Re: Misleading information on how clean nuclear energy is

In article <memo.20051023075713.1004E@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Alan) wrote:

> In article <memo.20051023075053.1004D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Alan) wrote:
>
> > President Bush informed the nation, during a press conference, he might
> > seek to use the U.S. military to quarantine parts of the nation if there is
> > a serious outbreak of the deadly avian flu that has killed millions of
> > chickens and 60-some people in Southeast Asia.
>
> And this is the good bit. 60 people who have supposedly died of "Bird Flu"
> but exactly how many people around the world die of some kind of flu every
> day?
>
> *s****
>
> Hey, some Americans will buy any bull*** story as Bush turns America into a
> prison camp.
>
> *s****

http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html

Why Politicized Science is Dangerous by Michael Crichton
(Excerpted from State of Fear)

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis,
and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and
celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished
philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is
reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high
school classrooms.

I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to
prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston
Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and
Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it
included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret
Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford
University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and
hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the
Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was
built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis
was passed in state from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if
Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding
the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were
shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant.
But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually
pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in
the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to
the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who
were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But
it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are
not repeated.

The theory of eugenics postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the
deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as
rapidly as the inferior ones --- the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates,
the unfit, and the "feeble minded." Francis Galton, a respected British
scientist, first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken far beyond
anything he intended. They were adopted by science-minded Americans, as well as
those who had no interest in science but who were worried about the immigration
of inferior races early in the twentieth century --- "dangerous human pests" who
represented "the rising tide of imbeciles" and who were polluting the best of
the human race.

The eugenicists and the immigrationists joined forces to put a stop to this. The
plan was to identify individuals who were feeble-minded --- Jews were agreed to
be largely feeble-minded, but so were many foreigners, as well as blacks --- and
stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.

As Margaret Sanger said, "Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the
good is an extreme cruelty ? there is not greater curse to posterity than that
of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles." She spoke of the
burden of caring for "this dead weight of human waste."

Such views were widely shared. H.G. Wells spoke against "ill-trained swarms of
inferior citizens." Theodore Roosevelt said that "Society has no business to
permit degenerates to reproduce their kind." Luther Burbank" "Stop permitting
criminals and weaklings to reproduce." George Bernard Shaw said that only
eugenics could save mankind.

There was overt racism in this movement, exemplified by texts such as "The
Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy" by American author Lothrop
Stoddard. But, at the time, racism was considered an unremarkable aspect of the
effort to attain a marvelous goal --- the improvement of humankind in the
future. It was this avant-garde notion that attracted the most liberal and
progressive minds of a generation. California was one of twenty-nine American
states to pass laws allowing sterilization, but it proved the
most-forward-looking and enthusiastic --- more sterilizations were carried out
in California than anywhere else in America.

Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation, and later by the
Rockefeller Foundation. The latter was so enthusiastic that even after the
center of the eugenics effort moved to Germany, and involved the gassing of
individuals from mental institutions, the Rockefeller Foundation continued to
finance German researchers at a very high level. (The foundation was quiet about
it, but they were still funding research in 1939, only months before the onset
of World War II.)

Since the 1920s, American eugenicists had been jealous because the Germans had
taken leadership of the movement away from them. The Germans were admirably
progressive. They set up ordinary-looking houses where "mental defectives" were
brought and interviewed one at a time, before being led into a back room, which
was, in fact, a gas chamber. There, they were gassed with carbon monoxide, and
their bodies disposed of in a crematorium located on the property.

Eventually, this program was expanded into a vast network of concentration camps
located near railroad lines, enabling the efficient transport and of killing ten
million undesirables.

After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a
eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the
attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention
it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some
argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form.

But in retrospect, three points stand out. First, despite the construction of
Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, despite the efforts of universities and the
pleadings of lawyers, there was no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact,
nobody at that time knew what a gene really was. The movement was able to
proceed because it employed vague terms never rigorously defined.
"Feeble-mindedness" could mean anything from poverty to illiteracy to epilepsy.
Similarly, there was no clear definition of "degenerate" or "unfit."

Second, the eugenics movement was really a social program masquerading as a
scientific one. What drove it was concern about immigration and racism and
undesirable people moving into one's neighborhood or country. Once again, vague
terminology helped conceal what was really going on.

