Readers of my various blogs probably already know the names Robert Solow and Trevor Swan.
They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.
(Sic ---- very very Sic....)
Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.
These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of things like capital and labour and resources.
So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can, in effect, "get along without any natural resources".
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.
He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.
I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.
That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".
When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.
There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.
They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.
That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.
Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.
An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.
Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.
Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.
This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.
Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.
But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?
All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.
This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.
But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).
Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.
He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.
But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.
His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.
Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....
Who was right?
In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.
Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."
PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.
But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .
Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????
Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.
They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.
So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.
As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
4Fs, Women and the Grace of God
Con Mensa is Latin for 'at' 'a table'.
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
Sunday, February 12, 2012
4Fs,Women & the Grace of God
Modernity, BIG MO, was soooo very big during the years of WWII.
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
Helping MO go CO : 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God ...
In the short term,during his tragically short life, Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny band did nothing more than pique the supporters of Modernity.
Annoyed them, but nothing else.
But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.
Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.
(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)
In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.
So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...
Annoyed them, but nothing else.
But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.
Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.
(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)
In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.
So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Project "BIG" brought down by the smallest imaginable opponents...
Enraptured by Platonic delusions,the Modernity Project imagined Life to be basically stabilizable and hence oriented to the K-selected and the Very Large.
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
Peaked Modernity or Piqued Modernity ?
Both, actually.
World War Two, 1939-1945, was both the Apogee and the Nadir of the Enlightenment-Modernity Project.
In '21st Century-Speak', 1945 saw Peak Modernity staring down at a long, slow, slide into oblivion.
In the early 1940s, most middle class members of world civilization supported the Modernity project, almost without question.
But the war wasn't going as predicted, on any side.
And while 'Power Over Others' isn't really intrinsic to Modernity ( Pol Pot did pretty good in that department with pre-modern shovels and sticks), Precision is truly intrinsic to Modernity.
Put simply:
"Modernity without Precision is not Modernity".
The flustered Modernity supporters had enough self-created problems of imprecision of their own, without needing a dying doctor and his tiny team flaunting their own defiance of Modernity in everyone's face.
Martin Henry Dawson piqued Peak Modernity.
In return, Peak Modernity supporters, when it came to write the official and semi-official histories of World War Two, never forgave him.
But our world, today, looks a lot more like his than it does theirs, so I guess he got the last laugh....
PS: a note to grammarians : I look forward to explanations to flustered writers not to confuse 'Peking Modernity' with 'Piquing Modernity'. Puns, you gotta love 'em ---- at least if you read me !
World War Two, 1939-1945, was both the Apogee and the Nadir of the Enlightenment-Modernity Project.
In '21st Century-Speak', 1945 saw Peak Modernity staring down at a long, slow, slide into oblivion.
In the early 1940s, most middle class members of world civilization supported the Modernity project, almost without question.
But the war wasn't going as predicted, on any side.
And while 'Power Over Others' isn't really intrinsic to Modernity ( Pol Pot did pretty good in that department with pre-modern shovels and sticks), Precision is truly intrinsic to Modernity.
Put simply:
"Modernity without Precision is not Modernity".
The flustered Modernity supporters had enough self-created problems of imprecision of their own, without needing a dying doctor and his tiny team flaunting their own defiance of Modernity in everyone's face.
Martin Henry Dawson piqued Peak Modernity.
In return, Peak Modernity supporters, when it came to write the official and semi-official histories of World War Two, never forgave him.
But our world, today, looks a lot more like his than it does theirs, so I guess he got the last laugh....
PS: a note to grammarians : I look forward to explanations to flustered writers not to confuse 'Peking Modernity' with 'Piquing Modernity'. Puns, you gotta love 'em ---- at least if you read me !
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wartime Manhattan's OTHER 4F project...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson 's PEN project (producing natural
penicillin systemics to save the lives of tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.
No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.
But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.
I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.
'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.
And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.
Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.
And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.
Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.
Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.
Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.
John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.
And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.
I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....
penicillin systemics to save the lives of tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.
No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.
But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.
I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.
'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.
And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.
Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.
And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.
Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.
Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.
Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.
John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.
And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.
I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
The Right of Life
The Manhattan Engineering District aka The Manhattan Project aka The Bomb, was the biggest scientific project of WWII and indeed one of the biggest of all time.
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The OTHER Manhattan Project...
... Establishing the Right of Life.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Berlin T4 ; Manhattan 4F
If World War Two was anything, it was War Among the Big Battalions.
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Monday, December 12, 2011
The "Concert Manque" ? or "Three Waller" ?
When asked by a Canadian "what am I
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
Thursday, October 20, 2011
the OTHER Manhattan Project
The problems of 'Doctor D', 'Miss H' and of Charlie don't seemed to have loomed up very large in the work of historians, novelists, composers or movie makers in the 75 years since those problems first began.
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.
But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.
The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.
Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?
Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.
That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.
We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?
The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.
The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.
The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .
Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.
I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The problems of three little people ...
... at the height of WWII --- and how their solution changed our whole world for the better, forever.
Saturday, July 2, 2011
Don't let my modest manner fool ya
Intellectually, I am damned immodest.
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.
We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.
This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?
We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of 20th century science altogether.
If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....
This post came from an old deleted blog called
Friday, June 10, 2011
2011: creation of clash of 1840s darwin/dalton versus 1940s dirac/dawson
The "Four Ds" are not "The Four Divas" but two groups of conflicting scientists who laid the ground for the world most of us are destined to live , reproduce and die in - the 21st century.
John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.
But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.
Plenty of irony in the latter pair.
Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.
In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.
Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.
From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...
John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.
But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.
Plenty of irony in the latter pair.
Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.
In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.
Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.
Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.
From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...
Thursday, June 9, 2011
What this Blog is about
Henry Dawson's tiny AKTION 4F team and his research into QUORUM BIOLOGY were hopeful first steps towards restoring sanity amid the horrors that Phaetopia released during World War Two.
I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .
Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .
This is NOT a 'book review blog'.
Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize) new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.
Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.
My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.
I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !
They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...
I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .
Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .
This is NOT a 'book review blog'.
Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize) new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.
Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.
My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.
I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !
They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Quantum Physics,Quorum Biology confound Phaetopia
Phaetopia seems a big word - its not.
I made it up recently - its a neologism - which is a big word that means a 'newly invented word or phrase.'
Neologisms is what writers do - or should do - expand the language with new vivid and useful words that describe new concepts that the writers hopefully also came up with.
Phaeton Man (aka Modernity Man) is exactly like his ancient counterpart.
Both, while messing about with the Earth when they were specifically told not to, end up making some parts of it too hot and dry and others too cold and wet.
World War Two was a chance for Phaeton Man to really feel his oats, strut on a world stage and throw his weight around.
At the macro level, he came apart at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal where frostbite or heat stroke mixed it up with starvation and led to cannibalism and defeat.
The whole world - even children - could see this smashup.
But in addition, during that same War and albeit at a micro level and virtually unseen except inside university classrooms and laboratories, Phaeton Man's grandest delusion --- that he could control the inert building blocks of mass/energy (the atom) and life (the cell) went totally and permanently west.
Quantum Physics said there was no stable reality inside the inside of the inside of an atom to control - heck there might not even be any reality there that we mere humans could ever understand.
People like Einstein, who sort of understood Quantum Physics didn't like this at all - famously called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove it wrong.
But quantum entanglement is still with us and has tended to clip the wings of the sort of physicist who is tempted to play God...
It is very well known but is very poorly understood - even by physicists who believe in it and spent their lifetimes studying it.
Henry Dawson's life work (Quorum Biology) - which was coming to a summing up point at his Fall of 1943 Columbia Genetics Department Seminar only because he knew he was dying, is much less known but ultimately is also much much easier to understand.
However easy it is to understand, it remains awfully hard for the Phaeton Men still among us to accept.
Think of it, pace Einstein, as "spooky action" right inside us, right beneath our noses, as opposed to happening off at the other side of the Universe.
Dawson's thesis, simply put was this:
that the biggest civilized nations of Man were less smart than Man thought they were and that the smallest, weakest, oldest bits of life, the bacteria, were a lot smarter than Man could imagine them to be in his worst nightmare.
He said he had shown that oral commensal strep bacteria ,living inside Man as their habitual home, acted collectively in a form of collective intelligence, to evade the fiercest blows of the human immune system by being the ultimate shape shifters.
A group of bacteria, after collectively polling each other and achieving a quorum of agreement (hence the name QUORUM BIOLOGY) could run the gambit from L,R,S,M and B forms.
L cells had no cell walls and evaded our immune system by being totally invisible in terms of having no known antigens.
R cells, the normal type of strep bacteria on our body (more or less living peacefully on our throat skin but not inside our throat skin) had a cell wall but no sugar capsule - our body thus recognized they were in a harmless ,non-invasive, phase.
The invasive S type had a cell wall and a medium thick sugar 'cap' and were the dreaded bacteria found deep in our internal organs.
The super invasive M type had a cell wall and a really thick cap and could really move through our skin defenses ---- but their cap consisted of a rare biological material normally only found in humans - our body thought they were us .
The B type had a cell wall but no individual cap - they had put sugar goo to work to create an entire house that didn't let big white cells and such in to hurt them, but let tiny food, water and water in and out along internal channels.
Think of it as a sort of tiny ant colony living on your teeth as plaque or as a endocarditis vegetation on your heart valves, as in SBE - Dawson's Bete Noire.
And Dawson had already shown, between 1928 and 1933, that strep bacteria had a quorum call at times of crisis and collectively agreed to toss all their genetic housekeys into a blanket and play house with each others' kin.
This was called by him, Transformative Horizontal DNA and it made a total mess of Darwin's prim and proper Vertical DNA inheritance.
I'll edit this lot later - off to work now !
The
I made it up recently - its a neologism - which is a big word that means a 'newly invented word or phrase.'
Neologisms is what writers do - or should do - expand the language with new vivid and useful words that describe new concepts that the writers hopefully also came up with.
Phaeton Man (aka Modernity Man) is exactly like his ancient counterpart.
Both, while messing about with the Earth when they were specifically told not to, end up making some parts of it too hot and dry and others too cold and wet.
World War Two was a chance for Phaeton Man to really feel his oats, strut on a world stage and throw his weight around.
At the macro level, he came apart at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal where frostbite or heat stroke mixed it up with starvation and led to cannibalism and defeat.
The whole world - even children - could see this smashup.
But in addition, during that same War and albeit at a micro level and virtually unseen except inside university classrooms and laboratories, Phaeton Man's grandest delusion --- that he could control the inert building blocks of mass/energy (the atom) and life (the cell) went totally and permanently west.
