Put Some Harvard SmartCream on That

Put Some Harvard SmartCream on That

By James Lewis
AmericanThinker.com

The Obama administration takes great pride in Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, because Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. In physics, too, which is a real science that has something to do with energy. Sort of. And he's Chinese, one of the oppressed people of color, and he's an immigrant whose papers are in order.

That's 3.5 gold stars in ObamaWorld.

Chu's research showed how to push around individual atoms with laser beams. Amazing stuff. But Nobel winners are not necessarily good at fixing oil leaks, as we have seen.

I don't know if Dr. Chu plays the fiddle like Fibonacci, or if he is a trained ballet dancer like Rahm Emanuel, or if he does brain surgery on the side. Whatever Dr. Chu's many talents may be, he doesn't know how to solve that oil leak.

When Saddam Hussein blew up hundreds of oil wells in Kuwait in 1992, George Bush #41 sent in Red Adair from Texas. Kuwait's burning oil wells got fixed. The media lost a big story, and the Left, which was all ready to accuse Bush # 41 of a planetary crime for making Saddam blow up all those oil wells, lost a big agitprop opportunity. They had to wait for Bush # 43 to work off their spleen.

The weirdness is that during the months of oil gushing from the BP leak, Obama and his spokesnoid Robert Gibbs kept reminding the world that Dr. Chu has a Nobel Prize. That plus five bucks will buy you a Starbucks French Roast on the Gulf Coast, right where you can watch the sunset reflecting off the oil slick. It's really pretty, and as some Obamanoid was saying the other day, if Louisiasans were smart, they would turn it into a tourist attraction. Fortunately, it looks like the oil leak has been plugged, and all that oil will be metabolized by the ocean in due course.

But the Leftist superstition about Harvard SmartCream will keep haunting us for years. The reason is that no matter what the emergency may be, the instinct of this White House is to apply the same panacea. Put some SmartCream on that, and it'll be fixed. Or at least it will look as if we are Doing Something.

Obama's adoring fans seem to share the superstitious belief that intelligence is a kind of oil slick that you just discover in places like Harvard and Yale. Take a problem, any problem -- global warming, the U.S. economy, race, and gender-baiting -- and smear it liberally with SmartCream from Larry Summers or Elena Kagan -- and behold! The answer pops out, just like that. It's amazing. For you, it's only $ 9.95, 'cause I like your face. Can't you see Obama selling that line on an informercial with his great photogenic smile?

This superstition about a universal panacea of high intelligence seems to be really widespread on the Left. Jozef Stalin used to lecture academic audiences on the topic of linguistics, even before Noam Chomsky transformed the base metal of syntax into the gold of leftist opportunism. Why does the world listen to Chomsky's radical politics? Because he is reputed to be a great linguist. It doesn't work for me, but apparently for millions of people it looks like logic.

This is so much like Anton Mesmer (the first "mesmerist") back in 1770 or so, who used to cure his medical patients by sweeping a long magnetic iron rod over their bodies. Poor people stood in line for a chance to sit around a magnetized tub of water with iron handles sticking out, just like socialized medicine. It all worked like a charm, because everybody knew that animal magnetism spread its healing rays wherever it touched your body.

Animal magnetism worked fine for Anton Mesmer in 1770. It still works, along with crystal therapy and pyramids for keeping your razor blades sharp. Ask just about anybody in Berkeley, California.

Don't knock the great con artists of history, because the media world is still doing the same thing today. What do you think the global warming scam is about? It is a mass hysteria stirred up by the media to make money without having to actually work, or to learn anything -- along with almost universal ignorance and superstition, also spread by the media and the education establishment -- plus deep corruption in Big Money Science.

In the U.K., the Labour Government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown practically had group hugs imagining how much the global warming rainbow would pay off -- they were officially demanding trillions of dollars -- so they pushed it and pushed it for decades using their poodle scientists at Hadley CRU, and their lapdog droids like the BBC and the Guardian.

