Like many of you, I was a great admirer of the the Australian blog "Watching the Deniers".
Mike's blog started out closely monitoring those who denied the existence of man-made climate change but he quickly discovered that the people who denies this also denied a whole host of things.
On the surface at least, it is hard to know what this variegated bunch of tin hats won't deny : starting with the birth of Christ and ending with the denial of any smoke at Auschwitz.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Would you let your daughter marry an eighty year old ??!!
Happy 80th to Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones, in case I forget in October when my grand daughter is keeping me busy.
Eighty years young !
That might explain why rock music is as popular with the Alt-White geriatrics on the far right of the Republicans as it is with the young 'uns on the left of the Democrats....
Eighty years young !
That might explain why rock music is as popular with the Alt-White geriatrics on the far right of the Republicans as it is with the young 'uns on the left of the Democrats....
grant the ALT-RIGHT a modicum of intellectual consistency...
Whenever you cross the street to avoid the snarls of the guard dog accompanying your local neo-nazi skinhead member of the racial purity ALT-RIGHT (ALT-WHITE) brigade, you can be plenty sure of just one thing : that the dog is a purebred , never ever a 'mixed race' mongrel.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
A partial review of Robert P. Jones' "The End of White Christian America"
Yesterday's Pure modernity : attending Jesus's churches, but not to his words.
Today's Diverse modernity : not attending Jesus's churches --- but attending to his words.
Robert P. Jones' new book looking at the recent sharp decline in church attendance among America's youngest white evangelicals seems to have nothing but bad news for Jesus's churches --- and nothing but good news - Gospel Good News - for Jesus.
Today's Diverse modernity : not attending Jesus's churches --- but attending to his words.
Robert P. Jones' new book looking at the recent sharp decline in church attendance among America's youngest white evangelicals seems to have nothing but bad news for Jesus's churches --- and nothing but good news - Gospel Good News - for Jesus.
Friday, August 12, 2016
If Babies had the vote, would Trump stand a chance ?
Five hundred kids have boiled to death in hot cars in the US after being forgotten by their old-enough-to-vote-parents since 9/11, far far more than the number of people who have been murdered in the States by Moslem terrorists since then.
There is a possible solution to help remind forgetful parents : a mandated very loud alarm that goes off automatically if a car is not in motion for twenty minutes and the carseat straps are still buckled up .
But kids can't vote so their needs are ignored at election time, when they are not kicked out of political rallies all together, while many adults will be allowed to give their vote to a charlatan ---- all in mindless fear over the very remote statistical chance they will be murdered in their beds by Moslems.
A sad world....
There is a possible solution to help remind forgetful parents : a mandated very loud alarm that goes off automatically if a car is not in motion for twenty minutes and the carseat straps are still buckled up .
But kids can't vote so their needs are ignored at election time, when they are not kicked out of political rallies all together, while many adults will be allowed to give their vote to a charlatan ---- all in mindless fear over the very remote statistical chance they will be murdered in their beds by Moslems.
A sad world....
wartime penicillin's 3Ps, 1As and 4Fs
The wartime Allies and their publics had three "P" questions to decide, each involving a choice between different kinds of penicillins, different kinds of producers to make it and different kinds of patients to receive it.
belief in Conspiracy Theories and belief that world is Chaotic, Complex, Dynamic don't go together
Counter-intuitively, I argue that Donald Trump supporters, for example, don't really see the world as complex and chaotic, though they are quick to say they do.
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
"Natural Penicillin For All" a sort of spiritual balm, one that moved the heart, rather than changed the mind
For reasons they couldn't really explain, and at a pace as slow and as unremittingly as the tide going out, the post WWII world fundamentally changed.
That world now repulsed the approach of those who long advocated "purifying" the gene pools down to just the "fit".
Instead it accepted that the world's very survival depended on the widest possible diversity of life: survival lay in expanding gene pools, not shrinking them.
I didn't say "the world's population changed their mind" because the world didn't : this was no intellectual or rationally thought out conversion, no decision made 'inside the brain'.
It was an emotional conversion, made 'inside the heart' and the language that best describes that sort of change is that used by the religious.
That world now repulsed the approach of those who long advocated "purifying" the gene pools down to just the "fit".
Instead it accepted that the world's very survival depended on the widest possible diversity of life: survival lay in expanding gene pools, not shrinking them.