Quantum Physics said there was no stable reality inside the inside of the inside of an atom to control - heck there might not even be any reality there that we mere humans could ever understand.
People like Einstein, who sort of understood Quantum Physics didn't like this at all - famously called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove it wrong.
But quantum entanglement is still with us and has tended to clip the wings of the sort of physicist who is tempted to play God...
It is very well known but is very poorly understood - even by physicists who believe in it and spent their lifetimes studying it.
Henry Dawson's life work (Quorum Biology) - which was coming to a summing up point at his Fall of 1943 Columbia Genetics Department Seminar only because he knew he was dying, is much less known but ultimately is also much much easier to understand.
However easy it is to understand, it remains awfully hard for the Phaeton Men still among us to accept.
Think of it, pace Einstein, as "spooky action" right inside us, right beneath our noses, as opposed to happening off at the other side of the Universe.
Dawson's thesis, simply put was this:
that the biggest civilized nations of Man were less smart than Man thought they were and that the smallest, weakest, oldest bits of life, the bacteria, were a lot smarter than Man could imagine them to be in his worst nightmare.
He said he had shown that oral commensal strep bacteria ,living inside Man as their habitual home, acted collectively in a form of collective intelligence, to evade the fiercest blows of the human immune system by being the ultimate shape shifters.
A group of bacteria, after collectively polling each other and achieving a quorum of agreement (hence the name QUORUM BIOLOGY) could run the gambit from L,R,S,M and B forms.
L cells had no cell walls and evaded our immune system by being totally invisible in terms of having no known antigens.
R cells, the normal type of strep bacteria on our body (more or less living peacefully on our throat skin but not inside our throat skin) had a cell wall but no sugar capsule - our body thus recognized they were in a harmless ,non-invasive, phase.
The invasive S type had a cell wall and a medium thick sugar 'cap' and were the dreaded bacteria found deep in our internal organs.
The super invasive M type had a cell wall and a really thick cap and could really move through our skin defenses ---- but their cap consisted of a rare biological material normally only found in humans - our body thought they were us .
The B type had a cell wall but no individual cap - they had put sugar goo to work to create an entire house that didn't let big white cells and such in to hurt them, but let tiny food, water and water in and out along internal channels.
Think of it as a sort of tiny ant colony living on your teeth as plaque or as a endocarditis vegetation on your heart valves, as in SBE - Dawson's Bete Noire.
And Dawson had already shown, between 1928 and 1933, that strep bacteria had a quorum call at times of crisis and collectively agreed to toss all their genetic housekeys into a blanket and play house with each others' kin.
This was called by him, Transformative Horizontal DNA and it made a total mess of Darwin's prim and proper Vertical DNA inheritance.
I'll edit this lot later - off to work now !
The
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
a poem : "After the Bombers"
modernity pours
lakes of fire from up above ;
while Unnoticed,
Beneath our feet,
a green sign
appears...
lakes of fire from up above ;
while Unnoticed,
Beneath our feet,
a green sign
appears...
Saturday, May 7, 2011
post MODERNITY is pre COMMENSALITY , n'est pas ?
This blog argues that while the Peak of Modernity was the New York's World's Fair of 1939, Modernity was heading for its Nadir by 1945.
But !
But still hasn't hit its nadir yet - more than sixty five years later .
Post Modernity, which is the only world that the majority of the world's population (human, plant, animal,microbe) has ever known, is a hybrid existence.
It has elements of both the older Modernist Age and the newer Commensal Age co-existing in somewhat parallel streams, rather than having the two ideologies contesting each other directly and continuously.
This blog's job, as I see it, is to hasten MODERNITY out the door.
And, of course, to hasten on Commensality, before Modernity burns up this planet and renders the whole question moot.
But there is no way I am going to sprout cliches that we are "standing on the threshold of a totally new world, etc,etc."
All my talk of "LIFE 2.0" is rhetoric, not a fact.
We are changing, we have been changing and will go on changing forever.
No revolution - no revolution truly worthy of that name - will ever be televised : it will drift in slowly like early morning fog, speaking a language of its own new invention.
We will only truly realize that it has arrived ,at the moment of its departure - in the clarity of hindsight.
I don't know how COMMENSALITY will turn out and I am very mindful that most future-oriented predictions throughout history have been less accurate than flipping a coin with your eyes closed.
But this blog can (and will) imagine how it might look.
That is, it will express my personal hopes for the shape of the future, without pretending they are predictions worth betting the store upon.
I truly believe that the coming into being of The Commensal Age is already happening, without much conscious action on the part of anyone to make it so.
But I also believe a single individual can help speed it along and shape its path, to the fullest that their talents will allow....
But !
But still hasn't hit its nadir yet - more than sixty five years later .
Post Modernity, which is the only world that the majority of the world's population (human, plant, animal,microbe) has ever known, is a hybrid existence.
It has elements of both the older Modernist Age and the newer Commensal Age co-existing in somewhat parallel streams, rather than having the two ideologies contesting each other directly and continuously.
This blog's job, as I see it, is to hasten MODERNITY out the door.
And, of course, to hasten on Commensality, before Modernity burns up this planet and renders the whole question moot.
But there is no way I am going to sprout cliches that we are "standing on the threshold of a totally new world, etc,etc."
All my talk of "LIFE 2.0" is rhetoric, not a fact.
We are changing, we have been changing and will go on changing forever.
No revolution - no revolution truly worthy of that name - will ever be televised : it will drift in slowly like early morning fog, speaking a language of its own new invention.
We will only truly realize that it has arrived ,at the moment of its departure - in the clarity of hindsight.
I don't know how COMMENSALITY will turn out and I am very mindful that most future-oriented predictions throughout history have been less accurate than flipping a coin with your eyes closed.
But this blog can (and will) imagine how it might look.
That is, it will express my personal hopes for the shape of the future, without pretending they are predictions worth betting the store upon.
I truly believe that the coming into being of The Commensal Age is already happening, without much conscious action on the part of anyone to make it so.
But I also believe a single individual can help speed it along and shape its path, to the fullest that their talents will allow....
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
MODERNITY stole it from the Beatles - we're stealing it back
Before MODERNITY stole the term 'commensal' and tortured it out of shape , the concept had been used for thousands of years, to describe the particularly unique aspect of Jesus's physical ministry:
At a time when sharing the salt was only done with one's friends and family, Jesus was eager to be a 'diner at the common table' with just about anyone.
Including - or should I say particularly - those viewed with disdain by the general society.
Like it or not, we must all get along, share and share alike, if we are to survive Jesus told his followers.
MODERNITY Science, a sort of Stephen Harper clone with a PhD in Biology, turns a stone cold eye to the very idea that commensality actually exists for very long out in the natural world.
But this is to take a normative view of something in which we actually have no choice.
All Life on Planet Earth, willy nilly, is a 'diner at a common table' .
Equally some Life - the human sort - could take all the food on the table and leave the rest of Life to starve to death.
But since humans don't actually produce food but are only parasites on those beings that do, we will soon quickly starve to death ourselves.
MODERNITY hates the thought of being dependent on non-humans but the facts are that we must.
If MODERNITY can't adjust to that fact, then it must go.....
his willingness to share his table with just about anybody.
At a time when sharing the salt was only done with one's friends and family, Jesus was eager to be a 'diner at the common table' with just about anyone.
Including - or should I say particularly - those viewed with disdain by the general society.
Like it or not, we must all get along, share and share alike, if we are to survive Jesus told his followers.
MODERNITY Science, a sort of Stephen Harper clone with a PhD in Biology, turns a stone cold eye to the very idea that commensality actually exists for very long out in the natural world.
But this is to take a normative view of something in which we actually have no choice.
All Life on Planet Earth, willy nilly, is a 'diner at a common table' .
Equally some Life - the human sort - could take all the food on the table and leave the rest of Life to starve to death.
But since humans don't actually produce food but are only parasites on those beings that do, we will soon quickly starve to death ourselves.
MODERNITY hates the thought of being dependent on non-humans but the facts are that we must.
If MODERNITY can't adjust to that fact, then it must go.....
Friday, April 22, 2011
1939-1945: the second WORD war.....
That is not a typo: I am interested in the abject historical neglect of the extent to which WWII was a war fought by words as well as by weapons .
No popular audiences wanted the war, so every leading nation at
war had to woo a large number of audiences.
First it had to deal with the concerns of its domestic population - civilians at home and their 'boys' under arms overseas.
Then your allies - their governments and their restless domestic audiences.
The neutrals - you hoped to move them to allies or away from your opponents to at least true neutrality.
Your opponents' domestic population and maybe even their military and elite.
The occupied people and one's colonial populations were extremely important.
A moment's attention would lead one to quickly see the need to divide all these big populations into many subsets, each with their own unique concerns and need for unique messaging.
I tend to think very "election-ly" about everything , so I tend to see the war as a six year long election campaign fought between three major political parties (and a lot of lesser ones) for the hearts and minds of the world's electorate.
Each party laid forth its claims of virtue and attacked the others' shortfall between their virtues claimed and their very sorry failings in practice.
The three parties?
The ANGLO SAXON Atlantic Charter (Four Freedoms) Party , the GERMAN SAXON New Order Party and the JAPANESE SAXON Co-Prosperity Sphere Party....
No popular audiences wanted the war, so every leading nation at
war had to woo a large number of audiences.
First it had to deal with the concerns of its domestic population - civilians at home and their 'boys' under arms overseas.
Then your allies - their governments and their restless domestic audiences.
The neutrals - you hoped to move them to allies or away from your opponents to at least true neutrality.
Your opponents' domestic population and maybe even their military and elite.
The occupied people and one's colonial populations were extremely important.
A moment's attention would lead one to quickly see the need to divide all these big populations into many subsets, each with their own unique concerns and need for unique messaging.
I tend to think very "election-ly" about everything , so I tend to see the war as a six year long election campaign fought between three major political parties (and a lot of lesser ones) for the hearts and minds of the world's electorate.
Each party laid forth its claims of virtue and attacked the others' shortfall between their virtues claimed and their very sorry failings in practice.
The three parties?
The ANGLO SAXON Atlantic Charter (Four Freedoms) Party , the GERMAN SAXON New Order Party and the JAPANESE SAXON Co-Prosperity Sphere Party....
A "glass-half-full" history of WWII
My book was inspired by an important poll of Americans seeking to determine the most important news story of the entire 20th Century.
In 1999, over 36,000 American men and women told the Newseum and USA Weekend magazine that the single most important event of the 20th Century involved a little boy and a baby girl and happened on a tiny island not far off the American coast back in the 1940s.
