Meet Lamar Smith (R-TX). He authored the SOPA bill that everyone loved a few years ago. He's a climate denier with all kinds of science sense.
While Smith admits to having studied some science in college, most of his science credentials come straight from Congress: he’s already served on the science committee for the past 26 years. His votes reflect a pattern of opposition to climate change and alternative energy efforts, sympathy to large industry in matters of copyright and patent law, deference to law enforcement on privacy issues, and moral policing of the internet.
Smith’s record on energy and the environment represents one of his most controversial policy arenas. He voted to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, voted no several times on tax credits for renewable energy and incentives for energy production and conservation, voted against raising fuel efficiency standards, and rejected implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. Opponents of the appointment have observed in recent days that Smith, like his predecessor Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), have expressed skepticism about man-made global warming—a question that suffers no serious objection in scientific literature, but has become a contentious topic of debate after conservative groups cast it as a social problem in the 1990s.
He continues his crusade to make America safe from science and its commie scientists. He's been sending staffers to pour through the National Science Foundation's (NSF) material
related to projects that the NSF has funded over the past decade. They've been by 4 times this summer alone:
The visits from the staffers, who work for the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees NSF, were an unprecedented—and some say bizarre—intrusion into the much admired process that NSF has used for more than 60 years to award research grants. Unlike the experts who have made that system work so well, however, the congressional staffers weren’t really there to judge the scientific merits of each proposal. But that wasn’t their intent.
The Republican aides were looking for anything that Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), their boss as chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, could use to support his ongoing campaign to demonstrate how the $7 billion research agency is “wasting” taxpayer dollars on frivolous or low-priority projects, particularly in the social sciences. The Democratic staffers wanted to make sure that their boss, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (D–TX), the panel’s senior Democrat, knew enough about each grant to rebut any criticism that Smith might levy against the research.
The most immediate problem with all of this is that Rep. Smith is threatening the NSF's promise to researchers that its peer-review process remains confidential. The fundamental principal of research is the ability to make mistakes, to follow theories, unabashedly, and then take the harsh reviews and critiques of your scientific community. Here's how Smith goes about it all:
How did things get to this point? For the past 18 months, Smith has waged a very public assault on NSF’s storied peer-review system. He’s issued a barrage of press releases that ridicule specific awards, championed legislation that would alter NSF’s peer-review system and slash funding for the social science programs that have supported much of the research he has questioned, and berated NSF officials for providing what he considers to be inadequate explanations of their funding decisions.
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Below the fold you'll find an
example of what Smith is talking about and how backward and insane his methodology is.
One such project was a $300,000 grant received by 2009 to study the feedback system that allows humans to control a vehicle, in this case a bicycle. "The NSF has gone off the road, and taxpayers are paying for it," Smith told the press. "Scarce public funds were awarded for an ill-conceived study to improve bicycle designs. Peddling their proposal, the researchers asserted that bicycle riding dynamics are 'poorly understood.' Yet bicycling is a $65 billion per year global industry that invests hundreds of millions in research and development. What's really poorly understood is why the NSF wasted $300,000 of taxpayer money on this project."
What's really poorly understood is why Smith doesn't even seem inclined to speak with the scientists conducting the research. As ScienceInsider reports, the recipient of that grant— Mont Hubbard an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Davis—has a ready answer to Smith's question about how his research could possibly serve the national interest.
"It's easy to learn to ride a bicycle, but it's hard to explain how we do it," Hubbard says. His broader research into operator control of mechanical systems has applications across many areas, he explains. Substitute "pilot" for "rider" and "airplane" for "bicycle,"
This is all a part of the GOP's need to find spending cuts they can champion without raising taxes on the top 1 percent. They must cut school lunches and school buses and they cut science programs that they
refuse to understand, because they are interested in their own power alone. They're cutting NASA's budget so much that we have just lost an important program that tries to track
projectiles hitting us from outer space. But, you know, there are all kinds of scientists that can tell you all kinda of things. So, it's probably better to go with people like Republican Lamar Smith's gut feelings because, in the end, you know what's in everyone's guts, right?
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