I loved it.

by ian
(leominster massachusetts)

Twister was a very intense movie. Iv'e watched it many many times. I would recommend it to people who havnt seen it. Great movie!

Barry's Response Thanks Ian. It was an entertaining piece, for sure. It had that certain charm that the ol' Speilberg/Crichton combo provides. They've done it before and could do it again successfully.

I'd like to see a film-version of State of Fear. One of the most interesting things Michael Crichton has written was included as an appendix to State of Fear.

It sets out how policy created and enacted based on fearful conjecture can result in disaster. He illustrates the policy of eugenics our ancestors held dear from around 1900 or so until WWII when the Nazis carried it to extremes. The list of politicians, universities and other influential supporters at the time is long and impressive. The naysayers were few; the deaths were many.

Here, he referred to eugenics, in which the people believed that our genetic composition as a society was to become compromised. That there were substandard human beings and that they should not be allowed to breed. It all came from speculation. These people thought of foreigners as a disease to the human race of sorts. They were prevented in large numbers from breeding at all. The control mechanism of choice: sterilization. That and gas chambers.

After the war, nobody seemed to remember this campaign, or least remember supporting it. Why would they? There was no real science behind it. In its glory, though, eugenics was the biggest bandwagon ever. He goes on to cite another example of this type of movement involving agriculture and seed processing, which led to policy changes and human deaths in Russia.

Now What

In the 2000's, we have seen this type of movement build up again. The universities, celebrities, legislators and other supporters are there and critical supporters suppressed. The science is sketchy at best. Crichton notes that retired academics, the ones with no personal stake the matter, have voiced the greatest amount of criticism of global warming.

Mixing science with policy can lead to destructive results. Read his full text here: https://msu.edu/course/lbs/332/bellon/R0124b.pdf

And the Wikipedia page on eugenics at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

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