the onion explains how science is funded
Nothing is more important to a modern nation's prosperity than science and engineering, and nothing is more neglected by today's politicians.
One of the topics I tried to explore last year is scientific funding and the problems with having lawmakers who either just don't care about scientific research, or use scientists as convenient scapegoats for politicians' chronic inability to stop giving out earmarks and no bid contracts to each other and their donors. Well, recently, I was reminded that the writers at The Onion tackled the same issue back in 2007 and managed to describe how politicians treat science grants with pretty uncanny accuracy. Just consider the following quote about the importance of science and staying competitive with other countries and compare it to what you will hear when politicians pay some passing lip service to STEM disciplines in the real world with vague umbrella terms…
"While [the] expense is something to consider, I think it's very important that we have this kind of scientific apparatus, because, in the end, I have always said that science is more important than it's unimportant," Committee chairman Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN) said. "And it's essential we stay ahead of China, Japan, and Germany in science. We are ahead in space, with the NASA rockets going to other planets, so we should be ahead in science too."
How many of those science as a competition declarations have you seen in the news? How many times are we told how scientists in other countries are gaining on the U.S. and we have to encourage more students to become scientists not to lose our existing advantage? And have you even noticed that the degree of scientific advance is all too often measured by how much money is being committed to new labs or research projects rather than the actual results and how well those labs fare in publishing influential papers and results which could be used by other labs to build on new ideas? Science is a collaborative effort, and we all too often get a group of politicians trying to use their nations' research hubs as a tool for winning international prestige, and declare how ahead their states are in scientific achievement when compared to others, even though without the contributions from numerous scientists across the world, those advances wouldn't even be possible.
And there's also that notion about the importance of science. We're told that it's really important, but the same politicians who tell us how we must maintain high standards for scientific education and R&D won't fund the actual research because they insist it's too expensive to do so, and don't bat an eyelash when school boards dismantle their educational standards to indoctrinate students with partisan and religious dogmas. Science is really, really important for our elected officials. So much so they either ignore it or attack it right after making speeches about how it's essential for the nation for the purposes of international posturing.
