Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Trump Moscow's "Manchurian Candidate" ?

When I was a little kid, more than fifty years now, I had a good laugh about the absurd plotline of both the book and original movie of The Manchurian Candidate.

As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !

But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.

Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....

reductionist Eugenics, born and throttled at Cold Spring Harbour ...

Nobody in the American scientific-corporate-medical-government cartel controlling the fate of the Allies' wartime penicillin wanted to hear from him.

However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)

Monday, August 8, 2016

What would Henry do ?

We all have our own very good reasons for not helping suffering humanity:
  • We are so overworked on the job that we simply lack the time and energy.
  • Our bosses are really tightening down on us - or our all-powerful government is.
  • There are restrictions on where we can travel, what we can write, what we can do.
  • We have a lot of little kids to raise - or a handicapped spouse.
  • Or maybe we're dying of a painfully debilitating disease
Or maybe 'all of the above' : like WWII's Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Still believe that just one person --- one overworked, over-burdened, over-censored, over-restricted and over-dying person --- can't possibly change our whole world, for the better, forever ?

wartime Penicillin : controlled by the few, granted to the few -- or controlled by no one and a right of all ?

Simply substitute "Life" for "Penicillin" and very few would have any problem with the above title.

For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.

Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.

But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.

And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....

Sunday, August 7, 2016

Pure Modernity, circa 1870s -1960s : winnowing Life's answers, keeping the correct and discarding the wrong

Lets face it, if you already know the correct answers to all of the Future's questions, why keep the wrong answers hanging about ?

So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Pure Modernity becomes Diverse Modernity : Dawson's legacy ?

The original Modernity (Pure Modernity) had very high hopes indeed for 'purifying' all of Life's gene pools, though to judge by their 'success' with the English Bulldog, that would only have resulted in pure-breeding Humanity and Nature into rapid extinction.

By contrast, scientist Martin Henry Dawson's study of bacterial diversity had convinced him that the most successful lifeforms throughout history, the microbes, had survived four billion years because they evolved to support the widest possible amount of diversity.

In particular, the microbes survived dire change because they deliberately sustaining even those strains judged by scientists to be useless degenerate defective failures.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Japanese Muscularity, 1890s-1940s : Japanese culture becomes extraordinarily hands-on brutal

In an age surely dominated by the machine (and the machine gun) what stands out instead about the era of Muscular Modernity was the rise of the subtly implied threat of old fashioned physical violence, used as a casual instrument of control by parents, teachers, bosses and competitors all through the Westernized world.

But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.

Totalitarianism : the one 'all around fit' surviving in the one only global niche

Totalitarianism is, deep down, Muscular Darwinism's 'survival of the one fit in a single globe-wide niche' against Charles Darwin's original 'survival of the many fittest in many niches'.

One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.

Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.

Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.

Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.

So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?

Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.

"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...

Muscular Deferments : Trump (and Florey)

Viewing news photos & videos, I am always amazed at just how many prominent military-service dodging 'chicken-hawks' are big, tall, muscular and verbally aggressive.

Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.

Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Diverse Modernity replacing Muscular Modernity

Muscular Modernity is hardly dead, not judging by the recent insurgent success of strongman politics all over the world, from Putin to Trump to Duterte.

But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.

We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.

But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....

One can really only be a PD broadcaster, never a PD publisher

Once something is released into the Public Domain, becomes 'PD', one can no longer speak of it being controlled and published.

It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

"Nature's House has many Niches" --- and many different creatures to fill them

John 14:2 probably says all that needs to be said in proof of the 'survival of the MANY fittest' over the claim of the 'survival of the one most all-around fit'.


Survival of the MANY fittest


Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....

What if 1759 or 1959 first saw theory that a vast diversity of species needed to best fill every little niche in Nature ?

Muscular Modernity was going to happen, was already well underway, whether or not Darwin and Wallace ever publicly presented their new theory that Natural Selection, aka Survival of the Fittest, was why Evolution did exist and how it worked itself out.

PD sunshine & penicillin hated by Big Oil and Big Pharma

The same sort of - despicable - people who pushed patented synthetic penicillin 'sometime in the future' over currently available PD natural penicillin, during WWII's desperate times for the ill & wounded, are at it again.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Muscular Modernity, Muscular Eugenics, Muscular Darwinism : survival of the FIT

Like Charles Darwin, I have come to see that the term "survival of the fittest" is a useful shorthand, but ringed with at least as many shortfalls as advantages.

