John, I have been a scientist and researcher for quite a while. And I can tell you with absolute certainty from personal experiences that scientists very often choose to follow politically and economically expedient courses of action rather than ones which the data show are the right ones to follow.

Would you like an example of this which I have mentioned before?

Shan has developed a forecasting procedure which involves monitoring ground movement near a fault zone and using that information to forecast earthquakes. I believe that it might be regarded as a very inexpensive version of the GPS systems which are being researched.

It would cost almost nothing for researchers to carefully examine his forecasting procedure and try to see if it actually works. And if it did it could be easily and inexpensively duplicated and used by people in even the poorest countries around the world. Yet as far as I am aware, no researcher or government agency has ever contacted him for information on how it works which I understand he is willing to share with them for free. And at the same time I understand that people are planning on spending fortunes to do research on the GPS systems.

I believe that this would be an almost perfect example of how politics frequently controls science. And I believe that I now understand what the politics are which are controlling this particular situation. But I do not want to discuss what is taking place here in public.