I didn't say "the world's population changed their mind" because the world didn't : this was no intellectual or rationally thought out conversion, no decision made 'inside the brain'.
It was an emotional conversion, made 'inside the heart' and the language that best describes that sort of change is that used by the religious.
Cosmic Rays damage our babies' DNA, connecting the ancient past to the distant future
One big reason we can never fully know the past, let alone fully know the present or the future, is that these three theoretical categories don't really live in separate boxes, not out here in the real world.
So : energy from cosmic rays, originating from places trillions upon trillions upon trillions of miles away and hundreds of millions of years ago, smashes into our bodies every single minute of our lives, constantly mutating the DNA destined to become that of our children's children.
So : energy from cosmic rays, originating from places trillions upon trillions upon trillions of miles away and hundreds of millions of years ago, smashes into our bodies every single minute of our lives, constantly mutating the DNA destined to become that of our children's children.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
for many of my readers, Sodom and Gomorrah, not Balm and Spiritual Healing, are the words most associated with 'impure' Manhattan
If my readers are poor, rural and church-going, or if they are the 'old families' living among the best addresses of the Upper East Side, that is most definitely the case.
But they are wrong - or at the very least, not always right - and my blog and book intends to convince them of that fact.
The unexpected medical balm of 'natural penicillin for all', and far more importantly, the unexpected spiritual balm that it represented, came along just when misguided humanity needed it most - in the dying days of WWII.
And it didn't just come out of 'impure' diverse perverse Manhattan by some sheer bad luck --- it could only have come from there.
The story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the individual behind that balm, is a story of tough times, fierce battles, persistence, tenacity, perseverance, courage - a story not without pain and tears, but ultimately life-changing, a story both uplifting and empowering. ....
But they are wrong - or at the very least, not always right - and my blog and book intends to convince them of that fact.
The unexpected medical balm of 'natural penicillin for all', and far more importantly, the unexpected spiritual balm that it represented, came along just when misguided humanity needed it most - in the dying days of WWII.
And it didn't just come out of 'impure' diverse perverse Manhattan by some sheer bad luck --- it could only have come from there.
The story of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the individual behind that balm, is a story of tough times, fierce battles, persistence, tenacity, perseverance, courage - a story not without pain and tears, but ultimately life-changing, a story both uplifting and empowering. ....
Not a trendy lip balm, an O.T. soothing oil, nor a mere antibiotic --- more a N.T. healing of the spirit
In the Fall of 1940, it must have seemed to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny penicillin team that pretty well the whole world was profoundly morally sick : exalting the powerfully wicked and casting down the blameless weak.
It badly needed an intervention.
So into the rooms of the rejected, dejected and terminally dying SBE patients, Dr Gladys Hobby daily displayed above her head a transparent glass petri dish of radiating penicillium growth, intensely blue green grey with tiny bright golden dew drops of exuded penicillin juice.
In those partially darkened rooms, if the October light through the small window caught the petri dish just right, it suddenly appeared to the patient's eye like some glowing bejewelled monstrance : with natural penicillin's promise of, if not Eternal Life, than at least a fair crack at three score and ten.
A monstrance, along the lines of the various Catholic traditions, but held aloft by a devout protestant Presbyterian and venerated before an audience of a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Jew : only in Manhattan.... !
It badly needed an intervention.
So into the rooms of the rejected, dejected and terminally dying SBE patients, Dr Gladys Hobby daily displayed above her head a transparent glass petri dish of radiating penicillium growth, intensely blue green grey with tiny bright golden dew drops of exuded penicillin juice.
In those partially darkened rooms, if the October light through the small window caught the petri dish just right, it suddenly appeared to the patient's eye like some glowing bejewelled monstrance : with natural penicillin's promise of, if not Eternal Life, than at least a fair crack at three score and ten.
A monstrance, along the lines of the various Catholic traditions, but held aloft by a devout protestant Presbyterian and venerated before an audience of a Southern Baptist and an Orthodox Jew : only in Manhattan.... !
Trump Moscow's "Manchurian Candidate" ?
When I was a little kid, more than fifty years now, I had a good laugh about the absurd plotline of both the book and original movie of The Manchurian Candidate.
As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !
But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.
Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....
As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !
But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.
Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....
reductionist Eugenics, born and throttled at Cold Spring Harbour ...
