Let me give you some background. My TV is approaching its 20th anniversary of providing me with a window on society. The remote control quit long ago. I must use the push-buttons on the front of the TV to change channels, adjust volume, or turn it on or off. I was changing the channel the other night, which included stepping through the Marxist-Socialist-National-Barack-Channel. Their program at that moment was a show I call "CRAPTOWN with Keith Olbermann." The host was frothing at the mouth, his eyes rolled back in his head, and twitching like the city kids who would urinate on the electric fence when they visited the farm I grew up on. Hence my diagnosis: Rabies-Epilepsy Syndrome. It seems that Mr. Olbermann was commenting on, or at least attempting to comment on, the recently published book by Sarah Palin.

I have observed these symptoms, primarily in Liberals, when commenting on Republicans in general and Sarah Palin in particular. As a result, I think that the Department of Health and Human Services should undertake a multi-faceted program to address this health threat:

 1) Sarah Palin, Richard Cheney, and anyone involved with the Tea Party Movement should be quarantined immediately. It seems that there is a rise in the incidences of Rabies-Epilepsy Syndrome whenever they are in the news or the topic of discussion by media pundits.

 2) The Health and Human Serivces efforts should be "deficit-neutral." Therefore, all Liberals and Left-leaning Independents should be assessed a healthcare surcharge tax since this disease seems to be exclusive to their segment of society.

 3) A program should iimmediately be implemented to develop a vaccine for Rabies-Epilepsy Syndrome. No efforts should be spared to protect our children, the aged, and the other weaker members of our society. Given the Government's track record with producing a vaccine for H1N1, there is no time to spare.

I have submitted tho following article to the local newspapers for publication.  So far, all have chosen to ignore it:

There have been a number of articles and features in the news lately about scientists fudging the data on climate change to support preconceived hypotheses, or to discredit opposing viewpoints.  This has brought to mind my experiences in the scientific research community.

When I was an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Kansas in the early and mid-70's, I had the good fortune to gain "real world" engineering experience by working on a NASA-funded research project.  This project was doing the basic research on the remote sensing of agricultural targets by microwaves from space.  The team of which I was a member assembled and operated the equipment necessary to measure the reflection of microwave signals from agricultural crops and soils.  We collected data in a joint experiment with Texas A&M in the summer of 1974, and collected data from farms in the Lawrence area in the summer of 1975.  This research was to be the basis of radar designs that later flew on Space Shuttle remote sensing missions.

My immediate supervisor was a PhD student who was to make this research the basis of his PhD thesis.  One semester, he and I were both enrolled in a class on numerical methods, which instructed us on how to use computers to calculate trends from raw data points (this was long before such tools as Microsoft Office, Excel, and Power Point were available).  One day I asked him if he would use the techniques we learned in class to prepare his thesis from the data we had collected.  He said:  "No, I'm going to sit at my desk with a french curve and draw lines on a graph that look "purty"".  From this experience, I've concluded that the scientific community holds no special franchise on altuistic objectivity.

Another point that has been made in recent news reports is that the raw climate data has been deleted.  I find this incredulous.  The data that we collected when I was a student was on punched paper tape, and teletype printout.  For redundancy purposes, the teletype printouts were copied by a student standing at a xerox machine for several days.  On the other hand, by working in the research community, I was able to see how one professor, who was the Principal Investigator on a project, would jealously guard the data from other professors who might have the opportunity to draw different conclusions from that data.

In recent years, public relations releases from the University of Kansas Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering reveal that it is involved in research projects to map the thickness of ice sheets on Greeenland.  I can't help but wonder if sloppy research methodology is allowing bias and misrepresentation to creep into the conclusions they are drawing from this research.