Science returns to the Middle Ages with a vengeance By Anthony J. Sadar
Touring Britain’s Cotswolds region in Gloucestershire, England and beyond can be downright inspirational. Castles long ago conquered, now in ruins, recall a cold, hard past — a past that relied on the sun and wood for heat, coupled with wind and water for power. And mostly only feudal lords and royal gentry could comfortably afford even paltry luxuries on a regular basis.
Today it’s back to the future of medieval times with a vengeance and a modern twist. Not only are we moving back to sunbeam collectors and windmills to power our twenty-first century homes and industry, we are redefining what it is to be human. Not likely that even the sixteenth-century founder of human anatomy, Andreas Vesalius, thought of recategorizing humans into more than two sexes.
The foundations of science painstakingly developed since the dawn of humanity have been denied. The onset of human consciousness established that men were men and women were women by rudimentary deduction. The medieval mindset was too primitive to contemplate that men could somehow menstruate or become pregnant. After all, with no observance of male lady parts, the nascent scientific method including observation, hypothesis, and testing, was a nonstarter.
Apparently, contemporary intellectuals know better. You need not believe your own two eyes or observe an actual condition to affirm its reality. So, anatomical males can be deemed females and pigs can fly.
The new science aristocracy has produced not only ethereal new horizons of “science,” but also new fears to enslave serfdom and reenact sumptuary laws to dampen modern pleasures.
In Michael Crichton’s 2004 bestselling novel, State of Fear, a skeptical climate science character named Professor Hoffman said “I study the ecology of thought… and how it has led to a State of Fear.” The professor went on to explain that the government practices “social control [which is] best managed through fear.”
Part of the control derives from claimed certainty in dubious climate modeling results and presentation of select disastrous weather conditions as the new norm to frighten the great unwashed into living less comfortably.
All the while, cutting edge means to generate electricity — and to lift billions of people out of unnecessary poverty — exist in the enormously plentiful natural gas reserves obtainable through hydraulic fracturing and energy released via nuclear fission reactors now and hopefully fusion reactors in the near future, plus hydrogen fuel cells and other novel means of power production. The future looks bright.
Welcome to twenty-first century reality. With ample, affordable electricity, peasants can live like kings of yesteryear. But, where does that leave present-day wannabe kings with control over the hoi polloi? Dethroned.
The 1600s had Galileo and Newton to help deliver the world from its dark ages. But, are there enough independent, courageous, influential thinkers today to stave the tide of left-wing anti-science? Many of us believe there are such thinkers and they’re slowly making science real again.
In the meantime, if a guy in a dress tells you to trust him because he knows science, you might respond as a cockney Brit and say, “Not bloody likely!”
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