Nobody in the American scientific-corporate-medical-government cartel controlling the fate of the Allies' wartime penicillin wanted to hear from him.
However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)
The cartel didn't want to hear from him because while the shortage of naturally-made penicillin for dying patients was very real, it was also a deliberate creation of that same cartel.
The 'shortage' was intended to hold off vocal Allied civilian demand and hence attention from Axis chemists, until the cartel's Allied chemists had a patent lock on pure man-made penicillin, intended to go into military frontline use only ----- and only after D-Day.
The Allied hope was that the vastly superior infection-fighting qualities of penicillin would greatly speed up the percentage of lightly wounded Allied troops quickly able to return to combat, compared to the percentages returning to combat from the surprised and unprepared Axis still relying on outdated Sulfa drugs.
Dr Demerec wanted to use the high dose x-ray radiation techniques of microbial 'eugenics' to induce far more mutations among penicillium spores than typical in Nature, in the hopes that among the very few survivors of all this nuclear blasting, there just might be one spore that proved a very high penicillin yielding strain.
The cartel, controlled by America's all-powerful OSRD and Vannevar Bush, ignored Demerec.
But a few years later, a much smaller, much less powerful but more New Dealerish/people-oriented government agency, the War Production Board's OPRD, took up Demerec's offer.
Dr Henry Dawson, in decidedly 'impure' Manhattan (at least in the eyes of the world's eugenic believers) was overjoyed : at last his faith in the ability of the primitive little penicillium to produce cheaper, more abundant, safer penicillin than the cartel's chemists had been fully justified ---- equally his vision that all the world's sick should expect succor.
Incredibly soon, Demerec's research paid off as incredibly high yielding strains provided more than enough cheap safe American naturally-grown penicillin for all the world's sick ----- and also spelled the death knell to the cartel's years of expensive chasing the never-never chimera of commercially viable man-made penicillin.
As a direct result of those high (highly profitable) yields, if chemistry was the queen of all science during WWII and atomic physics for a few years thereafter, today Demerec's micro biology is the queen of all the sciences, in academia and on Wall Street.
The unexpected consequences were even more immense.
The stunning scientific triumph of simple primitive creatures from the bottom slime of Nature besting the top human chemists 'in the universe' then allowed the moral triumph of 'abundant natural penicillin for all' over 'patented man-made penicillin for the select few'.
And so spelling the end of the kind of exclusionary thinking that had led to the Cold Spring Harbour eugenics lab being set up in the first place.
For it was their initial faith in a scientific model of a highly vertical Tree of Progress, with the very stupid microbes at the very bottom and the very clever civilized chemists at the very top, that had held together the eugenicists' belief in the racial superiority of civilized folk over 'primitive' folk.
Not only did the high yielding penicillium strains best the world's top chemists, they themselves would normally be considered highly unfit and degenerate strains, as the metabolic energy they devoted to producing all that penicillin came at a high cost to their biological fitness, their ability to reproduce rapidly.
Except that in the frequent times of food crisis for the fungus, these strains' greatest defect became their greatest virtue, as their antibiotic penicillin kept non-penicillium competitors at bay and allowed them, at least until conditions again returned to 'normal', to be in fact, the most biological fit.
Confirming dramatically that there never was any biological imperative towards the big strong all around fit in Nature, because Darwin had always insisted that it is 'the survival of the fittest', tiny niche by tiny niche, brief moment by brief moment.
And only a great diversity of lifeforms could fill all the niches, all the time, successfully.
So yes, it is a highly local story, if also a highly improbable story : 'impure' Manhattan borough triumphing over Long Island's 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour, with help from that same 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour.
But it also all of humanity's story as well ....
However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)
The cartel didn't want to hear from him because while the shortage of naturally-made penicillin for dying patients was very real, it was also a deliberate creation of that same cartel.
The 'shortage' was intended to hold off vocal Allied civilian demand and hence attention from Axis chemists, until the cartel's Allied chemists had a patent lock on pure man-made penicillin, intended to go into military frontline use only ----- and only after D-Day.
The Allied hope was that the vastly superior infection-fighting qualities of penicillin would greatly speed up the percentage of lightly wounded Allied troops quickly able to return to combat, compared to the percentages returning to combat from the surprised and unprepared Axis still relying on outdated Sulfa drugs.
