Science In Crisis

By Rich Kozlovich

 

Recently I've noticed a lot of hits to pieces on P&D going back as far as 2008. I always wonder why when that happens, and when I get a bunch from any one year I assume someone in particular is looking at P&D with some interest. Good! That's what it's for.  One that was hit today was from March of 2017 entitled Science in Crisis, which is from  Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum. 

They used to send out regular notices with links to articles dealing with all the green issues involving energy and climate change, which of course slopped over into a lot of other issues involving junk science and the corruption of science.   All of which I posted faithfully for a number of years.  They don't seem to do that any longer, mores the pity.  Good work is being done there! 

The above cartoon came from one of their notices, and since there's so much talk these days about censorship at universities, the media, and in just about every institution that makes up the structure of America, I decided it was a good time to go over what was reported.  The subtitle was, "British Universities Stifle Debate As Academics Lurch To The Left". 

On March 2, 2017 this was reported at the Adam Smith Institute saying:

New report reveals dangerous effects of sizeable left wing skew within UK Universities

• Strong left-liberal skew in British academia, which has risen since 1960s
• Left-liberals make up around 75% of academics; conservatives only 12%
• 90% of British Universities censored free speech on campus last year
• IQ not the explanation, with top 5% of IQ roughly split between left and right
• Excessive ideological homogeneity risks bias in scholarship, which may prompt governments to defund research
• University gatekeepers must seek ideological diversity or lose trust of public and government

Groupthink mentality is rife within academia, with 90% of British universities censoring speech on campus last year, a new report released today by the Adam Smith Institute reveals.

 

People with right-wing and conservative views are underrepresented in British universities, making up less than 12% of academics, even though 50% of the general public vote for right-wing parties, risking systematic biases in scholarship.

This didn't just start.  This was done over decades, long decades before the 1960's, and especially after 1920 when Stalin sent his agents to America to infiltrate our institutions, including the federal government.  It's been said the federal government was the most infiltrated government in the history of the world, and I believe it.

Recommended reading: 

• American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character
• Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government

And it was is done in the same manner as are all leftist takeovers.  Slowly, mendaciously and insidiously.  Just like Satan, the left constantly changes itself into an angel of light in order to keep everyone unaware of what they're really doing.  And whether you're a believer of not, the analogy fits.

Greg Hurst substantiates this view in The Times saying:

British universities suffer from “group-think” with a strong left-wing or liberal bias among academics and an under-representation of conservative views, a report claims. It argues that the trend poses a threat to higher education because it raises the possibility of future clashes with right-of-centre governments that may strip universities of funding. There is an increased risk of unconscious academic bias and a possible threat to free speech.

Well, defunding the universities of the western world would be one of the biggest things these nations could do in order to preserve western culture.  The University Observer in March stated (the link no longer works): 

The censoring of free speech is rampant across the UK, with nine out of ten universities curbing free speech on university campuses. This is according to the 2017 Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR), published by the online magazine Spiked. According to the rankings, 63.5% of institutions are marked ‘Red’, meaning that significant restrictions are placed on speech through “the banning [of] particular speakers, materials and ideas”. Spiked, in the preamble to the rankings describes these universities as “hostile to free speech and free expression, mandating explicit restrictions on speech, including, but not limited to, bans on specific ideologies, political affiliations, beliefs, books, speakers or words”. 

This isn't being ignored as John Morgan's piece in the Times Higher Education article of March 2, 2017 points out: 

Politicians’ claims that universities are systematically prejudiced against researchers and students with conservative views raise the prospect that Western institutions could become key battlegrounds in a new age of “culture wars”. Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s education secretary, lit a fire under the long-standing debate over supposed liberal bias last week in her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. 

After asking how many in the audience at the biggest conservative conference in the US were college students, she said: “The fight against the education establishment extends to you, too. The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. “They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community. But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights [including free speech] of people with whom you disagree.”

These leftist misfit professors, who never had a real job, never started or ran a business, never had to meet a payroll, never had to put their home on the line to keep their business up and running, take these young inexperienced malleable minds and turn them into mushrooms. In the dark and fed a lot of horse manure.  And it's done so effectively their parents don't recognize them when they come home.  

All of a sudden, and with unbounded emotion and passion, they almost violently espouse views that are antithetical to everything their parents believe and have taught them.  And they do it with disgust for their parents views, showing a total lack of respect for the parents who raised them, gave them a good education, gave them the food they eat, the clothes they wear and the house they live in. 

But after a very short time at college they all of a sudden come to believe their parents are ignorant, stupid, unreasoning lackeys that need to be caged in with government regulations and economic control.  Because now these universities are the ultimate moral arbiters of their lives and these misfit professors are their real parents.  

Only, these academic misfits are leeches and they aren't paying these kids bills or their tuition. 

Do they need to be enlightened?  Absolutely, and here's a good start for their enlightenment. Stop feeding them, stop clothing them, stop housing them, and most importantly, stop funding their education. 

We're not only facing a crisis of censorship and corruption of traditional values at the university level we're dealing with scientific fraud.

My personal motto is De Omnibus Dubitandum! "Everything is to be questioned!".  I adopted it when I started writing about science issues because that's supposed to be the motto of science.  I found out it sounds really good, and for me it's my touchstone, but among scientists, it's not being practiced universally, and it seems not even by a majority of scientists. 

Tom Feilden's piece, in the BBC news of February 22, 2017, Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers' reporting:

Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests. Concern over the reliability of the results published in scientific literature has been growing for some time. According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments.

This didn't just start yesterday or four years ago.  Scientific fraud  has a long history, and this isn't just a British phenomenon.  This recent piece, Study Shows Liberal Discrimination Against Conservatives In Academia, noting:

Our educational system has become a Liberal-run racket where they are so against conservatives that they will often refuse to even hire a teacher if they express a conservative view. The bias is so bad that 1 in 3 conservatives experience some form of discipline for their views. Liberal educators are essentially killing free speech on campus............4 in 10 American academics indicated in a survey this summer that they would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job."

In August of 2012 I published a list of scientific papers that had to be withdrawn, (For the first six months of 2012) entitled,  Scientific Integrity is an Oxymoron: From Retraction Watch and that list was so massive I had trouble getting Blogger to post it in one posting.  Remember, this was for the first six months only, and this pattern of retractions happens year after year.  The number will of course vary, but the number of retractions are still stunning.

Let's try and get the right.  Censorship and corruption go hand and hand, and it's getting worse.  Not only has leftism corruptly placed science in a crisis, that same leftist corruption has permeated every aspect of our lives, and now, America is in crisis.