Like many of you, I was a great admirer of the the Australian blog "Watching the Deniers".
Mike's blog started out closely monitoring those who denied the existence of man-made climate change but he quickly discovered that the people who denies this also denied a whole host of things.
On the surface at least, it is hard to know what this variegated bunch of tin hats won't deny : starting with the birth of Christ and ending with the denial of any smoke at Auschwitz.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Would you let your daughter marry an eighty year old ??!!
Happy 80th to Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, in case I forget in October when my grand daughter is keeping me busy.
Eighty years young !
That might explain why rock music is as popular with the Alt-White geriatrics on the far right of the Republicans as it is with the young 'uns on the left of the Democrats....
Eighty years young !
That might explain why rock music is as popular with the Alt-White geriatrics on the far right of the Republicans as it is with the young 'uns on the left of the Democrats....
grant the ALT-RIGHT a modicum of intellectual consistency...
Whenever you cross the street to avoid the snarls of the guard dog accompanying your local neo-nazi skinhead member of the racial purity ALT-RIGHT (ALT-WHITE) brigade, you can be plenty sure of just one thing : that the dog is a purebred , never ever a 'mixed race' mongrel.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
A partial review of Robert P. Jones' "The End of White Christian America"
Yesterday's Pure modernity : attending Jesus's churches, but not to his words.
Today's Diverse modernity : not attending Jesus's churches --- but attending to his words.
Robert P. Jones' new book looking at the recent sharp decline in church attendance among America's youngest white evangelicals seems to have nothing but bad news for Jesus's churches --- and nothing but good news - Gospel Good News - for Jesus.
Today's Diverse modernity : not attending Jesus's churches --- but attending to his words.
Robert P. Jones' new book looking at the recent sharp decline in church attendance among America's youngest white evangelicals seems to have nothing but bad news for Jesus's churches --- and nothing but good news - Gospel Good News - for Jesus.
Friday, August 12, 2016
If Babies had the vote, would Trump stand a chance ?
Five hundred kids have boiled to death in hot cars in the US after being forgotten by their old-enough-to-vote-parents since 9/11, far far more than the number of people who have been murdered in the States by Moslem terrorists since then.
There is a possible solution to help remind forgetful parents : a mandated very loud alarm that goes off automatically if a car is not in motion for twenty minutes and the carseat straps are still buckled up .
But kids can't vote so their needs are ignored at election time, when they are not kicked out of political rallies all together, while many adults will be allowed to give their vote to a charlatan ---- all in mindless fear over the very remote statistical chance they will be murdered in their beds by Moslems.
A sad world....
There is a possible solution to help remind forgetful parents : a mandated very loud alarm that goes off automatically if a car is not in motion for twenty minutes and the carseat straps are still buckled up .
But kids can't vote so their needs are ignored at election time, when they are not kicked out of political rallies all together, while many adults will be allowed to give their vote to a charlatan ---- all in mindless fear over the very remote statistical chance they will be murdered in their beds by Moslems.
A sad world....
wartime penicillin's 3Ps, 1As and 4Fs
The wartime Allies and their publics had three "P" questions to decide, each involving a choice between different kinds of penicillins, different kinds of producers to make it and different kinds of patients to receive it.
belief in Conspiracy Theories and belief that world is Chaotic, Complex, Dynamic don't go together
Counter-intuitively, I argue that Donald Trump supporters, for example, don't really see the world as complex and chaotic, though they are quick to say they do.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
"Natural Penicillin For All" a sort of spiritual balm, one that moved the heart, rather than changed the mind
For reasons they couldn't really explain, and at a pace as slow and as unremittingly as the tide going out, the post WWII world fundamentally changed.
That world now repulsed the approach of those who long advocated "purifying" the gene pools down to just the "fit".
Instead it accepted that the world's very survival depended on the widest possible diversity of life: survival lay in expanding gene pools, not shrinking them.
I didn't say "the world's population changed their mind" because the world didn't : this was no intellectual or rationally thought out conversion, no decision made 'inside the brain'.
It was an emotional conversion, made 'inside the heart' and the language that best describes that sort of change is that used by the religious.
That world now repulsed the approach of those who long advocated "purifying" the gene pools down to just the "fit".
Instead it accepted that the world's very survival depended on the widest possible diversity of life: survival lay in expanding gene pools, not shrinking them.
I didn't say "the world's population changed their mind" because the world didn't : this was no intellectual or rationally thought out conversion, no decision made 'inside the brain'.
It was an emotional conversion, made 'inside the heart' and the language that best describes that sort of change is that used by the religious.
Cosmic Rays damage our babies' DNA, connecting the ancient past to the distant future
One big reason we can never fully know the past, let alone fully know the present or the future, is that these three theoretical categories don't really live in separate boxes, not out here in the real world.
So : energy from cosmic rays, originating from places trillions upon trillions upon trillions of miles away and hundreds of millions of years ago, smashes into our bodies every single minute of our lives, constantly mutating the DNA destined to become that of our children's children.
So : energy from cosmic rays, originating from places trillions upon trillions upon trillions of miles away and hundreds of millions of years ago, smashes into our bodies every single minute of our lives, constantly mutating the DNA destined to become that of our children's children.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
for many of my readers, Sodom and Gomorrah, not Balm and Spiritual Healing, are the words most associated with 'impure' Manhattan
If my readers are poor, rural and church-going, or if they are the 'old families' living among the best addresses of the Upper East Side, that is most definitely the case.
But they are wrong - or at the very least, not always right - and my blog and book intends to convince them of that fact.
The unexpected medical balm of 'natural penicillin for all', and far more importantly, the unexpected spiritual balm that it represented, came along just when misguided humanity needed it most - in the dying days of WWII.
And it didn't just come out of 'impure' diverse perverse Manhattan by some sheer bad luck --- it could only have come from there.
The story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the individual behind that balm, is a story of tough times, fierce battles, persistence, tenacity, perseverance, courage - a story not without pain and tears, but ultimately life-changing, a story both uplifting and empowering. ....
But they are wrong - or at the very least, not always right - and my blog and book intends to convince them of that fact.
The unexpected medical balm of 'natural penicillin for all', and far more importantly, the unexpected spiritual balm that it represented, came along just when misguided humanity needed it most - in the dying days of WWII.
And it didn't just come out of 'impure' diverse perverse Manhattan by some sheer bad luck --- it could only have come from there.
The story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the individual behind that balm, is a story of tough times, fierce battles, persistence, tenacity, perseverance, courage - a story not without pain and tears, but ultimately life-changing, a story both uplifting and empowering. ....
Not a trendy lip balm, an O.T. soothing oil, nor a mere antibiotic --- more a N.T. healing of the spirit
In the Fall of 1940, it must have seemed to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny penicillin team that pretty well the whole world was profoundly morally sick : exalting the powerfully wicked and casting down the blameless weak.
It badly needed an intervention.
So into the rooms of the rejected, dejected and terminally dying SBE patients, Dr Gladys Hobby daily displayed above her head a transparent glass petri dish of radiating penicillium growth, intensely blue green grey with tiny bright golden dew drops of exuded penicillin juice.
In those partially darkened rooms, if the October light through the small window caught the petri dish just right, it suddenly appeared to the patient's eye like some glowing bejewelled monstrance : with natural penicillin's promise of, if not Eternal Life, than at least a fair crack at three score and ten.
A monstrance, along the lines of the various Catholic traditions, but held aloft by a devout protestant Presbyterian and venerated before an audience of a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Jew : only in Manhattan.... !
It badly needed an intervention.
So into the rooms of the rejected, dejected and terminally dying SBE patients, Dr Gladys Hobby daily displayed above her head a transparent glass petri dish of radiating penicillium growth, intensely blue green grey with tiny bright golden dew drops of exuded penicillin juice.
In those partially darkened rooms, if the October light through the small window caught the petri dish just right, it suddenly appeared to the patient's eye like some glowing bejewelled monstrance : with natural penicillin's promise of, if not Eternal Life, than at least a fair crack at three score and ten.
A monstrance, along the lines of the various Catholic traditions, but held aloft by a devout protestant Presbyterian and venerated before an audience of a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Jew : only in Manhattan.... !
Trump Moscow's "Manchurian Candidate" ?
When I was a little kid, more than fifty years now, I had a good laugh about the absurd plotline of both the book and original movie of The Manchurian Candidate.
As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !
But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.
Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....
As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !
But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.
Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....
reductionist Eugenics, born and throttled at Cold Spring Harbour ...
Nobody in the American scientific-corporate-medical-government cartel controlling the fate of the Allies' wartime penicillin wanted to hear from him.
However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)
The cartel didn't want to hear from him because while the shortage of naturally-made penicillin for dying patients was very real, it was also a deliberate creation of that same cartel.
The 'shortage' was intended to hold off vocal Allied civilian demand and hence attention from Axis chemists, until the cartel's Allied chemists had a patent lock on pure man-made penicillin, intended to go into military frontline use only ----- and only after D-Day.
The Allied hope was that the vastly superior infection-fighting qualities of penicillin would greatly speed up the percentage of lightly wounded Allied troops quickly able to return to combat, compared to the percentages returning to combat from the surprised and unprepared Axis still relying on outdated Sulfa drugs.
Dr Demerec wanted to use the high dose x-ray radiation techniques of microbial 'eugenics' to induce far more mutations among penicillium spores than typical in Nature, in the hopes that among the very few survivors of all this nuclear blasting, there just might be one spore that proved a very high penicillin yielding strain.
The cartel, controlled by America's all-powerful OSRD and Vannevar Bush, ignored Demerec.
But a few years later, a much smaller, much less powerful but more New Dealerish/people-oriented government agency, the War Production Board's OPRD, took up Demerec's offer.
Dr Henry Dawson, in decidedly 'impure' Manhattan (at least in the eyes of the world's eugenic believers) was overjoyed : at last his faith in the ability of the primitive little penicillium to produce cheaper, more abundant, safer penicillin than the cartel's chemists had been fully justified ---- equally his vision that all the world's sick should expect succor.
Incredibly soon, Demerec's research paid off as incredibly high yielding strains provided more than enough cheap safe American naturally-grown penicillin for all the world's sick ----- and also spelled the death knell to the cartel's years of expensive chasing the never-never chimera of commercially viable man-made penicillin.
As a direct result of those high (highly profitable) yields, if chemistry was the queen of all science during WWII and atomic physics for a few years thereafter, today Demerec's micro biology is the queen of all the sciences, in academia and on Wall Street.
The unexpected consequences were even more immense.
The stunning scientific triumph of simple primitive creatures from the bottom slime of Nature besting the top human chemists 'in the universe' then allowed the moral triumph of 'abundant natural penicillin for all' over 'patented man-made penicillin for the select few'.
And so spelling the end of the kind of exclusionary thinking that had led to the Cold Spring Harbour eugenics lab being set up in the first place.
For it was their initial faith in a scientific model of a highly vertical Tree of Progress, with the very stupid microbes at the very bottom and the very clever civilized chemists at the very top, that had held together the eugenicists' belief in the racial superiority of civilized folk over 'primitive' folk.
Not only did the high yielding penicillium strains best the world's top chemists, they themselves would normally be considered highly unfit and degenerate strains, as the metabolic energy they devoted to producing all that penicillin came at a high cost to their biological fitness, their ability to reproduce rapidly.
Except that in the frequent times of food crisis for the fungus, these strains' greatest defect became their greatest virtue, as their antibiotic penicillin kept non-penicillium competitors at bay and allowed them, at least until conditions again returned to 'normal', to be in fact, the most biological fit.
Confirming dramatically that there never was any biological imperative towards the big strong all around fit in Nature, because Darwin had always insisted that it is 'the survival of the fittest', tiny niche by tiny niche, brief moment by brief moment.
And only a great diversity of lifeforms could fill all the niches, all the time, successfully.
So yes, it is a highly local story, if also a highly improbable story : 'impure' Manhattan borough triumphing over Long Island's 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour, with help from that same 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour.
But it also all of humanity's story as well ....
However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)
The cartel didn't want to hear from him because while the shortage of naturally-made penicillin for dying patients was very real, it was also a deliberate creation of that same cartel.
The 'shortage' was intended to hold off vocal Allied civilian demand and hence attention from Axis chemists, until the cartel's Allied chemists had a patent lock on pure man-made penicillin, intended to go into military frontline use only ----- and only after D-Day.
The Allied hope was that the vastly superior infection-fighting qualities of penicillin would greatly speed up the percentage of lightly wounded Allied troops quickly able to return to combat, compared to the percentages returning to combat from the surprised and unprepared Axis still relying on outdated Sulfa drugs.
Dr Demerec wanted to use the high dose x-ray radiation techniques of microbial 'eugenics' to induce far more mutations among penicillium spores than typical in Nature, in the hopes that among the very few survivors of all this nuclear blasting, there just might be one spore that proved a very high penicillin yielding strain.
The cartel, controlled by America's all-powerful OSRD and Vannevar Bush, ignored Demerec.
But a few years later, a much smaller, much less powerful but more New Dealerish/people-oriented government agency, the War Production Board's OPRD, took up Demerec's offer.
Dr Henry Dawson, in decidedly 'impure' Manhattan (at least in the eyes of the world's eugenic believers) was overjoyed : at last his faith in the ability of the primitive little penicillium to produce cheaper, more abundant, safer penicillin than the cartel's chemists had been fully justified ---- equally his vision that all the world's sick should expect succor.
Incredibly soon, Demerec's research paid off as incredibly high yielding strains provided more than enough cheap safe American naturally-grown penicillin for all the world's sick ----- and also spelled the death knell to the cartel's years of expensive chasing the never-never chimera of commercially viable man-made penicillin.
As a direct result of those high (highly profitable) yields, if chemistry was the queen of all science during WWII and atomic physics for a few years thereafter, today Demerec's micro biology is the queen of all the sciences, in academia and on Wall Street.
The unexpected consequences were even more immense.
The stunning scientific triumph of simple primitive creatures from the bottom slime of Nature besting the top human chemists 'in the universe' then allowed the moral triumph of 'abundant natural penicillin for all' over 'patented man-made penicillin for the select few'.
And so spelling the end of the kind of exclusionary thinking that had led to the Cold Spring Harbour eugenics lab being set up in the first place.
For it was their initial faith in a scientific model of a highly vertical Tree of Progress, with the very stupid microbes at the very bottom and the very clever civilized chemists at the very top, that had held together the eugenicists' belief in the racial superiority of civilized folk over 'primitive' folk.
Not only did the high yielding penicillium strains best the world's top chemists, they themselves would normally be considered highly unfit and degenerate strains, as the metabolic energy they devoted to producing all that penicillin came at a high cost to their biological fitness, their ability to reproduce rapidly.
Except that in the frequent times of food crisis for the fungus, these strains' greatest defect became their greatest virtue, as their antibiotic penicillin kept non-penicillium competitors at bay and allowed them, at least until conditions again returned to 'normal', to be in fact, the most biological fit.
Confirming dramatically that there never was any biological imperative towards the big strong all around fit in Nature, because Darwin had always insisted that it is 'the survival of the fittest', tiny niche by tiny niche, brief moment by brief moment.
And only a great diversity of lifeforms could fill all the niches, all the time, successfully.
So yes, it is a highly local story, if also a highly improbable story : 'impure' Manhattan borough triumphing over Long Island's 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour, with help from that same 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour.
But it also all of humanity's story as well ....
Monday, August 8, 2016
wartime Penicillin : controlled by the few, granted to the few -- or controlled by no one and a right of all ?
Simply substitute "Life" for "Penicillin" and very few would have any problem with the above title.
For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.
Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.
But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.
And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....
For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.
Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.
But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.
And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Pure Modernity, circa 1870s -1960s : winnowing Life's answers, keeping the correct and discarding the wrong
Lets face it, if you already know the correct answers to all of the Future's questions, why keep the wrong answers hanging about ?
So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.
When the scientists insist that reality can be reduced fundamentally down to a few simple motions by a few tiny atoms, why clutter up things by keeping unneeded Plans Bs, Cs, Ds, etc ?
Best to simplify and purify our gene pools - not diversify them --- that's what any good stockbroker would tell you : bet the entire farm by putting all your eggs in one basket.
Nonsense you say, this is all so untrue : we value biodiversity and always have !
Not true.
Depending on your age, your grandparents and great-grandparents certainly didn't.
It is not all all true, or rather insufficiently true, that we have 'changed' since the war.
In fact, we did a complete 180 degree U-ie.
We went from exalting pure-breeds and pure-bloods and banning any form of mixed marriage to exalting biodiversity and lustily admiring pop stars and actors with those vaguely tawny brown skins that signal the offspring of mixed race marriages.
So Diverse Modernity, circa 1970s till who knows : doesn't know what the future holds and is unashamed in admitting that.
So, best to to keep all options open : Plans B,C,D,E,F,G, bring 'em on - the more the merrier.....
So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.
When the scientists insist that reality can be reduced fundamentally down to a few simple motions by a few tiny atoms, why clutter up things by keeping unneeded Plans Bs, Cs, Ds, etc ?
Best to simplify and purify our gene pools - not diversify them --- that's what any good stockbroker would tell you : bet the entire farm by putting all your eggs in one basket.
