News & Articles

A National Union of Friendly Americans (NUFA) alert has been posted.
Science is in your shoes.
Science is in your soup.
Science is in your soap.
Everything we make or break can be broken down according to basic or complex scientific principles, no matter if it’s pancakes or pollution.
For some reason, and this is the reason the NUFA alert has been issued, science does not exist in the minds of many Americans, including those members of the Wayward Order of Rumpt who enjoy a breakfast of bacon from scientifically-grown hogs and industrially produced corn syrup on their science-based pancakes.

Science and God are everywhere. One is blasphemous and the other sanctimonious according to the many members of the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP).
Apparently God, or the notion of God, can’t be tampered with in the worldview of the NCNP and their minions.  As long as you are fundamental in your belief in Christianity, a socially-conservative Christianity where gays and the environment are out but a laisse-faire economy is in, God is immutable. The bedrock of all creation from here to heaven. He sets the rules so don’t take ideas about the known universe, speeding ever outward, too seriously. Science is questionable and so are the people behind the curtain who manipulate the data. According to Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, belief in science-based climate change due to the burning of fossil fuels within a closed atmospheric system is an affront to the Big Man Upstairs. Inhofe claimed recently that Man is full of conceit and arrogance if he believes his actions can change God’s plan. Pollution is a mere illusion.    

Science, of course, is easily tampered with in their view and is an obvious political puppet. Watch out for your soup. It may be a tool of the scientific community, which, of course, tends to be liberal in its social perspective. Godless. Just plain different.
I read an article the other day about the way American society has grown ever more leery of science, God-fearing Christians or not. Even though our vast consumer nation is a cradle of scientific achievement both good and bad we are deciding in droves that science can’t be trusted. Too political according to common NCNP folk who talk to their GPS-instilled cars and hand-held electronic devices, folks who eat processed foods that certainly came from test tubes in research labs across the Heartland for our culinary and nutritional pleasures. Too political when something may challenge a belief system that says that the climate isn’t warming and the glaciers aren’t melting and it just makes sense that middle America should vote against its own best working class interests because anything deemed left of center is suspect and right down the alley of the socialists and the scientific community.

We are surrounded by the forest and can’t see the trees.
That presents a problem.
If people are going to reject the science of climate change and economics and the notions of a sustainable planet, challenge the math so to speak, just what will we accept and put into policy?
According to Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of “The War On Science”, partisan affiliation will drive policy, not science.
Otto said that today’s policymakers “are increasingly unwilling to pursue many of the remedies science presents.” 
Otto said policymakers “take one of two routes: deny the science, or pretend the problems don’t exist.”
What a conundrum. 
Surrounded by science but reject it when it cuts too close to our flawed beliefs. Buy the latest flat screen television, invite everyone over to watch a football game on the satellite and drink beer that’s been brewed with scientific principles lurking nearby. Hey folks, the secondary fermentation of champagne doesn’t happen without a little basic chemistry occuring in the process. 

The science of sustainable energy is being handed over to the Germans and the Chinese because the political landscape of this nation is still in denial about the science of climate change and fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution built this nation but we pretend the exhaust of nearly 200 years doesn’t exist, even though we know exactly what comes out of the smokestacks and tailpipes.

I met the other day with some folks who responded to the NUFA alert and have been promoting ways to open dialogue within our very complex and often uncertain society.  Several years ago the National Union of Friendly Americans welcomed the group North Shore Neighbors (NSN) into the NUFA family in this trying time of ideology and paralyzing rhetoric. 

The NUFA Board of Directors and the Exalted Shack Master were especially fond of the NSN motto:
“It doesn’t hurt to learn a little more.”
Those are words to live by.