Word: plaines
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Your Science article "Life on a Billion Planets" [March 3], is plain horse sense. Who the hell are we (on this planet) to believe we are the only humans in all the cosmic world? Astronomer Struve says: "It is perfectly conceivable that some intelligent race meddled once too often with nuclear laws and blew themselves to bits." This is just about what may hit us-if we keep monkeying around with nuclear fission...
...Toxicology, about the Soviets' five-year plan (1956-60) for pharmacological research. A major aim of the Soviet plan, as translated last week by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is to develop "pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work." In plain English, the Russians are looking for drugs like the "psychic energizers" foreseen by New York's Dr. Nathan S. Kline (TIME, Feb. 24), that will make them supermen...
...poor performance of their students has proved the educationists wrong. U.S. high school students are plain ignorant of things grammar school students would have known a generation ago. Years of barren discussion courses in English have made a whole generation chronically incoherent in the English language. Cut off from any but the most obvious contact with his tradition, e.g., an occasional project visit to the local courthouse, the student has lost his sense of history. Surely the history of the Crusades can give a young American a better grasp of the. problems implicit in the U.N. or NATO than dressing...
Unfortunately, the accounts of Communists at work leave them strangely faceless and bearing mostly names like Bill and Phil. Hoover makes it plain that he is sensitive to charges of sensationalism that have been made against the FBI. Perhaps on this ground, he omitted all reference to the Hiss case, on which 263 agents of his bureau were engaged, although the chapter on "Espionage and Sabotage" would seem to call for it (Don Whitehead's The FBI Story, which Hoover underwrote, dealt with the case in some detail). Hoover's conclusion is a convincingly humble plea for Americans...
...sophisticated critics. His contempt for the addled notion that Communism is essentially a response to economic inequalities is soundly based. As he sees it, there are two faiths at war in the world, and his notion that only a true faith will defeat a false one may be so plain and old-fashioned as to be right...