I imagine the comment thread will be well worth reading.
33 Replies to “This will go down well at the HuffPo”
The comment section at Huffpo IS well worth reading if you’re feeling masochistic and want to ruin your day.
I quickly skimmed the comments and here’s a synopsis: Harper-BAD, Big Oil-BAD, poor, poor scientists, victims of tory fascism.
Do these people EVER look at a dissenting view?
Given that I recently attended an event in which the government recently funded 1.4 million in neural research at my old alma mater which had relevancy to the EMS staff; I would call this what it is, a CBC disinformation campaign…
Surprise, surprise the CBC reports only the facts that support its narrative…hmm.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
I suspect that PM Harper hates bull*hit science like most of the rest of us that comment on this site, as well as on WUWT, and other similar sites.
The cartoon picture at the bottom of the article sums up the ideology of the eco-fascists that support Gore, Suzuki, et al.
You imagine wrong, Lance. I read the comments, they were pretty much what I expected and mildly amusing. But ‘well worth reading’? Only in the same sense that Dumb and Dumberer is well worth watching.
Just moved another foot of gorebull warming, stopped for a coffee, good to see the rage and anger of the Gorons is right on cue, cheerleading by the CBC as usual, and like Ken says, Harper is sick of funding fleecical science, that being the fleecing monetarily of the populace for a tooth fairy Santa Clause Easter Bunny approach to science. Good science has taken a rap and been caught up in this santa science and that is unfortunate because there are thousands of honest good scientists working on REAL problems that face us, and they have a hard time getting funding when all the public money has been stolen by these charlatans and the scam “climate change”. Any politician that directs any funds to Suzookers scam should be jailed with Suzookers deniers.
No shortage of parasites using other peoples money. Plus billions more spent on ‘scientific’ fairy tales.
Fire them all.
I thought the Huffpost article on Reese Witherspoon’s dress conveyed much more important information to the masses.
There are no ‘good’ scientists that exist on the public dole. They’re parasites, plain and simple. Only there because the politics of the day deems them the proper sort of parasite.
I think the CBC is described correctly! Time to shut them down or cut all taxpayer funding. They don’t represent Canada, unless all Canadians are marginal morons.
JMHO
Quite enjoyed those comments! So floundery!
So, spending in R&D is up under the Harper Conservatives, and we rank among the top internationally in percent of GDP invested in science.
Well, what horrible news, because it can’t be on anything valuable to Canadians.
Do I need a sarcasm label?
Yes, Reese Witherspoon’s dress is miles more important than the tripe the commentators are peddling at Huffpo. I rather prefer the comments “here”, with great description like “Gorebull” warming. Perfect! “Well I heard Mister Young sing about her. Well, I heard ole Neil put her down. Well I hope Neil Young will remember – A Northern man don’t need him around anyhow. Sweet Home ALBERTA, where the skies are so BLUE, and the Guv’ment’s true. Sweet Home ALBERTA…Lord, I’m coming home to you.” (Hurray for Lynyrd Skynyrd)
“I imagine the comment thread will be well worth reading.”
I doubt that very very much. Reading the back and forth rantings of partisan hacks is like watching a never-ending game of catch where everyone loves to throw the ball but no one gives a sh*t about catching it.
Scientists have a union?
I am a physicist, an academic, and a member of the Conservative Party of Canada.
My main disagreement with Stephen Harper is that he is too liberal.
I am sick and tired of hearing “scientists” described as upset about some political
cause or other. Some thoroughly fourth-rate types, “climate scientists”, are of
course, to their eternal disgrace.
By far and away the most harmful politician to Canadian science was Pierre
Trudeau, although the various members of the civil service who bullied universities
into feminism would come a close second.
Hopefully you don’t take public money, that would also make you a parasite.
I can’t abide parasites who can’t stand on their own two feet. If your ‘research’ is of value someone is paying for it.
My dear little Violin, of course I take public money. Fundamental research has never paid for itself and never will.
Pharmaceuticals research, perhaps. As for yourself, I would suggest that you take your screechings off to –
oh let us see – Saudi Arabia, a wealthy state with litre science.
To be fair to the Saudis, their government is spending a lot of money to improve the strengths not only of their
applied science but also of their fundamental research.
