" realms in our society.
>Most science is now done with government grants or at government
>institutions such as state universities.
>
>The overriding agenda of nearly all science is to make government bigger
>and its spending on science more lavish. Any President who aims to cut
>taxes and reduce the size of government is, therefore, by definition the
>enemy of our scientific establishment.
>
>To understand science and scientists in America today, you need to think
>of them as existing in the now-extinct Soviet Union.  This was first
>brought home to me many years ago, when I was a climate specialist about
>to deliver a paper at the First International Conference on Iceberg
>Utilization.
>
>After listening for several minutes to an obviously-illogical discourse
>by another speaker, I turned to my seatmate and asked how many of our
>colleagues would correct the last point the speaker made.  "Nobody will
>correct him," the scientist replied grimly, "because that's the man who
>controls who gets all the National Science Foundation grants in this
>field."
>
>Every field of science in America today has its Commissars, the
>politically-chosen bosses who control the government grants. Each field
>has its own top journals in which scientists building a career in that
>specialty are expected to publish their work, and each journal has a top
>editor. These power-brokers almost always have their own biases. If a
>young scientist wants promotions and salary-increases, he or she will
>conform to those well-known Commissar biases. To do contrary research is
>to risk being dismissed as a heretic or as Politically Incorrect.
>
>In the field of climatology, for example, the official orthodoxy since
>the 1920s has been that, all else being equal, the carbon dioxide
>released by burning fossil fuel should be causing global warming. Woe
>onto the young scientist who, e.g., dared point out that such burning
>also releases smoke and smog, which reduce sunlight reaching Earth's
>surface, which might explain periods like 1940-1978 during which fossil
>fuel burning increased while much of our world was measurably cooling.
>
>The path to individual career success, and to more government funding
>for institutions such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research
>(NCAR), has been to do studies that supported this Greenhouse Theory of
>global warming.
>
>"We ought to 'ride' the global warming issue," said unctuous Senator Tim
>Wirth (D.-Colorado) nearly 30 years ago, "because even if the theory
>eventually proves wrong, it will lead us to make changes we should make
>anyway." The changes sought by Wirth, of course, included vastly higher
>taxes, more controls on private industry, and a denigration of
>capitalism.
>
>But because Democrats like Wirth for many decades controlled the
>government budgets of institutions like NCAR - and those who fattened on
>these government budgets were the Commissars who decided the fate of
>young scientists - this pro-Greenhouse Effect bias has become deeply
>entrenched. Most scientists who dared voice contrary evidence or
>theories were driven out of climatology or into the wilderness of
>academic backwaters.
>
>This restriction of free thought and expression is not limited to
>climate scientists. As I witnessed during 15 years as Roving Science
>Editor at Reader's Digest, such political Commissars and their biases
>largely control most fields of science in America today. Our scientists
>are only slightly freer than were Soviet scientists during the reign of
>intellectual terror imposed by Stalin's eccentric science czar Trofim
>Lysenko.
>
>The prominent scientists who last week hypocritically accused President
>Bush of "politicizing" American science were, for the most part, these
>very Commissars.
>
>The dirty little secret the Leftist press did not tell you is that our
>science was already politicized decades ago. The current war is merely
>over whose politics will prevail. Will it be the present ruling
>Establishment whose Big Government agenda parallels that of the
>Democratic Party? Or will it be the more decentralized, open science
>advocated by President Bush that in many areas dispels dogma and permits
>a wider diversity of scientific views to be recognized and heard?
>
>The list of scientists rounded up by the Union of Concerned Scientists
>to sign its "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking" letter
>attacking President Bush looks impressive to most people. What you need
>to remember is that scientists are human beings, too. They have
>political and ideological views. They have selfish interests that
>influence their opinions, just like everybody else.
>
>And outside their narrow field of expertise, scientists are often no
>wiser than the drunk at the end of the bar in your local saloon. In fact
>they are often more foolish than this drunk, because those with the
>power of science Commissars often become intoxicated with the notion
>that knowledge and intellect in one field empowers them to speak with
>the authority of gods in all fields.
