You Can't Trust Them Jewish Scientists

The government of Texas has removed references to climate change, rising sea levels and loss of wetlands from an environmental report because those references are not politically correct from the GOP point of view.

The scientists who wrote the report are demanding that their names be stricken from the report.

Politics may squash science, but only temporarily. Truth does win. In the meantime, Pick Perry is doing damage to any reputation Texas may have had for being a state where good science is done. Why would any scientist want to work in a state, and especially in a state university system, where the work done by scientists is squeezed through a political filter?

This has been done elsewhere, of course. Which is why when the Soviet Union was making great strides in rocketry, the one thing you never heard of was cutting edge Soviet biological research. There was a reason for that.

In 1940 [Trofin Lysenko] became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned.

Lysenkoism spread throughout most of the Soviet scientific community, except for the rocket and nuclear areas. those whose research led them away from the approved thoughts of Lysenko either quit or were arrested. The Soviet scientific community was eviscerated.

Science is fact based. Facts are observed, hypotheses and theories are developed and subjected to continuing factual analysis. If the hypotheses and the theories don't fit the facts, the hypotheses and theories are modified or discarded.

But what politicians do is take their pet theories and discard the facts that are not convenient. When politicians reach into science and apply their "we don't need no stinking facts", the effects can be very damaging.

Texas might be a nice state to live in. But it is becoming clear that only blind adherents of the Christian Taliban will be welcome.