Adolf Hitler really got it wrong, metaphorically, when he called Jews a fungus and proposed that humans (Aryan humans) could easily remove them all from Europe and thus restore it permanently to its former state of racial purity.
True, the fungus will starve unless they are successful in dissolving the physical (and mental) bonds we use to try to keep 'pure' concepts like wet fluids and dry solids from co-mingling in a slime like fashion on top of a piece of damp wood.
The fungus are thus a highly appropriate metaphor for the intermingling hybridity that Hitler (and Modernity) so hated.
But the ever-spreading ever-enduring (non-metaphorical) fungus and their tiny tough invisible spores gently wafting over President Trump's border wall willy nilly are also among the best possible proofs that the normal natural un-nutured state of Reality is in fact impurity and miscegenation and HGT and hybridity and Metis and intermingled.
A constant reminder that Donald Trump's (and Modernity's) dream of a return to simple purity was bound to fail.
For Reality and Nature and Humanity and the Universe has never ever been "Pure" and never ever will be "Pure".....
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
IMPURITY just is, it was PURITY, like Nature, that had to be fabricated, subsidized, sustained and nutured
Technology, like impurity and reality, just is : it was Science, High Culture, Purity and Tradition and Free Enterprise and Nationalism and Nature that had to be invented, subsidized and nurtured...
Monday, May 30, 2016
Lies, damned lies and peer-reviewed scientific articles
In a perfect world, elementary grade school kids could be set an series of simple arithmetic problems, based on the information contained within any number of peer-reviewed articles, published in highly reputable scientific journals, on the early wartime production of penicillin by penicillium fungus.
After all the basic arithmetic is dead simple, but unfortunately the scientists were allowed to fudge the vital numbers , time and again, all to better flatter the humans nominally in charge of the penicilliums' production, the patients be damned.
Here is the start of one arithmetic question, again based solely on the information contained in most of those scientific publications, that one might set for a class of bright eyed grade six students :
The pioneering Meyer-Chaffe-Dawson-Hobby penicillin production effort have a nominal maximum capacity of 700 two litre flasks, each containing 13.5% penicillium medium by volume --- how much medium is that in cubic centimetres and in US gallons ?
(Fifty US gallons as it happens - by no coincidence, exactly the smallest possible amount to qualify the effort as pilot plant sized, rather than merely lab level sized.)
So it yields 50 US gallons or 190,000 cc of penicillin juice every two weeks..
The two weeks needed for each run is ten days devoted to production and four days devoted to initial seeding and post-op cleaning.
Article readers would also know that at this time in the war, each cc of penicillin medium at the end of the run will contain, on average, about 2 units of penicillin biological activity.
So kiddies, if all the capacity is used and the penicillin survives without production mishaps, you will have 380,000 gross units of penicillin at hand after a typical two week batch run, yes ? Did every child get that answer? Good !
That means the whole effort will have yielded, in the gross, a single solitary tiny one quarter of a gram of pure penicillin in a huge 190 litres of water and other unwanted biological material.
Now the real hard work begins. A lot of expensive chemicals and a lot of expensive scientific labour will remove all of the water and some of the unwanted biological material, while also removing and or destroying some/most of the badly needed penicillin in the process.
In the end, the chemists are sure to proudly announce in the article that they have a perfectly dry powdered solid penicillin with a relative purity level of 40 units per mg (or later on, 200 per mg or maybe even 1200 per mg).
Since a cc of mostly water is about 1000 mg or 1000 ml, getting even just 40 units of dry penicillin from one mg (one ml) instead of just 2 units from 1000 ml is a considerable achievement.
And the desperately waiting patients better hope the chemists weren't just jiving about their semi-purified being perfectly dry, because nothing destroys penicillin like being a little bit wet - it survives longest if either perfectly all dry or perfectly all wet.
But math teachers will quickly discover a problem when they seek to set a possible elementary level arithmetic question based around yield and efficiency.
Because nowhere ever will any of these articles ever tell readers just how many mgs of finished dry penicillin they got from say an initial start of 380,000 units of gross penicillin.
If the article had said it obtained, let us say 4750 mgs of dry penicillin at 40 units a mg, any bright school kid could work that out to be 190,000 units of dry penicillin --- and that from 380,000 units of wet penicillin that yields an efficiency level of 50%.
But the articles never do reveal the amount of finished penicillin in mgs and thus never have to reveal their efficiency.
I personally suspect the typical run final yields, in terms of clinical penicillin, were closer to 10% or even 0%.
Almost all of the precious life-saving stuff was destroyed by academic chemists doing their typical academic thing of trying to score really high purity figures (but no efficiency figures) to impress other academic chemists.
In the end, never giving their final yield in terms of numbers of mgs of solid penicillin was rather like asking their scientific readers (or my poor innocent elementary students) to complete this arithmetic question : 2651 divided by 17 over X equals what ?
Its fractions math, on LSD --played with a numerator but without a denominator. A joke - a disaster.
All this matters because an almost unknown scientist in Brisbane Australia regularly got yields of 100% ----- while doing almost nothing in the way of blood and sweat.
In fact he left all the production work to one elderly lab tech, E Pitcher.
This scientist, Dr Vincent Duhig, simply saw to it that the penicillin juice was 'harvested' at the point of maximum yield, instantly ran through a cheesecloth to remove any solids, quickly chilled it to preserve it and then slowly ran it into the veins of a dying patient through a slow IV drip a few scant hours later.
Duhig didn't even stop to determine the titration, in units, of his raw penicillin juice --- why bother, it was all that he had and he had a dying patient before him.
More and more and more was the only button he wanted pushed.
A consistent drip of sometimes as many as 3000 cc of penicillin juice per day (each cc having maybe 2, 4 0r maybe 8 units of penicillin within) into people with poor kidney function kept a constant if incredibly tiny amount of germ killing penicillin in their blood enough to let their body start the heavy lifting of fighting off their terminal infection.
Calling this 'heroic medicine' doesn't begin to describe it --- today that same hospital in Brisbane would routinely use 10,000 times as much antibiotic power to achieve the same effect !
Duhig made the point clear in his conclusions of his article : producing life-saving penicillin with minimal staff and money in a run of the mill general hospital was dead simple, if you just kept your eye on the patient first and kept the scientific wannabes at bay.
What he didn't say, but he could have, is after all that blood and sweat to produce dry penicillin, 100% free of water, the stuff is often totally useless.
Because penicillin so quickly leaves the body via the kidneys mostly unused, the dry stuff was often deliberately diluted all over again in a lot of water and run very very slowly into the veins of the patient to maximize the time the penicillin stayed in the blood, doing its job.
Duhig saw this necessity and simply cut out the middle man, cut out the hard work, expense and tremendous loss of the fragile penicillin -- and in doing so, saved many lives with a minimum amount of effort.
Duhig didn't work hard - he worked smart.
In 1943, Duhig the Irishman did what Fleming the Scot should have done 15 years earlier - started right into saving lives with the stuff.
Duhig used even less technology than even Fleming's team had (and they had very little) -- but he used his heart and his head instead.
The end result : a Nobel for the lazy Fleming and nothing for the doughy Duhig ---- ain't it always the way ......
After all the basic arithmetic is dead simple, but unfortunately the scientists were allowed to fudge the vital numbers , time and again, all to better flatter the humans nominally in charge of the penicilliums' production, the patients be damned.
Here is the start of one arithmetic question, again based solely on the information contained in most of those scientific publications, that one might set for a class of bright eyed grade six students :
The pioneering Meyer-Chaffe-Dawson-Hobby penicillin production effort have a nominal maximum capacity of 700 two litre flasks, each containing 13.5% penicillium medium by volume --- how much medium is that in cubic centimetres and in US gallons ?
(Fifty US gallons as it happens - by no coincidence, exactly the smallest possible amount to qualify the effort as pilot plant sized, rather than merely lab level sized.)
So it yields 50 US gallons or 190,000 cc of penicillin juice every two weeks..
The two weeks needed for each run is ten days devoted to production and four days devoted to initial seeding and post-op cleaning.
Article readers would also know that at this time in the war, each cc of penicillin medium at the end of the run will contain, on average, about 2 units of penicillin biological activity.
So kiddies, if all the capacity is used and the penicillin survives without production mishaps, you will have 380,000 gross units of penicillin at hand after a typical two week batch run, yes ? Did every child get that answer? Good !
Relative purity, not absolute efficiency, dominated early penicillin - but only absolute amounts of penicillin saves lives
That means the whole effort will have yielded, in the gross, a single solitary tiny one quarter of a gram of pure penicillin in a huge 190 litres of water and other unwanted biological material.
Now the real hard work begins. A lot of expensive chemicals and a lot of expensive scientific labour will remove all of the water and some of the unwanted biological material, while also removing and or destroying some/most of the badly needed penicillin in the process.
Talk up the unimportant stuff
In the end, the chemists are sure to proudly announce in the article that they have a perfectly dry powdered solid penicillin with a relative purity level of 40 units per mg (or later on, 200 per mg or maybe even 1200 per mg).
Since a cc of mostly water is about 1000 mg or 1000 ml, getting even just 40 units of dry penicillin from one mg (one ml) instead of just 2 units from 1000 ml is a considerable achievement.
And the desperately waiting patients better hope the chemists weren't just jiving about their semi-purified being perfectly dry, because nothing destroys penicillin like being a little bit wet - it survives longest if either perfectly all dry or perfectly all wet.
Bury the Efficiency levels as too low to publish
But math teachers will quickly discover a problem when they seek to set a possible elementary level arithmetic question based around yield and efficiency.
Because nowhere ever will any of these articles ever tell readers just how many mgs of finished dry penicillin they got from say an initial start of 380,000 units of gross penicillin.
If the article had said it obtained, let us say 4750 mgs of dry penicillin at 40 units a mg, any bright school kid could work that out to be 190,000 units of dry penicillin --- and that from 380,000 units of wet penicillin that yields an efficiency level of 50%.
But the articles never do reveal the amount of finished penicillin in mgs and thus never have to reveal their efficiency.
I personally suspect the typical run final yields, in terms of clinical penicillin, were closer to 10% or even 0%.
Almost all of the precious life-saving stuff was destroyed by academic chemists doing their typical academic thing of trying to score really high purity figures (but no efficiency figures) to impress other academic chemists.
In the end, never giving their final yield in terms of numbers of mgs of solid penicillin was rather like asking their scientific readers (or my poor innocent elementary students) to complete this arithmetic question : 2651 divided by 17 over X equals what ?
Its fractions math, on LSD --played with a numerator but without a denominator. A joke - a disaster.
Leave it to an Irishman to do the job right, without working up a sweat
All this matters because an almost unknown scientist in Brisbane Australia regularly got yields of 100% ----- while doing almost nothing in the way of blood and sweat.
In fact he left all the production work to one elderly lab tech, E Pitcher.
 |
| This elderly man did all the work in this ultra efficient penicillin plant |
This scientist, Dr Vincent Duhig, simply saw to it that the penicillin juice was 'harvested' at the point of maximum yield, instantly ran through a cheesecloth to remove any solids, quickly chilled it to preserve it and then slowly ran it into the veins of a dying patient through a slow IV drip a few scant hours later.