>
>Because President Bush has been cutting and redirecting scientific
>budgets, he is viewed as a mortal threat by many scientists. For some,
>signing this attack may have been a matter of idealism - "My field of
>research is vitally important to humankind, and President Bush should
>get a 'brush back' pitch to make him more aware of its importance."
>
>For others, signing this attack might have been outright selfishness -
>"Mr. Bush is favoring policies that will lead to big cuts in my personal
>research, or that will reduce the importance and power of the field
>where I am Commissar.  I'll make him pay a political price for this."
>(This was the tenor of the National Research Council report, an almost
>direct demand for more taxpayer money and preference for certain
>research.)
>
>And for some, signing the anti-Bush attack was probably outright
>partisanship - "I'm going to use my position to smear this stupid cowboy
>and cost him votes in November. How dare he take away my budget and give
>it to other scientists, or tell me to include the views of scientists I
>disagree with in the journals and grants I control! I want him replaced
>with a Democrat like me!"
>
>One familiar name among the signers of this political attack is Paul
>Ehrlich of Stanford University. In his field of expertise Ehrlich is a
>giant. His expertise, like that of the late Harvard neo-Marxist Stephen
>Jay Gould, is as the world's leading biological authority on certain
>species of bugs.
>
>Trouble is, Ehrlich has the delusion that being a bug scientist makes
>him an expert in many other fields. He authored the sky-is-falling
>doomsday book The Population Bomb nearly 40 years ago that predicted
>overpopulation would by now have destroyed our planet through famine and
>global war. Like Karl Marx, his predictions have proven false again and
>again. And yet hubris and lust for the limelight prompts Ehrlich to keep
>thrusting himself into political issues.
>
>In 1984 Ehrlich joined anti-nuclear activist Carl Sagan and other
>politicized scientists in authoring The Cold and the Dark: The World
>After Nuclear War, which claimed that nuclear war would plunge our
>planet into the ice age of "nuclear winter." Ehrlich, a bug scientist,
>was putting himself forward as an expert on global climate, nuclear
>weapons and nuclear war.
>
>Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist and expert on other planets, created a
>computer model of Earth to demonstrate "nuclear winter," and the world
>media dutifully reported his claims as fact.
>
>Dr. Stephen Schneider, then at NCAR as Deputy Head of the Climate
>Project and now at Stanford University, wondered why Sagan bothered to
>create his own computer model. "We would have been glad to let Sagan
>simulate nuclear war on NCAR's Supercomputer model," Dr. Schneider told
>me.
>
>But when Schneider tried to duplicate Sagan's results on the NCAR
>computers, he discovered that "the most we could replicate was a little
>bit of 'nuclear autumn,' a bit more frost in a few places."
>
>Upon examining the model Sagan had shown to the world press to "prove"
>the danger of "nuclear winter," Schneider found it was of a barren ball
>of rock with no mountains and no oceans. Oceans, as both Schneider and
>Sagan knew, act as gigantic energy flywheels that moderate temperature,
>helping cool adjacent continents in summer and warm them in winter.
>
>Sagan, in other words, knowingly committed deliberate scientific fraud.
>He cooked up a phony computer model to concoct the phony "nuclear
>winter" results he wanted for political reasons.  He avoided the
>already-available NCAR computer climate model precisely because he knew
>it would not produce the "nuclear winter" he wanted to sell to gullible
>journalists and an ignorant public. And were he still alive, Sagan would
>doubtless be among the signers, like Ehrlich, of this letter accusing
>President Bush of politicizing science.
>
>The Union of Concerned Scientists letter rests on a larger February 2004
>document entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation
>into the Bush Administration's Misuse of Science.
