Quotes, abstracts and short essays

Nuclear Technology: The Inappropriate Exercise of Human Intelligence

In this essay, we articulate some of the fundamentally treacherous assumptions underlying claims used by nuclear industrial interests, to justify further development and the ongoing employment of this technology in our society and on our ineffably precious and irreplaceable planetary home. We then conclude with a partial listing of what our response abilities provide us with in the exercise of our true intelligence. We begin with the most essential and obfuscated fact to understand about nuclear weapons -- which was known by the original bomb creators back at the very beginning of this new epoch.
Local copy of document from rat haus reality's radiation page.

Icarus, or, the Future of Science by Bertrand Russell

Mr. Haldane's Daedalus has set forth an attractive picture of the future as it may become through the use of scientific discoveries to promote human happiness. Much as I should like to agree with his forecast, a long experience of statesmen and government has made me somewhat sceptical. I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy. ...

Daedalus, or, Science and the Future by J. B. S. Haldane

[A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923.] As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly, great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an almost visible hatred. ...

Risk and the New Modernity by Simon Carter

Review of Ulrich Beck's "Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity". A sociologist/anthropologist looks at the developing "new modernity" and the logic of "the social production of risk" as it relates to various nuclear and other disasters.
(http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.593/review-5.593)

An Afternoon with Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin talks about a "philosophy of 20 C technology". One of the "E-sermons" from The Church of Euthanasia. The One Commandment: "Thou shalt not procreate". The Four Pillars: suicide/abortion/cannibalism/sodomy. Extract.
(http://www.paranoia.com/coe/e-sermons/jeremy.html)