What He Said

Wished I wrote this; http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson110211.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Deborah Grey became the first member of the Reform Party elected to Parliament

Enter the wayback machine and set the controls for November 1988.  Canada was having an election. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, made the election about the Canada USA free trade agreement.  The message was, if the Progressive Conservatives did not win, Canada was doomed.   In the newly created Alberta riding of Beaver River  there was no incumbent.  The riding consisted of the area surrounding Bonnyville, Saint Paul, Cold Lake, and Lac La Biche,  created in 1987 from  Athabasca ,  Pembina  and  Vegreville . It was safe to assume that whoever  the PC's nominated as their candidate would win. The three ridings Beaver River was carved out of elected Progressive Conservative MPs in the previous election. The nomination meeting was held shortly before the election behind closed doors, no one other than those inside  knew how or why candidate John Dahmer was picked. The Liberals and...
Read more

So you wanna live on Mars?

Image
  This redneck mispent a significant portion of his youth devouring science fiction. I pretty much stuck to what is now categorized as 'hard' science fiction, as in based on 'hard' science, ie what we thought we knew about physics and such.  We populated other planets, solar systems, created new societies, fought wars, and when things got tough, we could board a rocket and go somewhere else. Space travel was easy. About the same time I grew out of sci-fi, the genre evolved into fantasy and science fiction, as in mostly fantasy, elves, dragons and wizards, and magic without science.  Then we got dystopian future fiction, which  is also classified as fantasy and science fiction.  In contrast to the sci fi I grew up with, the dystopian was a future  no one would want to live in. Looking back with a critical eye, so called hard sci-fi was every bit as fictional and magical as elves and dragons.  When science fiction went to Hollywood it became even more di...
Read more

Political Science

Image
  "Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals..." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics).   "Science is a rigorous, systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about everything." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science). Political truths only need agreement or compliance. There is no requirement for political truths to make sense.  Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet  agronomist who was appointed the head of  the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences by Joseph Stalin.  Lysenko stated that  genetics and agricultural science was "bourgeois and  fascist   " .  Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, substituting his own crackpot ideas.  As many as 3,000 soviet scientists who challenged his ideas were silenced, fired, imprisoned or even executed.  Lysenko studied as an agronom...
Read more