Pauline
Moffitt Watts, in American Historical Re-
view (Feb. 1985),400 A St. S.E., Washing-
ton, D.C. 20003.
"God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which he spoke in the Apocalypse of Saint John . . . and he showed me the spot where to find it." So wrote Christopher Columbus in 1500, eight years after discovering the New World.
Columbus has gone down in history as a bold explorer and man of sci- ence who overcame the ignorance and superstition of his ti...
Maura Clancey and Michael J. Ro-
Campaign '84 binson, in Public Opinion (Dec.-Jan. and Feb.-Mar. 1985), American Enterprise In- stitute, 1150 17th St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20036-9964.
Conservative commentators found much fault with the three major TV networks for anti-Reagan bias during the 1984 presidential campaign. Clancey and Robinson, researchers at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, respectively, see plenty of evidence that President Reagan did indeed come off...
Stephen Hess, in Society (Jan.-As 'Leakcraft' Feb. 1985), Box A, Rutgers-The State
University, New Brunswick, N.J. 08903.
The morning newspapers often set teeth gnashing in the White House. Leaks-disclosures of inside information-are the cause of this high- level angst; they are also an increasingly common part of life in official Washington.
The fact is, says Hess, a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow, most leaks are sprung the President's own political appointees, not by ca- reer civil servants...
a given disclosure. When reports that Libyan "hit squads" had been dispatched to make an attempt on President Reagan's life surfaced in December 1981, New York Times columnist William Safire concluded that it was a White House ploy to publicize Muammar Qaddafi's "export of terrorism." No, replied Joseph Kraft in the Washington Post, the Reagan administration was too fearful of up- setting the planned withdrawal of Libyan troops from Chad to risk pub- licity that would anger Qaddafi.
A...
this definition, Clor notes, the Marquis de Sade would qualify as an admirable man. As if to answer, Mill, in his 1861 essay Utilitarian-ism, distinguished between higher and lower human pursuits, with such aberrations as the Marquis's falling into the lower realm.
But Mill never showed how a society governed the principles of On Liberty would encourage citizens to pursue "higher" pleasures. In fact, Clor says, Mill never really grappled with the reality that many people, given a choice,...
a sharp anti-Semitic bias. What the Revised Standard Bible renders as "we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe," for exam- ple, The Book gives as "We were slaves to Jewish laws and rituals." A more recent effort the National Council of Churches to remove "sexist" language from the Scriptures has produced its own share of problems. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son" thus becomes "For God so loved the world that God gave...
Harriet Ritvo, in BioScience (Nov. 1984), 1401 Wilson Blvd., Arling- ton, Va. 22209.
"The word vivisection has an old-fashioned ring, and antivivisectionist is even more suggestive of quixotic Victorian crusades," writes the Massa- chusetts Institute of Technology's Ritvo. Yet, protests against the use of live animals in scientific research have been growing in recent years.
The origins of antivivisectionism actually predate the Victorian era. 1780, a number of Evangelical clergymen...
infecting healthy rabbits with the disease. Even though a rabies epidemic had taken 79 English lives in 1877, revulsion against Pas- teur's method sparked a public outcry against use of his vaccine. Within 20 years, however, the role of animal experimentation in the conquest of such deadly diseases as diphtheria deprived antivivisec- tionism of broad popular support.
Today's most vocal animal-rights protesters in Britain and the United States, like their Victorian predecessors, doubt the value...
natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."
Many evolutionists admit that taxonomy has, in the past, been a bit slipshod; few make such sweeping statements as "mammals evolved from reptiles" anymore. (Cladists assert that reptiles, like invertebrates, refers to no real group of animals.) Still, evolutionists say, Darwin must be right: If one agrees that all organisms have parents and that there was once a time when...
Congress in 1980, the Synthetic Fuel Corporation subsidizes private companies producing synfuel (e.g., oil from shale and tar sands). Its annual budget: $8 billion. But despite the subsidies, today's temporary oil glut has rendered current synfuel technology uneconomi- cal. Many private companies have closed down their synfuel plants. What was needed all along, Landsberg argues, was federal financing for research-and-development efforts.
Washington has enjoyed a few successes. The Strategic Petroleum...