We’ve all heard about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning to us about the “military industrial complex”. It’s practically iconic. But what I didn’t know was that same farewell speech contained a second warning, one that hints at our current situation with such figures as Dr. James Hansen. This is from the blog “Big Hollywood” It’s worth a read. – Anthony
Ike’s Not So Famous Second Warning
by Dwight Schultz “Big Hollywood blog”
On Saturday January 17, 2009, during the Fox 4 0′clock news hour, Shepard Smith recalled the anniversary of President Eisenhower’s famous 1961 farewell address to the nation, but he only mentioned one of Ike’s threat warnings, the one that reminded us to beware of the “Military Industrial Complex.” This warning came from a military man, so it’s been a turn of phrase that slobbers off the lips of suspicious lefty infants shortly after they’re forced to abandon the nipple and accept Marx.
So I shouted at Shepard, “What’s wrong with threat number two, you big beautiful blue eyed capitalist! What’s wrong with Fox News and your staff? There are only two warnings in that speech for God’s sake, if you’re going to honor a historical document maybe somebody could at least read it, and maybe for once in almost fifty years remind us of Ike’s second warning: “…that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Does anything come immediately to mind when you read that? Ike goes on, “…Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” And, “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”
Do you think Ike was warning us that politicians like Al Gore and Barack Obama could cuddle with the scientific technological elite alike and, oh, I don’t know, maybe get behind Obama’s plan to tax your breath? Do you think that perhaps some time in the near future you might not be considered a person but a carbon footprint … does something like that sound ridiculous?
Have you seen how fast Obama has placed environmental academic hysterics and socialists in positions of real power? Steven Chu, John Holdren, Carol Browner and others are there to see to it that every exhaust in your life is a financial event favorable to the government. So how is it that one of Ike’s warnings became famous and the other a historical ghost note?
Above: Watch Ike’s farewell address in its entirety, 46 minutes
It’s really not hard to grasp. Our educational institutions monitor and control historical information and also educate and train the future guardians of public discourse — the indispensable journalists we read, see, and hear every day. By definition both the media and our nation’s scholars digest information and parcel it out in what should be an honest and thoughtful way. They digested Ike’s warning about the military and saw fit to warn us 10 billion times that the military is bad and needs to be feared and pushed off campus. They digested Ike’s warning about universities, scholars, federal money, science and policy, then gave it to Helen Thomas to scatter on some hot house tomatoes in the Nevada desert. It doesn’t get any simpler.
Think about this: How many times have you heard that the debate over anthropogenic global warming has ended? When and where was this debate? The mere recitation of the words, “the debate has ended” closed the discussion without you having ever heard it because, get it! It’s ended! Get It! Neat trick! Gore says the debate has ended….McCain says the debate has ended…Obama says the debate has ended …Hanson says the debate has ended, and no one in the media wants to ask, “What debate?” When? Where? Was there a scientific or political debate… or, God forbid, both, and who was for and who was against?
Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth,” has by now been proven to be almost a 100% big fat lie, and yet there is no media outcry against it or price for Gore to pay because he is supporting the scientific technological elite who want to hold public policy captive to the carbon tax that Socialists and Democrats have wanted since the 1992 Rio summit.
This is a clear example of years of liberal bias in protective favor of the university media structure. It just takes a lot of repetition and a strong ideological preference for saying: American military bad! American university good! CO2 bad! Tax our breath! Raise the tuition! Kick the Marines off campus! Long live man made global warming and the tax dollars we shall inherit from it. STING shall be our band and “Every Breath You Take” shall be our song … revenue streams for eternity.
Repeat after me this slogan … or, if you would rather stick this on the backside of your transportation vehicle , please do and remember, paying higher taxes is patriotic, so breathe baby, breathe for your country, just don’t breathe behind our back and not let us see you, ‘cause we’re talk’n money now, baby! The debate has ended!
…Hmmm?