In fact, the Guardian still believes in global warming today, but then they believed Stalin's lies for thirty years, followed by Mao and Pol Pot, and today, Gorbachev. For all I know, they still believe in Stalin's phony agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, who made all the real scientists in the Soviet Union applaud his scientific fantasy life on pain of exile in Siberia. Or a bullet to the head -- take your pick.

We are much too civilized to threaten scientists with execution or exile to Alaska, where they might run into the Palins and go native. We just give them millions of dollars if they sing along with the Party Line. And it works! They chime right in, and sometimes they even do a little dance.

That's how you earn credibility, buddy, and don't you forget it.

The Left is infinitely gullible, but they also spread gullibility in the schools. In the Clinton years, Al Gore had a hand in appointing NASA's witch doctor, James Hansen, the guy who wants warming skeptics to be thrown in jail "for crimes against humanity and nature." That just shows you world-caliber science at work. Where's Hansen's Nobel Prize? Why should Algore get one, and Barry the 0, but not James Hansen, who makes up all the climate videogames?

When it all fell apart in Copenhagen last year, Tony Blair showed up on TV telling us with his million-dollar smile that it didn't matter if global warming was true or not. There's your public confession of guilt, when politicians tell you that it's still a global emergency and yes, they still need astronomical new taxes from five billion people even if it doesn't happen to be true. Hold onto your wallet. Right now Tony is working for Muammar Khadaffi of Lybia, 'cause that's where the money is.

The media fall for this Dr. Science gag because they never read anything about real science. They're much too busy thinking up tomorrow's phony headlines. But even if they were literate they still would go on the belief that their audiences are mostly suckers. The mantra that "Obama is soooo smart" is supposed to shut them up and keep 'em voting Democrat. No proof is ever needed.

I'm not saying the media are wrong about their audiences. It works, as you can see right in front of your eyes. It's just that the audiences are complicit in the con job. The TV-watchers and newspaper-readers have dumbed themselves down. Every day they engage in willing suspension of disbelief, like kids listening to Santa Claus or good Soviet citizens in the Evil Empire.

In fact, Obama does keep telling them he is Santa Claus, and all his free goodies come out of that stash he keeps in the White House. The same liberals who fall for all other con jobs keep the Demagogues in power -- media scams like imaginary energy shortages, No Nukes campaigns, clean government in Detroit and Chicago, feminist malarkey, ObamaCare, and any conceivable qualifications Elena Kagan might have for the Supreme Court.

Ignorance can be cured with education; but self-imposed ignorance has no cure. It just rots your brain until you die from Donald Berwick Disease. If you don't know what Donald Berwick Disease is, you will -- you will, very soon.

I know highly educated folk who are so stuck at age 22 that they will never reach adulthood. You can find them all over the campuses, where scruffy hippies gather in little cafés to tell each other lies.

A month ago, forty-two members of the British Royal Society finally worked up enough integrity to protest the abject mendacity of Global Frauding. The Royal Society then withdrew its public support for the scam. Scientific societies around the world have fallen for it, either because they took somebody's word for it (and they know that scientists never tell a lie), or because they were bought off. But the Royal Society -- founded by Isaac Newton -- sacrificed four centuries of integrity for one big payoff. And now they've lost it. It couldn't happen to a more deserving crowd.

The Brits pioneered global warming. Before GW there was Mad Cow, a huge public health fraud that was based on unsupported computer modeling in the United Kingdom -- which should sound familiar. If you assume that prion infections like Mad Cow spread on an accelerating curve, just like the infamous global warming hockey stick, you can show that everybody is going to die tomorrow, or next week at the latest, based on a perfectly good math model that just happens to be totally wrong. It is the worst of GIGO disease, really primitive thinking, but it's good enough to swing a ton of money for the people who promoted it.

In the upshot, the formerly sane nation of Britain went Banana Republic over Mad Cow Disease, as propagated by the intellectual giants of Fleet Street. That's where the newspapers used to be located, right near the busiest pubs in the world. Take a deep breath in Fleet Street and you're drunk. News reporting used to be the professional disease of British alcoholics. Think of Chris Hitchens and you get the idea.