Since I am getting into the matter, let me say that Canada does not and never has had a science policy worthy
of the name, which is part of the reason that we are a rather peripheral country – no longer small, just
unnecessary. The pattern of research and development in Germany is instructive – around perhaps 1750
“Germany” was a collection of feudal states – my Dutch colleagues used to refer to them as little better than
denizens of the interior of Africa – but began to build up a research capability. First came pure mathematics
and philosophy. Then in the 19th century came pure chemistry and pure physics. These in turn bred
applied physics and chemistry, and the chemical industry, electrical and then electronics industries etc.
The Russians followed the German model.
In the United States it worked the other way around. The great engineering schools such as MIT and Cal Tech
grew their own pure science departments.
The one exception, and rather an important one to my previous remarks about Canadian science, is that
Energy Mines and Resources and its predecessors did a lot of work in geology which did eventually aid
the resource industry in this country.
…of course I take public money.
Then, you’re a parasite, plain and simple. Whatever the excuse. If your ‘research’ were really of value, someone would pay for it without being forced.
Einstein, Plank, Boltzmann, Dirac, etc never made a profit, yet without them there would be no computers, phones, trains, etc.
Scientists employed by the government will generally be in unions. Politicians sold out the taxpayers’ interests to the unions long ago.
John, please never waste your time replying to Strad. He’s an utterly worthless troll as mean-spirited as the worst of the lefties. In fact, if I could trade him to the socialists for a bag of gravel, I’d do it in a heartbeat. With his attitude, he’d feel right at home.
stradivarious, if you believe in what you’re preaching, stop using the computer that connects you to the internet and pen a letter and snail mail it to SDA. Fundamental scientific research is one use of tax dollars that I fully support. Some 40 years ago, I remember talking to a mathematician who was a number theorist and one of the things that drew him to that field was that it had absolutely zero practical application (pure mathematicians tend to be that way and look with disdain upon mere “applied” mathematicians). Fast forward 20 years and the basis of all public key encryption is the research performed by pure number theorists who naively believed that their work would be of no practical value ever.
I’m not a mathematician as I use mathematics to help me solve real world problems that interest me. Thus, I’ll never make any fundamental discoveries in mathematics. Pure science irritates many people because it represents grown men playing. Scientists are neotenous humans and maintain the curiosity of children into old age. The research I do now I can fund myself although I really long for a fully equipped lab again where I had (for the time) bleeding edge computers, electrophysiologic recording apparatus and a wide selection of drugs to test out on neurons. Now I’d just love to be looking at cultures of neurons who have had had various genes implanted in them so that they light up when they fire an action potential and one can study the activity of a group of cells in culture with a grid of photomultipliers. Of course we’re now so far ahead in the area of tinkering with cellular machinery that a lab with a modest budget can have it’s own DNA sequencer and synthesizer.
When I was in research there was the obligatory “practical applications” aspect of our research that would get stuck into grant applications to make it look as if our work would be medically useful, but really we were a group of grown up kids playing with brains and bits of brains trying to figure out how they worked. It’s up to other people to take the results of basic research and find practical applications for it. The greater the quantity of basic research findings one has as raw materials, the greater the potential that someone is going to figure out a way of using them to create a marketable product.
Applied research is fine for some people but it’s not something I could do. In the cutthroat area of pharmaceutical research, only positive findings see the light of day and scientific objectivity is the loser. I could never work in an environment where I would be forced to hide experimental results which shoe the negative effects of a drug companies star product. For every drug such as a PDE5 inhibitor which has huge profit potential and almost no adverse side effects in the user of the drug, there are a majority of drugs where some people who take it develop severe, even fatal, side effects and the business model is to get the drug to market with just the glowing research results, make as much money as possible before the adverse effects come to light and the lawsuits start and the drug gets taken off the market. The latter problems are a result of a society that demands everything be absolutely safe regardless of the physical impossibility of “absolute safety”.
