PRECIS
Elsewhere in the 11/28/99 NYTimes, we
find "Cold War Without End" by
Jacob Weisberg in
the Magazine section.
Although the pulling down of the Berlin Wall
a decade ago all but ended the Cold War, it's
still being played out in a series of dueling
revisionist, counter-revisionist and even
counter-counter-revisionist accounts being
written about the last 80 years.
A central bone of contention involves
the recent release of the
Venona Documents, a collection of
decrypted Soviet messages from the 1940s
concerning attempts to infiltrate the
U.S. government.
Various people are mentioned in the documents,
including J. Robert Oppenheimer and
I. F. Stone, the famous liberal journalist
who died in 1989. With Stone, for instance,
the documents mention that he met with KGB
agents in the 1940s. Those wishing to discredit him read this as proof that he was
a KGB agent, while those without such a
pressing need admit the lack of any proof
of recruitment.
Among those most enraged by the accusations
against Stone is his son Jeremy, the president
of the
Federation
of American Scientists.
The younger Stone's recent memoirs
Every Man Should Try: Adventures of
a Public Interest Activist lend irony
to the situation since he describes someone
therein as fitting the description of a mole
inside the Manhattan Project.
Fellow scientists reading the memoir recognized
Philip Morrison in Stone's description,
prompting Morrison to issue
a denial pointing out significant
discrepancies between himself and the
person described as the mole.
Stone publicly accepted the denial, perhaps
realizing he wasn't doing his father any
good by playing the same game himself.
Weisberg points to all these obsessive battles
as being more a sign of a continued ideological
struggle than of a concern for history,
especially since everyone involved is either
still a "leftist" or a "reformed leftist."
Timothy Ferris - in
"A Space Station? Big Deal!" - describes
various even more ambitious space-related
projects including
space elevators and hotels,
Mars colonization,
lunar mining,
cruises to the moon,
tiny interstellar probes, a
Europa probe, and
even bioengineered life forms adapted to
survival in space, e.g. a space squid.
All of the concepts are niftily illustrated
by Bob McCall in the style of mid-60s to
mid-70s science fiction magazine and book
covers. Ferris's
Coming of Age in the Milky Way and
The Whole Shebang are related books
well worth a read.
"Safety in Numbers" by Robert Frank tells
how we've become "macroeconomic-data junkies"
in our mad rush to capitalize on the stock
market. He claims that all the information
(e.g. capacity utilization, consumer price
index, housing starts and building permits,
etc., ad nauseaum) ostensibly for making
better financial decisions is really a
"palliative to ease our anxiety about the
eventual downturn."
I decided long ago to occasionally glance
at the forest and ignore the trees, i.e. to
put money into a diversified set of
mutual funds and check the numbers when I
get a hardcopy statement each quarter.
I know people who do a lot more and, what
the hell, I suppose it's as fun a hobby as
most. For me, the mutual fund's a lot
better than the pathetic interest one gets
in a savings account, and I'm not yet ready
to start stuffing the mattress. Besides,
if the stock market utterly fails then I
think my chief worries aren't going to be
financial.
posted by Steven Baum
11/28/1999 09:55:23 PM |
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