>
>As you can guess from the word "Misuse" in its title, this
>pseudo-scientific report is an entirely one-sided attack. As you would
>expect from the rulers of today's socialist science establishment, it
>allows not one word, not one "devil's advocate" sentence to give the
>Bush Administration's view from the other side. It is an unrelieved
>screed of attack and political vituperation with no pretense of balance
>or fairness.
>
>The document is simply, therefore, a lie. You can look at its first
>sentence - "The U.S. government runs on information.." - and find
>yourself saying "No, the government runs on money, and your real
>objection to President Bush is that he is beginning to disperse the
>government science budget in ways that remove money from the monopoly of
>longtime establishment Commissars."
>
>The authors are furious that in an Environmental Protection Agency memo
>on climate change, "White House officials demanded so many qualifying
>words such as 'potentially' and 'may' that the result would have been to
>insert 'uncertainty.where there is essentially none.'" (page six)
>
>But this has been the problem all along with Greenhouse theory. Almost
>all climatologists bend their knee to the theory, but few have agreed
>that indisputable evidence in the form of measured global warming (at
>the predicted rates and in the predicted places) have yet given a clear
>"signal" that confirms the theory.
>
>Those like former Senator Wirth, eager to "ride" the Greenhouse theory
>to higher taxes and socialist policies, have been furious with genuine
>scientists who insist on putting in those qualifiers. Those qualifiers
>mean that global warming is not a sure thing, and that therefore radical
>policies to deal with it are premature.
>
>What this attack on President Bush reveals is that he is the genuine
>scientist who wants extreme claims to be carefully qualified and
>circumscribed.  And it reveals that those attacking Bush are
>irresponsible, unscientific, and motivated by politics instead of a
>sincere search for facts.
>
>"The Bush administration went further by distorting the U.S. Centers for
>Disease Control's (CDC) science-based performance measures to test
>whether abstinence-only programs were proving effective," says the
>report (page 10).  Translation: Clinton Administration left-overs at CDC
>were prevented from cooking the books to discredit "abstinence-only"
>research.
>
>Oddly enough, I do not remember the Union of Concerned Scientists
>objecting when President Bill Clinton ordered creation of a whole
>research section at CDC to study injuries to "children" caused by
>firearms - even though guns by no stretch of imagination can be called a
>disease.
>
>Nor did UCS object when this Clinton political project, obviously
>intended to concoct a medical basis for further firearms control and
>confiscation, put out a study of how many "children" had been killed by
>guns - and defined "children" as those up to 22 years of age. This was
>done, of course, because almost no small children die from gunfire - and
>so the logical parameters of the study were gimmicked up by including
>more young adults killed in inner city drug turf war shootouts.
>
>The Union of Concerned Scientists, a Leftist advocacy group, does not
>like sexual abstinence. To do a CDC study that might give it legitimacy
>as a way to prevent sexually transmitted diseases (which new research
>suggests will infect 50 percent or more of young Americans) is
>politically incorrect. But UCS Leftists hate guns in citizen hands. A
>rigged, gimmicked CDC study wholly unrelated to disease that could
>create a pretext to outlaw guns is politically correct - and that is
>ordered by a Democratic president - hence is not a political "misuse" of
>science.
>
>The Bush Administration applied pressure to "make it harder to list
>threatened species" under the Endangered Species Act (page fourteen).
>Honest researchers will remind you that the Clinton-Gore Administration
>tried to add 3,000 new species, mostly bugs, to this act - and to make
>it impossible to remove any species that was listed, even if it proved
>no longer to be "endangered." Had this become law, it would put every
>inch of private property in the United States under the developmental
>control of Federal bureaucrats.
>
>Less than three years ago, two Federal wildlife inspectors were caught
>planting tufts of hair from "endangered" species in Northwestern forests
>scheduled for logging. Their obvious intent was to have these
>illegitimate specimens "found" and used as a pretext to block the
>logging. Such Federal jobs have been filled by environmental enthusiasts
>and political activists, an unknown number of whom could use fraudulent
>science to achieve their political objectives.
