Nearly twenty years ago I went to see a dynamic international group of young performers called “Up With People” sing at the Strand Capitol Performing Arts Center. There were songs in the program I liked so I bought a tape that ran for weeks on a tape player on auto reverse. The song that still rings in my mind at times contains the line, “We sure could use a little more good news today.” To some degree that song reflects the time it was written but look at two of the lines that seem to be for today:

“Some senator was squawkin’ “bout the bad economy
It”s gonna get worse you see, we need a change in policy”

That senator’s name today is Obama. And one thing I have seen over the years, “it”s gonna get worse’ is often a self-fulfilling prophecy that is used by politicians to get elected! Several of the worst we have had in my lifetime have been elected on that platform. Bill Clinton managed to get elected that way and his legacy includes a national embarrassment, 9/11, devaluation of our currency and a rise of terrorism.

Sure there is a lot of bad news. Bad things happen in this world as the result of evil men and women. Robbery, murder, corruption, earthquakes, tornadoes, accidents, rape, child abuse are just a few of the evils. Politicians like Obama and Clinton encourage them by taking a posture of weakness. But there is another aspect of this that we often miss. There is good news but good news doesn’t sell. I kid wining the special Olympics gets hidden behind a kid that hurts an old lady in an robbery attempt. Unfortunately that is not only in the papers, the radio, the TV, the news. It is also in the halls of government, and unfortunately in science, in entertainment. In government only problems are worth money for programs. Only funded programs provide money that can be siphoned off to make people rich. No bad news, no money.

No money, no opportunity to misuse it. In science only threats that can be trumped up are worth money for grants. If there are no grants academics actually have to work for a living teaching. If you don’t claim an asteroid is going to hit the earth you don’t get money. If you can’t claim an earthquake will hit New York, no money. In entertainment look at the fare. Sure there are movies like “27 Dresses”, “What Women Want”, that have good endings. But they are called, with disdain, “Chick Flicks” while movies like “Asteroid”, “Comet’, “Earthquake in New York” and the Michael Moore bad news fictional trash get top billing and money. Check the advertising on films. Watch the previews in the theatre some time. The bad news films get more AD time!

There were about a dozen murders in York PA last year. Twelve mornings of three hundred sixty five there was a murder overnight. Three hundred and fifty three times the headline could have read, “Nobody fired a shot in anger, nobody had to die in vain,” but it didn’t, not one time. When someone didn’t die some other piece of bad news made the front page. It didn’t matter if the editor had to dredge up a two week old murder, robbery or rape story and speculate on what the police were doing wrong to have some bad news to print. Even warmed up leftover bad news sells! When are we going to get fed up with the fare and let it on the news stands and turn off the TV? When are we going to boycott the theatres?

Sadly in the science community it is the same. Back in the fifties it was warning that an ice age was coming! No kidding, it wasn’t global warming, it was a fear of an ice age. There was funding to determine when it would happen. Then it was DDT and that was banned. Check the information. With DDT banned on political whim, not science, malaria is on the rise to the extent that it is a medical catastrophe in the third world. With DDT controlling the mosquitoes it was nearly gone. Sure it was overused but let’s put the blame where it belongs, politicians like Rachel Carson masquerading as scientists.

Now the bad news is the increase. We have people today competing for money to study earthquake zones, asteroids, comets, levees, and at least a thousand other disasters. And we have Al Gore, a poor politician at best, flying his ridiculously inefficient fuel gulping, carbon emitting airplane while masquerading as a scientist. And worse, the scientific community is bowing and genuflecting to him because he is a money magnet. You can ride his cause to big bucks. If the early scientists had operated the way science is today the politically correct flat world theory would still be in vogue.

Today the dialog in science that brought the big gains no longer exists. If you question CO2, global warming, asteroid risks or Darwin’s Theory, you will be attacked. If you talk of using coal you are treated like you are insane. Yet CO2 is only a part of global warming, if it is really more than a climate cycle. Fortunes are being spent on asteroid tracking when we do not have any way to do anything about it if one is headed our way. Darwin’s theory is based on a knowledge of the living cell that was as primitive as a covered wagon when we now know it is as complex as the space shuttle. Darwin’s theory should be re-examined for that reason even if we had no proof that there are issues known in his time that he failed to consider!

We follow the urgings of entertainers with questionable intelligence and morals. None of the Dixie Chicks ever graduated from College but they sound like political experts. Allan Alda played a drunken doctor and people think he knows something because he made money acting like an imbecile. Michael Moore nearly destroyed the British economy with his shady dealings. Now he wants to destroy the United States. And we are helping him. Jane Fonda is a traitor to the U.S. and has no training in science or journalism but her film, “The China Syndrome”, the scientific basis of which has been disproven at least three times was taken as a science textbook to kill nuclear power in the U.S.

France generates over ninety percent of its electricity and even exports power using American reactor designs while we shut down coal and nuclear plants and become more dependent on foreign oil and gas because the Hollywood ilk doesn’t like nukes and wants to keep us from drilling in the sacred Anwar! Foreign countries drill off our coast but Americans can’t drill there! Perish the thought that California would have to burn that dirty black coal or the Kennedy Royalty would have to look at a wind farm!

When are we going to grow up and realize that many of these are all like Professor Harold Hill in the “Music Man”, hucksters taking our money, building their fame, and furthering their careers and fortunes at our expense? It is exactly what they are doing.