WHAT’S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 11 July 08 Washington, DC

1. SPIRITUAL REALITY: TEMPLETON PRIZE FOUNDER DIES AT 95.
John Templeton, raised in the Bible-Belt town of Winchester, KY, was a
devout Presbyterian whose middleclass parents stressed the virtues of
thrift and compassion. He learned both lessons so well that in 1968 he
renounced his U.S. citizenship, moving to the Bahamas to avoid the income
tax, and in 1987 was knighted for his philanthropies by the Queen.
Believing spiritual understanding to be more important than understanding
nature, he created the Templeton Prize for Spiritual Realities, directing
that it be adjusted annually to be larger than the Nobel Prize. Now about
$1.5 million, it was first awarded to Mother Theresa in 1973. In recent
years the Templeton Prize has been awarded almost exclusively to
physicists who dream up connections between science and religion.

2. MALTHUSIAN REALITY: POPULATION GROWS GEOMETRICALLY.
Last year Russia established September 12 as Family Love Day, a holiday
for people to stay home and do their part to halt population decline.
Maternity wards were braced for business on June 12, but it was just
another slow day. Just give women control over their own reproduction,
and populations will stabilize. Food production, Thomas Malthus observed
in his 1798 essay, grows arithmetically; without effective contraception,
or war, or pestilence, he warned, world famine is inevitable. Government
and business leaders were horrified at this negative thinking, not to
mention the Church. Governments need armies, business needs workers,
religion need souls to save. Malthus was vilified, and accused of
favoring war and disease. The world population in 1798 was less than 1
million.

3. UNREALITY: ONLY CHINA SUPPORTS POPULATION CONTROL.
The world population today is 6.7 billion, in spite of pandemics and
almost continuous warfare. The closest the U.S. government has come to
investing in population control is to fund Gerard O’Neill’s loony
fantasies of space colonies. Malthus is rarely mentioned today, and
almost never favorably. Much is made of the fact that in industrialized
countries the population is stabilized or shrinking as it is in Russia.
Alas serious food shortages are growing, famine is widespread in Africa,
shortages of clean water are on the increase, fuel costs are rising
rapidly and ocean fisheries are declining. Energy shortages make all the
other problems more difficult to deal with. Overpopulation is never
mentioned as the cause, but the world population may already be
unsustainable.

4. GASOLINE SCAMS: ABOUT THOSE VOODOO FUEL SAVINGS.
Last week we called attention to the Hydro Assist Fuel Cell and the Pre-
Ignition Catalytic Converter advertised in mainstream magazines by the
same company. Where to send your money was clear from the ads, but who
was getting your money was not. Eric Krieg, www. phact.org/hafc.htm ,
perhaps the world’s top debunker of perpetual motion and free energy
scams, has tracked it down and tells me it was none other than Dennis Lee,
who now uses the company name of Dutchman Industries. WN has followed
Lee and his perpetual motion machines for eleven years
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN97/wn071897.htm .

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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