Government & Tax $$$ Drive Scientific Opinion

April 26, 2012 - by: Gary DeMar

In 2006, then climate change enthusiast James Lovelock believed that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” The 92-year-old scientist is now in the recanting phase of his life. He admits that some of the language in his 2006 book Revenge of Gaia had been over the top. He admits that if he were writing today he would be more cautious.

It’s a little late now that laws are being implemented to curtail what was said to be “scientific fact.”

More than a century ago, John William Draper made the unsupported claim that scientific “opinions on every subject are continually liable to modification, from the irresistible advance of human knowledge.”[1] This wasn’t true then and it’s not true today.

In reality, many new scientific theories are often opposed by scientists for any number of reasons. There is continued scientific debate over the causes or even the reality of human-caused global warming, whether oil is a “fossil” fuel or a renewable abiotic resource,[2] the medical benefits of embryonic stem-cells, and much more. A lot of it has to do with grant money.

These debates can be downright hostile as charges and counter charges are lobbed from scientific strongholds where the claim is made that there is no room for debate. Consider the Inquisition-like reaction to those who question the certainty of global warming:

Scientists who dissent from the alarmism [over global warming] have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis. . . . In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.[3]

Some have gone so far as to propose that “global warming deniers” are aiding and abetting a global holocaust and should be prosecuted. Australian columnist Margo Kingston “has proposed outlawing ‘climate change denial.’ ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial,’ she wrote. ‘Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’ Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the ‘global warming . . . Holocaust.’”[4] These arguments are being made by those within the secular scientific community. Follow the money.

There’s a new Inquisition in operation. If you don’t hold to the agreed-upon theories, then you will not be hired, and if you already have a position, there is a good chance you will lose it if you express your opinion, especially if that opinion goes against a theory that might jeopardize money that flows from government grants. Stephen Jay Gould has written: “The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.”[5] Scientists are just like everybody else. They want the same things.

We shouldn’t be surprised that climate scientists might fudge the evidence to keep the grant money coming in. Who’s really getting harmed? Anyway, the kids need new shoes and an investment portfolio so they can get into the best universities to learn how to game the system.

Gary Sutton, writing in an online article for Forbes, makes the point:

 

You can’t blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed’s mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today’s scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.[6]

Of course, they can be blamed when they claim that they are doing real science, there is no contrary evidence, and what contrary evidence they do find they suppress it. So the next time someone dogmatically asserts that the majority of scientists believe in Global Warming, ask your antagonist how much grant money he’s getting?

Notes:


1.John William Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875), vi. [↩]


2.Jerome R. Corsi and Craig R. Smith, Black Gold Stranglehold (Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2005). [↩]


3.Richard Lindsen, “Climate of Fear: Global-Warming Alarmists Intimidate Dissenting Scientists into Silence,” The Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2006): www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 [↩]


4.Brendan O’Neill, “Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech” (October 6, 2006): www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1782/ [↩]


5.Stephen Jay Gould, “In the Mind of the Beholder,” Natural History (February 1994), 103:14. [↩]


6.Gary Sutton, “The Fiction of Climate Science,” Forbes.com (December 4, 2009). [↩]

http://godfatherpolitics.com/4900/the-new-inquisition-against-scientists-who-disagree-with-theories-that-have-the-support-of-the-government-and-tax-dollars/

Critical Race Theory Pushed in Omaha and Nation's Public Schools

“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” 
- Obama

With Breitbart's release of the elusive "Obama/Derrick Bell's Critical Race Theory" video on March 8th, it has come to national attention the administration's push to introduce "Critical Race Theory" (aka: Racist Indoctrination) into public school systems across the country.

Yesterday, Breitbart.com reported on a group known as Pacific Educational Group (PEG) who, with the approval of the Obama administration, and under the guise of closing achievement gaps between black and white students, is promoting teaching methods that discourage “black and brown” students from conforming to an inherently “white” -- and therefore racist -- curriculum. PEG also encourages teachers to conform to the presumed cultural backgrounds of students, rather than focusing on norms of assessment and accountability.

A promotional video for PEG explains that the organization targets “white culture” as the source of the problems that minority students face.

Critical Race Theory, which began at the margins of the legal academy, has been picked up by race-obsessed radicals and is being woven deeper into the fabric of government education--with Obama’s apparent blessing, and at taxpayer expense.

Unfortunately, Omaha does not escape the racist agenda.

Many are already aware of the push by the OPS system to begin indoctrination of students and staff. The school district has already spent more than $130,000 in taxpayer-funded federal stimulus money to purchase 8,000 copies of a book pushing racial discrimination, "The Cultural Proficiency Journey".

