U.S. Energy Policy Part II.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko sez: your Energy Policy is ready Mr. President.

Part Two is the fun flip side of the Evolution issue, or what happens when dim-bulbed people who have a fundamental(ist) contempt for science get to sit in the Big Chair. It’s what happens when your religion requires that your higher brain functions be obliterated and yanked out of your skull with a crochet needle…

This from Akhet Egyptology:

“When a body was mummified the internal organs were usually preserved in some way. This was not true of the brain which was often just discarded. This was usually done by inserting a hook up the nose and using it to slice up and remove the brain tissue, with the cavity then being washed out.”

Sure sounds like Fundy Sunday schools to me.

And once your ability to reason has been fragged, bagged and tagged, all you are left with as a tool for comprehending the world is the faux virtual illumination of superstition. Like the drunk that looks for his car keys a block from where he dropped them because the light is better, once rationality has been blotted out, anyone can be led anywhere by any unscrupulous bastard with a single, flickering birthday candle.

So to understand the Fundy (and hence, the White House) take on Science, you have to understand that they don’t just hate it…they fear it.

It is the means by which their whole ignorant medieval, voodoo cult theology can come crashing down, because the single, Jesus Bolt holding the whole contraption of Biblical Literalism together is that none of the faithful are allowed to even contemplate the possibility that the Bible is factually wrong about anything.

Doesn’t matter how tiny or seemingly trivial it may be (like the Spinning Mary in the Garden of Gethsemane), they are barred from any admission of any error of any kind…because if they admit one, then who’s to say there aren’t two? And then ten? And then soon nobody’s upending their changes purses into the Love Buckets, and no one’s signing over their Social Security checks to Big Jerry’s Wee Church o’ the Holy Odium.

And much worse than the fiscal downside, these fuckers actually do believe the shit they trowel out like it's, well, The Gospel :-) Their whole persona -- their whole self -- rests completely on caissons sunk a mile deep into the Literalist bedrock of their faith. Science (Hell, basic critical thinking skills) prowls around them night and day, threatening to destroy them and threatening to drag others down into the febrile swamp of Sinful Secular Science.

They’ll die to protect their delusions. And they’ll kill anyone who tries to take them away.

They are stranded one bad precedent and bad thought away from hard slide down a terminally slippery slope, so no admission of any glitch, no matter how microscopic can be tolerated, which means they can never get close enough grasp what science is, and what it isn’t. So for them, Science is Magic. Incomprehensible, probably evil, but certainly Magic, and since it's Magic, there is no reason why it can’t grant any wish at all. And no reason why its wizards shouldn't be made to bend in any political direction at all.

Which is why Stalin liquidated a whole lot of his scientists who made the mistake of advocating, well, science, and promoted the likes of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.

Which is the kind of stunningly idiotic paralogia we see burbling out of the Bush White House on virtually every issue, but especially on energy matters.

This snipped from the Skeptic’s Dictionary summarizes the Lysenkoism pretty well.

Lysenkoism refers to an episode in Russian science featuring a non-scientific peasant plant-breeder named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko [1898-1976]. Lysenko was the Leading proponent of Michurianism during the Lenin/Stalin years. I. V. Michurin, in turn, was a proponent of Lamarckism...According to Lamarck, evolution occurs because organisms can inherit traits which have been acquired by their ancestors.
...
Lamarckism is favored by those who see will as the primary driving force of life, e.g., the 20th century French philosopher Henri Bergson. Darwinism, or natural selection, is hated by many of those who believe God created everything and everything has a purpose: the fundamentalist teleologists of the world.
...
[Michurin's] views on evolution found favor with the party leadership in the Soviet Union. When the rest of the scientific world were pursuing the ideas of Mendel and developing the new science of genetics, Russia led the way in the effort to prevent the new science from being developed in the Soviet Union. Thus, while the rest of the scientific world could not conceive of understanding evolution without genetics, the Soviet Union used its political power to make sure that none of their scientists would advocate a genetic role in evolution.

It was due to Lysenko's efforts that many real scientists, those who were geneticists or who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection, were sent to the gulags or simply disappeared from the USSR. Lysenko rose to dominance at a 1948 conference in Russia where he delivered a passionate address denouncing Mendelian thought as "reactionary and decadent" and declared such thinkers to be "enemies of the Soviet people" (Gardner 1957). He also announced that his speech had been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Scientists either groveled, writing public letters confessing the errors of their way and the righteousness of the wisdom of the Party, or they were dismissed. Some were sent to labor camps. Some were never heard from again.

Under Lysenko's guidance, science was guided not by the most likely theories, backed by appropriately controlled experiments, but by the desired ideology. Science was practiced in the service of the State, or more precisely, in the service of ideology. The results were predictable: the steady deterioration of Soviet biology. Lysenko's methods were not condemned by the Soviet scientific community until 1965, more than a decade after Stalin's death.

Sound familiar? Tediously, nauseatingly, “I can’t believe anyone brighter than crab lice could really fall for this drivel” familiar?

Well, welcome inside the Fundy Biosphere at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where once inconvenient science is banished, any crazy shit goes as long as the Dear Leader wishes it to be so.

And then, since it’s all just magic, the True Believers all drool over the idea of a pure, theocratic state where Demon Science is finally caged and enslaved and can be tasked with granting each and every one of their deprave desires. Smartass science, that has always made the inbred homunculi of the Right Wing feel impotent and inferior, can at last be made to kneel and grovel and beg and say whatever the fuck Jerry Falwell tells it to say and do whatever the fuck George Bush wishes it to do.

That Creationism is the one and only Truth.

That the whole of the Cosmos is an illusion.

That Global Warming is a Bad Magic chimera made up by crafty, America-hating liberals.

And that Technology is Good Magic and can save us from the laws of cause and effect.

And just to repeat it yet again, if you are a Moderate Republican, you are specifically and personally responsible for this insanity.