MB Civic

Lapham ..

A report entitled “Scientific Integrity in Policy Making,” issued in February 2004 by the Union of Concerned Scientists.. Signed by more than 60 of the country’s most accomplished scientists honored for their work in many disciplines .. the report bore witness to their experience when called upon to present a federal agency or congressional committee with scientific data bearing on a question of the public health and welfare. Time and again in the 40-page report, the respondents mention the refusal on the part of their examiners to listen to, much less accept, any answers that didn’t fit with the administration’s prepaid and prerecorded political agenda .. On topics as various as climate change, military intelligence, and the course of the Missouri River, the reincarnations of Pope Urban VIII reaffirmed their conviction that if the science didn’t prove what it had been told to prove, then the science had been tampered with by Satan. The report.. didn’t attract much notice in the press or slow down the retreat into the provinces of unreason. The eight years that have passed since its publication have brought with them not only the illusion of “The Magic Kettle” on Wall Street, but also the election of President Barack Obama in the belief that he would enter the White House as the embodiment of Merlin or Christ .. Wall Street clerks subcontract the placing of $100 billion bets to the judgment of computer databanks that stand as silent as the stones on Easter Island, while calculating at the speed of light the rates of exchange between the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns

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