Actually the men and women divided by gender - the men pointing to the baby boy as story number one and the women saying the baby girl was the most important.
The men , backed up by tenured, professional, important historians, said that WWII ended in a BANG, and gave a downcast glass-half-empty account of the war's end.
By contrast the women looked up from the diapers and said the war ended hopefully with a WHIMPER, and in their view the glass was half-full.
I too take this view and decided to write a green revisionist history of 1939-1945 that sees the outcome as more hopeful than not.
My view of WWII may owe more to Alexander Pope and Francois
Rabelais than to the academic Dunces of my own era but so be it....
In 1999, over 36,000 American men and women told the Newseum and USA Weekend magazine that the single most important event of the 20th Century involved a little boy and a baby girl and happened on a tiny island not far off the American coast back in the 1940s.
Actually the men and women divided by gender - the men pointing to the baby boy as story number one and the women saying the baby girl was the most important.
The men , backed up by tenured, professional, important historians, said that WWII ended in a BANG, and gave a downcast glass-half-empty account of the war's end.
By contrast the women looked up from the diapers and said the war ended hopefully with a WHIMPER, and in their view the glass was half-full.
I too take this view and decided to write a green revisionist history of 1939-1945 that sees the outcome as more hopeful than not.
My view of WWII may owe more to Alexander Pope and Francois
Rabelais than to the academic Dunces of my own era but so be it....
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
a Modernist is anyone who has never changed a diaper...
Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Tojo - do you think any of those utopian dreamers ever changed a diaper?
WWII through a female-oriented lens...
I am not a female.
My most extensive bout of diaper changing was over 35 years ago, when I routinely changed diapers on adults with mental ages of one or two, in a mental hospital.
Never been a parent.
But neither did I grow up a privileged upper middle class male, waited upon hand and foot while I floated above it all , exalting in my profound thoughts.
Pause here for loud guffaw from Rebecca....
I had led a frugal life, living on a very small income and working at a variety of manually-oriented jobs.
I am very aware of the ability of material limitations to prevent grand ideas ever coming into actual existence.
And I have an ingrained respect for street smarts - be they from adults with a mental age of one or two, from infants with mental ages of one or two, or even when coming from the very humble-seeming bacteria.
Most think that World War Two was the apogee of modern science.
I ,and Adorno, disagree.
I see it was the time when Modernity was finally given its oats and told to 'go for it' .
Modernity then proceeded to 'go postal' and tore itself apart - on the inside .
It took thirty more years for Modernity to start to show its scars --- and it is still not dead yet.
I am here to help kill it - before it kills all of us and all of the Earth...
My most extensive bout of diaper changing was over 35 years ago, when I routinely changed diapers on adults with mental ages of one or two, in a mental hospital.
Never been a parent.
But neither did I grow up a privileged upper middle class male, waited upon hand and foot while I floated above it all , exalting in my profound thoughts.
Pause here for loud guffaw from Rebecca....
I had led a frugal life, living on a very small income and working at a variety of manually-oriented jobs.
I am very aware of the ability of material limitations to prevent grand ideas ever coming into actual existence.
And I have an ingrained respect for street smarts - be they from adults with a mental age of one or two, from infants with mental ages of one or two, or even when coming from the very humble-seeming bacteria.
Most think that World War Two was the apogee of modern science.
I ,and Adorno, disagree.
I see it was the time when Modernity was finally given its oats and told to 'go for it' .
Modernity then proceeded to 'go postal' and tore itself apart - on the inside .
It took thirty more years for Modernity to start to show its scars --- and it is still not dead yet.
I am here to help kill it - before it kills all of us and all of the Earth...
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Modernity: a definition
A modernist is anyone who can claim, with a straight face , that there is a fixed gene for capricious human creativity, without immediately bursting into laughter.
A modernist, in other words, is an eugenicist - not sometimes but all the times and always.
In the 1960s, it was possible to claim that only the Nazis were eugenicists and since they were anti-modernist, eugenics and modernity were thus, ipso facto, poles apart.
The 1970s and 1980s had scholars detail the extent to which eugenicists were common in every nation and in every form of ideology. In particular, world cultural figures of the first water were shown to be avid eugenicists.
The 1990s had scholars like Christina Cogdell demonstrate that popular or 'assumed' eugenics was endemic among the educated classes in America and around the world until t least the end of WWII - eugenics being more 'simple common sense' than a formal organization you had to pay a membership fee to join.
I think 21st century research will suggest will move beyond the most advanced scholarship to date.
It will move beyond claiming that eugenics was a major branch of the broad church of modernity to state that it was its only dogma : modernity was eugenics ; eugenic was modernity...
A modernist, in other words, is an eugenicist - not sometimes but all the times and always.
In the 1960s, it was possible to claim that only the Nazis were eugenicists and since they were anti-modernist, eugenics and modernity were thus, ipso facto, poles apart.
The 1970s and 1980s had scholars detail the extent to which eugenicists were common in every nation and in every form of ideology. In particular, world cultural figures of the first water were shown to be avid eugenicists.
The 1990s had scholars like Christina Cogdell demonstrate that popular or 'assumed' eugenics was endemic among the educated classes in America and around the world until t least the end of WWII - eugenics being more 'simple common sense' than a formal organization you had to pay a membership fee to join.
I think 21st century research will suggest will move beyond the most advanced scholarship to date.
It will move beyond claiming that eugenics was a major branch of the broad church of modernity to state that it was its only dogma : modernity was eugenics ; eugenic was modernity...
Too many defensive histories of WWII ; too few explanations...
This blog and its eponymous website were created because I believe that there has been far too few books written about World War Two.
At first, or even second glance, this seems to be a totally untenable position to defend.
'Glut' is the usual word used to describe the mini-industry of books, movies and TV shows produced about WWII.
But I hold that all the books about the war, to date, have come in two (distinctly biased) thirty five year long 'chunks'.
The first 'chunk', produced during the war itself and on until the late 1970s, were written by participants, middle aged or older in 1940, who had started and sustained the war but who were too old to actually fight in the foxholes.
(These people were born mostly between about 1885 and 1900.)
Their books defended the specific positions and decisions they and their allies had taken during that war.
By the 1980s most were dead or in their mid eighties and their publishing careers were over.
Then starting around 1980, we got a second glut of books - this 'chunk' written by people who had been teenagers in 1939 and so hadn't started or run the war but who, thanks to their frontline bravery, finally ended the bloodshed.
These people had been born between about 1914 and 1929.
They stoutly defended their nation's overall goals during the war, while feeling free to criticize specific activities - after all, they had been too young to actually order any of those 'wrong-in-hindsight' decisions.
Now the youngest of them, in turn, are in their mid eighties and their publishing efforts have almost fallen silent.
What is most notable about all these books, in both chunks, is their defensive cast.
All these authors somehow sensed that the generations who hadn't been participants in the war failed to see it as a clear cut case of Good against Evil.
But I think that in the course of assembling a quick argument to dismiss such an absurd claim, all of these authors found some merit in the later generations' case.
They were then reduced to defending ,or explaining away, actions that were hard to condone in normal times, as regrettable actions taken at the nadir of a Total War they felt they were losing.
I will be 60 this year and came of age when the Cold War, let alone the Second World War, was at its moral ebb.
Seventy years of distance from the wartime deluge of propaganda should allow me and others of my generation (and younger) to finally seek explanations of WWII that do not, in advance, seek to explain away actions taken by any side or person in this conflict.
Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think I would be writing about WWII - growing up, that seemed as something for grandfather's and father's generations to do.
I came at the war obliquely after a lifetime of interest in Eugenics and Modernity - Eugenic Modernity, for short.
One should always strive to see that Eugenics and Modernity in America, Russia, Japan and German had a mixture of things they did or believed in common and a mixture of things they did or believed differently.
But after 70 years of books focussed on the differences between Communism, Capitalism and Fascism one does long for and hunger for a bit of balance and redress where their similarities are also compared and evaluated.
Fair is fair.
My bias in advance:
I see World War Two as a war that the educated in America, Japan,Russia,Germany (and in all other countries) had predicted would come, should come, must come : a biologically-scientifically proven battle that must take place between 'the fittest of the fit societies' for survival.
A war between humans, with the world present only as an inert backdrop.
That is not to say that most of them also didn't fear and dread it and wish it won't happen.
It is just that, as Richard Overy claims in his book "THE MORBID AGE", they expected it was about to happen because modern science had proven it had to happen - it was in our genes.
Evolution, Natural Selection,Progress , Genetics had all foredained it would be so.
So by June 1940, the ground rules for this drama had been laid out.
Against a totally inert backdrop of Nature, six huge military empires (the British Empire,America,German-occupied Europe,Russia, Japan and China) would fight it out over six vast continents - and as it turns out in a neat trick in symmetry, over six long years.
A mind war (martial spirits), not a material war (motor spirits).
In the beginning, Japan and Germany , tiny nations with few natural resources but abundant will-to-power in science and warfare, bested the bigger empires.
Did their military or scientific vigor falter during the war, leading to their defeat?
Few military men who ever directly engaged the forces of those two comparatively small nations felt that the Germans or Japanese fighters could be bested by the Allied side, one on one.
Our will-to-freedom simply couldn't reliably best their will-to-power.
This view is held by virtually all the world's public - that the average German or Japanese soldier, as individual fighters, were fiercer than Allied soldiers, on average.
So perhaps Allied Science bested Axis Science. Much of the public -at least the older public - still believes this.
Interestingly, few scientists or historians who have studied the matter, do so.
So we are left with the consensus view that while Blitzkreig wars strike hard and fast, they also strike short.
That is to say, that the Japanese and German Blitzkreig in the Spring of 1942 fell short by only conquering about 8% of the world each, when what they really needed to do to be ultimately successful was to conquer about a half the world each.
Specifically German troops had occupy Britain and Japanese had to occupy Australia and both had to have met in Tehran and at the Urals Mountains by Spring 1942.
Under these conditions, America would have to resign itself to dominating the Americas and the southern half of Africa, but not seriously attempting to defeat Japan and Germany.
But the land and naval Blitzkreigs only conquered about one sixth of the world's surface and eventually the resources of the other five sixths defeated the Axis in a long slow war of attrition.
Thus accepting that the human factors failed to explain the ultimate defeat of the Axis ( the Allied morale/courage and scientific ability not being better enough in themselves to defeat the Japanese or Germans ) , the consensus view is forced back upon a material explanation for the war's outcome.
A explanation, from our best educated, for the outcome of the war that is totally at variance with the explanation for the start of the war, again from the world's best educated.
