science

Science is a backwater two-bit superstition.

Science has survived, not on its own merits, but because it’s been dragged into modernity by its big brother, corporate capitalism. You were thinkin it. It took me to say it. Science is a backwater but not in a good way. It’s not the backwater of fertile fen and marsh, not the happy throng of fur and feather at the wellspring of desire. Nope. I just mean backwater as a synonym for ignorant.

People who are sweet on science always say the same thing when you point out that science’s main impact on all known science planets is the destruction of planetary surfaces, and science’s main impact on minds is to promote and institutionalize incuriosity. Who can argue with these evident truths? People typically concede the obvious but then go:

Well, yeah, but I meant pure science.

Oh for cripes sake, “purity.” German national socialism venerated and intensified that science-purity dream into a fetish. Remember those guys? Hygienic cosmology. No dark matter on my toilet. [What would Freud say?] Science! So clean. So, so clean. Pure science, not that dang applied stuff that looks strangely like science’s dirty twin, technology.

Science is always pretending it’s too pure to be engineering despite the fact, or because of the fact, that most of what passes for science is actually engineering. Hence the white coats to make science seem more elevated. White coats seem a little desperate, don’t they? As goofy as engineers putting hard hats on at job sites, like engineering is a real job worth actually having.

An engineer is a sort of retread [yup, that’s how we have to spell it these days] whose career peaked in sophomore year of college with the ability to drink three six-packs at one sitting. He’s the kind of guy who can’t figure out how a basic bridge works but he figures he’ll go to Baltimore and try his hand at bridgebuilding if he can get someone to pay him while he experiments. He had an erector set once—how hard can a real bridge be?

After Baltimore, scientists are going to be wearing whites as pure as a trad virgin’s aisle-walking costume, am I right? Engineer? What? Never met one.

Pure science. Jesus. Not tethered to the demands of business. Cue the Vangelis. Pure science: the ethereal speculative cosmological realm of pure theoretical physics. [fade to angels singing]

Pure, pure science. Or as I like to call pure science…(punchline coming)…or as I like to call it:

The Manhattan Project.

Boom.

German physics and American know-how working together to melt Japanese children. What’s not to love? Add Bellamy salutes as necessary to point out where nuclear con-, hmm, -fusion, -fession, fashion, sorry, fission (there we go) is heading. Cuz evidence-based. Don’t hide your Bellamy salute under a bushel, dear reader. Come on, I want to see those hands. Every Bellamy salute equals a like. Two Bellamies is a re-stack, if you know what I mean. I might not be a developed country but a little re-stack wouldn’t hurt.

The truth of how science works is even more tawdry than the brute fact of its having been sullied by money and engineering, and it’s this: bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is science in a nut’s hell, sorry Mr. Kafka, I meant nutshell.

What people think of as the burgeoning of science in the nineteenth century was actually the burgeoning of book keeping. You heard it here first. Now admittedly, credit where credit’s due, the thing called science was actually pretty good at careful records. It takes a certain kind of meticulous dullard to do good book-keeping, and science types are the right level of dull for the job. Add big Latin words as necessary. Caveat emptor means naked emperor, I think.

Sciencey true believers like to tell you the story of how modern weather prediction supposedly triumphed a couple of centuries back. This is a good one, so hang in. If memory serves, sciencey weather boosters bang on about nineteenth-century barometers and they’ll wild-cherry-pick a bit of data to supposedly prove that science beat out cranky elders with arthritic joints in the weather-prediction department. Did it though? I think it depends on how cranky the elders were. Speaking of old salts, I’ve been outperforming Noah weather, sorry, NOAA weather, for years now, so listen up. Après, le déluge is my best guess on global trends if I’ve got my comma right. That comma’s a real killer.

I’ll concede that nowadays it might be difficult for even the crankiest old salt to predict when Canadian air-farce bombers are coming to deliver the weather. Tuesdays are a good guess. These bastards are like ghoulish weather gods, and they lay down successive waves of lead-and-aluminum chaff upon the heads of the Vancouver citizenry like some sort of meteor-illogical moo-ha-ha Mengele project. Not to mention the rest of Canada. Serves Canada right, being the worst mining aggressor in the history of yada yada.

In short, the rise of science is really the rise of book keeping. So very many things to write down in modern bourgeois life. If you write down enough things, even a scientist might notice a pattern in there somewhere. They call it big data now but it’s a nineteenth-century thing.

I speak as a weather expert, or at least as someone who invented the idea of having windows in weather stations (yeah, that was me), but I failed to get a patent. I’m working on Romeo balconies right now. With a Romeo, instead of weather reportage focusing on when and where, we can focus on wherefore. I’m targeting the philosopher’s weather channel.

Here’s the real weather report, and it’s issued by me, Dave, at the end of the world:

Storm’s a-comin.

Put that in your little book.

As for medical science, you already know the deal: follow the money and the dead rats. If you ever find a medical study that isn’t a pure (that word again!) cash transaction with la cosa nostra phamily thang (cosa is thang in Italian) then that study will not be statistically large but will be statistically smell. Sorry, small. Typoop (a type of oop). And what’s the deal with rats? Is torturing rats the best way to figure out how to heal our children? When it comes to health, maybe instead of maiming rats it would be better to issue an uninjured rat to each child and see how affection works.

In short, money + dead rats = evidence-based.

And that’s everything you need to know about science. I gotta say, compared to science, astrology’s looking pretty good right now. Astrology’s lookin up.

To summarize you and science:

1) Your belief in purity is a nationally socialist one and it’s a scandal you’re not Bellamy saluting more vigorously.

2) Actual science is 99% technology and 99% book-keeping, which means that science is 198% a) tawdry and b) boring.

3) The ethereal two percent of pure science is reserved for the non-boring stuff of melting a few kids.

4) Science is good at book keeping. So good, it likes to keep two sets of books.

Does that cover science? Can we be done now?

===

Dr. David Thor

2 April 2024

This article is dedicated to all my subscribers who left without saying good-bye. Did I say something? Lol.

Apparent photograph is actually me as a Large Print emoji for any of my readers who like to sing my articles in karaoke singalongs and want my comforting presence. Kum bah yah.