If the core data of a model is proven to be false, is it still a valid model? Worse yet, what if the very model itself becomes meaningless? What are we to do with a “science” where that “science” lacks either soundness or substance? The situation we know as climategate will not go away — not until the situation is resolved. Today’s editorial by Daniel Henninger clarifies the situation:
A line has been crossed. But this is only a recent step, as during the last century the sciences behind naturalism have notably created a myriad of false evidences to support a model which is vague and hardly sufficient to answer the question that it raises. Whether Piltdown Man or Brontosaurus, the errors may be later written off, but in their times each is respectively held up as an undeniable proof that the model is both correct and sufficient.
What is happening at East Anglia is an epochal event. As the hard sciences—physics, biology, chemistry, electrical engineering—came to dominate intellectual life in the last century, some academics in the humanities devised the theory of postmodernism, which liberated them from their colleagues in the sciences. Postmodernism, a self-consciously “unprovable” theory, replaced formal structures with subjectivity. With the revelations of East Anglia, this slippery and variable intellectual world has crossed into the hard sciences.
This ability of scientists so-called has been transmitted to politicians. These men, after all, are the most self-agrandizng of all (except for hollywood, of course). Some thrive on the ends that they can produce while others are so bold as to try to shape, or should I say reshape, the fabric of our society:
And let you think it’s just about a few policies or helping the poor, the efforts go much further:
The New England Journal of Medicine has turned into a weird weekly amalgam of straight medical-research and propaganda for the Obama redesign of U.S. medicine.
This is the effort of radical leftist anti-capitalists. Not a “communist” and not the type of “socialist” that we see in Europe, but a new, very American thing I like to brand a nouveau-communist that has taken permanent levels of control in the auto industry, in finanace, and is today making the same efforts into banking and insurance. They attack speech regularly, supposing that liberty is somehow “unjust” and requires a new media justice to resolve the undesirable disagreement that is broadcast by Fox News and Clear Channel Communications.
The Obama administration’s new head of policy at EPA, Lisa Heinzerling, is an advocate of turning precaution into standard policy. In a law-review article titled “Law and Economics for a Warming World,” Ms. Heinzerling wrote, “Policy formation based on prediction and calculation of expected harm is no longer relevant; the only coherent response to a situation of chaotically worsening outcomes is a precautionary policy. . . .”
All of these energies can be summarized in the words of Saul Alinksy, mentor of President Obama (see Legacy), at the very beginning of his 1971 work, Rules for Radicals:
These things do not happen by accident.
In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to live by values that give meaning to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change the world into a place where all men and women will walk erect, in the spirit of that credo of the Spanish Civil War, “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” This means revolution.
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