Diverse Modernity
Nonsense you say, this is all so untrue : we value biodiversity and always have !
Not true.
Depending on your age, your grandparents and great-grandparents certainly didn't.
It is not all all true, or rather insufficiently true, that we have 'changed' since the war.
In fact, we did a complete 180 degree U-ie.
We went from exalting pure-breeds and pure-bloods and banning any form of mixed marriage to exalting biodiversity and lustily admiring pop stars and actors with those vaguely tawny brown skins that signal the offspring of mixed race marriages.
So Diverse Modernity, circa 1970s till who knows : doesn't know what the future holds and is unashamed in admitting that.
So, best to to keep all options open : Plans B,C,D,E,F,G, bring 'em on - the more the merrier.....
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Japanese Muscularity, 1890s-1940s : Japanese culture becomes extraordinarily hands-on brutal
In an age surely dominated by the machine (and the machine gun) what stands out instead about the era of Muscular Modernity was the rise of the subtly implied threat of old fashioned physical violence, used as a casual instrument of control by parents, teachers, bosses and competitors all through the Westernized world.
But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.
Only in Japan could one expect a superior officer to slap a junior officer as hard as they could, for some very minor problem, without anyone blinking.
And in no other country were officially authorized executions administered to victims so often by direct hands-on physical violence - by bayonet, knife, axe,swords, beatings - rather than by the indirect use of gun, rope or gas.
Perhaps it is worthy wondering if this behavior, rather than that of the much better known Auschwitz, might be the true culmination of 'Muscular' Darwinism....
But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.
Only in Japan could one expect a superior officer to slap a junior officer as hard as they could, for some very minor problem, without anyone blinking.
And in no other country were officially authorized executions administered to victims so often by direct hands-on physical violence - by bayonet, knife, axe,swords, beatings - rather than by the indirect use of gun, rope or gas.
Perhaps it is worthy wondering if this behavior, rather than that of the much better known Auschwitz, might be the true culmination of 'Muscular' Darwinism....
Totalitarianism : the one 'all around fit' surviving in the one only global niche
Totalitarianism is, deep down, Muscular Darwinism's 'survival of the one fit in a single globe-wide niche' against Charles Darwin's original 'survival of the many fittest in many niches'.
One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.
Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.
Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.
Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.
So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?
Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.
"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...
One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.
Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.
Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.
Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.
So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?
Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.
"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...
Muscular Deferments : Trump (and Florey)
Viewing news photos & videos, I am always amazed at just how many prominent military-service dodging 'chicken-hawks' are big, tall, muscular and verbally aggressive.
Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.
Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.
One has only to note the small size of many front line infantry conscripts in press photos, something replicated in every nation in every big war, to wonder how on earth do young men so excel as sports and yet fail a medical test that even the small and weedy pass ?
I don't think for one moment that all top athletes set themselves up to fail the military medical -- only those with a desire to not risk their futures by serving their country and with well to do, well-connected parents in agreement with that notion.
We all know the concept of smart lawyers winning their case by astute 'judge-shopping' --- well off well connected people, in times of the draft, can do the same with doctors.
For there are always doctors who are eager to curry favour with prominent people on the same side of the political, ethnic and religious fence as themselves --- and the unusually fat fee doesn't hurt either.
One just has to work to find them - and then top athlete Donald Trump - presto ! - has minor bone spurs that just won't let him serve his country, even in a rear echelon supply formation, but will let him play hard enough to win many quasi-combat-like sports.
Another chicken-hawk: Sir Howard Florey.
(He won the Nobel prize from the war-dodging Swedes for trying to prevent the use of 'impure' natural penicillin during WWII.
In WWI, he was equally an outstanding and very combative young athlete at the very same time some friendly doctor found he was totally unfit to serve his country.
Interestingly, chicken-hawks more often than not, are not only outstanding athletic draft-dodgers as young men : as middle aged men they are unusually physically combative with colleagues (who are usually smaller and lower in the professional hierarchy than themselves).
One thinks here of Florey and Vannevar Bush both punching out colleagues they disagreed with.
So big, so fit, so aggressive, so patriotic in times of peace --- so unwell in times of war...
Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.
Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.
One has only to note the small size of many front line infantry conscripts in press photos, something replicated in every nation in every big war, to wonder how on earth do young men so excel as sports and yet fail a medical test that even the small and weedy pass ?
I don't think for one moment that all top athletes set themselves up to fail the military medical -- only those with a desire to not risk their futures by serving their country and with well to do, well-connected parents in agreement with that notion.
We all know the concept of smart lawyers winning their case by astute 'judge-shopping' --- well off well connected people, in times of the draft, can do the same with doctors.
For there are always doctors who are eager to curry favour with prominent people on the same side of the political, ethnic and religious fence as themselves --- and the unusually fat fee doesn't hurt either.
One just has to work to find them - and then top athlete Donald Trump - presto ! - has minor bone spurs that just won't let him serve his country, even in a rear echelon supply formation, but will let him play hard enough to win many quasi-combat-like sports.
Another chicken-hawk: Sir Howard Florey.
(He won the Nobel prize from the war-dodging Swedes for trying to prevent the use of 'impure' natural penicillin during WWII.
In WWI, he was equally an outstanding and very combative young athlete at the very same time some friendly doctor found he was totally unfit to serve his country.
Interestingly, chicken-hawks more often than not, are not only outstanding athletic draft-dodgers as young men : as middle aged men they are unusually physically combative with colleagues (who are usually smaller and lower in the professional hierarchy than themselves).
One thinks here of Florey and Vannevar Bush both punching out colleagues they disagreed with.
So big, so fit, so aggressive, so patriotic in times of peace --- so unwell in times of war...
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Diverse Modernity replacing Muscular Modernity
Muscular Modernity is hardly dead, not judging by the recent insurgent success of strongman politics all over the world, from Putin to Trump to Duterte.
But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.
We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.
But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....
But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.
We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.
But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....
One can really only be a PD broadcaster, never a PD publisher
Once something is released into the Public Domain, becomes 'PD', one can no longer speak of it being controlled and published.
It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.
I was a bit of a DXer in my younger days, devoted to picking up very distant AM stations on my cheap little table radio, so I could enjoy signals in metro Halifax Nova Scotia that came from faraway Havana Cuba or Buffalo New York.
I doubt that I was the target audience that businesses in upstate New York or Fidel Castro's government were exactly aiming for when they broadcast their signals into the ether, but that is the nature of broadcasting, be it seeds, spores or radio waves.
Publishers on the other hand are all about controlling their content, deciding on how it is to be presented, to whom and for what price.
And that control has only potentially increased in this age of the Internet ---- ask any library about all the new restrictions that came along with all those new-media e-books from the Big Five publishers.
In keeping with my interest in PD solar and wind energy versus the cartel control over oil and coal and with 'impure' Manhattan's theme of PD naturally grown penicillin versus patented man-made penicillin, the contents of this blog and book are also fully PD.
Once broadcast, I willingly accept that means I lose all control over it.
That means all manner of others can take it in whole or in part and publish it under their own name for profit.
Or simply past it on to others to read.
Whatever.....
It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.
I was a bit of a DXer in my younger days, devoted to picking up very distant AM stations on my cheap little table radio, so I could enjoy signals in metro Halifax Nova Scotia that came from faraway Havana Cuba or Buffalo New York.
I doubt that I was the target audience that businesses in upstate New York or Fidel Castro's government were exactly aiming for when they broadcast their signals into the ether, but that is the nature of broadcasting, be it seeds, spores or radio waves.
Publishers on the other hand are all about controlling their content, deciding on how it is to be presented, to whom and for what price.
And that control has only potentially increased in this age of the Internet ---- ask any library about all the new restrictions that came along with all those new-media e-books from the Big Five publishers.
In keeping with my interest in PD solar and wind energy versus the cartel control over oil and coal and with 'impure' Manhattan's theme of PD naturally grown penicillin versus patented man-made penicillin, the contents of this blog and book are also fully PD.
Once broadcast, I willingly accept that means I lose all control over it.
That means all manner of others can take it in whole or in part and publish it under their own name for profit.
Or simply past it on to others to read.
Whatever.....
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
"Nature's House has many Niches" --- and many different creatures to fill them
John 14:2 probably says all that needs to be said in proof of the 'survival of the MANY fittest' over the claim of the 'survival of the one most all-around fit'.
Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....
Survival of the MANY fittest
Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....
What if 1759 or 1959 first saw theory that a vast diversity of species needed to best fill every little niche in Nature ?
Muscular Modernity was going to happen, was already well underway, whether or not Darwin and Wallace ever publicly presented their new theory that Natural Selection, aka Survival of the Fittest, was why Evolution did exist and how it worked itself out.
I believe that if that theory had been presented a century earlier or a century later, the theory would have stood a better chance to being - correctly - seen as the theory that accounts for the wide diversity in kinds of 'fittest' living beings, each accurately reflecting the extremely wide diversity of niches in Nature.
Not as a theory that confirmed muscular modernity's belief that the world was progressively moving to the day when one small sub-section of one recent species (humanity) won a competition etched in toothmarks and blood ---- and ended up controlling and consuming almost all of Nature's bounty...
I believe that if that theory had been presented a century earlier or a century later, the theory would have stood a better chance to being - correctly - seen as the theory that accounts for the wide diversity in kinds of 'fittest' living beings, each accurately reflecting the extremely wide diversity of niches in Nature.
Not as a theory that confirmed muscular modernity's belief that the world was progressively moving to the day when one small sub-section of one recent species (humanity) won a competition etched in toothmarks and blood ---- and ended up controlling and consuming almost all of Nature's bounty...
PD sunshine & penicillin hated by Big Oil and Big Pharma
The same sort of - despicable - people who pushed patented synthetic penicillin 'sometime in the future' over currently available PD natural penicillin, during WWII's desperate times for the ill & wounded, are at it again.
Today we again face a crisis, one involving the climate and mass extinction ; one far worse than even whatever Hitler and Tojo could possibly dream up.
But once again, the same sort of wicked evil greedy people are trying to stall the move to ever-safe, ever-renewable, ever-abundant sunshine simply because it being PD and thus inherently 'free enterprise', its success will kill their monopoly and cartel swollen profits.
The finding of profitably pools of oil is extremely rare in this world, today rarer than ever, and the guys who find them first, hold all the oil cards.
Rather like the holding of an extremely broadly drawn Anglo-American 1945 patent on synthetic beta lactams, as codified by a very rare treaty between the USA and the UK.
Controlling most of the world's commercially viable oil supplies, no matter how value a weapon to hold over the rest of the world, is hardly of life and death import in the way that a broad patent for synthetic beta lactams would have turned out to be.
For all of the thousands of different antibiotics ever brought forth to the testing stage, almost all of the best ones were (and still are) beta lactams, almost all made from a base of naturally produced PD penicillin G.
They are basically the world's only defence against mass death by infectious bacterial pandemics.
Put another way, the monopoly on patented penicillin post 1945 would have been far more a powerful weapon to enforce Anglo-American hegemony than the equally-patented A-Bomb ever turned out to be ...
Today we again face a crisis, one involving the climate and mass extinction ; one far worse than even whatever Hitler and Tojo could possibly dream up.
But once again, the same sort of wicked evil greedy people are trying to stall the move to ever-safe, ever-renewable, ever-abundant sunshine simply because it being PD and thus inherently 'free enterprise', its success will kill their monopoly and cartel swollen profits.
The finding of profitably pools of oil is extremely rare in this world, today rarer than ever, and the guys who find them first, hold all the oil cards.
Rather like the holding of an extremely broadly drawn Anglo-American 1945 patent on synthetic beta lactams, as codified by a very rare treaty between the USA and the UK.
Controlling most of the world's commercially viable oil supplies, no matter how value a weapon to hold over the rest of the world, is hardly of life and death import in the way that a broad patent for synthetic beta lactams would have turned out to be.
For all of the thousands of different antibiotics ever brought forth to the testing stage, almost all of the best ones were (and still are) beta lactams, almost all made from a base of naturally produced PD penicillin G.
They are basically the world's only defence against mass death by infectious bacterial pandemics.
Put another way, the monopoly on patented penicillin post 1945 would have been far more a powerful weapon to enforce Anglo-American hegemony than the equally-patented A-Bomb ever turned out to be ...
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Muscular Modernity, Muscular Eugenics, Muscular Darwinism : survival of the FIT
Like Charles Darwin, I have come to see that the term "survival of the fittest" is a useful shorthand, but ringed with at least as many shortfalls as advantages.
The biggest by far being the incredibly large number of otherwise intelligent-appearing people who once mistook the survival of the 'fit' as being fully equal to the survival of the 'fittest' ---- when actually they were 180 degrees opposed.
Still the original term remains a useful term ; one well worth salvaging.
A short term to describe a very long and very complex process.
One that sees a tendency, in general and over the long term, for individuals with phenotypes (physical bodies with all their attributes) (created through a peculiar mix of their species' pool of genes) that are better suited to their currently constituted niche in Nature to have more surviving and reproducing offspring.
Over time, this means their descendants tend to outnumber those other individuals in the same population of a particular species whose bodies aren't so suited to that current niche.
Their gene mix and resulting body type, better suits (better fits) their niche in Nature, as it currently exists.
Note that their fellows' keys also 'sort of' fit the lock that is their shared niche.
However, currently at least, our particular individuals are the fittest, the bestest, keys for this lock.
So they tend to get more food and tend to survive long enough to reproduce healthy offspring who (and this is key) inherit the same - currently lucky - mix of genes.
So they also experience extraordinary success in getting enough food and living long enough to produce healthy fertile fecund offspring.
So on and so on --- as long as their niche doesn't change.
Which it always does --- but that is another story.
The term 'niche' brings with it the sense of small, specialized, one among many : as in 'niche marketing', for example.
In Nature, there are not just many different geography-based niches at any current moment in time, there are many different niches over time, based on changes in climate, etc as well as based upon changes in geography.
So the 'fittest' key for a hundred million tiny niche locks means a hundred million tiny niche keys.
The population of "fittest keys" is large and very diverse - as diverse as can be imagined.
By way of contrast, remember what that nagging phys ed teacher always tried to drum into you about the all around virtues of having a healthy fit body.
Mine, both Brits of the old pre-Commonweath mold, were always insisting a healthy body would make us better students, fight off diseases, better soldiers, more attractive employees, better lovers, husbands and fathers, as well as better 'team' players on the field and off.
All around better off - equipped to work hard, play hard, fight hard, love hard, whether in Arctic cold, an air conditioned centrally heated office or Jungle heat.
My phys ed teachers were very old school - they felt that a fit males' natural niche was the entire world. Newer marks of their type would no doubt insist the Universe is our natural niche.
A 'fit' body was an all rounder 'master key' that would fit all locks and all niches. Read master key for master race and you are bang on.
They wanted the human gene pool to be sharply reduced to just two basic types : lots of docile but well built worker bees, bees of color, and then a smaller group of physically well built big brained boss/officer types who could, in theory do hard work or fight hard etc - but rarely did.
Darwin, at least when it came to that part of Nature that didn't include the human animal, never said that or foresaw that.
He saw a world of many many niches and a need for many different gene mixes to survive successfully in each. Perhaps he erred most in seeing these niches changing far more slowly than they actually do, but in general he saw the world (and hence lifeforms) as very diverse.
For him, 'survival of the fittest' meant 'survival of the diverse', not the survival of just one supra-fit being to handle all of one big supra-niche.
The sudden rise of the appeal of big muscles for the ruling elites ("the survival of the fit") did not occur by chance just at the point when muscles meant less than ever in war or on the job ( per the rise of accurate long range rapid fire rifles and labour-saving machines).
In fact, it arose precisely in response to those facts.
We can start by recognizing that the difference between violence and force is that the successful use of force implies successfully bluffing others that one will be violent, and violently success, if the need arises.
For it was no longer morally acceptable, in the late nineteenth century, for lords of the manor, colony or factory, to simply string up unimportant nobody, whenever a small problem arose.
And given the ability for the unhappy-with-a-rife to snipe and assassinate the lord, from a safe distance away, behind some rock ,in the dim of the evening, it was no longer even safe to try it on.
But the big well muscled man who was 'fit' and who looked 'fit' and who exuded the self confidence of someone who was part of the ruling elite, with the force of an entire 'fit' empire behind him, could still usually intimidate others to get his own way, in normal day to day situations.
Tall, well built, well off, self confident men of the elite ethnicity still usually successfully intimidate even policemen at a traffic stop, as well as women, children, employees, etc that are physically smaller and financially less wealthy than themselves.
Muscular Christianity and the well muscled biceps holding a hammer (that were almost the only iconography of trade union imagery until very recently) shows how this cult of the muscle spread to all parts of the culture --- even to groups that might have ordinarily resisted the use of elite led violence.
But the breeding of all rounder fit types, pure of all 'defects', one size key fits all locks and niches, would never let humanity survive for very long.
We can see this with the deliberately inbreed noble families of Europe - we can even look to the deliberately inbreed family tree of Darwin himself.
We can see the results with the deliberately inbreed, 'pure' breeds of horses and dogs that came to be popular in the UK and the USA at the very same time as the rise of muscular modernity and muscular eugenics.
Like their owners, these animals were actually disease prone physical disasters and frequently infertile.
