Martin Henry Dawson vs the American Red Cross 1940 on mixing blood of blacks , whites and slime

Heroes ????

The American Red Cross began WWII on the side of Hitler, banning the mixing of Negro blood with that of the pure white (Ayran) race when it came to blood transfusions, just as Hitler also opposed the mixing of Jewish and Ayran blood in German blood transfusions.

The idea of mixing the blood of slime and white people found appalling by 99.9999% of western doctors

The Red Cross and Hitler were probably equally opposed to the idea of mixing the blood of dirty basement wall slimy fungus with that of white Ayrans, when it came to using impure natural penicillin in systemic (in the blood stream) medications.

Dr Dawson obviously did not agree with any of this : his first patients to receive his life-saving impure natural systemic penicillin were a young black man and a young Jewish man : October 16th 1940 , New York City : the other (life-saving, not life-killing) "Manhattan Project" .....

Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII

Modernity finally gets its own WAR

The historians of 75 years ago could only see the things that made the leading warring nations different but with the passage of time and today's new era, younger historians are beginning to see the thing that all the leading warring nations held in common: Modernity.
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)

1945 : MO goes PO

Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.

Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.

Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........

School Days Over, come on then Pen

School Days Over, Come on Then PEN

In September 1940 , Penicillin was just over 12 years old and yet had never gone to real work. Henry Dawson thought that real work for Pen was very much overdue, and well, it was probably Ewan MacColl who sang it best in one of his Radio Ballads :

"Time you were putting your work boots on, it's time to go, time you were working down below; Time you  were on your way, time you were learning a lifesaver's job and earning a lifesaver's pay..."

The MORAL invention of impure-systemic antibiotics by Martin Henry Dawson

When asked, in strictest confidence by a worried Howard Florey, "what's this guy Dawson really like ?" , establishment bacteriologist Stanhope Bayne-Jones said  'he is honest - but much too enthusiastic at times'.


One of those times was September 1940.

America's medical establishment was happily slipping into war medicine mode, so it could drop all this nonsense about helping the poor via the social medicine movement ("socialist medicine if you ask me", they snorted.")

In was aviation medicine for our middle class flyboys, the 1As of the country club set.

Out was help for Rheumatic Fever and SBE, that Polio of the poor, the colored and the ethnic immigrant : the peacetime 4Fs.

Dawson noticed that ,up into the late 1930s, many middle to upper class people gave generously , as a charitable act, to hospitals aiding those children with Rheumatic Fever, the leading cause of death for school kids and a disease that rarely hit the well to do.

Now they were shifting their dollars and attention to Polio - the Rheumatic Fever of the well to do. Polio hit hardest in those leafy green Republican-voting Protestant suburbs obsessed with cleanliness being next to godliness.

Self-help groups of patients and their families banded together to help their own cope with polio. Admirable perhaps, but not charity - not in the strictest sense, rather it was self-interested help.

Against this backdrop, when Dawson failed to get SBE experts (of which he was definitely not one) to look at penicillin's advantages over the new sulfa drugs for treating SBE , he probably "reacted badly", got "emotional" "angry" , worse : "enthusiastic".

Because the heart valves - ironically enough - lack their own internal blood supply, a drug has to saturate the blood supply to get at them. Try that with the sulfa drugs and their toxicity would kill the patient before it killed the SBE bacteria.

But penicillin is still about the least toxic lifesaver known and it is readily diffusible - unlike sulfa which can not penetrate the SBE bacteria's biofilm shield of matted bacteria goo and human blood platelets (aka "vegetations").

The dirty and the pure, in an eugenic age

True, Sulfa was "pure" and "synthetic" , both highly fashionable attributes in that chemistry-obsessed age, but so what ?

Penicillin was natural and impure - but safe - as even those researchers unwilling to inject it into patients publicly admitted.

Dawson said, ' if impure natural safe penicillin can save people dying of SBE and pure synthetic sulfa can't, we have a moral duty to put it to work - now ! - not five years from now when it has been perfected and all the SBE patients are dead...' .

That is why this Nova Scotian born and raised doctor became the first doctor in the world to use penicillin to save lives.

He took only 5 weeks from hearing about penicillin to building a penicillin-growing factory and injected two young men - one black, one Jewish - with the live-saving mold, though as an arthritis outpatient clinic doctor he knew he had no business mucking about in the cardiologists' domain.

But his parents' Scottish Presbyterian sense of duty, engrained in him as a child, drove him to it and thanks to him, our whole world changed for the better, for ever......

1940 : Henry Dawson invents antibiotics - without ever quite realizing it !