Dr Demerec wanted to use the high dose x-ray radiation techniques of microbial 'eugenics' to induce far more mutations among penicillium spores than typical in Nature, in the hopes that among the very few survivors of all this nuclear blasting, there just might be one spore that proved a very high penicillin yielding strain.
The cartel, controlled by America's all-powerful OSRD and Vannevar Bush, ignored Demerec.
But a few years later, a much smaller, much less powerful but more New Dealerish/people-oriented government agency, the War Production Board's OPRD, took up Demerec's offer.
Dr Henry Dawson, in decidedly 'impure' Manhattan (at least in the eyes of the world's eugenic believers) was overjoyed : at last his faith in the ability of the primitive little penicillium to produce cheaper, more abundant, safer penicillin than the cartel's chemists had been fully justified ---- equally his vision that all the world's sick should expect succor.
Incredibly soon, Demerec's research paid off as incredibly high yielding strains provided more than enough cheap safe American naturally-grown penicillin for all the world's sick ----- and also spelled the death knell to the cartel's years of expensive chasing the never-never chimera of commercially viable man-made penicillin.
As a direct result of those high (highly profitable) yields, if chemistry was the queen of all science during WWII and atomic physics for a few years thereafter, today Demerec's micro biology is the queen of all the sciences, in academia and on Wall Street.
The unexpected consequences were even more immense.
The stunning scientific triumph of simple primitive creatures from the bottom slime of Nature besting the top human chemists 'in the universe' then allowed the moral triumph of 'abundant natural penicillin for all' over 'patented man-made penicillin for the select few'.
And so spelling the end of the kind of exclusionary thinking that had led to the Cold Spring Harbour eugenics lab being set up in the first place.
For it was their initial faith in a scientific model of a highly vertical Tree of Progress, with the very stupid microbes at the very bottom and the very clever civilized chemists at the very top, that had held together the eugenicists' belief in the racial superiority of civilized folk over 'primitive' folk.
Not only did the high yielding penicillium strains best the world's top chemists, they themselves would normally be considered highly unfit and degenerate strains, as the metabolic energy they devoted to producing all that penicillin came at a high cost to their biological fitness, their ability to reproduce rapidly.
Except that in the frequent times of food crisis for the fungus, these strains' greatest defect became their greatest virtue, as their antibiotic penicillin kept non-penicillium competitors at bay and allowed them, at least until conditions again returned to 'normal', to be in fact, the most biological fit.
Confirming dramatically that there never was any biological imperative towards the big strong all around fit in Nature, because Darwin had always insisted that it is 'the survival of the fittest', tiny niche by tiny niche, brief moment by brief moment.
And only a great diversity of lifeforms could fill all the niches, all the time, successfully.
So yes, it is a highly local story, if also a highly improbable story : 'impure' Manhattan borough triumphing over Long Island's 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour, with help from that same 'purist' Cold Spring Harbour.
But it also all of humanity's story as well ....
Monday, August 8, 2016
wartime Penicillin : controlled by the few, granted to the few -- or controlled by no one and a right of all ?
Simply substitute "Life" for "Penicillin" and very few would have any problem with the above title.
For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.
Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.
But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.
And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....
For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.
Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.
But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.
And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Pure Modernity, circa 1870s -1960s : winnowing Life's answers, keeping the correct and discarding the wrong
Lets face it, if you already know the correct answers to all of the Future's questions, why keep the wrong answers hanging about ?
So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.
When the scientists insist that reality can be reduced fundamentally down to a few simple motions by a few tiny atoms, why clutter up things by keeping unneeded Plans Bs, Cs, Ds, etc ?
Best to simplify and purify our gene pools - not diversify them --- that's what any good stockbroker would tell you : bet the entire farm by putting all your eggs in one basket.
Nonsense you say, this is all so untrue : we value biodiversity and always have !
Not true.
Depending on your age, your grandparents and great-grandparents certainly didn't.
It is not all all true, or rather insufficiently true, that we have 'changed' since the war.
In fact, we did a complete 180 degree U-ie.
We went from exalting pure-breeds and pure-bloods and banning any form of mixed marriage to exalting biodiversity and lustily admiring pop stars and actors with those vaguely tawny brown skins that signal the offspring of mixed race marriages.
So Diverse Modernity, circa 1970s till who knows : doesn't know what the future holds and is unashamed in admitting that.