Duhig didn't even stop to determine the titration, in units, of his raw penicillin juice --- why bother, it was all that he had and he had a dying patient before him.
More and more and more was the only button he wanted pushed.
A consistent drip of sometimes as many as 3000 cc of penicillin juice per day (each cc having maybe 2, 4 0r maybe 8 units of penicillin within) into people with poor kidney function kept a constant if incredibly tiny amount of germ killing penicillin in their blood enough to let their body start the heavy lifting of fighting off their terminal infection.
Calling this 'heroic medicine' doesn't begin to describe it --- today that same hospital in Brisbane would routinely use 10,000 times as much antibiotic power to achieve the same effect !
Ignoring Fleming & Florey and listening to Duhig would have saved thousands
Duhig made the point clear in his conclusions of his article : producing life-saving penicillin with minimal staff and money in a run of the mill general hospital was dead simple, if you just kept your eye on the patient first and kept the scientific wannabes at bay.
What he didn't say, but he could have, is after all that blood and sweat to produce dry penicillin, 100% free of water, the stuff is often totally useless.
Because penicillin so quickly leaves the body via the kidneys mostly unused, the dry stuff was often deliberately diluted all over again in a lot of water and run very very slowly into the veins of the patient to maximize the time the penicillin stayed in the blood, doing its job.
Duhig saw this necessity and simply cut out the middle man, cut out the hard work, expense and tremendous loss of the fragile penicillin -- and in doing so, saved many lives with a minimum amount of effort.
Duhig didn't work hard - he worked smart.
In 1943, Duhig the Irishman did what Fleming the Scot should have done 15 years earlier - started right into saving lives with the stuff.
Duhig used even less technology than even Fleming's team had (and they had very little) -- but he used his heart and his head instead.
The end result : a Nobel for the lazy Fleming and nothing for the doughy Duhig ---- ain't it always the way ......
Subsidizing the Inevitable
Why did tight-fisted Depression Era middle class taxpayers so willingly subsidize the sterilization of their less well off neighbours, particularly in the name of the inviolate Law of Nature that stated the superior races (themselves) would inevitably triumph over the weak (their neighbours), with or without the need to sterilize the weak and the poor ?
Why do we still spend tax dollars to make Nature naturally natural, again ?
Why do political parties who hold sacred the inviolate Law of Economics governing the free movement of goods, ideas, capital and labour not actually apply that belief to labour attempting to freely enter their nations' borders?
Why are scientists, 500 years into the Enlightenment Project, able to still claim that Reality isn't as complex and dynamic as it seems on the surface ---- because they are sure it has a deep albeit invisible calm simplicity lying somewhere beneath that chaotic surface ?
Inevitability, to you and I and even to deep deep thinkers, either is or is not --- it is not something that has to be subsidized, assisted, protected and nudged along.....
Why do we still spend tax dollars to make Nature naturally natural, again ?
Why do political parties who hold sacred the inviolate Law of Economics governing the free movement of goods, ideas, capital and labour not actually apply that belief to labour attempting to freely enter their nations' borders?
Why are scientists, 500 years into the Enlightenment Project, able to still claim that Reality isn't as complex and dynamic as it seems on the surface ---- because they are sure it has a deep albeit invisible calm simplicity lying somewhere beneath that chaotic surface ?
Inevitability, to you and I and even to deep deep thinkers, either is or is not --- it is not something that has to be subsidized, assisted, protected and nudged along.....
Making 1920s Better Babies and Fitter Families with ...Theda Bara, Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino ???
I have been enjoying Ewa Luczak's "Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination".
Perhaps you are like me, with your first language English, but not the sort of English written by most professors of English these days.
If so, you will absolutely love the limpid English of Ms Luczak, whose first language is Polish and who, despite the limpidness of her English, is a fully tenured professor of English.
Her recounting of the efforts of organized eugenicists to push "Fitter Family" contests in the 1920s got me thinking of not what the eugenists were supposed to be promoting but rather of what they were trying to push back against.
You see, who America's WASP 1920s elite claimed 'everyone' wanted to sleep with to make 'better babies' were the blandly bovine blonde and blue eyed winners of Eugenic's Fitter Family contests.
But in that decade we know full well that who the American public really wanted to sleep with and make babies with were the exotic dark Sheik and Vamp : Rudolph Valentino, Theda Bara and Pola Negri.
Hollywood's first sex symbols : foreign, swarthy, immigrants ; Italians, Poles, Catholics, Jews.
Oh Lord : your wife fantasizing making love to Rudy...while Negroid jungle jass music plays on the Victrola.
Could things get any worse ?
It all suggests that sexual jealousy, a far stronger emotion than even racial fears, might just partially lie behind the sudden mid-1920s success of eugenic supporters to have Congress ban almost all the darkie races from ever again emigrating to America.
Hollywood America, in particular ....
Perhaps you are like me, with your first language English, but not the sort of English written by most professors of English these days.
If so, you will absolutely love the limpid English of Ms Luczak, whose first language is Polish and who, despite the limpidness of her English, is a fully tenured professor of English.
Her recounting of the efforts of organized eugenicists to push "Fitter Family" contests in the 1920s got me thinking of not what the eugenists were supposed to be promoting but rather of what they were trying to push back against.
You see, who America's WASP 1920s elite claimed 'everyone' wanted to sleep with to make 'better babies' were the blandly bovine blonde and blue eyed winners of Eugenic's Fitter Family contests.
But in that decade we know full well that who the American public really wanted to sleep with and make babies with were the exotic dark Sheik and Vamp : Rudolph Valentino, Theda Bara and Pola Negri.
Hollywood's first sex symbols : foreign, swarthy, immigrants ; Italians, Poles, Catholics, Jews.
Oh Lord : your wife fantasizing making love to Rudy...while Negroid jungle jass music plays on the Victrola.
Could things get any worse ?
It all suggests that sexual jealousy, a far stronger emotion than even racial fears, might just partially lie behind the sudden mid-1920s success of eugenic supporters to have Congress ban almost all the darkie races from ever again emigrating to America.
Hollywood America, in particular ....
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Penicillin vs Auschwitz : microbial inclusion vs civilized exclusion
Auschwitz ("killing your way to genetic purity") was civilization by exclusion's apogee.
As much as Manhattan's penicillium slime produced lifesaving (the gift of HGT and of microbial inclusivity) was its nemesis...
"natural-penicillin-for-all" vs Auschwitz's "civilization-for-just-some"
As much as Manhattan's penicillium slime produced lifesaving (the gift of HGT and of microbial inclusivity) was its nemesis...
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
civilized stupidity of the exclusionary "12 year German Reich" vs microbial intelligence of the inclusionary "4 billion year Bacterial Reich"
Carl Schmitt , the most EVIL philosopher of the 20th century
And if you happen to think ideas matter, that makes Carl Schmitt the most evil person of the 20th century.
The Allies did believe that ideas matter, but feared the fallout if they actually tried any Nazi-oriented philosophers for promoting their ideas --- ideas that they knew were dangerously close to mainstream popular thought throughout the Western World in the years between 1875-1965.
So Carl Schmitt, born almost the same time as Hitler, lived out his entire life in prosperity and prestige, before during and even after the rise of the Hitler he had cheered upon his coming to power : dying aged 96 in 1985.
Admittedly he only held a relatively minor post in the overall Nazi regime and that only for three years, 1933-1936.
But then again if ideas do matter --- and Hitler clearly thought so, just he thought of himself as a philosopher-king, then Schmitt's real power came from all his books, articles, teaching and personal prestige.
To Schmitt the Jews were handy, but not essential, as enemies
Schmitt may have claimed that his anti-semitism was, like Hitler's, based on a personal distaste for the mere sight, smell and voices of Jews, of along with their ideas.
But like Hitler, he was lying.
He had a globe-wide set of ideas, he claimed the Jews (as an entire collective) also had a globe-wide set of ideas and that the two sets of ideas clashed totally.
There can be no doubt if the Jews of Europe had all left for Palestine in the late 19th century, Hitler and Schmitt would have still held onto their own ideas and just invented a new enemy to act as their antithesis.
Schmitt's entire philosophy, zillions upon zillions of words over a very long lifetime, could be boiled down to the absolute need to invent endless numbers of imagined external enemies to hold an imagined race-nation together.
Creating an imaginary existential struggle to the death among sub-species when none ever existed in Nature
Schmitt's evil continues, because unlike Hitler, his ethnicity-free philosophy can still influence many many intellectuals who would recoil in disgust - today - from believing in Hitler's more limited concept of a world wide Jewish-communist-banker conspiracy against the World.
They do however still believe in a world wide communist conspiracy (or perhaps a world wide capitalist conspiracy), along with a world wide Moslem conspiracy.
Just as they earlier believed in a world wide anarchistic conspiracy, a Negro conspiracy , a yellow peril Oriental conspiracy, a slavic Russian conspiracy, and a Jewish conspiracy.
They are already a little ashamed, as rational academics, for being so paranoid, due to personal brain chemistry and personal family upbringing, but thankful Schmitt arrives on the scene to sooth their guilt over it.
Don't worry, be happy, he says : paranoia is good for the collectivity --- it binds together an otherwise potentially constantly civil war oriented nation, all in defense against a much larger globe-wide existential evil.
Now if you have ever have taken more than one or two political science courses, anywhere, anytime, in the world, you soon learn that the most prestigious professors in the entire Poli Sci department are those who preach a variant of Schmitt's philosophy in their International Relations courses.
Schmitt the Realist in International Relations
They hold the philosophic position of Realism, as defined within in the study of International Relations.
Now that terms covers a very wide and very warring body of thoughts, when you actually get down to the nitty-gritty details.
Now that terms covers a very wide and very warring body of thoughts, when you actually get down to the nitty-gritty details.
But what all its proponents do agree upon is that international relations are dominated by the actions of nations .
Not the actions of individuals, international organizations or globe-binding ideologies.
And that these nations act like real world anarchists because there is no effective supra-national body or body of world public opinion above them to constrain them.
Not the actions of individuals, international organizations or globe-binding ideologies.
And that these nations act like real world anarchists because there is no effective supra-national body or body of world public opinion above them to constrain them.
The Realists do not deny that there are global idea systems and global non-governmental organizations, just that they solely act in the real world beyond books and speeches, only effectively through nation-states.
So, to Hitler and Schmitt, while the Jews possessed no state of their own, they were the true 'powers behind the throne' in the states of America, Russia, the UK and France etc.
Realists see nations having no ideals, only temporary tactics, in the constant struggle for every individual nation to stay alive and prosper at the expense of its neighbours.
"Trust no one - particularly not erstwhile allies" and "might is always right, the only right" is the maxims of this deep dark pool of human thought.
Realists would be horrified if my description of them was to stand uncorrected but they remain - in my view - permanently and fatally wounded on the position of inclusionary coalitions in their exclusionary philosophy.
Don't get me wrong --- Realists love coalitions , they just totally distrust - sight unseen - all its potential partners.
Realists misread the earlier Darwin and focus on the darker later Darwin
They refuse to adjust their worldview, by admitting the long history of the decisive action of coalitions into their nation-dominated reality.
