Posted on 04/22/2017 9:23:03 PM PDT by Fester Chugabrew
I am a Carl Sagan fan from way back. His 1980 TV miniseries Cosmos hit me at just the right age and inflamed a lifelong love of science. But weve had nearly 40 years to assess the long-term effects and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that muddled public understanding of science. This weekends so-called March for Science is a perfect example of what went wrong.
All you really need to know about the March for Science is that it is scheduled for Earth Day. The organizers may say the march is nonpartisan and has a variety of goals, but its mostly just about global warming. Its not just about whether global warming is actually happening, or whether it is caused by human activity, but about a specific political program for dealing with global warming.
To be sure, there are other goals involved in the march and some contention, even among the organizers, about the extent to which the march should embrace causes like diversity. So the goals run the gamut from the left to the far-left. And thats the problem. The March for Science is an attempt to equate the Lefts political goals with Science Itself, claiming the intellectual and moral authority of science for the Lefts agenda.
You can see why they would want to do that. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
No...real science is a spiral. Saganized science is a circle.
Besides being an abuser and murderer, he was a first class scam artist as well, before he murdered his girlfriend, from what I remember from reading a book about his crime.
It’s “normalizing”; taking a concept and sinking it into the psyche so it becomes part of the thought process. It’s done repeatedly and the child or adult come to accept the concept as normal.
Said comment is, in fact, anti-science in the extreme. Replicated experimental data is all that is required for ANY question of science, all previous existing data and theory notwithstanding.
Based on, and much better than, Sagan’s book Contact. A great film from Robert Zemeckis.
Cheers,
Jim
Here's the first paragraph of one of the reviews at Amazon:
This book is a blow-by-blow account of how Carl Sagan systematically misrepresented Velikovsky, and used the full weight of his reputation and position within the establishment to complete the work of suppression begun over two decades earlier by Harlow Shapley and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The sheer hypocrisy, dishonesty and self-regard of Sagan is brutally exposed for all the world to see. Unfortunately, for Sagan fans and true believers, the book will be so unpalatable that they might not get beyond the first few pages. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that almost none of the critics of this book, who have here given it a one-star rating on Amazon, have actually read it. The very act of reading it would dispel all notions one might have had of Sagan's nobility and intellectual honesty. He was a fraud and, in some respects at least, a bully. He was also a very poor scientist, as Ginenthal demonstrates in literally dozens of ways.
Mugshots Of The Balanced, Well-Adjusted Hippie, Ira Einhorn |
Still not based on any actual reality ever proven.
Cheers.
Arlen Specter still amazes me what a scumbag he was.
When I saw him pimping and lying for ObamaScare...
Re: Evidence
I was echoing yesterday’s ERF day meme.
Repeated by many speakers at DC.
“We are scientists, we all should believe in science, it will cure all the problems, and we have evidence.”
Then I note the article about the comet that hit the earth. We found diamonds therefore comet dust cooled the earth. No you were wrong, you found graphine and a glacial lake flowed into the oceans and messed up all the warm currents. No, we really did find diamonds, you are misstating things.
This is a consensus?
No...real science is a spiral.
= = =
No, that is a duck penis.
to which the march should embrace causes like diversity.
= = =
I saw some of the crowd on the broadcast of DC ERF day.
One of the speakers mentioned diversity, in the context of broad variety of plants and animals, and some glazed-eye, open-mouth chick in the audience nodded her head at the word diversity.
There is a tragicomic scene in Lucifer’s Hammer where two astronauts are arguing if we are going into an Ice Age or global warming. One of them is convinced we’re going into an Ice Age, forestalled by burning oil ... and the horror is that we’re running out of oil.
Under the pseudonym “Mr. X”, he contributed an essay about smoking cannabis to the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered.
Oh.
Lester Grinspoon. I remember his Reconsidered books.
Thanks for the infom
Sagan Wrecked Paranormal research in many Universities—closing down ESP Labs and discharging real researchers because be branded them a “Pseudoscience” . Dr. Thelma Moss was doing great research until she was let go out of UCLA. He set back Paranormal research 20 years.
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