The Decline and Fall of Science

What has happened to “science”? Does it exist anymore or has the pressure on professors to “publish or perish” become so intense that the long and arduous effort necessary to do effective research is being bypassed in favor of “statistical” studies many of which are simply data mining activities with no scientific basis. Worse we are being bombarded by “studies” that are so ridiculous that one must wonder if they were intended as joke or a satirical comment on other similar studies. One of these ridiculous studies was recently published that purported that the brains of political liberals were more developed and had greater reasoning ability than the brains of political conservatives. That isn’t a joke, so stop laughing – this was a serious study conducted by a --- dare I say it --- professor --- now don’t roll your eyes like that – he really was a professor at NYU.

This was a real “scientific” research project that consisted of showing students a card with a design and then flashing that design on the screen for a tenth of a second and the student had to push a button if the designs matched. This experiment was divided into two phases. In phase one the designs matched every time and in phase two they never matched. The objective of the experiment was to determine the ability of the individual to make snap judgments in limited time. Once the results were tabulated it seems that all of the students got 100% right in the first phase but in phase two those students who professed to be “liberal” only make errors 34% of the time while those students who classified themselves as “conservative” made errors 44% of the time, thus demonstrating that the “liberal” brain is more capable of making quick and accurate decisions than the “conservative” brain. Stop laughing – really now – I did not make that up. Furthermore, this experiment was based on a total of 43 students with half (please stop laughing – I KNOW that 43 is a prime number so there wasn’t an even division) of the students being selected from a West Coast University and the other half (maybe they used two midgets and classed them as one person – you never can tell when it comes to professors) were from Eastern Universities. Where they found conservatives in these bastions of learning and group think is beyond me, but the professor assures us this was a balanced study.

Of course this entire exercise – which you can be assured, was paid for in some way by the taxpayers – is completely laughable. Not only is the total number of students studied miniscule to the point of being statistically irrelevant the selection of students only from East and West Coast universities further compromised whatever this was. Of course the difference of 10% points on such a small sample further compromises any the activity but the most ridiculous point was the conclusion that liberal students are more capable of making considered and reasoned decisions than conservative students who simply react like trained monkeys. This same experiment run with different students across the country and incorporating smaller colleges and universities, including military cadets, would undoubtedly yield a different set of results – most likely showing that there is no difference in the brains of people or how they use them. Although the brains of college professors might actually be smaller and more ossified.

This brings us to the other popular liberal cause and that is global warming, which has replaced the hysteria over global cooling so those giant liberal brains have now connected the two and assure us that global warming is driving global cooling and the warmer it gets the more it will cool – or is that vice versa – the colder it gets the warmer it will become. It really doesn’t matter because none of these liberal cause apparatchiks really research any of this stuff anyway. The thing that amazes me is it is widely believed that much of the Earth was once covered by ice. This was called the “ice age” and there appear to have been several of them. During this period animals grew long hairy coats and in spite of PETA the human let their hair grow and wore fur clothes which they took from these poor defenseless animals. This tendency to grow long hair in times of stress can be observed on most college campuses – especially on the East and west Coasts.

However, the ice ages did occur and glaciers did appear to have covered much of North America. The long haired animals seem to have disappeared along with – are you ready for this astonishing observation -- the ice!! The ice sheets and glaciers are gone and we are left to speculate on where they went. Of course we are left with only two possibilities migration or melting – I choose melting. Now I guess we could assume that all of those cave people built big fires to melt all of that ice but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of that while there is evidence that the entire climate got warmer. Sort of a Paleolithic global warming that occurred seemingly without any human assistance since the earliest of these occurred before humans graced the Planet. In fact, there is evidence that this warming was so great that Antarctica was NOT covered by ice.

Of course these are the inconvenient facts not addressed by the deep thinkers who are determined to indict Western Civilization for all of the ills of the world as they demand The US sign the Kyoto treaty before it is too late. What they aren’t telling you is that the Kyoto Treaty will not reduce CO2 nor will it have any impact on Global Warming at all, it just redistributes who can make the CO2 so the total remains the same. Just remember when you hear these ridiculous claims that they are coming from the same universities who gave us Ward Churchill and the scientific proof that liberals are smarter.

