Re: [asa] AAAS President Keynote Address

At 12:37 AM 2/21/2007, Rich Blinne wrote:

>On Feb 20, 2007, at 8:08 PM, Janice Matchett wrote:
>
>>At 10:43 PM 2/19/2007, Rich Blinne wrote:
>>
>>>President Holdren's address ... drew a standing ovation when he
>>>called on them to "tithe" 10% of their time to "to working to
>>>increase the benefits of science and technology for the human
>>>condition and to decrease the liabilities."
>>
>>@ http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787818/posts?page=2#2
>>
>>~ Janice :)
>
>Yeah, you're right. It's so unchristian to devote 10% of our time
>for the good of humanity. Anybody proposing that has got to be
>immediately suspect. And what giving that a standing ovation? That's
>the most pagan thing I have heard in years. Jesus taught us to take
>our talent and bury it, right? Yeah, that's the ticket.
>~ Joe Isuzu :)

@@ Since you have chosen to miss the point once again, I'll just
reiterate (NOTE!!!!!! This is a quote):

"...we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We
need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday
predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the
religion of environmentalism.

First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not
very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history
that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already
killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's
not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in
objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it
needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. ..

The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing.
Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the
environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving
systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those
who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their
belief system, not the state of their knowledge. ...

How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of
religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple
answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what
constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly
sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true.

It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth.
Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to
present it in the strongest way.

Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is
lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.

This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day.
At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of
Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over.

What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA.

We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring
verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to
more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get
honest fast.

Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics.
And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. ...
So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return
to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy
decisions firmly on that." ~ Michael
Crichton http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787818/posts?page=4#4

~ Janice

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Received on Wed Feb 21 11:55:52 2007