We reprint below Rudyard Kipling's poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings because it so perfectly describes the well-worn path down which the American people are being led by their government and their own foibles - and the ultimate consequences of that journey. While so far the United States has been able to export most of the tragic consequences of its actions such as its ban of DDT or its massive fiscal irresponsibility as custodian of the world fiat money system, there are signs that the bill for a half century of recklessness may soon need to be paid.

Paradoxically, this payment may not be extracted first in the expected ways - by economic collapse under monetary debts that obviously will never be honored or by military defeat with nuclear and rocket technology that we have exported to our enemies and then refused to defend ourselves against. More imminent seems to be the possibility of simple self-destruction by the manias that we have internalized into our body politic in order to rationalize so many selfish, yet self-destroying actions.

To an increasing extent, our civilization is being washed to and fro by fear, greed, hatred and envy - negative human characteristics that we have now so clothed in institutions and rationalizations that we can no longer recognize them for the evil that they represent.

Consider the remarkable squabble that has now broken out about the construction of light trucks and sport utility vehicles as reported in "Tests Question Whether Light Trucks Are Much Deadlier Than Cars in Crashes'' by Gregory L. White in The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 1998, p A4.

As government regulations based upon mythical claims about energy shortages and the pseudo-need for forced conservation through fuel economy regulations and higher fuel taxes have forced the auto companies to produce smaller and lighter automobiles, the death toll of people involved in accidents in those cars has risen. This was, of course, to be expected. Less protective steel around the passengers and less overall mass in the vehicle obviously puts passengers at a competitive disadvantage with respect to anything with which they collide - whether it be another vehicle, a tree, or even the ground itself as the vehicle rolls over.

The political process, however, has provided an escape hatch that increasing numbers of Americans have utilized - light trucks and sport utility vehicles which are necessarily larger and more strongly built. Many people now pay prices formerly reserved for only the most luxurious prestige autos - in order to own pickup trucks. And what pickup trucks they are! With four doors, complete luxury equipment packages, diesel engines with turbochargers that make them accelerate like sports cars, and great islands of steel, both front and back, between passengers and the chaos outside, the larger of these vehicles provide a substantial amount of protection against crash injuries and also fires, since diesel fuel is less flammable than gasoline.

Even the smaller sport vehicles provide considerably more passenger safety than the toy cars in which the envirocrats would prefer to bury us. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has been observed that when an ordinary car hits another car from the side - the direction from from which its passengers are most vulnerable - deaths in the cars hit are six times higher than in the cars doing the hitting, while, if the vehicle colliding with its front is a pickup or sport-utility vehicle, this injury ratio is 25 to 1.

Most of this advantage turns out to be caused by the difference in protective steel around the passengers and, of course, the relative positions of the cars in this sort of accident. In fact, in recent tests, government investigators found that the size or type of vehicle colliding with the side of another car made little difference to injuries to dummies in the side-hit automobile. Enviros have objected, however, that the test cars were rammed symmetrically, so that the center posts between their doors offered additional protection. They claim the tests would have come out differently if the doors alone had been hit.

So far, so good. Clearly we need more steel in the doors, perhaps stronger center posts, a little more mass in the whole vehicle, a higher center of gravity and - well, a car that looks a little more like a sport vehicle - or even more like a mid-sized Chevy or Ford from the years before bureaucrats started whittling down the size of our cars.

No - this turns out to be completely wrong. The enviros are demanding instead that the sport vehicles be made lighter and weaker so that they will have less competitive advantage. They do not want the smaller cars to be stronger. After all, there are decades of enviro propaganda invested in making them weaker. They just want the sport vehicles to be weakened to the point that their owners are just as vulnerable to death as are those in the toy cars.

A great deal of time could be saved, however, by a different approach, since there are scores of other ways in which people act to reduce their risks as compared to others. What we need here is a "fairness principle'' - applied automatically.

When a crash occurs, all of the participants should be rushed to a hospital where doctors are ready to inflict on every one of them injuries as severe as those of the most seriously injured in the accident. If anyone dies in the accident, all participants should be immediately put to death by means as painful as those that killed the one.