Conspiracy and Intelligence

It is worth noting that conspiracy theories abound just as they always have but recently they seem to have exploded into a full time activity for people who seem to have nothing better to do with their time. Actually as it turns out that isn’t precisely true because many of these conspiracy addicts are young people who were infected with there inability to think clearly while still in college. As we already know the University System is stuffed to the brim with “professors” like Ward Churchill who have never actually held a job, have never had to make a profit, who have never served in the military or served their country in any way. These are the dregs of the Flower Power generation, the men (?) who remained in college with a deferment hoping to outlast the Viet Nam War. Unfortunately that war dragged on and on in spite of their best efforts to derail it. Ultimately they succeeded with the help of the media and such illustrious patriots as Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda, and Walter Cronkheit, but by the time the war was over they had their Phd’s in political science, sociology, black studies, are some similar subject, certainly not degrees in any challenging subject like mathematics because they had to maintain their grade point average in order to keep their deferments. So this gaggle of patriots found themselves in post-doctoral work and holding positions as professors at their universities because they had no skills to sell in the job market. The common thread with these university whack jobs is their universal hatred of the military, of capitalism, the government, and of course anything that even smells like competition.

However, it is their universal hatred of the military and mistrust of the government that they have conveyed to their students over the last 30 years. With the accessibility of the internet we now find these young people sitting at their desks surfing the internet while they slave for some capitalist pig, so they don’t see their failure to give a days work for a days pay as stealing, it is merely redistributing the wealth and this is their share. But these are the people who create these wild conspiracies out of thin air because they cannot accept that any poor, down trodden, non-American, would actually attack America unless manipulated by that cabal of arch criminals – the CIA. Therefore, Al Qaeda is either a totally made up organization or if real it is simply a shadow organization being used by the CIA, the Pentagon, and oil magnates to gain control of the Middle Eastern oil fields. So logically (in their clouded and immature minds) the destruction of the World Trade Center could not possibly have been accomplished by some ignorant goat herders from Saudi Arabia.

The educational background of these Saudi’s was obviously made up by the CIA because no educated person would be capable of such a crime. So while these ignorant peasants may have actually flown airplanes into the twin towers, the actual destruction was an implosion carried out by the federal government under the direction of the administration. The objective of this entire exercise was to trigger the invasion of Iraq for the purpose of seizing control of the oil wealth of Iraq. To these simple minds America is imperialist and Americans are evil grasping people bent on taking control of the world’s wealth. They see any reduction in taxes as “welfare” for the rich and any legislation aimed at giving unearned money to the “poor” as the redistribution of wealth and morally justified. The fact that most of these theorists do not earn a great deal, may in fact be unemployed, and certainly do not hold positions of any responsibility is ignored as other members of this lightly educated elite rush to their support.

To actually believe any of these conspiracy theories you must believe that the American Military is morally corrupt. That the senior military officers would commit crimes like the destruction of the Twin Towers without regard to the law or the morality of such an act. You must believe that the Pentagon was destroyed – not by an airplane being flown into it but by a missile launched by the military against itself. What happened to the missing plane and people is ignored because these theorists were never taught critical thinking in college. The Ward Churchill’s of the universities do not encourage questioning – just belief.

The real irony is that these same people carry signs and placards calling President Bush a stupid man and that he and his administration are hiding these vast secrets from the American people. First, off President Bush has been consistently “misunderestimated” by his critics. I am reminded of the Emperor Claudius who played the fool to survive and outlived all of his smarter relatives. President Bush uses these ignorant fools to great advantage and makes them seen even dumber than they are. Secondly, no administration since Washington’s has been able to keep a secret longer than it takes to call the newspaper. If any part of these conspiracies were even partially true it would be all over the New York Times and Washington Post. The reality is that it is our premier universities, the tenure system, and the force of groupthink in those classrooms that are our greatest threat today.