The Simon Singh case illustrates how laws restricting free speech WILL be misused.

Not MAY be misused. WILL be misused.

Laws against libel were introduced to prevent scoundrels besmirching the reputations of innocent people. Who can be against that?

But powerful people and institutions can use these laws to squelch reporting of their wrongdoing. The result is that people like the late newspaper baron, Robert Maxwell, was able to loot his employees' pension fund with impunity.

See: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/legan/legan032.pdf

QUOTE

By far the worst abuse of the libel laws in recent times was the case of Robert Maxwell. He was notorious for the number of times he threatened to sue people for libel if they criticised his business practices, and he was rich enough to make his threats credible. The result was that it was not until his death that anyone realised he had embezzled £400 million from a pension fund.

END QUOTE

Scientologists too are notorious for their use of laws against libel, and laws protecting religion, to intimidate their critics.

With the 'brain drain' in recent history, we are DAMN lucky to have the scientist we have (although we almost lost all of them to the US too).

Sadly our top national researcher CSIRO is trying to figure out how to make 'clean coal' because it was lazily blurted out as a PR stunt by our former Prime Minister.

I think we need our scientific institutions to be a lot more independent (or accountable to a WIDER but larger body than the government ministry of the day)

One area in which scientific research is discouraged in academia and kept out of the public print media is to do with the tremendous problem of illiteracy and failing readers in English speaking countries. Although psychological and educational researchers have demonstrated the role of unnecessary difficulties in English spelling. e.g. Seymour, Goswami, and Paulesu, academic research in how this basic element in modern communications technology may be improved is held back by 19th century English views that the only way is radical phonemic reform, which is impossible.
We do not even observe how most other modern langauges have reformed their spellings in major or minor ways in the past hundred years.

All the arguments and assumptions against reform of Englishspelling point the way to how it can be improved – that whatever helps learners must help readers as well, that reading is visual as well as auditory, that families of words must be recognisable, cultural value, the ‘Chomsky’ line, the importance of an international vocabulary, even etymology.
It is posibl to cut out the unnecessary dificulties in English spelling and keep the general appearance of print, changing about 6% of letters in text and omitting about 8%. This would not require reprinting of all that is currently in print to remain accsessibl.
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/spelling.htm

English is the world’s lingua franca for historical reasons. It cannot remain so unless something is done about its spelling. This is not a field for humorous subeditors. It should be a thriving field for academic research, aided by the Internet.

Yess wee must doo sumthing abowt English spelling. English speekurs arr not as intelleejent as Chinees peepul hoo hav 2 lurn 1000s of ideeograms. Compaird 2 Chinees peepul wee arr ideeogramless idyots.

Scientist who reject the evolution myth have been muzzled for decades despite the gigantic faith steps needed to believe this fairytale.

stevenlmeyer is one of those who ridicule without investigation. Verbally able people like stevenimeyer can learn any writing system. Those who are not struggle, and miss out on reading as a way of raising IQ. Statistics for adult learning are bleak. Chinese learners today start with pinyin, which is a consistent alphabetic script, and then when they have confidence, even the slow learners can start on the difficult ideographs. Previously a high proportion of Chinese remained illiterate. Similarly, Japanese start with hiragana, which is even easier, before they begin the difficult kanji. Both Chinese and Japanese ideographs have also been simplified since 1945.

The unnecessary difficulties in a writing system are a barrier to all vulnerable people. A scientific approach is necessary to English spelling as one cause of reading difficulties, which includes testing assumptions and making experiments.
But this is not being encouraged.