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....

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....

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....

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.....

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.

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......

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...

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.....

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....

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 ...

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...

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.

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...

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'...

"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.....

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 ........

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......

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 ?

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 ....

Epochs change the way governments change : with almost as many opposed as in favour

It is routine for new governments to make massive society-wide changes, confident they will be sustained, based solely on the fact that they got a full 52% of the 2/3 of voters who bothered to turn up, while their opposition, which got only 48% of that same vote, will greet those changes with obedient, if sullen, silence.

Epochal change works the same way : a new way of thinking seems to have hegemonic power mostly because the opposition to it, while massive, knows it is a little short of 50% of the population and so remains obediently if sullenly silent.

Mostly this is because that same opposition tends to feel - at least temporarily - rather dispirited, discredited and bereft of popular new ideas, while their not much larger opponents are feeling exalted, uplifted and as if riding the crest of the wave of the future - at least temporarily.

All this is a long windup to say that while might-is-right Modernity was definitely in the hegemonic ascendancy while young Martin Henry Dawson was growing up in the small town of Truro Nova Scotia, it probably wasn't that popular with his main influences, his parents, judging by what we know and can submise about them.

Strong Presbyterian evangelicals, they were unlikely to believe that inward moral character-based manliness should be replaced by outward physical masculine strength and aggression, anymore than they believed that 'masculine' boxing should replace 'sissy' basketball down at the local YMCA.

The adult Dr Dawson probably never lost faith in might-is-right Modernity between 1940-1945, because he never had any such faith to lose....

Modernity Man : just an animal like the others or sui generis ?

Inconsistency ever being their password, Modernity's darwinists (scientists and non-scientists alike) usually emphasized to the little people that Modernity Man was just an animal like all other animals but at times of internal intellectual crisis, they were at pains to emphasize just how much he was Sui Generis and apart from Nature.
In the first case, the darwinists considered he (always definitely a "he") was fully subject to what they imagined were the laws of Nature.

Inside their minds, Nature's laws set groups of individuals, red in tooth and claw, against other groups of individuals, red in tooth and claw, in a total war of attrition within species as to the sole winner in terms of their long term reproductive success.

Germans versus the French, Whites versus Blacks, etc.

(In point of fact Darwin's theory insisted that a new (and "good") mutation usually happened just once, to a single individual, and it was the superior reproductive success of that sole individual and their descendants that oh so very very gradually led to their emergence as a new sub-species group cum strain or race.)

To a much lesser extend, they admitted that their vision of total war to the death happened between species as well : so that, in theory, one day the lion might replace the tigers and become the sole top predator of the Asian jungle.

But if they worried about Russians replacing the Britons and the perilous Yellow Races replacing the Whites, why not also worry that a plant species might replace the human species, species replacing species, as it supposedly did out in Nature ?

(But one could equally argue that when an old niche changed/vanished and the old species that once filled that old niche failed to evolve quickly enough, they disappeared and a new species then arose to fill a new niche, not replaced the old species in the old niche.)

Where are the moral panics that another earthly species will replace Humans ? 

Why not worry about an individual mutated Kudzu plant emerging - even more rapidly growing and now poisonous - killing off all other plants by shading them to death, leading to mass starvation up the food chain and reaching even to the most civilized humans ?

"Oh", the darwinists would insist, "Kudzu replacing all the plants might indeed happen in Nature, but Modernity Man is superior to and apart from mere Nature --- our chemists will quickly kill back the Kudzu or even render it highly edible".

In effect, they meant that yes alien Martians, green and scaly but otherwise as smart as us, might replace us - but dumb animals, plants or microbes never could.

"We are not dumb animals, for Heavens Sake", cry these atheists - "we are DEVO".

But if Modernity Man was smart enough to quickly beat back all other species, alien or earthly, why wasn't he equally clever enough to permit a few parents to experience the joy of their severely handicapped child without this swiftly and inevitably leading to certain race suicide ?

