More wisdom from the 'geostrategically lobotomized' NY Times

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See the Lev Navrozov Archive By Lev Navrozov SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

Here is a ÒNew York Times MagazineÓ article of June 6, by Jon Gertner about Bill Joy, whom the author describes as a ÒSilicon Valley deity, generally regarded as one of the most gifted engineers,Ó etc.

Not that I read the ÒNew York Times.Ó But the article was found and printed for me from the NYTimes.com as an outstanding geostrategic document, by Isak Baldwin, the manager of our Center for the Survival of Western Democracies, Inc.

You see, Bill Joy, the Silicon Valley deity, is not just a dazzling success, and nothing but.

Four years ago in an article he wrote for Wired magazine, Joy declared that the headlong race in biotechnology and nanotechnology might prove catastrophic.

See how complex, multidimensional, and self-contradictory human nature or at least the nature of this American scientist or technologist is? On the one hand, he is a Silicon Valley deity Ñ success, money, esteem verging on worship. On the other hand, here we read what the Silicon Valley deity wrote for Wired magazine! Gartner shows to what extremes of free thinking the thoughts of Joy go:

Joy has been especially provocative [!] on the threat of tiny self-replicating ÒnanobotsÓ reducing all earthly matter Ñ us included Ñ to dust.

Actually, Joy repeats what Eric Drexler, the founder of nano technology, wrote 18 or even 23 years ago but, according to the ÒNYTimes MagazineÓ article, Joy is Òespecially provokingÓ in this statement of his in 2004.

Yet there is a difference between Drexler's statements and Joy's Òespecially provokingÓ reminiscences of them 18 or 23 years later.

Every psychiatrically normal adult can realize that if Òtiny self-replicating nanobotsÓ may be dangerous to the population in a friendly environment (such as a lab or a test in Nevada), they may be infinitely more dangerous if used by a powerful enemy country as a weapon to annihilate the United States or the West as a whole.

But here Joy has a mental block, along with the ÒNYTimes Magazine.Ó An enemy country? A war? An enemy country's annihilation of the United States? The United States recently faced one enemy country Ñ Iraq. Hussein had a nervous breakdown when the Coalition's invasion of Iraq began last year and never recovered.

A war? There could only be a war against Iraq before and after Hussein's nervous breakdown. A weapon? There could only be Hussein's Òweapons of mass destruction,Ó once fantasized by the CIA.

Hence the ÒNYTimes MagazineÓ article resembles a view of sexual love as expressed by a child between 3 and 5. He or she may say that ÒLove is strong as death,Ó if his or her uncle is prone to quote this saying from King Solomon's ÒSong of Songs.Ó But the child may not know what role sexual love plays in procreation. Joy and the ÒNYTimes MagazineÓ do not know what role molecular nanotechnology may play in the development in China of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields.

Actually, the revelations of Joy, which he has been intending to express in a book of his (and a publisher signed a Òsix-digit advanceÓ contract with him) do not go beyond a film that is being made out of Michael Crichton's sci-fi novel ÒPreyÓ: American scientists were engaged in a molecular nano test in Nevada, and an apocalyptic annihilation resulted. Moral: stop American molecular nanotechnology, for the apocalypse can come only from American molecular nano tests.

The ÒNYTimes MagazineÓ article is entitled: ÒProceed With Caution.Ó This is the advice to the American molecular nano technology. In ÒPreyÓ they did not proceed with sufficient caution. Hence the end of the world.

How to proceed with caution? According to Joy, the obstacle is free, and much-too-free, enterprise Ñ the Òfinancial markets.Ó

Actually, the Manhattan Project of the 1940s was a federal government project, for what was the financial value for Òfinancial marketsÓ of the two nuclear bombs dropped on Tojo's Japan?

On the other hand, in China, the Sino-American trade surplus exceeds $100 billion a year, and the Òsupreme leaders of ChinaÓ can pour this golden rain on the development of molecular nano weapons without any congress. But this is, of course, not for children from 3 to 5.

Joy repeats bits from Drexler of 18 or 23 years ago and avoids what Drexler has always said about the danger of molecular nano weapons, developed and used by a powerful enemy country. In his recent article, published in the Institute of Physics ÒNanotechnologyÓ and entitled ÒSafe Exponential Manufacturing,Ó he argues that a laboratory nano accident is not the concern, but the development and use of molecular nano weapons by a sufficiently powerful enemy country is.

That is, the stand of the founder of nanotechnology, a nano scientist of genius, is the diametrical opposite of that of Bill Joy and the NYTimes article about him. Characteristically, it is the BBC, and not the U.S. media, that paid much attention to Drexler's article. The NYTimes Magazine piece did not even mention Drexler, our outstanding compatriot and contemporary, either.

So much for the ÒNYTimes MagazineÓ article. What about the article in ÒWindow Open to Good Winds,Ó the Chinese newspaper?

The contrast between the two articles is staggering. The Chinese article of 2000 seemed to be published in a militarily-technologically advanced civilization, while the NYTimes Magazine article in a backward Third-World country whose denizens do not know in 2004 what was common knowledge in China in 2000. Bill Joy, the ÒprovokingÓ Silicon Valley deity of the NYT Magazine, does not even hint at the possibility of using molecular nano weapons (which Eric Drexler predicted 18, if not 23, years ago), while such weapons are described in a Chinese newspaper in 2000, as apart from six other Òtop-notch weapons of future warfare.Ó

Several years ago I began to use my term: Òthe geostrategically lobotomized West.Ó The NYTimes Magazine article and its ÒprovokingÓ freethinker exemplify this geostrategic lobotomization, especially in comparison with a randomly sampled article from a Chinese newspaper of 2000.