Posted by
VBushmills on Wednesday, December 02, 2009 8:29:12 AM
Richmond, December 2, 2009
About twenty years ago I penned an essay about Science and the Method with a view toward warning the medical community about the risks of getting into bed with politicians.
That view was predicated on the fact that Science and Medicine didn't just drop into our laps as the most respected and revered of fixed stars in our heavens. They had to fight tooth and toenail to get us humans to dispense with our old wives tales and superstitions, and replace them with concrete facts and diagnostic procedures.
And that fight took centuries, not mere years. Through plaque and Black Death, to the environmental diseases of the 19th Century, there were always men and women who knew the answers to these pandemics did not lie in God's wrath, the stars or evil straw men like the Jews. Still, it took a long time, and much proof, to make their claims heard and believed.
This position of Scientist and Doctor as ones to be revered rather than seen as alchemists and magician is relatively recent, having only been around about a hundred years. Even in my day old country people kept the tomato (love apple) away from girls because of its powers as an aphrodisiac.
In Germany, by 1900, doctors and professors were gods. To be called "Herr Doktor" was a sign of respect that not even royalty could hope to match. After all, the nobility were born to their station. Doctors earned every letter of the title.
But in 1933, along came this little Austrian corporal, and behind him a cult following of voodoo artists, preaching eugenics, racial superiority, and even the occult. To move toward a final solution, as they saw it, they needed to enlist the services of the revered and respected in Germany. They need respectability's final stamp of approval. And by the simplest of measures, peer pressure, the good doctors came over, not as individuals, mind you, but as a club. They all took one for the team.
That was then and this is now. Oh, doctors are still valuable assets to German society. But they are no longer gods. They are still respected, but there is no awe in saying "Herr Doktor" any longer. They are only scarcely higher ranked than lawyers.
In twelve years it was all lost. The shine had dulled. For not just doctors, but the profession itself, you see, were seen as corruptible.
In America, doctors never quite attained the royal heights of their counterparts in Germany. But engineers and scientists probably even exceeded them. Can-do societies always worship their doers. Besides, in America, doctors always had the jealous lawyer class pursuing them at every turn, hoping to bring down, then replace them with themselves as America's most feared-but-loved profession.
But in their hey-day, until recently, doctors were always forgiven "being wrong" due to misdiagnosis or errors in surgery. The people can forgive being wrong. What the people can never forgive is Being Wrong, as the German doktors found out.
But this warning is not really about medicine, or the health care "reform" bill.
It is about Science and the recent revelations of a complete and total fraud existing inside the global warming/climatology discipline. (It is more widespread that that,as time will reveal.) For those who have followed the numbers, the math, the statistics, the Method, it has always been known that the entire premise was either a giant mistake...or a doubly-sized hoax.
Our warning: This will all sort itself out...one way or the other. For a very short period of time the scientific community, the entire scientific community, has a small window to correct this failure of professional ethics and hold onto that reverence and respect they've spent two centuries earning.
After that, it's just a matter of time. In Germany it took twelve years to lose it. In America it may take only eight, or possibly thirty. Who knows? What we do know is that once that process begins, in the hearts and minds of men, the scientific community will revert back to the days before the plague swept Europe. It will be long road back...and under circumstances far less conducive to success than the first trek.
Vassar Bushmills