Because popular darwinism and modernity was never an internally consistent theory but rather just a grab bag of pseudo rhetoric, designed to sooth the middle class mind without making it work.

Also known as 'retaining your man-is-an-animal cake ---- and yet quickly eating it whenever it suits you' ...

diversity-affirming Manhattan : diversity-denying Auschwitz

Adolf Hitler sought an antidote to a world seeming moving to the model of 'impure' Manhattan by 'hedging Germany's best assets', as he saw them.

So he devoted ever more of Germany's and Europe's scarce wartime resources to its homogenous and fit (pure Aryan) population by denying those resources to members of its population that he considered heterogeneous, impure and unfit.

Essentially, in a time of crisis, he decided to 'hedge his assets' by draining the gene pool nearly bone dry --- a move to greater conformity and homogeneity that was very common in every nation during wartime.

Hitler's murderous methods were unique, even among the fascists, but his underlying aims were widely popular worldwide in the early 1940s.

In response, Dr Henry Dawson back in wartime Manhattan, offered up an antidote to the views held by Hitler and most other middle class people worldwide.

In essence, he wanted to see that the Allies 'hedge their risks' by protecting every single person in their existing gene pool and by bringing all peoples and all ideas, no matter how out of left field, inside the Allies' war-winning Big Tent.

Hitler, thinking we could know in advance all the solutions to any future problems, slimmed down the existing gene pool to just the 'right' answers and discarded all the rest, the 'incorrect' answers.

Dawson wasn't sure we could ever know any correct solutions to future problems and so decided it was best if we kept all the answers in the existing gene pool, because one never knew when an answer long thought to be hopelessly incorrect, in fact turned out to be an absolute humanity-saver.

Today, as we face an even bigger global crisis than even WWII, we must ponder whose approach is best for us now -- Hitler's or Dawson's .....

Teddy Roosevelt vs the Persister bacteria

Though 'persister' bacteria existed long before Teddy Roosevelt was born, they were not discovered until about twenty five years after he died, so he never lived long enough to see one of his many pet certitudes about 'Nature' being questioned by Nature.

Teddy Roosevelt campaigned long and hard against men and women who refused to have lots of children, or even no children at all.

He labelled them all as weaklings and defectives, traitors to the race and said their behavior was an affront to Nature and sure to lead to race suicide. But was he scientifically accurate in saying so ?

Persister bacteria - first described in 1942 by Dr Gladys Hobby of Henry Dawson's wartime penicillin team - are a very small but also very constant presence in bacteria populations, bacteria that don't do that most characteristic behavior of all other bacteria : make more babies incessantly.

We are not talking about the general fact that bacteria that can reproduce in as little as twenty minutes can also hold off for hundreds of years, if food is short.

It is not so much that persisters totally fail to reproduce but that they do so very very slowly, in bacterial terms, even when conditions are stable and food is plentifully.

They are indeed one of Roosevelt's 'defective' beings, in the least prejudicial and most accurate sense of that word.

But their continued existence is not an inexplicable aberration but rather an example of one of Nature's widest and most enduring general rules.

Counterintuitively, in terms of evolutionary survival, it actually makes sense for species to be cautious and risk adverse in good times and yet to be willing to throw caution to the winds and be willing to take big unknown risks in bad times.

To go on as before is to die out for sure, but by hedging one's risks by being willing to try anything and everything might just pay off with continued survival.

Animals, insects, microbes and quite recently, even plants have displayed this behavior, known as RST, Risk Sensitivity Theory.

Microbes display it when in times of great stress, their ability to repair mistakes in DNA and RNA reproduction greatly worsens and more and more genetic aberrations emerge.

These aberrations can be as simple as a gene that is normally kept switched off is suddenly full on.

It only takes one of these genetic monsters, revealing an unrivalled ability to survive the stress, to ensure the survival of the entire bacteria species.