Their owners knew the score yet they still promoted the idea of narrow gene pools --- and amazing example of the intellectual disconnect that is possible in humans and perhaps even particularly possible in university educated humans....
The biggest by far being the incredibly large number of otherwise intelligent-appearing people who once mistook the survival of the 'fit' as being fully equal to the survival of the 'fittest' ---- when actually they were 180 degrees opposed.
Still the original term remains a useful term ; one well worth salvaging.
A short term to describe a very long and very complex process.
One that sees a tendency, in general and over the long term, for individuals with phenotypes (physical bodies with all their attributes) (created through a peculiar mix of their species' pool of genes) that are better suited to their currently constituted niche in Nature to have more surviving and reproducing offspring.
Over time, this means their descendants tend to outnumber those other individuals in the same population of a particular species whose bodies aren't so suited to that current niche.
Their gene mix and resulting body type, better suits (better fits) their niche in Nature, as it currently exists.
Note that their fellows' keys also 'sort of' fit the lock that is their shared niche.
However, currently at least, our particular individuals are the fittest, the bestest, keys for this lock.
So they tend to get more food and tend to survive long enough to reproduce healthy offspring who (and this is key) inherit the same - currently lucky - mix of genes.
So they also experience extraordinary success in getting enough food and living long enough to produce healthy fertile fecund offspring.
So on and so on --- as long as their niche doesn't change.
Which it always does --- but that is another story.
The term 'niche' brings with it the sense of small, specialized, one among many : as in 'niche marketing', for example.
In Nature, there are not just many different geography-based niches at any current moment in time, there are many different niches over time, based on changes in climate, etc as well as based upon changes in geography.
So the 'fittest' key for a hundred million tiny niche locks means a hundred million tiny niche keys.
The population of "fittest keys" is large and very diverse - as diverse as can be imagined.
By way of contrast, remember what that nagging phys ed teacher always tried to drum into you about the all around virtues of having a healthy fit body.
Mine, both Brits of the old pre-Commonweath mold, were always insisting a healthy body would make us better students, fight off diseases, better soldiers, more attractive employees, better lovers, husbands and fathers, as well as better 'team' players on the field and off.
All around better off - equipped to work hard, play hard, fight hard, love hard, whether in Arctic cold, an air conditioned centrally heated office or Jungle heat.
My phys ed teachers were very old school - they felt that a fit males' natural niche was the entire world. Newer marks of their type would no doubt insist the Universe is our natural niche.
A 'fit' body was an all rounder 'master key' that would fit all locks and all niches. Read master key for master race and you are bang on.
They wanted the human gene pool to be sharply reduced to just two basic types : lots of docile but well built worker bees, bees of color, and then a smaller group of physically well built big brained boss/officer types who could, in theory do hard work or fight hard etc - but rarely did.
Darwin, at least when it came to that part of Nature that didn't include the human animal, never said that or foresaw that.
He saw a world of many many niches and a need for many different gene mixes to survive successfully in each. Perhaps he erred most in seeing these niches changing far more slowly than they actually do, but in general he saw the world (and hence lifeforms) as very diverse.
For him, 'survival of the fittest' meant 'survival of the diverse', not the survival of just one supra-fit being to handle all of one big supra-niche.
The sudden rise of the appeal of big muscles for the ruling elites ("the survival of the fit") did not occur by chance just at the point when muscles meant less than ever in war or on the job ( per the rise of accurate long range rapid fire rifles and labour-saving machines).
In fact, it arose precisely in response to those facts.
We can start by recognizing that the difference between violence and force is that the successful use of force implies successfully bluffing others that one will be violent, and violently success, if the need arises.
For it was no longer morally acceptable, in the late nineteenth century, for lords of the manor, colony or factory, to simply string up unimportant nobody, whenever a small problem arose.
And given the ability for the unhappy-with-a-rife to snipe and assassinate the lord, from a safe distance away, behind some rock ,in the dim of the evening, it was no longer even safe to try it on.
But the big well muscled man who was 'fit' and who looked 'fit' and who exuded the self confidence of someone who was part of the ruling elite, with the force of an entire 'fit' empire behind him, could still usually intimidate others to get his own way, in normal day to day situations.
Tall, well built, well off, self confident men of the elite ethnicity still usually successfully intimidate even policemen at a traffic stop, as well as women, children, employees, etc that are physically smaller and financially less wealthy than themselves.
Muscular Christianity and the well muscled biceps holding a hammer (that were almost the only iconography of trade union imagery until very recently) shows how this cult of the muscle spread to all parts of the culture --- even to groups that might have ordinarily resisted the use of elite led violence.
But the breeding of all rounder fit types, pure of all 'defects', one size key fits all locks and niches, would never let humanity survive for very long.
We can see this with the deliberately inbreed noble families of Europe - we can even look to the deliberately inbreed family tree of Darwin himself.
We can see the results with the deliberately inbreed, 'pure' breeds of horses and dogs that came to be popular in the UK and the USA at the very same time as the rise of muscular modernity and muscular eugenics.
Like their owners, these animals were actually disease prone physical disasters and frequently infertile.
Their owners knew the score yet they still promoted the idea of narrow gene pools --- and amazing example of the intellectual disconnect that is possible in humans and perhaps even particularly possible in university educated humans....
Anti-Vax patients 2016 = Anti-Natural-Penicillin doctors 1940
I believe that Anti-Vax (unwarranted) concerns about heavy metals in vaccines and heavy money controlling vaccine approvals are just an unconscious smoke screen to hide these patients' free-floating fears and phobias.
Just as I believe that (unwarranted) concerns about the 'impurity' of natural penicillin among most of the world's doctors and scientists in early 1940s was equally an unconscious smokescreen to hide their similar free-floating fears and phobias.
We easily grant patients as being irrational --- but doctors and scientists, too ? Yep !
While society is quite comfortable talking about 'invasive' surgery, it hasn't been as open in accepting that receiving needles or drawing blood are also invasive, as are most microbial infections and all knife attacks, etc.
Most people, quite rightly, set initial firm limits on invasions past the boundaries of their body and psyche.
But many--- quite irrationally --- hold onto an initially rational fear about taking in unknowable 'foreign' objects to well past the point of common caution.
There are different concerns for each individual as to what is a potentially 'foreign object' and further, their fear level varies widely over each foreign object, by time and place.
Their free floating fear never really goes away, even if they can be reluctantly convinced to take this or that foreign object, on this or that occasion.
And that irrational fear is listened too and acted upon, whenever an occasion arises that allows people to guise this fear as really a quite rational objection based on hard evidence.
After all one faked medical article fanned by one air-headed TV personality was all that was needed to set off our current anti-vax pandemic of irrationality.
In the case of natural penicillin, doctors who had never previously balked at injecting 'deadly toxic but medically useful' serums and synthetic drugs into patients, suddenly ignored the hard evidence that natural penicillin's impurities seemed almost as harmless as did this extremely non-toxic medicine itself.
But the timeless and general revulsion against the melting and dissolving work of fungus because it so reminded humanity of their certain death and decay, the only species with this foreknowledge of their fate, had only heightened during the Era of Pure Modernity.
For a fungus body on a log dissolved not just the bark and fibre into gooey wetness, it dissolved Pure Modernity's passion for pure divisions, such as between wet and dry, solid and slime.
Such that, in the same decade as penicillin's discovery quintessential Pure Modernists A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft both found the gooey slimy fungus to be their extreme example of all encompassing evil.
If the thought of the slimy smelly body of the penicillin-producing penicillium fungus wasn't bad enough, the knowledge that penicillin itself was a secondary metabolite (basically fungus piss and poop) was even worse.
Doctors who had balked at eating mushrooms as kids were not about to welcome the idea of injecting fungus into the temple of the human blood supply, not in an age that still thought the genome resided in the 'blood' rather than in chromosomes inside each cell nucleus, not when 100% pure synthetic Sulfa medicine was working so well.
They felt this, but they weren't about to say it aloud - not publicly or even privately.
So the Big Lie about 'potentially' 'dangerous' 'impurities' in impure natural penicillin were trotted out instead.
Even when, as readers of medical journals, they knew better....
Just as I believe that (unwarranted) concerns about the 'impurity' of natural penicillin among most of the world's doctors and scientists in early 1940s was equally an unconscious smokescreen to hide their similar free-floating fears and phobias.
We easily grant patients as being irrational --- but doctors and scientists, too ? Yep !
While society is quite comfortable talking about 'invasive' surgery, it hasn't been as open in accepting that receiving needles or drawing blood are also invasive, as are most microbial infections and all knife attacks, etc.
Most people, quite rightly, set initial firm limits on invasions past the boundaries of their body and psyche.
But many--- quite irrationally --- hold onto an initially rational fear about taking in unknowable 'foreign' objects to well past the point of common caution.
There are different concerns for each individual as to what is a potentially 'foreign object' and further, their fear level varies widely over each foreign object, by time and place.
Their free floating fear never really goes away, even if they can be reluctantly convinced to take this or that foreign object, on this or that occasion.
And that irrational fear is listened too and acted upon, whenever an occasion arises that allows people to guise this fear as really a quite rational objection based on hard evidence.
After all one faked medical article fanned by one air-headed TV personality was all that was needed to set off our current anti-vax pandemic of irrationality.
In the case of natural penicillin, doctors who had never previously balked at injecting 'deadly toxic but medically useful' serums and synthetic drugs into patients, suddenly ignored the hard evidence that natural penicillin's impurities seemed almost as harmless as did this extremely non-toxic medicine itself.
But the timeless and general revulsion against the melting and dissolving work of fungus because it so reminded humanity of their certain death and decay, the only species with this foreknowledge of their fate, had only heightened during the Era of Pure Modernity.
For a fungus body on a log dissolved not just the bark and fibre into gooey wetness, it dissolved Pure Modernity's passion for pure divisions, such as between wet and dry, solid and slime.
Such that, in the same decade as penicillin's discovery quintessential Pure Modernists A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft both found the gooey slimy fungus to be their extreme example of all encompassing evil.
If the thought of the slimy smelly body of the penicillin-producing penicillium fungus wasn't bad enough, the knowledge that penicillin itself was a secondary metabolite (basically fungus piss and poop) was even worse.
Doctors who had balked at eating mushrooms as kids were not about to welcome the idea of injecting fungus into the temple of the human blood supply, not in an age that still thought the genome resided in the 'blood' rather than in chromosomes inside each cell nucleus, not when 100% pure synthetic Sulfa medicine was working so well.
They felt this, but they weren't about to say it aloud - not publicly or even privately.
So the Big Lie about 'potentially' 'dangerous' 'impurities' in impure natural penicillin were trotted out instead.
Even when, as readers of medical journals, they knew better....
Thursday, July 28, 2016
Pure Neo-Darwinism just dog whistle code for pure WASP ?
It is always interesting to discover that the most ardent and 'purest' of Neo-Darwinists are seemingly likely to also be English and Protestant (middle class and male, too, but we'll overlook that for the moment!)
European biologists, for example, are always being faulted by them for failing to adhere to every last jot and tittle of their Neo-Darwinist dogma.
Even Americans aren't as quintessentially 'pushy' in this area as these folks from Home Counties England.
Now that they've lost the Empire, Europe and soon Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well, one supposes that Darwin (along with Shakespeare and Britpop) is about all they have left to offer world culture.
If I was reduced to my intellectual uppers, I, too, would fight like the Devil to remain the high priests of Evolution theory....
European biologists, for example, are always being faulted by them for failing to adhere to every last jot and tittle of their Neo-Darwinist dogma.
Even Americans aren't as quintessentially 'pushy' in this area as these folks from Home Counties England.
Now that they've lost the Empire, Europe and soon Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well, one supposes that Darwin (along with Shakespeare and Britpop) is about all they have left to offer world culture.
If I was reduced to my intellectual uppers, I, too, would fight like the Devil to remain the high priests of Evolution theory....
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
WWII's 'war of ideas' ran at subterranean right angles to its 'war of weapons'
It is comparatively easy to sort out WWII's 'war of weapons' (particularly if one is allowed to view that war moment by moment, region by region), much less so for its 'war of ideas'.
True, the weapon war has its classification difficulties.
After all, many countries that were originally Germany's friends on the battlefield (such as Italy, Russia, Hungary and Finland) eventually ended up being savagely attacked by their erstwhile friend.
Even Britain seriously thought about bombing Russia ---- but then later decided to sent it bombers instead.
(We also mustn't forget that originally Britain fought side by side with the French military, only to kill thousands them at Oran Algeria in 1940 and then by late 1944 was once again fighting side by side with the French.)
And of course, not so very long after the war, Germany became Britain's new bosom friend and Russia its new sworn enemy.
The cases of France, Italy and Hungary reminds us that for many (perhaps even for most) nations, WWII was often as much a deeply divided civil war, fought over ideas, as it was a war of weapons fought by the entire (fully united) population of a nation simply intent on resisting foreign invasion.
But fundamentally, I believe that WWII's war of ideas was mostly fought, almost invisibly and mostly silently and inaudibly, inside billions of individual minds.
Over the seven long years of the war and its immediate aftermath, most people became far less certain than they were in 1939, about a collection of unexamined assumptions that we now call Perfectionist Modernity.
It was proving far harder than once thought to perfect perfection and there were increasing doubts that the version of perfection that had been put about really was perfect.
Humanity, Nature, Reality ---- they all proved to be far less amenable to suggestions from 'the smartest civilizations in the Universe', than anyone suspected.....
True, the weapon war has its classification difficulties.
After all, many countries that were originally Germany's friends on the battlefield (such as Italy, Russia, Hungary and Finland) eventually ended up being savagely attacked by their erstwhile friend.
Even Britain seriously thought about bombing Russia ---- but then later decided to sent it bombers instead.
(We also mustn't forget that originally Britain fought side by side with the French military, only to kill thousands them at Oran Algeria in 1940 and then by late 1944 was once again fighting side by side with the French.)
And of course, not so very long after the war, Germany became Britain's new bosom friend and Russia its new sworn enemy.
The cases of France, Italy and Hungary reminds us that for many (perhaps even for most) nations, WWII was often as much a deeply divided civil war, fought over ideas, as it was a war of weapons fought by the entire (fully united) population of a nation simply intent on resisting foreign invasion.
But fundamentally, I believe that WWII's war of ideas was mostly fought, almost invisibly and mostly silently and inaudibly, inside billions of individual minds.
Over the seven long years of the war and its immediate aftermath, most people became far less certain than they were in 1939, about a collection of unexamined assumptions that we now call Perfectionist Modernity.
It was proving far harder than once thought to perfect perfection and there were increasing doubts that the version of perfection that had been put about really was perfect.
Humanity, Nature, Reality ---- they all proved to be far less amenable to suggestions from 'the smartest civilizations in the Universe', than anyone suspected.....
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
SCIENCE purifies intellectual 'gene pool' : TECHNOLOGY diversifies it
I want to suggest a totally different way of looking at the vast difference between Science (theories) and Technology (tools).
Usually it is claimed by scientists (in deliberate error) that Science first accumulates new additions to the human body of knowledge and then Technology, the applied application of scientific knowledge, simply creates new products from that new knowledge.
But there is little hard evidence that most technology was the direct result of proceeding basic science theories.
It is rather very often that it is directly the other way around, with the new better tools made by technology greatly expanding and securing the factual base of Science, far beyond the limits of its traditional mere mind-experiment based theories.
No, to my way of thinking, the key difference is that tools, often made for a single purpose originally, often turn out to have many uses with open-ended and highly unpredictable results for humanity, while a truly successful 'scientific' theory always imposes narrow limits on a piece of reality once thought to have wide variants.
Which is to say that that any academic paper that claims, with much evidence footnoted, that life and reality is inordinately and extremely complicated is likely to be accepted by a philosophy journal ----- but not by any science journal.
Thomas Kuhn famously described how water and alcohol mixed in any proportion was once considered a compound by all scientists ----- until Dalton showed a compound can only be formed by the combination of atoms in definite, fixed, simple whole number proportions : water always has just two atoms of hydrogen for every one of oxygen, full stop.
Dalton's theory's success at limiting made his name a household word.
But Darwin and Galton are more this blog's area of interest.
So I now wish to dismiss the claims that Eugenics was always seen as a pseudoscience by scientists or that it was a once fully accredited member of Science but now is totally discredited, proposing instead that all Science is Eugenics ---- and that Technology is Eugenic's antithesis.
Further, that Science/Eugenics is fundamentally a subset of humanity's primeval fear of the unknowable and the uncontrollable.
Science's job, 24/7 year in and out, is to be a lethal chamber cum refiner's fire, an Auschwitz, an Aktion T4, to all manner and sizes and shapes of ideas ---- subconsciously hoping to produce, not one small elite Master Race, but rather a single simple Theory of Everything.
I suspect that this hardly seems to fit your vision of how science really works - I know it does not fit mine.
Scientists always seem to be adding to our knowledge base - expanding rather than trimming it.
But I repeat : new tools bring new domains into the orb of scientists, forcing them to widen earlier theories that always, always, always are now seen as too limited.
Cast your mind over any area of Science and try to tell me differently.