The Germans and the Japanese didn't lack ambition - they planned and agreed to meet in Tehran and on the Urals.
They bested all the human enemies they ever met.
So why did they fail? Why did Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini, ham actors all, fail to chew the scenery?
Why did the scenery prove much less than an inert backdrop, why did the scenery end up chewing the actors ?
Now I include such ham actors as Churchill and FDR, Portal and Hap Arnold and all those other Allied proponents of a swift Air based victory.
This because if the German armoured tank based Blitzkreig failed to deliver what it promised and the carrier & landing craft based Japanese Naval Blitzkreig failed to deliver, so did those B-17s and Norden bombsights and their Aerial Blitzkreig.
Three separate Blitzkreigs - three separate failures that crossed the Allied-Axis divide.
Why did they all fail?
These are some of the questions I hope to raise and hope to begin to answer.
There have been many accounts of the world war, I hope this one is a GREEN account - one that looks at least as much as the world's part in the war as we have given the humans' part in the war to date.....
At first, or even second glance, this seems to be a totally untenable position to defend.
'Glut' is the usual word used to describe the mini-industry of books, movies and TV shows produced about WWII.
But I hold that all the books about the war, to date, have come in two (distinctly biased) thirty five year long 'chunks'.
The first 'chunk', produced during the war itself and on until the late 1970s, were written by participants, middle aged or older in 1940, who had started and sustained the war but who were too old to actually fight in the foxholes.
(These people were born mostly between about 1885 and 1900.)
Their books defended the specific positions and decisions they and their allies had taken during that war.
By the 1980s most were dead or in their mid eighties and their publishing careers were over.
Then starting around 1980, we got a second glut of books - this 'chunk' written by people who had been teenagers in 1939 and so hadn't started or run the war but who, thanks to their frontline bravery, finally ended the bloodshed.
These people had been born between about 1914 and 1929.
They stoutly defended their nation's overall goals during the war, while feeling free to criticize specific activities - after all, they had been too young to actually order any of those 'wrong-in-hindsight' decisions.
Now the youngest of them, in turn, are in their mid eighties and their publishing efforts have almost fallen silent.
What is most notable about all these books, in both chunks, is their defensive cast.
All these authors somehow sensed that the generations who hadn't been participants in the war failed to see it as a clear cut case of Good against Evil.
But I think that in the course of assembling a quick argument to dismiss such an absurd claim, all of these authors found some merit in the later generations' case.
They were then reduced to defending ,or explaining away, actions that were hard to condone in normal times, as regrettable actions taken at the nadir of a Total War they felt they were losing.
I will be 60 this year and came of age when the Cold War, let alone the Second World War, was at its moral ebb.
Seventy years of distance from the wartime deluge of propaganda should allow me and others of my generation (and younger) to finally seek explanations of WWII that do not, in advance, seek to explain away actions taken by any side or person in this conflict.
Never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think I would be writing about WWII - growing up, that seemed as something for grandfather's and father's generations to do.
I came at the war obliquely after a lifetime of interest in Eugenics and Modernity - Eugenic Modernity, for short.
One should always strive to see that Eugenics and Modernity in America, Russia, Japan and German had a mixture of things they did or believed in common and a mixture of things they did or believed differently.
But after 70 years of books focussed on the differences between Communism, Capitalism and Fascism one does long for and hunger for a bit of balance and redress where their similarities are also compared and evaluated.
Fair is fair.
My bias in advance:
I see World War Two as a war that the educated in America, Japan,Russia,Germany (and in all other countries) had predicted would come, should come, must come : a biologically-scientifically proven battle that must take place between 'the fittest of the fit societies' for survival.
A war between humans, with the world present only as an inert backdrop.
That is not to say that most of them also didn't fear and dread it and wish it won't happen.
It is just that, as Richard Overy claims in his book "THE MORBID AGE", they expected it was about to happen because modern science had proven it had to happen - it was in our genes.
Evolution, Natural Selection,Progress , Genetics had all foredained it would be so.
So by June 1940, the ground rules for this drama had been laid out.
Against a totally inert backdrop of Nature, six huge military empires (the British Empire,America,German-occupied Europe,Russia, Japan and China) would fight it out over six vast continents - and as it turns out in a neat trick in symmetry, over six long years.
A mind war (martial spirits), not a material war (motor spirits).
In the beginning, Japan and Germany , tiny nations with few natural resources but abundant will-to-power in science and warfare, bested the bigger empires.
Did their military or scientific vigor falter during the war, leading to their defeat?
Few military men who ever directly engaged the forces of those two comparatively small nations felt that the Germans or Japanese fighters could be bested by the Allied side, one on one.
Our will-to-freedom simply couldn't reliably best their will-to-power.
This view is held by virtually all the world's public - that the average German or Japanese soldier, as individual fighters, were fiercer than Allied soldiers, on average.
So perhaps Allied Science bested Axis Science. Much of the public -at least the older public - still believes this.
Interestingly, few scientists or historians who have studied the matter, do so.
So we are left with the consensus view that while Blitzkreig wars strike hard and fast, they also strike short.
That is to say, that the Japanese and German Blitzkreig in the Spring of 1942 fell short by only conquering about 8% of the world each, when what they really needed to do to be ultimately successful was to conquer about a half the world each.
Specifically German troops had occupy Britain and Japanese had to occupy Australia and both had to have met in Tehran and at the Urals Mountains by Spring 1942.
Under these conditions, America would have to resign itself to dominating the Americas and the southern half of Africa, but not seriously attempting to defeat Japan and Germany.
But the land and naval Blitzkreigs only conquered about one sixth of the world's surface and eventually the resources of the other five sixths defeated the Axis in a long slow war of attrition.
Thus accepting that the human factors failed to explain the ultimate defeat of the Axis ( the Allied morale/courage and scientific ability not being better enough in themselves to defeat the Japanese or Germans ) , the consensus view is forced back upon a material explanation for the war's outcome.
A explanation, from our best educated, for the outcome of the war that is totally at variance with the explanation for the start of the war, again from the world's best educated.
The Germans and the Japanese didn't lack ambition - they planned and agreed to meet in Tehran and on the Urals.
They bested all the human enemies they ever met.
So why did they fail? Why did Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini, ham actors all, fail to chew the scenery?
Why did the scenery prove much less than an inert backdrop, why did the scenery end up chewing the actors ?
Now I include such ham actors as Churchill and FDR, Portal and Hap Arnold and all those other Allied proponents of a swift Air based victory.
This because if the German armoured tank based Blitzkreig failed to deliver what it promised and the carrier & landing craft based Japanese Naval Blitzkreig failed to deliver, so did those B-17s and Norden bombsights and their Aerial Blitzkreig.
Three separate Blitzkreigs - three separate failures that crossed the Allied-Axis divide.
Why did they all fail?
These are some of the questions I hope to raise and hope to begin to answer.
There have been many accounts of the world war, I hope this one is a GREEN account - one that looks at least as much as the world's part in the war as we have given the humans' part in the war to date.....
Saturday, April 16, 2011
WWII was supposed to be the triumph of the PROFESSIONAL will-to-power
WWII was supposed to be "THE GOOD WAR" for modern science; its beginnings coinciding with the beginnings of that love-in for Utopian modern science that was the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940.
Ironically and appropriately, it was in a New York City university and hospital itself that these hopes were dashed six years later.
Until quite recently, most universities and hospitals (including these particular institutions) were founded by a particular church denomination and there was a documented religious
impulse behind the creation of these quasi-temples of God.
As is well known, modern science claims its beginnings from when it threw out the preachers (and their God and God's animate Nature) from these buildings and made them temples of science instead.
God's World and God's Nature ceased to be seen as full of animate biology (unpredictable tigers) and quasi-animate matter (unpredictable earthquakes or monsoons) --- it all became inert matter that is never consumable, but merely, and eternally, transformable and utterly predictable.
This new temple was clearly for a new religion : "The-People-Of-The-First-Law" , ie the human-flattering First Law of Thermodynamics.
But in fact, these new - professional - scientists (amateur scientists had been around for millenniums) only fully succeeded when they threw the parishioners out of the temple as well.
Sir Charles Lyell, the Godfather of modern science, overthrew the preachers by convincing enough of the upwardly mobile professional middle class that there was no further need to hire preachers to make supplication to God for mercy when overwhelmingly immense catastrophes suddenly hit.
Under this uniformitarianist and gradualist view of the Universe, disasters still happened - but they happened only locally and only briefly and came with lots of warning ---- professional,full time, well funded, scientists thus had lots of time to mitigate the damage
----and to earn a full pension while doing so.
This was science at its most leisurely and at its most dignified - scientists who never sweated.
We can date this event with confidence - by no coincidence , it happened in the aftermath of the First British Reform Act when the urban upper middle class came to share power with the rural land-based aristocracy.
Exactly when non-renewable ,dead, coal began to replace renewable life-and-land based biological energy as the engine of the modern economy.
Science became the (new) sinecure and a well paid, high prestige, job-for-life --- sort of like being a Canadian senator, a British member of the House of Lords or a member of the American NAS : a new professional degree-based aristocracy to replace the old land-based aristocracy.
But if disasters hit only infrequently, why hire a whole bunch of well paid professional scientists to deal with something that only happens briefly, infrequently, and probably only in a small section of somebody else's country ?
Professional scientists took heed of this view and answered that all those pioneers who had cleared the land, built their own homes and raised their kids unaided were revealed as dangerous amateurs: actually these were only jobs that only trained professionals could be relied upon to do right.
DIY and self-reliance (aka subsistence farming) were bad,bad,bad --- old fashioned and out-moded.
So today, you can actually get a PhD in grief-counselling because ordinary people, the parishioners of years ago, can not be trusted to cry over the death of their own child properly --- and none of us stand up and complain about this insult upon the average human being !
No global catastrophe was too big for the scientific professional
(because asteroids simply didn't drop out of the sky) just as no personal catastrophe was so small that an ordinary person could be trusted to deal successfully with it on their own.
Martin Henry Dawson was a modern scientist who at the height of WWII - the war of science - successfully challenged these twin dogmas of science.
Ironically he was not religious - apparently far from it.
But perhaps unconsciously, he smuggled both God's animate Nature and a big role for the amateur laity back into a leading Temple of Science, New York's Columbia University.
Scientists in all the warring nations and all the neutral states of World War Two tried to work up a sweat about what would happen if the (stars and stripes) (hammer and sickle) (swastika) suddenly replace the normal flag flying over the scientific institution where they worked.