My own view is that indeed international politics is dominated by power relationships but that 'power' is widely diffused indeed : not just in the hands of national executives, but also shared with domestic legislatures and domestic voters, international ideals like equality, international ideologies like environmentalism, mid-level and globe-wide coalitions, the varying state of the weather and the economy around the globe, even the timing of internal elections.
On and on and on.
In Darwinian terms, the potted version of which is where the realists got all their ideas, the effort to survive long enough to produce healthy offspring is indeed a power struggle.
But Darwin then and his fans today, see that struggle as composed of many clashing and overlapping struggles.
Individual against other individuals in their own species and sub species and regions, against other species, against the local and global environment.
The sub species against other sub species in their own species and against all others mentioned above.
The species against all others mentioned above.
It does not consist primarily - as the Realists, Schmitt and Hitler claim - in the struggle of sub-sub-species warring against other sub-sub-species.
Biologically, the humans, as primates, are defined at the edges by the inability to conceive a child with other close species.
Biologically, there are no such privileged sub species as whites and blacks and yellows, Jews and Germans.
But there are literally thousands of potentially useful sub species of humanity --- all the humans with the genetic ability to safely drink cow milk being but one.
The point being that biologically, for all living beings, only their different gene structures matter in defining species and sub-species - not whether they speak German or worship the Hebrew God.
No biological definition of Canadians is possible - Schmitt to the contrary
No single simple definition can define Canadians --- after all many people are 'Canadian' only because they were born there but grew up and live elsewhere, others have a Canadian passport but live outside Canada, still others live in Canada, perhaps most their lives, but still aren't citizens.
Canadians have different religions, taste in foods and TV shows, speak different languages, vote differently.
So while the Canadian executive branch does indeed have the Realists' much touted legal monopoly over the use of military force abroad to kill people, it is also constrained, in practise, by thousands of cross pressuring threads of shared support between its citizens and peoples and ideas from abroad.
Reality is a lot more complex than realists like Schmitt allow --- sometimes we fight against others and sometimes we work together : it is neither rule of the jungle nor love and peace beads.
Where I part company most with the Realists is their lack of evidence that exclusionary 'going it alone as a nation' has been more successful long term, in history, than inclusionary coalition building has been.
I think the most extreme example of exclusionary 'going it alone' only lasted 12 years and seemingly permanently destroyed centuries of intellectual prestige accorded the hugely powerful German nation.
By contrast, the evolutionary concept of inclusion, exhibited by microbial HGT (the horizontal gift transferring of genes amongst the globes' microbes) has allowed these tiny sacks of water to survive four billion years pf the worst the Universe can throw at them.
Realists like Schmitt may believe that they are 'thinking biologically' but the truth is that they are not thinking anywhere widely enough....
I think the most extreme example of exclusionary 'going it alone' only lasted 12 years and seemingly permanently destroyed centuries of intellectual prestige accorded the hugely powerful German nation.
By contrast, the evolutionary concept of inclusion, exhibited by microbial HGT (the horizontal gift transferring of genes amongst the globes' microbes) has allowed these tiny sacks of water to survive four billion years pf the worst the Universe can throw at them.
Realists like Schmitt may believe that they are 'thinking biologically' but the truth is that they are not thinking anywhere widely enough....
Monday, May 23, 2016
Hippies better at making war than making love ?
You all remember the Hippies and their peace, love, and understanding. All that lovely-dovey, huggy-buggy inclusion stuff.
Placing flowers down the barrels of rifles : hardly prime war-winning material, the entire draft dodging deserting lot of them.
Not so.
Because the last Big One (DOuble'ya DOuble-ya Two) was actually won by the Allies' inclusive values greatly besting the contrasting exclusionary values of their more war-like opponents in the Axis.
The world wouldn't stand up to bullies between 1932 to about 1942, which is why the hate-even-your-erstwhile-allies Axis won so many victories, picking off nations one at a time while their neighbours carefully averted their eyes.
But once the Allies started trying to be inclusionary, at least as inclusive as their own exclusionary values would let them, there was no holding them back.
In the end, the United Nations encircled the world and trapped the Axis.
No, the newer and often reluctant Allied nations didn't all fight, not by a long shot, but even in denying the Axis access to their raw materials and war bases, while giving the same to the Allies, they did much to first restrain and then defeat the clearly superior fighting machine of the Axis.
The postwar world has confirmed that alliances with a higher commitment to genuine inclusion hang together better and present a more convincing united front, stopping many aggressors from going to war and reducing the length and severity of wars that do start.
Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo saw the world as 'every man and every nation-race-species for his/them selves'.
Dog eat dog, law of the jungle, kill or be killed.
Big and as warlike as these three nation-races were, their war was going nowhere fast when they started literally taking on the entire world, by putting even the most feckless nations on guard against them and their exclusionary philosophy.
The microbes have been inclusive for years - through their HGT (horizontal gift transferring) of genes amongst them all, they effectively form one globe-wide supra organism that has allowed these tiny beings to survive four billion years of the worst that reality can throw at them.
Call it 'microbial intelligence' if you will.
It brought us WWII's penicillin for example.
But then call what Germany did at Auschwitz during WWII 'civilized stupidity'- and this from what was generally considered the smartest human civilization (intellectually, technologically and culturally) during the first half of the 20th century.
So : 'peace, love & understanding' as a superior instrument of war -- who would ever have thought......
Placing flowers down the barrels of rifles : hardly prime war-winning material, the entire draft dodging deserting lot of them.
Not so.
Because the last Big One (DOuble'ya DOuble-ya Two) was actually won by the Allies' inclusive values greatly besting the contrasting exclusionary values of their more war-like opponents in the Axis.
Allies stayed together in defeat but Axis couldn't even stay together in victory
The world wouldn't stand up to bullies between 1932 to about 1942, which is why the hate-even-your-erstwhile-allies Axis won so many victories, picking off nations one at a time while their neighbours carefully averted their eyes.
But once the Allies started trying to be inclusionary, at least as inclusive as their own exclusionary values would let them, there was no holding them back.
In the end, the United Nations encircled the world and trapped the Axis.
No, the newer and often reluctant Allied nations didn't all fight, not by a long shot, but even in denying the Axis access to their raw materials and war bases, while giving the same to the Allies, they did much to first restrain and then defeat the clearly superior fighting machine of the Axis.
The postwar world has confirmed that alliances with a higher commitment to genuine inclusion hang together better and present a more convincing united front, stopping many aggressors from going to war and reducing the length and severity of wars that do start.
Promoting superiority of the big going it alone, means big bears losing to large packs of small dogs
Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo saw the world as 'every man and every nation-race-species for his/them selves'.
Dog eat dog, law of the jungle, kill or be killed.
Big and as warlike as these three nation-races were, their war was going nowhere fast when they started literally taking on the entire world, by putting even the most feckless nations on guard against them and their exclusionary philosophy.
The microbes have been inclusive for years - through their HGT (horizontal gift transferring) of genes amongst them all, they effectively form one globe-wide supra organism that has allowed these tiny beings to survive four billion years of the worst that reality can throw at them.
Call it 'microbial intelligence' if you will.
It brought us WWII's penicillin for example.
But then call what Germany did at Auschwitz during WWII 'civilized stupidity'- and this from what was generally considered the smartest human civilization (intellectually, technologically and culturally) during the first half of the 20th century.
So : 'peace, love & understanding' as a superior instrument of war -- who would ever have thought......
The GREATER efficiency of Dawson's impure Manhattan penicillin
Biochemist Dr Karl Meyer's original idea in early September 1940, one approved by his three helping team mates, was to work towards the man-made synthesis of plentiful amounts of pure penicillin within about six months ----and only then test it clinically on human patients.
Until then,the job of his microbiologist team mates Dr Henry Dawson and Dr Gladys Hobby, assisted by Meyer and his lab tech Eleanor Chaffee, was mostly to grow some penicillium mold and harvest the natural impure penicillin.
All this impure natural penicillin would then be purified to as high a degree as possible by Meyer and Chaffee (losing most of the actual penicillin in the process) - the purity quest being judged a success when the resulting 'penicillin' exhibited a highly specific melting point and would easily 'go into crystal' form.
All this, just so Meyer and Chaffee could then destroy this tiny but fairly pure amount of penicillin, reassured that an analysis of the resulting smaller (simpler) chemical fragments making up this unique new compound would give an accurate description of its structure.
Then the artificial synthesis of newer and better penicillins might become possible.
Only relatively occasionally were Dawson and Hobby's other microbiological skills to be deployed, in testing the bacteria-killing power (if any) of the initial impure natural penicillin, the smaller fragments of purer natural penicillin and the early synthetic penicillin production.
Not at all, during this initial six months, was teammate Dawson to employ his further - and unique - skills as a attending physician, and actually clinically treat human patients with amounts of this early impure natural penicillin.
But then suddenly and unexpectedly, Dawson broke ranks with his friends and teammates and injected some of this highly impure natural penicillin into two patients on October 16th 1940, thus birthing our present Age of Antibiotics.
But why unilaterally break ranks and totally change directions for what was really Dr Meyer's initial show?
After all, Dawson was rather well known for being un-bossy and un-Alpha Male, at least as driven medical scientists generally go.
I believe Dawson began to realize that to chemically analysis and synthesize an unknown complex natural biological compound, purity (quality) was an absolute requirement while in the clinical treatment of patients, the opposite (quantity) was the absolute requirement for success.
Let me try to explain, starting at the breakfast table.
To get our needed 100 mg of daily Vitamin C, we could drink a big glass of highly 'impure' orange juice (my choice !) or consume a tiny amount of pure white Vitamin C powder.
But clinically, both produce absolutely the same effect on the patient.
Now lets go from the breakfast table to the hospital ward.
There it would be far far better for the survival of Dawson's dying patients if they got a slow drip of 2500 cc of highly impure (raw in fact) penicillium juice into their blood (containing a total of 10,000 units of pure penicillin) each and every day for four weeks, rather then if they got a shot of 500 micrograms (mcg) of 100% pure penicillin once every four days over the same four weeks.
The first regime - impure regime - would give the patient a total of 280,000 units of penicillin infection fighting power.
That was enough to cure most life-threatening infections in 1940, if delivered early and often enough, (and the ability to deliver early and often was in fact one of a key advantages of taking the easier and more consistent 'impure' route, as Dawson saw it.)
The second regime, only able to fitfully producing its highly purified product, would deliver only 7000 units in total over the same 28 days, not nearly enough to save even a baby from a life threatening infection.
Simply put, early penicillin was so easily destroyed, given our almost totally inability to grasp the measures needed it to render it less chemically fragile, that purifying it always destroyed much of it and each further purification step destroyed more and more and more.
Worse, the more of a very limited amount of human energy and space/money any small penicillin team devoted to purification quality, the less that could be devoted to increasing the quantity production of raw penicillin juice.
Clinically, the human body couldn't care less if one hundred milligrams of Vitamin C or Penicillin is delivered as a small amount of pure white powder or in a big bottle of water and other stuff.
As long as the 'other stuff' was safe when introduced into the body.
