Alan M. Turing and how Government Creates Problems

Alan M. Turing

Today marks the 100th birthday of Alan M. Turing, apparent victim of government busybodies. No, I am not one to engage the assassination theories, at least not those of direct assassination at the hands of government agents. There is ample evidence that he died at his own hand, after having his life ruined by government busybody meddling.

Turing, as you can see in the Encyclopedia Britannica link, was a brilliant mathematician who solved the theoretical problem of how to "compute" and his work is the foundation of modern computing. Turing was also recruited during WWII for the code-breaking efforts at the famed Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. After the war, he was employed by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London to take his theory from paper and build the computing device "in reality." When his fellow geeks decided to build a different gadget, he left them and went to work with the Computing Machine Laboratory. Pretty good resume, eh?

However, as many people find out, Turing discovered government is a harsh, jealous and brutal lover. From Britannica:

Though he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in March 1951, Turing’s life was about to suffer a major reversal. In March 1952 he was prosecuted for homosexuality, then a crime in Britain, and sentenced to 12 months of hormone “therapy”—a treatment that he seems to have borne with amused fortitude. Judged a security risk by the British government, Turing lost his security clearance and his access to ongoing government work with codes and computers. He spent the rest of his short career at the University of Manchester, where he was appointed to a specially created readership in the theory of computing in May 1953.

. . .

Turing was discovered dead in his bed, poisoned by cyanide. A homemade apparatus for silver-plating teaspoons, which included a tank of cyanide, was found in the room next to his bedroom. The official verdict was suicide, but no motive was ever discovered.

Here we have a prime example of government creating a problem, the "crime" of homosexuality and the security clearance issue, combined with government hogging all the cool computer research.  If just one of those three legs did not exist, the stool would have fallen and Turing may have lived a productive and longer life.
Until quite recently homosexuals were considered a security risk for one primary reason: susceptibility to blackmail.  If one were found by hostile forces to be homosexual, the blackmailer could leverage privileged information from the target because of the stigma associated with the crime of homosexuality, a creation of government.

I am not sure when the US government changed its policy, and I only mention that because I live in the USA while Turing lived in the UK and I have no idea what their current rules are today, but now merely being homosexual does not kill your security clearance.

For some years, the National Security Agency in the USA has encouraged homosexual couples withing their employ to get together. They have included homosexuals in their recruiting literature since at least 2009:

Special Emphasis Programs are currently in place for the following groups:

• African-Americans
• American Indians/Alaska Natives
• Asian-Americans/Pacific Islanders
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT)
• Hispanics
• People with Disabilities
• Women

(Italics added)

Also, if the British government were not 'hoarding' all of the cool computing jobs, Turing could have worked for private industry, for an employer who did not care who he was knocking loafers with.  A private company free to decide on its own if homosexuality had any impact on worker performance.

Fiction: The Fuel of Regulation

How Wired Magazine sees Love Canal

From Karl Marx to Upton Sinclair to Michael Brown, the tradition continues; If you want the government to run things, make up a scary story.

Who remembers the Love Canal story?  If you don't, the script went something like this: Evilcorp (Hooker chemical) dumped dangerous chemicals into a canal, covered it with dirt, built houses on it and sold it to poor people for corporate profit.

That is not a strawman, that is what you will hear from most Americans if you mention Love Canal.  Just look at the way Wired told the story in 2008. Thanks to the major media narrative, a work of fiction by Michael Brown (Laying Waste: The Poisoning of America by Toxic Chemicals), and the endless assaults on commerce by fellow travelers trying to spread the 'truth' of Marx, this is the story we are left with.  The tell us at every turn that the only reason anybody gets hurt is because someone did not care, or worse, some corporation did it to make a buck.

As usual, the truth is the opposite of what your caring, loving, Democrat party member neighbor/professor/news writer told you.  At Love Canal, the government injured and killed people despite ample warnings by Hooker Chemical.

In a nine page 1981 Reason magazine article by Eric Zuesse (The Truth Seeps Out), and other sources we learn that:
- The US Army and the City of Niagara Falls dumped waste into the canal, including Manhattan Project waste, before Hooker became sole owner of the site.

- Hooker Chemical (Electrochemical) was the first entity to seal the bottom of the canal with clay and treat it as a proper long-term hazardous waste disposal site.

- The City of Niagara Falls created all breeches in the canal, after they owned the property.

- The property was sold to the government, after threats of condemnation and seizure under eminent domain, for $1, with ample information and warning of what was buried there and the accompanying hazards. From the deed:

Prior to the delivery of this instrument of conveyance, the grantee herein has been advised by the grantor that the premises above described have been filled, in whole or in part, to the present grade level thereof with waste products resulting from the manufacturing of chemicals by the grantor at its plant in the City of Niagara Falls, New York, and the grantee assumes all risk and liability incident to the use thereof. It is therefore understood and agreed that, as a part of the consideration for this conveyance and as a condition thereof, no claim, suit, action or demand of any nature whatsoever shall ever be made by the grantee, its successors or assigns, against the grantor, its successors or assigns, for injury to a person or persons, including death resulting therefrom, or loss of or damage to property caused by, in connection with or by reason of the presence of said industrial wastes. It is further agreed as a condition hereof that each subsequent conveyance of the aforesaid lands shall be made subject to the foregoing provisions and conditions.

So, the real story is: The government, from local to federal, was using a canal dug in 1890 as a waste pit. A chemical company came along in the 1950s and improved the area to a standard that exceeded government standards well into the 1980s.  The storage area that Hooker used remained intact until municipal government began digging willy-nilly through the hazardous waste repository after they owned it.

After the city discovered that Hooker Chemical's warnings were true, they sold the land at auction to the only sucker who would bid on it, and then proceeded to prevent him from improving the property at all through a flurry of regulations and permit requirements, none of which had anything to do with the hazardous waste in and around the site.

Eventually the property was sold a few more times and Niagara Falls, eager for tax revenue, approved a subdivision be built on the hazardous waste swamp created by that same local government.

If we had truly responsible government in the USA, every government official associated with Love Canal would be in jail and their property sold for restitution.  Even a casual examination of this case shows that Hooker Chemical was one of the only honest players in the disaster.  Of course, government made them the biggest victim.

As I indicated in the subtitle, this is not new.  Upton Sinclair wrote fiction, now quoted as canon whenever people talk about industrial regulation.  In The Jungle, Sinclair spun the yarn of a man ground to death in a packing plant, becoming part of the sausage produced there.  It made no difference that the event never happened, it was not even an exaggeration of a finger or leg amputation adapted to fiction, it was just fiction.

Worse than that, it was fiction designed to shove Americans toward Socialism that fell short of Sinclair's goal of a government owned and operated meat processing industry of the type he was fond of in Europe.  To Sinclair's disappointment, what the Progressive Teddy Roosevelt did was initiate the haphazard bombardment of the food industry with "inspectors" and regulations that, to this day, never solved a problem that never existed to begin with.