America is the home of the free and the land of the brave.  At least that is what we all learned in school.  A basic tenet of the role science has in a free society is that the government does not direct science or instruct scientists where their quests must lead; that scientists are free to explore and search for truth, whether that truth is convenient, politically correct, contradicts government policy, or runs contrary to the sentiments of the day.  Truth is truth, whether you like it or not and agree with its existence.  Truth is not like your wife who may look beautiful to you and ugly to your girlfriend, or vice versa.  When the Inquisition forced Galileo to recant the Copernican theory, after he did so, he muttered, “And yet [the Earth] it still moves.”
 
           Apparently a subject that has attracted scientists is the question of the correlation between race and intelligence.  Now don’t get us wrong.  We believe that basically this is an area of wasteful analysis.  In our lives, we don’t deal with “races,” we deal with individual people.  For instance, if science has determined that Jews are smarter than Buddhists, the fact is if we needed an operation, we would rather have a smart Buddhist picking up the scalpel than a dumb Jew.  But if scientists want to explore a particular subject for what they believe is a search for the truth, and want to waste their (hopefully, not the public’s) money on a particular piece of nonsense, so be it.
 
            A worldwide uproar occurred because Nobel Prize winner James Watson made a racist statement about the lower intelligence of Africans.  “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours,” according to the London Sunday Times, but then he added, “Whereas all our testing says, ‘Not really.’”  Who cares?  Even if true – which we believe it is not – it is basically an irrelevancy.  Does that mean, if Watson is to be believed, that Africans should not be entitled to an equal share of the economic pie, the right to be equally educated, or the right to have all the protections and benefits that government can offer?  In short, even if it were true – again, which we do not believe it is – who cares?  Might not centuries of exploitation and denial of the benefits of education and health facilities cause testing to be skewed?

            Watson’s position is eerily similar to that of Professor Arthur Jensen, who wrote an article in 1969 in the Harvard Educational Review wherein he postulated that racial differences in intelligence test scores may have a genetic origin.  He suffered the same fate as Dr. Watson.

            While one may believe or disbelieve this sort of pseudo-science – and we do believe these “results” should be dumped into the dustbin where we personally put global warming and the Loch Ness monster – scientists like Watson and Jensen should have a right to journey to wherever their scientific quest leads them and not be attacked personally.  The problem is, if we start attacking the scientists, somewhere down the line we will only produce scientists who produce what the government wants them to produce.  Their role will basically be one of validating positions that have already been taken by the authorities before they begin their undertakings.  Even if these explorations result in cockeyed results and theories and, in the long run, theories that should impact our thinking not one bit, the alterative – cutting off the scientists before they do the work, or making them feel that if they don’t produce the desired results they will be personally discredited – is much worse than the nonsense they eventually produce.  
 

            This week I attended the 100th anniversary of the Plaza Hotel.  About 1,000 people were packed into the area in front of the Hotel, by invitation, after having gone through a double security check.  There were many police facilities around the event, all paid for, undoubtedly, by the City.  Performing was an orchestra that looked like the New York City Pops, and behind that was a jumbo-thon television screen.  The orchestra seemed to be playing primarily Cole Porter songs.  Whoever made the choice of music was blithely oblivious to the fact that Cole Porter lived at the Waldorf Astoria and, in fact, his piano is still there.  It became apparent that most of the people were in real estate, congratulating each other for the reformation of the Plaza Hotel.  The unworthy thought that occurred to me was – congratulating each other for what?  There was no work of beauty to elevate or enoble a man’s sensibilities, there was no new invention, discovery, that will help people in terms of their health or welfare, no housing for people who don’t have homes – just a lot of people congratulating each other for building condominiums to sell to very rich people.  Is this really something that we need to celebrate?

            People used to say, “Do right and fear no man; don’t right and fear no woman.”  And now e-mails have supplanted old fashioned snail mail, but yet, no such caution seems to be involved.  It seems that people feel that when they sit in front of their computer alone at night and type out all sorts of nonsense, somehow they are removed from responsibility for their missiles. 

            Currently, the Governor of New York appears, perhaps rightfully, perhaps wrongly, disinclined to release his e-mails that may be part of the scandal du jour, and, the Governor of New Jersey appears to be in trouble because of e-mails concerning his girlfriend, which he now, pursuant to a court order, has to turn over.  All of this is quite an apart and aside from the fact that any divorce lawyer will tell you about half of the people who come into their offices have a briefcase full of e-mails sent or received by a formerly believed-to-be-faithful spouse.  Various laws have been passed, such as one in New York, making it illegal to look at somebody else’s e-mail, but that doesn’t seem to deter jealous spouses.  They apparently operate under the proposition that if the computer is in their home, it is open season on whatever’s in it.

            Best advice:  don’t send e-mails of a personal nature unless you have no problem with your spouse – and eventually a judge – reading them.

            Don’t you think you would be pretty sore if somebody decided to take your money and make a charitable donation with it and not even ask your permission, nor even tell you to what charity the money was to go.  But that is exactly what Hillary Clinton and Eliot Spitzer did.           

            Norman Hsu was an on-the-lamb businessman who had been wanted by the State of California on grand larceny charges and just surrendered to authorities.  Simple enough story!  But wait, it gets more involved.  Hsu had given $62,000 to Governor Eliot Spitzer’s and $23,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  A fundraiser for Mrs. Clinton called him “a bit of a political junkie.”  The media revealed his criminal background, and both Hillary Clinton and Governor Spitzer then said that they would take the money given to them by Hsu and donate it to charity.  Now really!  Hsu never intended that money to be given to charity.  He intended to donate it to two political campaigns.  The proper thing to do would have been to return the money to its source, not volunteer to be charitable with Mr. Hsu’s money.  But then again, politicians are good at spending other people’s money.

 

Obviously, anybody this side of a lunatic asylum would not suggest that all the poisons, automobile omissions, factory smoke, and cow flatulations that go into the atmosphere could be doing any of us any good.  Of course, the cow flatulation problem could easily be resolved by mixing substantial amounts of Gas-X in with the hay.  But there is apparently a substantial amount of scientific authority (ranging from the scientists at NASA, the Brookhaven Laboratory, and various universities) that cannot merely be ascribed to payments from financially invested corporations suggesting that global warming is more hype than reality.  But one thing should be plain to even non-scientific types, and that is, simple arithmetic. 

In 2003, there was a monumental heat wave across Europe killing approximately 35,000 people – 2,000 in the U.K. alone.  This is an awful and painful statistic.  But worse is the fact that many more people die from the cold each winter.  In England alone, approximately 25,000 people usually die each year from the cold.  In Europe, over the same period that approximately 200,000 people died from heat, approximately 1.5 million Europeans died from the cold.  Also, probably because of expanding use of air conditioners, the death rate from heat is continually being reduced. 

Logically, the same global warming, whether one believes it is something we cause, or it is just one of those ebbs and flows that happen in the history of the world, at the same time saves many more lives by reducing the greater number of people who would otherwise die from the cold winters.  The arithmetic, though cruel and unfair, is simple, and suggests we need more research, and the fact that we should not facilely accept the fact that global warming is a people-created killer – or even is an unnatural phenomenon