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http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/02/republican-congressman-introduces-bill-to-require-political-approval-of-scientific-papers/

Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas really does not understand science. Not scientific method, not scientific theories or laws, none of it. Which is why he submitted a bill draft titled the “High Quality Research Act” which would in effect add a politician into scientific studies.

The bill says that any research done using federal funds (which is the majority of research done in the United States) must have its results and finding approved by the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology of the House of Representatives. If the findings are not agreed to, the research is taken from the researchers and disposed of by Congress as it sees fit.


Congressman Smith has already landed himself in scientific hot water over his April 25th Letter to the National Science Foundation where he demanded that the NSF conduct an investigaton into five research programs which contradict policies his donors want passed. This is what was expected when the noted anti-science Texan was appointed to the Congressional Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

In response to Congressman Smith’s letter to the NSF, fellow committee member, and fellow Texan, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, had this to say according to the LA Times:

Politicians, even a distinguished chairman of the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, cannot be ‘peers’ in any meaningful sense.

Peer in this case referring to the peer review methodology employed by scientists to ensure that their papers are concise, clear, and accurate.

In response to the criticism, Congressman Smith issued his own statement in which he defended the bill by saying:

The draft bill maintains the current peer review process and improves on it by adding a layer of accountability. The intent of the draft legislation is to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent on the highest-quality research possible.

One must ask, how does making peer review accountable to politicians an “improvement?” The scientific method has proven itself over centuries. This “improvement” is nothing but a way to attempt and strong arm scientists into pushing political agendas, typically those held by whomever donates the most money to a politician during the campaign.

Congressman Lamar Smith is a leading example as to the disconnect within the Republican Party and reality. His “improvement” would compromise scientific research, and dismantle what little America has left for integrity. Despite how many other industries have fallen apart across the United States, we as a nation remain the gold standard of scientific research. It appears Lamar Smith will not rest until that too joins our other areas of once excellence, and we surrender to our national collapse.

Because nothing will enhance scientific advance, you know, that thing that makes the US a world leader in market innovation, military superiority and medicine, like it having to be approved by people who think Jesus rode to work on a T Rex, people just like Congress Science Committee member, Paul Broun, R-Ga, who said:
”All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,” Broun said at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet recently. “And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.”

And let's take a look at some of the other guys who'd be in charge of 'science stuff gettin done'...

1. Let’s start with the chairman himself, Ralph Hall of Texas. Though he was once a Democrat, Hall was behind a 2010 effort by Republicans to cut off billions in funding for scientific research and math and science education. He did this by rather cannily tacking onto a bill a provision that would have forced Democrats to vote in favor of letting federal employees view pornography while on the job. Hall also once said of climate change: “I’m really more fearful of freezing. And I don’t have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us they’re not basing it on real scientific facts.”

2. Then there’s Todd Akin. In the course of his campaign for Missouri Senate, Akin made the following comments about rape: “First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

3. Maryland Rep. Roscoe Bartlett had a similar take on pregnancies resulting from rape: “There are very few pregnancies as a result of rape, fortunately, and incest — compared to the usual abortion, what is the percentage of abortions for rape? It is tiny. It is a tiny, tiny percentage.”

4. Texas Rep. Randy Neugebauer is best known for yelling out, “It’s a baby killer!” during the House debate on Obama’s healthcare reform bill. But did you know he also drafted a resolution for Americans to ”join together in prayer to humbly seek fair weather conditions” after a series of destructive tornadoes and droughts?

5. In 2007, Congress held a hearing on a report that found global warming to be “unequivocal.” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, who has no truck with man-made global warming, was skeptical about testimony regarding a period 55 million years ago when similar dramatic climate change occurred: “We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows?”

6. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is a renowned climate change skeptic who has alternately decried ”scientific fascism” and described research on climate change as an “international conspiracy.”

7. Allen West-backed Sandy Adams lost her Florida primary in 2012, but she still managed to serve on the committee while bad-mouthing evolution. “I’m Christian. I believe in the biblical terms of how we came about,” she once said. Adams also voted in favor of a bill to have teachers “teach theories that contradict the theory of evolution.”

How would that even work? You can do research but only if your conclusions are politically acceptable?

So either allot of inconvenient scientific facts will end up being be suppressed or scientists will have to fudge their findings to get their research published.

Sounds pretty terrifying to me.

The road to hell was paved with best intentions.

I think the reasoning behind this is that they want to ensure money isn't being wasted on frivolous things that come up with stupid crap.