Dr Martin Henry Dawson knew (from the published medical literature of Alexander Fleming) he was not the first person to treat a person clinically with penicillin, so he modestly limited himself to saying only that he was the first person in America to do so.


(In truth, though it wasn't known till about 50 years after the event, he wasn't even the first person to cure a patient with penicillin.)

But why we celebrate his efforts is that he was the first to cross an all-important psychological barrier --- without apparently ever realizing it.

Dawson was the first person to attempt to cure a life-threatening disease with an antibiotic  ---- as we understand its meaning today : a systemic life-saving medication produced naturally by microbes.

Let us break that sentence apart word by word.

Fleming only used penicillin as an antiseptic and even got an unpublished cure by doing so, as did one of his former students (a success also tragically never made public.)

Antiseptics (germ-killing medications applied to the outer surface of the body, in open wounds or in the eye socket etc) can cure a disease, but very rarely - by themselves - cure a potentially fatal disease.

Generally any infectious disease capable of killing us does so because it has spread throughout the inside of our bodies and needs to be combated by a similarly mobile medication.

In other words, by a systemic, not an antiseptic : some medicine that we swallow or have injected into us by needle, a medication that then spreads freely throughout our bodies, killing the germs wherever they may be found.

Antibiotics were something totally new to Mankind's way of doing medicine, when introduced in the 1940s.

Man, animals and plants are immensely huge in size and so were apparently 'complex' , compared to germs and microbes. So it seemed only natural that only we big beings could produce clever ways to kill the tiny beings that threaten us.

We invented totally new medications or synthesized the drugs produced by plants to fight off microbes.

But none worked very well.

They had a tendency to kill the human as quick as they killed the germ --- they weren't very selective.

Penicillin was a real kick in the head for the naive and hubristic scientists of  1940.

It was produced by the tiny fungus that created those foul smelling slimes in our dark dank basements -- produced by the lowest of the lower - lower than any tramp on the street.

That role reversal did not sit well with this eugenically-oriented age.

And Penicillin was tremendously effective by being tremendously selective. It zeroed in on the one thing that sharply distinguished bacteria from all other life - their "walls" - and tore it apart, killing the bacteria.

But since we humans had no walls - and nothing in our bodies at all like it - this powerful germ killer was totally ( and I do mean totally) non-toxic to humans.

Yes, some people can be made allergic to it, but this is not toxic in the definition of that word : if a substance is toxic, it is toxic to all of us.

And it was made naturally, by those slimy fungus, slime poop if you want to get technical, mixed in with all the other waste by products of fungus life.

Ugh ! said 99.9999999999999% of the world's forward thinking doctors.

These cutting edge doctors, who routinely glanced through all the really big medical journals, agreed with authors who said penicillin will only be useful medically when (crucially not "if") Man has synthesized and improved upon it, giving us a 100% pure, stable, cheap, abundant medication we can use without any effort on our parts.

Until then, the world's patients dying of infectious diseases would just have to put up with synthesized Sulfa-based medications, of which there are already hundreds of variants and that unlike those pesky fungus, Man's rational mind was constantly improving.

(No dirty-dark garlic-eating slimy fungus is smarter than a clean-shaven Northern European Protestant male scientist !)

But surprisingly, many doctors were not opposed to other doctors dabbing impure natural penicillin on open wounds or even encouraging patients to swallow it.

But never never was impure natural penicillin to go into the bloodstream via a needle.

This, after all , was a pre-DNA era, when people felt a person's generic character was found in their blood : and people of all stripes routinely talked of pure bloods versus mixed bloods.

In many American states, any white with 1/32 negro blood was legally fully black and the American Red Cross forbade the mixing of negro and white blood when creating blood products for blood transfusions.

Introducing impure dirty penicillin from those slimy foul smelling basement walls into the human blood stream ( the river of the race) was beyond the pale, though I doubt scientists - of all people ! - would articulate their unspoken feelings in such emotional terms.

They based their faith on the claim that impure penicillin's unwanted fellow travellers were dangerous --- though all the evidence at hand in 1940 said otherwise.

In the end, these fellow travellers never caused any problems - and possibly helped impure natural penicillin do its job.

Only when natural penicillin was 99.99% and available to give in huge doses, did a few people start dying - from pure penicillin itself !!!!

Now of these moral panics stalled Dawson in the Fall of 1940 : in just 5 incredible weeks he moved from first learning of penicillin to inventing his own little penicillin factory and then injecting the resulting penicillin into the bloodstream of two young men dying of invariably fatal endocarditis.