In any case, Mad Cow guaranteed a decade of scare headlines for the denizens of Fleet Street so they didn't even have to work. A whole generation of journos died of the DTs before somebody found out that no actual people were getting Mad Cow disease, and indeed, that mighty few cows were getting it, either.

Basically, they destroyed millions of cattle on the raw assumption that they might get sick someday. It was a purely imaginary epidemic; most mass hysterias are. If you kill the cattle before they get the disease, you can never find out if your math model was wrong. If you demand your trillions of bucks before global warming ever happens, there's no way to prove you are wrong. Right now, the scammers are recovering all their old power and prestige, because the last ten years of actual cooling is just covering up the trend toward the world coming to an end. They say. And by gum, they've got the computer models to prove it! They still want all that money, and they are still getting it. Phil Jones and Michael Mann haven't been fired, or even embarrassed in public. They still have their jobs, and they're looking forward to running another pricey scam sometime soon.

Across the Channel from London, the French never fell for Mad Cow, so millions of happy eaters kept chomping down on delicious sheep brains in wonderful wine sauces and finally died of gourmet ecstasy. The French got their meat cheap from British farmers who were forced to kill their cattle, or maybe to sell them for a few euros before the animal inspectors turned up. At the end, a total of about a hundred people were said to have died from Mad Cow over a dozen years, which is statistically right around zero. Given the integrity of the folks who spread the scam, I would not be surprised to find out that Mad Cow Disease record-keeping was strangely intermittent, amazingly like the CRU Hadley Climate records, the Russian meterology bureau, NASA, and NOAA. None of those scientific Holy of Holies seem to have kept their data, and they're not showing us their computer programs.

During Mad Cow days, the socialist Labour Government paid British farmers to destroy their cattle. The British taxpayers were subsidizing French cuisine, and the chefs were laughing all the way to their mistresses' mattresses, where they traditionally keep their money. Those crazy Brits!

Britain used to do world-class science, but socialism corrupts everything, because everything becomes politicized. Previous generations of scientists would be ashamed of the level of corruption in Britain, but these characters just keep coming. Today, socialist politicians have conquered science in Europe, as in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia. The EU itself has never passed a financial audit in its fourteen years of existence, and it doesn't care to pass the next one. Nobody in the world can make them. They are the bosses, just as surely as the Soviet apparatchiks. So they don't bother with audits. It's like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Who's going to make them?

Historically, corrupt science kills people. It did so with AIDS (which the media lied about for years as a heterosexual disease) and with Saint Rachel Carson depriving Africa of DDT insecticide, thereby hurting tens of millions of African children but doing a lot of good for the tsetse fly. Then there is the abject Western surrender to street drugs, with the media and politicians constantly talking about getting it all legalized, in spite of the victims who show up at emergency rooms every day around the country -- especially teenagers and minorities, as it turns out. When lies are propagated as truths, and science colludes with the lies, people get hurt.

It's sad, but on the other hand, scientific corruption is a self-imposed disease. Scientists have an intellectual and moral duty to think skeptically and to demand evidence. When they fail to meet their most basic obligations over many years, that is not an accident.

Why was there only a small coterie of heroic global warming skeptics who demanded to see the original data? In science, that should be a standard practice -- but now that scientific institutions, including universities, have been proven to be much less trustworthy than your local drugstore, it's mighty strange that there is no movement afoot for all climate data to be put on the web, as a routine precaution against fraud and cherry-picking. Where's the outrage? It's exactly where it was during the Clinton years in D.C. In a Leftist Political Machine, public outrage never gets a hearing.

That kind of scientific ignorance is willful. It is a moral disease, not a mistake. Scientific institutions could purge their crooks any day they want. But they don't do that -- and that leaves us to draw our own conclusions, doesn't it?

Dr. Chu is not so unusual in a world of global warmists and Mad Cow chasers. I don't know the man, and I can't read his mind, but either he is not as smart as he's cracked up to be, or...