>
>Most of the "endangered species" listed under the Endangered Species Act
>are not even species - they are subspecies. The "Northern Spotted Owl"
>that blocked logging in much of the Pacific Northwest is a virtually
>identical subspecies of the "Mexican Spotted Owl," of which a very
>unendangered eight million live in the Southwestern United States and
>northern Mexico.
>
>How different does a subspecies have to be to gain protected status? In
>theory no two individuals are identical, not even genetic twins, so
>every living thing on the planet could be deemed the patriarch or
>matriarch of a future new species.
>
>Every claim in this anti-Bush study could be dissected and disputed in
>similar fashion. But the study gives only one side, depending on the
>Leftist bias and general ignorance of the media to echo the claim that
>Bush is politicizing science. In truth, Bush is exorcising the
>monolithic control of socialist scientists who politicized science long
>ago.
>
>One good step forward for freedom of thought and scientific integrity:
>remove every dollar of Federal money from those who have traded their
>scientific objectivity for political partisanship by signing this
>anti-Bush document. They, as Carl Sagan did, have ceased to be
>scientists and become mere politicians.
>
>Another recent story of science and politics has echoed through the
>American and British media. "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: Climate Change
>Will Destroy Us," screamed the headline of last Sunday's Observer,
>sister publication of England's Laborite Guardian newspaper.
>
>This news story told of a "secret" Pentagon report that forecast rioting
>and nuclear war caused by rapid climate change. This report in fact had
>never been "secret," nor was this story news - just a rehash of a
>similarly breathless piece by David Stipp in the January 26 issue of
>Fortune Magazine.
>
>The actual report, entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its
>Implications for United States National Security, was done for the
>Department of Defense last October as a contingency study. To prepare
>for the unexpected, our government commissions a wide and wild range of
>studies into hypothetical risks. I used to be a think tank researcher
>working on the potential risks of high tech terrorism, weather-climate
>manipulation, and other contingencies.
>
>"The purpose of this report is to imagine the unthinkable - to push the
>boundaries of current research on climate change," write futurologists
>Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the Global Business Network, neither
>of whom are climatologists. "We have created a climate change scenario
>that although not the most likely, is plausible, and would challenge
>United States national security in ways that should be considered
>immediately."
>
>What they produced in exchange for tax dollars, in other words, was a
>low-probability, high-risk scenario that ought to be considered.  No,
>Chicken Little, the sky is not yet falling as Leftist journalists would
>have you believe.
>
>In fact, very little is new in this report. Most of its ideas and
>analyses can be found in my 1976 book The Cooling, published by
>Prentice-Hall (with forward by U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell and preface
>by University of Wisconsin climatologist Dr. Reid A. Bryson.) The
>Cooling, I'm told, has been used as a textbook at the National Defense
>College to expand the thinking of some of America's highest level
>military planners.
>
>Come to think of it, I gave Peter Schwartz a copy of my book sometime
>around 1979 or 1980, when we spent a delightful afternoon chatting in
>his office then at Stanford Research Institute. He is a brilliant fellow
>whose scenarios enriched such Hollywood movies as "War Games,"
>"Sneakers," "Deep Impact," and "Minority Report." I'm delighted that he
>and a few safely-tenured maverick scientists have carried forward and
>expanded the analysis I first laid out of how global warming could
>plunge the world into rapid global cooling, even a sudden ice age.
>
>Such cutting-edge and innovative thinking should also be done by
>America's brightest young scientists, not just those of us Ph.D.s who
>worked as futurists in the think tank community. We can no longer afford
>to lock our best minds into the prison of Leftist conformity that
>American science has become.
>
>By breaking the stranglehold of today's socialist conformity Commissars,
>President Bush may be able to restore a healthy diversity of ideas and
>freedom of thought to American science.  This is a war for freedom of
>thought and ideas, and those fighting for liberation are in and on the
>Right.
>
>Thinkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
>You have a world to win!
>
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