So, best to to keep all options open : Plans B,C,D,E,F,G, bring 'em on - the more the merrier.....
So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.
When the scientists insist that reality can be reduced fundamentally down to a few simple motions by a few tiny atoms, why clutter up things by keeping unneeded Plans Bs, Cs, Ds, etc ?
Best to simplify and purify our gene pools - not diversify them --- that's what any good stockbroker would tell you : bet the entire farm by putting all your eggs in one basket.
Diverse Modernity
Nonsense you say, this is all so untrue : we value biodiversity and always have !
Not true.
Depending on your age, your grandparents and great-grandparents certainly didn't.
It is not all all true, or rather insufficiently true, that we have 'changed' since the war.
In fact, we did a complete 180 degree U-ie.
We went from exalting pure-breeds and pure-bloods and banning any form of mixed marriage to exalting biodiversity and lustily admiring pop stars and actors with those vaguely tawny brown skins that signal the offspring of mixed race marriages.
So Diverse Modernity, circa 1970s till who knows : doesn't know what the future holds and is unashamed in admitting that.
So, best to to keep all options open : Plans B,C,D,E,F,G, bring 'em on - the more the merrier.....
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Japanese Muscularity, 1890s-1940s : Japanese culture becomes extraordinarily hands-on brutal
In an age surely dominated by the machine (and the machine gun) what stands out instead about the era of Muscular Modernity was the rise of the subtly implied threat of old fashioned physical violence, used as a casual instrument of control by parents, teachers, bosses and competitors all through the Westernized world.
But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.
Only in Japan could one expect a superior officer to slap a junior officer as hard as they could, for some very minor problem, without anyone blinking.
And in no other country were officially authorized executions administered to victims so often by direct hands-on physical violence - by bayonet, knife, axe,swords, beatings - rather than by the indirect use of gun, rope or gas.
Perhaps it is worthy wondering if this behavior, rather than that of the much better known Auschwitz, might be the true culmination of 'Muscular' Darwinism....
But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.
Only in Japan could one expect a superior officer to slap a junior officer as hard as they could, for some very minor problem, without anyone blinking.
And in no other country were officially authorized executions administered to victims so often by direct hands-on physical violence - by bayonet, knife, axe,swords, beatings - rather than by the indirect use of gun, rope or gas.
Perhaps it is worthy wondering if this behavior, rather than that of the much better known Auschwitz, might be the true culmination of 'Muscular' Darwinism....
Totalitarianism : the one 'all around fit' surviving in the one only global niche
Totalitarianism is, deep down, Muscular Darwinism's 'survival of the one fit in a single globe-wide niche' against Charles Darwin's original 'survival of the many fittest in many niches'.
One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.
Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.
Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.
Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.
So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?
Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.
"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...
One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.
Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.
Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.
Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.
So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?
Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.
"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...
Muscular Deferments : Trump (and Florey)
Viewing news photos & videos, I am always amazed at just how many prominent military-service dodging 'chicken-hawks' are big, tall, muscular and verbally aggressive.
Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.
Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.
One has only to note the small size of many front line infantry conscripts in press photos, something replicated in every nation in every big war, to wonder how on earth do young men so excel as sports and yet fail a medical test that even the small and weedy pass ?
I don't think for one moment that all top athletes set themselves up to fail the military medical -- only those with a desire to not risk their futures by serving their country and with well to do, well-connected parents in agreement with that notion.
We all know the concept of smart lawyers winning their case by astute 'judge-shopping' --- well off well connected people, in times of the draft, can do the same with doctors.
For there are always doctors who are eager to curry favour with prominent people on the same side of the political, ethnic and religious fence as themselves --- and the unusually fat fee doesn't hurt either.
One just has to work to find them - and then top athlete Donald Trump - presto ! - has minor bone spurs that just won't let him serve his country, even in a rear echelon supply formation, but will let him play hard enough to win many quasi-combat-like sports.
Another chicken-hawk: Sir Howard Florey.
(He won the Nobel prize from the war-dodging Swedes for trying to prevent the use of 'impure' natural penicillin during WWII.
In WWI, he was equally an outstanding and very combative young athlete at the very same time some friendly doctor found he was totally unfit to serve his country.
Interestingly, chicken-hawks more often than not, are not only outstanding athletic draft-dodgers as young men : as middle aged men they are unusually physically combative with colleagues (who are usually smaller and lower in the professional hierarchy than themselves).