Warning number two? What warning? Oh, you mean the military thing? We’ve taken care of that. Here’s Matt Damon’s number, he’ll tell you all about it. He went to Harvard you know. Remember, be upscale, don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh, breathe! And did I tell you to pay your taxes and act patriotic, especially when they’re going up?
Gotta run, I’m meeting Tom Daschle, Laurie David, Tyrano-Soros and secretary Geithner for lunch.
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One primary reason that the Soviet economy collapsed was because the government chose the technological winners, rather than allowing the marketplace and consumers to decide what was worthwhile technology. The Russian’s found themselves decades behind the rest of the world.
We see exactly the same pattern now, with the White House and hand-picked academics choosing the technologies of the future.
In my work as an editor and reviewer of scientific journal articles, I’ve seen no tendency for academics to give scientists with government jobs any kind of free pass in getting their research published in peer-reviewed journals.
If we want to derail scientific advances by American scientists, why don’t we just cut off government grants for basic research, such as NSF and NIH? This would effectively stop the education of Ph.d. scientists and would get rid of the US scientific elite in a generation or two. Our nation policy on scientific matters would then probably be firmly in the hands of politicians who ignore science when making policy decisions. It would be a quick solution to the problem of Americans getting more than their fair share of Nobel prizes in science and published articles in scientific journals.
Who funded Einstein?
Bill D,
As a scientist, science teacher and physician, your glib sarcasm about the solution is to cut out government funding altogether actually gets at the real problem: nearly every scientist in the nation is dependent on the government for funding and position and credibility, and if they step very far off from the political ‘consensus’ for certain issues, a scientist will lose all three. Indeed, most all scientists are dependent on the scientific-technological elite and its relationship with the political class for training and acceptance into the community, essentially training and admitting only those to the academy who are blindered by the ‘consensus.’
A very personal example for me is research into using carbon nanowire alternatives to traditional semiconductor manufacturing. Year after year, you’d hear talks promoting nanowires as the future. But the technology never got very far. Fast forward ten-years and traditional industry methods are now in reach of the benefits without the defects. But meanwhile Billions in government grants have been spent–driven crude reasoning and contrived comparisons to bolster the case for carbon nanowires. Eventually, so much money was tied into this future that the incentives to surreptitiously attach your research to carbon nanotubes went from compelling to necessary, and not buying into the dogma of carbon nanotubes meant your possible avenues of funding were limited.
My daughter is working on her PHD in Chemical Engineering at a leading public university. She has been brainwashed by too many years of public education. She thinks her project to build a better solar cell will save the world. She and a bunch of intellgent green zombies are being funded by obese federal grants made possible by Goreism.
The methods and technologies that her group applies are 30 years old. It is a total waste of money except that the kids learn how to resolve problems that industry addressed decades ago. This is a prime of example of the government picking a ‘winner.’
It is so sad to see great young minds wasted by educational institutions corrupted to their cores by politcal ideology.
I keep telling my daughter that her education will start the day she leaves school – but I am just a senile old man that reads Watts Up.
If you have young children, get them out of public schools.
Perhaps we should start a League of Senile Old Men (with apoligies to the female posters, since you never grow old, you don’t qualify :). We could promote honesty, hard work, keeping promises, meeting deadlines, delivering products that do what they are supposed to, not spending what we don’t have, (and reading Watts Up), all those things that are no longer necessary in this New Age World.
Given our carbon-taxed, resource limited, over regulated future, if I had known I would live this long, I’d have lived faster and died younger.
Senile Grumpy Old Retired Engineer.
Sign me up for that league. The problem is that only “goups” have sway. The left has created and/or infiltrated a zillion groups and sytematically created the “loudest voice in the room”. In the political calculus driving policy the single voice is not registered, no matter how many there are in absolute numbers. When it gets so bad that the “mob” sikutaneously takes to the streets, God help us.