That is certainly the case with a drink of orange juice and as for penicillin juice it certainly seemed to be the case in endless amounts of earlier studies with animals and human cells.
Dawson began to sense, I believe, that the rational separation of natural penicillin production into 'quality is better for the chemist's efforts' and 'quantity is better for the clinician's efforts' was being lost in the unconscious and highly emotional reactions of his colleagues and bosses.
Simply put, during the Age of Modernity, 1875-1965, Purity as an end in itself was raised to far too high a level, even when, as in this case, it made no rational sense at all.
The history of published wartime penicillin efforts is rife with clinicians exalting the high purity of their teams' penicillin, even when the resulting quantities of penicillin were far too small to save the numbers of dying patients they faced.
As these morally broken doctors worshipped the false god of Purity, their hapless patients died.
So much so that, whether as Nazi doctors or as Allied doctors, WWII was hardly Organized Medicine's finest hour ...
Until then,the job of his microbiologist team mates Dr Henry Dawson and Dr Gladys Hobby, assisted by Meyer and his lab tech Eleanor Chaffee, was mostly to grow some penicillium mold and harvest the natural impure penicillin.
Quality makes sense ---- for the chemist
All this impure natural penicillin would then be purified to as high a degree as possible by Meyer and Chaffee (losing most of the actual penicillin in the process) - the purity quest being judged a success when the resulting 'penicillin' exhibited a highly specific melting point and would easily 'go into crystal' form.
All this, just so Meyer and Chaffee could then destroy this tiny but fairly pure amount of penicillin, reassured that an analysis of the resulting smaller (simpler) chemical fragments making up this unique new compound would give an accurate description of its structure.
Then the artificial synthesis of newer and better penicillins might become possible.
Only relatively occasionally were Dawson and Hobby's other microbiological skills to be deployed, in testing the bacteria-killing power (if any) of the initial impure natural penicillin, the smaller fragments of purer natural penicillin and the early synthetic penicillin production.
Not at all, during this initial six months, was teammate Dawson to employ his further - and unique - skills as a attending physician, and actually clinically treat human patients with amounts of this early impure natural penicillin.
But then suddenly and unexpectedly, Dawson broke ranks with his friends and teammates and injected some of this highly impure natural penicillin into two patients on October 16th 1940, thus birthing our present Age of Antibiotics.
But why unilaterally break ranks and totally change directions for what was really Dr Meyer's initial show?
After all, Dawson was rather well known for being un-bossy and un-Alpha Male, at least as driven medical scientists generally go.
Quantity makes sense - for the patient
I believe Dawson began to realize that to chemically analysis and synthesize an unknown complex natural biological compound, purity (quality) was an absolute requirement while in the clinical treatment of patients, the opposite (quantity) was the absolute requirement for success.
Let me try to explain, starting at the breakfast table.
To get our needed 100 mg of daily Vitamin C, we could drink a big glass of highly 'impure' orange juice (my choice !) or consume a tiny amount of pure white Vitamin C powder.
But clinically, both produce absolutely the same effect on the patient.
Now lets go from the breakfast table to the hospital ward.
There it would be far far better for the survival of Dawson's dying patients if they got a slow drip of 2500 cc of highly impure (raw in fact) penicillium juice into their blood (containing a total of 10,000 units of pure penicillin) each and every day for four weeks, rather then if they got a shot of 500 micrograms (mcg) of 100% pure penicillin once every four days over the same four weeks.
The first regime - impure regime - would give the patient a total of 280,000 units of penicillin infection fighting power.
That was enough to cure most life-threatening infections in 1940, if delivered early and often enough, (and the ability to deliver early and often was in fact one of a key advantages of taking the easier and more consistent 'impure' route, as Dawson saw it.)
The second regime, only able to fitfully producing its highly purified product, would deliver only 7000 units in total over the same 28 days, not nearly enough to save even a baby from a life threatening infection.
Simply put, early penicillin was so easily destroyed, given our almost totally inability to grasp the measures needed it to render it less chemically fragile, that purifying it always destroyed much of it and each further purification step destroyed more and more and more.
Worse, the more of a very limited amount of human energy and space/money any small penicillin team devoted to purification quality, the less that could be devoted to increasing the quantity production of raw penicillin juice.
Clinically, the human body couldn't care less if one hundred milligrams of Vitamin C or Penicillin is delivered as a small amount of pure white powder or in a big bottle of water and other stuff.
As long as the 'other stuff' was safe when introduced into the body.
That is certainly the case with a drink of orange juice and as for penicillin juice it certainly seemed to be the case in endless amounts of earlier studies with animals and human cells.
Modernity's FALSE GOD : the Cult of Purity
Dawson began to sense, I believe, that the rational separation of natural penicillin production into 'quality is better for the chemist's efforts' and 'quantity is better for the clinician's efforts' was being lost in the unconscious and highly emotional reactions of his colleagues and bosses.
Simply put, during the Age of Modernity, 1875-1965, Purity as an end in itself was raised to far too high a level, even when, as in this case, it made no rational sense at all.
The history of published wartime penicillin efforts is rife with clinicians exalting the high purity of their teams' penicillin, even when the resulting quantities of penicillin were far too small to save the numbers of dying patients they faced.
As these morally broken doctors worshipped the false god of Purity, their hapless patients died.
So much so that, whether as Nazi doctors or as Allied doctors, WWII was hardly Organized Medicine's finest hour ...
Saturday, May 21, 2016
WWII's Microbial Intelligence & Civilized Stupidity
The Intellectual History of WWII, according to Luke
We must never forget that the people actually running WWII, men in their fifties and sixties, all still thought of Germany (despite the temporary aberration of Hitler) as the most advanced civilization on Earth, in fact the most civilized nation ever.
That was the overwhelming consensus of the entire world when they were in their formative years, back in the years before WWI.
Germany then was where all the world's ambitious went to successfully conclude their involvement with higher education, the country that was the font of all wisdom, in areas stretching across the whole spectrum of human thought.
The Elevated, base
That is why it was such an intellectual shock when this most civilized of nations (hence most potentially moral of all nations) was revealed, in late 1945, to have actually been the most evil nation in history.
It was a reversal of the sort that the Gospel author, LUKE the DOCTOR , revelled in.
But waaaiiiit ! There's more : lots more !
More than 99% of all species of microbes have nothing what so ever to do with humans and couldn't survive a few minutes inside them.
A very few species do indirectly seek to live (not die) on or inside humans as one of their favourite hosts.
Their gene actions (not their self conscious will because they have none) make their current hosts expel them in sneezes, runny noses and in excrement.
This spreads them about and some land on and in new human hosts.
But, I repeat, they do not actually 'invade' humans intent on 'killing' them, driven by pure innate evil malevolence, as the popular version of Germ Theory has it.
Until very recently, and that still fitfully, all the focus (from scientists & public) has been on the one time in a lifetime - for a period of perhaps a week - when pneumococcus 'invaded' the lungs of some elderly people and brought that life to a relatively peaceful close.
"Captain of the Men of Death" they rather dramatically used called these little bacteria.
Totally ignored was the fact that this patient (and all other human beings) had permanently or transitorily hosted the pneumococcus in their throat and nose all their life, without any apparent harm to us humans.
How does a bug that lives in the lungs of a few people for a week, compares statistically, with the same bug living in the throat of all people all their lives ?
It doesn't and it didn't.
But that awkward truth was irrelevant, because the supposed innate evilness of microbes at the bottom of the Tree of Life was in reality a scientific 'straw dog' - meant to act as a vivid contrast to the supposed innate goodness of civilized man - like the Germans - at the very top of the same Tree of Life.
Even weirder, prewar Modernity reserved the fungus as the most evil of the evil microbes, though in fact fungus and molds rarely kill humans.
No matter --- like molds, the inchoate processes of late Victorian modernization dissolved the binary boxes of inequality that late Victoria Modernity so frantically erected to preserve the established social hierarchy of inequality.
So molds and funguses became modernization's metaphoric equivalent (it not be politic to actually forthrightly oppose the progress of modernization, not when one was always trumpeting on about the virtues of Progress in general).
One can easily fill any number of books with quotes from authors of the era of pure-is-simple Modernity, all using fungus as a metaphor for various kinds of ultimate horror and evil.
Starting of course with Adolf Hitler, who stupidly didn't know where a metaphor ends and reality begins : he regards the Jews as literally the semi-human equivalent of evil fungus and used a fumigating agent to kill millions of them.
Given Hitler's intense fear and hatred for moldy fungus, it would have been sweet irony indeed if his life had been saved by penicillium mold pee, after the July 1944 assassination attempt on his life.
It wasn't ----- so why then was/is the myth so popular ?
This was distinctly a popular myth otoo : definitely generated from below, by ordinary folk who sensed that the idea of a mighty saved by the meek was in some profound sense a rebuke to all the mighty and a moral coup for all the meek, not just the penicillium mold.
In an age when chemists were the scientists at the very top of the science status ladder, it cheered up humans at the bottom of the inequality ladder on end, so see these 'smartest guys in the Universe' fail to produce any lifesaving penicillin when the slimy little penicilliums did it with ease.
The Base, elevated
This then was the second intellectual shock of WWII : that the wartime symbol of ultimate goodness, lifesaving penicillin, had come from the prewar symbol of evilness, the fungus molds.
Most of us already think Auschwitz was a prime example of civilization gone stupid and many of us throw in Katyn Forest and Hiroshima as more examples.
But where on earth do I come up with the concept of 'microbial intelligence' ?
Individually, each bacteria is relatively simple, by choice : it keeps its active capabilities and its genome (its brains) deliberately smaller than us humans so it can reproduce much much faster : a new generation in 20 minutes, not in 20 years.
But collectively, the microbes have a vast genome and a vast amount of capabilities - far far greater than us humans.
Every single individual microbe has a tiny piece of that giant supra genome and shares it, when crisis demands it, by HGT (horizontal gift transfers) --- a system of microbes sharing their DNA with each other and even with us.
So for example, the basic genes needed to create the vast penicillin family of antibiotics (the beta lactams) emerged once in one species of bacteria and - vis HGT - spread to the penicillium and other bacteria.
However you describe it, this de-centralized and very robust system of collectively storing massive amounts of precious data globally is a form of superb intelligence, it being exactly how the humans internet works, along with all forms of human de-centralized file sharing.
Human scientists, blinded by their hubris, felt sure the tiny, formless, microbes just had to be extremely simple and hence in some sense, evil -- evil merely to survive against larger, smarter, nicer beings.
They thus signally failed, despite their claim that science was unique in human activities because it was always probing below surface impressions, to see that the microbes' beauty was more than skin deep : that their true sophistication lay inside, in their many powerful enzymes, spread out over a globe-wide genome.
Penicillins, beta lactams, still represent the majority of our life-saving antibiotics and are still all based on wartime style, fungus made, penicillin G.
We 'clever' humans are still too stupid to do it anywhere as well as the 'dumb' microbes...
Friday, May 20, 2016
WWII's Auschwitz & Penicillium : "The Elevated, base, & The Base, elevated"
An elaboration of my elevator pitch about my book, "Impure Manhattan,Auschwitz Antidote", written in the form of a blog post...