Similarly, all stock investors should be required to buy only a government-managed mutual fund with equal exposure to all stocks in the market. All computer software companies should be required to sell a package of their competitor's software along with their own (see the recent "Justice'' department demand that Microsoft Windows include a Netscape browser) and share their profits equally. All participants in civil and criminal litigation should be identically punished. (If the lawyers were included, we might support this one.) Why not give ourselves over entirely to the consequences of envy?

Envy is the terrible companion of milder jealousy. Jealousy only burns to have the same advantages as one's neighbor. Envy, however, wishes to see his neighbor's blessings destroyed. Jealousy aspires to better things. Envy aspires to the destruction of everyone.

Envy is everywhere in America today. It is in our politics, in our schools, in our courts, in our business practices, and in our news media. It is so common that we no longer recognize it. The Gods of the Copybook Headings understood it - and soon, again, will we.

In 1990, the government launched a $3 billion, 15-year project to sequence the DNA in the human genome. Eight years into the project, this is now about 3% completed. A reasonable estimate is that they will manage to finish the job over a 25-year period for perhaps $10 billion.

This is not, however, as wasteful as it may seem. After all, the government is committed to a giant welfare program for scientists in which it spends tens of billions of dollars each year on non-defense research - dollars seized by force or threat of force from the citizens who earned them. The genome money was going to be spent on these welfare cases anyway. Why worry about the way it is labeled?

There is, however, much unhappiness in genome land tonight, since the Applied Biosystems division of Perkin-Elmer Corporation of Norwalk, Connecticut, and the Institute of Genomic Sciences of Rockville, Maryland, have just announced a $200 million project to sequence the human genome in three years. This was announced on May 10, 1998. (See, for example, The Sunday Oregonian published in Portland, Oregon, May 10, 1998, page 1 - which also has an article on the same page about our petition project.) The beneficiaries of the soon-to-be-obsolete government program are, of course, scrambling to preserve their money tree. "Genome Effort Still in Need of Support'' by D. Dickson and M. Wadman, Nature 393 (1998) p 201, provides some examples. Those involved in the government program are complaining that private enterprise will not do as good a job. Also, some corporate competitors of Perkin-Elmer are also favoring the tax-financed project because they want the public to provide them with free gene sequences, whereas Perkin-Elmer may gain a competitive advantage from this investment.

This episode serves as an excellent example of the interaction of science, government, and the free market - in a high-tech area of substantial medical interest.

The human genome is thought to contain about 3 billion base pairs organized into between 50,000 and 100,000 genes. The base pairs consist of four simple organic compounds linked together in long, usually paired chains which contain, in their sequences, the genetic code from which a human being is biologically constructed. The four-letter code is expressed in three-letter combinations which represent the amino acids in peptides and proteins. There are also bits of code related to DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid, which is the chemical name of the long paired chains) function and very large sections of code that are thought also to be involved in the protein library - but may serve as yet entirely unknown purposes.

With the sequence (order in the chains) of the 3 billion base pairs known, scientists will have in hand most of the information required to construct a human being. (Some information is passed by means other than DNA.) Moreover, in the case of those parts of the DNA code that determine the structures of proteins (which are the most important molecules in living things), it is known how to read this code.

This does not mean that scientists will soon be able to build a human being or any other living thing, however, because the enormously complicated living systems that read this code and utilize it are only partially understood. The construction of such systems is far beyond the capabilities of science today.

Scientists have, however, become increasingly clever at inducing already existing living systems to work for them. It is, for example, commonplace to synthesize a section of DNA which codes for a protein of a particular structure and then induce a living thing to make that protein - either for its own good or for the purpose of production of the protein for use elsewhere.

While bits and pieces of the human genetic code have been sequenced for special purposes, the advantages of having the complete library available - both for medical purposes and for basic research -are substantial. As laboratory procedures and machines were developed for sequencing sections of DNA - developments that were primarily made possible by private corporations, especially Applied Biosystems mentioned above and LI-COR Corporation in Lincoln, Nebraska - hopes rose that the entire code might be within reach.