The biggest by far being the incredibly large number of otherwise intelligent-appearing people who once mistook the survival of the 'fit' as being fully equal to the survival of the 'fittest' ---- when actually they were 180 degrees opposed.

Anti-Vax patients 2016 = Anti-Natural-Penicillin doctors 1940

I believe that Anti-Vax (unwarranted) concerns about heavy metals in vaccines and heavy money controlling vaccine approvals are just an unconscious smoke screen to hide these patients' free-floating fears and phobias.

Just as I believe that (unwarranted) concerns about the 'impurity' of natural penicillin among most of the world's doctors and scientists in early 1940s was equally an unconscious smokescreen to hide their similar free-floating fears and phobias.

We easily grant patients as being irrational --- but doctors and scientists, too ? Yep !

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Pure Neo-Darwinism just dog whistle code for pure WASP ?

It is always interesting to discover that the most ardent and 'purest' of Neo-Darwinists are seemingly likely to also be English and Protestant (middle class and male, too, but we'll overlook that for the moment!)

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

WWII's 'war of ideas' ran at subterranean right angles to its 'war of weapons'

It is comparatively easy to sort out WWII's 'war of weapons' (particularly if one is allowed to view that war moment by moment, region by region), much less so for its 'war of ideas'.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

SCIENCE purifies intellectual 'gene pool' : TECHNOLOGY diversifies it

I want to suggest a totally different way of looking at the vast difference between Science (theories) and Technology (tools).

Monday, July 25, 2016

Dawson's Unwashed Penicillin for the Great Unwashed or Florey's Pure Penicillin for the Pure & Fit ?

Wars, externally, may involve the clash of guns, but inside, they're really about the clash of ideas


You may think that the seventy five year old conflict over how best to make and distribute wartime penicillin was simply not capable of being freighted with the key clash of ideas and values behind WWII, but I am here trying to convince you that it was.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

The greater evolutionary success, circa 1944 : Microbial diversity or Aryan uniformity ?

To Dr Martin Henry Dawson, after two decades of research into the astonishing and under-travelled scientific world of four billion years of microbial diversity, versatility and survival, the scientific answer to the secret of long term evolutionary success seemed perfectly clear.

This is not to say he did not also oppose Eugenics (Axis, Neutral & Allied) on purely moral grounds.

But in 1944, he stood almost alone in the scientific world in strongly opposing all attempts at perfecting, purifying and reducing the human gene pool.

For he saw it as positively harmful rather than helpful to humanity's future prospects.

he based this simply upon the great evolutionary success of the tiny, weak, simple, diverse bacteria versus the equally great survival failure of the much larger, stronger, smarter carnivores ---- and Nazis.....

Wartime penicillin : Patented for some or PD for all ?

For the young Black and Jewish men receiving those historical first needles (October 1940) of Dr Henry Dawson's "Impure Manhattan" brew. it is very important to note that this impure naturally grown penicillin were not at all dangerous, medically speaking.

As any 1940 era medical scientist or doctor, literate enough to read past medical journal articles on penicillin, knew well.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

Most victims of WWII died from the non-action of NEGLECT, not from direct violence

Most of the people who died prematurely because of WWII were not bombed, shot, gassed, hung, beaten or chopped up.

They did not die because of direct actions but through deliberate acts of non-action.

They died through Neglect, but not in its minor sense of mere forgetfulness: rather, powerful people in top positions of authority fully discussed the matter and committed the decision of official Neglect to paper.

These victims died because they were denied an equal share of what were often inadequate total amounts of available food, medical care, housing, fuel, clothing within each regime area.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

the ALLIED HOLOCAUST : pure penicillin, for only some

The Nazis never fully carried out their original Hunger Plan and the Allies never carried out their original Penicillin plan.

So the Holocaust of Jews and Romas remains the outstanding horror of WWII, in terms of lives snuffed out prematurely and total suffering induced.

