John Gulick
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Yes, thanks. The creepy idiots use the alternate, skeptical quasi-left as a market to sell their potions and charms. It's not much different than the plague of the chirstians on the right who seem a lot more successful. At a guess the only reason the health nut potion sales force doesn't move over to the right, is probably because the christians would smell paganism and witchcraft---which is pretty accurate.
There is another more serious problem and that is the scientific community itself. In the sciences there are multiple social-political issues and implications to fields like nuclear science that its community refuse to acknowledge and refuse to take positions in the ridiculous pretense of neutrality. For example, I spent a lot of time reading through Union of Concerned Scientist artcles trying to figure out just how bad Fukashima was. UCS took a dead pan neutral position and dragged their feet toward classifying Fukashima potentially worse than Chernobyl.
This was ridiculous. There is an entire field of scientific study with as close to near perfect knowledge as can be had in nuclear medicine. They know to an art, what kinds of radiation and radioactive elements can and not be tolerated tissue by tissue and all the possible variations. They work with these materials and expose them to patients as an industry. Where were those guys?
NSF and other funding agencies like NIH et al are not neutral. The funding is used to channel development of science in specific areas. There is no such thing as neutral inquiry. Particular studies may be interesting to a particular group in and of themselves. However, the only reason they get funded is that somebody somewhere in the upper reachs of policy see such work as potentially useful, usually for economic or military reasons. You can go to NSF website and read between the lines in their general research guidelines.
CG