It is likely that this project was premature. Although laymen are often given the impression that science advances by individual geniuses in their laboratories suddenly shouting "Eureka!'' and changing the world, it is rarely this way. While an individual scientist may have the opportunity to add the last necessary discovery to an important advance - and thereby receive credit for the advance - most such people stand on the shoulders of numerous colleagues who are contributing to the advance of knowledge along a wide and sophisticated front.

When biological science is truly advanced sufficiently to make good use of the sequence of the entire human genome, it will also likely have advanced to the point that sequencing the genome is easy to accomplish. The Perkin-Elmer announcement indicates that this time may now be near - ten years after the government started pouring tax money into the genome project with little success.

Several things were wrong with the government program.

1. It was ethically flawed. There is absolutely no way in which sequencing the human genome justifies the seizure of the property of free men, women, and children by threat of force - which is, of course, the way in which the project has been financed. Moreover, as a high-profile do-good project, this effort has been used politically as justification for the seizure of far more money than required by the project itself. Our government is always looking for publicity-attracting examples of its good intentions with which to justify its vast seizure of private property - and the public is rarely in a position to understand that a very small part of the government's loot is spent for these causes.

2. It, along with thousands of other unnecessary tax-financed projects, drained savings and capital from the private sector - where they would have been much more efficiently utilized for the public good, including for medical and basic research.

3. The project was split up between many different laboratories in academia and academic-like research laboratories. The last place to conduct a project that depends upon the organized resourcefulness and drive of large numbers of people working together is academia. Today's academic institutions have substantially decayed along the same lines as are normal for other human institutions that receive large amounts of money that they have not earned. Ordinary government welfare has done great damage to the poor whose self-respect and ambition it extinguishes. Likewise, academic government welfare payments have killed the incentives that built and maintained our formerly great academic institutions.

4. It was premature. The technology to sequence the genome and use this information productively had not yet arrived.

At this point, we still do not know whether or not even this investment of $200 million in private capital will yield information of commensurate worth. We do not need to know. Private entrepreneurs are risking honestly obtained money in the effort. The free market will reward or punish them in accordance with the ultimately demonstrated wisdom of their efforts.

In a broader sense, while it is good to see molecular knowledge about living things advancing with respect to the genetic code, it is disheartening to see the selectiveness of this advance. Vast areas of biochemistry - some of basic importance and many of medical significance - have been ignored while DNA sequencing has been pushed up to and even beyond current technological limits. These neglected areas are far more ready to bear fruit for science and medicine at their current stages of development than have been the forced advances in DNA sequencing. This is yet another effect of government seizure of half the earnings of the American people - with small portions of the money returned in self-justifying projects that are claimed to be for the public good.

With literally billions of tax dollars available for DNA work, there has been a tendency for scientists to gravitate toward this field to the exclusion of other areas. Fad and fashion is, of course, always a part of human actions, but the government giant is so flush with our money that it tends to push its interests to far greater excesses in particular directions than would otherwise be the case in an economically free civilization. Moreover, in biochemistry, these unwise extremes can last for very long times.

Most scientists, especially academics, are very slow to change fields because they shun the effort required to start over in another specialty wherein they will need to re-educate themselves and establish reputations. The army of "DNAologists'' who have now entered science will do everything it can to keep the federal spigots of money open for DNA work and to convince the public that great advances are just around the corner.

That there will be advances is, of course, quite likely. We will never know, however, how those advances compare with the progress that would have been made had the earnings of the American people not been confiscated and then allotted by federal bureaucrats to those scientific projects that were best mated with their own prejudices and with the advancement of their own bureaucratic careers.

Long ago it was customary to teach young students penmanship and writing skills by having them copy published texts into their copy-books. The texts were selected to also provide useful information about the lessons of life. In our home-school curriculum, we make substantial use of the writings of Rudyard Kipling. His poem The Gods of the Copy Book Headings speaks so eloquently about so many of the topics covered in Access to Energy that we have decided to reprint it below. This poem and its companion IF (also reprinted here) should be a part of the secular education of every young person.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the gorillas while we followed the march of mankind.
We moved as the spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton, they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know.''
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death.''
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die.''
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true,
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four--
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man--
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began--
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins,
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

If You can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't talk too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!''
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a man, my son!