Where, for just one example among many, do you ever find any earlier scientists proposing that the age of the Earth was twenty billion years old and that the Universe was 100 billion years old when we know feel the Earth is only a little over four billion years old and the Universe just about fourteen billion years old?
Science, particularly late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Science, was a counterrevolution against the chaotic and fecund consequences thrown up by the steady advance of more and more technologies in that period.
Only recently have we seen some scientists who positively accept , indeed welcome, the fecundity of reality and the limits of knowledge and perhaps in time we will see that reflected in what constitutes a legitimate scientific theory......
Usually it is claimed by scientists (in deliberate error) that Science first accumulates new additions to the human body of knowledge and then Technology, the applied application of scientific knowledge, simply creates new products from that new knowledge.
But there is little hard evidence that most technology was the direct result of proceeding basic science theories.
It is rather very often that it is directly the other way around, with the new better tools made by technology greatly expanding and securing the factual base of Science, far beyond the limits of its traditional mere mind-experiment based theories.
No, to my way of thinking, the key difference is that tools, often made for a single purpose originally, often turn out to have many uses with open-ended and highly unpredictable results for humanity, while a truly successful 'scientific' theory always imposes narrow limits on a piece of reality once thought to have wide variants.
Which is to say that that any academic paper that claims, with much evidence footnoted, that life and reality is inordinately and extremely complicated is likely to be accepted by a philosophy journal ----- but not by any science journal.
Thomas Kuhn famously described how water and alcohol mixed in any proportion was once considered a compound by all scientists ----- until Dalton showed a compound can only be formed by the combination of atoms in definite, fixed, simple whole number proportions : water always has just two atoms of hydrogen for every one of oxygen, full stop.
Dalton's theory's success at limiting made his name a household word.
But Darwin and Galton are more this blog's area of interest.
So I now wish to dismiss the claims that Eugenics was always seen as a pseudoscience by scientists or that it was a once fully accredited member of Science but now is totally discredited, proposing instead that all Science is Eugenics ---- and that Technology is Eugenic's antithesis.
Further, that Science/Eugenics is fundamentally a subset of humanity's primeval fear of the unknowable and the uncontrollable.
Science's job, 24/7 year in and out, is to be a lethal chamber cum refiner's fire, an Auschwitz, an Aktion T4, to all manner and sizes and shapes of ideas ---- subconsciously hoping to produce, not one small elite Master Race, but rather a single simple Theory of Everything.
Science is not at all objective - its bias is always to purify and simplify ----- regardless of the facts
I suspect that this hardly seems to fit your vision of how science really works - I know it does not fit mine.
Scientists always seem to be adding to our knowledge base - expanding rather than trimming it.
But I repeat : new tools bring new domains into the orb of scientists, forcing them to widen earlier theories that always, always, always are now seen as too limited.
Cast your mind over any area of Science and try to tell me differently.
Where, for just one example among many, do you ever find any earlier scientists proposing that the age of the Earth was twenty billion years old and that the Universe was 100 billion years old when we know feel the Earth is only a little over four billion years old and the Universe just about fourteen billion years old?
Science, particularly late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Science, was a counterrevolution against the chaotic and fecund consequences thrown up by the steady advance of more and more technologies in that period.
Only recently have we seen some scientists who positively accept , indeed welcome, the fecundity of reality and the limits of knowledge and perhaps in time we will see that reflected in what constitutes a legitimate scientific theory......
Monday, July 25, 2016
Dawson's Unwashed Penicillin for the Great Unwashed or Florey's Pure Penicillin for the Pure & Fit ?
Wars, externally, may involve the clash of guns, but inside, they're really about the clash of ideas
You may think that the seventy five year old conflict over how best to make and distribute wartime penicillin was simply not capable of being freighted with the key clash of ideas and values behind WWII, but I am here trying to convince you that it was.
Let's start with Truth Time : for all the highly technical industrial processes of 'purifying' of sophisticated antibiotics such as the penicillins, (whether they are made by microbes or by man) when you actually get down to it, they're pretty much downhome and domestic, basically consisting of a long series of repeated 'washings' by various liquid solvents.
And in point of fact, in the very early days of penicillin production, each washing by these strong chemicals tended to remove only a little of the relatively harmless impurities and a great deal of the scarce (and very fragile-seeming) penicillin intended for the dying patient
To be actually able to save lives (now !) rather than merely compete in the Alpha Dog contest to be the first to reach the Mount Everest of 100% pure penicillin, Dr Dawson's pioneering 1940 penicillin 'homebrew' had to be decidedly radical.
So his "Impure Manhattan" was not just the 'rushed' application of the naturally grown rather than waiting for the man-made stuff, it was also highly 'impure', because it had been deliberately under-washed.
Dawson's reasoning, set against the doubts of even his closest friends, was that in this way, more of his precious penicillin could be saved for his dying patients.
Dawson reasoned that the remaining impurities didn't seem to do more than offer a short term fever spike. Since penicillin itself remains about the most un-toxic lifesaver ever discovered, Dr Dawson sensed it all would balance out in the end.
(And for similar humanitarian reasons, Brisbane's Dr Vincent Duhig's homewbrew penicillin, three years later, was totally unwashed - merely strained once through a cheesecloth, no bigger than a perizoma loincloth. But with it, he saved many seemingly hopeless cases.)
To his doubting colleagues, Dr Dawson's sins were producing Underwashed Penicillin, for the Great Unwashed
In the eyes of Dawson's colleagues worldwide, his rush to put deliberately dirty penicillin into the holy temple of the human bloodstream (for this was an era when even scientists seemed to hold that our genome resided more in our 'blood' than within each cell) was only his first great sin.
His bigger sin was just who he choose to give these very first, very precious doses to, the very first doses of our present Age of Antibiotics.
To a Negro ! - and to a Jew ! - both members of the working class ! , both dying from hitherto invariably SBE, already judged by the Anglo-American medical establishment as a condition of 'no military importance' and so unworthy of scarce medical resources in wartime.
Dawson was proposing that the government had to see to the mass production of natural and impure (but good enough for dying patients) penicillin right now, and make enough for all the world in need of it.
A positive concrete example of the pious sentiments behind the Atlantic Charter and the four Freedoms : make penicillin the biggest possible of all Big Tents and invite all in.
Dr Dawson was no longer a religious believer but rather a lapsed Protestant like most of his colleagues, so no one seemed to have noticed the ironic Christian echoes in all this.
For one of Jesus's chief rhetorical styles was to deliberately compound the breaking of one social taboo by doing it in conjunction with another breaking of a social taboo --- all to reinforce his main point.
So Jesus choose not just to invite publicans, sinners and all manner of the socially marginalized into his new Big Tent Kingdom of God, he also did so at the communal dining table, hitherto a pure and safe pious Jews only sanctuary against the sin of the outer world introduced when they became a small part of the global Roman Empire.
Whether by instinct or as partial remembrance of his many years of early church going, Dawson had taken much the same rhetorical approach.
Florey's 100% Pure Penicillin, to which only the Pure & Fit are worthy
Opposing Dawson's ideas on penicillin was most of the scientific community and behind them, most of the educated world.
Their assumption was that microbial penicillin simply had to be as crude as they were, while man-made penicillin simply had to be as good as the best in human civilizations.
German chemists, for example, were widely viewed as the best in the world, and probably, in the Universe.
But as it happened the best of German chemists couldn't make life-saving penicillin, instead making only Auschwitz's life-taking Zyklon-B gas.
Florey and Fleming and the rest of the Anglo-American scientific establishment soldiered on, in part because synthetic penicillin also meant patented, controllable penicillin -- a tightly controlled and rationed penicillin that could be used, in wartime, to further the eugenic aims lacking popular support in peacetime.
Under the guise of wartime necessity, and via an artificially created scarcity, life-saving penicillin was meant to be kept for only the best of their citizens and also kept from from all those people judged eugenically as lives unworthy of penicillin.
But natural PD penicillin could be made by any old silly sentimental Hippocratic Code quoting doctor anywhere, so intent on saving the worthless dying that they were fatally undercutting the scientific establishments' eugenic intentions.
We view the clash of ideas behind WWII totally differently than 1940 did
Dawson's opening gambit in October 1940 had a much wider significance than just being seen as a in-house tiff over how best to produce and distribute wartime penicillin.
His opposition to the approach taken by Howard Florey, Alexander Fleming and the Anglo-American scientific establishment foreshadowed the approach most of us now take, seventy five years now, to the war of ideas that lay behind WWII's mass killing.
In a nutshell : we think that the war of ideas behind WWII was over whether most people back then preferred either our existing world of wide diversity or wanted a new utopian world of strict symmetrical uniformity and perfection.
But it is very important to realize that almost no one saw it that way back then ---- almost all felt a world of pure symmetrical uniformity was better scientifically and hence morally.
Simply put, Humanity changed, between how most felt in 1940 and how most feel today.
And someone and some event had to start that change.
Almost all historians will agree that the main reason why natural Biology is so much the leading science today when it was manmade Chemistry back in 1940, was as a result of the unexpected success of microbe penicillin making against the failed attempt to make commercially viable man-made penicillin during WWII.
Scientists, as a result, had to re-consider their unquestioned assumptions about the supposed lack of abilities among the weak and the small and the
simple.
This at the same time that the new knowledge of Auschwitz forced them and all the world to also consider whether we really want to remove all the small and the simple and the mis-formed to create a future utopia of perfection and uniformity.
In 1945, those seemed totally separate questions - one scientific and one moral.
But over time, we have come to see them as fused - just as Dr Dawson did, way back in 1940 : welcoming the widest possible diversity not only feels morally right, it is also now well established, scientifically, as the most successful means of ensuring longterm evolutionary survival.
Dawson's Paradox : move over Fermi : why are microbes still here ?
Dawson's two decades of studies of the unimaginably wide scope of bacterial diversity had suggested an explanation for a profound paradox : "Why are microbes still here ?"
Why is it that the creatures at the very bottom of the progressive Tree of Life, the dumb, small, weak microbes, are also the most successful form of life, surviving four billion years against all odds when some of the biggest and toughest of beings, like the dinosaurs, are long gone ?
Dawson found that microbes tolerated their defectives and mis-formed members , finding them highly useful for survival when circumstances changed and their disadvantages suddenly become advantages.
Microbes even had a unique way (HGT) to see that these once-useless now invaluable genes could be quickly pass around the entire microbe community world wide, from species to species.
Microbial genes, in effect, are PD - Public Domain, not figuratively patented and held in guarded exclusively as human genes are.
We today think these sorts of approaches to safeguarding diversity against sudden disaster and the sharing of life-saving ideas as eminently sensible.
But few realize that they originated first among the simple microbes or that it was one man, Dr Henry Dawson, that first highlighted their worth...
Sunday, July 24, 2016
The greater evolutionary success, circa 1944 : Microbial diversity or Aryan uniformity ?
To Dr Martin Henry Dawson, after two decades of research into the astonishing and under-travelled scientific world of four billion years of microbial diversity, versatility and survival, the scientific answer to the secret of long term evolutionary success seemed perfectly clear.
This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.
But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.
For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.
he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....
This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.
But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.
For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.
he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....
Wartime penicillin : Patented for some or PD for all ?
For the young Black and Jewish men receiving those historical first needles (October 1940) of Dr Henry Dawson's "Impure Manhattan" brew. it is very important to note that this impure naturally grown penicillin were not at all dangerous, medically speaking.
As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.
The supposed dangers of impure natural penicillin was just a 'Big Lie' generated from deep within the Anglo-American establishment, given out for media and laity consumption.
For Dawson's taboo-breaking needles were indeed highly dangerous, to that establishment and their ideology of Anglo-American racial superiority in all things intellectual and commercial.
Because the invisibly small and light spores of penicillin-producing penicillium were inherently PD (public domain) as they drifted everywhere throughout the world, in particular constantly drifting over and through the highest of tariff barriers like, well, like spores.
That meant any nation on Earth could make their own monopoly-breaking public domain natural penicillin and soon, all could consider making this wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) life-saving boon for humanity.
No chance then to add penicillin to the arsenal intended to promote the Anglo-American's postwar vision of "Soft Imperialism", wherein their exclusive control over items like atomic bombs, food, technology and life-saving medicines would allow them to create a whole slew of new "informal" colonies abroad.
The establishments in America and Britain were totally determined to patent and thus control highly expensive synthetic penicillin (meanwhile undercutting the much cheaper and equally effective natural PD penicillin by proclaiming over and over that the artificial stuff, like sarin gas, was 100% pure --- and hence, ipso facto, 100% safe).
So much so that they were committed to delaying, by all means fair and foul, the use of any penicillin to save wartime lives, until one of their cartel of organizations had patented a synthetic penicillin.
Dr Dawson was dying through the war and was often under emergency care, but his courage and his vision inspired a handful of equally determined colleagues, friends and associates to take up his cause and ultimately forcing the Allies to shift their position 180 degrees.
There was his Columbia University colleague Dr Rudy Schulinger, now in uniform in Europe, trying to get his superiors to demand penicillin from a reluctant Washington scientific bureaucracy to save American boys overseas.
Eventually the Army's commitment to getting penicillin, if necessary by making it themselves - such as Army doctor Frank B Queen in Utah had proposed - scared even the Washington wartime Beltway into giving way.
Dawson's patient, American super industrialist Floyd B Odlum, advisor to the head of the only remaining New Deal oriented Washington bureaucratic organization, the powerful WPB (War Production Board).
The WPB's bold decision to seek incredibly huge amounts of wartime penicillin, enough to deal with those dying for lack of it worldwide, tore open the cartel's tight control over limited production runs of penicillin.
A former patient of Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti, broke the story locally in New York City on the dire effects of the withholding of penicillin for a dying baby girl, Patty Malone.
One of the oldest saying in the American media is "if a New York story is breaking wide, its breaking stateside !" and this local story certainly did so, ultimately breaking worldwide as well.
In turn, it inspired Mrs John L Smith, mother of a girl who also had died through lack of penicillin and wife of industrialist who had been earlier working together with Dawson on penicillin.
Now her husband pushed his relatively small firm to buck the industry consensus on betting everything on synthetic penicillin, whenever and if ever it proved commercially viable (it still hasn't).
Instead his firm went down the natural PD penicillin route, ending up making most of the war's penicillin all by itself - while 'breaking' the law on giving penicillin to those dying who were deemed eugenically 'unworthy' of it.
FDR's personal physician Dr L W Gorham, was just one of a number of prominent doctors, men too powerful to easily bring to heal, also 'broke' the law on the making and use of wartime penicillin, inspired by Dawson's continuing lawbreaking example.
The wide availability of cheap abundant natural penicillin soon had a sort of herd immunity effect.
For it, unusually, reached those people ordinarily either too poor or too remote to receive cutting edge medicine and in helping cure them, also knocked back long endemic pools of infectious pathogens that had affected all the world's population.
Since October 1940, ten billion of us have led happier lives because of this herd immunity, all thanks to Dr Dawson....
As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.
The supposed dangers of impure natural penicillin was just a 'Big Lie' generated from deep within the Anglo-American establishment, given out for media and laity consumption.
For Dawson's taboo-breaking needles were indeed highly dangerous, to that establishment and their ideology of Anglo-American racial superiority in all things intellectual and commercial.
Because the invisibly small and light spores of penicillin-producing penicillium were inherently PD (public domain) as they drifted everywhere throughout the world, in particular constantly drifting over and through the highest of tariff barriers like, well, like spores.
That meant any nation on Earth could make their own monopoly-breaking public domain natural penicillin and soon, all could consider making this wonderful (and wonderfully inexpensive) life-saving boon for humanity.
No chance then to add penicillin to the arsenal intended to promote the Anglo-American's postwar vision of "Soft Imperialism", wherein their exclusive control over items like atomic bombs, food, technology and life-saving medicines would allow them to create a whole slew of new "informal" colonies abroad.
The establishments in America and Britain were totally determined to patent and thus control highly expensive synthetic penicillin (meanwhile undercutting the much cheaper and equally effective natural PD penicillin by proclaiming over and over that the artificial stuff, like sarin gas, was 100% pure --- and hence, ipso facto, 100% safe).
So much so that they were committed to delaying, by all means fair and foul, the use of any penicillin to save wartime lives, until one of their cartel of organizations had patented a synthetic penicillin.
Dr Dawson was dying through the war and was often under emergency care, but his courage and his vision inspired a handful of equally determined colleagues, friends and associates to take up his cause and ultimately forcing the Allies to shift their position 180 degrees.
There was his Columbia University colleague Dr Rudy Schulinger, now in uniform in Europe, trying to get his superiors to demand penicillin from a reluctant Washington scientific bureaucracy to save American boys overseas.
Eventually the Army's commitment to getting penicillin, if necessary by making it themselves - such as Army doctor Frank B Queen in Utah had proposed - scared even the Washington wartime Beltway into giving way.
Dawson's patient, American super industrialist Floyd B Odlum, advisor to the head of the only remaining New Deal oriented Washington bureaucratic organization, the powerful WPB (War Production Board).
The WPB's bold decision to seek incredibly huge amounts of wartime penicillin, enough to deal with those dying for lack of it worldwide, tore open the cartel's tight control over limited production runs of penicillin.