But it was a close run thing : because both the Nazi Hunger Plan and the planned shortage of pandemic-preventing Allied penicillin at war's end had the potential to kill far far more than 'The Holocaust' actually achieved.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

K Auschwitz hedged its assets, r Manhattan its bets

Right to the end of WWII, most 'fit Aryan' Germans thought that Germany's food rationing system was both fair and efficient.

And it was - for them.

Everyone else inside Germany, 'unfit' Aryan Germans and 'non-Aryan' Germans alike, starved to see that the fit Aryans got nothing but the best.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Evolutionists' mental limits : why they never asked when first minerals evolved

Ironically, mainstream evolutionists weren't (and still aren't !) really comfortable about Evolution's ever dynamic change and diversity : they fear it and seek, intellectually, to reduce it to as small amount as possible, at least inside their minds.

Monday, July 11, 2016

"Everybody always talks about the lethal chamber but nobody ever does anything about it" Until Hitler

Almost everybody who was middle class and progressive did indeed once earnestly and openly talk about using lethal chambers to mass murder all the handicapped degenerate defective deviant working class poor.

But when Mr Hitler dared to actually did so, those very same people rounded on him like a ton of bricks.

No, Hitler isn't lying in the innermost circle of Hell - that is reserved for all these hypocrites.....

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Eugenics covers the evolutionary waterfront : feeble yet fecund - strong yet sterile

No matter what kind internal inconsistency or awkward external evidence flies up in their faces, supporters of that ever elastic science Eugenics (big shoutout to J Carroll !) always seem to find a ready explanation, helped by the fact that their's is a very undemanding faith.

Saturday, July 9, 2016

To aristocrats, all combat, if not war itself, was inherently 'fair' before advent of crossbow archery and guns

When efficient killing meant having to use a sword, axe, club or spear at very close (hand to hand) range, aristocrats ( aka WASPs)  felt that combat was inherently 'fair' and not 'sneaky' ---- no wonder, given that the likely victors were inherently taller and stronger than their opponents.

People who were inherently bigger, taller, stronger --- like the very well fed protein-stuffed aristocracy - loved this form of combat, because they always won.

(Today a close form of this sort of combat it is only found in contact sports - which aristocrats and WASPs also love.)

But all too soon peasant soldier archers ,with very small bodies but employing wind-up crossbows, and while safe behind distant rocks or trees, could pierce the best of aristocratic armour from long distances.

Low tech peasant rebels often simply combined plentiful farm tools into becoming deadly poleaxes, again multiplying their small strength and their short reach to deadly effective against their taller and bigger aristocratic opponents.

To the suddenly much threatened big tall aristocracy, these deadly small guys were fighting 'dirty', 'sneaky' - terms their descendants still use to describe the North American aboriginals (or guerillas everywhere).

Today's M-16 type weapon is the ultimate combat equalizer : a light weight rifle with little recoil that fires a rapid spray of light but lethally high speed bullets such that even a small child can use it to kill a giant of an adult man at a distance, from behind a wall or tree.

But when a standing (white) policeman, with a gun already drawn, confronts a seated (minority) car driver with no gun at all or with gun in pocket, fighting is finally 'fair' again......

blacks on buses rarely killed by police : too pitiful or just too many witnesses ?

I have only been to America a very few times and for very short periods of time.

But since I love bus travel, each time I rode public transit and closely observed the sort of people about to ride it.

Today, in light of all the recent shootings in America involving black car drivers at 'routine' (quote unquote) traffic stops, that experience has left me reflecting.

Given the relatively greater proportion of blacks and other minorities who ride public transit, compared to whites, I have a theory why then are so few blacks and minorities are killed on buses compared to those riding around in cars.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Masculine Modernity result of shorter, less tiring, work hours ?

Over the last hundred and fifty years, the work day for most of us in the West has gotten (a) much shorter (b) much less physically tiring and (c) much more financially rewarding.

And this in turn, has produced an ongoing crisis for those who used to have near-exclusive control over reproducing Western Hegemony : our (mostly male) rentier class.

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

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

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

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

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

Monday, July 4, 2016

making the BIOLOGICAL case against Auschwitz, Aktion T4 & modernity

Most people in the western democracies were once convinced that (a) the brutal Adolph Hitler was very morally wrong to kill chronically 'unfit' individuals yet (b) gentle Mother Nature would equally never ever permit the chronically 'unfit' to survive, 'there out in the wild'.