The book, being pushed by the Progressive Research Institute of Nebraska contends that only those educators who acknowledge the existence of white privilege in America, that "white" is a culture in America and that race "is a definer for social and economic status" can reach proficiency. Those who score poorly on a worksheet are asked in the book what they will do "to align yourself with the values expressed."

Karen Abrams, board president of the Progressive Research Institute of Nebraska, challenged OPS to implement culturally proficient practices throughout its system including hiring more teachers who reflect their students' ethnicities.

read more

It is evident that indoctrination isn't exclusive to our colleges and universities any longer.

Bias and bigotry in academia

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=181357

July 19, 2010
Pat Buchanan

A decade ago, activist Ron Unz conducted a study of the ethnic and religious composition of the student body at Harvard.

Blacks and Hispanics, Unz found, were then being admitted to his alma mater in numbers approaching their share of the population.

And who were the most underrepresented Americans at Harvard?

White Christians and ethnic Catholics. Though two-thirds of the U.S. population then, they had dropped to one-fourth of the student body.

Comes now a more scientific study from Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford to confirm that a deep bias against the white conservative and Christian young of America is pervasive at America's elite colleges and Ivy League schools.

Wake up! This is the reality of what Christian students face in the secular world of academia.

The Espenshade-Radford study "draws from ... the National Study of College Experience ... gathered from eight highly competitive private colleges and universities (entering freshman SAT scores: 1360)," writes Princeton Professor Russell K. Nieli, who has summarized the findings:

Elite college admissions officers may prattle about "diversity," but what they mean is the African-American contingent on campus should be 5 percent to 7 percent, with Hispanics about as numerous.

However, "an estimated 40 percent to 50 percent of those categorized as black are Afro-Caribbean or African immigrants, or the children of such immigrants," who never suffered segregation or Jim Crow.

To achieve even these percentages, however, the discrimination against white and Asian applicants, because of the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, is astonishing.

As Nieli puts it, "Being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white ... equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1,600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310-point SAT advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points."

"To have the same chance of gaining admission as a black student with a SAT score of 1100, a Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have 1230, a white student a 1410 and an Asian student a 1550."

Was this what the civil-rights revolution was all about – requiring kids whose parents came from Korea, Japan or Vietnam to get a perfect SAT score of 1600 to be given equal consideration with a Jamaican or Kenyan kid who got an 1150? Is this what it means to be an Ivy League progressive?

What are the historic and moral arguments for discriminating in favor of kids from Angola and Argentina over kids whose parents came from Poland and Vietnam?

There is yet another form of bigotry prevalent among our academic elite that is a throwback to the snobbery of the WASPs of yesterday. While Ivy League recruiters prefer working-class to middle-class black kids with the same test scores, the reverse is true with white kids.

White kids from poor families who score as well as white kids from wealthy families – think George W. Bush – not only get no break, they seem to be the most undesirable and unwanted of all students.

Though elite schools give points to applicants for extracurricular activities, especially for leadership roles and honors, writes Nieli, if you played a lead role in Future Farmers of America, the 4-H Clubs or junior ROTC, leave it off your resume or you may just be blackballed. "Excelling in these activities is 'associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds on admissions.'"

Writes Nieli, there seems an unwritten admissions rule at America's elite schools: "Poor Whites Need Not Apply."

For admissions officers at our top private and public schools, diversity is "a code word" for particular prejudices.

For these schools are not interested in a diversity that would include "born-again Christians from the Bible belt, students from Appalachia and other rural and small-town areas, people who have served in the U.S. military, those who have grown up on farms or ranches, Mormons, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses, lower- and middle-class Catholics, working-class 'white ethnics,' social and political conservatives, wheelchair users, married students, married students with children or older students just starting into college and raising children."

"Students in these categories," writes Nieli, "are often very rare at the most competitive colleges, especially the Ivy League."

"Lower-class whites prove to be all-around losers" at the elite schools. They are rarely accepted. Lower-class Hispanics and blacks are eight to 10 times more likely to get in with the same scores.

That such bigotry is pervasive in 2010 at institutions that preen about how progressive they are is disgusting. That a GOP which purports to represents Middle America, whose young are bearing the brunt of this bigotry, has remained largely silent is shameful.

Many of these elite public and private colleges and universities benefit from U.S. tax dollars through student loans and direct grants. The future flow of those tax dollars should be made contingent on Harvard and Yale ending racial practices that went out at Little Rock Central High in 1957.


Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.