Wednesday, September 2, 2015

On Harvey Washington Wiley (Chief Chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry Under Teddy Roosevelt)

People wonder why I'm so opposed to government and science mixing. To those folks I say take a look at this guy in that he actually thought that a) people should eat more sugar, b) the average diet should contain 3,500 calories and 125 grams of fat a day, c) physicians should be prescribing straight whiskey as a medication, d) the caffeine found in Coca Cola is as addictive as opium and morphine (he apparently had no problem with the caffeine found in coffee probably because of his close relationship to John Arbuckle, the country's largest coffee importer), and e) it was acceptable to use healthy young men as guinea pigs as a part of his "poison squad" experiments (which really weren't experiments in that there wasn't a control group). I mean, the guy was an absolute quack and the fact that he was able to not just sponge off the taxpayers but engage in cronyism for as long as he did is a real blot on our history.................................................................................................P.S. And as for the argument that that was such a long time ago and that they surely don't think things like this today, need I remind you that there are government-sponsored scientists today who actually believe that a) we can predict what the climate will be doing hundreds of years into the future, b) human-induced CO2 is the primary driver of climate change and so humans control the earth's thermostat, in other words, c) wind energy (which has the lowest power density and the highest resource intensity) is going to ultimately be a major player, and d) CO2, one of the fundamental building-blocks of life, is a pollutant.  

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