The Frontiers of Science- Lysenko in America.

Moira Breen has dug up the latest legislative pork being thrown at a newly casino-enriched class of potential political contributors. This time the political class is prostituting itself to a post-modern view of truth. Apparently, we can no longer refer to purported 10,000 year old "oral" traditions as "nice stories" unrelated to empirical truth. Nope, the political class has taken a leaf from the Communists and the "Socialist Science" that so benefitted Russian agriculture by creating the concept of "Native Science" which is to be given equal weight to "real science." Here's the definition of "Native Science:"

(4) NATIVE SCIENCE- The term `Native science'--

(A) means the oral knowledge of Native Americans gained throughout history by observation and experience;

(B) embodies traditional tribal lifestyles and values;

(C) is based on the fundamental belief of the sanctity of all life;

(D) is guided by principles that include interdependency, reciprocity, and the significance of place;

(E) is a living, spiritual knowledge of the relationships between the land, natural resources, and the environment; and

(F) is transferred from one generation to the next often through oral tradition and practice.

This is, of course, sheer nonsense.

Sheer racist nonsense at that. Ascribing dark and mysterious powers to the heathen has been a standard of racism for centuries -

O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to judgment Day,
Be gentle when 'the heathen' pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!

There is something implicitly racist in the notion that the gentle, interdependent, spiritual natives were able to keep complex historical narratives going back 10,000 years when my forebears historical reckoning going back only one hundred years is that we come from some place in Northern Ireland. Of course, as Westerners we don't have that keen "living, spiritual knowledge of the relationship between the land, natural resources and the environment," having instead to make do with science, history and writing.

What's equally amazing is the utter, dead silence we hear on this subject. Outside of Moira, I have yet to see any real discussion of this subject in the media. And, yet, the idea of Congress legislating the standards of "science" - science that is a complete sell-out to the ideology of post-modernism and diversity at that - may be more threatening to society than the Patriot Act.

A generation of Soviet geneticists - the ones who lived, that is - could verify that point.