That positive reference to Mother Nature's supposed harsh treatment of those chronically unfit to survive the evolutionary race was the very hallmark of the Era of Modernity,1860s -1960s.

It thus seems possible to at least suggest that Hitler might have gotten a much better historical press, if instead of Aktion T4 and Auschwitz, he had taken up the methods used by the western democracies to see that the numbers of their unfit aboriginals gradually faded away to extinction.

Sunday, July 3, 2016

diversity-affirming Manhattan : diversity-denying Auschwitz

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

Teddy Roosevelt vs the Persister bacteria

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

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

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

Saturday, July 2, 2016

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

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

They were hardly the only ones to be extremely disappointed, even extremely surprised - most male adults - even male adult scientists - felt much the same.

Slave-Importing only ended when it became a 'biological crime' as well as an ethical crime

Millions around the world had profited, directly or indirectly, for centuries from the labour of 'imported' (aka kidnapped) slaves.

But suddenly, mid nineteenth century, they developed new (post Darwin) fears that age-old 'slave and master' miscegenation would lead inevitably to eugenic rot and race death.

Only then did the practise finally end.

For the minority who had always seen slavery as a (ethnical/moral) crime had never made much headway --- until the majority invented a new moral panic around the possibility of biological crimes 'against the race'....

Friday, July 1, 2016

Closing the Frontier...... and Opening the Empire

The 1890s saw the emergence of 'pioneer days' wannabes ---- only now cutting down natives instead of trees.

The newly conquered Philippines became reconstituted as an open air Dude Ranch for wannabe imperial hard men.

Because as the late Victorian era saw more and more machines doing the hard physical labour once done by male humans, this meant that small women could now do jobs that once only big men had the physical strength to do.

How else now could dumb but strong males pull down serious coin and respect if not in re-directing all that labouring strength into state-sanctioned violence against humans, instead of against Nature ?

making sure that Hitler, not Stalin, take ALL the rap for our ills

In terms of the sheer number of murders ordered by both, it is hard to decide who was worst - Hitler or Stain.

But in terms of the popular imagination, as seen exhibited by individuals and the entertainment and news media, it is no contest -- Hitler gets almost all the blame.

Upon Hitler, not Stalin, we have displaced all our guilt for past wrongs the West inflicted on 'Others' in the recent past.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

It wasn't just the Bomb that changed everything in '45

Everyone agrees our world changed fundamentally in 1945, but nobody is exactly sure why.

It should have been the apogee of that era of "pure is simple" modernity. But the 'triumph' of the atomic bomb and the defeat of the Axis felt like ashes in most mouths.

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Getting pregnant by someone who didn't say they had AIDS --- or Mental Health issues

We are appalled today that anyone would impregnate someone without telling them first that they have AIDS.

The chronic disease AIDS, top scientists tell us, is both highly infectious (a sort of virus-caused 'genetic infection') and in a sense directly inheritable - a disease able to be directly passed on to the newborns of the pregnant woman.

These sort of 'infectious genetic' concerns are hardly new.

Seventy five years ago, top scientists also told us that all sorts of chronic diseases (laziness, lust and epilepsy among the hundreds of them) were both highly infectious and directly inheritable.

It was rational for the very Powerful to fear the very Weak, if weakness (degeneracy) was indeed infectious and then inheritable ...

If your basic (often unconscious) assumptions are plum-dead crazy, as they usually were during the 1860s-1960s era of Panic Modernity, it matters not how logical and rational your subsequence arguments are.

Teddy Roosevelt : 4F &1A, fit and unfit, defective, degenerate --- and heroic

When Theodore Roosevelt was a young adult, he was told by his doctors that because of his many serious chronic diseases, he should take up a soft indoor occupation if he wished a normal lifespan.

Instead, Teddy self-consciously took up his famous 'vigorous life'.

(However, partly due to his excessive vigour, he in the end only lived to age sixty, which he might also have reached if he had taken up the soft life !)

He lived in an age when most scientists considered that humans had a very, very, limited ability to alter the health their genome gave them at birth ------ except to drive it downhill and then inevitably pass that bad health on to their descendants.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Racial purity hedges assets, Racial diversity hedges risks

The two geographies of pure Auschwitz and impure Manhattan (those opposing antidotes to each other) nevertheless shared the concept of 'hedging', in its metaphorical sense.