"We're Defending Our Right to Innovate'' by Bill Gates in The Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1998, p A14, and "As Goes Microsoft, So Goes the Computer Industry'' by Thomas W. Hazlett and George Bittlingmayer in The Wall Street Journal, May 26, 1998, p A18, make the obvious case that Microsoft and the industry that currently depends upon its software should not be subject to government harassment. Now Intel, maker of the microchips in most personal computers, is also under attack by the Clinton Administration.

The large financial contributions to the Clinton Administration by some of Microsoft's competitors are now being rewarded by more than just access to the administration through monthly meetings with Algore and White House perks. The rivals of these cheerful givers are being attacked by Clinton's "justice department.'' As Bill Gates says, "Some of our competitors don't want to compete in the marketplace; they want to compete in court.''

The computer industry, in which Microsoft and Intel are currently the most successful companies, has literally revolutionized personal access to information. They have placed a technological miracle in a box within reach of most homes in America. Moreover, competition in their industry is so intense that prices for these products fall so fast that month's absence from the market renders virtually one's price information obsolete.

Moreover, the particular success of these companies has caused a widespread standardization of the marketplace that makes many new products by very small enter prises possible. We could not, for example, have effectively disseminated our home-school curriculum on CD-ROMs had we not been able to depend upon most users having Windows software. The non-standard soft ware from Apple was a major impediment because we were required to produce a separate product for the home-school families that are using MacIntosh computers. The dominance of Microsoft and Intel permitted us to compete with the large home-school companies, offer a better product, and, in little more than a year, provide our product to over 25,000 homeschooled children - and receive a recent rating as the third most popular home-school high school curriculum in America.

We are thankful to Microsoft and Intel for providing this opportunity - just as we would be thankful to any of their competitors who are able to replace Microsoft and Intel products with even better ones. Punishment of these companies for political and envy-driven reasons is unacceptable and unconscionable.

The 1998 annual DDP meeting will be held near Phoenix, Arizona on July 10-12. Rooms at the Scottsdale Hilton are $59 and $69 per night for single or double, respectively. Registration for the conference is $95 per person which includes two luncheons and the banquet.

Just the tours of the Palo Verde nuclear generating station and of the laboratory of Sherwood Idso, which includes the world's longest running experiment on the growth of trees as a function of atmospheric carbon dioxide, are, by themselves, worth the trip.

We listed the speakers last month except for your Access to Energy editor who will give a talk about the global warming Petition Project and the prospects for further such actions. You should also have received a special letter from DDP about the event. This is a rare use of the Access to Energy address list that we permit each year - because the DDP meetings are so extraordinary and include speakers on many of the topics covered in Access to Energy.

Recently I have been reading more of the writings of J. Gordon Edwards (one of the scientists who will speak at this conference) about DDT - and thinking more about the children who are dying unnecessarily from malaria at the world-wide rate of one every 12 seconds. These children are being killed by pseudoenvironmental genocide.

Wars have been fought to stop atrocities much less severe than this. Yet, the Clinton Administration ignores these deaths; seeks to add to them the much greater suffering and death that will accompany worldwide energy rationing; and then continues to regale us at every opportunity with crocodile tears over their concern for "the children.'' The DDP meeting includes 16 such speakers as Dr. Edwards.

The Petition Project has now received signed petitions from 18,700 individuals, of whom 16,500 have degrees in science. It has become a permanent stumbling block in the way of those who wish to impose United Nations controlled world energy rationing - with the resulting world-wide technological genocide. How much of a stumbling block? This is impossible for us to know now.

From the amount of ammunition the enviros have expended in efforts to discredit the petition, it is clear that they consider it very dangerous. Clinton's principal point man for global warming now finds it necessary to attack the petition in presentations to Congressmen.

