A blatant example of what is so wrong with these present times.

Yesterday, in my post, A return to integrity, I offered up the hope:

Each of us, whoever you are, for the sake of your children and for all of the children in the world, embrace today the qualities, the values of Nature.

Love, Honesty, Loyalty, Trust, Openness, Faithfulness, Forgiveness, Affection.

Now if the shenanigans going on over here in my home country aren’t bad enough, then a recent essay from George Monbiot about the UK’s Department of Environment (DOE) really takes the cake.  The essay is called Age of Unreason, published in the UK Guardian newspaper, and for obvious copyright reasons, I can only offer limited extracts.  This is how the essay opens:

The governments of Britain, Canada and Australia are trying to stamp out scientific dissent.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st Ooctober 2013

It’s as clear and chilling a statement of intent as you’re likely to read. Scientists should be “the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena.”(1) Vladimir Putin? Kim Jong-un? No, Professor Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser at the UK’s department for environment.

Boyd’s doctrine is a neat distillation of government policy in Britain, Canada and Australia. These governments have suppressed or misrepresented inconvenient findings on climate change, pollution, pesticides, fisheries and wildlife. They have shut down programmes which produce unwelcome findings and sought to muzzle scientists. This is a modern version of Soviet Lysenkoism: crushing academic dissent on behalf of bad science and corporate power(2).

Mr. Monbiot offers a very convincing argument to show how Professor Ian Boyd used poor scientific data to justify the culling of British badgers and how Boyd’s boss, the UK’s Environment Secretary Owen Paterson, is playing down the dangers of global warming – even suggesting the process had its advantages. George Monbiot goes on to show how that aforementioned Department has claimed, “that its field trials of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees showed that “effects on bees do not occur under normal circumstances”! [my italics].

Oh, and that there was an attempt to cull British buzzards to enable the rich and famous to ‘enjoy’ better pheasant shoots!

And more!  All very properly documented with footnotes.

Mr. Monbiot’s essay closes thus:

To be reasonable, when a government is manipulating and misrepresenting scientific findings, is to dissent. To be reasonable, when it is helping to destroy human life and the natural world, is to dissent. As Julien Benda argued in La Trahison des Clercs, democracy and civilisation depend on intellectuals resisting conformity and power(28).

A world in which scientists speak only through their minders and in which dissent is considered the antithesis of reason is a world shorn of meaningful democratic choices. You can judge a government by its treatment of inconvenient facts and the people who expose them. This one does not emerge well.

oooo

Please do go across and read the essay in full because Mr. Monbiot is a journalist whom one can trust.  In stark contrast to so many that purport to be governing on our behalf.

As an Englishman grateful to have the right to live in this fair country, it pains me to see what is happening to both my old country and my new one.  When I was granted my visa, my fiancee visa, from the US Embassy in London I was given a small booklet containing the text of the US Constitution.  Page One is open in front of me at this moment:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Enough said!

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