Saturday, September 7, 2024

                          NO SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO

When General Gage and his Redcoat army landed to take over Boston in the aftermath of the Tea Party, John Adams did not greet him with a platter of macaroons and corn dodgers to declare:

"I, for  one,  welcome  our  new alien overlords." 

Nor did the nation's Founders convene in 1787 to proclaim:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form diverse Efforts to change social Norms and establish Opportunities and Strategies to promote Behavior Change  ...
Yet that's what Obama's  Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren articulated in 2016 in an oration worthy of Brave New World or Coneheads , delivered  to an auditorium full of young Federal  bureaucrats looking  for  new turf to conquer, and citizens to rule:
"As  President  Obama  noted in his Executive Order 13707, behavioral  science  insights  can  support  a  wide  range of national priorities including ... accelerating the transition to a low carbon economy. 
That Executive Order, 13707, directs Federal agencies to apply behavioral science insights to their policies and programs, and it institutionalizes  the Social and Behavioral Science Team...The adminstration is releasing new guidance to agencies that supports continued implementation of
The Behavioral Science Insights Executive Order. 

John's performance begot two National Academy of Sciences reports:


The  "new guidance"  of  Executive  Order  13707  still applies  to every department of government, and requires  the Department of Defense to report back to the White House Social and Behavioral  Sciences Team at regular intervals, as to how the armed forces are being remodeled in accord with the executive guidance of an order that remains one signed by the Commander In Chief.

No advocates of  The Precautionary Principle at  the  National Academies -- and  there  are  many ,  have  so far stepped forward to ask if it applies to the warning given the 1787 Constitutional  Convention  by Yale  Professor Roger Sherman ,of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence: 
 “If the Executive can model the army, he    may set up an absolute government.” 
A fear  General Washington astutely echoed in his 1796 farewell address, when he  warned  the nation to:
avoid the necessity of those overgrown... establishments  which, under any form of government,  are inauspicious to liberty.