Seventy five years later, injected impure natural penicillin is still how we save lives from endocarditis.

Dawson clearly was so colour blind - the first patients he injected with his penicillin were almost certainly a black and a Jew - that he didn't perceive a barrier to break.

Seventy years after Auschwitz, few of us are alive who still believe that our genetic character is in our blood ---- but we shouldn't deny that it once was a near universal sentiment - and honour a man who bucked this evil idea....

PRODUCTION scientists pro Romney and Denial ; IMPACT scientists pro Obama and climate change reality ?

undergrad scientists DENY climate change, vote Romney

The latest Washington Post/ABC TV poll has a few figures you probably hadn't seen in this polled-to-death election season : the difference in GOP/DEMOCRAT support between people with undergraduate and post graduate degrees : undergrads pro Romney, post-grads pro Obama.


I believe it explains the push back on climate change reality in one easy sentence:

Undergraduates with degrees in science tend to go to work in factories producing things (and pollution) ; while scientists with post graduate degrees tend to work in universities and government assessing the impact of that pollution upon the wider world and society.

Allan Schnaiberg's election

Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg - dead for years - could probably explain the current American election (the one that has both sides refusing to mention climate change)   better than anyone alive ---- thanks to his theory of the primal conflict between production science and impact science.

The pushback on climate change reality is coming from people with undergraduate degrees in science - enough to be minimally credible to speak on science matters , but not really involved in current world class basic research.

Typically, the lead climate deniers are TV weathermen in their seventies, with an undergraduate science degree from a fourth rate university that they obtained in the early 1960s, based on mediocre teachers whose own science education was last seriously updated in the late 1940s.

State of the art climate science today is simply quite different than it was 65 years ago and this is fuelling the conflict between two sides , both sides sincerely convinced that their science is the state of the art....

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

VWB : "Voting While Black" : the WHITE PROTESTANT drive to steal elections they can no longer win legally

VOTING WHILE BLACK a crime?

The 2012 election in America was probably decided a few years ago, well before this year's $6 billion in ads and hoopla, when Republicans looked at new demographic figures and decided that the long-assured White Protestant voting majority, a fact for over 400 years, was toast.


Now White Protestants could only to continue to control America and , indirectly the world, if they stole the votes of the OTHERS.

The OTHERS include Catholics and Moslems and other faiths and all coloured/aboriginal people --- even if they are Protestant,  particularly if these OTHERS are young or poor.

Voter registration which most countries do for the voters automatically, in Republican-dominated states became an lengthy obstacle course.

Your chance to vote early, on a day of your own choosing when your work-weary feet are less sore, were reduced or eliminated. Ditto voting on line or mailing by mail from the security of your own home.

When you did finally get registered and did get a slim time window to vote, GOP middle class thugs stood around to challenge everything about you, hoping to scare you away from exercising your democratic right.

Lynching (the traditional method used to keep OTHERS than white Protestants from voting), has not yet been re-introduced. Thankfully.

(Perhaps its Plan B ?)

All this from a party and an ethnicity and religion that likes to invade nations like Iraq and see a million people killed or seriously injured, all to encourage them to vote in democratic elections !

Physician : heal yourself

Maybe America should invade itself and re-teach itself what other democracies have already learned : a society works better when all its members feel they at least had a say on an issue, even when half of them are still in disagreement about the final decision reached.

Andrew Johnson - the worst president America ever suffered through - did not accept that idea and he ensured that the wounds of the US Civil War never healed, when he encouraged wholesale voter suppression in the late 1860s, after he replace the assassinated Lincoln.

America can not - should not - lead the world's democracies until it itself , not Iraq or Afghanistan, truly learns all the rules of democracy, an ideal that it helped bring into being centuries ago....

War as Entropy : its permanent costs

Pure - useless - ENTROPY

"Think about Germany and Japan : smashed to pieces in the last war, but look at them now." "So, no real - permanent - harm in a little war now and then is there ?" " Boys must be boys, etc."
(Sample conversations of conventional economists ...in their cups.)

In my last SVE post "Artillery Shells : Entropy for Economists" , I tried to put a difficult term from physical science into the everyday language of voters and consumers, into language that even conventional economists should be able to understand.

I focussed on the purest and quickest form of entropy most of us will ever personally experience , when we learn that the very expensive, very well made 105 mm artillery shell our taxes just paid for, has been blown to the tiniest of bits.

In that post, I neglected the entropy inherent in the fates of the three victims of our 105 mm shell : the soldier, the civilian car and the civilian building , as all three were also blown to pieces.