But they couldn't - as Operation Paper Clip and its ilk revealed, smart scientists (even evil smart scientists) will always land on their feet, under what ever regime takes over.
But Dawson's efforts threatened the jobs and prestige of all science and he has never been forgiven for his transgressions, no matter how much us laity might applaud his efforts....
Ironically and appropriately, it was in a New York City university and hospital itself that these hopes were dashed six years later.
Until quite recently, most universities and hospitals (including these particular institutions) were founded by a particular church denomination and there was a documented religious
impulse behind the creation of these quasi-temples of God.
As is well known, modern science claims its beginnings from when it threw out the preachers (and their God and God's animate Nature) from these buildings and made them temples of science instead.
God's World and God's Nature ceased to be seen as full of animate biology (unpredictable tigers) and quasi-animate matter (unpredictable earthquakes or monsoons) --- it all became inert matter that is never consumable, but merely, and eternally, transformable and utterly predictable.
This new temple was clearly for a new religion : "The-People-Of-The-First-Law" , ie the human-flattering First Law of Thermodynamics.
But in fact, these new - professional - scientists (amateur scientists had been around for millenniums) only fully succeeded when they threw the parishioners out of the temple as well.
Sir Charles Lyell, the Godfather of modern science, overthrew the preachers by convincing enough of the upwardly mobile professional middle class that there was no further need to hire preachers to make supplication to God for mercy when overwhelmingly immense catastrophes suddenly hit.
Under this uniformitarianist and gradualist view of the Universe, disasters still happened - but they happened only locally and only briefly and came with lots of warning ---- professional,full time, well funded, scientists thus had lots of time to mitigate the damage
----and to earn a full pension while doing so.
This was science at its most leisurely and at its most dignified - scientists who never sweated.
We can date this event with confidence - by no coincidence , it happened in the aftermath of the First British Reform Act when the urban upper middle class came to share power with the rural land-based aristocracy.
Exactly when non-renewable ,dead, coal began to replace renewable life-and-land based biological energy as the engine of the modern economy.
Science became the (new) sinecure and a well paid, high prestige, job-for-life --- sort of like being a Canadian senator, a British member of the House of Lords or a member of the American NAS : a new professional degree-based aristocracy to replace the old land-based aristocracy.
But if disasters hit only infrequently, why hire a whole bunch of well paid professional scientists to deal with something that only happens briefly, infrequently, and probably only in a small section of somebody else's country ?
Professional scientists took heed of this view and answered that all those pioneers who had cleared the land, built their own homes and raised their kids unaided were revealed as dangerous amateurs: actually these were only jobs that only trained professionals could be relied upon to do right.
DIY and self-reliance (aka subsistence farming) were bad,bad,bad --- old fashioned and out-moded.
So today, you can actually get a PhD in grief-counselling because ordinary people, the parishioners of years ago, can not be trusted to cry over the death of their own child properly --- and none of us stand up and complain about this insult upon the average human being !
No global catastrophe was too big for the scientific professional
(because asteroids simply didn't drop out of the sky) just as no personal catastrophe was so small that an ordinary person could be trusted to deal successfully with it on their own.
Martin Henry Dawson was a modern scientist who at the height of WWII - the war of science - successfully challenged these twin dogmas of science.
Ironically he was not religious - apparently far from it.
But perhaps unconsciously, he smuggled both God's animate Nature and a big role for the amateur laity back into a leading Temple of Science, New York's Columbia University.
Scientists in all the warring nations and all the neutral states of World War Two tried to work up a sweat about what would happen if the (stars and stripes) (hammer and sickle) (swastika) suddenly replace the normal flag flying over the scientific institution where they worked.
But they couldn't - as Operation Paper Clip and its ilk revealed, smart scientists (even evil smart scientists) will always land on their feet, under what ever regime takes over.
But Dawson's efforts threatened the jobs and prestige of all science and he has never been forgiven for his transgressions, no matter how much us laity might applaud his efforts....
Thursday, April 14, 2011
WWII is a war the World won (and human hubris lost)
"Nature Bats Last" is hardly a catchphrase that originated with me.
But it is seems always to have been used in a non time-specific manner .
At least until I started this blog and website.
My unique take is this:
that World War Two marked both the high point
and the beginning of the end for Modernist Science :
that is to say 1939-1945 marked the apogee of Modernism.
But because History is written by losers with money and tenure, WWII has been played out, for the last 70 years, as an unalloyed triumph of Allied science and modernity with the nothing-if-not
-scientific German Nazi and Tojo-era Japanese elite recast as anti-modernists.
Adorno never bought that and neither do I.
But because Mother Nature can't speak, someone has to step forward tell her side (the winner's side) of the story .
Not seeing anyone else coming forward, I offer myself.....
But it is seems always to have been used in a non time-specific manner .
At least until I started this blog and website.
My unique take is this:
that World War Two marked both the high point
and the beginning of the end for Modernist Science :
that is to say 1939-1945 marked the apogee of Modernism.
But because History is written by losers with money and tenure, WWII has been played out, for the last 70 years, as an unalloyed triumph of Allied science and modernity with the nothing-if-not
-scientific German Nazi and Tojo-era Japanese elite recast as anti-modernists.
Adorno never bought that and neither do I.
But because Mother Nature can't speak, someone has to step forward tell her side (the winner's side) of the story .
Not seeing anyone else coming forward, I offer myself.....
Monday, March 28, 2011
Dinosaurs, Saber-Toothed Tigers,Nazis --- gone,gone,gone
75 years after the rise of the One Big Master Race, the one holding the one Master Key to fit in the one Master Lock of Charles Lyell's
world of stasis and equilibrium, we can better see that the Nazis were not anti-modern barbarians as is often claimed about them by others.
Rather we can now see them , as they themselves claimed to be : the people who best took the full logic of Modernist Science to its ultimate conclusion.
Its ultimately absurd conclusion, because Modernist Science was Bad Science.
It always had been, but it wasn't broadly revealed as such until 1939-1945.
The War stressed the tape holding Modernist Science together well beyond the breaking point.
The unexpected result was not just that many citizens of the Axis changed their mind about the value of Modernist Science, but that also so did many people in the Allied and Neutral countries as well.
WWII was the triumph of the weak and the wild over the forces of the might and of the will.
The bacteria and the Jews were still there but the mighty Third Reich like the dinosaurs before it was gone.
As had happened so often in the past history of global catastrophes, r-selected trumped K-selected once again...
world of stasis and equilibrium, we can better see that the Nazis were not anti-modern barbarians as is often claimed about them by others.
Rather we can now see them , as they themselves claimed to be : the people who best took the full logic of Modernist Science to its ultimate conclusion.
Its ultimately absurd conclusion, because Modernist Science was Bad Science.
It always had been, but it wasn't broadly revealed as such until 1939-1945.
The War stressed the tape holding Modernist Science together well beyond the breaking point.
The unexpected result was not just that many citizens of the Axis changed their mind about the value of Modernist Science, but that also so did many people in the Allied and Neutral countries as well.
WWII was the triumph of the weak and the wild over the forces of the might and of the will.
The bacteria and the Jews were still there but the mighty Third Reich like the dinosaurs before it was gone.
As had happened so often in the past history of global catastrophes, r-selected trumped K-selected once again...
Saturday, March 5, 2011
During WWII, the "4Fs of the 4Fs of the 4Fs" were the non-motile bacteria
No head or eyes or ears or nose or mouth, no arms or legs, just incredibly tiny bags of salty water floating about where ever the currents took them.
No wonder that during WWII zoologists and eugenicists (is there a difference?) called the non-motile bacteria living fossils from the childhood of the origins of life.
The stupidest of the stupidest, the unfittest of the unfit.
Sulfa drugs were expected to make short work of them and soon all the infectious hospitals would close for good.
Problem solved.
But it turns out that non-motile bacteria have been on earth for 4 billion years and will be here long after we depart.
They occupy every possible spot on Earth - hottest to the coldest, high in the stratosphere to deep in the bowels of the earth.
They are so numerous and successful that their biomass outweighs us and all the mammals even though we individually outweigh them individually a trillion times over.
Most of the cells in us aren't us at all - they're them.
Now that is a miscegenation nightmare for the latent eugenicist !
They can do things to DNA that we can only dream of - including altering our DNA to better suit them.
No better proof of how off target was the very concept of the unfit than how the educated middle class of WWII viewed the unfit bacteria world....
No wonder that during WWII zoologists and eugenicists (is there a difference?) called the non-motile bacteria living fossils from the childhood of the origins of life.
The stupidest of the stupidest, the unfittest of the unfit.
Sulfa drugs were expected to make short work of them and soon all the infectious hospitals would close for good.
Problem solved.
But it turns out that non-motile bacteria have been on earth for 4 billion years and will be here long after we depart.
They occupy every possible spot on Earth - hottest to the coldest, high in the stratosphere to deep in the bowels of the earth.
They are so numerous and successful that their biomass outweighs us and all the mammals even though we individually outweigh them individually a trillion times over.
Most of the cells in us aren't us at all - they're them.
Now that is a miscegenation nightmare for the latent eugenicist !
They can do things to DNA that we can only dream of - including altering our DNA to better suit them.
No better proof of how off target was the very concept of the unfit than how the educated middle class of WWII viewed the unfit bacteria world....
WWII's biggest battle didn't happen between six military empires
You all know the score: WWII was all about the empires ---- the
empires of Britain and American and Russia and China fighting the empires of Germany and Japan.
Six huge military empires (and their allies) with hundreds of millions of men under arms, fighting for six long years all over six huge continents.
75 million dead, trillions and trillions of dollars of non-renewable resources blown up or sunk or burned.
K-selected history with a vengeance.
The God of WWII history books seems definitely on the side of the big battalions.
But I argue the biggest battle of World War Two actually happened off the battlefield and occurred instead, inside the educated middle class's collective conscience - and I aim to compress that battle into three short hours and three tiny rooms in a New York hospital and thrust it onto a stage near you.
This is the r-selected history of WWII - cutting it down to the essence...
empires of Britain and American and Russia and China fighting the empires of Germany and Japan.
Six huge military empires (and their allies) with hundreds of millions of men under arms, fighting for six long years all over six huge continents.
75 million dead, trillions and trillions of dollars of non-renewable resources blown up or sunk or burned.
K-selected history with a vengeance.
The God of WWII history books seems definitely on the side of the big battalions.
But I argue the biggest battle of World War Two actually happened off the battlefield and occurred instead, inside the educated middle class's collective conscience - and I aim to compress that battle into three short hours and three tiny rooms in a New York hospital and thrust it onto a stage near you.
