= new reply since forum marked as read
- It goes back a long ways......
John Stuart Mill,
May 20 1806 – May 8 1873
started with the Reagan Revolution when he forged a new party out of four major constituencies: warmongers (Haig, Secord, Singlaub), fundies (Hargis, Robertson, Moon, Falwell), corporatists (Dow, the MIC, Justice Powell, Hunts, Kochs, Big Oil), and right-libertarians (Hunts, Kochs, Big Oil): so for instance the very scientistic (but also Romantic) Robert Heinlein would fall into the militarist and libertarian quadrants and loathe the other two
the televangelists themselves are quite recent--after Coughlin, the 50s and 60s' attitude was that God was either American, dead, or that hippie woman you're digging: even the Baptists had to have a coup to serve their new role in the late-70s backlash
there were many, many scientists--hardliners and technocrats who thought that Dow and Boeing HAD won Vietnam but victory had been stolen by those hippies that want us to TALK to savages about what jungle plants they use for "medicine"; Reagan LOVED science--or at least the napalm and missile and space-laser parts of it; thousands of scientists and engineers were materially or ideologically tied to the MIC and the "Science Wars" quickly turned to slamming women, Blacks, and everyone in the Third World
then came Gorbachev: one way or another the USSR fell and there was nobody to have any more "races" with: as the sole superpower we didn't need the B-2 or anything like it, our nukes and heavy-lift missiles rusting; the big-ticket SSC was cancelled after losing $2B; tens of thousands of engineers and managers and researchers were let go by Lockheed and Raytheon and General Dynamics and IBM and Boeing--it was a massacre (and yet somehow the Pentagon contractors' incomes didn't go down: we got no "peace dividend." funny, that); the sector's logic of cost-plus accounting and feeding its sparrows only through a horse caught up with its own workers, "rightsizing" consuming its own labor
already there were mutterings that this shift in priorities and doctrine was a sign that "America didn't respect science anymore": such complaints are often tied to "school reform" calls ("we're falling behind in math and science! the school of the 60s/80s/10s needs less violins and Beverly Cleary!"
the Reaganauts turned to telecom messianism and then cyberselfishness; at the same time the 90s corporatists needed scientists to start covering up their own discipline's results: CFCs, global warming, tobacco, junk food, and GMOs were suddenly big issues and coming under attack: now there's two ways you can insulate yourself and keep your profits at $20B instead of $19.5B: you can directly buy scientists, of course, but the more lasting and flexible approach is to create a massive propaganda campaign: people talk back to whitecoats now, so after Watergate FUD is much more cost-effective; these two wings work together--only 50M Americans would believe it if a Senator said that AGW can't be real because of Genesis 9:17, but another 100M will delay judgment if you add James Randi to the mix (like how Islamophobia is increasingly carried on "liberal" currents)
It was interesting to listen about the Rush Limbaugh’s and Beck’s the so called Conservative intellectuals.
These media fabricated characterizations as todays Conservative intellectuals, yet mildly suggested as being propped up by social media.
There is a self-awareness in the University System, it is at the precipice of collision, knowing and understanding how it is being condemned by todays Conservative. These Conservatives do exactly what they are taught in economics, they take the derivative and don’t care about you or me.
The simple flag of enlightenment being raised is the defiance, and arrogance in the underfunded pension plans though out the system.
All of a sudden the majority of intellectuals that have been quietly silent for decades prospering with a good pay checks now understand how these political characters are going to tap their future and swindle every penny they can.
My view about the intellectuals of the University System; they are getting punked in their pensions especially in Illinois , welcome to the club 
