Your Tax Dollars: National Science Foundation

Thomas Jefferson stands out among the Founders because of his prolific writing and varied talents in which he made major contributions as a politician, statesman, diplomat, intellectual, writer, scientist, and philosopher. Jefferson committed his presidency toward the protection of civil liberties and minority rights, and he also promoted the education of the “masses”. His brilliant scientific mind welcomed technological change. He founded the University of Virginia, established as a secular institution in 1819 after he left the presidency. Jefferson believed that libraries and books were important in individual and institutional education and designed the university around its library. Virginia did not establish free public education in the primary grades until after the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era.

Jefferson has an impressive personal library of thousands of accumulated books at Monticello. A large portion of his library was bequeathed to him in the will of George Wythe, who had an extensive book collection. Jefferson once stated: I cannot live without books.

By 1815, Jefferson's library had 6,487 books, which he sold to the Library of Congress for $23,950 to replace the smaller collection destroyed in the War of 1812. He bought more books with some of that money received from the LOC. His retirement library contained 74 volumes with 28 book titles, discovered at the Washington University in St. Louis.

In 1817, Jefferson proposed a system of public schools for the Commonwealth of Virginia. He wanted it as a model for a national public educational system, which Jefferson was an advocate of.

Jefferson was not opposed to textbooks, but believed that an individual professor, not school trustees, should be the one to choose texts used in a course. However, he did believe that the school trustees should monitor the textbooks to ensure the content was educational and not political or proven theories.

The National Science Foundation (SF) is a government agency that supports research and education in non-medical fields of science and engineering. Medical science falls under the National Institutes of Health. It has an annual budget of $7 billion (FY 2012), funding 20% of federally supported research conducted by colleges and universities in the United States. The director, deputy director and 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB) are appointed by the President of the United States and was established by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. It's scope has expanded, like the federal government, over the decades that include social and behavioral sciences and engineering. It is the only federal agency that has a mandate to support ALL non-medical fields of research.

Its most significant involvement, combined with other federal agencies has been in the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the understanding of matter at the atomic and molecular scale, significantly between 2000 and 2009. A poll taken in 2008 revealed that 54% of Americans had little scientific understanding of nanotechnology. Effectively, as what happens when government expands itself to a large degree, those funding the government with taxation, rarely know where their tax money is spent or how it is spent.

In 2011, Republican Senator Tom Coburn released a 73-page report entitled National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope, which revealed how much of taxpayer funding was being wasted on junk science and frivolous scientific endeavors.

What began as so-called global warming, changed to “climate change” after the Climate-gate email was made public that proved the program that became a consensus as a fraud. More scientists are stepping forward to show that warming activity or climate change in general is usually caused by the activity of the star we call the Sun.

Dr. Patrick Moore stated what high school science teaches us – CO2 makes things colder, not warmer – and CO2 is used by plants who in turn produce O2 (oxygen). Moore pointed out:

There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years; perhaps the simplest way to expose the fallacy of extreme certainty is to look at the historical record. When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an ice age occurred 450 million years ago when carbon dioxide was 10 times higher than today.

Indeed, as politicians and junk scientists raved about global warming, the eastern coast of the United States was being hit by an historically cold winter and it snowed in Rome, Italy where it never snows. Record cold temperatures were announced elsewhere across the globe.

Moore also stated:

The increase in temperature between 1910 and 1940 was virtually identical to the increase between 1970 and 2000. Yet the IPCC does not attribute the increase from 1910-1940 human influence. Does the IPCC believe that a virtual identical increase in temperature in 1950 is caused mainly by human influence, when it has no explanation for nearly identical increase from 1910 to 1940?

Dr. Moore and others can see no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species. Indeed, we should fear another ice age rather than a warming trend; which scientists were researching before the global warming scare became a consensus.

Also, they are ignoring that the cyclic activity of the storm in terms of solar flares and solar storms during those periods are not taken into account.

Despite all of this, Columbia University has received millions of your tax funds to create games depicting doomsday scenarios as a result of “climate change”. $5.7 million was issued by NSF for Columbia's POLAR Climate Change Education project that uses games to – engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.

In effect, legislators and scientist believe they can alter/control climate changes that have been cycling throughout 500 million years of history; and they are wasting our tax dollars in a time that the national debt has gone well over the limits, and the United States is on the brink of an economic collapse – which is more real than any climate change module devised by junk scientists.

Just as we cannot fund other nations' wars any longer – so should we not waste tax dollars on climate change games created to indoctrinate and not educate – using the age-old political tactic of fear to get people to support their schemes. 97% of the climate change junk science has been debunked, but politicians still support it with YOUR tax dollars; while veterans are not receiving the care and support of those who send them to battle zones they designate.

The international science community need to reform itself, but most of all, US politicians need to stay out of it and quit wasting tax dollars on any junk science. Like religion, politics and science should not mix - as history has shown when it was so difficult for people like Christopher Columbus to show/prove that the Earth was not flat.

We are not just wasting tax dollars but the minds of our children who are the future of our nation. Science should have a foundation of truth and facts checked and rechecked - open discussion and research outweighs any consensus that charlatans can devise.

And, just in: University of Washington students start a medical marijuana delivery service.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is true corrective abuses of constitutional power. Thomas Jefferson, letter to W. Jarvis, 1820

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. [Thomas Jefferson, letter to C. Yancey, 1816]

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. [Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Price, 1789]

I have a conviction that science is important to the preservation of our republican government, and that it is also essential to its protection against foreign power. [Thomas Jefferson, 1821]

The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness, which merits to its premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes, are consideration that should always be present and bear with their just weight. [Thomas Jefferson: On the Book Duty, 1821]

The boys of the rising generation are to be the men of the next, and the sole guardians of the principles we deliver over to them. [Thomas Jefferson, letter to Samuel Knox, 1810]