They are blown into much bigger pieces, physically , than the shell and the explosives that propelled it and blew it up, so does the concept of entropy really apply to them ?

Let me argue why it does.

It costs a lot of money to feed, clothe, shelter and above all educate a 20 year old man : his parents and society pay it hopeful his 45 years of labour as an adult will pay it back --- in particular taxes on his employment will help pay the health costs of his parents when they are old.

Blown into four or five big chunks by the shell, he is not really recyclable : at best he is about 15 cents worth of plant fertilizer when he is buried.

All that money in raising him, all that future return via his employment income ----- gone, gone, gone, in an instant.

Ignore scientists' bafflegab : entropy is war, end of story

The car, used daily as a taxi, also is blown into a few big pieces, but is "recyclable" --- albeit as scrap steel. $15,000 car to $100 in scrap metal --- in an instant.

The building, home to a dentist's clinic is worth say $100,000, independent of the land it sits on, which we will claim ins undiminished in value, despite being used as a battlefield.

Badly damaged, it will cost another $5,000 just to tear it down, before we can even think of rebuilding on the same site. The value of the carted away rubble, minus cost of cartage and disposal/sale is a negative $1000 dollars.

Surprisingly perhaps, much of the heavily built and very valuable dentistry equipment inside the building is virtually undamaged and can be easily returned to a useful long life ----- but only if it is got to, before the elements rust it to bits. And that is iffy : depending on the state of the war raging around it - and the weather.

I call these real life examples, taken from WWII,  pure entropy (useful to useless) , won't you ?

Artillery Shells : Entropy for Economists

ENTROPY MK I

Politically and economically, entropy simply means that today's concentrated, useful, work-able, matter and energy invariably  becomes tomorrow's "useless-to-humans because too-finely dispersed" matter and energy. All we can hope to do, is slow the process as best we can.


(Note that microbes like bacteria can often make useful, work-able materials out of atoms and molecules too finely dispersed for humans to make economic use of them : in fact long dead bacteria  created many of the highly concentrated ore bodies we humans use to create our industrial world.)

Politically and economically, concentrated matter and energy is useful and dispersed matter and energy is not : despite the fact that neither total mass or energy has changed one iota in the process.

It takes much energy and matter to assemble an ordinary 105 mm High Explosive artillery shell, the kind that are fired off in the millions and millions in every war for the last century.

A chunk of high grade of steel is carefully bored to the microscopically exact dimensions before an artful blend of chemical explosives is poured into it. This is then attached to a carefully made brass cartridge also filled with a different blend of explosive chemicals.

Warfare is entropy at its purest....

Each shell and cartridge is made by highly skilled machinists with a careful inspection process weeding out any one a little imperfect.

Even with a hundred years of world wide experience in making these shells, and their mass production economy of scales, each shell costs at least a thousand dollars, when all the disguised development costs are factored in.

Now it is fired, hitting a human soldier , a civilian and a civilian building and destroying all three in the process of blowing itself to pieces.

(The brass cartridge is recyclable, by the army that fired it or by the other side, depending on how the course of the war goes.)

How does conventional economics (versus physical economics) explain the economics of this process int terms of equilibrium theory ?

Taxes, some of them from the people in the armament plant and the men firing the gun, will pay to make the shell  and pay the pensions of the soon-to-be veterans who fired it.

Since the shell was blown into tiny pieces, along with its explosive solids which were turned into heat and kinetic energy and lots of very rapidly expanding gases, none of this will ever be recycled, in fact can't be recycled.

For hundreds of metres around the shell blast, the earth will hold tiny rusting pieces of metal hardly visible to the eye.

Soon they will rust back into the soil around them.

 The winds will carry the rapidly expanding explosives' gases into the air for miles around.

On the other side, the side actually hit by the shell's force, economic activities will also be generated.

(Just listen and read how Wall Street sees an economic upside to Hurricane Sandy's death and destruction.)

 A pension will go to the soldier's family, government assistance will help pay carpenters to rebuild the building - the loss of the car will probably never be recovered by its owner from the government or the enemy, but another car will be built to replace it, employing people at a car plant.

The GDP on both sides sees an "upside" from the explosion of that 105 mm shell.

But physical economists say a shell is not like a tractor : the tractor consumes resources in being built but then helps harvest resources and at the end of its life is melted down and recycled in new metal products.

But a fired shell, like a ship filled with warplanes sunk by a sub in deep waters, is pure entropy : concentrated useful matter and energy is blown (dispersed) to the winds and the waters and is totally useless to mankind from then on.