Sign me up too. We share similar backgrounds, so we can sit around drinking our black coffee (coffee, not that 4 dollar fru-fru stuff), and talk about the good old days.
Being “not quite retired” and getting further from it by the second, I’ve found that the real world still values the things that you mentioned. It’s only the educational and government employees that live in this so called “New World”.
Voodoo:
I agree! We’ve homeschooled our three boys and it’s shocking as they compete against public school kids. My oldest says University is much easier than what he was doing at home throughout High School. He’s a sophomore now. My middle boy has simlarly earned a full academic scholarship so it’s 2 down and one to go – I’m not paying anything so far! My third – a 14 year old HS Freshman – will probably score around 26-28 on his first attempt at the ACT this summer, then jump into the 30’s when he re-takes it as a HS Sophomore – none of my boys bothered for a higher score their Senior Year… I
[getting way off topic – please focus]
I’m not so sure.
By military industrial complex he was referring to that which was of use solely for military application. Without the “dreaded military industrial complex” driving technologies that were also useful outside the military, we’d all be discussing this using the postal service in the “N-QB3” manner.
Meanwhile public policy is already driven by that elite. e.g. The common man has no way of determining the efficacy of new drugs, the compounds that are in foods, what frequencies gadgets have to be careful not to interfere with, and so on. Where it concerns a technological society, policy MUST be set by an elite* only in that otherwise very few have the time and/or requisite expertise.
The problem isn’t the elite* but that the elite* are or can be politically tainted (or suspected as such.)
*elite = group members demonstrating required expertise in the subject knowledge; nothing more than that is intended here.
You can feed a politician just about anything, if one talks the talk correctly.
Hansen fed Gore, who is no scientist.
And now, Chu is going to feed Obama.
You can’t have a one-sided opinion monopolizing policy and expect disasters not to happen.
That is the reason why there are military advisors (plural) who feed all the opinions, angles and scenarios to the Commander-in-Chief.
What’s Chu going to do, have an AGW argument with himself?
Albert Einstein said “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
Academics should do research, and leave technology to people who actually know how to build things that work. BTW – the “Chu Effect” is working marvelously. Since he gave his apocalyptic speech about California dying from drought ten days ago, Kirkwood has received over 10 feet of snow.
Bill D – With all due respect, and I mean that, how many scientific journal articles are from research NOT funded by the federal government?
I see no problem with cutting off federal government grants for basic research. It would save a ton of money and force universities to train Ph.D.s on their own dime. It might also compel less-than-competent scientists to find other jobs doing something worthwhile within their range of competency.
The corruption of science by politics is a widely recognized problem. Political Correctness has stifled scientific advancement in numerous fields, not just climate research. Environmental sciences have been thoroughly prostituted to Fed money and have deviated so far from credible science as to be unrecognizable as such.
It is not surprising that the most exciting and relevant scientific advancements of the last 20 years have been in information technology and medicine, two areas of research dominated by private interests.
Ike was right. PC science is not science at all. It is Lysenkoism and a drag on the real thing.
Steven Goddard (22:50:55) : “…We see exactly the same pattern now, with the White House and hand-picked academics choosing the technologies of the future.”
Yep, good point Steve. It’s not the American way. America didn’t become great by being told what to do….. It became great by allowing people to do what they were best at.
G Alston (23:41:25) : “…Where it concerns a technological society, policy MUST be set by an elite* only in that otherwise very few have the time and/or requisite expertise.”
No GA… In a Democratic society that policy MUST be DISCUSSED by ALL. Not just determined by an ‘elite’. There are no “uninformed” in a democracy…. Otherwise you are fulfilling the scenario Eisenhower warned against.
It is easy to think people are fools GA…. America become the greatest country in the world, by letting it’s “fools” think. Something that was unimaginable in Europe.