Third, and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both the United
States and Germany did not mount any sustained protest. Quite the contrary. In
Germany scientists quickly fell into line with the program. Modern German
researchers have gone back to review Nazi documents from the 1930s. They
expected to find directives telling scientists what research should be done. But
none were necessary. In the words of Ute Deichman, "Scientists, including those
who were not members of the [Nazi] party, helped to get funding for their work
through their modified behavior and direct cooperation with the state." Deichman
speaks of the "active role of scientists themselves in regard to Nazi race
policy ? where [research] was aimed at confirming the racial doctrine ? no
external pressure can be documented." German scientists adjusted their research
interests to the new policies. And those few who did not adjust disappeared.

A second example of politicized science is quite different in character, but it
exemplifies the hazard of government ideology controlling the work of science,
and of uncritical media promoting false concepts. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was
a self-promoting peasant who, it was said, "solved the problem of fertilizing
the fields without fertilizers and minerals." In 1928 he claimed to have
invented a procedure called vernalization, by which seeds were moistened and
chilled to enhance the later growth of crops.

Lysenko's methods never faced a rigorous test, but his claim that his treated
seeds passed on their characteristics to the next generation represented a
revival of Lamarckian ideas at a time when the rest of the world was embracing
Mendelian genetics. Josef Stalin was drawn to Lamarckian ideas, which implied a
future unbounded by hereditary constraints; he also wanted improved agricultural
production. Lysenko promised both, and became the darling of a Soviet media that
was on the lookout for stories about clever peasants who had developed
revolutionary procedures.

Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his celebrity for all it was
worth. He was especially skillful at denouncing this opponents. He used
questionnaires from farmers to prove that vernalization increased crop yields,
and thus avoided any direct tests. Carried on a wave of state-sponsored
enthusiasm, his rise was rapid. By 1937, he was a member of the Supreme Soviet.

By then, Lysenko and his theories dominated Russian biology. The result was
famines that killed millions, and purges that sent hundreds of dissenting Soviet
scientists to the gulags or the firing squads. Lysenko was aggressive in
attacking genetics, which was finally banned as "bourgeois pseudoscience" in
1948. There was never any bias for Lysenko's ideas, yet he controlled Soviet
research for thirty years. Lysenkoism ended in the 1960s, but Russian biology
still has not entirely recovered from that era.

Now we are engaged in a great new theory that once again has drawn the support
of politicians, scientists, and celebrities around the world. Once again, the
theory is promoted by major foundations. Once again, the research is carried out
at prestigious universities. Once again, legislation is passed and social
programs are urged in its name. Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt
with.

Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once
again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears
high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme
actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because
an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again,
vague terms like sustainability and generational justice --- terms that have no
agreed definition --- are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the
similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion
of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals
have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I
argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who
has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics
of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are not longer
seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications
and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms.

In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are
wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands
of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with
the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people
each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to
emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That
hope is science.

But as Alston Chase put it, "when the search for truth is confused with
political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power."

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and
politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history,
and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested
and honest.



Hey, and you are stuck with a President who not only mixes science and politics
but throws in religion as well.

Good luck to all sensible Americans. You sure are going to need it during the
next couple of years, because the neo-cons have the money to drag out any
impeachment process for two years.



Alan, son of Nemesis.

?Our own soldiers are returning contaminated with depleted uranium and
now they?re fathering children that are horribly deformed because they?ve
been contaminated with radiated material,?

Peter DeMott

Gulf Coast Support Blog

http://unitedeuropeanworkersunion.blogspot.com/

Nemesis Peace Centre

http://www.veloceraptor.free-online.co.uk/protector.html

Nemesis The Goddess of Divine Retribution

http://thanasis.com/modern/nemesis.htm

Firebird - Fighting For Women and Childrens Rights.

http://theoriginalfirebird.blogspot.com/

Nemesis News

http://lordcerneabbas.blogspot.com/

http://www.planetarybillofrights.org/

The Hymn of Nemesis:

Nemesis, winged balancer of life,
dark-faced Goddess, daughter of Justice,
You who restrain with adamantine bridles
the frivolous insolences of mortals,
and spurning the destructive violence of mankind
drive out black envy!

Beneath Your unceasing, traceless orbit
is spun the grey fortune of man
and unnoticed You walk in his tracks,
you bend the neck that is proud.
Beneath Your arm You ever measure out life
and ever do You lower Your eye to Your bosom
as You control the scales in Your hand.

Be gracious, blessed dealer of justice,
Nemesis, winged balancer of life.
Nemesis the deathless Goddess we sing,
Victory with slender wings, all-powerful
infallible, and the assistant to Justice,
You who in displeasure at the pride of men
carry it down into Tartarus.
.