The below pdf, from the Cal Tech archives, is Richard Feynman's commencement address to the graduating class of 1974. His title, framed with his characteristic wit, is “Cargo Cult Science: Some remarks of science, pseudoscience, and leaning how not to fool yourself.”
Feynman's subject is nature of integrity in the practice of science and the search for truth (and, I would add, in life). His remarks are especially germane when the practice science involves the quest for money and the misshaping of public policy (a subject President Eisenhower also addressed explicitly in his farewell address almost 14 years earlier
Eisenhower Extract:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
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.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
November 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and virtually all major TV channels, magazines, and other media outlets are planning specials, documentaries, articles with historical analyses and personal retellings of where people were at the time of assassination. Also, Oliver Stone's 1991 Oscar-nominated film JFK challenging the conventional theory that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and suggesting that there may have been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy will be shown this month in over 250 theaters nationwide. To put the Kennedy assassination in a historical perspective that is both spiritual and political, we here reprint Peter Gabel's brilliant article on the subject, “The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality),” originally published in Tikkun in March/April 1992 in response to the original release of Stone's film. Gabel’s piece is an example of the kind of historical analysis we are trying to develop in Tikkun—locating the critical event of JFK's assassination in the context of the repression of our collective spiritual longings for a loving world that characterized the 1950s, and what he calls the “opening up of desire” represented by JFK. In defending Stone's film against its critics, Gabel also shows how the conflict between hope and fear, between the desire for an erotic, loving, and caring world and the forces seeking to deny and contain that desire, is central to understanding the meaning of historical events. His analysis also implicitly helps explain why this month there is such an outpouring of memory, pain, longing, and loss in recollecting the assassination fifty years later.
The Spiritual Truth of JFK (As Movie and Reality)
by Peter Gabel
Oliver Stone's JFK is a great movie, but not because it “proves” that John F. Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. Stone himself has acknowledged that the movie is a myth — a countermyth to the myth produced by the Warren Commission — but a myth that contains what Stone calls a spiritual truth. To understand that spiritual truth, we must look deeply into the psychological and social meaning of the assassination — its meaning for American society at the time that it occurred, and for understanding contemporary American politics and culture.
Infopolicy – Christian Engström: The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.
The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament’s hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:
The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.
“France will not give way on nuclear proliferation, so long as we are not certain that Iran has renounced nuclear arms, we will keep in place all our demands and sanctions,” he said afterwards. He didn’t explain why France and Israel have the right to threaten humanity with nuclear weapons and others do not have the right of self-defense.
This wasn’t just diplomatic chit-chat, Israel and France are getting as close as they haven’t been since the 1950s. Hollande had arrived with seven of his government ministers, tens of French businessmen and many journalists. They came to sign many deals publicly and a few secretly.
Here is the latest report on the Fukushima catastrophe that I think is credible. I take it as a given that the Japanese government, TEPCO, and certain branches of the American government are either lying or don't actually know the truth about Fukushima, and put out information whose real purpose is not to inform but to keep people calm. The fact is there has never ! been an event like this, and no one really knows quite what the implications are.
Almost every day it seems there is more and more information about the American Gulag, one of the great shames of the United States. This story is a measure of the abject failure of the Congress and the President to serve the interests of national wellness. The privatization of prisons is just the final step in a long process of creating the new American slavery. Given that the average net worth of a U.S. Congressperson from either chamber is $1,066,000 and the average net worth of an American family is $66,000 is it any wonder they seem to have no sense of national wellness, or what is really going on in the lives of average Americans?
This is the latest in the Superbug trend, and it is very scary. Having experienced what contracting one of these Superbugs did to my late brother Alan, and my late wife, Hayden, I have a direct sense of what this story is about. This problem is human created, arising from the over prescription of antibiotics, dumping unused ones ! into the toilet thus polluting the ground water and, particularly, the over-use of antibiotics in industrial animal husbandry. Yet the governments of the world, led by the U.S., just can't seem to put the welfare of the many ahead of the profits of the few. See also the current issue of the Medical journal The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/antibiotic-resistance-the-need-for-global-solutions.
I don't eat chicken nuggets, but I know many people do. Here's what you're eating. Bon Appétit. What I do object to is the fact that this, or things like it, are all that is available in some neighborhoods or rural areas.
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40th anniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende.
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Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other nations might get ideas about independence, were the very reason for the coup and even the partial moves toward nationalization instituted by Allende could not be tolerated by the US business class.
Henry Kissinger was national security advisor and one of the principle architects – perhaps the principle architect – of the coup in Chile. US-instigated coups were nothing new in 1973, certainly not in Latin America, and Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon were carrying on a violent tradition that spanned the breadth of the 20th century and continues in the 21st – see, for example, Venezuela in 2002 (failed) and Honduras in 2009 (successful).
Where possible, such as in Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964, coups were the preferred method for dealing with popular insurgencies. In other instances, direct invasion by US forces such as happened on numerous occasions in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and many other places, was the fallback option.
The coup in Santiago occurred as US aggression in Indochina was finally winding down after more than a decade. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger again, along with Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
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It is impossible to know with precision how many were killed during those four years; all the victims were considered enemies, including the vast majority who were non-combatants, and the US has never been much interested in calculating the deaths of enemies.
Estimates of Indochinese killed by the US for the war as a whole start at four million and are likely more, perhaps far more. It can thus be reasonably extrapolated that probably more than a million, and certainly hundreds of thousands, were killed while Kissinger and Nixon were in power.
In addition, countless thousands of Indochinese have died in the years since from the affects of the massive doses of Agent Orange and other Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction unleashed by the US. Many of us here know (or, sadly, knew) soldiers who suffered from exposure to such chemicals; multiply their numbers by 1,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 – again, it’s impossible to know with accuracy – and we can begin to understand the impact on those who live in and on the land that was so thoroughly poisoned as a matter of US policy.
Studies by a variety of organizations including the United Nations also indicate that at least 25,000 people have died in Indochina since war’s end from unexploded US bombs that pocket the countryside, with an equivalent number maimed. As with Agent Orange, deaths and ruined lives from such explosions continue to this day. So 40 years on, the war quite literally goes on for the people of Indochina, and it is likely it will go on for decades more.
Near the end of his time in office, Kissinger and his new boss Gerald Ford pre-approved the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, an illegal act of aggression again carried out with weapons made in and furnished by the US.
