| From Technology to Mysticism |
At the 1995 meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (CD-ROM available from DDP, 1601 N. Tucson Blvd., Ste. 9, Tucson, AZ 85716), Lowell Wood spoke about the manned exploration of Mars. Dr. Wood, a protege of Edward Teller, led the group that developed the Brilliant Pebble strategic defense devices. These inexpensive satellites should now be protecting Americans from missile attack.
Strategic defense technologies have, however, a fundamental flaw -their deployment would mitigate the fear with which the American people are controlled by their government and the liberal media complex with which it shares power. Lowell Wood is now working on the defense of Americans from biological weapons - and making little progress. (The problems here are entirely political, not technical.) Civil defense (nuclear, biological, chemical, and natural disaster protection for civilians) also mitigates fear - while fear and envy are the primary means by which our government maintains and extends its control.
Even for natural disasters, pre-positioned civil defense (which is more effective and less costly than centralized disaster response) is ignored in favor of enormously costly disaster response efforts launched after the events. The government wants its citizens to believe that they are protected only by bureaucrats who will ride to their rescue.
The military campaigns against Iraq alone - justified largely by Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction'' - have cost more than would a sound defense for the United States against such weapons from any source. Whatever the goal in Iraq, it certainly is not primarily the defense of the American people.
Many years ago, Lowell Wood and his colleagues developed an inexpensive plan for the manned exploration of Mars. Robert Zubrin (also a DDP speaker) and his coworkers developed a similarly inexpensive Mars plan using a different approach. Neither system has been of interest to NASA bureaucrats, however. They prefer a plan ten times as expensive and requiring more than a generation to implement because it provides permanent jobs for NASA planners.
Dr. Wood opened his speech with a prelaunch photograph of one of the moon rockets (vintage 1969) and the comment that it was the finest piece of space hardware that had ever been built - before or since. He then calculated that the money spent on NASA, in the 25 years since the manned missions to the moon, would have paid for a manned moon mission - every six weeks during the entire 25 years. That money has instead bought us three shuttle planes that run back and forth to Earth orbit - and a vast network of NASA welfare cases so unprincipled that they now make regular, false pronouncements about human effects on weather in order to keep climate change money flowing to NASA from the Clinton Administration. Instead, it should have purchased the manned colonization of the moon and Mars.
Only the integrity of Richard Feynman, who was accidentally appointed to the commission charged with covering up the cause of the Challenger shuttle disaster, allowed the public to know that an O-ring problem - well-known to the rocket engineers who strongly warned against launching the shuttle in such cold weather - caused the crash.
The NASA tragedy (not that they have failed to accomplished remarkable things - but that they have accomplished so much less than was possible) stands in the middle of a philosophical battle that is raging now throughout our society. One of the issues in this battle is the question of whether or not our future will be determined by truth or by propaganda-disseminated falsehoods.
The outrageous events of the past few weeks in Congress, where Clinton supporters and retainers have lied with an abandon unprecedented in American public life, are not an aberrant side-show. They are reflective of the degree to which "actual truth'' has been downgraded with respect to "perceived truth.'' The propagandists claim that the issues of perjury and obstruction of justice should be decided by polling the public to determine the "perceived truth'' - after the public has been subjected to appropriate propaganda campaigns. In tens of thousands of college humanities courses throughout America - courses similar to the one Arynne refuses to take at Southern Oregon University - the curricula are designed to twist the truth in order to encourage politically correct "perceptions.'' In fact, some of these courses are now beginning to overtly teach that reality is only an illusion - that there are no such things as facts or truths.
In "New Light on Edison's Light'' by Robert Friedel in
Great Inventions, a supplement to American Heritage of Invention and Technology published by Forbes (1997), we read about the entirely different situation that prevailed a century ago when Thomas Edison and his colleagues combined their high-voltage, high-vacuum carbonized filament light bulb with new devices for power generation, metering, fusing, switching, and insulating in order to give the world practical, low-power electric lights. Regardless of his great prior accomplishments, Edison was held rigorously to the truth by the investors and news media (government was not involved), who closely followed progress in his small laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.By contrast, "Heating Up'' by Royce Flippin in the
Princeton (New Jersey) Alumni Weekly, December 2, 1998, pp 12-19, begins with the entirely false statement that "carbon dioxide is far and away the most important of the greenhouse gases'' (it is actually classed as a minor greenhouse gas - water is the most important) and goes downhill from there. Meanwhile, the featured scientist at Princeton's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (funded entirely by the federal government) poses beside his Cray T-90 supercomputer saying: "People want us to tell them exactly how bad global warming will be, and who will be hurt most by it - but science can't answer those questions.'' The truth is that science does not have a shred of evidence that anyone will be hurt by it, but that will not keep the money flowing.The "perceived truths'' that have prevented real space exploration, prevented the strategic and civil defense of the United States, and are now threatening the world's hydrocarbon-based technology are rapidly forming a mystic pseudoreality that has more effect on human affairs than reality itself. It is as though those who teach that reality doesn't really exist are winning - by simply replacing reality with perceived reality and enforcing these perceptions with government power.
Polls are publicized more frequently than facts because it is public perception that becomes established reality - and the value of any statement is measured not by its truth but by its effect on public perception. Perceived reality is then enforced by government power. This is, of course, an environment wherein mathematics, science, engineering, and technology cannot thrive.
At present, information technologies are still flourishing in America - because they are changing so fast that government planners have been unable to catch them. Much of our technology is, however, stagnating or being spun off to workers in other countries. Eventually, reality with catch up with "perceived reality'' - with, perhaps, the Republican impeachment of William Clinton an important first step.