One thinks here of Florey and Vannevar Bush both punching out colleagues they disagreed with.
So big, so fit, so aggressive, so patriotic in times of peace --- so unwell in times of war...
Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.
Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.
One has only to note the small size of many front line infantry conscripts in press photos, something replicated in every nation in every big war, to wonder how on earth do young men so excel as sports and yet fail a medical test that even the small and weedy pass ?
I don't think for one moment that all top athletes set themselves up to fail the military medical -- only those with a desire to not risk their futures by serving their country and with well to do, well-connected parents in agreement with that notion.
We all know the concept of smart lawyers winning their case by astute 'judge-shopping' --- well off well connected people, in times of the draft, can do the same with doctors.
For there are always doctors who are eager to curry favour with prominent people on the same side of the political, ethnic and religious fence as themselves --- and the unusually fat fee doesn't hurt either.
One just has to work to find them - and then top athlete Donald Trump - presto ! - has minor bone spurs that just won't let him serve his country, even in a rear echelon supply formation, but will let him play hard enough to win many quasi-combat-like sports.
Another chicken-hawk: Sir Howard Florey.
(He won the Nobel prize from the war-dodging Swedes for trying to prevent the use of 'impure' natural penicillin during WWII.
In WWI, he was equally an outstanding and very combative young athlete at the very same time some friendly doctor found he was totally unfit to serve his country.
Interestingly, chicken-hawks more often than not, are not only outstanding athletic draft-dodgers as young men : as middle aged men they are unusually physically combative with colleagues (who are usually smaller and lower in the professional hierarchy than themselves).
One thinks here of Florey and Vannevar Bush both punching out colleagues they disagreed with.
So big, so fit, so aggressive, so patriotic in times of peace --- so unwell in times of war...
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Diverse Modernity replacing Muscular Modernity
Muscular Modernity is hardly dead, not judging by the recent insurgent success of strongman politics all over the world, from Putin to Trump to Duterte.
But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.
We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.
But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....
But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.
We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.
But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....
One can really only be a PD broadcaster, never a PD publisher
Once something is released into the Public Domain, becomes 'PD', one can no longer speak of it being controlled and published.
It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.
I was a bit of a DXer in my younger days, devoted to picking up very distant AM stations on my cheap little table radio, so I could enjoy signals in metro Halifax Nova Scotia that came from faraway Havana Cuba or Buffalo New York.
I doubt that I was the target audience that businesses in upstate New York or Fidel Castro's government were exactly aiming for when they broadcast their signals into the ether, but that is the nature of broadcasting, be it seeds, spores or radio waves.
Publishers on the other hand are all about controlling their content, deciding on how it is to be presented, to whom and for what price.
And that control has only potentially increased in this age of the Internet ---- ask any library about all the new restrictions that came along with all those new-media e-books from the Big Five publishers.
In keeping with my interest in PD solar and wind energy versus the cartel control over oil and coal and with 'impure' Manhattan's theme of PD naturally grown penicillin versus patented man-made penicillin, the contents of this blog and book are also fully PD.
Once broadcast, I willingly accept that means I lose all control over it.
That means all manner of others can take it in whole or in part and publish it under their own name for profit.
Or simply past it on to others to read.
Whatever.....
It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.
I was a bit of a DXer in my younger days, devoted to picking up very distant AM stations on my cheap little table radio, so I could enjoy signals in metro Halifax Nova Scotia that came from faraway Havana Cuba or Buffalo New York.
I doubt that I was the target audience that businesses in upstate New York or Fidel Castro's government were exactly aiming for when they broadcast their signals into the ether, but that is the nature of broadcasting, be it seeds, spores or radio waves.
Publishers on the other hand are all about controlling their content, deciding on how it is to be presented, to whom and for what price.
And that control has only potentially increased in this age of the Internet ---- ask any library about all the new restrictions that came along with all those new-media e-books from the Big Five publishers.
In keeping with my interest in PD solar and wind energy versus the cartel control over oil and coal and with 'impure' Manhattan's theme of PD naturally grown penicillin versus patented man-made penicillin, the contents of this blog and book are also fully PD.
Once broadcast, I willingly accept that means I lose all control over it.
That means all manner of others can take it in whole or in part and publish it under their own name for profit.