G Alston,
Are you sure about this? Few people realize that the original speech actually referred to the “Military – Congressional – Industrial Complex”, but Ike was advised by his speech editors to remove the word “Congressional” from his speech, he originally resisted but at the last minute did as he was advised. This presumably so as not to expose the complete loop. I am not certain of the full story behind this, but you should be able to find further information on this subject.
We are seeing precisely what Ike had warned us about, you know, Halliburton, Black Water, ties to politics and those profiting. I will leave the rest to your own research.
The reason for science’s assent to its lofty status, particularly with ‘progressive’ types is because it serves as a surrogate religion. It helps provide ‘certainty’ & ‘truth’ to live by.
What the scientific community utters is taken as gospel. Anyone outside of the ‘church’ of knowledge who disputes the claims is a heretic or ‘denier’ of truth.
No doubt science & technology is seductive. It has enormous explanatory power. (I know, I use it daily.) But it’s a dangerous double edge sword. The infatuation created by with numbers and equations represented through a model can be powerful. They seem to clearly represent, with certainty, how the world works.
But that certainty is an illusion. Science & its tools cannot represent ‘unknown unknowns’; and often most of the people doing the science don’t fully understand the concept of uncertainty.
As we have seen many times with applications of models and scientific approaches to finance & the economy the downside of that blind faith can lead to devastating results (e.g. LTCM failure, current credit crisis).
For those who appreciate the concept of uncertainty can see the same blind faith climate science….and the devastating results could well impact us all if we continue down the path these ‘new priests’ want to take us. .
Reply: OK, I’m gonna start getting serious about this. Enough with the religious meme of blind faith applied to the opposition, no matter what side you’re on. We are striving for civil discourse at this site. The only reason I did not heavily edit this comment is that it targeted generalities and not specific posters, but even that leeway is coming to an end. If I encounter this pejorative going forward, there will be censorship. ~ charles the moderator.
…… America became the…
I can’t proof read fer nuts!
The average human (if there is such a thing) produces 894 grams of CO2 each day.
Put that figure into you calculators with each national population figure and multiply up by 265.25 to get the annual figure. Then, just for laughs, put in the future predicted population figures for say 2050.
We need to produce some very efficient carbon sinks pronto.
If you take this scenario a step further, then we will only ever see evidence to support global warming as any measurement that contradicts this view would simply be removed from the data sets to protect future funding and personal income streams.
Of course this notion is utter nonsense !
It would be like the LIA or MWP vanishing from NOAA’s temperature proxy data. Surely not !
Ooops… 365.25.. 🙁
Bill D (23:11:02) : If we want to derail scientific advances
It’s not about derailing them, it’s about focusing them on politically driven areas… Finding a way to sequester CO2 may very well be excellent in it’s execution, yet a total waste of time and money when CO2 is shown to be unimportant.
It would be a quick solution to the problem of Americans getting more than their fair share of Nobel prizes
Um, given the behaviour of the Nobel committee lately (at least in the Nobel Peece Prize and Literature Prize) I don’t think you want to be advertising that Americans get a lot of their prizes. It’s looking more and more like a “good ‘ol boys” club handing out gifts to friends; less and less like a meritocracy.
Kind of reminds me of an old movie star selling soap or plastic junk on TV. Their reputation lifts the product for a while, then they get pulled down to just being another pitch man. Sad really. Once their reputation is spent, they are cast aside.
I’d give it about another decade to become about as prestigious as the Oscar (no, wait, it already is…), better make that the Emmy, drat, no, er, Tony?
No, this has no smiley face. I did once hold the Nobel in awe. Now it’s just a political tool handed out by hacks. That’s what happens when you spend your reputation to pedal junk. No, the idea that one or two of their prizes might still be based on some merit is not important. Folks just don’t go that fine grained on this stuff. (BTW, this is well understood in marketing. It was in an MBA marketing class that we covered it, in a unit on celebrity endorsements.)
