Boulder is a Stoopid Place

PJ Lifestyle » 20 Things You Might Not Know About Robert A. Heinlein, Part 1: His Maculate Origin.

3. An incident seen as a child became the core of his personality and his writing.

(I knew of this incident before, from listening to recorded speeches and reading his essays, but for this I’ll use William H. Patterson’s bio, on which I rely for this article, mostly because it’s handy and clear. Also a good read.)

“A young couple was walking along a set of railroad tracks that cut through the park in those days when the woman got her heel caught in a switch – a nuisance, until they heard a train whistle approaching at speed. Another young man – the newspapers later said he was a tramp – stopped to help them get free. As the train fore down on them, the husband and the tramp struggled to get the woman free and were struck, all of them. The wife and the tramp were killed instantly and the husband was seriously injured…. Why did he [the tramp] do it? Wondered little Bobby and then adolescent Bobby – and so on repeatedly, did Midshipman Bob and politician Bob and adult Robert, understanding a bit more, a bit differently, every time he looked at it. “This incident became a core image for him, one that showed him in a way beyond words what it means to be a human being.”

This moral clarity, this idea of meaning found by defending others, probably is responsible for the falling out of the leftists in science fiction and Heinlein. They don’t see the military as a legitimate form of service, and a man who believes in defending/protecting/saving the innocent can’t help but see military service in the USA as an admirable profession.

Bo Jackson: Facing the Unknown | SUCCESS.

In some instances, Jackson explains, kids are pushed too hard by their parents, which can eventually stunt their progress. But some parents aren’t hands-on enough. “It’s not about sports. It’s all about life lessons, too. It’s about education,” Jackson says.

Faith in science? | New York Post.

In fact, given that Americans have grown broadly more skeptical of institutions in general, it’s not surprising that conservatives are more skeptical of scientific institutions than they were almost 40 years ago. What’s surprising is that liberals have grown less skeptical over the same period. (Perhaps because scientific institutions have been telling them things they want to hear?)

Regardless, while one should trust science as a method — honestly done, science remains the best way at getting to the truth on a wide range of factual matters — there’s no particular reason why one should trust scientists and especially no particular reason why one should trust the people running scientific institutions, who often aren’t scientists themselves.

In fact, the very core of the scientific method is supposed to be skepticism. We accept arguments not because they come from people in authority but because they can be proven correct — in independent experiments by independent experimenters. If you make a claim that can’t be proven false in an independent experiment, you’re not really making a scientific claim at all.

And saying, “trust us,” while denouncing skeptics as — horror of horrors — “skeptics” doesn’t count as science, either, even if it comes from someone with a doctorate and a lab coat. (emphasis added)

After a century of destructive and false scientific fads — ranging from eugenics to Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” scaremongering, among many others — the American public could probably do with more skepticism, not less.

And from nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

The climate change/global warming crowd would do well to take a step back and ask if their zealotry has any relationship to science.

h/t to Instapundit for the first article.