This is the r-selected history of WWII - cutting it down to the essence...
WWII's biggest battle happened inside our collective conscience
History is written by the losers, not the winners - the winners have better things to do.
It is written by the losers with l'argent .
As a result, history's losers say that Modernity won WWII - by defeating the forces of darkness that were the Nazis and their friends.
So why then was the film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL was replaced at the moment of victory by the film ... DOUBLE INDEMNITY ?
!!!!!!!!!
Surely this must rank as the sourest victory pageant ever staged.
It rather casts doubt on just how strong a triumph for Modernity were the victories of 1945.
I argue that ,in fact , the unexpected events of 1939-1945 dealt Modernity such a severe blow that it never recovered.
And that the last 65 years have merely recorded its slow steady death throes.
No where is this more clearly seen than in the concept of the unfit, a concept that held wide support among the world's educated middle class from Berlin to Boston and from Toyko to Moscow for almost a hundred years.
But that concept 'unfit' was transformed - in the narrow Henry Dawson sense of that word - by the actions of the 'unfit' and the 'fit' during WWII.
Remember the unfit's ranks could take in not only most of humankind but also most of the planet's lifeforms and even most inanimate planetary activities like the weather.
You and I probably fitted into it at various times and circumstances.
So a change in the concept of the term was bound to change almost everything.
But pushed to the wall in 1939-1945 by the fit, the unfit unexpectedly bit back hard and Modernity itself faltered.
This was because the conscience of educated middle class was gradually badly troubled by the events of WWII.
Slowly but surely, its members became progressively less and less glib about making easy assertions that the world neatly (and permanently) divided itself into the fit and the unfit.
After 1945, PostModernity then slowly arose from the resulting moral ruins....
It is written by the losers with l'argent .
As a result, history's losers say that Modernity won WWII - by defeating the forces of darkness that were the Nazis and their friends.
So why then was the film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL was replaced at the moment of victory by the film ... DOUBLE INDEMNITY ?
!!!!!!!!!
Surely this must rank as the sourest victory pageant ever staged.
It rather casts doubt on just how strong a triumph for Modernity were the victories of 1945.
I argue that ,in fact , the unexpected events of 1939-1945 dealt Modernity such a severe blow that it never recovered.
And that the last 65 years have merely recorded its slow steady death throes.
No where is this more clearly seen than in the concept of the unfit, a concept that held wide support among the world's educated middle class from Berlin to Boston and from Toyko to Moscow for almost a hundred years.
But that concept 'unfit' was transformed - in the narrow Henry Dawson sense of that word - by the actions of the 'unfit' and the 'fit' during WWII.
Remember the unfit's ranks could take in not only most of humankind but also most of the planet's lifeforms and even most inanimate planetary activities like the weather.
You and I probably fitted into it at various times and circumstances.
So a change in the concept of the term was bound to change almost everything.
But pushed to the wall in 1939-1945 by the fit, the unfit unexpectedly bit back hard and Modernity itself faltered.
This was because the conscience of educated middle class was gradually badly troubled by the events of WWII.
Slowly but surely, its members became progressively less and less glib about making easy assertions that the world neatly (and permanently) divided itself into the fit and the unfit.
After 1945, PostModernity then slowly arose from the resulting moral ruins....
Thursday, January 27, 2011
If it feels like AKTION 4F's alter ego - that's because it is
This is new, additional, blog that will largely parallel the theme of my AKTION 4F blog.
So why yet another blog?
It is because I am 'test driving' my book series' title and subtitle which will appear on the books' front cover, website, posters etc.
Should it be:
The OTHER Manhattan Project
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
Aktion 4F
Or should it be :
AKTION 4F
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
the other Manhattan Project
I am inclined to favor option one , but I will have to await further reader feedback....
So why yet another blog?
It is because I am 'test driving' my book series' title and subtitle which will appear on the books' front cover, website, posters etc.
Should it be:
The OTHER Manhattan Project
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
Aktion 4F
Or should it be :
AKTION 4F
(In between the big, top, title and the small, bottom, subtitle will be my painted illustration of an August 1944 faux 'group photo' --- 4 team members using crutches, canes or wheelchairs, together with two patients in wheelchairs, all exhibiting an air of tired and tattered triumph.)
the other Manhattan Project
I am inclined to favor option one , but I will have to await further reader feedback....
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Ungrateful bastards : Manhattan's penicillin saved a family member of everyone of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists
I admit that I didn't start this project on Dr Dawson's penicillin crusade with any intention to call it "the OTHER Manhattan Project".
But here is how it all came about, as best I remember it.
I was watching a CBC TV debate about the reasons why Manhattan was attacked on 9/11; this was some time in 2005... or even 2006.
Someone on the panel was trying to explain that older people everywhere around the world, rather like Frank Sinatra, just loved the Hollywood movie version of New York City.
However the younger generation, in general and not just in the Muslim world, had some quite different, additional, images conjured up whenever 'Manhattan' was mentioned .
Such as the worldwide recession and high youth unemployment caused by the excessive 'Greed-is-Goodism' of a small handful of traders from Manhattan Island's Wall Street.
And the prospects of Mankind blowing us all up, thanks to the nuclear bomb possibilities generated by "The Manhattan Project."
At this point, I yelled up to my better half, Rebecca, in my usual exasperated TV-watching tone, "What about the OTHER Manhattan Project??"
"I'd bet my life", I said," that someone in everyone of those 9/11 hijackers' families at some time or other had their life saved by the antibiotics that came out of wartime Manhattan and Dr Dawson's quixotic efforts ----- those un - grate - ful bastards !!!!"
I promptly forgot all about it after blowing off steam.
But I soon took to calling my effort, informally and only to Rebecca, Manhattan's other Project or the other Manhattan Project.
But I didn't take it too seriously as an actual concept or theme.
Dusty - or muddy - areas as empty of people and urbanity as Manhattan was full of them.
Clever, very clever.
But actually the planners of the Atomic Project were even cleverer.
They took a page from Edgar Allan Poe and put the brainy bits of the atomic effort in Manhattan - "hidden in plain sight" - and only put the final production plants out in the desert. But all that high tech equipment and manpower out in the desert actually came out of the North East industrial core, in particular from the Greater New York City area.
Atomic Historian, Robert S Norris, set the world straight on the massive amount of atomic history that happened first and foremost in the New York area.
But what I specially noted, even if Norris didn't particularly highlight the fact, was that the Cold War Nuclear Threat was actually birthed in Harlem, not out in the desert, and within a few hundred meters of the most dramatic single event in all the penicillin saga.
As a Baby Boomer, 1950s antibiotics ending childhood diseases and Cold War mass production of A- bombs possibly ending childhood, period, interested me far more than the small amount of inefficient bomb materials developed out in the desert to end WWII but then were never used again to make A-bombs.
If our world should end tomorrow, it is gaseous diffusion uranium that did it - and that was the stuff developed in Harlem's Nash Building and then taken up by all the world's big nuclear bomb makers.
Now I had the two biggest news stories of the entire 20th Century ( according to a poll of 35,000 Americans ) happening in the same year in the same 80 acre space in North West Harlem - what a story !
And I stand by my claim - everyone on Earth, 60 years after the beginnings of the Antibiotic Era, has had a family member, now or in the past, whose life was saved by the antibiotic revolution.
You all remember the british policeman, one of the most famous patients in all history, who told his family when they saw the tiny dot of blood on his cheek, "Don't panic - I just got scratched by a rose while out gardening and you can't possibly die from that !"
But before antibiotics, you could.
And he did.
Hospitals back then were filled with foul-smelling septic wards and filled with septic cases, sad stories of healthy young people dying needlessly of blood poisoning that all started with a little infection.
You don't have to be at death's door to have a course of antibiotics 'save your life' ---- you just need to make the emotional leap back in time to think what might of happened to you if your minor infection hadn't been nipped in the bud.
So don't be like those ungrateful 9/11 bastards.
Thank your lucky stars, and thank Dr Dawson, the next time your doctor yawns behind their hand while they write out a prescription for a course of antibiotics after discovering you have a minor bacterial infection.
'May life-saving always be so routine' .....
But here is how it all came about, as best I remember it.
I was watching a CBC TV debate about the reasons why Manhattan was attacked on 9/11; this was some time in 2005... or even 2006.
Someone on the panel was trying to explain that older people everywhere around the world, rather like Frank Sinatra, just loved the Hollywood movie version of New York City.
However the younger generation, in general and not just in the Muslim world, had some quite different, additional, images conjured up whenever 'Manhattan' was mentioned .
Such as the worldwide recession and high youth unemployment caused by the excessive 'Greed-is-Goodism' of a small handful of traders from Manhattan Island's Wall Street.
And the prospects of Mankind blowing us all up, thanks to the nuclear bomb possibilities generated by "The Manhattan Project."
At this point, I yelled up to my better half, Rebecca, in my usual exasperated TV-watching tone, "What about the OTHER Manhattan Project??"
"I'd bet my life", I said," that someone in everyone of those 9/11 hijackers' families at some time or other had their life saved by the antibiotics that came out of wartime Manhattan and Dr Dawson's quixotic efforts ----- those un - grate - ful bastards !!!!"
I promptly forgot all about it after blowing off steam.
But I soon took to calling my effort, informally and only to Rebecca, Manhattan's other Project or the other Manhattan Project.
But I didn't take it too seriously as an actual concept or theme.
Like most of us, I had long thought the 'Manhattan' part of the Manhattan Project was a clever ruse to put the Nazis off the scent - everyone knew the atomic bomb was developed in the desert of New Mexico and also in desert-like conditions in Washington State and backwoods Tennessee .
Dusty - or muddy - areas as empty of people and urbanity as Manhattan was full of them.
Clever, very clever.
But actually the planners of the Atomic Project were even cleverer.
They took a page from Edgar Allan Poe and put the brainy bits of the atomic effort in Manhattan - "hidden in plain sight" - and only put the final production plants out in the desert. But all that high tech equipment and manpower out in the desert actually came out of the North East industrial core, in particular from the Greater New York City area.
Atomic Historian, Robert S Norris, set the world straight on the massive amount of atomic history that happened first and foremost in the New York area.
But what I specially noted, even if Norris didn't particularly highlight the fact, was that the Cold War Nuclear Threat was actually birthed in Harlem, not out in the desert, and within a few hundred meters of the most dramatic single event in all the penicillin saga.
As a Baby Boomer, 1950s antibiotics ending childhood diseases and Cold War mass production of A- bombs possibly ending childhood, period, interested me far more than the small amount of inefficient bomb materials developed out in the desert to end WWII but then were never used again to make A-bombs.