Getting back to physics, in the 1920’s there could have hardly been a more arcane area of research than solid-state physics. The practical individual at the time would use vacuum tubes as this technology would have been the obvious way in which one created radio transmitters, amplifiers and computers. I have a collection of vacuum tubes which are now interesting antiques and am surprised at the miniaturization that occurred in this area with some of the tiniest tubes being the size of power transistors. Then Schockly invented the transistor and in a couple of decades tubes were an interesting artifact of an ancient age. (Well actually there were semiconductors in use at the time like the galena crystal one used in crystal radios and selenium rectifiers but these were quite minor in comparison to the complexity of various vacuum tubes that coexisted).
For those individuals who are sufficiently wealthy that they can fund their own research, the nicest thing about such research is that they alone can decide what they’re going to research and how they’re going to go about it. State funded pure research has a lot more strings attached as politicians pick the fields that they think the public will want them to spend money in and so they will only attract scientists whose area of interest corresponds to those fields. The greater the amount of funding, the more restricted individual researchers are. When one gets to the obscenity known as “climate research”, one has statist whores who pretend to be scientists starting with a predetermined conclusion and cherry picking data to support it. The amount of data spent on such immoral “research” probably tops a trillion dollars now. Far better to have spent this sum of money on fundamental research into low energy nuclear reactions for energy production, conventional fusion reactors as well as reliable breeder reactor technologies.
One must be a Facebook member to post on HuffPo. Since recently implementing that policy, the number of comments has dropped significantly and the viewpoint has shifted to an obvious bias.
Of course we’re now so far ahead in the area of tinkering with cellular machinery that a lab with a modest budget can have it’s own DNA sequencer and synthesizer.
I’m reminded of a scene in ‘Blade runner’ with the guy who grew eyes. In the cutthroat area of pharmaceutical research, only positive findings see the light of day and scientific objectivity is the loser. I could never work in an environment where I would be forced to hide experimental results which shoe the negative effects of a drug companies star product.
I recently saw the film “Side Effects” which takes a very thought provoking and entertaining look at the ‘depression mediating’ industry, and the unintended side effects. I highly recommend it.
You don’t need a lab to do theoretical physics, you just need a brain, and some skill at math.
Look at Leonard Susskind’s vid’s on YouTube, now I do string theory for fun, if not for profit, and who knows, maybe I’ll come up with something.
Socialist tendencies abound…you certainly deserve the society you rail about. AGW ‘science’, and all.
When it comes right down to it, only your pet cause is worthy of forcing others to fund it, showing you to be a true socialist.
And you have a very poor knowledge of history. Very few past scientists were able to fund their own research. They had patrons, nobles, lords, or kings to fund them. As monarchies and lords fell away, governments stepped in to fund scientific research. Either through prizes or direct funding in certain areas. A government will tend to fund pure research while corporations now will fund applied research. There’s nothing socialist about this. Now in regards to AGW, there’s been a lot of abuse and that area of research should be severely audited on all levels and areas.
There’s nothing socialist about this.
LOL, just like leftists, always changing the definition of socialist. Black is white…
There’s one point most of the commenters at Huffpo missed: whatever your take on CBC’s bias, WHY THE HELL should it be taxpayer-funded? Why are we paying for such bias?
Yeah well, Germany was cited as an example….
Germany had a well earned reputation for scientific research until the rise of the Third Reich when basic research was defunded and the emphasis was on applied research and engineering.
This emphasis produced a veritable avalanche of cutting edge technology, especially in weapons/weapon systems…..but about 1943 the well had gone dry…..the slow refinement of the turbojets and failed atomic programme are symptomatic. Von Braun came very close to losing funding….
Yes Allied bombing and commando raids had an effect. The raid on The Tellmark, Norway was actually a psy op to encourage Nazi pursuit of a failed concept/avenue of research. Heavy atoms split/react much easier than the light atoms.
One matter I find of interest, of the early 20th century, was that America produced the best, most precise machine tools and machines. However, the US consistently failed to use their superior tooling to produce superior product, compared to British or German….Germany had to implement a crash programme of training tool and die makers, after Pearl Harbour, because all their kit was sourced from the US…..
I don’t understand why harper with his majority did not stop funding the CBC. the only people that would be upset are liberals and they would never vote conservative. opportunity missed here Mr Harper.
So, a democratically elected government chooses to fund federal science programmes in accordance with its political objectives.