 Rather like the valuable metals, from scarce concentrated ore bodies, that we build into thin food container foils and then wastefully disperse into huge landfills : the exact civilian equivalent of blowing up metal shells to the high winds....

Is Earth gaining or losing MASS and why this matters...

Herman Daly "GETS IT"

The vast majority of economists are in fact 'psychic' economists only, and they  greatly resent attempts of rebel economists like Herman Daly to re-establish their discipline on a physical basis.


 So they claim that thermodyamic physical restraints on human activity on earth are totally irrelevant, as we are not living in an "isolated system" planet where the limits of the second law of thermodynamics would apply, but on an "open system" planet that annually gets a great deal of new solar energy and a 100,000 tons of cosmic dust.

But is this true ?

( Is anything that mainstream economists ever say about physicality  true ? In my experience, not usually. Useful members of a sub branch of the psychology department yes, but truly brain-dead hopeless in the physical sciences.)

We also lose much matter and energy annually : in particular, we lose about as much light molecules of gases like hydrogen and helium outbound into space as we gain in cosmic dust. We also lose a small amount annually of mass from being converted into energy via natural radioactivity, which affects every atom eventually.

Yes, every atom in the universe will spontaneously break down, if the universe lasts long enough. Uranium does it quite fast, but all elements do so, at increasingly slower rates.

And energy - thankfully - escapes the Earth annually in huge amounts : or we'd be a molten chunk of dead rock otherwise.

Eventually all that inbound solar energy that helped make the huge ancient redwoods escapes back into space, slightly raising the temperature of the space vacuum ever so slightly ( if its continuing expansion doesn't lower it right back again !)

But I will argue, being first and foremost a practical politician, not some dreamy-eyed academic scientist, that what we really care about - as voters and consumers (aka the guys who actually put the groceries on economists' and scientists' breakfast tables),is neither mass or energy but work.

Engineers usually "get it" right away , but most academic scientists struggle to understand the political difference.

Politically, its all about WORK , not the scientists' mass or energy

On the way to becoming finely dispersed (useless to humans) friction-dust pollution and thermal-noise pollution, concentrated forms of  mass and energy ( commercially large bodies of iron ore  and coal ore) can do very useful work for us, as industrial humans.

But once these ore bodies are gone (over the next two centuries) they will not be replaced, at least not in any world that humans can survive in.

A world such where ocean bacteria were able to concentrate enough widely dispersed iron atoms to create the vast beds of iron ore that we run our world upon will not be one for humans --- nor would the hot swampy world that led giant ferns growths becoming vast beds of coal our electrified world relies on to run its lights and Internet.

We will have to learn to survive on the immediate biological conversion of solar energy into plants and animals.

 And upon the use of  daily solar energy to do such things as to bake abundant clay into bricks : once again in a human world of rock and wood , with metals treated as precious and only used for their most valuable applications :  such as high grade steel reserved for blade edges, as in the days of old.

What about uranium and atomic energy ? Uranium is only useful to humans if found in those rare highly concentrated ore bodies : dispersed into random atoms all over the planet, per the second law of thermodynamics, they are as useless in terms of work as they are (nearly) indestructible in terms of mass.

To misquote Brian Mulroney : "its all about work,work,work !"

99% of the world tacitly agrees with Italian "earthquake" court : no such thing as a natural disaster, only human negligence...

MODERNITY sentences scientists

It should be, by far, the biggest news story this year - in fact, one I feel sure historians will be referencing two centuries from now, when they try to assist citizens of the future to understand the 'spirit of the age' of this still very modernist early 21st century.

But in fact, almost unnoticed by most of the world's largest media, an Italian court has sent a half dozen scientists to jail for 6 years, for failing to warn citizens that an earthquake was going to happen.

Actually they had  publicly warned that a major earthquake might or might not happen fairly soon in this earthquake-prone part of the world : which is as vague or as precise as scientists can ever get about earthquakes' timing, severity and location.

The judge found them guilty and tacitly, so did the rest of the world by their approving silence.

In 99% of the educated world's eyes, unpredictable random natural disasters (Acts of God) do not and can not exist in a "just world" : only preventable human irrationality.

The ballot question on modernity versus post modernity (cum global commensality)

In a nutshell, as concise a statement of what it means to be Modernist as one can ever hope to find.

By contrast, I am a post-modernist and I believe that much of Nature and Reality will always be veiled from human understanding, controlling and predicting : natural disasters can and do happen and they are not the fault of an conspiracy of willfully negligent humans.

It is truly a ballot question as we Canadian political scientists are wont to say: the crux of every election that turns complicated voting decisions into a simple plebiscite choice.

