Glad you mentioned boards of directors. The CEO's are the front men,who can take credit or blame, for which they are paid well in either case.

The hiding of the boards and overlapping directorships
and other information about them is a media-wide practice. The little men who are not there.

And, what branch of government will solve a problem, thus putting themselves out of work? Crime? Too many prisons, courts, police, social services, lawyers, etcetera
depend upon it for expanding authority and budgets,
which mean not only job security, but promotions, not to mention outsourcing to buds in some biz.

We had a similar fiasco here! Bob Hawke, when he was Prime Minister, had a panel of judges look into the feasibility of nuclear power, and when they gave a favourable report, he was obliged by politics to ignore it completely! The people concerned were quite put out, and wouldn't pass him the sugar-bowl at meetings. He belongs to the 'No nukes is good nukes' school.

I applaud Professor Nutt. He took the government at face value, and proved that they are the mendacious, deceitful shills we always knew. He took a theory, subjected it to an empirical test, and proved its validity by way of public experiment. The man is a scientist after all.

Regretfully, most political education begins with adults telling lies to small children; and, by the punishments that derive from disobedience to a dishonest norm.

Even religious dogma is in less conflict with science than political dogma.

Religion is faith in what is not known. Science is a faith that something can be known. Politics, dealing in plausable deniability, tries to keep anyone from finding - out.

Funny how Governments take the advice of some scientists but not others, isn't it?

I wish some Govt would say to the scientists at the IPCC that their views are not helpful, and will be ignored.

Perry,

I assume the post was written tongue-in-cheek?

Of course Professor Nutt knew that scientific advice is a prop, and that you only get the job, and keep it, if you give them the answers they want. Anyone who works for the government knows that - you couldn't possibly get to head a committee without knowing it.

But few scientists like it, and Professor Nutt evidently decided to make a point of it, and start a fight, at the time when he thought it would do the most damage.

Not only have the government's credentials (such as they are) for rational decision making taken a hit, but their interference with supposedly impartial evidence has been exposed. It's not nearly as good as the expenses scandal, but it's still pretty good.

The only way it could be made more perfect is if someone were to ask a sceptical question of the minister on climate change, for them to bring up the scientific evidence as justification for overriding the public will, and then for the comparison with the rejected scientific evidence concerning the harmful effects of drugs to be made. "Did the scientists who gave that climate change evidence know they would be sacked if they gave answers conflicting with government policy?" Delicious!

Or indeed smoking, obesity, alcohol, or any of the other stuff they want to ban on spurious "scientific" grounds. It wouldn't stop them, of course. But annoying them would be fun.

The headline made me pee a little:

Scientists quit government drugs body over David Nutt sacking

I assume the post was written tongue-in-cheek?

Moi?

On getting rid of the drug laws:

Everyone should remember that the libertarian position is for drug addicts to be given no government help whatever.

No free needles, not welfare benefits - NOTHING.

This is not exactly what the pro drug left is in favour of.

Being anti nuclear in Australia one of the biggest uranium deposit areas in the world.

Leftist bleepers, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep..................

Any scientist can prove anything, given the time and the tools. Nutt's "horseriding versus ecstasy" calculations etc. may have been immediately mathematically true, but certainly don't stand up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.
The trouble as, as we all know, that once those views are out there and published by the Daily Mail, it's extremely hard to get people to forget them, even if they are complete BS.
Wakefield and his despicable MMR hoax springs to mind as a good example.