Henry Dawson reviews the microbial evidence that 'out in Nature' defectives quickly die out and finds it faulty, with gratifying results for all humanity

One of the most popular bromides among penny-pinching middle class intellectuals of the era of Panic Modernity (circa 1860s to the 1960s) was that without humanity's regrettable humanitarian social safety net, human 'defectives' would quick die out, as always happens 'out there' with Nature's defectives.

Dr Henry Dawson, born in 1896, had imbibed this certitude growing up but from his earliest days of independent scientific research he seemed to have doubted its validity.

Instead, he chose to focus on closely studying microbial 'defectives' and both studying and trying to help human 'defectives'.

And ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940 have had better lives because he choose to do so.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Henry Dawson's microbial complexity --- vs civilized simplicity

Whenever I tell someone that my book in set during WWII and contrasts microbial intelligence versus civilized stupidity, this often quickly leads to an argument over whether anyone but humans can show true intelligence.

(I suppose this is progress, of a sort - we are long past people claiming that only middle class protestant white males are capable of exhibiting true intelligence.)

But as a consequence, I am recasting my book's main theme as the contrast between 'microbial complexity' and 'civilized simplicity'.

Friday, June 24, 2016

Eugenics' individuals can be measured but Racism's 'human germs' can not --- and that was its appeal to Modernity

Try to imagine this sentence - even once - ever being written or spoken out loud :
"It is an indisputable fact that any white with an IQ of 80 is in intellectually far superior to any black with an IQ of 140."
Highly specific small entities like a particular individual can be measured, more or less accurately, but a vast entity like a 'race' with fluid ill-defined and hotly contested boundaries can never be.

Eugenics' problem for Modernity was that it was a science, all about fussily precise measurements which usually didn't reveal what its promotors (and people like Hitler) wanted to hear .

By contrast, Racism was pure poetry, all about vague metaphors, and so was custom made for Hitler's well-tuned rhetorical skills...

Brexit unites Left and Right in their mutual dislike of the Poles : rather like August 23rd 1939 in fact

The poor old Poles get it in the neck, again.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

WASPs are always ex-pats and never 'illegals' while darkies are always immigrants and 'illegals'

left and right media agree on at least one thing --- their subtle racism


The far right mainstream media in the UK were oh so careful to portray a WASP terrorist who recently killed a Labor MP as a gentle soul who did the gardens of his elderly neighbours (who are all voting to Brexit).

They deliberately left out the fact that the man was also a member of both British and American (quasi nazi) racist organizations.

I doubt this would have happened if he had been a British born Moslem --- their kid glove treatment of this WASP killer was pure racism.

shelter of a universally-superior English 'race' first rate idea to third rate Englishmen who would otherwise lose out if evolution pitted individuals against each other

Darwin and his cousin Galton, founder of Eugenics, saw evolution primarily as involving a competition between individuals within a species sharing the same environment in the same geographic space.

Not as a competition between species (or sub-species) occupying different environments in different geographic spaces.

"In Evolution, all the Apples don't compete with all the Oranges."

Bad news then for most of us, who could be described as second and third rate and thus certain losers if Darwin, Galton and all the eugenists are actually right.

nothing is, has, or will be pure : no man is an island - no island is an island

Pollsters given edge in today's vote on Britain's future to Isolationists, Appeasers ---and the 'pure' delusions of Auschwitz...


The same sort of people - in some cases, the very same people - who let Hitler roll all over Europe while they repeated their dismissive mantra that 'the Wogs start at Calais' - are at it again.

Supposedly its a vote among all the residents of the UK but headlines in the right wing Leave newspapers are all about 'England, England, England'.

Heavens know what their many UK readers outside of England make of this distain of not just Europe's wogs, but of the English internal empire's very own 'wogs' : the conquered Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the Manx etc.

We do know how most these internal wogs are voting -- and now why.

For most, remaining in the EU's multi-national home is safer for their small minority than entrusting in an isolated and chauvinistic England's traditional hardly-tender mercies.

But if you are a wavering non-wog-hating voter in England today, please vote to stay : for no man and no island is ever an island, nothing is ever pure, everything and everybody is always impure and interconnected....