Or “peddle”, even, unless you’re talking about junk bicycles 😉
“One primary reason that the Soviet economy collapsed was because the government chose the technological winners,…”
Another bigger? reason was the utter inefficiency of centralised planning. The average citizen in Soviet bloc countries spent more than 300 hrs per year waiting in queues! Often for simple staples such as bread, butter and flour.
In communist East Germany, one had to wait 15 YEARS for a sparkling brand new Trabant car.
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/original/trabant.jpg
Americans don’t realise it, but you’re entering a so-called PERMISSION SLIP SOCIETY.
Yes, you’re going to need a permission slip for everything.
– Want to use a normal light bulb – permission slip!
– Want to eat steak – permission slip please!
– Want to drive extra miles? – permission slip!
– Want to fly? – where’s your permission slip?
– Bottled water? – permission slip please!
– 1500+ sq. ft. home? – permission slip for that too!
– Wanna flush the john? – permission slip!
– Want more than 2 kids? – special permit process!
– 2-stroke engine of any kind – need a permit!
– Want to cut down some trees? – cough it up!
Don’t think this is serious?
LOL – You think you own your property?
Wake up you marionettes! They’re coming at you with chains and shackles.
Wasn’t long ago Anthony wrote up a timely thread about all the eco-regulations and initiatives. And he’s right to point out what kooks you’ve got in the big environmental government posts. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Obama didn’t say “Change”,
He said “Chains”!
Your “permission slip” concept alludes to some authority that will manage access. I think it won’t be as obvious as that. I suggest that access will be resticted by price. All those things you listed will be available to those with the $’s. They will also be able to assuage their conscience by purchasing “offsets”. In case you haven’t noticed the class with access tomorrow will be same “elites” (sorry the word strikes the right chord even if it is misapplied) that are driving us down this path today. For the “Joe the plumber” or “retired engineer” types? They will invent some form of green palliative to keep us content.
Off topic — the Vatican will be canonizing Fr. Damien soon. A man who worked with people afflicted with Hansen’s disease. Hmm… Do we have a patron saint?
St. Thomas.
Michael Crichton called it the new “Media-Legal-Political Complex” in “State of Fear”
I can’t tell the difference between David Cameron(Conservative leader) and Gordon Brown(Labour Prime Minster) when it comes to AGW!
I made good bonuses and the company profits were up when we started publishing in the relatively new field of international environmental law back in the 90s. This in a contracting industry.
I para-phrase Alston Chase in Playing God in Yellowstone “when you make science fit the policy you fail, better to make the science determine the policy”
When it becomes a political debate and not a scientific one you lose me. I cant get away from thinking you’re hiding something and theres that slimy feeling one gets from a politicians handshake.
This has been a great blog and very educational. Thanks for that.
By the sounds of the above posts, the next 4 years will go down in history as “the dark ages” ( and thats got nothing to do with sun spots)
“American military bad! American university good!”
It always escapes the writers of these columns that what we are seeing is a morphing of what started in the 60’s. The words I have in quotes are the same type of things I heard back in the early 70’s, “The military is bad, make love not war, put a flower in a soldiers gun barrel. The universities are good because that is where we can do our protests, and have our freedom of speech.”
I think most people don’t see that the Baby Boomer/ Hippie generation controls American culture, and for the most part, the media. Political correctness is the spawn of what the protesters of the 60’s/ 70’s wanted. There was a militant aura about those protests. They said they wanted “freedom”. But that was not what they meant. What they really wanted was control; they wanted to have the power, the control, that “the man” had. That is, when you have power then you truly have the freedom to do anything you want. You can’t fully have freedom unless you have power. And boy, they have that now. They tell us what we can and cannot say in public. If you go off the reservation and say something that they don’t like, i.e. if you are politically incorrect, you are labeled as an intolerant bigot, or a denier, or some other incriminating name. There is a militant aura that goes along with the enforcment of this political correctness just as there was a militant aura in those protests 40 years ago.