It is much much too hard today, with most of our top science and top musical artists coming out of the US, to really accept that before WWII everyone considered that all the best science and the most distinguished (classical) music came from the German culture.
But it was definitely so.
That is why the late 1945 revelations that the wartime rumours about Auschwitz understated its actual horrific intent, were such a particular intellectual shock for those who came of age before WWII.
Note well : I definitely think our generation feels a much greater moral shock about Auschwitz than than did our grandparents' generation, because our underlying moral values are far less aligned with the Nazi doctors than theirs were.
By which I mean to say that most educated middle class people back then agreed with the broad thrust of Eugenics ---- but felt Auschwitz took it all way way too far in its attempts to improve the entire human ecosystem by gassing every last Jewish 'fungus' on Earth.
Rather, their intellectual shock came about because all the previous German cultural and scientific activities seemed to mark Germany as the civilization at the very top of the Tree of Life.
So the revelation that the world's supposedly most civilized nation actually turned out to act the most evil was Modernity's first salutary shock of WWII.
The next salutary intellectual shock for that hubris-ridden generation of Modernity was that their very essence of the ultimate imaginable horror and evil (insert here references to James Joyce & HP Lovecraft & Adolf) , the quivering jelly-like fungus slime, was actually the unlikely hero of the war.
For it was the lowly penicillium, yes another fungus, that literally rose to the moral occasion and produced all of our penicillin when 'the smartest guys in the Universe', the chemists, signally failed to produce any of it.
Thus assailed by these twin wartime intellectual shocks (one from the very top and one from the very bottom) to the way they had always thought Reality was supposed to work, prewar modernity started into writing itself a long long suicide note, with a due date circa 1965 ....
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Snyder/ Black Earth : vertical Race exclusivity versus horizontal Jewish inclusivity
Unlike most other book reviewers I have read to date, I fully support Timothy Snyder's key claim in his newest work on the Holocaust, BLACK EARTH.
Perhaps because, selfishly, I thought it was my insight.
Or if not mine alone, at least an insight shared by many of us environmentalists who are now looking much more closely at the work of conservationists and their 'science' of Invasion Ecology, realizing the uneasy parallels they hold with the mindset of people like Hitler and Stalin.
(Or in my case, the parallels they hold with the mindset of all of prewar 'pure is simple' modernity.)
But actually I don't think anyone has ever done a better job than Dr Snyder at actually close reading Hitler's two early books.
In that reading, Snyder shows how Hitler repeatedly faults the Jews for infecting Hitler's forever vertically separate and forever vertically unequal human races with horizontally inclined notions : cosmopolitan and universalistic ideas about all the things that all humans hold together in common.
These inclusive ideas, just like what the physical fungus do with damp wood, dissolve the mental barriers separating the races and unite them in a miscegenative matrix that is a bit of both.
Bond together as brothers under God, they refused to do what Hitler's Mother Nature demanded of all species -- to fight each other onto death, to obtain their daily bread.
So, in his mind, when Hitler called the Jews a human fungus growth he was not at all being metaphorical but rather biological and factual....
Perhaps because, selfishly, I thought it was my insight.
Or if not mine alone, at least an insight shared by many of us environmentalists who are now looking much more closely at the work of conservationists and their 'science' of Invasion Ecology, realizing the uneasy parallels they hold with the mindset of people like Hitler and Stalin.
(Or in my case, the parallels they hold with the mindset of all of prewar 'pure is simple' modernity.)
But actually I don't think anyone has ever done a better job than Dr Snyder at actually close reading Hitler's two early books.
In that reading, Snyder shows how Hitler repeatedly faults the Jews for infecting Hitler's forever vertically separate and forever vertically unequal human races with horizontally inclined notions : cosmopolitan and universalistic ideas about all the things that all humans hold together in common.
These inclusive ideas, just like what the physical fungus do with damp wood, dissolve the mental barriers separating the races and unite them in a miscegenative matrix that is a bit of both.
Bond together as brothers under God, they refused to do what Hitler's Mother Nature demanded of all species -- to fight each other onto death, to obtain their daily bread.
So, in his mind, when Hitler called the Jews a human fungus growth he was not at all being metaphorical but rather biological and factual....
WWII turned prewar moral certitudes totally upside down
In 1945, it was revealed that the very top of Modernity's Great Tree of Being had given us the worst killing machine ever (in the form of Auschwitz) while the very bottom of that Great Tree of Being had given us the best lifesaver ever (in the form of Penicillin).
That wasn't the way prewar 'pure is simple' modernity had said that Reality worked, at such forums as the famous 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
Instead 'pure is simple' modernity had claimed that all the best moral actions was found among the very top big human civilized races and that all the worst evil moral actions were found among the tiny pathogenic bacteria, viruses and fungus at the very bottom of life.
That was what I was basically still taught in early elementary school in the 1950s, but looking around at the big nations trying to kill us kiddies with nuclear tipped rockets while tiny bacterial and fungus slime scraped off of jungle dirt were trying to save us with antibiotics, it sure didn't feel that way.
I was conceived five years after the end of WWII, but believe me, I still 'got it' ....
That wasn't the way prewar 'pure is simple' modernity had said that Reality worked, at such forums as the famous 1939-1940 New York World's Fair.
Instead 'pure is simple' modernity had claimed that all the best moral actions was found among the very top big human civilized races and that all the worst evil moral actions were found among the tiny pathogenic bacteria, viruses and fungus at the very bottom of life.
That was what I was basically still taught in early elementary school in the 1950s, but looking around at the big nations trying to kill us kiddies with nuclear tipped rockets while tiny bacterial and fungus slime scraped off of jungle dirt were trying to save us with antibiotics, it sure didn't feel that way.
I was conceived five years after the end of WWII, but believe me, I still 'got it' ....
In Hitler's strictly B&W world, strictly modernist world, gray was the ultimate evil
Because in Hitler's B&W world, if fungus had a color, it would be that gray.
Fungus (or rather fungus like behavior), for Hitler, was the ultimate evil.
Because the fungus dissolved and joined things that should be always kept conceptually and physically separate.
As when they create a jelly like softness in a damp corner of a house , something that is neither dry firm wood or wet water but rather a mixture of both, rather like a quaking swamp created from dry firm soil and wet yielding water.
Human fungus, said Hitler, he meant mostly the Jews, did the same to the hitherto separate human races and thus had to be all destroyed ,right down to their spore like babies, if the human ecosystem was to be saved.
Hitler didn't like the negroid blues, but he too, felt he was on a mission from God......
Fungus (or rather fungus like behavior), for Hitler, was the ultimate evil.
Because the fungus dissolved and joined things that should be always kept conceptually and physically separate.
As when they create a jelly like softness in a damp corner of a house , something that is neither dry firm wood or wet water but rather a mixture of both, rather like a quaking swamp created from dry firm soil and wet yielding water.
Human fungus, said Hitler, he meant mostly the Jews, did the same to the hitherto separate human races and thus had to be all destroyed ,right down to their spore like babies, if the human ecosystem was to be saved.
Hitler didn't like the negroid blues, but he too, felt he was on a mission from God......
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Clean Fill is dirt, but never 'dirty'
All across the southern American Black Belt, that arc of dark black upland soil where the short staple cotton grows so profitably, there are still plenty of modern day plantations with modern day massas and field hands and that makes it as good a place as any to define what Pure Modernity did and didn't mean by 'dirty'.
If you grow up out in the country (anywhere ,not just in the Black belt) you know that 'clean fill' just means dirt (soil) free of too much in the way of industrial pollution.
The term is usually seen on a sign stuck up on a low-lying piece of cheap land that the owner wants filled up to the average level of the surrounding area, so that eventually it will get county approval for a house and a septic system on it.
The idea is that dump truck drivers are paid by the load to haul away soil excavated from a construction site and the shorter distance the driver has to go to get rid of the stuff, the more money they make in a day.
The landowner planning to fill up his low lying wetlands is really seeking 'free clean fill' and they usually get it, because if the dump trucker must normally drive twenty miles to get rid of the load at a municipal waste site and also pay a tippage fee to do so, dropping it off a mile or two away for free is a no-brainer.
All this to say that even pure black dirt, as black as the field hands that tend it, can still be 'clean' and 'pure' - if left out in the field.
As clean and pure as the pure white bed sheets inside the massas' bedroom, sheets as white as the massas himself and his spouse.
Both black dirt and white sheets are equally clean and pure, as long as they remain in their separate spheres : separate and equal.
But if even the smallest possible amount of that black dirt from the field gets left on those white sheets, perhaps from the field hands' feet, then the sheet is now 'dirty'.
Very very dirty : dirty as in Mandingo 'dirty' miscegenation.
To Pure Modernity, 'dirty' was just about anything, 'out of order'.
Because under Pure Modernity the key base assumption about reality was that it was indeed 'ordered' , even if the order was buried deep down inside the structure of reality and not easily seen or even yet detected by the best scientific instruments.
If you hold the opposing (and more current) view of reality, that everything in reality seems either already intertwined or potentially able to intertwine, you might suspect big problems for people living in the era of Pure Modernity.
That is because while they claim there is deep hidden clean purity and order everywhere, on the surface everything seems intertwined, IE dirty.
The social history of Pure Modernity then seems to threaten a repeat of that tale of frantic people with brooms running around wildly, trying to hold back the tide.
And I think that is what you indeed do find : an endless series of moral panics all revolving around fears of two supposedly separate spheres (say Jew and Aryan) touching and interacting...
If you grow up out in the country (anywhere ,not just in the Black belt) you know that 'clean fill' just means dirt (soil) free of too much in the way of industrial pollution.
The term is usually seen on a sign stuck up on a low-lying piece of cheap land that the owner wants filled up to the average level of the surrounding area, so that eventually it will get county approval for a house and a septic system on it.
The idea is that dump truck drivers are paid by the load to haul away soil excavated from a construction site and the shorter distance the driver has to go to get rid of the stuff, the more money they make in a day.
The landowner planning to fill up his low lying wetlands is really seeking 'free clean fill' and they usually get it, because if the dump trucker must normally drive twenty miles to get rid of the load at a municipal waste site and also pay a tippage fee to do so, dropping it off a mile or two away for free is a no-brainer.
All this to say that even pure black dirt, as black as the field hands that tend it, can still be 'clean' and 'pure' - if left out in the field.
As clean and pure as the pure white bed sheets inside the massas' bedroom, sheets as white as the massas himself and his spouse.
Both black dirt and white sheets are equally clean and pure, as long as they remain in their separate spheres : separate and equal.
But if even the smallest possible amount of that black dirt from the field gets left on those white sheets, perhaps from the field hands' feet, then the sheet is now 'dirty'.
Very very dirty : dirty as in Mandingo 'dirty' miscegenation.
To Pure Modernity, 'dirty' was just about anything, 'out of order'.
Because under Pure Modernity the key base assumption about reality was that it was indeed 'ordered' , even if the order was buried deep down inside the structure of reality and not easily seen or even yet detected by the best scientific instruments.
