Science

Robert Oppenheimer by Revilo P. Oliver The Fly in the Ointment IT IS HIGH TIME we returned from our excursus to Mr. Catran and took notice of one nugget of wisdom he offers us, an injunction that we must never study history. History, you see, would tell us what human beings are by nature, and prophets of a…

by Revilo P. Oliver Is There Any Hope? IN THE Eighteenth Century, as Voltaire tells us, two extraterrestrials, Micromégas, a native of Sirius, and his friend, a Saturnian academician, stopped by the earth and discovered, somewhat to their astonishment, that there was life on it. Their scientific…

Triumph of Daedalus Over Fate and Futility (2017) by Bryan Larsen (bryanlarsen.com) by Revilo P. Oliver Superstition Springs Eternal PLUS ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.” It is human nature that is meant in the familiar Horatian tag, naturam expelles…

Jeremy Rifkin by Revilo P. Oliver Ain’t Science Wonderful? UNFORTUNATELY, for our race (I am not interested in others) common sense is not enough. Despite, our race’s characteristic recognition of the supreme authority of ascertained facts, it has a psychic need to escape now and then from the trammels…

“Spiritual” hoaxer Carlos Castaneda by Revilo P. Oliver Through the Looking Glass EARLY IN 1969, while looking over the ordure on a newsstand, I noticed a paperback, The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, and I squandered $1.25 on it. It purported to record…

by Revilo P. Oliver Jewish scientific fraudster Immanuel Velikovsky Anything Goes! THE Skeptical Inquirer, a quarterly published in Buffalo, New York, and now completing its seventh year, is a praiseworthy periodical. I have read it with interest since its first issue. I admire the men who write…

Joseph Banks Rhine by Revilo P. Oliver The Pip-Squeak Effect IN America’s Decline I quoted, from a journal that I kept in my youth, an entry made in 1934, when I tried to analyse the probable shape of the coming World War at a time when our “intellectuals” were blabbering about “world peace” and similar…

Jewish magician and “psychic” con man Uri Geller by Revilo P. Oliver Our Spooners WHEN I WAS in college (long ago, when it was still possible to get an education in some of them) I knew a number of men of considerable accomplishment in the genuine sciences. They would no more have wasted three…

Arthur Conan Doyle by Revilo P. Oliver Scientific Suckers IT IS TRUE that quite a few men who attained competence, and some who attained distinction, in some one of the sciences have evinced remarkable gullibility, but that was almost always a susceptibility to some superstition about the supernatural…

by David Sims THE IDEOLOGY of modernity, and its offspring, globalism, might be partially correct in one way. That one way is the baby in the bathwater of that ideology. Modernity holds that science is the best way by which the truth might become known. The idea that truth is like the rain, carving many…