November 6th 2012 : *FEMA : kill it (Romney) or keep it (Obama) ?

Anytime : NATURAL DISASTERS : real or result of human failure ?

Pick one or the other and then pull the lever......

*Romney promises to kill FEMA and hand its job over to for-profit corporations, if he was prez when another SANDY hits....

Globe and Mail : will the Commercial paywall become merely a Conservative echo chamber ?

Hoisted on his own Petard !

Ironic, ain't it ? Most of the world's loudest & most bombastic right wing newspapers have totally disappeared from public view --- behind a commercially-oriented paywall --- reducing their public influence to zero. This certainly wasn't their original intention (money,money,money was their intent) - but this situation is the totally unexpected results.


The right wingers who own and run Canada's leading newspaper, the GLOBE and MAIL and who are about to leap in the fire and erect a paywall should pay heed to the sad story of Rupert Murdoch's earlier experiments in this area.

Whatever inane right wing notions Rupert Murdoch's LONDON TIMES is touting this week, you and I (because we are not living in the UK) won't even hear of it, unless we pay to get behind its digital "all or nothing" total  paywall.

The TIMES, as you have probably noticed, as been marked "absent" from the worldwide digital news conversation the last few years - even search engines like Goggle carries nothing from them - because Rupert-Murdoch-the-Genius planned it that way.

As a result, even the influence of the once all-powerful print version of the paper has also been reduced to nearly zero.

Sure its subscribers read it faithfully - but they are die-hard right-wingers so there is no influencing the undecided at play here : you can't preach to the already-converted, you can merely confirm their faith.

The result is a tiny closed community of true believers, echoing each other in the echo chamber that is the LONDON TIMES : a mere 400,000 readers in a world of more seven billion citizens.

Murdoch bought the TIMES to serve as his bully-pulpit, to expand the influence of his inane right wing notions --- and to make him more money.

Paywalls around right wing newspapers reduces their influence to zero : become echo chamber for right wing subscribers only

The paywall didn't make him money, merely reduced his huge losses ---- but it also reduced the political-public impact of this once world opinion leader to echoing the certitudes of a few hundred thousand die-hard far righters.

So news that Murdoch has totally thrown in the towel and admitted this total paywall was an abject failure editorially, comes as no real surprise.

He will now admit defeat and allow Google and other search engines to index the headlines and opening paragraph "lede" of the TIMES' articles : hoping that if the unconverted will not buy a subscription , they will at least absorb some of his bile from the misleading headline and dishonest opening lede.

Public Influence or Profitable Paywall : pick one.

Lots of money and lots of influence, the age-old dream of lots of newspaper barons, is dead : you can have one but not the other.....

Horse and Buggy Era political party "isms" vs today's new scientific reality : not up for the job ?

I am pro MULTIPLE choice !

Our electioneering rhetoric is, as always, as flexible as an Etch A Sketch ( big shout out to Mitt Romney !)


 But once in government, our party ideologies, those beloved "isms" of Liberalism, Conservatism and Socialism, are as rigid and unchanging today as at their birth 150 to 200 years ago - when the Horse and Buggy, not the Airbus A380, reigned supreme.

There you have our prolonged Global Climate crisis in a nutshell : Science has moved on in the 150 years since the exuberant Mid-Victorian Era and its naive optimism about Man's ability to control Reality, but our political "isms" remain locked in some dusty time warp.

By education, I am a political scientist, but my abiding interest is in physical science ---- but with the proviso that I view all science as political !

When I say Science has changed, I lie.

Oh yes, public (formally peer reviewed published) science has changed greatly since the 1860s : moving from an overwhelming emphasis on PRODUCTION science (science of the hubris-laden first law of thermodynamics) to a new emphasis on IMPACT science (science of the more-somber second law of thermodynamics).

But popular (aka public school science) science has not changed a pinch since the days of total Anglo Saxon Protestant dominance of science.

Newton, Dalton and Darwin still reign supreme and nothing of dour 20th century science, let alone that of the 21st century, dares stain the ever-optimistic laboratories and textbooks of your average high school science course.

Like Carthage, our current high school science boosterism 'must be destroyed' .

The writing and selecting of Public School textbooks ( physical and social science texts above all) are not really in the hands of teachers and scientists ---- they reveal instead the dead weight of the political-commercial elites who really run departments of education and district school boards.

All they ask of high school textbooks is that they are "uplifting" and "positive" (Service Club Boosterism science, as it were).

Ever more and more of that time-old Mid Victorian optimism that science can do almost anything and even if it (temporarily and locally) messes up ,science can also step in to fix the mess.