Am I missing something here?
The comment section at Huffpo IS well worth reading if you’re feeling masochistic and want to ruin your day.
I quickly skimmed the comments and here’s a synopsis: Harper-BAD, Big Oil-BAD, poor, poor scientists, victims of tory fascism.
Do these people EVER look at a dissenting view?
Given that I recently attended an event in which the government recently funded 1.4 million in neural research at my old alma mater which had relevancy to the EMS staff; I would call this what it is, a CBC disinformation campaign…
Surprise, surprise the CBC reports only the facts that support its narrative…hmm.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
I suspect that PM Harper hates bull*hit science like most of the rest of us that comment on this site, as well as on WUWT, and other similar sites.
The cartoon picture at the bottom of the article sums up the ideology of the eco-fascists that support Gore, Suzuki, et al.
You imagine wrong, Lance. I read the comments, they were pretty much what I expected and mildly amusing. But ‘well worth reading’? Only in the same sense that Dumb and Dumberer is well worth watching.
Just moved another foot of gorebull warming, stopped for a coffee, good to see the rage and anger of the Gorons is right on cue, cheerleading by the CBC as usual, and like Ken says, Harper is sick of funding fleecical science, that being the fleecing monetarily of the populace for a tooth fairy Santa Clause Easter Bunny approach to science. Good science has taken a rap and been caught up in this santa science and that is unfortunate because there are thousands of honest good scientists working on REAL problems that face us, and they have a hard time getting funding when all the public money has been stolen by these charlatans and the scam “climate change”. Any politician that directs any funds to Suzookers scam should be jailed with Suzookers deniers.
No shortage of parasites using other peoples money. Plus billions more spent on ‘scientific’ fairy tales.
Fire them all.
I thought the Huffpost article on Reese Witherspoon’s dress conveyed much more important information to the masses.
There are no ‘good’ scientists that exist on the public dole. They’re parasites, plain and simple. Only there because the politics of the day deems them the proper sort of parasite.
I think the CBC is described correctly! Time to shut them down or cut all taxpayer funding. They don’t represent Canada, unless all Canadians are marginal morons.
JMHO
Quite enjoyed those comments! So floundery!
So, spending in R&D is up under the Harper Conservatives, and we rank among the top internationally in percent of GDP invested in science.
Well, what horrible news, because it can’t be on anything valuable to Canadians.
Do I need a sarcasm label?
Yes, Reese Witherspoon’s dress is miles more important than the tripe the commentators are peddling at Huffpo. I rather prefer the comments “here”, with great description like “Gorebull” warming. Perfect! “Well I heard Mister Young sing about her. Well, I heard ole Neil put her down. Well I hope Neil Young will remember – A Northern man don’t need him around anyhow. Sweet Home ALBERTA, where the skies are so BLUE, and the Guv’ment’s true. Sweet Home ALBERTA…Lord, I’m coming home to you.” (Hurray for Lynyrd Skynyrd)
“I imagine the comment thread will be well worth reading.”
I doubt that very very much. Reading the back and forth rantings of partisan hacks is like watching a never-ending game of catch where everyone loves to throw the ball but no one gives a sh*t about catching it.
Scientists have a union?
I am a physicist, an academic, and a member of the Conservative Party of Canada.
My main disagreement with Stephen Harper is that he is too liberal.
I am sick and tired of hearing “scientists” described as upset about some political
cause or other. Some thoroughly fourth-rate types, “climate scientists”, are of
course, to their eternal disgrace.
By far and away the most harmful politician to Canadian science was Pierre
Trudeau, although the various members of the civil service who bullied universities
into feminism would come a close second.
Hopefully you don’t take public money, that would also make you a parasite.
I can’t abide parasites who can’t stand on their own two feet. If your ‘research’ is of value someone is paying for it.
My dear little Violin, of course I take public money. Fundamental research has never paid for itself and never will.
Pharmaceuticals research, perhaps. As for yourself, I would suggest that you take your screechings off to –
oh let us see – Saudi Arabia, a wealthy state with litre science.
To be fair to the Saudis, their government is spending a lot of money to improve the strengths not only of their
applied science but also of their fundamental research.