A former patient of Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti, broke the story locally in New York City on the dire effects of the withholding of penicillin for a dying baby girl, Patty Malone.
One of the oldest saying in the American media is "if a New York story is breaking wide, its breaking stateside !" and this local story certainly did so, ultimately breaking worldwide as well.
In turn, it inspired Mrs John L Smith, mother of a girl who also had died through lack of penicillin and wife of industrialist who had been earlier working together with Dawson on penicillin.
Now her husband pushed his relatively small firm to buck the industry consensus on betting everything on synthetic penicillin, whenever and if ever it proved commercially viable (it still hasn't).
Instead his firm went down the natural PD penicillin route, ending up making most of the war's penicillin all by itself - while 'breaking' the law on giving penicillin to those dying who were deemed eugenically 'unworthy' of it.
FDR's personal physician Dr L W Gorham, was just one of a number of prominent doctors, men too powerful to easily bring to heal, also 'broke' the law on the making and use of wartime penicillin, inspired by Dawson's continuing lawbreaking example.
The wide availability of cheap abundant natural penicillin soon had a sort of herd immunity effect.
For it, unusually, reached those people ordinarily either too poor or too remote to receive cutting edge medicine and in helping cure them, also knocked back long endemic pools of infectious pathogens that had affected all the world's population.
Since October 1940, ten billion of us have led happier lives because of this herd immunity, all thanks to Dr Dawson....
Sunday, July 17, 2016
Most victims of WWII died from the non-action of NEGLECT, not from direct violence
Most of the people who died prematurely because of WWII were not bombed, shot, gassed, hung, beaten or chopped up.
They did not die because of direct actions but through deliberate acts of non-action.
They died through Neglect, but not in its minor sense of mere forgetfulness: rather, powerful people in top positions of authority fully discussed the matter and committed the decision of official Neglect to paper.
These victims died because they were denied an equal share of what were often inadequate total amounts of available food, medical care, housing, fuel, clothing within each regime area.
They died - usually - of the infectious diseases brought on by slow starvation, stress, overcrowded shelters or no shelter at all, and the cold ------ rather than literally 'starving to death'.
In a sense then, they mostly died quietly and quickly offstage, mere small 'noises off', rather than in the more operatic death scene style of a highly visible and a highly prolonged form of total starvation death, of bodies reduced to mere skeletons.
Inadequate food was obviously the key form of neglect - with enough food we simply need less urgent medical care and can often survive, short term, inadequate heated shelters and clothing long enough to set about overcoming these problems.
During WWII, least a few people in every country on earth probably died from diseases brought on by inadequate healthy food : even in Canada, Australia and America.
There, aboriginal peoples in remote places unaffected by increased wartime demands for labour were still getting inadequate healthy food, as they had during the peacetime Depression and now were despite wartime rationing.
Rationing , after all, dealt with the fair pricing and distribution of bought (not donated) food.
We can extend this argument to all the Neutral nations and imperial colonies that weren't directly affected by wartime fighting, merely by the overall global wartime demand for foodstuffs that drove up domestic prices in their country.
If they couldn't benefit from the additional labour demands in that country thrown up by the same shifts in global trade, they suffered to the point that it threatened their life.
A poor pensioner already hungry in Depression era Latin America and an equally already hungry poor small farmer in the British colonies, did even worse when the war came.
Their premature deaths would occur so quietly and slowly that they would only be visible years later when demographers noticed trends in national birth and death figures by decade : perhaps an increase in already high death rates for the very young and very old among the poor.
In most countries, many vulnerable patients within the public long term care system, particularly if they couldn't 'work', often got the traditional and often fatal diseases of severe poverty, such as TB.
They got hit by a triple process of smaller rations, severe overcrowding spreading infectious diseases and highly overworked staff, combined with a moral sense in the custodial and medical community that their lives didn't matter as much in wartime because they were a burden, rather than a help, to the all-out war effort.
They too died quietly offstage and became visible only through postwar demographers' work.
Some of their largest numbers were found among the civilians, supposedly safe behind the Soviet lines during WWII, worked hard with very little food and heat.
Rather more studied, though still far off the radar for most people when they are asked about WWII deaths, were the war's highly public (but often local,short, sharp) 'famines'.
They occurred in Italian and German controlled Greece, in the original German treatment of Soviet POWS, at the German siege of Leningrad, in German-controlled Polish Jewish ghettos, in British Bengal, in German-controlled western Netherlands and in Japanese and French-controlled Vietnam.
We mustn't forget, that based on traditional but cruel rules of war involving sieges, the Allies refused to help those starving in enemy-controlled areas such as in Greece and western Netherlands (as well as during the little known sieges of the Channel ports in 1944-1945).
These publicly recognized 'famines' killed many millions so they can't be dismissed but neither should their dramatic stories be allowed to overshadow the huge numbers who died quietly (boringly) everywhere and all throughout the war.
Think also of the millions of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, but only after the Allied and Neutral nations repeatedly refused to accept them as immigrants or refugees.
Our collective refusal not only denied them the physical protection far from Nazi hands but also and perhaps even more importantly, a sense that they were equal fellow human beings whose violent deaths won't go un-revenged by non-Jews.
That too was a crime of Neglect on the part of the non-Nazi world.
In the case of my book's subject, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, he was fighting against perhaps the war's most unknown case of official Neglect, the official Allied decision to deliberately delay (and then limit) the wartime production of natural penicillin, then the ONLY defence against many fatal potentially pandemic diseases.
Today we have a few dozen common active antibiotics and about a hundred more we have discontinued due to relative inefficiency and toxicity more we could bring back into production if we needed to, perhaps to combat microbial resistance.
But during the war, natural Penicillin G was the one and only antibiotic we had --- and starting in the Fall of 1942, the synthetic Sulfa family of anti-bacterials failed to yield any effective new drugs while the existing ones began failing to cure diseases they once did easily.
If another America-started, globe circling, Spanish Flu type of pandemic had happened during this later world war - perhaps growing worldwide from the outbreak of respiratory diseases in America between November 1943 to February 1994, we could have had an additional number of disease deaths that would swamp even WWII's death total from all causes.
Dr Dawson, if known as all, is known for resisting the Allied decision to directly deny limited penicillin supplies to all cases of sub-acute bacterial endocarditis on the grounds that it wasn't a disease of military priority.
SBE, as it was generally known, as was the hitherto invariably fatal terminal disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most dreaded of all childhood diseases .
The authorities expected - wrongly as it turned out - that SBE patients, even if cured, were expected to be too weak to do war work, let alone fight in the war.
But Dawson saw the almost certain deaths of SBEs from being denied the only medicine that could cure them merely as a symbol - albeit an important symbol - of the overall secret Allied plan to only devote a tiny amount of Allied war resources to producing wartime penicillin.
Basically, only enough penicillin was to be made to allow lightly wounded Allied combat troops to return quickly to battle, so upper class deferred students won't have to be called up in their place.
No one else in the world would get any, till the war's end.
If this plan had been carried out, it would have still cost millions of lives, before the routine mass production of this unusual and totally new type of biological product could have been ramped up in 1947-1948, even without a new Spanish Flu type of global pandemic to deal with.
The dying Dr Dawson so successfully led the battle to resist this terribly cruel crime of Neglect that the ragtag New Dealer portion of the FDR wartime government began the mass producing natural penicillin and its export to all the world to save lives, forcing all the other reluctant Allied nations to play rapid catchup.
If intention, rather than botched execution, is the true measure of a sin, if not a crime, than this Penicillin denial tale ranks with the German Hunger Plan for some of the most egregious sins of all time ...
They did not die because of direct actions but through deliberate acts of non-action.
They died through Neglect, but not in its minor sense of mere forgetfulness: rather, powerful people in top positions of authority fully discussed the matter and committed the decision of official Neglect to paper.
These victims died because they were denied an equal share of what were often inadequate total amounts of available food, medical care, housing, fuel, clothing within each regime area.
They died - usually - of the infectious diseases brought on by slow starvation, stress, overcrowded shelters or no shelter at all, and the cold ------ rather than literally 'starving to death'.
In a sense then, they mostly died quietly and quickly offstage, mere small 'noises off', rather than in the more operatic death scene style of a highly visible and a highly prolonged form of total starvation death, of bodies reduced to mere skeletons.
Inadequate food was obviously the key form of neglect - with enough food we simply need less urgent medical care and can often survive, short term, inadequate heated shelters and clothing long enough to set about overcoming these problems.
During WWII, least a few people in every country on earth probably died from diseases brought on by inadequate healthy food : even in Canada, Australia and America.
There, aboriginal peoples in remote places unaffected by increased wartime demands for labour were still getting inadequate healthy food, as they had during the peacetime Depression and now were despite wartime rationing.
Rationing , after all, dealt with the fair pricing and distribution of bought (not donated) food.
We can extend this argument to all the Neutral nations and imperial colonies that weren't directly affected by wartime fighting, merely by the overall global wartime demand for foodstuffs that drove up domestic prices in their country.
If they couldn't benefit from the additional labour demands in that country thrown up by the same shifts in global trade, they suffered to the point that it threatened their life.
A poor pensioner already hungry in Depression era Latin America and an equally already hungry poor small farmer in the British colonies, did even worse when the war came.
Their premature deaths would occur so quietly and slowly that they would only be visible years later when demographers noticed trends in national birth and death figures by decade : perhaps an increase in already high death rates for the very young and very old among the poor.
In most countries, many vulnerable patients within the public long term care system, particularly if they couldn't 'work', often got the traditional and often fatal diseases of severe poverty, such as TB.
They got hit by a triple process of smaller rations, severe overcrowding spreading infectious diseases and highly overworked staff, combined with a moral sense in the custodial and medical community that their lives didn't matter as much in wartime because they were a burden, rather than a help, to the all-out war effort.
They too died quietly offstage and became visible only through postwar demographers' work.
Some of their largest numbers were found among the civilians, supposedly safe behind the Soviet lines during WWII, worked hard with very little food and heat.
Rather more studied, though still far off the radar for most people when they are asked about WWII deaths, were the war's highly public (but often local,short, sharp) 'famines'.
They occurred in Italian and German controlled Greece, in the original German treatment of Soviet POWS, at the German siege of Leningrad, in German-controlled Polish Jewish ghettos, in British Bengal, in German-controlled western Netherlands and in Japanese and French-controlled Vietnam.
We mustn't forget, that based on traditional but cruel rules of war involving sieges, the Allies refused to help those starving in enemy-controlled areas such as in Greece and western Netherlands (as well as during the little known sieges of the Channel ports in 1944-1945).
These publicly recognized 'famines' killed many millions so they can't be dismissed but neither should their dramatic stories be allowed to overshadow the huge numbers who died quietly (boringly) everywhere and all throughout the war.
Think also of the millions of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis, but only after the Allied and Neutral nations repeatedly refused to accept them as immigrants or refugees.
Our collective refusal not only denied them the physical protection far from Nazi hands but also and perhaps even more importantly, a sense that they were equal fellow human beings whose violent deaths won't go un-revenged by non-Jews.
That too was a crime of Neglect on the part of the non-Nazi world.
In the case of my book's subject, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, he was fighting against perhaps the war's most unknown case of official Neglect, the official Allied decision to deliberately delay (and then limit) the wartime production of natural penicillin, then the ONLY defence against many fatal potentially pandemic diseases.
Today we have a few dozen common active antibiotics and about a hundred more we have discontinued due to relative inefficiency and toxicity more we could bring back into production if we needed to, perhaps to combat microbial resistance.
But during the war, natural Penicillin G was the one and only antibiotic we had --- and starting in the Fall of 1942, the synthetic Sulfa family of anti-bacterials failed to yield any effective new drugs while the existing ones began failing to cure diseases they once did easily.
If another America-started, globe circling, Spanish Flu type of pandemic had happened during this later world war - perhaps growing worldwide from the outbreak of respiratory diseases in America between November 1943 to February 1994, we could have had an additional number of disease deaths that would swamp even WWII's death total from all causes.
Dr Dawson, if known as all, is known for resisting the Allied decision to directly deny limited penicillin supplies to all cases of sub-acute bacterial endocarditis on the grounds that it wasn't a disease of military priority.
SBE, as it was generally known, as was the hitherto invariably fatal terminal disease that made Rheumatic Fever the most dreaded of all childhood diseases .
The authorities expected - wrongly as it turned out - that SBE patients, even if cured, were expected to be too weak to do war work, let alone fight in the war.
But Dawson saw the almost certain deaths of SBEs from being denied the only medicine that could cure them merely as a symbol - albeit an important symbol - of the overall secret Allied plan to only devote a tiny amount of Allied war resources to producing wartime penicillin.
Basically, only enough penicillin was to be made to allow lightly wounded Allied combat troops to return quickly to battle, so upper class deferred students won't have to be called up in their place.
No one else in the world would get any, till the war's end.
If this plan had been carried out, it would have still cost millions of lives, before the routine mass production of this unusual and totally new type of biological product could have been ramped up in 1947-1948, even without a new Spanish Flu type of global pandemic to deal with.
The dying Dr Dawson so successfully led the battle to resist this terribly cruel crime of Neglect that the ragtag New Dealer portion of the FDR wartime government began the mass producing natural penicillin and its export to all the world to save lives, forcing all the other reluctant Allied nations to play rapid catchup.
If intention, rather than botched execution, is the true measure of a sin, if not a crime, than this Penicillin denial tale ranks with the German Hunger Plan for some of the most egregious sins of all time ...
Friday, July 15, 2016
the ALLIED HOLOCAUST : pure penicillin, for only some
The Nazis never fully carried out their original Hunger Plan and the Allies never carried out their original Penicillin plan.
So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.
But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.
Fortunately in the end, wartime penicillin became a moral triumph - a rare one in that morally squalid war - and a 'disgusting' affront to everything that Modernity stood for and an affront to Modernity supporters on all sides of WWII.
But by war's end, Modernity defenders no longer dared not say so, but instead merely lick their wounds silently as the world, their world until then, shifted tectonically beneath their feet.
For wartime penicillin was not a pure patented synthetic, made by 'the smartest chemists in the civilized human universe'.
Rather it was the impurely mixed, slimy, smelly, PD, natural effluent of simplest dumbest smallest microbes.
It was not made, during the war, in small amounts, profitably patented, and only used to quickly return lightly infected and wounded Allied soldiers to combat, so as to prevent upper middle class Allied youths being called up to replace them.
Yet one of the key lessons of WWI that the medical world had fully absorbed was that the war made the Spanish Flu much much worst than it already was.
As in most past wars throughout history, this war-spread infection preying up the worn out and hungry killed far more than the combat deaths of the war itself.
Most of its actual deaths were only the indirect result of the flu virus - pneumonia bacteria taking advantage of the situation was the actual killer and in 1943, penicillin was far and away the best way to stop pneumonia bacteria in its tracks.
The Allies fully expected some sort of infectious pandemic during the war or in its messy aftermath, so why they hoped to leave it to the rapidly failing Sulfa family of drugs to do all the heavy lifting is beyond criminal.
Fortunately and in a complete reversal, penicillin's wartime production was scaled up a thousand fold from the original plans and made abundant enough - and cheap enough - to be given to all, even during a total war.
No pandemic occurred in this world war, unlike the previous.
In fact, the fact that it was to be given to all, even during a total war, was deliberately highly publicized.
All because it was quickly apparent that this airlifting of penicillin to the world's dying was the first believable example to doubters that the Allies actually meant all that high flowing talk from their 1941 Atlantic Charter.
Now naturally impure penicillin was being given to badly wounded Allied troops and to Allied POWs ; to Allied civilians poor as well as rich, 'unfit' as well as 'fit', 'useless' as well as 'useful'.
To civilians in Neutral countries, to civilians in liberated lands, even to enemy wounded soldiers and enemy civilians.
Naturally, because the intellectual bread of Nobel committees always ends up somehow buttered side down, their prize went to the losing side, to Fleming & Florey.
Their eugenically-bounded side had been backed by virtually all the scientific and medical elites in every Allied nation.
Fleming and Florey had worked very hard to delay the widespread wartime use of naturally impure PD penicillin.
They wanted instead that wartime penicillin be first synthesized pure and patentable, no matter how long that took. (Almost ninety years on from Fleming's original discovery, it still hasn't happened.)
Even then, this pure 'fit' penicillin was to be made, during wartime, only in small amounts : just enough to allow 'fit' young 1As soldiers to survive to reproduce and 'save the race', not to save unfit 4Fs civilians and thus allow them to further 'swamp the race'.
Tolerance of mass death, 'for the greater eugenic good', was the moral value that Allied and Axis elites held in common and it was only by mere luck and the gumption of a dying doctor (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) that we remember the horror of Pure Auschwitz and not that of Pure Penicillin...
So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.
But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.
Fortunately in the end, wartime penicillin became a moral triumph - a rare one in that morally squalid war - and a 'disgusting' affront to everything that Modernity stood for and an affront to Modernity supporters on all sides of WWII.
But by war's end, Modernity defenders no longer dared not say so, but instead merely lick their wounds silently as the world, their world until then, shifted tectonically beneath their feet.
For wartime penicillin was not a pure patented synthetic, made by 'the smartest chemists in the civilized human universe'.