If our world should end tomorrow, it is gaseous diffusion uranium that did it - and that was the stuff developed in Harlem's Nash Building and then taken up by all the world's big nuclear bomb makers.
Now I had the two biggest news stories of the entire 20th Century ( according to a poll of 35,000 Americans ) happening in the same year in the same 80 acre space in North West Harlem - what a story !
And I stand by my claim - everyone on Earth, 60 years after the beginnings of the Antibiotic Era, has had a family member, now or in the past, whose life was saved by the antibiotic revolution.
You all remember the british policeman, one of the most famous patients in all history, who told his family when they saw the tiny dot of blood on his cheek, "Don't panic - I just got scratched by a rose while out gardening and you can't possibly die from that !"
But before antibiotics, you could.
And he did.
Hospitals back then were filled with foul-smelling septic wards and filled with septic cases, sad stories of healthy young people dying needlessly of blood poisoning that all started with a little infection.
You don't have to be at death's door to have a course of antibiotics 'save your life' ---- you just need to make the emotional leap back in time to think what might of happened to you if your minor infection hadn't been nipped in the bud.
So don't be like those ungrateful 9/11 bastards.
Thank your lucky stars, and thank Dr Dawson, the next time your doctor yawns behind their hand while they write out a prescription for a course of antibiotics after discovering you have a minor bacterial infection.
'May life-saving always be so routine' .....
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Martin Henry Dawson was grandson of Independent MLA, John Barnhill Dickie
I was bemused to see John Barnhill Dickie's name re-emerge as one of Nova Scotia's relatively rare number of MLAs who jumped the party they were elected under, to sit as an Independent or join another political party .
He represented Colchester County.
The same county represented by the province's newest ship-jumper, former Conservative Party leader (pro temp), Karen Casey.
Dickie is usually remembered today, if at all, because his inept actions as Speaker of the Nova Scotia legislature 125 years ago resulted in a very rare move by the legislature members to dump their Speaker.
He should be remembered, as well, as a very
successful businessman.
He moved from farming and schoolteaching into shipbuilding and then into banking and insurance -- all this success fueled by his extraordinary facility with mathematics.
Point of fact, he was one of the very,very first employees of the Royal Bank of Canada, aka RBC, (my bank) the largest bank in Canada and one of the largest in the world.
In addition,of course, he was the grandpa of the subject of this blog - Martin Henry Dawson - who perhaps inherited some his scientific abilities from his grandfather....
He represented Colchester County.
The same county represented by the province's newest ship-jumper, former Conservative Party leader (pro temp), Karen Casey.
Dickie is usually remembered today, if at all, because his inept actions as Speaker of the Nova Scotia legislature 125 years ago resulted in a very rare move by the legislature members to dump their Speaker.
He should be remembered, as well, as a very
successful businessman.
He moved from farming and schoolteaching into shipbuilding and then into banking and insurance -- all this success fueled by his extraordinary facility with mathematics.
Point of fact, he was one of the very,very first employees of the Royal Bank of Canada, aka RBC, (my bank) the largest bank in Canada and one of the largest in the world.
In addition,of course, he was the grandpa of the subject of this blog - Martin Henry Dawson - who perhaps inherited some his scientific abilities from his grandfather....
Monday, January 17, 2011
Himmler: "Now I become Death"
I got it wrong, didn't I?
You know better than me - it was actually Robert Oppenheimer who uttered those famous words from the Bhagavad Gita when the Atomic Bomb successfully exploded on cue.
But actually Himmler never went anywhere without his own leather bound copy of BG - even slept with it at night.
It was the moral staff he leaned on to kill , kill and kill again without getting emotionally involved.
He paraphrased its main message quite closely in his famous Posen Speech, as he steeled the SS elite to do 'their painful duty' and kill every last Jew on the planet, children and all -- for the greater good of the greatest number - Himmler-Hindu-Utilitarianism as it were.
We see this same 'painful duty' line in the contemporary recorded and later re-counted justifications of the key participants for their actions in Aktion T4 and in the organized killings of Romas, Slavs and Homosexuals as well.
Menwhile, in the Allied World, Einstein also thought highly of this book and its main message : the self-sacrificing Will-To-Duty on behalf of Mankind , as did Ghandi and Herman Hesse.
The triumph of sheer willpower, laid out in various forms, had a wide appeal across much of the world's educated elite in the years from the 1880s to the 1980s.
I repeat: WWII was a fight within a family.....
You know better than me - it was actually Robert Oppenheimer who uttered those famous words from the Bhagavad Gita when the Atomic Bomb successfully exploded on cue.
But actually Himmler never went anywhere without his own leather bound copy of BG - even slept with it at night.
It was the moral staff he leaned on to kill , kill and kill again without getting emotionally involved.
He paraphrased its main message quite closely in his famous Posen Speech, as he steeled the SS elite to do 'their painful duty' and kill every last Jew on the planet, children and all -- for the greater good of the greatest number - Himmler-Hindu-Utilitarianism as it were.
We see this same 'painful duty' line in the contemporary recorded and later re-counted justifications of the key participants for their actions in Aktion T4 and in the organized killings of Romas, Slavs and Homosexuals as well.
Menwhile, in the Allied World, Einstein also thought highly of this book and its main message : the self-sacrificing Will-To-Duty on behalf of Mankind , as did Ghandi and Herman Hesse.
The triumph of sheer willpower, laid out in various forms, had a wide appeal across much of the world's educated elite in the years from the 1880s to the 1980s.
I repeat: WWII was a fight within a family.....
Friday, January 14, 2011
Martin Bader and Charlie Aronson: different fates same disease
I had long suspected that there existed people who had exactly the same course of disease that Charles Aronson had, but who suffered an entirely polar opposite fate.
(Charlie was Martin Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F "posterboy", as it were.)
These would have been many people like Charlie in Germany , for example .
These would be people who had had a severe case of encephalitis lethargica (a form of sleeping disease) at the end of World War One but who had survived, albeit with obvious permanent stigmata of the disease's ravages.
This mysterious disease , a huge killer and crippler for the 10 years between 1917-1927, is only unknown to most of us because the Spanish Flu killed about 100 times as many victims in same time period.
Most of us first learned of its existence when Dr Oliver Sacks produced some incredible (but sadly short term) success with some of its long time catatonic victims, with a new drug called L-Dopa.
You may have seen all of this in the book and film called "Awakenings".
Germany covered up then, and still covers up today, the real names of the the 250,000 "disabled/unfit" people it killed in the Aktion T4 program between 1939-1945.
Lately the new excuse is "privacy laws concerns for the victims".
I know that game: Canada can do this squalid "privacy law" game far better than even the Germans could ever hope to - only a small percentage of Germans are self-suited to become ask-no-questions bureaucrats, aka lifers.
But in Canada, it seems to be bred in all of our bones. But I digress.
A German historian, Dr Petra Fuchs, has wormed herself deep into a cache of medical records of 60,000 or so of the T4 victims found in the HQ of the old East German secret police.
Strict privacy laws keep the names concealed - so German youth can not put a human face on these 250,000 dead and start asking grandpa and grandma why did they let it happen.
But by tracking down clues, Dr Fuchs has located some families who can tell the story of their dead relatives from the family end of the affair.
A elderly son named Helmut Bader got to put a face on one victim - his father, Martin Bader.
Martin had had the sleeping disease real bad - but not bad enough to kill him or stop him from running a business and earning a living afterwards.
But Hitler had a particular fear of this disease - based I suspect on the waxy catatonic features of its most severely affected survivors.
So Martin was swept up and killed and his family lied to.
Charlie also had the sleeping sickness bad, along with a half dozen other different Group A strep diseases ( this rare variant on sleeping disease is today felt to be a form of auto immune reaction to a highly particular variety of strep throat).
He had survived and he worked.
Prominent doctors here too wanted him dead - either directly with a needle (Dr Foster Kennedy) or indirectly by not-so-benign neglect (Dr Chester Keefer).
Dr Dawson felt differently - so differently he made Charlie, this 4F of the 4Fs, the very first success story of the penicillin effort - and did so on the very day dedicated , above all else, to exalting the 1A above the 4F.
If you ,or someone you know, has ever been saved by antibiotics -------- raise a glass to Charlie, to Aktion 4F, and to a life, like all life, totally worthy of life.
And raise a toast to Martin Bader who never got a chance to live out his life, thanks to Aktion T4 .....
(Charlie was Martin Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F "posterboy", as it were.)
These would have been many people like Charlie in Germany , for example .
These would be people who had had a severe case of encephalitis lethargica (a form of sleeping disease) at the end of World War One but who had survived, albeit with obvious permanent stigmata of the disease's ravages.
This mysterious disease , a huge killer and crippler for the 10 years between 1917-1927, is only unknown to most of us because the Spanish Flu killed about 100 times as many victims in same time period.
Most of us first learned of its existence when Dr Oliver Sacks produced some incredible (but sadly short term) success with some of its long time catatonic victims, with a new drug called L-Dopa.
You may have seen all of this in the book and film called "Awakenings".
Germany covered up then, and still covers up today, the real names of the the 250,000 "disabled/unfit" people it killed in the Aktion T4 program between 1939-1945.
Lately the new excuse is "privacy laws concerns for the victims".
I know that game: Canada can do this squalid "privacy law" game far better than even the Germans could ever hope to - only a small percentage of Germans are self-suited to become ask-no-questions bureaucrats, aka lifers.
But in Canada, it seems to be bred in all of our bones. But I digress.
A German historian, Dr Petra Fuchs, has wormed herself deep into a cache of medical records of 60,000 or so of the T4 victims found in the HQ of the old East German secret police.
Strict privacy laws keep the names concealed - so German youth can not put a human face on these 250,000 dead and start asking grandpa and grandma why did they let it happen.
But by tracking down clues, Dr Fuchs has located some families who can tell the story of their dead relatives from the family end of the affair.
A elderly son named Helmut Bader got to put a face on one victim - his father, Martin Bader.
Martin had had the sleeping disease real bad - but not bad enough to kill him or stop him from running a business and earning a living afterwards.
But Hitler had a particular fear of this disease - based I suspect on the waxy catatonic features of its most severely affected survivors.
So Martin was swept up and killed and his family lied to.
Charlie also had the sleeping sickness bad, along with a half dozen other different Group A strep diseases ( this rare variant on sleeping disease is today felt to be a form of auto immune reaction to a highly particular variety of strep throat).
He had survived and he worked.
Prominent doctors here too wanted him dead - either directly with a needle (Dr Foster Kennedy) or indirectly by not-so-benign neglect (Dr Chester Keefer).