See it as a case of an ever more optimistic frantic whistling, past our current 'grave' climate graveyard.

If we truly want to save the planet and prevent global climate disaster, setting our sights and scopes on our truly God-awful high school science Babbitry would be an pretty good place to start......

The GREAT DISCONNECT : our 200 year old party ideologies vs today's Science

Today's parties are as old as her !!

It might surprise many but all of our governing party ideologies - ALL of them - are as old as Queen Victoria.

Before the rise of mass democracy, there were no need for formally constituted political parties with a consistent political ideology to rally around --- all that began to change after the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Check out the formal birth date for any party of your own choosing : from the British Conservative party to the American Democrats to the German Social Democrats to the Russian Communists to the Spanish Anarchists and you will find the ghost of Queen Victoria hovering over them.

All of them born trying to deal with the new world, post Napoleon and post the American and French Revolutions.

(Note ye well , I said our governing parties: the Green Parties decidedly postdate the Queen's death in 1901 but have not yet been the sustained majority government in any country.)

So all our parties have moved along, more or less, with changing times --- but their ideologies have not - by definition.

(Any "ideology" that changes with the polls, like some Mormon weathervane or Etch a Sketch, is many things but it is not an ideology.)

We can not modify or update core ideologies anymore than we can modify or change our date of birth : we can only drop one and take up another, as many did in the decade of the 1910s , going from being Liberals to become Labour voters in Britain.

The problem with all our Victorian political ideologies, from Conservatism to Communism, is that they are - well - so bloody Victorian : so optimistic , so activist, so human-oriented.

They are all the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed children of the optimistic First law of Thermodynamics --- the governing meme of the physical and social sciences of their day.

Other philosophies of their day (based upon religious or on  science of the natural history kind) were more Nature-oriented and more skeptic of the possibility of humans successfully controlling reality.

But these philosophies failed to engender any really successful political ideologies, though they did sponsor some fairly successful political parties.

 Such as Germany's Christian Democrats , who despite their 'Christian' name are rather too easy to confuse with plain old Conservatives or Republicans.

The GREAT DISCONNECT : in the 200 years since our party ideologies were created, science has changed ---- but they haven't.

Roll the movie ahead 200 years : now the Second law of Thermodynamics is the governing meme of today's (21st century) science ----- and it is as mutually hostile with our creaking old 19th century party ideologies as can be imagined.

Unless we develop new - 21st century - political ideologies to go along with our better current understanding of natural reality than what we held in 1812, we will find our political Rhetoric will always fall short of our real world physical Reality - to great cost to us and our world....

As Brits reel from Jimmy Savile coverup scandal, Nova Scotians yawn : been there, done that, got the semen-stained T-shirt to prove it ....

Jimmy Savile "NOT GUILTY" ??

If you are a very powerful figure, someone who dines with the Queen and Prime Ministers, you can safely "interfere" with teenage girls for decades and decades and everyone in a position to do something about it will decide, on sober second thoughts ---- to do nothing at all about it.


They will do nothing, even though knowledge of your repeated sexual assaults are an "Open Secret",  known to tens of thousands of people in positions to stop it.

That includes the evil-doer's competitors and concerned friends , his/her family, the media, the police and the victims and their families.

All rendered scared shitless of  simply saying publicly what they gladly whisper at parties:  that the beloved emperor actually has no clothes when he's out sexually assaulting teenage girls.

All out of fear his/her lawyers will rip them apart in court or see to it that they 'never eat lunch in this town again'.

Nova Scotians have already seen a powerful figure sexually assault hundreds of girls and be ignored by media and police

In fact, unless Jimmy Savile had ordered endless numbers of "hits" to permanently seal all possible lips, bolder Brits would have found that that the all-powerful Jimmy was actually nothing but a hollow house of cards---- with a very low Gladwellesque "tipping point".

That is my personal experience anyway....

"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

Extreme optimism leads , inevitably, to extreme Paranoia : it sounds counterintuitive but its true

Optimistic Paranoia

If you think reality and the Natural World is far too simple and far too benign to pose much of a threat to Modern Man and you have lost your belief in the possibility of Divine (or Devilish) Acts of Providential Intervention, how do you account for why even simple things can go wrong with no obvious signs of intervention ?


You are left to blame it on other humans, usually working in huge, well organized, highly invisible secular conspiracies --- which is why there are no signs of their intervention.

But if you claim you are very religious, as most "optimistic paranoids" do, why not credit this to God or the Devil and their minions : isn't doing invisible things in mysterious ways supposed to be in their very un-Earthly nature?