Rather it was the impurely mixed, slimy, smelly, PD, natural effluent of simplest dumbest smallest microbes.
It was not made, during the war, in small amounts, profitably patented, and only used to quickly return lightly infected and wounded Allied soldiers to combat, so as to prevent upper middle class Allied youths being called up to replace them.
Yet one of the key lessons of WWI that the medical world had fully absorbed was that the war made the Spanish Flu much much worst than it already was.
As in most past wars throughout history, this war-spread infection preying up the worn out and hungry killed far more than the combat deaths of the war itself.
Most of its actual deaths were only the indirect result of the flu virus - pneumonia bacteria taking advantage of the situation was the actual killer and in 1943, penicillin was far and away the best way to stop pneumonia bacteria in its tracks.
The Allies fully expected some sort of infectious pandemic during the war or in its messy aftermath, so why they hoped to leave it to the rapidly failing Sulfa family of drugs to do all the heavy lifting is beyond criminal.
Fortunately and in a complete reversal, penicillin's wartime production was scaled up a thousand fold from the original plans and made abundant enough - and cheap enough - to be given to all, even during a total war.
No pandemic occurred in this world war, unlike the previous.
In fact, the fact that it was to be given to all, even during a total war, was deliberately highly publicized.
All because it was quickly apparent that this airlifting of penicillin to the world's dying was the first believable example to doubters that the Allies actually meant all that high flowing talk from their 1941 Atlantic Charter.
Now naturally impure penicillin was being given to badly wounded Allied troops and to Allied POWs ; to Allied civilians poor as well as rich, 'unfit' as well as 'fit', 'useless' as well as 'useful'.
To civilians in Neutral countries, to civilians in liberated lands, even to enemy wounded soldiers and enemy civilians.
Naturally, because the intellectual bread of Nobel committees always ends up somehow buttered side down, their prize went to the losing side, to Fleming & Florey.
Their eugenically-bounded side had been backed by virtually all the scientific and medical elites in every Allied nation.
Fleming and Florey had worked very hard to delay the widespread wartime use of naturally impure PD penicillin.
They wanted instead that wartime penicillin be first synthesized pure and patentable, no matter how long that took. (Almost ninety years on from Fleming's original discovery, it still hasn't happened.)
Even then, this pure 'fit' penicillin was to be made, during wartime, only in small amounts : just enough to allow 'fit' young 1As soldiers to survive to reproduce and 'save the race', not to save unfit 4Fs civilians and thus allow them to further 'swamp the race'.
Tolerance of mass death, 'for the greater eugenic good', was the moral value that Allied and Axis elites held in common and it was only by mere luck and the gumption of a dying doctor (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) that we remember the horror of Pure Auschwitz and not that of Pure Penicillin...
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
K Auschwitz hedged its assets, r Manhattan its bets
Right to the end of WWII, most 'fit Aryan' Germans thought that Germany's food rationing system was both fair and efficient.
And it was - for them.
Everyone else inside Germany, 'unfit' Aryan Germans and 'non-Aryan' Germans alike, starved to see that the fit Aryans got nothing but the best.
Recall that American POW (and later famous author) Kurt Vonnegut was employed in the very last days of the war as a slave-worker at a Dresden area factory, preparing vitamin enriched malt syrup for pregnant fit Aryan moms so that future baby fit Aryans would have the best possible start in life.
There weren't too many of them left by 1945, but these young saving remnants, the most precious assets the Nazis figured they had yet produced, would have the best care and attention possible.
There weren't many of them for many reasons, some obvious while others are less so.
Among the obvious : that many children were among the Allied bombing casualties and the fact that so many young German dads were away (or dead) in the war and thus unavailable to breed.
In addition, the Nazi regime's institution of a near total end to legal migration into Germany further reduced the pool of potential young parents.
The less obvious reason for the big shortfall in baby Germans was the official (and the later and even bigger 'unofficial') Aktion T4 effort to secretly murder all unfit Aryan citizens and all non-Aryan German citizens (Jews, Romas, Slavs), an effort intent on killing everybody in those groups, from babies to the elderly.
Since the loose term 'unfit' could include anybody who had a physical or mental handicap no matter how slight and who lacked wealthy and powerful family and friends, this offered a near endless pool of genes to eliminate.
In practise, the term unfit was further expanded to include the work shy, the whiners no one really liked, any girl that too obviously enjoyed sex, alcoholics, petty criminals, people with TB or any number of non-inherited infectious diseases.
On and on and on.
By contrast, the hardcore Aryan opponents of the Nazi regime (almost none of these 'unfits' were ever even mild opponents), such as socialists, communists and trade unionists, were usually sent to 'hard work and few rations' concentration camps for periods of time.
By no means did all die there, let alone were murdered forthright upon admission like the unfit.
This allows us to see the highly unusual course of modernity thought as revealed in its ultimate version with Hitler's Nazis : it feared 'the weak' far more than it feared 'the strong'.
So, we find a wartime regime that fully displayed Modernity's self consciously rigorous application of K-selection thought, the likes of which hadn't even been seen in Spartan times.
A regime that hedged its best assets, as it saw them (the fit Aryan children of fit Aryan parents), making them as safe as could be within well built bomb shelters and well supplied with the best of food and nursing care.
And it then ruthlessly killed off all its worst assets : ruthless draining its gene pool and betting the farm and the entire future of Germany, on just this one narrow throw of the genetic dice.
Against resistance from most of America's scientific class, who also espoused, like the Nazis, the fashionable mainstream scientific disbelief in the virtues of human diversity to meet an uncertain future, Dr Dawson's penicillin project in wartime Manhattan survived as a near perfect example of r-selection thinking.
Dr Dawson welcomed 1940 Manhattan's existing huge and diverse gene pool, brought about by external and internal immigration in the proceeding decades.
He was very far from wanting to draining it down to a tiny select elect, a saving remnant, as wartime Germany was trying to do.
Instead Dawson fought hard to try and ensure that none of Manhattan's handicapped members died from official neglect, murdered at a stroke of a pen by scientific death panels just using the war effort, just like the Nazis did, to do what they couldn't get away with in peacetime.
Dawson believed, contrary to the currently fashionable scientific consensus, that based on his studies in bacterial diversity, that over the long term, evolution rewarded species with the biggest gene pool and the widest diversity.
So when the German medical establishment tried to kill off all of Germany's unfit, an activity that went on even after the war right under the occupying American troops noses, the country permanently lost so much human diversity, so much human potential.
We obviously can't directly measure the loss - that potential human potential ended with all those individuals' deaths.
But, indirectly, we can note the tremendous pre-war German success in all of the wide realm of ideas and culture and compare that with its post-war relative lack of success.
We can also think of some of today's world-changing ideas that would have never seen the light of day if the Nazis had conquered Britain and had murdered Alan Turing for being gay and Stephen Hawking for being handicapped.
Dawson unexpectedly won his argument, forcing the hugely powerful Allied coalition to reverse their position on the distribution of wartime penicillin.
Originally only enough was to be made during the war to see that lightly wounded Allied frontline troops could be quickly returned to combat so the service-deferred children of the elite didn't have to take their place.
Everyone else would have to wait to the war's end to enjoy expensive patented synthetic pure penicillin.
Dawson was full of moral fervour over his idea that the existing non-synthetic non-pure natural penicillin was already 'good enough to safely save lives' and this PD material should be made available to all, even Neutral Nation civilians and enemy combatants, as a potent concrete example that the Allies' Atlantic Charter was not, in fact, mere cant.
The dying Dr Dawson's moral fervour must have been contagious because it is far beyond a coincidence that so many of the key players in the wartime effort to promote natural-penicillin-for-all had close personal contact with him.
Eventually the Allied were forced to reverse horses on wartime penicillin .
They began to mass produce natural penicillin and then to publicize widely that they were flying it all over the world to save dying children from all sorts of nations.
Children-loving people, many of whom had been sitting on their hands in the battle against the Axis, couldn't help but contrast this with Hitler's well known efforts to kill children...
And it was - for them.
Everyone else inside Germany, 'unfit' Aryan Germans and 'non-Aryan' Germans alike, starved to see that the fit Aryans got nothing but the best.
Pure Auschwitz
Recall that American POW (and later famous author) Kurt Vonnegut was employed in the very last days of the war as a slave-worker at a Dresden area factory, preparing vitamin enriched malt syrup for pregnant fit Aryan moms so that future baby fit Aryans would have the best possible start in life.
There weren't too many of them left by 1945, but these young saving remnants, the most precious assets the Nazis figured they had yet produced, would have the best care and attention possible.
There weren't many of them for many reasons, some obvious while others are less so.
Among the obvious : that many children were among the Allied bombing casualties and the fact that so many young German dads were away (or dead) in the war and thus unavailable to breed.
In addition, the Nazi regime's institution of a near total end to legal migration into Germany further reduced the pool of potential young parents.
The less obvious reason for the big shortfall in baby Germans was the official (and the later and even bigger 'unofficial') Aktion T4 effort to secretly murder all unfit Aryan citizens and all non-Aryan German citizens (Jews, Romas, Slavs), an effort intent on killing everybody in those groups, from babies to the elderly.
Since the loose term 'unfit' could include anybody who had a physical or mental handicap no matter how slight and who lacked wealthy and powerful family and friends, this offered a near endless pool of genes to eliminate.
In practise, the term unfit was further expanded to include the work shy, the whiners no one really liked, any girl that too obviously enjoyed sex, alcoholics, petty criminals, people with TB or any number of non-inherited infectious diseases.
On and on and on.
By contrast, the hardcore Aryan opponents of the Nazi regime (almost none of these 'unfits' were ever even mild opponents), such as socialists, communists and trade unionists, were usually sent to 'hard work and few rations' concentration camps for periods of time.
By no means did all die there, let alone were murdered forthright upon admission like the unfit.
This allows us to see the highly unusual course of modernity thought as revealed in its ultimate version with Hitler's Nazis : it feared 'the weak' far more than it feared 'the strong'.
So, we find a wartime regime that fully displayed Modernity's self consciously rigorous application of K-selection thought, the likes of which hadn't even been seen in Spartan times.
A regime that hedged its best assets, as it saw them (the fit Aryan children of fit Aryan parents), making them as safe as could be within well built bomb shelters and well supplied with the best of food and nursing care.
And it then ruthlessly killed off all its worst assets : ruthless draining its gene pool and betting the farm and the entire future of Germany, on just this one narrow throw of the genetic dice.
Impure Manhattan
Against resistance from most of America's scientific class, who also espoused, like the Nazis, the fashionable mainstream scientific disbelief in the virtues of human diversity to meet an uncertain future, Dr Dawson's penicillin project in wartime Manhattan survived as a near perfect example of r-selection thinking.
Dr Dawson welcomed 1940 Manhattan's existing huge and diverse gene pool, brought about by external and internal immigration in the proceeding decades.
He was very far from wanting to draining it down to a tiny select elect, a saving remnant, as wartime Germany was trying to do.
Instead Dawson fought hard to try and ensure that none of Manhattan's handicapped members died from official neglect, murdered at a stroke of a pen by scientific death panels just using the war effort, just like the Nazis did, to do what they couldn't get away with in peacetime.
Dawson believed, contrary to the currently fashionable scientific consensus, that based on his studies in bacterial diversity, that over the long term, evolution rewarded species with the biggest gene pool and the widest diversity.
So when the German medical establishment tried to kill off all of Germany's unfit, an activity that went on even after the war right under the occupying American troops noses, the country permanently lost so much human diversity, so much human potential.
We obviously can't directly measure the loss - that potential human potential ended with all those individuals' deaths.
But, indirectly, we can note the tremendous pre-war German success in all of the wide realm of ideas and culture and compare that with its post-war relative lack of success.
We can also think of some of today's world-changing ideas that would have never seen the light of day if the Nazis had conquered Britain and had murdered Alan Turing for being gay and Stephen Hawking for being handicapped.
Dawson unexpectedly won his argument, forcing the hugely powerful Allied coalition to reverse their position on the distribution of wartime penicillin.
Originally only enough was to be made during the war to see that lightly wounded Allied frontline troops could be quickly returned to combat so the service-deferred children of the elite didn't have to take their place.
Everyone else would have to wait to the war's end to enjoy expensive patented synthetic pure penicillin.
Dawson was full of moral fervour over his idea that the existing non-synthetic non-pure natural penicillin was already 'good enough to safely save lives' and this PD material should be made available to all, even Neutral Nation civilians and enemy combatants, as a potent concrete example that the Allies' Atlantic Charter was not, in fact, mere cant.
The dying Dr Dawson's moral fervour must have been contagious because it is far beyond a coincidence that so many of the key players in the wartime effort to promote natural-penicillin-for-all had close personal contact with him.
Eventually the Allied were forced to reverse horses on wartime penicillin .
They began to mass produce natural penicillin and then to publicize widely that they were flying it all over the world to save dying children from all sorts of nations.
Children-loving people, many of whom had been sitting on their hands in the battle against the Axis, couldn't help but contrast this with Hitler's well known efforts to kill children...
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Evolutionists' mental limits : why they never asked when first minerals evolved
Ironically, mainstream evolutionists weren't (and still aren't !) really comfortable about Evolution's ever dynamic change and diversity : they fear it and seek, intellectually, to reduce it to as small amount as possible, at least inside their minds.
So not only did they claim that any new biological species must take millions of years to emerge, they also clung to Sir Charles Lyell's comforting myth that even slow geological activities were the same in the distant past, and will be in the distant future, as they are today : a soothing basic stability.
So : all the minerals (basically, crystalline compounds) had always been everywhere and always in the universe, apparently, and always would be : they stood outside evolution, change, time.
So minerals were not thought of as temporal, rare and fragile like Life and Biology but rather as always existing and universal : endlessly abundant and impossible to make, break or totally consume.
Sub sub atomic particles, alone, perhaps fit that description.
But even pure elemental atoms emerged very very slowly over time after the Big Bang, birthed by the death of successions of stars exploding out ever heavier (in terms of atomic weight) elements.
But other than the early diamond crystals, all of the Universe & Earth's actual minerals came much much later.
Most of the Earth's almost 5000 known minerals happened step by step over time through combined chemical, physical and finally biological processes interacting in feedback systems.
Most importantly, most of these minerals never seemed to have emerged at all on any other planets than Earth, because those planets lacked all of Earth's seemingly unique combination of rare features, a few among them being a magnetic field shielding effect, tectonic activity and Life itself.
Even where microbes, animals and plans don't do much, directly, to create new essential minerals for humanity, they still tended to be key in producing ores - which are energy-efficient concentrations of essential minerals.
Because while gold is very abundant in ocean water, we humans simply can't afford to extract it, one atom at a time --- ore 'bodies' are the host bodies that we parasite humans must mostly prey upon.
And often those mineral ore bodies were microbe created.
Or consider that the fact that the ore bodies of hydrocarbon rich biological-oriented oil and coal were one time accidents and mistakes and are not endlessly abundant energy sources that the Earth is still making and will always be making.
If mainstream evolutionists had realized that the minerals essential to human civilizations were dependent on fragile Earthly life and won't be found on planets like Mars and Venus, they might not be so cavalier about how they mistreat Life on Earth, confident that they can always make oxygen and food 'out of rock'...
So not only did they claim that any new biological species must take millions of years to emerge, they also clung to Sir Charles Lyell's comforting myth that even slow geological activities were the same in the distant past, and will be in the distant future, as they are today : a soothing basic stability.
So : all the minerals (basically, crystalline compounds) had always been everywhere and always in the universe, apparently, and always would be : they stood outside evolution, change, time.
So minerals were not thought of as temporal, rare and fragile like Life and Biology but rather as always existing and universal : endlessly abundant and impossible to make, break or totally consume.
Sub sub atomic particles, alone, perhaps fit that description.
But even pure elemental atoms emerged very very slowly over time after the Big Bang, birthed by the death of successions of stars exploding out ever heavier (in terms of atomic weight) elements.
But other than the early diamond crystals, all of the Universe & Earth's actual minerals came much much later.
Most of the Earth's almost 5000 known minerals happened step by step over time through combined chemical, physical and finally biological processes interacting in feedback systems.
Most importantly, most of these minerals never seemed to have emerged at all on any other planets than Earth, because those planets lacked all of Earth's seemingly unique combination of rare features, a few among them being a magnetic field shielding effect, tectonic activity and Life itself.
Even where microbes, animals and plans don't do much, directly, to create new essential minerals for humanity, they still tended to be key in producing ores - which are energy-efficient concentrations of essential minerals.
Because while gold is very abundant in ocean water, we humans simply can't afford to extract it, one atom at a time --- ore 'bodies' are the host bodies that we parasite humans must mostly prey upon.
And often those mineral ore bodies were microbe created.
Or consider that the fact that the ore bodies of hydrocarbon rich biological-oriented oil and coal were one time accidents and mistakes and are not endlessly abundant energy sources that the Earth is still making and will always be making.
If mainstream evolutionists had realized that the minerals essential to human civilizations were dependent on fragile Earthly life and won't be found on planets like Mars and Venus, they might not be so cavalier about how they mistreat Life on Earth, confident that they can always make oxygen and food 'out of rock'...