Monday, June 20, 2016

Modernity : an Era that no longer believed in Miracles or Magic, believed in Microbes instead ....

Germ Theory replaces God Theology ?


In the early 19th century, intellectuals of the Western World prided themselves on no longer believing in warlocks and witches, goblins and ghouls, magic ---- all those discredited remnants of pantheist thought.

By the end of the same century, most (semi-secretly) now prided themselves on longer believing in God and the Devil, miracles --- all of those discredited remnants of pre-Darwinian monotheist thought.

Charles Lyell and other scientists had already convinced the educated world that Mother Nature's catastrophes, such as massive flooding caused by an asteroid crashing the Earth, were impossible. 

But who or what then to blame when mighty civilizations were still brought low by invisible but all-powerful plagues and discontents ?

Enter Germ Theory into "The Blame Gap", a theory known for many centuries but never accepted, which suddenly became intellectually respectable in a very few, very uncontested,  years.

Germ Theory replaces all powerful but invisible spirits with invisible but all-powerful tiny living beings, microbes.

Thursday, June 16, 2016

surely everything that Humanity, a mere animal of Nature, does is natural

It was the hallmark of the non-God-fearing members of Panic Modernity (1865-1965) to believe that (a) 'Man' was but an animal of Nature and yet (b) almost everything that 'Man' did was not natural.

Even while the God-fearing members of that era persisted in believing that humanity were not mere animals, they were at least consistent in also denying that anything humanity did was 'natural a la Nature'.

So, back to the no-God-fearers : to them, if the beaver-the-animal built a big lodge for its family that was natural ---- but if humanity-the-animal built a big lodge for its elderly members that was un-natural.

And humanity putting its elderly in comfy lodges was not natural but humanity putting its elderly at the chilly edge of the snowy woods was natural.

we have never been Eugenicists

Have we been collectively guilt at taking the eugenicists at their word ---- and not their deed ? Have we offered up to each other the wrong explanations for WWII's horrors ?

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The NON-thriller literary qualities of extremely 'fixed' Eugenic danger

The book-reading equivalent of watching paint dry is trying to imagine an eugenic thriller based upon a debate among eugenists over when to sterilize a 'defective' child before they can reproduce more 'defectives'.

Sterilize them at birth or age one or age thirteen or even wait till age sixteen ?

Yawn !

Because Eugenics is supposedly about extremely 'fixed' 'unmoving' 'known' hereditary qualities, by definition it is hard to build up a good Moral Panic around it.

'conspiracy of infectious invasive (germ like) miscegenation weakens the eugenics of the racial germline' Phew !

When scientists and medical doctors talk of germ cells, what do they mean ?

Are they talking about infectious bacteria germ cells or are they describing the human egg and sperm that contain the human germ line ?

Obviously they are talking about both.

The root of the word "germ" has a variety of meanings and perhaps surprising to most of us, that meaning for thousands of years was a highly positive one.

In fact, at a time when most people met the Spring sun basically near starving, perhaps the most hopefully positive word in the whole human lexicon.

Sunday, June 12, 2016

Time to replace Eugenics with Germ Theory as the guiding metaphor of Modernity ?

None hated and feared progress more than Progressives - just as none hated modernization more than Modernists.

But if that hatred of and progress and modernization was the real reason for the birth of 'Modernity' and 'Progress', their avid proponents dared not say so.

They loved the direct -intended- consequences of all these new inventions and technologies, invented by themselves, so why not ?, but just couldn't handle what happened when their Genie slipped away from the Bottle.

Friday, June 10, 2016

Preferring to inject pure patented synthetic penicillin into patients, medical community dismissed Dawson's natural penicillin as 'impure Manhattan' like it was a low grade of caribbean raw sugar

Unconsciously perhaps, the wartime  medical community seemed to have adopted the floor level lingo of the global sugar market to describe their vision of the sort of penicillin suitable (or not) to inject into the bloodstreams of patients dying for lack of it.

Their vision of the perfect penicillin , needed before ninety nine percent of them would do anything new to try and save the dying, was something crystalline, white and pure : rather like 100% pure table sugar with its top grade - and top price.