And don't most religions also teach us that Man is fallible and imperfect - not at all the sort of being capable of pulling off huge conspiracies -- or in keeping his mouth shut if he did ?

Those who are extreme optimists about controlling Nature, (aka DENIERS of any limits on Man's abilities), in practise also act as if they disbelieve God or the Devil can interfere in human activities.

As a result they are left in the position of those Victorians who lost their traditional explanation crediting God or Nature for their strong sense of the Sublime and had to find new explanations to account for it : most opting for the new Technological Sublime, in many scholars' view.

DENIERS all believe in the Technological Sublime in spades, in the technical fix for what ever small, temporary, local, problems Nature or Man can throw our way.

Extreme optimism about Man controlling Nature leads to extreme paranoia about Man controlled by other men - acting in secret conspiracies....

But that isn't enough : for mixed in with the "awe" of the traditional sense of the Sublime, is also a healthy dollop of "fear".

Free floating fear - nationalistic,ethnic, whatever - really grew up along with the new age of Scientism , being in fact a product of it.

For if we no longer find it easy to fear the dark, the tiger or the Devil, we now must fear being overrun by the Yellow Peril or the Socialist Hordes or the Jewish Banksters instead......

Romney, calling little children "takers not makers" and "part of the 47% , says NO to Nickelodeon

Kids are "TAKERS, not makers"

Taking an axe to Big Bird on live nationwide TV, saying no to the traditional presidential candidate visit to Nickelodeon TV's "Kids Pick the President" special ---- Mitt Romney sure knows how to erase that huge, crucial, gender deficit he has with young "waitress moms" and their children doesn't he ?

Picking on little kids - its a male Mormon thing, right ?

Are all Mormons this screwed up on women and children or is it just the LDS/LSD types with five wives in Kenya and Indonesia ?

Yes all little children - newborns especially - are "takers not makers" (even part of the 47%) - giving back nothing useful to society, unless you count the smiles on the faces of parents, grandparents and total strangers.

But Mitt treats kids like he does his dogs - strapping them to the hood of his election campaign bus and driving off madly in all directions.

Why doesn't he stop beating up the kids and starts into fleshing out more information on just exactly what tax loopholes he pledges to cut to get rid of the 16 trillion dollar deficit .......

"7.8% unemployment figures work of Satan" says GOP, "Act of Providence" retort Dems

I lowered it to 7.8% !

We admit its not a headline you're ever likely to see soon in an American newspaper.


But SVE asks, "why not expect such headlines in what is supposedly the most religious nation on Earth?"

Yesterday the latest US unemployment figures came out.

For about 50 previous months, the figures had always been suitable for tin hatters (Republicans) in the US , even praiseworthy: because the figures confirmed the tin hat belief in "what a mess Obama was making of the economy".

But now yesterday's hint of better days led the tin hatter conspiracy -prone GOP to charge it was a top secret secular conspiracy to favour Obama, involving tens of thousands of civil servants and businesses - about half of them not even Democrats.

There are several other alternatives.

The figures are actually correct.

There is a conspiracy, all right - of aliens.

There is a conspiracy of Satan and his band of devils. Or a conspiracy by God and His angels.

Even the GOP would dismiss the idea that aliens are to blame.

But equally quickly, even the most evangelical among the Tin Hats would also dismiss the idea that God or the Devil influenced the latest unemployment figures.

Even as recently as WWII, most of the governments of the Allied nations could direct that a national day of prayer or thanks be held after a disaster or a victory and expect it would be a widely attended and be an uncontroversial event.

Enough voters - even if only the elderly voters of 75 years ago, ie those raised in times of mid-Victorian piety - still believed strongly in Acts of Providence for the rest of society to think it wise to go along with the gag.

But not anymore.

Is America actually the LEAST religious nation on earth ?

Now for half of the population - they call themselves conservative, I call them blue sky optimists - Nature/Reality is too simple to really hurt Man and the God/Satan doesn't exist and so that only leaves other humans to hurt them.

Dismiss the possibility of your own error and imperfections, dismiss  the existence (or Free Will) of God/Satan, dismiss the complexity of Nature/Reality, who or what else is there to blame when things don't go the way you ordain them to be ?

Conspiracy theories are not irrational, if your underlying assumption is that neither Nature/Reality nor God/Satan can seriously harm you.

It is is your underlying assumption that is brain-dead - not the reasoning thereafter.

The unemployment figure truthers of 2012 are the fallout of the loss of faith in God and loss of fear of Nature that accompanied the rise in the belief in "reified-science" in 1812 : 200 years ago....