College students know very well that in the domain of the Baby Boomer/ Hippie, the university, there is political correctness. It’s funny, isn’t it, how topics like politics, and global warming, are lectured by professors in classes that have nothing to do with either? That’s what happens when you have power, when you have control; you have the freedom to do whatever you want, and to do it wherever you want.
How is it these baby boomers have got in the drivers seat of America? They use guilt. They make you feel guilty about any and everything. They push global warming by trying to make you feel guilty about polar bears, or your car exhaust, or your house that uses electricity from a coal powered plant. They get you coming and going. You can never turn anywhere with their not having already paved your path with guilt. Guilt is their atom bomb–and they’ve dropped it!
This manipulation by guilt has it’s roots in Kent State. I know it sounds odd for me to say that. But, Kent State was the turning point, their D-Day. (I hope I don’t sound cold.) The guilt from that day made society give those Baby Boomer protesters what they wanted. Society couldn’t say no to them after that, it just didn’t have the heart to. Guilt has been their power source ever since.
I am a Baby Boomer so I can understand these things. I know the Baby Boomer. Al Gore is a Baby Boomer. Have you notice how Al Gore conducts himself in the same way the Baby Boomers did back then? They had Woodstock, he has Live Earth. They had garbage (“Who’s Going to Collect the Garbage? (1969)”), and ecology (“Artifacts: The Eco-Hippies”), he has global warming. They both sound like they’re cut from the same cloth, don’ they? What we are seeing now is what a movement from 40 years ago has morphed into.
James Hansen missed being born in the Baby Boomer time frame. But none the less he uses guilt the way they do. What do I mean? Well, for one, he is helping to organize a “protest” in Washington D.C. about the guilt of using coal.
video about it :
pg=embed&sec=
“Marinated in the sixties”
Being a “baby Boomer” myself I heartily endorse what you say. Recently I heard a young college student comment that he was sick of the hippies and the cr#@&%p they were teaching. He looked forward to the day the last hippie dies.
It is not surprising that the most exciting and relevant scientific advancements of the last 20 years have been in information technology and medicine, two areas of research dominated by private interests.
Kary Mullis was responsible for key medical breakthrough here, and he was a self-taught scientist. He’s worth watching (he’s one of us folks). IT has weird roots, that nobody wants to look at too closely… but there are strange links with Rothwell reverse-engineering.
Thanks for the requote of this important quote Anthony. Just as I was putting up a page on the story from Seitz and Singer of the alteration to the 1995 IPCC scientists’ report, another key incident that deserves remembering anc checking. I’ve now added Ike’s quote to the IPCC section of my primer (click my name).
Bill D
“Our nation policy on scientific matters would then probably be firmly in the hands of politicians who ignore science when making policy decisions.”
would then?????????????
Ummm….so not like now, right?
“It would be a quick solution to the problem of Americans getting more than their fair share of Nobel prizes in science.”
It seems to me that most people feel the Nobel prize has become much more political in nature…based on…what WAS that movie???
Oh…yeah…An Inconvenient Truth?…which was made by…wait for it…a politician who completely ingored science and is having a tremendous impact on policy.
JimB
Pierre Gosselin (02:13:55) :
“One primary reason that the Soviet economy collapsed was because the government chose the technological winners,…”
Another bigger? reason was the utter inefficiency of centralised planning. The average citizen in Soviet bloc countries spent more than 300 hrs per year waiting in queues! Often for simple staples such as bread, butter and flour..
I have in my former institute a colleague who came from Soviet Georgia, a second generation greek. He had to say the following about the soviet system and how it impacted his village: When they first made off with the feudal masters and the village became the owner of the fields, they organized themselves in a democratic way, counting up the man hours each villager worked and sharing the profits accordingly ( Georgia was the garden of the SU). They started amassing money for the village in the bank and voted to use it to send worthy young ones to study, and generally they were quite happy with the change. Then came centralization.
The village’s money was taken by the central government and a salary was paid to workers. That was the end of the experiment and downhill from then on.