Or simply past it on to others to read.
Whatever.....
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
"Nature's House has many Niches" --- and many different creatures to fill them
John 14:2 probably says all that needs to be said in proof of the 'survival of the MANY fittest' over the claim of the 'survival of the one most all-around fit'.
Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....
Survival of the MANY fittest
Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....
What if 1759 or 1959 first saw theory that a vast diversity of species needed to best fill every little niche in Nature ?
Muscular Modernity was going to happen, was already well underway, whether or not Darwin and Wallace ever publicly presented their new theory that Natural Selection, aka Survival of the Fittest, was why Evolution did exist and how it worked itself out.
I believe that if that theory had been presented a century earlier or a century later, the theory would have stood a better chance to being - correctly - seen as the theory that accounts for the wide diversity in kinds of 'fittest' living beings, each accurately reflecting the extremely wide diversity of niches in Nature.
Not as a theory that confirmed muscular modernity's belief that the world was progressively moving to the day when one small sub-section of one recent species (humanity) won a competition etched in toothmarks and blood ---- and ended up controlling and consuming almost all of Nature's bounty...
I believe that if that theory had been presented a century earlier or a century later, the theory would have stood a better chance to being - correctly - seen as the theory that accounts for the wide diversity in kinds of 'fittest' living beings, each accurately reflecting the extremely wide diversity of niches in Nature.
Not as a theory that confirmed muscular modernity's belief that the world was progressively moving to the day when one small sub-section of one recent species (humanity) won a competition etched in toothmarks and blood ---- and ended up controlling and consuming almost all of Nature's bounty...
PD sunshine & penicillin hated by Big Oil and Big Pharma
The same sort of - despicable - people who pushed patented synthetic penicillin 'sometime in the future' over currently available PD natural penicillin, during WWII's desperate times for the ill & wounded, are at it again.
Today we again face a crisis, one involving the climate and mass extinction ; one far worse than even whatever Hitler and Tojo could possibly dream up.
But once again, the same sort of wicked evil greedy people are trying to stall the move to ever-safe, ever-renewable, ever-abundant sunshine simply because it being PD and thus inherently 'free enterprise', its success will kill their monopoly and cartel swollen profits.
The finding of profitably pools of oil is extremely rare in this world, today rarer than ever, and the guys who find them first, hold all the oil cards.
Rather like the holding of an extremely broadly drawn Anglo-American 1945 patent on synthetic beta lactams, as codified by a very rare treaty between the USA and the UK.
Controlling most of the world's commercially viable oil supplies, no matter how value a weapon to hold over the rest of the world, is hardly of life and death import in the way that a broad patent for synthetic beta lactams would have turned out to be.
For all of the thousands of different antibiotics ever brought forth to the testing stage, almost all of the best ones were (and still are) beta lactams, almost all made from a base of naturally produced PD penicillin G.
They are basically the world's only defence against mass death by infectious bacterial pandemics.
Put another way, the monopoly on patented penicillin post 1945 would have been far more a powerful weapon to enforce Anglo-American hegemony than the equally-patented A-Bomb ever turned out to be ...
Today we again face a crisis, one involving the climate and mass extinction ; one far worse than even whatever Hitler and Tojo could possibly dream up.
But once again, the same sort of wicked evil greedy people are trying to stall the move to ever-safe, ever-renewable, ever-abundant sunshine simply because it being PD and thus inherently 'free enterprise', its success will kill their monopoly and cartel swollen profits.
The finding of profitably pools of oil is extremely rare in this world, today rarer than ever, and the guys who find them first, hold all the oil cards.
Rather like the holding of an extremely broadly drawn Anglo-American 1945 patent on synthetic beta lactams, as codified by a very rare treaty between the USA and the UK.
Controlling most of the world's commercially viable oil supplies, no matter how value a weapon to hold over the rest of the world, is hardly of life and death import in the way that a broad patent for synthetic beta lactams would have turned out to be.
For all of the thousands of different antibiotics ever brought forth to the testing stage, almost all of the best ones were (and still are) beta lactams, almost all made from a base of naturally produced PD penicillin G.
They are basically the world's only defence against mass death by infectious bacterial pandemics.
Put another way, the monopoly on patented penicillin post 1945 would have been far more a powerful weapon to enforce Anglo-American hegemony than the equally-patented A-Bomb ever turned out to be ...
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