If you hold the opposing (and more current) view of reality, that everything in reality seems either already intertwined or potentially able to intertwine, you might suspect big problems for people living in the era of Pure Modernity.
That is because while they claim there is deep hidden clean purity and order everywhere, on the surface everything seems intertwined, IE dirty.
The social history of Pure Modernity then seems to threaten a repeat of that tale of frantic people with brooms running around wildly, trying to hold back the tide.
And I think that is what you indeed do find : an endless series of moral panics all revolving around fears of two supposedly separate spheres (say Jew and Aryan) touching and interacting...
Thursday, May 5, 2016
joe stalin Popular science vs joe friday Published science
Don't get me wrong - I love joe friday Published science, usually generated by junior nobodies, particularly when it is long on assembled evidence and short on windy conclusions.
Its pontifical Popular science - the kind mostly generated by the established famous scientists (Science's thumb-suckers-in-chief) - that really gets me in the long and curlies.
Expansive theories, short on facts, long on wind, generated not from down in the dirt or out in the field but delivered ex cathedra from some determinist LaPlacian cloud, way up on high.
Now the theory normally started as a normal joe friday peer reviewed article with some particularly but limited insightful conclusions that for whatever reason, usually something happening in the society outside formal Science, really catches fire inside the discipline and became the new dogma among its members.
Thus encouraged, the original author and their fans push that insight further than the evidence would normally take it and their snow ball starts growing.
No longer formally peer-reviewed, this wind is now issued publicly in the form of the author writing popularly-oriented science books and expansively expressed in author interviews with important non-scientific media.
More privately, it becomes the unchallenged thinking behind the author's designing of chapters in the big popular college textbooks, in the editing choices of the big journals, in the choices made at important grant and hiring committee meetings and in the placement of speakers at big society AGM sessions.
The reason I rant about this is perhaps because drawing expansive conclusions from a shallow study is supposed to be my bailiwick and the bailiwick of my kin in the blogging and pamphleteer worlds.
But as I am not a scientist (in fact never took high school biology and no science courses at all in university) and certainly am not a famous scientist, there is no aura of scientific certainty over any of my windy conclusions.
Instead, it is just my water cooler opinion, just my over-dinner speculations --- and published as such.
Published with the attitude that one can feel free to rebuke it tooth and nail, or just ignore it, or call me a gadfly, an amateur, a pamphleteer - 'I don't care, I don't care, I don't care'.
I am a spiritual son of Eva Tanguay - 'I just don't care'.
But what I do care about - muchly - is when established scientists want to have it both ways.
You know : the freedom to speculate wildly and widely based on a superficial relationship to a few facts like any opinionated non-scientist and yet to come off sounding like the seasoned cautious author of a narrowly argued, fact-filled, peer-reviewed published scientific article.
My only suggestion is for members of every academic discipline to self-consciously and sharply limit the 'perks of power' of the authors of currently dominant theories in their academic discipline.
Don't make them heads of the big university departments, presidents of societies, editors of big journals, textbook editors, or put them on all big grant and hiring committees.
Let them rightly enjoy their virtual intellectual cachet, but without giving them control of any real world instruments that let them enforce their theory but hiring or not hiring people based mostly on the strength of their publicly voiced support of that theory.
A truly scientific theory needs to live or die in the world of evidence, not because young scientists get sent to the scientific gulags if they fail to support it : let Science be Joe Friday, not Joe Stalin....
Its pontifical Popular science - the kind mostly generated by the established famous scientists (Science's thumb-suckers-in-chief) - that really gets me in the long and curlies.
Expansive theories, short on facts, long on wind, generated not from down in the dirt or out in the field but delivered ex cathedra from some determinist LaPlacian cloud, way up on high.
Now the theory normally started as a normal joe friday peer reviewed article with some particularly but limited insightful conclusions that for whatever reason, usually something happening in the society outside formal Science, really catches fire inside the discipline and became the new dogma among its members.
Thus encouraged, the original author and their fans push that insight further than the evidence would normally take it and their snow ball starts growing.
No longer formally peer-reviewed, this wind is now issued publicly in the form of the author writing popularly-oriented science books and expansively expressed in author interviews with important non-scientific media.
More privately, it becomes the unchallenged thinking behind the author's designing of chapters in the big popular college textbooks, in the editing choices of the big journals, in the choices made at important grant and hiring committee meetings and in the placement of speakers at big society AGM sessions.
Being windy based on a few facts is my job not theirs
The reason I rant about this is perhaps because drawing expansive conclusions from a shallow study is supposed to be my bailiwick and the bailiwick of my kin in the blogging and pamphleteer worlds.
But as I am not a scientist (in fact never took high school biology and no science courses at all in university) and certainly am not a famous scientist, there is no aura of scientific certainty over any of my windy conclusions.
Instead, it is just my water cooler opinion, just my over-dinner speculations --- and published as such.
Published with the attitude that one can feel free to rebuke it tooth and nail, or just ignore it, or call me a gadfly, an amateur, a pamphleteer - 'I don't care, I don't care, I don't care'.
I am a spiritual son of Eva Tanguay - 'I just don't care'.
But what I do care about - muchly - is when established scientists want to have it both ways.
You know : the freedom to speculate wildly and widely based on a superficial relationship to a few facts like any opinionated non-scientist and yet to come off sounding like the seasoned cautious author of a narrowly argued, fact-filled, peer-reviewed published scientific article.
Disciplines : cut your tall poppies
My only suggestion is for members of every academic discipline to self-consciously and sharply limit the 'perks of power' of the authors of currently dominant theories in their academic discipline.
Don't make them heads of the big university departments, presidents of societies, editors of big journals, textbook editors, or put them on all big grant and hiring committees.
Let them rightly enjoy their virtual intellectual cachet, but without giving them control of any real world instruments that let them enforce their theory but hiring or not hiring people based mostly on the strength of their publicly voiced support of that theory.
workaday Science needs to be more like Joe Friday and less like Joe Stalin...
A truly scientific theory needs to live or die in the world of evidence, not because young scientists get sent to the scientific gulags if they fail to support it : let Science be Joe Friday, not Joe Stalin....
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Half Breeds don't begin when an aboriginal and an european marry, but when we NOTICE
Miscegenation is just 'breed out of place'
It was only when the Victorian Age's growing addiction to pure modernity led them to put Aboriginals in a pile way over there and Europeans in a pile way over here that they then noticed that the children of a marriage between a native and what ? (an alien ?) were a hybrid, the half breed.
For centuries earlier, most people hadn't really noticed anything 'unusual' happening.
As Bruno Latour meant to say, the harder the pure modernists tried to separate humans from nature and worthy 'real' humans from unworthy sub-humanity, the more they created new hybrids were none were (noticed) before ....
Fort McMurray : WORSER forest fires 'start here'
First, a hat tip to decisively defeated former Premier Darrell Dexter of Nova Scotia, the person most credited with making the phrase "X start here" a rich resource for satirists of all stripes.
Now we all agree that forest fires did not start happening just because humanity decided, fairly recently, to burn up all of the world's coal, oil and gas as fast as they could.
But the human decision to go on burning all that fossil carbon even after being warned that it would lead to global warming and stronger winds did lead directly to the fact that today's forest fire seasons around the world start much earlier and end much later.
And that they all burn much more intensely, thanks to drier hotter fuel and stronger winds bringing in more fresh oxygen.
Canada's Tar Sands are not the biggest single source of human added carbon in the atmosphere.
But they are one of the biggest and by far the biggest one that was brought on stream, after humans were told it was foolishly dangerous to increase further the huge amount of carbon we were already adding to the air in the mid 1980s.
By the time that a link between burning fossil fuels and an destructive increase in global temperatures was made obvious in the the mid 1980s, literally trillions of dollars had already been sunk into oil operations into huge efforts in Saudi Arabia and in East Texas.
For most humans, all that time, money and effort spent made it hard to stop pumping and just throw it all away. But the oil sand projects developers do not have that excuse --- they knew what their planned new operations would do to world temperatures and they went straight ahead anyway.
Moral and ethical teachers would say that as a result of going ahead despite having full knowledge of the dire consequences makes them - not Texans or Saudis - are far more morally responsible, regardless of the relatively small size, globally, of their operations.
So yes, residents of Fort McMurray, capital of Canada's Tar Sands regions, did not start today's forest fires.
But are they partially responsible for the fact that today's forest fires are, on average, worse than before ?
Yes, I believe they need share some of the blame for that.
Today we all should worry about and pray for the 100,000 people stuck in and around Fort McMurray with a huge hot fire and strong winds threatening not only the city itself but also cutting off the only escape road out of the city and through the bush.
But afterwards, we can only hope for an honest assessment of the connection between the massive amounts of Alberta oil sand being turned into atmospheric CO2 and the hotter longer forest fires in the area immediately around those same oil sand sites ....
Now we all agree that forest fires did not start happening just because humanity decided, fairly recently, to burn up all of the world's coal, oil and gas as fast as they could.
But the human decision to go on burning all that fossil carbon even after being warned that it would lead to global warming and stronger winds did lead directly to the fact that today's forest fire seasons around the world start much earlier and end much later.
And that they all burn much more intensely, thanks to drier hotter fuel and stronger winds bringing in more fresh oxygen.
Canada's Tar Sands are not the biggest single source of human added carbon in the atmosphere.
But they are one of the biggest and by far the biggest one that was brought on stream, after humans were told it was foolishly dangerous to increase further the huge amount of carbon we were already adding to the air in the mid 1980s.
By the time that a link between burning fossil fuels and an destructive increase in global temperatures was made obvious in the the mid 1980s, literally trillions of dollars had already been sunk into oil operations into huge efforts in Saudi Arabia and in East Texas.
For most humans, all that time, money and effort spent made it hard to stop pumping and just throw it all away. But the oil sand projects developers do not have that excuse --- they knew what their planned new operations would do to world temperatures and they went straight ahead anyway.
Moral and ethical teachers would say that as a result of going ahead despite having full knowledge of the dire consequences makes them - not Texans or Saudis - are far more morally responsible, regardless of the relatively small size, globally, of their operations.
So yes, residents of Fort McMurray, capital of Canada's Tar Sands regions, did not start today's forest fires.
But are they partially responsible for the fact that today's forest fires are, on average, worse than before ?
Yes, I believe they need share some of the blame for that.
Chickens, roost
Today we all should worry about and pray for the 100,000 people stuck in and around Fort McMurray with a huge hot fire and strong winds threatening not only the city itself but also cutting off the only escape road out of the city and through the bush.
But afterwards, we can only hope for an honest assessment of the connection between the massive amounts of Alberta oil sand being turned into atmospheric CO2 and the hotter longer forest fires in the area immediately around those same oil sand sites ....
Impure + Manhattan : Oxymoron ?
Most of the world has always admired and even envied Manhattan and wished they could be among its residents, if only for a year or two.
Agreed, a significant minority of us has also always hated and loathed Manhattan and wished they could bomb and burn it to the ground.
Still, on balance, 'Manhattan' has long been seen as a highly positive word.
While 'Impure' has usually been seen as a very negative word.
I am a near life long resident of small bucolic Nova Scotia and someone who has spent a total of maybe seven hours - max - in busy Manhattan.
