Friday, July 11, 2008
John Templeton, raised in the Bible-Belt town of Winchester, KY, was a
devout Presbyterian whose middleclass parents stressed the virtues of thrift
and compassion. He learned both lessons so well that in 1968 he renounced
his U.S. citizenship, moving to the Bahamas to avoid the income tax, and in
1987 was knighted for his philanthropies by the Queen. Believing spiritual
understanding to be more important than understanding nature, he created the
Templeton Prize for Spiritual Realities, directing that it be adjusted
annually to be larger than the Nobel Prize. Now about $1.5 million, it was
first awarded to Mother Theresa in 1973. In recent years the Templeton Prize
has been awarded almost exclusively to physicists who dream up connections
between science and religion.
Last year Russia established September 12 as Family Love Day, a holiday for
people to stay home and do their part to halt population decline. Maternity
wards were braced for business on June 12, but it was just another slow day.
Just give women control over their own reproduction, and populations will
stabilize. Food production, Thomas Malthus observed in his 1798 essay, grows
arithmetically; without effective contraception, or war, or pestilence, he
warned, world famine is inevitable. Government and business leaders were
horrified at this negative thinking, not to mention the Church. Governments
need armies, business needs workers, religion need souls to save. Malthus
was vilified, and accused of favoring war and disease. The world population
in 1798 was less than 1 million.
The world population today is 6.7 billion, in spite of pandemics and almost
continuous warfare. The closest the U.S. government has come to investing in
population control is to fund Gerard O'Neill's loony fantasies of space
colonies. Malthus is rarely mentioned today, and almost never favorably.
Much is made of the fact that in industrialized countries the population is
stabilized or shrinking as it is in Russia. Alas serious food shortages are
growing, famine is widespread in Africa, shortages of clean water are on the
increase, fuel costs are rising rapidly and ocean fisheries are declining.
Energy shortages make all the other problems more difficult to deal with.
Overpopulation is never mentioned as the cause, but the world population may
already be unsustainable.
Last week we called attention to the Hydro Assist Fuel Cell and the Pre-
Ignition Catalytic Converter advertised in mainstream magazines by the same
company. Where to send your money was clear from the ads, but who was
getting your money was not. Eric Krieg, http://www.phact.org/hafc.htm,
perhaps the world's top debunker of perpetual motion and free energy scams,
has tracked it down and tells me it was none other than Dennis Lee, who now
uses the company name of Dutchman Industries. WN has followed Lee and his
perpetual motion machines for eleven years
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN97/wn071897.htm .
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