Unable to debate the science, the enviros have expended most of their invective in ad hominem attacks upon the petition's sponsors. This, however, is not working for them.

Recently, I gave a presentation about "global warming'' to the weekly science seminar at nearby Southern Oregon University. The one hour of science was followed by a one-hour planned attack from about a dozen enviros scattered in the audience of about 150. Remarkably, virtually everyone stayed for the whole, two-hour shootout. During the second hour, a wide variety of claims and accusations were heaped upon me - but virtually none had to do with science. When the dust settled, the enviros seemed to have convinced only themselves.

A video of the first hour has been shown several times on local television. Unfortunately, they did not tape the second hour, which was by far the best and most convincing part. The set of colored 35-mm slides for this talk are viewable on our Internet site. We will be happy to make a copy of these slides for anyone who wishes to utilize them.

When the Senate debate on the Kyoto Treaty formally begins, we expect the petition statement by these scientists to be a significant help. The more signatures we have at that time, the better. We are continuing to work on this to the limits of our resources. Please continue to help.

Updated reports of progress are available at www.oism.org/ppro-ject and www.sitewave.net/pproject. The OISM site has been somewhat unreliable. Our Unix servers here have run for many months with zero downtime, but our Internet service provider was frequently offline. We have now changed to another Internet provider.

• The Vice President of the United States (do we really have a Vice President?) has now taken to issuing monthly reports of "global temperature'' from the White House - as breathlessly reported by (as Petr Beckman would have said) The New York Slime.

There is no way of knowing, of course, whether or not the 300-year warming trend that has brought Earth temperatures up out of the Little Ice Age and now back to the 3,000-year average will continue. This is of little interest to pseudoenvironmentalist Algore who blames every upward temperature fluctuation that government scientists can find or manufacture upon the sin of too many people on the Earth.

It is truly stark raving mad that the decision on whether we will get world-wide energy rationing and the mass genocide that will accompany it turns on essentially the flip of a coin - whether naturally determined temperatures happen to rise or fall during the months ahead.

The temperatures for the short period immediately ahead cannot, of course, change the fact that mankind is just not causing catastrophic warming of the planet. The enviros have, however, with the help of unprincipled members of the press, relegated even the sun to a minor position in determining the weather. Every fluctuation - and they characterize all fluctuations as evil - is to be blamed on the technological original sin of allowing too many people to live and prosper.

These are Earth-worshiping human-sacrificing zealots. Their rise to prominence in the American political process is very dangerous.

• "Too Hot? Too Cold? Who is Just Right About Global Warming'' by Rob Kremer in Brainstorm, April 1998, includes two quotations by Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the Rio Summit - at which much of the current global pseudoenvironmental world control movement received its current momentum. Strong said, "We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for the industrial civilization to collapse'' and, commenting on what is required for the future, ". . . the deliberate quest of poverty . . . reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control.''

• Misconceptions about Environmental Pollution, Pesticides, and the Causes of Cancer by Bruce N. Ames and Lois S. Gold available from the National Center for Policy Analysis, 12655 N. Central Expwy., Suite 720, Dallas, TX 75243. Whether you want to prevent biological cancer for yourself and family or to slow down the regulatory cancer oozing out of Washington, DC, the writings of Bruce Ames on this topic are indispensable. This is well-written in laymen's terms.
  
  
• Weather Based Business Decisions by Phil Volker, a Portland, Oregon based meteorologist who has made substantial efforts to educate the public about the "global warming'' myth. This book is available from Extended Range Weather Forecasting, 430 North Lotus Isle Drive, Portland, Oregon 97217. Oregon politicos still exhibit kneejerk approval for Clinton Administration falsehoods about global warming, but this is not the case for Oregon meteorologists. Even the Oregon State Meteorologist decided to sign the Petition Project petition.
  
  
• "The Consequences of Kyoto'' by Patrick J. Michaels in Policy Analysis, Cato Institute, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20001. This is an excellent, well-reasoned article in which Michaels gives the warmers all the latitude they could possibly deserve and still shows the Kyoto treaty as a very bad and unnecessary action.