Chateau Heartiste pulled this out of the bowels of USENET, and I can confirm. You have to keep the bureaucrats happy because they are too scared we will do damage.

Or, worse, do good.

Yeah, but that’s only because as a society we’ve become effete and lost the will to try new things just for the hell of it. In the 60’s they were trying things like nuclear propulsion, and they were walking on the moon. Then, something horrible happened in the early 70’s. I grew up then, and I could FEEL it. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, but I think what it was, was a generation of kids who grew up with television instead of playing with gizmos, and who got into power and then just turned our society into a big mess of paperwork and lawyering, because paperwork was all they’d ever learned to do. When I look at the physiology research done in the 60’s, it takes my breath away. The creativity of it! The things they did! I find my “new” ideas all the time in papers done in the 1960’s, but they never went anywhere (perfusion of organs with fluorocarbones to cool them, for example). One guy (the same guy in fact), before heart lung machines, repaired the hearts of babies by surgically cross-connecting them to the circulation of adult humans, who volunteered in order to save a life. Where has that kind of courage gone? Where are the Yeagers and the Goddards and the Microbe Hunters? How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers. Arggh. I don’t care if it is Tom Cruise or John Travolta. And the rest of the movies seem to be re-creations of 60’s TV shows.

Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and deceptive word definitions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.

This shifting of words, this casuistry, has infected the church. We do no longer do great things. We no longer remain faithful in all things. We listen too much to feelings and not enough to duty.

When my now ex-wife was working her way up to leaving we had a series of meetings/studies with the preacher of the church we attended at the time. I had “grown up in” this church, as had every member of my family for a hundred years, and had several family members in the ministry, so I was well versed in the position the church had taken on everything to do with family and divorce for over a century. Once the preacher realized my then wife was unhappy he jettisoned EVERYTHING the church had ever taught about husband wife relations, and rebuked me for going to the Bible to justify my decisions in our family life. He made it clear that discussing what the Bible taught about marriage as well as what the church had taught in all times past about marriage was strictly forbidden. One statement he made that comes to mind is that when I objected to any woman using sex as weapon in marriage, he stated, “If you don’t want to live celibate then you had better learn to see things from her point of view.” That pretty much summed up his view on everything.

This legal cowardice is the shot.

The legalisation and microregulation of our churches and laboratories ins the bitter chaser.

We need to speak for the truth. We have to let our people do great things.

And we need to tell the bureaucrats and paper pushers that we count them as women. To be silent, submissive, and asking their husbands for guidance after church.