Since I am getting into the matter, let me say that Canada does not and never has had a science policy worthy
of the name, which is part of the reason that we are a rather peripheral country – no longer small, just
unnecessary. The pattern of research and development in Germany is instructive – around perhaps 1750
“Germany” was a collection of feudal states – my Dutch colleagues used to refer to them as little better than
denizens of the interior of Africa – but began to build up a research capability. First came pure mathematics
and philosophy. Then in the 19th century came pure chemistry and pure physics. These in turn bred
applied physics and chemistry, and the chemical industry, electrical and then electronics industries etc.
The Russians followed the German model.
In the United States it worked the other way around. The great engineering schools such as MIT and Cal Tech
grew their own pure science departments.
The one exception, and rather an important one to my previous remarks about Canadian science, is that
Energy Mines and Resources and its predecessors did a lot of work in geology which did eventually aid
the resource industry in this country.
…of course I take public money.
Then, you’re a parasite, plain and simple. Whatever the excuse. If your ‘research’ were really of value, someone would pay for it without being forced.
Einstein, Plank, Boltzmann, Dirac, etc never made a profit, yet without them there would be no computers, phones, trains, etc.
Scientists employed by the government will generally be in unions. Politicians sold out the taxpayers’ interests to the unions long ago.
John, please never waste your time replying to Strad. He’s an utterly worthless troll as mean-spirited as the worst of the lefties. In fact, if I could trade him to the socialists for a bag of gravel, I’d do it in a heartbeat. With his attitude, he’d feel right at home.
stradivarious, if you believe in what you’re preaching, stop using the computer that connects you to the internet and pen a letter and snail mail it to SDA. Fundamental scientific research is one use of tax dollars that I fully support. Some 40 years ago, I remember talking to a mathematician who was a number theorist and one of the things that drew him to that field was that it had absolutely zero practical application (pure mathematicians tend to be that way and look with disdain upon mere “applied” mathematicians). Fast forward 20 years and the basis of all public key encryption is the research performed by pure number theorists who naively believed that their work would be of no practical value ever.
I’m not a mathematician as I use mathematics to help me solve real world problems that interest me. Thus, I’ll never make any fundamental discoveries in mathematics. Pure science irritates many people because it represents grown men playing. Scientists are neotenous humans and maintain the curiosity of children into old age. The research I do now I can fund myself although I really long for a fully equipped lab again where I had (for the time) bleeding edge computers, electrophysiologic recording apparatus and a wide selection of drugs to test out on neurons. Now I’d just love to be looking at cultures of neurons who have had had various genes implanted in them so that they light up when they fire an action potential and one can study the activity of a group of cells in culture with a grid of photomultipliers. Of course we’re now so far ahead in the area of tinkering with cellular machinery that a lab with a modest budget can have it’s own DNA sequencer and synthesizer.
When I was in research there was the obligatory “practical applications” aspect of our research that would get stuck into grant applications to make it look as if our work would be medically useful, but really we were a group of grown up kids playing with brains and bits of brains trying to figure out how they worked. It’s up to other people to take the results of basic research and find practical applications for it. The greater the quantity of basic research findings one has as raw materials, the greater the potential that someone is going to figure out a way of using them to create a marketable product.
Applied research is fine for some people but it’s not something I could do. In the cutthroat area of pharmaceutical research, only positive findings see the light of day and scientific objectivity is the loser. I could never work in an environment where I would be forced to hide experimental results which shoe the negative effects of a drug companies star product. For every drug such as a PDE5 inhibitor which has huge profit potential and almost no adverse side effects in the user of the drug, there are a majority of drugs where some people who take it develop severe, even fatal, side effects and the business model is to get the drug to market with just the glowing research results, make as much money as possible before the adverse effects come to light and the lawsuits start and the drug gets taken off the market. The latter problems are a result of a society that demands everything be absolutely safe regardless of the physical impossibility of “absolute safety”.