Monday, July 11, 2016
"Everybody always talks about the lethal chamber but nobody ever does anything about it" Until Hitler
Almost everybody who was middle class and progressive did indeed once earnestly and openly talk about using lethal chambers to mass murder all the handicapped degenerate defective deviant working class poor.
But when Mr Hitler dared to actually did so, those very same people rounded on him like a ton of bricks.
No, Hitler isn't lying in the innermost circle of Hell - that is reserved for all these hypocrites.....
But when Mr Hitler dared to actually did so, those very same people rounded on him like a ton of bricks.
No, Hitler isn't lying in the innermost circle of Hell - that is reserved for all these hypocrites.....
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Eugenics covers the evolutionary waterfront : feeble yet fecund - strong yet sterile
No matter what kind internal inconsistency or awkward external evidence flies up in their faces, supporters of that ever elastic science Eugenics (big shoutout to J Carroll !) always seem to find a ready explanation, helped by the fact that their's is a very undemanding faith.
Darwin's Evolution said that the fittest species & individuals in Nature were those that produced the most descendants --- and that humanity was fully part of Nature.
Eugenicists fully agreed with that definition - until they had to explain to themselves why they also believed that the 'strongest' humans were becoming practically sterile and that the most 'feeble' humans were having the most children.
Then it turned out that, to eugenicists, humanity was - actually, ahem - both fully in Nature and fully out of it : an atheist echo perhaps of 'Son of Man but also Son of God' ?
So eugenicists decided that Mother Nature demanded humans selectively thrown out all the humanitarian bits of human civilization, while keeping keep the other good stuff, like automobiles and telephones.
Eugenicists were even willing to keep civilization's hospitals - but only for those able to pay for them.
For those who couldn't afford hospital care, these feeble-because-poor were to be figuratively banished to live out in the dark wild woods, there to be winnowed out of existence by Mother Nature's tough love mantra of 'root hog or die'.
Civilization, the eugenicists claimed, only kept the feeble alive because of misguided Christian concepts like charity to the weak ---- and then the ingrates dared to breed like rabbits.
Then eugenicists claimed that modern civilization also offered such seductive temptations to the best of men and women that they tended to enjoy themselves rather than make babies to secure the future of 'the race'.
This explanation satisfied the undemanding eugenicists but in reality, Darwin's Theory of Evolution was of the universal and eternal sort and did not really tolerate species deciding to step in and out of its dictates on mere whim.
So Dr Henry Dawson wondered (and wondered productively : see penicillin and DNA) why the microbes, supposedly the very feeblest of beings and those who should therefore be at the very back of the race for reproductive success, were actually the most fecund of beings.
They were hardly being kept alive only thanks to misguided Christian charity, were they ........
Darwin's Evolution said that the fittest species & individuals in Nature were those that produced the most descendants --- and that humanity was fully part of Nature.
Eugenicists fully agreed with that definition - until they had to explain to themselves why they also believed that the 'strongest' humans were becoming practically sterile and that the most 'feeble' humans were having the most children.
Then it turned out that, to eugenicists, humanity was - actually, ahem - both fully in Nature and fully out of it : an atheist echo perhaps of 'Son of Man but also Son of God' ?
So eugenicists decided that Mother Nature demanded humans selectively thrown out all the humanitarian bits of human civilization, while keeping keep the other good stuff, like automobiles and telephones.
Eugenicists were even willing to keep civilization's hospitals - but only for those able to pay for them.
For those who couldn't afford hospital care, these feeble-because-poor were to be figuratively banished to live out in the dark wild woods, there to be winnowed out of existence by Mother Nature's tough love mantra of 'root hog or die'.
Civilization, the eugenicists claimed, only kept the feeble alive because of misguided Christian concepts like charity to the weak ---- and then the ingrates dared to breed like rabbits.
Then eugenicists claimed that modern civilization also offered such seductive temptations to the best of men and women that they tended to enjoy themselves rather than make babies to secure the future of 'the race'.
This explanation satisfied the undemanding eugenicists but in reality, Darwin's Theory of Evolution was of the universal and eternal sort and did not really tolerate species deciding to step in and out of its dictates on mere whim.
So Dr Henry Dawson wondered (and wondered productively : see penicillin and DNA) why the microbes, supposedly the very feeblest of beings and those who should therefore be at the very back of the race for reproductive success, were actually the most fecund of beings.
They were hardly being kept alive only thanks to misguided Christian charity, were they ........
Saturday, July 9, 2016
To aristocrats, all combat, if not war itself, was inherently 'fair' before advent of crossbow archery and guns
When efficient killing meant having to use a sword, axe, club or spear at very close (hand to hand) range, aristocrats ( aka WASPs) felt that combat was inherently 'fair' and not 'sneaky' ---- no wonder, given that the likely victors were inherently taller and stronger than their opponents.
People who were inherently bigger, taller, stronger --- like the very well fed protein-stuffed aristocracy - loved this form of combat, because they always won.
(Today a close form of this sort of combat it is only found in contact sports - which aristocrats and WASPs also love.)
But all too soon peasant soldier archers ,with very small bodies but employing wind-up crossbows, and while safe behind distant rocks or trees, could pierce the best of aristocratic armour from long distances.
Low tech peasant rebels often simply combined plentiful farm tools into becoming deadly poleaxes, again multiplying their small strength and their short reach to deadly effective against their taller and bigger aristocratic opponents.
To the suddenly much threatened big tall aristocracy, these deadly small guys were fighting 'dirty', 'sneaky' - terms their descendants still use to describe the North American aboriginals (or guerillas everywhere).
Today's M-16 type weapon is the ultimate combat equalizer : a light weight rifle with little recoil that fires a rapid spray of light but lethally high speed bullets such that even a small child can use it to kill a giant of an adult man at a distance, from behind a wall or tree.
But when a standing (white) policeman, with a gun already drawn, confronts a seated (minority) car driver with no gun at all or with gun in pocket, fighting is finally 'fair' again......
People who were inherently bigger, taller, stronger --- like the very well fed protein-stuffed aristocracy - loved this form of combat, because they always won.
(Today a close form of this sort of combat it is only found in contact sports - which aristocrats and WASPs also love.)
But all too soon peasant soldier archers ,with very small bodies but employing wind-up crossbows, and while safe behind distant rocks or trees, could pierce the best of aristocratic armour from long distances.
Low tech peasant rebels often simply combined plentiful farm tools into becoming deadly poleaxes, again multiplying their small strength and their short reach to deadly effective against their taller and bigger aristocratic opponents.
To the suddenly much threatened big tall aristocracy, these deadly small guys were fighting 'dirty', 'sneaky' - terms their descendants still use to describe the North American aboriginals (or guerillas everywhere).
Today's M-16 type weapon is the ultimate combat equalizer : a light weight rifle with little recoil that fires a rapid spray of light but lethally high speed bullets such that even a small child can use it to kill a giant of an adult man at a distance, from behind a wall or tree.
But when a standing (white) policeman, with a gun already drawn, confronts a seated (minority) car driver with no gun at all or with gun in pocket, fighting is finally 'fair' again......
blacks on buses rarely killed by police : too pitiful or just too many witnesses ?
I have only been to America a very few times and for very short periods of time.
But since I love bus travel, each time I rode public transit and closely observed the sort of people about to ride it.
Today, in light of all the recent shootings in America involving black car drivers at 'routine' (quote unquote) traffic stops, that experience has left me reflecting.
Given the relatively greater proportion of blacks and other minorities who ride public transit, compared to whites, I have a theory why then are so few blacks and minorities are killed on buses compared to those riding around in cars.
I believe that the sight of a young black/brown/red man in a real nice car arouses unconscious envy and anger in us whites in a way that simply isn't reflected in the way that most of us whites feel nothing (but pity) when viewing (usually poor) people forced to 'put up' with public transit.
The best advice anyone has found to give black people when confronted by the police is to submit totally and abjectly, to think and act just like a slave from back in the 'good old days'.
Because every black-white traffic stop is in danger of ending up as an unconscious re-run of the Civil War.
Since so many ardent car drivers feel that riding public transit is a form of slavery, perhaps merely being seen riding a bus is abject submission enough for minority passengers.
Or could it just be that public transit situations simply offers too many witnesses ?
But since I love bus travel, each time I rode public transit and closely observed the sort of people about to ride it.
Today, in light of all the recent shootings in America involving black car drivers at 'routine' (quote unquote) traffic stops, that experience has left me reflecting.
Given the relatively greater proportion of blacks and other minorities who ride public transit, compared to whites, I have a theory why then are so few blacks and minorities are killed on buses compared to those riding around in cars.
I believe that the sight of a young black/brown/red man in a real nice car arouses unconscious envy and anger in us whites in a way that simply isn't reflected in the way that most of us whites feel nothing (but pity) when viewing (usually poor) people forced to 'put up' with public transit.
The best advice anyone has found to give black people when confronted by the police is to submit totally and abjectly, to think and act just like a slave from back in the 'good old days'.
Because every black-white traffic stop is in danger of ending up as an unconscious re-run of the Civil War.
Since so many ardent car drivers feel that riding public transit is a form of slavery, perhaps merely being seen riding a bus is abject submission enough for minority passengers.
Or could it just be that public transit situations simply offers too many witnesses ?
Thursday, July 7, 2016
Masculine Modernity result of shorter, less tiring, work hours ?
Over the last hundred and fifty years, the work day for most of us in the West has gotten (a) much shorter (b) much less physically tiring and (c) much more financially rewarding.
And this in turn, has produced an ongoing crisis for those who used to have near-exclusive control over reproducing Western Hegemony : our (mostly male) rentier class.
(Note that I don't include all 'the rich' when I say rentier class --- it can be very hard work earning a high income via the hands-on running of a factory. I mean rentiers are those of the leisure class who live -and live well - from the income produced by sinecures, investments or land rents.)
Back in the 1850s, earning your daily bread, outside or inside the home, was so physically demanding and took up up so much of the day, that only a very tiny minority had the time, money and energy to spend on maintaining the existing hegemony that made that minority so privileged.
Obviously the too-poor and too-tired majority did even less to revise or seriously threaten that hegemony.
Most of the majority was too tired in fact to read, let alone write a newspaper article - even if they could have afforded to read any of the (deliberately highly taxed) publications.
Enter modernization : the unexpected consequences thrown up by the invention and introduction of more and more machines to supplement the work that humans and animals used to do alone.
Over time, twelve hour days and seven day weeks, pittance wages, and back breaking labour were replaced by 40 hour five day weeks, with much higher relative wages, and after far less physically demanding effort.
The majority now potentially had the time, energy and income to read about (and write about), even organize against and agitate about the minority that ran everything to their advantage.
Potentially only - because all this was depending on modernization's invention of machines being as successful among the 'tools of communication' as it had been among the potential receivers and senders of communication.
Once, to influence even as few as a mere hundred people, scattered all over a nation or continent, one had to write one hundred individual letters (or pay a copyist to make ninety nine copies) and then pay - literally - a small fortune to have them delivered far away.
And partly to my main point that modernization's machines so reduced physical labour as to free it up for hegemony-threatening activities, the mere daily act of writing of that many accurate copies, rapidly enough to be efficient, required extremely tiring physical effort, if only in the arms.
Printing presses, from the biggest down to even something as basic as the mimeo machine, when combined with very cheap, rapid and efficient mail services changed all that, particularly in the area of print communication and influence.
It was no easier trying to influence people by means of your voice instead of your pen, in the recent past.
In the era before radio, TV and news reels, in fact before microphones and PA systems, a speaking tour to agitate for change meant having the time & means to travel widely by slow stage coach, along with possessing a naturally strong piercing voice (that still wore out permanently, over time, from the stress of projecting your voice).
The travelling alone was almost as physically taxing as the effort to be heard and understood by large crowds.
Many people recall that making records, as recently as one hundred years ago, might mean recording the same song over and over in a studio all day long, each complete rendering before the acoustic horn becoming just one record for just one customer.
That took great physical strength, and only a few had the strength to have both a voice big enough and the sheer amounts of lung endurance that made a success of singing that same song before a half dozen acoustic horns at a time.
Few of us remember that once, if that same singing star wanted to give away even just forty publicity photos, they had to pose (bone still) for fifteen minutes for every single copy - a very tiring ten hour day to make just 40 early photographs.
Singers can be forever grateful for the pressing plants' large rooms, filled with women working record stampers, that could easily make 20,000 copies each eight hour shift , every day, forever, all alike, from a one time recording of a song.
Similarly, the ability to easily mass produce endless photos or movies from a single negative copy of a still photo or motion film made the physical work of both star and technician much much easier.
Negative copies of photo negatives and stamper copies of record stampers, both sent overseas through the mails, allowed factories all over the world to combine mass production with the ease of local distribution.
Mass produced newspaper, magazine and book soon had halftone reproductions of photos, bringing accurate and vivid images of the distant world to everyone, for a negligible cost.
Via the new penny dailies, that meant even the very bottom (and perhaps even illiterate) percentage of the population could easily view these images of a world far beyond their ability to travel, via a much passed around newspaper copy.
When producing multiple copies of words, images and sounds thus become much physically easier (and thus much cheaper), it also means that their customers needn't find the time, energy and money to travel great distances to hear and see people, actions and sounds in person.
Soon all this resulted in a circular feedback system between writer and reader.
Ordinary working class readers, a bit better off and a lot less tired by their labours than they used to be, working eight hours instead of twelve hours a day, finally had time to read and reflect upon the radical thoughts of once impossibly distant writers, writers then usually at least one social class above themselves.
Those thoughts from a writer two thousand miles away were now easily conveyed into their living room by cheap books and newspapers.
In response, some working class readers became writers in turn and sent forth their results out into the world via small print runs of pamphlets and low circulation journals.
All this resulted in stronger trade unions, in demands for votes for the working class, talk of socialism and anarchism -- all as a result of technology making both work less tiring and leisure activities like the reading and the writing of cheap pamphlets much cheaper.
Both effects of modernization's machines and technology (less tired workers and cheaper communication tools) worked to challenge the hegemony of the rentier class.
Women were also beginning to see that ready made foodstuffs, clothes and cleaning supplies made domestic activities a little bit less demanding of energy and time.
Other women were already entering totally new areas of the workforce, as machines made more and more work activities less physically demanding and requiring much less absolute strength.
That last requirement was especially a physical barrier, even with the best of laws supporting women's right to work at any job.
For if we still to 'hand puddled' all our iron and steel, almost no women (and very few men) would be able to lift and hammer 80 pound lumps of molten iron all day, over the course of twelve hour days and seven day weeks -- even the strongest puddlers rarely survived past their thirties.
Like all working class individuals, women of other classes now had the freed up time and energy to think new thoughts about women's rights ------- and the ease of communication to get those ideas widely talked up, again threatening the mostly male rentier class's previous hegemony.
Ditto for the writing and speaking out of a handful of middle class writers and activists, members of the poorest and most persecuted minorities, who again threatened the hegemony of the male (always white and often Protestant) rentier class.
This post isn't about to rehash the resulting push back from the 1890s elite against women, the working class, deviants, the handicapped, minorities, immigrants, radicals of all sorts - you know that already.
But I do want to look at an ignored aspect of that self conscious counter-reaction against these unexpected consequences of the unconscious actions of modernization.
Given that the modest physical effort required to be a successful rentier was no less in 1890 than it was in 1850, why were the rentiers so obsessed with hard sweating lower-class-like physical effort (sports, hunting, exploring, conquering) just when hard physical effort was rapidly decreasing in all the rest of society ?
I think that maintaining the western hegemony had actually always been dependent on near exclusive access to two things, one intellectual and the other physical and modernization's machines had opened up both to all.
I have already talked about the rentiers' once near exclusive access to the best and most expensive tools of communication.
But they once also had near exclusive access to the best and most expensive tools of physical violence.
In the bad old days, when violence was a hands on affair, the much better fed and much under-worked rentier (aristocracy) class were definitely taller and heaver than the underfed little peasants.
They also had the money to for suits of armour, large tall fast horses and long range weapons like lances together with swords made of the finest sharpest steel.
They could intimate both their peasants/employees and their spouses.
But violence gradually shifted away from the need to be both long armed and strong to best opponents in a sword fight.
Now the revolver was personal violence's great equalizer , with a small woman able to 'fire and forget' a lethal missile from a distance well beyond the reach of even the biggest man.
Disputes among the powerful in any case were no longer settled by physical jousts but rather in courtrooms where neither opponents could even speak directly to each other.
Instead their advocates, perhaps tiny weedy men or worse, a woman - jousted verbally in a situation where physical strength mattered not at all , compared to a quick intelligence and a great memory for the facts.
Similarly, the case of warfare, by the 1890s military leaders no longer needed to be particularly physical strong or even very fit.
No longer did they personally led relatively small armies, sword in hand, from on top of a horse in the very front lines.
Instead they plotted out their moves on a big map at a big HQ ten miles to the rear while hundreds of runners and telephone lines conveyed their orders to the extended frontline to the thousands of officers and hundreds of thousands of enlisted men of a modern mass army.
Death in war was increasingly arriving from shells hurled from thousands of yards away, directed by pesky little middle class officers with a good education in maths.
Anyone with intelligence could sense that the calvary, the key military role traditionally reserved for the rentier aristocracy, was increasingly become useless in modern war.