For table sugar is the only food humans eat that is actually a 100% pure compound (C12H22O11) rather than a very muddled mixture.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Pure Auschwitz : antidote to impure Manhattan

Try just peering out once through red-rage-rimmed eyes, to view the twentieth century world as Hitler saw it.

Given his well known mid-1920s hatred for mongrel Manhattan (that ever popular symbol of 'impure' modernization's propensity for 'invasive' intermixing) it then becomes clear that early 1940s Auschwitz, Hitler's ultimate riposte of 'pure' modernity against impure modernization, seems almost foretold.

Literally, ironically, paradoxically, call it what you will : impure Manhattan and pure Auschwitz were made for each other


Auschwitz was designed to be the literal antidote for Manhattan.

As it just so happens, in the early 1940s Dr Henry Dawson had similar thoughts --- but in the totally opposite moral direction.....

modernization as a form of Mary Douglas's dirt : as invasive non-natives 'out of place'

In the era on both sides of the 1880s, modernization was seen mostly as a particularly marked revolution in (externally-oriented) transportation and communication, rather than in (internally-oriented) manufacturing.

This modernization worked to greatly ease the former immense difficulties from the danger, time and expense of moving people, material and ideas from a safely distant there to an dangerously intimate here.

This lets us see why the 1880s was also the start of a time of Moral Panic, as a great many people feared this sudden and massive incoming as overwhelmingly disruptive to their hitherto staid lives.

They also came to see the products of modernization as literally 'invasive' and yet almost invisibly so - *expanding upon the equally brand new 1880s idea of invisible germs invading a body to cause fatal diseases.

Soon they chose to see modernization as dirt, dirty, impure in the Mary Douglas sense of those terms : the invasive injection of non-native peoples, ideas, material into their native space.

Modernity (racial purity, purity of food and drink, purity nationalism and its immigration restrictions, purity eugenics, et al) was thus a virulent reaction against modernization - yes it grew 'out of it' , as is always claimed - but it was a powerful revulsion to it, not a celebration of it......

* No accident that Hitler repeatedly publicly proclaimed himself as the modern day Robert Koch, the person most associated with 1880s Germ Theory, and that he chose to mark the centenary of Koch's birth in December 1943 with much fanfare - it serving as a veiled public justification for the semi-secret Holocaust, then nearing its depths of evilness.

Dawson & Hobby's commensals, in the Phony War between pathogens & civilization

Germ Theory, not Eugenics, lay behind Auschwitz


Rather like the ideal civilized white middle class male, to qualify as worthy of respect, a microbe had to be virile and virulent and thus labelled a pathogen.

By contrast, Dr Henry Dawson's first independent scientific paper was all about the activities of non-virulent, non-pathogenic microbes.

Not a good way to position oneself in the fast track - certainly not in 1926 --- and still not in 2016.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Double V, Double V Too ! : the OTHER Manhattan Project

It took a hell of a long time - almost an entire war in fact, before the Allied leadership (at least the NEW DEALER portion of it) accepted that Allied and Neutral citizens weren't going to fully support the Allied military effort until they saw proof the Allies were actually as different from the Axis as they had long claimed.

I believe that moment began when the US government and military bombers began flying abundant amounts of naturally-grown penicillin all over the world, to save Allies & Neutrals "4Fs and quasi 4Fs" dying for lack of it.

Monday, June 6, 2016

DOUBLE V, DOUBLE V, TOO wasn't exactly Archie Bunker's war

Does one American in a hundred know what I'm talking about when I mention the DOUBLE V campaign ?

Does one Canadian or European, Asian or African in a thousand understand ?

I doubt it.

Full respect for all beings, at home as well as abroad ?

Didn't we start down that glorious road when we took up walking out with that great democrat, Uncle Joe ?

Didn't we achieve that victory fully when we defeated the Nazis ---- and then gave them big jobs ?

No, we did not....

we're STILL fighting for the second Double V victory, yes we are, yes we are

I don't remember the first of WWII's DOUBLE V victories, the fight against Axis, because I was born a few years after the guns stopped.

But I do remember the battles towards the second DOUBLE V victory, fighting the quiet prejudice against our fellow beings, hidden deep in the hearts of so many Allies and Neutrals.

For those battles are ongoing still.

WWII a battle between militaries far less divided, ethically, that they should have been

All the militaries involved in WWII were segregated.