Getting back to physics, in the 1920’s there could have hardly been a more arcane area of research than solid-state physics. The practical individual at the time would use vacuum tubes as this technology would have been the obvious way in which one created radio transmitters, amplifiers and computers. I have a collection of vacuum tubes which are now interesting antiques and am surprised at the miniaturization that occurred in this area with some of the tiniest tubes being the size of power transistors. Then Schockly invented the transistor and in a couple of decades tubes were an interesting artifact of an ancient age. (Well actually there were semiconductors in use at the time like the galena crystal one used in crystal radios and selenium rectifiers but these were quite minor in comparison to the complexity of various vacuum tubes that coexisted).
For those individuals who are sufficiently wealthy that they can fund their own research, the nicest thing about such research is that they alone can decide what they’re going to research and how they’re going to go about it. State funded pure research has a lot more strings attached as politicians pick the fields that they think the public will want them to spend money in and so they will only attract scientists whose area of interest corresponds to those fields. The greater the amount of funding, the more restricted individual researchers are. When one gets to the obscenity known as “climate research”, one has statist whores who pretend to be scientists starting with a predetermined conclusion and cherry picking data to support it. The amount of data spent on such immoral “research” probably tops a trillion dollars now. Far better to have spent this sum of money on fundamental research into low energy nuclear reactions for energy production, conventional fusion reactors as well as reliable breeder reactor technologies.
One must be a Facebook member to post on HuffPo. Since recently implementing that policy, the number of comments has dropped significantly and the viewpoint has shifted to an obvious bias.
Of course we’re now so far ahead in the area of tinkering with cellular machinery that a lab with a modest budget can have it’s own DNA sequencer and synthesizer.
I’m reminded of a scene in ‘Blade runner’ with the guy who grew eyes.
In the cutthroat area of pharmaceutical research, only positive findings see the light of day and scientific objectivity is the loser. I could never work in an environment where I would be forced to hide experimental results which shoe the negative effects of a drug companies star product.
I recently saw the film “Side Effects” which takes a very thought provoking and entertaining look at the ‘depression mediating’ industry, and the unintended side effects. I highly recommend it.
You don’t need a lab to do theoretical physics, you just need a brain, and some skill at math.
Look at Leonard Susskind’s vid’s on YouTube, now I do string theory for fun, if not for profit, and who knows, maybe I’ll come up with something.
Socialist tendencies abound…you certainly deserve the society you rail about. AGW ‘science’, and all.
When it comes right down to it, only your pet cause is worthy of forcing others to fund it, showing you to be a true socialist.
And you have a very poor knowledge of history. Very few past scientists were able to fund their own research. They had patrons, nobles, lords, or kings to fund them. As monarchies and lords fell away, governments stepped in to fund scientific research. Either through prizes or direct funding in certain areas. A government will tend to fund pure research while corporations now will fund applied research. There’s nothing socialist about this. Now in regards to AGW, there’s been a lot of abuse and that area of research should be severely audited on all levels and areas.
There’s nothing socialist about this.
LOL, just like leftists, always changing the definition of socialist. Black is white…
There’s one point most of the commenters at Huffpo missed: whatever your take on CBC’s bias, WHY THE HELL should it be taxpayer-funded? Why are we paying for such bias?
Yeah well, Germany was cited as an example….
Germany had a well earned reputation for scientific research until the rise of the Third Reich when basic research was defunded and the emphasis was on applied research and engineering.
This emphasis produced a veritable avalanche of cutting edge technology, especially in weapons/weapon systems…..but about 1943 the well had gone dry…..the slow refinement of the turbojets and failed atomic programme are symptomatic. Von Braun came very close to losing funding….
Yes Allied bombing and commando raids had an effect. The raid on The Tellmark, Norway was actually a psy op to encourage Nazi pursuit of a failed concept/avenue of research. Heavy atoms split/react much easier than the light atoms.
One matter I find of interest, of the early 20th century, was that America produced the best, most precise machine tools and machines. However, the US consistently failed to use their superior tooling to produce superior product, compared to British or German….Germany had to implement a crash programme of training tool and die makers, after Pearl Harbour, because all their kit was sourced from the US…..
I don’t understand why harper with his majority did not stop funding the CBC. the only people that would be upset are liberals and they would never vote conservative. opportunity missed here Mr Harper.
So, a democratically elected government chooses to fund federal science programmes in accordance with its political objectives.
Am I missing something here?
Heh. “Bag of gravel.” Classic.