Word: piel
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...publisher of "The Scientific American," Gerard Piel has a professional interest in problems of information exchange, not only between scientists, but between the researchers and laymen. Most of his nineteen essays collected here discuss the conflicting demands of national security and intellectual freedom. Security demands secrecy; science requires an unrestricted interchange of ideas on an international level. In recent years, the two have seemed irreconcilable...
...there is another, and more significant flaw in Ardrey's thesis. It must be clear to any careful observer that we are, in the words of Piel, editor of the Scientific American approaching a "propertyless" society. "The ownership of property," observed Piel, "is no longer the primary source of power, even economic power in our society. . . ." He goes on to note how modern consumers mortgage their homes, buy their cars on time and rent a good deal of what they need. He concludes that "the typical consumer owns no property in the classical meaning of the term...
...anyhow. and the final, strident, despairing plea for negotiations ("Both sides are driven to the conference table by the same iron compulsion of thermo-nuclear reality"). Nothing can disguise the fact that these arguments are of the heart and glands more than of the mind; and it is to Piel's credit that he does not try to disguise them (much...
...cannot really stand as a substitute for the kind of detailed and thorough--but no less passionate--discussion of shelter-fallacies which Roger Hagah, editor of the Committee of Correspondence newsletter and a Teaching Fellow here, provided in the November 4 issue of The Nation (and in Cambridge 38). Piel does not come to grips with what he himself calls "the subject emphasized in civil defence, '(fall-out danger in nonblast areas. As a result, his argument is of patches, not of a piece...
...more skeptical of civil defence than Americans appear to be, and certainly less informed about this country's shelter-craze.) Nonetheless, "The Illusion of Civil Defence" is a particularly interesting, particularly disappointing instance of what seems to happen to almost anyone who tires to speak intelligently on the subject. Piel's article suggests that it is difficult to write about such horror without surrendering to some kind of insanity...