Because when good times return, the aberration individuals are usually 'repaired' out of existence as the gene is again shut back off -- or it may simply be that they reproduce too slowly, when compared to their other bacteria compatriots common in times of plentiful food.

The persisters are one such example : the short term doses of antibiotics that bacterial competitors exude into the common living fluid when the overall food is short in supply kills only bacteria actively and rapidly reproducing and thus leaves most of the very slowly reproducing persisters unharmed.

But when new food arrives and the reproductively-costly antibiotics are shut back off, the persisters slowly reproduce their kin - most of whom are not persisters like their parents and so rapid reproduction resumes as normal.

It is very hard to think of a close human equivalent for this bacteria behavior.

Perhaps the situation when two nations are at war and both are very short of food, but one side has a lot more single young men with no small children of their own.

Each young man is made a soldier and is given food but no scarce food needs to be allocated to their non-existence children, children who can not in any case fight away.

In a short war, this fact might give this nation an advantage.

But in more human terms, Risk Sensitivity Theory suggests that counterintuitively, human societies should not seek greater conformity in total war crisis.

Rather instead, societies hoping to win wars of life and death survival should encourage dissent and questioning of the conventional and should seek out all sorts of normally outcast people and ideas to bring inside the national Big Tent.

Henry Dawson was a scientist more likely to reify practise than theory so we can only examine what he actually did, to act as a stand in or surrogate for what he perhaps thought.

We know that Dawson went very much against the very fibre of his profession, at the very apex of Modernity, by preferring to study non-virile and non-virulent bacteria.

He made his mark studying, not the assumed normal "S" forms bacteria but rather the "R", "M","L" and "P" forms before his early death stopped all further investigation.

One of those, the "M" form, is more virulent than the "S" norm but the other three are decidedly less virulent or virile.

The survival of bacteria into the present day was already inexplicable, based on the conventional view of Evolution as leading to ever newer, bigger, stronger more complex beings inevitably replacing the older, smaller, weaker and more simple beings.

Bacteria being the very oldest, smallest, weakest, simplest of all life forms, there was no good (Darwin-generated) answer why they were still around, let alone found everywhere on earth and in numbers of individuals that were millions of times more plentiful than any other species.

Dawson knew of this paradox, but he had another big one to explore.

Why did Bacteria, surviving for four billion years under very harsh natural conditions, still have at least as many defective variants as did modern western society ?

For the Darwinist majority of scientists claimed it was only modern western societies' cosy cosseted conditions that allowed human defectives to survive long enough to reproduce.

They further claimed - again without proof - that this rising tide of rapidly reproducing human defectives would soon lead to white race suicide.

Claims that defectives persist in human society, generation after generation after generation, is actually hard to prove ---- giving the slowness we modern middle class types reproduce even one generation : about the same time length as the life career of a typical scientist.

But some very rapidly growing bacteria species can actually give forth a new generation in one millionth the time a middle class western professional family might do so.

Dawson had thus repeatedly seen how defective bacteria were reproduced generation onto forever generation without appearing to harm the overall bacteria species.

Now, an even further Darwinian heresy emerged : for Dawson found more and more evidence that variation and defectives seemed to actually help, rather than hinder, the bacteria's ability to survive tough times.

So : R forms don't have conventional 'virulence factors' and thus don't provoke human immune systems to attack them, L forms lack cell walls so can't be attacked by antibodies IDing bacteria by their cell wall material and slow reproducing P forms can't be hit by rapid-reproduction-oriented killer antibiotics.

I could also throw in Dawson's pioneering research on other sophisticated bacterial survival techniques from the supposedly 'primitive' microbes : HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, but you get my point.

Perhaps all this mounting evidence did produce some sort of theory in Dawson's mind but he seemed to have kept strictly shtum about it.

But two practises of his during WWII, maintained against fierce pushback from his bosses and the Allied governments, hint at what it might have looked like.

Firstly, Dawson was initially and for many years, the only scientist in the entire world convinced that the 'primitive' penicillium fungus were probably better at making penicillin, after millions of years of practise, than even the best human chemists would be at first.

