WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Politicians do it to get votes, and ex-scientists do it to get funding. they paint a devil one the wall and wail "I can save you from this mortal danger if you give me your vote/money."

But of course, the devil is a lifeless, harmless agglomeration of paint, and after a while it is obvious that nobody needs saving. What do the politicians and ex-scientists do then?

Most often paint a new devil. The coming ice age was replaced by global warming, and now that it is becoming evident that global warming is a hoax, it will be replaced by something else. 20 years ago the big buzzword was "eutrophication." Detergents and other materials that caveman did not use were putting so much oxygen in the water that algae prospered, multiplied like crazy and pushed out all other life from pools, lakes and other bodies of water. The scare articles were accompanied by one or two photographs where this had actually happened and the sham-environmentalists with their well known logic screamed "If it happened here, it must happen everywhere!"

But it happened nowhere, and a new devil had to be painted on the wall "biodegradability. "Detergent let out after use into the water system could not be broken down by natural bacteria and would float on the water until doomsday, claimed the doomsdayers. The whole thing was a boldfaced lie, for most detergents always have been biodegradable. But Sears Roebuck and others, whether by inborn servility or inborn stupidity, set about making new boxes, thinking up new names and putting BIODEGRADABLE in big letters on the boy, which was filled with the old detergent. 'Twas a famous victory for the environmentalists, who were stupid enough to think that they had forced industry into producing biodegradable detergents, when they had only forced them to change the boxes, and were paying extra money for the privilege of being suckered.

There was the phosphate scare and the microwave oven scare and countless others, before the brainwashers arrived at global warming, ozone depletion and other rubbish.

The one myth that seems to have continued relentlessly was the one of overpopulation in the US. As pointed out recently [AtE Nov 92], the fertility rate was dropping at an unprecedented rate from 1957 to about 1978, and has since then made a barely perceptible recovery. The other two factors that influence population size, longevity and immigration, have also been growing, and the US Bureau of the Census has just revised its forecasts of population growth upward. This would be excellent news in any country where people produce more than they consume, i.e., in any civilization. As the US slips into Third World status, and more and more parasites produce less than they consume, this may, of course, eventually become unwelcome, as there will be more parasites per producer than before.

But the real reason for asking "Where are they now?" is the second return (fly-by) of the Galileo probe, which was launched in October 1989 amidst the most vigorous protests, doomsday forecasts and court battles, with the second fly-by on December 8, 1992, going almost totally unnoticed.