The amount of abuse that could arise from this though just negates any good intentions that may have been behind it.

 djones520 wrote:

I think the reasoning behind this is that they want to ensure money isn't being wasted on frivolous things that come up with stupid crap.

No, I don't think thats the reason. Thats done at the start of the funding, not the end. The funding application will tell you if it is frivolous work.

They want the results approved. By that time the money is gone and the work done. They want to control what is published.

This is to stop people "wasteing" money on papers that contradict what the politicos think. At the moment they have to say "Well, we know thats what the science says, but we are ignoring that for political reasons" and they want that embarrassment to go away.

Steve steveson wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

I think the reasoning behind this is that they want to ensure money isn't being wasted on frivolous things that come up with stupid crap.

No, I don't think thats the reason. Thats done at the start of the funding, not the end. The funding application will tell you if it is frivolous work.

This is to stop people "wasteing" money on papers that contradict what the politicos think. At the moment they have to say "Well, we know thats what the science says, but we are ignoring that for political reasons" and they want that embarrassment to go away.

Except it doesn't, or we wouldn't have things like funding to see how snails have sex.

I'm just guess here, I haven't read the guys reasoning behind it, but if you've got a threat to have "bunk" science thrown out and invalidate all of your work, then it might keep you from wasting peoples time and money.

That's the way I'd try to argue this. But as I said, it's a bad idea anyway you go about it.

Unrestrained science is Sorcery. Technology is the realm of the Mechanicum and the Omnissiah.

The Emperor Protects.

 djones520 wrote:

Except it doesn't, or we wouldn't have things like funding to see how snails have sex.

But it dose. To do that reaserch the researchers will have had to submit an application for funding. A funding application includes:

An outline of the work.
Clear costings and time scales.
Goals and milestones.
Aims of the work.

Once this has been approved finding is released as milestones are reached and until either a milestone is reached and the work to that point is submitted no more money is released. The final payments are not released until the full work is submitted and approved. The approval is done by scientists employed to do the approving who know what they are looking at. These people have no more idea than you or I.

Stories for "silly" research normaly come from two sources:

1) Companys paying for it for advertising. One that comes to mind was some work done on the "perfect bacon sandwich". This was funded by (as I remember) a bread maker. The university will have taken it on as they will make easy money out of it.

2) Willfull misrepresentation of valid work by news outlets. A prime example being yours. "How snails have sex" may sound silly, but it probably has some very important implications. Snaile are a major pest and ecological menace. Both for farmers and things like parasitic snales. If you know more about there life cycle you can devise more effective ways of controling snail populations. Now, this may not be the reason behind it, but an example of how work can be seen as silly by the way it is viewed.

The funding process for govenment funding is very strict. My organisation has allot of funding for research from the US govenment, along with the UK, EU and many major companys and charities (Somewhere around £0.5billion a year and growing). We have about 50 people whose sole job is to ensure that the proposals and claims researchers submit are correct.

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Allen West-backed Sandy Adams lost her Florida primary in 2012, but she still managed to serve on the committee while bad-mouthing evolution. “I’m Christian. I believe in the biblical terms of how we came about,” she once said. Adams also voted in favor of a bill to have teachers “teach theories that contradict the theory of evolution.”

I've never understood this line of thinking, at all. There simply isn't anything that keeps religion and evolution from both being accurate, from assuming that while God created the Earth, He saw fit to, rather than micro-manage every little thing, run a shell script called Evolution to automate some stuff while He went about his other works. I don't have to flip every bit or personally relocate every block for Scandisk to do what I intend it to.

I mean, this is even the stance of 3 different Popes. Who do these people think they are, to know the mind of God?

Well, anyway. This idea is horrible for reasons that are self evident to anyone who can read.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Steve steveson wrote:
2) Willfull misrepresentation of valid work by news outlets. A prime example being yours. "How snails have sex" may sound silly, but it probably has some very important implications. Snaile are a major pest and ecological menace. Both for farmers and things like parasitic snales. If you know more about there life cycle you can devise more effective ways of controling snail populations.

This reminds me of how some legislator railed against research into cow farts as a prime example of frivolous research, except of course it wasn't frivolous at all; as it turns out cows output an enormous amount of methane, and our agriculture has created vastly more cows than would normally have occurred...

"Who do these people think they are, to know the mind of God?"

This applies to every human being on the planet.

Also, if this bill passes, every other western country will start laughing as they get flooded by top American scientists and get to cash in all the stuff they come up with. Meanwhile America will stagnate.

Nope, it will regress and become a religious theocracy, like Iran.

So, A Christian version of Iran with all the guns in the world? That'll end well.