The hegemony of the rentier aristocracy was threatened on two fronts : their exclusive access to the intellectual and mechanical tools of hegemony-maintaining communication and their exclusive access to the most powerful forms of personal violence.
Their counter-attack on the communications front was to allow that anyone could, of course, speak on an issue, but that only experts - professionals - academics, with many years of highly expensive education at the best schools, had anything useful to say on any issue.
Post the 1840s, with its their Reform Acts and Corn Laws, the aristocracy realized that giving their eldest son the land or the other sons a career in the military or state church was no longer the best way to remain influential.
The unseemly rise of famous, much honored, wealthy untutored geniuses in science-oriented business was best repulsed by honoring meritocracy, in the breach.
Charles Darwin was an example of this : his social rise based on personal 'merit' wasn't hurt by his twenty five years worth of the world's best, most expensive, education.
So : tutors from birth before various expensive boarding schools, expensive scientific equipment as toys for hobbies, scientific Grand Tours, heavily subsidizing their children's unbroken attendance at the top universities from BSc to Post Doc fellowship.
Little wonder that even the well to do soon felt they could only 'afford' a few children !
Next, trial and error technology, despite all its useful and hopeful discoveries had to be dethroned from its currently exalted social standing.
Instead, Natural Philosophy, re-badged as basic-pure-fundamental-academic Science, had to be proclaimed as the key non-widget making activity, before technology could do its useful widget work.
(Ninety nine percent of the time, it is exactly the other way around : trial and error technology improves the instruments that allows basic science to see ever further or deeper or smaller vistas.)
All across the disciplines, basic (above the hoi polloi) researchers were exalted over the applied practitioners grubbing around with clients and customers.
Thus allowing the children of aristocrats of the world to move en masse and with the dignity appropriate to their station, off the land and into the better universities.
One of their first actions was in proclaiming a philosophy , Darwinism, that said science had proved that not all humans are equal, so don't listen, any longer, to the humanistic ideas from the less-equal humans like women, the working class, the colored races, etc.
But dealing with the fact that the most unique characteristic of males, their superior absolute strength, was becoming useless in the workplace or in situations of violence, was not so easily solved.
The solution, I suggest, was to escape into fantasy, fantasies expensive enough to again be restricted to the well-heeled and under-worked.
The rentier class invented social situations (games, sports, hobbies, vacations, even small wars) where the rules were arranged to appear to give superior physical strength and stamina (of well fed wealthy males) an advantage.
In fact, even here, machines crept in to ensure the game was fixed.
Teddy Roosevelt roughed it in the Dakota for a few months, spending half the time in New York City, all the while pretending to be a true pioneer rancher, albeit with tons of money to buy the best machinery - worked usually by his many hired hands.
He was never in any real danger from the elements, the Indians or starvation.
This in no way duplicated the sheer hard work of ordinary pioneers expending much hard labour instead of small fortunes of cash - yet he somehow got away with claiming he pioneered in a 'tougher' way than the lower classes were capable of.
Similarly he had a vast number of black servants to carry him in comfort and set up his kills, together with the best guns in existence, to shoot all the big animals he shot on his African safari.
He was never in any danger from big animals.
Many of the original explorers did starve to death or drown but by the 19th century, 'explorers' (not really finding anything truly unknown) generally went with lots of the best possible of equipment.
They were usually in little real danger from the elements. The Scott effort to the South Pole is famous precisely because it is the rare example of a well funded exploring effort going badly wrong.
Imperialism became a vast outdoor tame sport as huge rich advance nations selectively went after tiny bits of other continents with no access to advanced weaponry.
In this century, think of the 'wars' against Grenada and Panama.
Again, the Boer War, along with the later Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts, show what can go wrong when fake wars turn real.
Boxing - a bloody but ultimately phoney conflict with fists - was heavily promoted by well to do males from the late 19th century onwards, despite the fact that few opponents from the real worlds of war or crime would be sporting to risk a standup boxing match when they could shoot you from a distance, safe behind a rock.
Similar with many early team sports - they were violent but because they needed expensive gear and expensive training facilities, only college kids could partake in this form of high status violence.
Feats that supposedly required high strength violence counted almost all women out, together with many underfed undersized men from the poorer classes.
If those supposed feats of strength also required lots of money or access to facilities that could be restricted to the elite, they could do a lot to restore a male well to do oriented hegemony.
No Negro or woman was ever going to get official US Navy support in the years between the 1880s and the 1980s, to lead an exploration effort towards the North Pole, for example.
WASP men simply had to be seen to be doing all the 'exciting' 'daring' 'bold' things in the desert, jungle, snows,etc to prove they should also exclusively run the culture of their own nations.
And to to think all of this began when machines began making the work of the poorest classes much easier ....
And this in turn, has produced an ongoing crisis for those who used to have near-exclusive control over reproducing Western Hegemony : our (mostly male) rentier class.
(Note that I don't include all 'the rich' when I say rentier class --- it can be very hard work earning a high income via the hands-on running of a factory. I mean rentiers are those of the leisure class who live -and live well - from the income produced by sinecures, investments or land rents.)
Back in the 1850s, earning your daily bread, outside or inside the home, was so physically demanding and took up up so much of the day, that only a very tiny minority had the time, money and energy to spend on maintaining the existing hegemony that made that minority so privileged.
Obviously the too-poor and too-tired majority did even less to revise or seriously threaten that hegemony.
Most of the majority was too tired in fact to read, let alone write a newspaper article - even if they could have afforded to read any of the (deliberately highly taxed) publications.
Enter modernization : the unexpected consequences thrown up by the invention and introduction of more and more machines to supplement the work that humans and animals used to do alone.
Over time, twelve hour days and seven day weeks, pittance wages, and back breaking labour were replaced by 40 hour five day weeks, with much higher relative wages, and after far less physically demanding effort.
The majority now potentially had the time, energy and income to read about (and write about), even organize against and agitate about the minority that ran everything to their advantage.
Potentially only - because all this was depending on modernization's invention of machines being as successful among the 'tools of communication' as it had been among the potential receivers and senders of communication.
Once, to influence even as few as a mere hundred people, scattered all over a nation or continent, one had to write one hundred individual letters (or pay a copyist to make ninety nine copies) and then pay - literally - a small fortune to have them delivered far away.
And partly to my main point that modernization's machines so reduced physical labour as to free it up for hegemony-threatening activities, the mere daily act of writing of that many accurate copies, rapidly enough to be efficient, required extremely tiring physical effort, if only in the arms.
Printing presses, from the biggest down to even something as basic as the mimeo machine, when combined with very cheap, rapid and efficient mail services changed all that, particularly in the area of print communication and influence.
It was no easier trying to influence people by means of your voice instead of your pen, in the recent past.
In the era before radio, TV and news reels, in fact before microphones and PA systems, a speaking tour to agitate for change meant having the time & means to travel widely by slow stage coach, along with possessing a naturally strong piercing voice (that still wore out permanently, over time, from the stress of projecting your voice).
The travelling alone was almost as physically taxing as the effort to be heard and understood by large crowds.
Many people recall that making records, as recently as one hundred years ago, might mean recording the same song over and over in a studio all day long, each complete rendering before the acoustic horn becoming just one record for just one customer.
That took great physical strength, and only a few had the strength to have both a voice big enough and the sheer amounts of lung endurance that made a success of singing that same song before a half dozen acoustic horns at a time.
Few of us remember that once, if that same singing star wanted to give away even just forty publicity photos, they had to pose (bone still) for fifteen minutes for every single copy - a very tiring ten hour day to make just 40 early photographs.
Singers can be forever grateful for the pressing plants' large rooms, filled with women working record stampers, that could easily make 20,000 copies each eight hour shift , every day, forever, all alike, from a one time recording of a song.
Similarly, the ability to easily mass produce endless photos or movies from a single negative copy of a still photo or motion film made the physical work of both star and technician much much easier.
Negative copies of photo negatives and stamper copies of record stampers, both sent overseas through the mails, allowed factories all over the world to combine mass production with the ease of local distribution.
Mass produced newspaper, magazine and book soon had halftone reproductions of photos, bringing accurate and vivid images of the distant world to everyone, for a negligible cost.
Via the new penny dailies, that meant even the very bottom (and perhaps even illiterate) percentage of the population could easily view these images of a world far beyond their ability to travel, via a much passed around newspaper copy.
When producing multiple copies of words, images and sounds thus become much physically easier (and thus much cheaper), it also means that their customers needn't find the time, energy and money to travel great distances to hear and see people, actions and sounds in person.
Soon all this resulted in a circular feedback system between writer and reader.
Ordinary working class readers, a bit better off and a lot less tired by their labours than they used to be, working eight hours instead of twelve hours a day, finally had time to read and reflect upon the radical thoughts of once impossibly distant writers, writers then usually at least one social class above themselves.
Those thoughts from a writer two thousand miles away were now easily conveyed into their living room by cheap books and newspapers.
In response, some working class readers became writers in turn and sent forth their results out into the world via small print runs of pamphlets and low circulation journals.
All this resulted in stronger trade unions, in demands for votes for the working class, talk of socialism and anarchism -- all as a result of technology making both work less tiring and leisure activities like the reading and the writing of cheap pamphlets much cheaper.
Both effects of modernization's machines and technology (less tired workers and cheaper communication tools) worked to challenge the hegemony of the rentier class.
Women were also beginning to see that ready made foodstuffs, clothes and cleaning supplies made domestic activities a little bit less demanding of energy and time.
Other women were already entering totally new areas of the workforce, as machines made more and more work activities less physically demanding and requiring much less absolute strength.
That last requirement was especially a physical barrier, even with the best of laws supporting women's right to work at any job.
For if we still to 'hand puddled' all our iron and steel, almost no women (and very few men) would be able to lift and hammer 80 pound lumps of molten iron all day, over the course of twelve hour days and seven day weeks -- even the strongest puddlers rarely survived past their thirties.
Like all working class individuals, women of other classes now had the freed up time and energy to think new thoughts about women's rights ------- and the ease of communication to get those ideas widely talked up, again threatening the mostly male rentier class's previous hegemony.
Ditto for the writing and speaking out of a handful of middle class writers and activists, members of the poorest and most persecuted minorities, who again threatened the hegemony of the male (always white and often Protestant) rentier class.
This post isn't about to rehash the resulting push back from the 1890s elite against women, the working class, deviants, the handicapped, minorities, immigrants, radicals of all sorts - you know that already.
But I do want to look at an ignored aspect of that self conscious counter-reaction against these unexpected consequences of the unconscious actions of modernization.
Given that the modest physical effort required to be a successful rentier was no less in 1890 than it was in 1850, why were the rentiers so obsessed with hard sweating lower-class-like physical effort (sports, hunting, exploring, conquering) just when hard physical effort was rapidly decreasing in all the rest of society ?
I think that maintaining the western hegemony had actually always been dependent on near exclusive access to two things, one intellectual and the other physical and modernization's machines had opened up both to all.
I have already talked about the rentiers' once near exclusive access to the best and most expensive tools of communication.
But they once also had near exclusive access to the best and most expensive tools of physical violence.
In the bad old days, when violence was a hands on affair, the much better fed and much under-worked rentier (aristocracy) class were definitely taller and heaver than the underfed little peasants.
They also had the money to for suits of armour, large tall fast horses and long range weapons like lances together with swords made of the finest sharpest steel.
They could intimate both their peasants/employees and their spouses.
But violence gradually shifted away from the need to be both long armed and strong to best opponents in a sword fight.
Now the revolver was personal violence's great equalizer , with a small woman able to 'fire and forget' a lethal missile from a distance well beyond the reach of even the biggest man.
Disputes among the powerful in any case were no longer settled by physical jousts but rather in courtrooms where neither opponents could even speak directly to each other.
Instead their advocates, perhaps tiny weedy men or worse, a woman - jousted verbally in a situation where physical strength mattered not at all , compared to a quick intelligence and a great memory for the facts.
Similarly, the case of warfare, by the 1890s military leaders no longer needed to be particularly physical strong or even very fit.
No longer did they personally led relatively small armies, sword in hand, from on top of a horse in the very front lines.
Instead they plotted out their moves on a big map at a big HQ ten miles to the rear while hundreds of runners and telephone lines conveyed their orders to the extended frontline to the thousands of officers and hundreds of thousands of enlisted men of a modern mass army.
Death in war was increasingly arriving from shells hurled from thousands of yards away, directed by pesky little middle class officers with a good education in maths.
Anyone with intelligence could sense that the calvary, the key military role traditionally reserved for the rentier aristocracy, was increasingly become useless in modern war.
The hegemony of the rentier aristocracy was threatened on two fronts : their exclusive access to the intellectual and mechanical tools of hegemony-maintaining communication and their exclusive access to the most powerful forms of personal violence.
Their counter-attack on the communications front was to allow that anyone could, of course, speak on an issue, but that only experts - professionals - academics, with many years of highly expensive education at the best schools, had anything useful to say on any issue.
Post the 1840s, with its their Reform Acts and Corn Laws, the aristocracy realized that giving their eldest son the land or the other sons a career in the military or state church was no longer the best way to remain influential.
The unseemly rise of famous, much honored, wealthy untutored geniuses in science-oriented business was best repulsed by honoring meritocracy, in the breach.
Charles Darwin was an example of this : his social rise based on personal 'merit' wasn't hurt by his twenty five years worth of the world's best, most expensive, education.
So : tutors from birth before various expensive boarding schools, expensive scientific equipment as toys for hobbies, scientific Grand Tours, heavily subsidizing their children's unbroken attendance at the top universities from BSc to Post Doc fellowship.
Little wonder that even the well to do soon felt they could only 'afford' a few children !
Next, trial and error technology, despite all its useful and hopeful discoveries had to be dethroned from its currently exalted social standing.
Instead, Natural Philosophy, re-badged as basic-pure-fundamental-academic Science, had to be proclaimed as the key non-widget making activity, before technology could do its useful widget work.
(Ninety nine percent of the time, it is exactly the other way around : trial and error technology improves the instruments that allows basic science to see ever further or deeper or smaller vistas.)
All across the disciplines, basic (above the hoi polloi) researchers were exalted over the applied practitioners grubbing around with clients and customers.
Thus allowing the children of aristocrats of the world to move en masse and with the dignity appropriate to their station, off the land and into the better universities.
One of their first actions was in proclaiming a philosophy , Darwinism, that said science had proved that not all humans are equal, so don't listen, any longer, to the humanistic ideas from the less-equal humans like women, the working class, the colored races, etc.
But dealing with the fact that the most unique characteristic of males, their superior absolute strength, was becoming useless in the workplace or in situations of violence, was not so easily solved.
The solution, I suggest, was to escape into fantasy, fantasies expensive enough to again be restricted to the well-heeled and under-worked.
The rentier class invented social situations (games, sports, hobbies, vacations, even small wars) where the rules were arranged to appear to give superior physical strength and stamina (of well fed wealthy males) an advantage.
In fact, even here, machines crept in to ensure the game was fixed.
Teddy Roosevelt roughed it in the Dakota for a few months, spending half the time in New York City, all the while pretending to be a true pioneer rancher, albeit with tons of money to buy the best machinery - worked usually by his many hired hands.
He was never in any real danger from the elements, the Indians or starvation.
This in no way duplicated the sheer hard work of ordinary pioneers expending much hard labour instead of small fortunes of cash - yet he somehow got away with claiming he pioneered in a 'tougher' way than the lower classes were capable of.
Similarly he had a vast number of black servants to carry him in comfort and set up his kills, together with the best guns in existence, to shoot all the big animals he shot on his African safari.
He was never in any danger from big animals.
Many of the original explorers did starve to death or drown but by the 19th century, 'explorers' (not really finding anything truly unknown) generally went with lots of the best possible of equipment.
They were usually in little real danger from the elements. The Scott effort to the South Pole is famous precisely because it is the rare example of a well funded exploring effort going badly wrong.
Imperialism became a vast outdoor tame sport as huge rich advance nations selectively went after tiny bits of other continents with no access to advanced weaponry.
In this century, think of the 'wars' against Grenada and Panama.
Again, the Boer War, along with the later Vietnam and Afghanistan conflicts, show what can go wrong when fake wars turn real.
Boxing - a bloody but ultimately phoney conflict with fists - was heavily promoted by well to do males from the late 19th century onwards, despite the fact that few opponents from the real worlds of war or crime would be sporting to risk a standup boxing match when they could shoot you from a distance, safe behind a rock.
Similar with many early team sports - they were violent but because they needed expensive gear and expensive training facilities, only college kids could partake in this form of high status violence.
Feats that supposedly required high strength violence counted almost all women out, together with many underfed undersized men from the poorer classes.
If those supposed feats of strength also required lots of money or access to facilities that could be restricted to the elite, they could do a lot to restore a male well to do oriented hegemony.
No Negro or woman was ever going to get official US Navy support in the years between the 1880s and the 1980s, to lead an exploration effort towards the North Pole, for example.
WASP men simply had to be seen to be doing all the 'exciting' 'daring' 'bold' things in the desert, jungle, snows,etc to prove they should also exclusively run the culture of their own nations.
And to to think all of this began when machines began making the work of the poorest classes much easier ....
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