So the fact that the title of my blog (and book) is "Impure Manhattan" suggests that by bringing these two absolutely opposites intimately together I planned some sort of an ironic oxymoron for my title.
Not exactly.
Today the demographics of Manhattan are not actually that different from a dozen other global cities its size.
But let us never forget what a pioneer Manhattan was for almost a hundred years.
From the 1880s to the 1980s, it was unique for its mix of high income high ethnic status native born residents and its low income 'migrant' residents coming from low status nations or national sub-regions.
It was unique for mixing millions of the richest and whitest of WASPdom with millions of poorer people : slavic Jews, swarthy Italian Catholics and rural southern negroes.
All seen then as overly violent, overly sexual, overly loud, overly smelly and dirty.
And yet for all of that, from Rudy Valentino to Louie Armstrong to Al Jolson, they were also found at the very top of the most admired people in the world.
So, for those who have always hated Manhattan, they did so precisely because they saw it as impure, in fact the very ground zero of global impurity.
However by picking this title, I do wish to argue that those of us who love and envy Manhattan do so because it is, in fact - just as the haters always claimed - impure.
But that we love it because it is impure, not in spite of that fact.
And that we actually love impurity itself - as long as it is re-phrased, as it usually was/is by lovers of Manhattan, as cosmopolitan, variegated, diverse and inclusive....
Agreed, a significant minority of us has also always hated and loathed Manhattan and wished they could bomb and burn it to the ground.
Still, on balance, 'Manhattan' has long been seen as a highly positive word.
While 'Impure' has usually been seen as a very negative word.
My only visit to Manhattan lasted just seven hours
I am a near life long resident of small bucolic Nova Scotia and someone who has spent a total of maybe seven hours - max - in busy Manhattan.
So the fact that the title of my blog (and book) is "Impure Manhattan" suggests that by bringing these two absolutely opposites intimately together I planned some sort of an ironic oxymoron for my title.
Not exactly.
Today the demographics of Manhattan are not actually that different from a dozen other global cities its size.
But let us never forget what a pioneer Manhattan was for almost a hundred years.
From the 1880s to the 1980s, it was unique for its mix of high income high ethnic status native born residents and its low income 'migrant' residents coming from low status nations or national sub-regions.
It was unique for mixing millions of the richest and whitest of WASPdom with millions of poorer people : slavic Jews, swarthy Italian Catholics and rural southern negroes.
All seen then as overly violent, overly sexual, overly loud, overly smelly and dirty.
And yet for all of that, from Rudy Valentino to Louie Armstrong to Al Jolson, they were also found at the very top of the most admired people in the world.
A paradox as much as an oxymoron
So, for those who have always hated Manhattan, they did so precisely because they saw it as impure, in fact the very ground zero of global impurity.
However by picking this title, I do wish to argue that those of us who love and envy Manhattan do so because it is, in fact - just as the haters always claimed - impure.
But that we love it because it is impure, not in spite of that fact.
And that we actually love impurity itself - as long as it is re-phrased, as it usually was/is by lovers of Manhattan, as cosmopolitan, variegated, diverse and inclusive....
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Ecological Uniformitarianism leads to ecological einsatzgruppen
Its a rhetorical claim of 'absolute truth' that I never tire of repeating : Charles Lyell, not Charles Darwin, was the true intellectual father of Hitler and of Pure Modernity.
Charles Lyell made credible (to a worried world elite eager to hear it) the notion that Reality in the past (and in the future) was more or less like it was for the well-to-do in the 1850s : an oasis of stability with any change so gradual it was pretty well invisible over the average lifetime.
Supposedly, Lyell was only speaking about geological processes.
Supposedly Lyell was denying the possibility that at times in the past world (or in a future world) Life could be totally disrupted by sudden massive volcanic outflows or huge meteorites crashing in from out of space.
Instead Lyell insisted that the Earth's crust was being uplifted or eroded at the same leisurely pace as one saw happen in (earthquake & volcano free) northwestern Europe or northeastern America.
But in practise Lyell's notion (stability as the norm in Nature and change both abnormal and gradual) once out of the bottle was taken up eagerly by many, many powerful people deathly afraid of any sort of change that might hurt their wealth and influence, particularly if it came from (and with) outsiders.
So Lyell's idea was eagerly taken up by worried evolutionists like Darwin, worried sociologists like Herbert Spencer, worried nationalists like Hitler, worried eugenicists like Charles Davenport, worried bacteriologists like Koch.
And by worried ecologists like Frederic Clements, the Donald Trump like godfather of present day ecology, conservation and invasion biology.
The natural life living on the surface of the Earth was not a continuum along one long large international breezeway, pronounced Clements, and species could not flow backward and forward freely around the world, carried by wind, water and flotsam in a willy nilly fashion and adapting to new vistas surprisingly easily.
Instead , Clements proclaimed, Nature had always been arranged in a series of tight little quasi-nations (just as humans had recently done) called ecosystems.
Just as nations were then seen as organized into stable, eternal supra-organisms around a shared 'blood and soil', so too the ecosystems.
They were made up of tightly integrated species, just like a finely tuned engine --- take one native species out or introduce one alien species in and the whole thing would collapse.
It was sort of like South East Asia circa 1960, just let the aliens take out South Vietnam and the whole free world domino set would come crashing down.
Now in all this, for conservationists and ecologists like Clements, their fiercest enemies were not really alien plant and animal species or even all those horny dark natives daring to continue to live on their self-declared 'virgin' lands.
No, it was the archaeologists !!!
For when the ecologists wandered deep in the jungles of the Congo or Amazon, they saw only the eternal presence of rain forests, ecological oasis of calm and stability, currently being destroyed on their edges by ignorant natives allied to greedy European capitalists.
But deep in those same rain forests, the archaeologists dared to look down at the ground, even into the ground, not merely glancing upwards to enjoy the awesome jungle canopy as did the ecologists and conservationists.
There they found physical evidence of human-made ruins of such massive size and range as to suggest millions had just a few hundred years before lived in those rain forests after clearing much of them to farm and to smelt iron etc.
Why could they see this while the ecologists and conservationists only saw virgin forests ?
The archaeologists claimed the ruins were perhaps 400 years old, a mere instant in the history of human societies as they understood it.
For their scientific discipline saw human life as a dynamic process, always waxing and waning, as having a history.
But that same 400 years was a virtual eternity to the ecologists, who like Lyell, as a scientific discipline lived in the 'Eternal Present'.
For in terms of fast growing jungle trees, 400 hundred years was forever.
They quickly sprang up in the rain forest fields and cities the instant they were abandoned, after European-brought diseases wiped out much of the native populations of the New World and Africa, beginning in the 1500s.
What the ecologists saw as eternally native and pristine was not and even worse, at least for their purist point of view, were also probably filled with a different set of species than had existed there before humans began cutting down most of the trees a thousand years earlier.
Here in Nova Scotia, few realize that their beloved 'native' earthworms are not actually native but arrived in the 1500s, probably in European earth used as ship ballast.
Wheat, while arriving at the same time as the earthworms and well known as not to be 'native', are also never seen as 'alien'. While other plants, also arriving the same time as wheat and worms are still regarded as 'alien'.
What gives ??!
We need to avoid getting swept up in the ecologists' money cum moral 'panics' and remember that definitions like 'native' and 'alien', are not in anyway scientific absolutes but rather mere rhetorical terms.
And popular science, the science that seeks to influence the public in order to gain more money and power (and that includes about 99.99999999% of all science doesn't it?) is all about rhetoric.
For example, our much beloved earthworms actually did displace a few 'native' forest floor microorganisms, fungus and the like, but since no humans complained, the newcomer worms weren't seen as aliens and hence not seen as ipso facto 'bad'.
But even these fungus were only 'relatively recent' native species, ones that had to have arrived in the mere few thousands of years since the last ice age covered all of Nova Scotia and removed all life - including all the fungus and all earthworms.
So just as in human life, in Nature too, everything is relative with yesterday's alien as today's native.
Too bad the ecologists and conservationists refuse to admit the analogy.
Only by taking up Lyell's claims of near permanent stability (uniformitarianism), could Hitler or Clements credibly claim that invading aliens must be destroyed root and branch, less they quickly breed and replace all the natives.
The Nazis' continuing efforts, even as their empire collapsed, to kill all of the handful Jews in this or that remote island corner of Europe and to kill all of them - even babies - without exception has many many parallels, even to this day, in the brutally savage world of ecology and conservation.
As always, please read Fred Pearce's "THE NEW WILD" for plenty of examples of cash-strapped governments spending millions to track down and kill an entire species, babies and all, on tiny remote rock islands.
Ecological einsatzgruppens run by people who consider themselves nice decent people just doing their brutal but necessary job.
I believe them when they say that - as when many Nazis said the exact same during their role in the Holocaust.
Deadly earnest, terribly decent - but deadly and terribly wrong...
Uniformly stable
Charles Lyell made credible (to a worried world elite eager to hear it) the notion that Reality in the past (and in the future) was more or less like it was for the well-to-do in the 1850s : an oasis of stability with any change so gradual it was pretty well invisible over the average lifetime.
Supposedly, Lyell was only speaking about geological processes.
Supposedly Lyell was denying the possibility that at times in the past world (or in a future world) Life could be totally disrupted by sudden massive volcanic outflows or huge meteorites crashing in from out of space.
Instead Lyell insisted that the Earth's crust was being uplifted or eroded at the same leisurely pace as one saw happen in (earthquake & volcano free) northwestern Europe or northeastern America.
But in practise Lyell's notion (stability as the norm in Nature and change both abnormal and gradual) once out of the bottle was taken up eagerly by many, many powerful people deathly afraid of any sort of change that might hurt their wealth and influence, particularly if it came from (and with) outsiders.
So Lyell's idea was eagerly taken up by worried evolutionists like Darwin, worried sociologists like Herbert Spencer, worried nationalists like Hitler, worried eugenicists like Charles Davenport, worried bacteriologists like Koch.
frederic clements TRUMPS common sense
And by worried ecologists like Frederic Clements, the Donald Trump like godfather of present day ecology, conservation and invasion biology.
The natural life living on the surface of the Earth was not a continuum along one long large international breezeway, pronounced Clements, and species could not flow backward and forward freely around the world, carried by wind, water and flotsam in a willy nilly fashion and adapting to new vistas surprisingly easily.
Instead , Clements proclaimed, Nature had always been arranged in a series of tight little quasi-nations (just as humans had recently done) called ecosystems.
Just as nations were then seen as organized into stable, eternal supra-organisms around a shared 'blood and soil', so too the ecosystems.
They were made up of tightly integrated species, just like a finely tuned engine --- take one native species out or introduce one alien species in and the whole thing would collapse.
It was sort of like South East Asia circa 1960, just let the aliens take out South Vietnam and the whole free world domino set would come crashing down.
Now in all this, for conservationists and ecologists like Clements, their fiercest enemies were not really alien plant and animal species or even all those horny dark natives daring to continue to live on their self-declared 'virgin' lands.
No, it was the archaeologists !!!