Dr Dawson felt differently - so differently he made Charlie, this 4F of the 4Fs, the very first success story of the penicillin effort - and did so on the very day dedicated , above all else, to exalting the 1A above the 4F.
If you ,or someone you know, has ever been saved by antibiotics -------- raise a glass to Charlie, to Aktion 4F, and to a life, like all life, totally worthy of life.
And raise a toast to Martin Bader who never got a chance to live out his life, thanks to Aktion T4 .....
BIG MO goes south - sort of....
In response to many puzzled potential readers of my ebook project on the lost history of wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project, I have re-titled it.
Again.
Here is the post from my new blog, Aktion 4f, that tells more.
Republican bloggers opposed to Obama's new health program re-introduced the term Aktion T4 (Aktion 4F's older, evil, sibling).
Millions of North Americans seemed to have missed its first introduction during what so many of us foolishly still call "The Good War".
I have changed the ebook's title many,many times.
This is because while each title was good ( and usually good-er than the last one) none was capable of encapsulating a big, big, complex story and theme in a short catchy title.
This critical in today's world where most new books are first viewed from with a tiny, low resolution, 1 inch x 2 inch thumbnail photo online.
That is all that all online publishers and bookstores allow of any book's cover - from famous author or not.
With 1 million new book titles released in America alone, in just one year, we all do - and all must - 'judge books by their cover art and title' .....
Again.
Here is the post from my new blog, Aktion 4f, that tells more.
Republican bloggers opposed to Obama's new health program re-introduced the term Aktion T4 (Aktion 4F's older, evil, sibling).
Millions of North Americans seemed to have missed its first introduction during what so many of us foolishly still call "The Good War".
I have changed the ebook's title many,many times.
This is because while each title was good ( and usually good-er than the last one) none was capable of encapsulating a big, big, complex story and theme in a short catchy title.
This critical in today's world where most new books are first viewed from with a tiny, low resolution, 1 inch x 2 inch thumbnail photo online.
That is all that all online publishers and bookstores allow of any book's cover - from famous author or not.
With 1 million new book titles released in America alone, in just one year, we all do - and all must - 'judge books by their cover art and title' .....
my Aktion 4F posts are migrating - here's why
Read all about it in this post from my new blog.
I try to explain why I am re-titling my ebook project about wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project as "Aktion 4F" .
It is entitled thus because that term (a) accurately describes the bulk of the project's medical staff and of their patients.
In addition, (b) it reminds us that the project was begun to rebuke the Aktion T4 type of programs set up in Germany and throughout the Allied and Neutral worlds during WWII.
And it was changed because my readers and would-be readers are (almost) always right ...
I try to explain why I am re-titling my ebook project about wartime Manhattan's OTHER Project as "Aktion 4F" .
It is entitled thus because that term (a) accurately describes the bulk of the project's medical staff and of their patients.
In addition, (b) it reminds us that the project was begun to rebuke the Aktion T4 type of programs set up in Germany and throughout the Allied and Neutral worlds during WWII.
And it was changed because my readers and would-be readers are (almost) always right ...
Feedback back from would-be readers leads to new blog...
I had originally thought that the story of Dawson's "AKTION 4F" was a smaller story inside "MO goes po" (when Modernity suicided - and why) but my would-be readers disagreed.
They always immediately got the implications of something sub-titled "wartime Manhattan's other Project" because to them "The Manhattan Project" was a vivid shorthand for all that had gone wrong with the so called "Modernity Project".
Anybody who rose up as an alternative to, and rebuke of, the thinking behind the Manhattan Project was a hero in their eyes and someone well worth reading about.
But how and why and when Modernity became Post Modernity immediately seemed to evoke visions of french intellectuals speaking academic babble and my potential readers fled me as fast as they could.
They did want to hear about the decline and fall of Big Mo in a sense, but only if told through a 'life and times' biographical approach. I had thought I was doing that - I am doing that - but my title belied my claims.
Soooooooo - now the story of Big MO going postal (and postmodern) during WWII is inside Dawson's story - the minnow having succssfully swallowed the whale....
PS : A big thanks to Rebecca Mosher, my most ardent would-be reader of them all
They always immediately got the implications of something sub-titled "wartime Manhattan's other Project" because to them "The Manhattan Project" was a vivid shorthand for all that had gone wrong with the so called "Modernity Project".
Anybody who rose up as an alternative to, and rebuke of, the thinking behind the Manhattan Project was a hero in their eyes and someone well worth reading about.
But how and why and when Modernity became Post Modernity immediately seemed to evoke visions of french intellectuals speaking academic babble and my potential readers fled me as fast as they could.
They did want to hear about the decline and fall of Big Mo in a sense, but only if told through a 'life and times' biographical approach. I had thought I was doing that - I am doing that - but my title belied my claims.
Soooooooo - now the story of Big MO going postal (and postmodern) during WWII is inside Dawson's story - the minnow having succssfully swallowed the whale....
PS : A big thanks to Rebecca Mosher, my most ardent would-be reader of them all
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
1895-1945: the new forms of En-LIGHT-enment
We often fail to take the scientists at their word.
They meant for their "En-LIGHT-enment" project to be taken literally.
They had a determination to turn the full light of scientific curiosity upon that childhood darkness that lies at the top of all of Humanity's stairs, because they were certain to the point of certitude -They Had Faith - that it would turn out to be more simple, more regular and more benign than our dirty,cluttered day-to-day visible world.
Our fears of these dark unknown areas they dismissed as superstitions promoted by priests.
So between 1895-1945, we got ever more powerful searchlights that probed the skies above us or the seabed deep beneath submersibles.
In wartime, they served to coned Allied bombers high in the air or to Leigh-ted up U-boats lying low on the surface of the sea.
Bigger and bigger telescope lens or mirrors gathered up more light and concentrated it, letting us see further and further in Space and further and further back in Time.
With newer microscopes, we added ever sharper lights to ever more powerful lens, to clearly see Brownian motions and thus see the motion of molecules.
But ultimately there is a limit to the sharpness of visible light, so we expanded into X-Rays (circa 1895) to peer into bodies, metals and crystals and molecules and then Radar (circa 1945) to see into clouds and darkness and finally to bounce off of the Moon itself.
We developed flash photography, in ever shorter, sharper bursts so we could clearly photograph a speeding bullet stopped in mid-flight.
The electron microscope uses a sharper (a shorter wavelength) form of illumination to reveal a lot more of the hidden details of bacteria
and to show us viruses and even atoms for the first time.
If an atom buster ray can be thought of as a form of light, it too revealed much that was new - in particular the world of sub-atomic particles, indirectly visible as con tails in cloud chambers or revealed on exposed film.
New radio telescopes (circa 1931) listened to waves of information coming into us from the darkness of the universe - as did cosmic ray detectors.
All of this before 1945, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, et al.
The Enlightenment didn't die or fail - it succeeded only too well in revealing what lies in those areas of Reality beyond our normal ken - but it was totally wrong in assuming that they would be simple,regular and benign.
Perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous little mimeographed book a little too early.
Because they failed to understand that the deliberate 'return to darkness' of post 1945 Film NOIR might have been a reaction against all the bright enlightenment that the previous half century had produced...
They meant for their "En-LIGHT-enment" project to be taken literally.
They had a determination to turn the full light of scientific curiosity upon that childhood darkness that lies at the top of all of Humanity's stairs, because they were certain to the point of certitude -They Had Faith - that it would turn out to be more simple, more regular and more benign than our dirty,cluttered day-to-day visible world.
Our fears of these dark unknown areas they dismissed as superstitions promoted by priests.
So between 1895-1945, we got ever more powerful searchlights that probed the skies above us or the seabed deep beneath submersibles.
In wartime, they served to coned Allied bombers high in the air or to Leigh-ted up U-boats lying low on the surface of the sea.
Bigger and bigger telescope lens or mirrors gathered up more light and concentrated it, letting us see further and further in Space and further and further back in Time.
With newer microscopes, we added ever sharper lights to ever more powerful lens, to clearly see Brownian motions and thus see the motion of molecules.
But ultimately there is a limit to the sharpness of visible light, so we expanded into X-Rays (circa 1895) to peer into bodies, metals and crystals and molecules and then Radar (circa 1945) to see into clouds and darkness and finally to bounce off of the Moon itself.
We developed flash photography, in ever shorter, sharper bursts so we could clearly photograph a speeding bullet stopped in mid-flight.
The electron microscope uses a sharper (a shorter wavelength) form of illumination to reveal a lot more of the hidden details of bacteria
and to show us viruses and even atoms for the first time.
If an atom buster ray can be thought of as a form of light, it too revealed much that was new - in particular the world of sub-atomic particles, indirectly visible as con tails in cloud chambers or revealed on exposed film.
New radio telescopes (circa 1931) listened to waves of information coming into us from the darkness of the universe - as did cosmic ray detectors.
All of this before 1945, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, et al.
The Enlightenment didn't die or fail - it succeeded only too well in revealing what lies in those areas of Reality beyond our normal ken - but it was totally wrong in assuming that they would be simple,regular and benign.
Perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous little mimeographed book a little too early.
Because they failed to understand that the deliberate 'return to darkness' of post 1945 Film NOIR might have been a reaction against all the bright enlightenment that the previous half century had produced...
Be careful what you wish for...
During the Last War ,
the Enlightenment revealed a flair
-Brighter Than A Thousand Suns-
and saw physic sausages being made...
Coned its new searchlights upon,
that childhood darkness at the top of the stairs,
revealed that there are no ghostly goblins there,
-only a molester-
or Two...
Thanks to their Leigh's rocket-red glare / could stare,
At our abandoned Lascars,passing,
skeletally entwined,
-still bobbing-
and proclaim, "Snorkers, Good Oh !"
the Enlightenment revealed a flair
-Brighter Than A Thousand Suns-
and saw physic sausages being made...
Coned its new searchlights upon,
that childhood darkness at the top of the stairs,
revealed that there are no ghostly goblins there,
-only a molester-
or Two...
Thanks to their Leigh's rocket-red glare / could stare,
At our abandoned Lascars,passing,
skeletally entwined,
-still bobbing-
and proclaim, "Snorkers, Good Oh !"
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Martin Henry Dawson med orderly 1915
 |
| Martin Henry Dawson 1915 Cdn Medical Orderly Taken from a photo of all the 167 original members of the No 7 Canadian Stationary Hospital (Dalhousie University) taken in front of the original Dal building (aka The Forrest Building) ,now Dal Dental School, in December 1916 before heading overseas. |
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