Dear Lola,

I am eating breakfast at Marcela's Café & Bakery. The place has a spartan outside seating area, where I sit and read in the morning sun.

I am enjoying a book over coffee and breakfast, when I notice two guys loitering around the cafe's outdoor flower pots. Both guys are wearing a lot of black, and while it is clear that they are bikers in the Hells Angels fashion style, they are also strangely skinny, as if they are vegetarians.

Both of the men wear taunting statement t-shirts.

One t-shirt says,

"If you can read this, I found out the bitch was a yankee."

The other guy is wearing a bowie knife on his belt, and several other items packed in leather pouches, some of which are also knives.

The strange thing about these guys is that they're buzzing around the flower pots, combing their hands over the purple petals. It's 9 AM. I have been reading, but the sight of these unusual road men distracts me, and reminds me I intend to wander the entire day in the desert.

Lola, just right off the bat, I want you to know that I actually like my country populated by interesting people. I like strange ideas and creative energy and unusual hobbies. I love it when people are passionate about weird belief systems or who dress funny.

But when strange ideas are political or claiming to be scientific, I treat them differently. I have a lot of respect for different ideas, even in politics and science, but as a general rule, I believe that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In other words, if we depart from a consensus or offer a radical new idea, we need to work really hard to prove our case. This will be a theme in my letters to you.

You have often claimed that scientists are not immune to political bias; that there is perhaps an engine of conspiracy influencing huge bodies of science.

That scientists are unpure of objectivity as individuals is no secret. But where you and I disagree is whether science, in general works despites the weaknesses of its practicioners.

Consider Edward O. Wilson words in The Creation, "The power of science comes not from scientists but from its method.  The power, and the beauty too, of the scientific method is its simplicity.  It can be understood by anyone, and practiced with a modest amount of training.  Its stature arises from its cumulative nature.  It is the product of hundreds of thousands of specialists united by the one binding commonality of the scientific method.  Few scientists know more than a small fraction of available scientific knowledge, even within their own disciplines.  But no matter, their fellow scientists are continuously testing and adding to the other parts, and the entie body of scientific knowledge is easily available.  The invention of this remarkable engine of testable learning was the one advance in recorded human history that can be called a true quantum leap."

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