Archaeologists versus Conservationists
For when the ecologists wandered deep in the jungles of the Congo or Amazon, they saw only the eternal presence of rain forests, ecological oasis of calm and stability, currently being destroyed on their edges by ignorant natives allied to greedy European capitalists.
But deep in those same rain forests, the archaeologists dared to look down at the ground, even into the ground, not merely glancing upwards to enjoy the awesome jungle canopy as did the ecologists and conservationists.
There they found physical evidence of human-made ruins of such massive size and range as to suggest millions had just a few hundred years before lived in those rain forests after clearing much of them to farm and to smelt iron etc.
Why could they see this while the ecologists and conservationists only saw virgin forests ?
The archaeologists claimed the ruins were perhaps 400 years old, a mere instant in the history of human societies as they understood it.
For their scientific discipline saw human life as a dynamic process, always waxing and waning, as having a history.
But that same 400 years was a virtual eternity to the ecologists, who like Lyell, as a scientific discipline lived in the 'Eternal Present'.
For in terms of fast growing jungle trees, 400 hundred years was forever.
They quickly sprang up in the rain forest fields and cities the instant they were abandoned, after European-brought diseases wiped out much of the native populations of the New World and Africa, beginning in the 1500s.
What the ecologists saw as eternally native and pristine was not and even worse, at least for their purist point of view, were also probably filled with a different set of species than had existed there before humans began cutting down most of the trees a thousand years earlier.
consider my not-so-native Nova Scotia
Here in Nova Scotia, few realize that their beloved 'native' earthworms are not actually native but arrived in the 1500s, probably in European earth used as ship ballast.
Wheat, while arriving at the same time as the earthworms and well known as not to be 'native', are also never seen as 'alien'. While other plants, also arriving the same time as wheat and worms are still regarded as 'alien'.
What gives ??!
We need to avoid getting swept up in the ecologists' money cum moral 'panics' and remember that definitions like 'native' and 'alien', are not in anyway scientific absolutes but rather mere rhetorical terms.
And popular science, the science that seeks to influence the public in order to gain more money and power (and that includes about 99.99999999% of all science doesn't it?) is all about rhetoric.
For example, our much beloved earthworms actually did displace a few 'native' forest floor microorganisms, fungus and the like, but since no humans complained, the newcomer worms weren't seen as aliens and hence not seen as ipso facto 'bad'.
But even these fungus were only 'relatively recent' native species, ones that had to have arrived in the mere few thousands of years since the last ice age covered all of Nova Scotia and removed all life - including all the fungus and all earthworms.
So just as in human life, in Nature too, everything is relative with yesterday's alien as today's native.
Too bad the ecologists and conservationists refuse to admit the analogy.
Ecological Einsatzgruppen
Only by taking up Lyell's claims of near permanent stability (uniformitarianism), could Hitler or Clements credibly claim that invading aliens must be destroyed root and branch, less they quickly breed and replace all the natives.
The Nazis' continuing efforts, even as their empire collapsed, to kill all of the handful Jews in this or that remote island corner of Europe and to kill all of them - even babies - without exception has many many parallels, even to this day, in the brutally savage world of ecology and conservation.
As always, please read Fred Pearce's "THE NEW WILD" for plenty of examples of cash-strapped governments spending millions to track down and kill an entire species, babies and all, on tiny remote rock islands.
Ecological einsatzgruppens run by people who consider themselves nice decent people just doing their brutal but necessary job.
I believe them when they say that - as when many Nazis said the exact same during their role in the Holocaust.
Deadly earnest, terribly decent - but deadly and terribly wrong...
Monday, May 2, 2016
NATURE has never been WILD : Fred Pearce & the New Wild
Published last year by Boston's Beacon Press, Fred Pearce's eye-opening new book, "The New Wild", has had a little controversy, but unfortunately, not nearly enough.
Conservationists, eugenicists, racists and ecologists (pardon the redundancy) should be raging, blood red in interview and post, over its message - but they're not.
Here's why :
Please don't ever be fooled when scientists appear to quickly respond quickly to science-based criticism --- that actually only occurs if the criticism is seen by them as 'never laying a glove on them' intellectually.
So responding to Intelligent Design, to them, is like shooting fish in a barrel - a much enjoyed scientific blood sport.
In reality, science as a profession, is fundamentally passive aggressive.
Thus the general approach to any intellectually troubling criticism (any new scientific information and concepts that threatens Science generally/one of its major discipline and thus scientists' sense of self worth) is to ignore it in public but then back stab it in private, among trusted friends.
This is because tenure as a university teacher and a PhD in a general discipline are in terms of earnings and social prestige totally useless, in practise, to mid to high level academics.
It is their individual contributions to a sub branch of that discipline that has made them well off and respected.
And that sub branch is usually tightly tied to a particular concept.
Cue here Pearce.
He is a science journalist - rather than a scientist - but that's a feature, not a bug.
For his easy to read, vivid but scientifically acute book is giving millions of scientifically informed readers (including many scientists outside the narrow field of ecology) an arresting and disturbing insight into the high school science take on ecology, one they've trusted for years.
The losers in this current debate - the well secured middle aged men and women running major ecology departments and major conservation organizations - are just hoping that ignoring Pearce will let them reach retirement without having to re-adjust a lifetime of ideas-recruited-by-rote and hopefully let their intellectual legacy survive their deaths.
In a religious terms (always the best way to look at atheist science) Pearce dares to dis Ecology's Saint Clements and anoint the sinner Gleason - in public.
For a century now, Frederic Clements' view that a near permanent climax population exists on top of every ecosystem (a tightly bound super-organism ecosystem he claimed) ruled Ecology's roust, the foundation securing all the work published (and the successful academics careers) based around that concept.
But since 1945, the opposing views of Clements' defeated rival Henry Gleason have found ever more support inside the academic Ecology trade.
Gleason's was a sophisticated version of "Catastrophism" -- it gives far far more weight to sheer chance : so local environments are not 'climaxing' or 'successing' at all but merely 'are'.
Yesterday's new aliens are today's old term residents and tomorrow's locally extinct - change is the only constant.
So Pearce reveals to us, strangers to current ecology controversies, that all those pristine nineteenth century rain jungles in the Amazon and the Congo, as first 'discovered' by middle aged white guys, were actually only of recent duration - the areas had been cleared areas of high human activity only a few centuries before.
So what on Earth was truly pristine ?
In my opinion, this revival of long dead Gleason ideas was the result of the twin impact of Auschwitz and Penicillin gradually working their way through our collective mental universe, particularly among the young.
Not because the young are smarter than their elders - far from it.
But not having devoted a lifetime of hard slog to promoting Clements' incorrect concept and then securing fame and fortune as a result, they found it much easier to take up an old concept that better fitted 'the facts'.
Actually the facts hadn't change at all from Clements' time a century go - nor had his and Gleason's concepts.
All that had really changed was how these younger would-be scientists viewed the world while growing up, well before they hit university.
Published science is all about uncovering new facts, to simplify wildly.
But popular science is basically something best studied by social scientists, as social science.
(By popular science I don't mean the work of science journalists like Pearce but rather (a) the thumb sucking done by senior scientists, done over the import of these new facts and (b) the relative success of the rival new theories, among senior scientists and the power elite.)
For example, the rival concepts promoted by Clements and Gleason a century ago.
The winning scientific thumb sucking exercise rarely tells us anything eternally useful about the universe outside the human mind, but it is always an acute insight into the human mental universe during the era when it was popular...
Conservationists, eugenicists, racists and ecologists (pardon the redundancy) should be raging, blood red in interview and post, over its message - but they're not.
Here's why :
Please don't ever be fooled when scientists appear to quickly respond quickly to science-based criticism --- that actually only occurs if the criticism is seen by them as 'never laying a glove on them' intellectually.
So responding to Intelligent Design, to them, is like shooting fish in a barrel - a much enjoyed scientific blood sport.
Science : passive aggressive
In reality, science as a profession, is fundamentally passive aggressive.
Thus the general approach to any intellectually troubling criticism (any new scientific information and concepts that threatens Science generally/one of its major discipline and thus scientists' sense of self worth) is to ignore it in public but then back stab it in private, among trusted friends.
This is because tenure as a university teacher and a PhD in a general discipline are in terms of earnings and social prestige totally useless, in practise, to mid to high level academics.
It is their individual contributions to a sub branch of that discipline that has made them well off and respected.
And that sub branch is usually tightly tied to a particular concept.
Cue here Pearce.
He is a science journalist - rather than a scientist - but that's a feature, not a bug.
For his easy to read, vivid but scientifically acute book is giving millions of scientifically informed readers (including many scientists outside the narrow field of ecology) an arresting and disturbing insight into the high school science take on ecology, one they've trusted for years.
The losers in this current debate - the well secured middle aged men and women running major ecology departments and major conservation organizations - are just hoping that ignoring Pearce will let them reach retirement without having to re-adjust a lifetime of ideas-recruited-by-rote and hopefully let their intellectual legacy survive their deaths.
In a religious terms (always the best way to look at atheist science) Pearce dares to dis Ecology's Saint Clements and anoint the sinner Gleason - in public.
For a century now, Frederic Clements' view that a near permanent climax population exists on top of every ecosystem (a tightly bound super-organism ecosystem he claimed) ruled Ecology's roust, the foundation securing all the work published (and the successful academics careers) based around that concept.
But since 1945, the opposing views of Clements' defeated rival Henry Gleason have found ever more support inside the academic Ecology trade.
Gleason the catastrophist vs Clements the uniformitarianist
Gleason's was a sophisticated version of "Catastrophism" -- it gives far far more weight to sheer chance : so local environments are not 'climaxing' or 'successing' at all but merely 'are'.
Yesterday's new aliens are today's old term residents and tomorrow's locally extinct - change is the only constant.
So Pearce reveals to us, strangers to current ecology controversies, that all those pristine nineteenth century rain jungles in the Amazon and the Congo, as first 'discovered' by middle aged white guys, were actually only of recent duration - the areas had been cleared areas of high human activity only a few centuries before.
So what on Earth was truly pristine ?
In my opinion, this revival of long dead Gleason ideas was the result of the twin impact of Auschwitz and Penicillin gradually working their way through our collective mental universe, particularly among the young.
Not because the young are smarter than their elders - far from it.
But not having devoted a lifetime of hard slog to promoting Clements' incorrect concept and then securing fame and fortune as a result, they found it much easier to take up an old concept that better fitted 'the facts'.
Actually the facts hadn't change at all from Clements' time a century go - nor had his and Gleason's concepts.
All that had really changed was how these younger would-be scientists viewed the world while growing up, well before they hit university.
Published science is all about uncovering new facts, to simplify wildly.
But popular science is basically something best studied by social scientists, as social science.
Scientific thumb sucking
(By popular science I don't mean the work of science journalists like Pearce but rather (a) the thumb sucking done by senior scientists, done over the import of these new facts and (b) the relative success of the rival new theories, among senior scientists and the power elite.)
For example, the rival concepts promoted by Clements and Gleason a century ago.
The winning scientific thumb sucking exercise rarely tells us anything eternally useful about the universe outside the human mind, but it is always an acute insight into the human mental universe during the era when it was popular...
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