I think that was in a book I read a while ago...

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Nope, it will regress and become a religious theocracy, like Iran.

But it'll be the correct religion, so that's all good.

 Soladrin wrote:
So, A Christian version of Iran with all the guns in the world? That'll end well.

Well, as long as there's no nuclear wea... Oh, wait.

On a more serious note, anti-intellectualism is probably the dumbest thing ever. It makes absolutely zero sense.

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Nope, it will regress and become a religious theocracy, like Iran.

But it'll be the correct religion, so that's all good.

I thought Islam was the one true religion...

Politicised science is even worse...
It's like some people are intentionally trying to drag us back into the Stone age so they can con more people into believing what they believe...

Oh dear.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

 Alfndrate wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Nope, it will regress and become a religious theocracy, like Iran.

But it'll be the correct religion, so that's all good.

I thought Islam was the one true religion...

No, its Onanisum.

Clearly it's Scientology.

Steve steveson wrote:

 Alfndrate wrote:

 MrDwhitey wrote:

 MeanGreenStompa wrote:
Nope, it will regress and become a religious theocracy, like Iran.

But it'll be the correct religion, so that's all good.

I thought Islam was the one true religion...

No, its Onanisum.

The prophet Muhammad says otherwise... You shall be burned for such views.


Edit: I mean no offense to anyone that is Islamic, the majority of Muslims and Islams I've met have been friendly, caring people

Maybe it was best not to make such statements then.

This thread is supposed to be about political control of scientific results, not religion.

Yes but the source of the political control is based in a person's religious belief and appears to be the prime motivator behind it...

About time. For too long these crafty science types have just been writing about what they observe instead of writing about what people need to think.

 Ouze wrote:

Well, anyway. This idea is horrible for reasons that are self evident to anyone who can read.

[

Which is why I'm afraid it will pass.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Maybe it was best not to make such statements then.

This thread is supposed to be about political control of scientific results, not religion.

I didn't think my statements were offensive to begin with, I just didn't want anyone to confuse it as such.


The problem with political control of scientific results is that religion will obviously come into play. The article even mentions politicians that only believe in a non-scientific theory of how we as humans came to be on this planet. I'm all fine for meshing evolution and creationism, as that is what I personally have done, but to look at 1 and say, "there's no way that happened, the universe is too random/perfect to get the development you're describing" And what if you get a conservative republican that has been known and quoted to saying that global warming is a lie, and it's just scientific hogwash because dinosaurs (one of the last major Hot Earth cycles of the world) were put there to test the faithful, and nothing like that is actually happening, and someone comes across with some level of solid, hard to discredit proof that global warming is screwing us in the rear and he decides that the research should never see the light of day? How does religion not come into play there?

Maybe we should put our research on a 5 Year Plan while we are at it.

Ain't politics grand?

On a more serious note, anti-intellectualism is probably the dumbest thing ever. It makes absolutely zero sense.

Well, in the defense of some, it's not really intellectualism that (some) anti-intellectuals hate, but the culture of academia which they see as stuck up and arrogant, and lets be honest. At times it is like that. I've seen professors and college grads treat other human beings like trash just for not being as educated as they.

I don't think Sir Smith though is such a man. I think he's just a douche who would love to be able to not have to deal with pesky studies and research data that might show him to be an illiterate twit (what was that I said about arrogant and stuck up ). Afterall, why let truth get in the way of a good sound byte

So, Science has to find facts which are only acceptable.
Im sorry, but the whole point of science is that we dont know whether it is true until we test it.
And no, anti-intellectualism in my experience is about people who are to afriad to look for the truth...which is *gasp* scary.

 purplefood wrote:
Yes but the source of the political control is based in a person's religious belief and appears to be the prime motivator behind it...

No, I don't think religion has anything at all to do with this. That is just how the "other side" is painting it. It's basic US politics. If Republicans want to do something the Democrats don't want they try and pin a religious loon or heartless rich man angle on it. If Democrats want to do something the Republicans don't want they try and pin a Communist/Big State/Tax angle on it.

This is to do with politicians wanting to control everything and ensure that there is no decent, especially when it is backed up by scince. They want to make sure any scince matches up with what they want it to say to support there case.

See Prof David Nutt:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal

Sacked by the UK govenment after speaking out because they went contrary to the scientific data he and his committee had been asked to provide.

That's why I said some. I've met plenty of anti-intellectuals who are anti-intellectual because apparently insulting science and college educations somehow allows them be wrong and be just dandy about. I however also know people who more hate the culture of intellectualism than intellectualism itself.