He was thus an early, steadfast and strong advocate for immediately mass producing natural penicillin to use to save lives during the war, rather than wait for for chemists to commercially synthesize and patent it - something they still haven't done, even now.

Secondly, Dawson strongly opposed the semi-secret plan of the Allied governments that only enough wartime penicillin should be produced to just treat lightly wounded frontline troops judged capable of returning to immediate combat duty.

Dawson, by contrast, wanted wartime penicillin to be plentiful enough and cheap enough to treat all humanity - not just all the troops and all useful civilians but even civilians considered to be worse than useless towards the war effort and thus not a priority for scarce medical resources.

Into Dawson's wartime Big Tent solution to defeat the Axis went not just 1A troops, 1A war work civilians and 1A medicines but also 4F medicines like impure natural penicillin and human 4Fs like the incurably-useless-for-war-work SBEs - a disproportional number of whom were from outcast groups like Jews, Blacks, the poor and immigrants.

Many decent people during WWII felt that morally, defectives shouldn't be left to die just because it was wartime, despite sincerely believing it to be bad news biologically for overall humanity.

Only Dawson felt that not only was it morally wrong, it was even biologically wrong - because times of crisis call for actively seeking out and exalting all the beings and ideas considered deviant and defective.

Dawson thought that leaving 'defectives' and 'deviants' like Alan Turing, an invert, or Stephen Hawking, a cripple, to die during WWII to save scarce medical resources would only have hurt - not helped - humanity.

Teddy Roosevelt would have strongly disagreed with Dawson but I think time has proven Dawson amply right ....

July 21 1965 : the closing of the (last) (cosmic) Frontier and the death of Panic Modernity

Many of today's male adults who were small children back in July 1965 have recorded their intense disappointment when they opened their parents' daily paper to gaze upon the first photos from Mariner 4's flypast of Mars, revealing its surface to be as dead as that of the Moon.

They were hardly the only ones to be extremely disappointed, even extremely surprised - most male adults - even male adult scientists - felt much the same.
Earth based scientific research had already confirmed that all the other planets and moons in our own solar system were either far too hot or far too cold to sustain even bacterial life.

Still Mars had seemed a sure scientific bet to most knowledgable scientists to reveal evidence of current (or at least past) plant and microbe life.

Now the next nearest sun (hopefully with a livable planet, though no planets at all had yet been seen) was at least tens of thousands of years of space travel away.

(The top current space travel speeds were simply not available to the huge spaceships needed to provide multi-generational space travel for a breeding population of humans and to take them safely through milleniums of cosmic radiations and storms to that star - and back.)

A hundred years of (semi-realistic) male fantasies about continuing to honing the sharp edge of effeminate white civilization by battling savage space aliens after the last native cum aliens (sic) had been eliminated, suddenly died a premature death.

By 1965 the Slavs and the Chinese, both with nuclear weapons equal to those of America and Europe, were no longer able to be regarded as savages.

Aboriginals in the Americas and Australian had already been beaten to the point of near extinction - nor did Africa's struggling black nations seem a worthy 'savage' rival. (Moslems hadn't yet emerged as a threat but even in 1965, they too hardly seemed a realistic threat as 'savages'.)

Teddy Roosevelt must have rolled over in his grave that July in 1965.

Teddy was convinced that the white race would only remain on top of civilization if its edge was kept in shape by constantly combating savage hordes.

So when the 'Indians' were subdued in the American West in his own lifetime, he sought to invade the Philippines etc overseas instead.

Because after the white male invaders closed the Indians' last western frontier territories, they were honour bound to then invade new continents and even new cosmos, just like the the one that astronomer Lowell first saw on Mars in that same time period.

After Teddy died during WWI, his spiritual children saw fighting off Mars' space aliens as the last Great White Hope for white males to retain their virile edge of civilized violence.

Now all that died, July 21st 1965.

R.I.P. Modernity...