Humpty Dumpty

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scorn­ful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — nei­ther more nor less.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many dif­fer­ent things.”

“The ques­tion is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be mas­ter — that’s all.”

— Through the Look­ing Glass, Chap­ter 6

Just like Humpty Dumpty, Repub­li­cans in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and their Fox News enablers have started to decide what words mean. This week’s word: sci­ence.

Yes­ter­day, DC out­lined how the Republican-​​controlled North Car­olina State Leg­is­la­ture has tried to define an accept­able rate of sea level rise from global warming.

Pig (left); Con­gress­man Jeff Flake (right)

I’ve writ­ten about how a Republican-​​led leg­is­la­ture in Ten­nessee decided that cer­tain reli­gious beliefs are actu­ally sci­ence, while global warm­ing is not.

Dur­ing the Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial debates, can­di­date Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann (R-​​Stillwater, MN) just plain made up sci­ence to fit her preëx­ist­ing belief system.

And of course, the decades-​​long Repub­li­can War on Sci­ence is well-​​documented.

So it should come as no sur­prise that National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion (NSF) fund­ing bill amend­ment, spon­sored by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jeff Flake (R-​​Mesa, AZ) and passed by the House last month, pur­ports to define what is, and what is not, “science”.

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