Now that the war on science is over, maybe our scientists can get busy doing useful things again. For eight years under the Bush The Younger Administration, science was considered some sort of anti-religious voodoo. Our nation’s scientists had to be content with narrating shows on cable TV about black holes and biographies of dead scientists who actually accomplished something. It was a nice racket, but it has sort of dulled their intellectual edge. Our space program is dying on the vine too, with the latest attempt to send yet another piece of space junk into orbit landing in the Arctic Ocean. Our space shuttles are starting to become a collection of old, beat-up cargo trucks, accidents waiting to happen.
The only diseases that have been cured are the phony ones some scientists have been inventing while in the employ of giant drug companies who then market expensive placebos to treat them. That whole Attention Deficit scam is nothing more than a world full of people bored to tears with our paltry scientific output in recent years. Who wants to listen to people with expensive educations babbling about some wonder drug that still doesn’t make anything they say worth our time? That attention deficit will in force remain until they come up with something worthwhile. Some suggestions:
CLOSE THE NUTRITION/ENJOYMENT GAP. It seems that everything that is bad for you tastes great while anything good for you tastes like crap. No matter how you slice it, shape it or package it, tofu is horrible and unsatisfying. What the hell is it, anyway? It’s not even similar to food. Why not get to work on potato chips that are nutritious without tasting like fried cardboard? How about a wholesome food that tastes like Peeps? The kids would clean their plates at every meal. And stop trying to get us to stop enjoying steak. It’s not going to happen. We’re carnivores and predators by nature and don’t give a rat’s ass who disapproves. If we were meant to eat bean sprouts, the damned things would taste like something.
STOP WITH THE CRAZY WEAPONS. Who’s side are the scientists on? They have provided the world’s military organizations with enough firepower to kill us all several times, from poison gasses to nuclear warheads and now unmanned predator airplanes that can find you and kill you along with anybody in the immediate vicinity without anybody getting so much as mud on their boots. While all these things are pretty impressive from a pure technological standpoint, where’s the benefit to mankind? If the scientists don’t cooperate with the military, none of these things get manufactured. How about conducting a war on cancer or diabetes? If we deploy half the resources and energy that we bring to bear in the taking of lives, maybe we could save a few. Maybe the scientists could sleep a little better too.
LOSE THE “JUST BECAUSE WE CAN” MENTALITY. Most of us are capable of doing any number of crazy things but we don’t. Just because one is capable of something, that doesn’t mean that it must be done. Who wants cloned humans? We’ve got a ton of people already and we let 36,000 of them die every single day from the torture of starvation. How much regard will we have for the lives of people we create in laboratories? And knowing scientists, they’ll clone themselves, and then we’ll have two or three of each of these annoying social misfits on our hands. Then what? People will start reaching for some of those high-tech weapons to thin the herd of these pompous and tedious creeps, that’s what. And if they feel they must clone somebody, how about cloning some strippers? Everybody likes them.
LEARN TO SPEAK. Scientists like to speak in shop talk, then get all condescending like we’re all morons because we don’t understand them. We would understand them just fine if they lose their pomposity and speak like regular people, which is what they are, white coats or no white coats. Somewhere during their many years of schooling, they need to take a course or two in speaking intelligibly. The temptation of many professionals is to assume that the basics of their specialized fields is common knowledge, but most people get over it and learn to communicate with other people. People can understand just about anything when it is explained by a person skilled not only in molecular biology, but in talking. Which, by the way, is a skill most of master quite early in life. Maybe some of these people could do a study on why scientists have been unable to grasp this most basic of human concepts when they are capable of unraveling DNA codes. It could be that their own DNA code is missing something somewhere. Odds are, though, that none of them will go near that one with a 10-foot test tube.