Full stop.

All ignored the fine talk of the Allied Atlantic Charter, all treated some fellow human beings as lesser beings.

In all, upper class males from the dominant ethnic religious group ran the show and all the rest of us followed their orders ---- or felt the lash.

If we were allowed in the military, its combat units or its high-paying weapons factories at all.

WWII's ethnic prejudice never really changed - just died of old age

The global aura of ethnic prejudice that spawned and fuelled WWII's violence and hatred didn't stop simply because the guns stopped firing.

Instead it became less publicly assertive and moved underground and into private conversation.

If you love country music, you revere the names of Canadians Dominic Guarasci, James Amadeo and Myrna Petrunka.

No ?

Your tastes more All-American and totally WASPish ?

How about Loretta Lynn record producer Don Grashey and those two sweethearts of the rodeo,  Buddy De Val and Myrna Lorrie ?

Same folks, guys.

Yeah it was still routine when I was growing up for non-WASP Canadians in all walks of life to change their names to something more Anglo to get along -  and it continued to happen until at least the 1980s.

Only when most of the older folks, raised at teenagers in the Edwardian Era's hothouse atmosphere of casual Anglo imperialism,eugenics and racism, finally died or withdrew from the public sphere did the need eased off...

Sunday, June 5, 2016

The Long 1950s : from the death of Stalin to the death of Kennedy ?

Historians are always aware that human events don't swivel on a dime every time the decades change.

And by the way, I am one with the math experts who insist a decade should be marked in the same way we normally count numbers, (1,2,3) , that is 1951-1961 rather than 1950-1960 for the Fifties.

Fat chance we'll ever be taken seriously though.

But we also have the historians' concept of the Long Forties, the Long Sixties etc.

So I offer up 1953 to 1963 as one way to see the Long Fifties, from the easing of tension after Stalin's death until the later easing of tension after the Atomic Testing Ban was approved. The two events being a good way to bookmark both ends of the Long Fifties....

not all movers & shakers of WWII died at war's end

In fact most didn't.

That was because most of those movers and shakers had come of age in the Edwardian Era and thus were born between about 1890 and 1905, so in 1945, they still had a long way to go before retirement.

In addition, the frightened cautious period between 1945 and 1965 was a time in human history when the postwar power elite, in almost all aspects of life, were almost unbelievably old ---- as a check on most nations' top leader in that period will quickly confirm !

The material artifacts of war linger longer after its mental atmosphere evaporates

I was conceived five years after WWII ended so I have, of course, no direct memories of the war, above all of its unique mental atmosphere.

(I, after all, already knew that 'the good guys won'.)

But my recollections of actual wartime physical artifacts is excellent.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Reductionism is Darwinian inheritance, but for atoms (or is it the other way around ?)

For the last twenty million years or so, Darwinists believe, giraffes have looked like today's giraffes ---- and also like the very first ma and pa giraffe.

Nature vs natural

Nature simply is, Nature is its total totality, always there and always changing, is real, all real and can not be anything but real.

But natural is faked, fabricated, invented, created and re-created : is yesterday's un-natural invasive species  (earthworms in the case of my province of Nova Scotia) seen as today's natural native species.

Of course, if I wanted to invite in the hobgoblins of total consistency, following my low culture technological modernization and High Culture  Scientific Modernity, it would be spelled 'nature' and 'Natural'.....

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Darwin's role in inventing the Zionist & Aryan 'ethnicities'

By the 1870s, the educated world had reduced popular Darwin to a handful of key takeaways.

Simple enough takeaways to help cause not one but two world wars.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Hitler removing from Europe a pretend fungus (the Jews) --- maybe ; but Hitler removing real fungus --- never

Adolf Hitler really got it wrong, metaphorically, when he called Jews a fungus and proposed that humans (Aryan humans) could easily remove them all from Europe and thus restore it permanently to its former state of racial purity.

True, the fungus will starve unless they are successful in dissolving the physical (and mental) bonds we use to try to keep 'pure' concepts like wet fluids and dry solids from co-mingling in a slime like fashion on top of a piece of damp wood.

The fungus are thus a highly appropriate metaphor for the intermingling hybridity that Hitler (and Modernity) so hated.

IMPURITY just is, it was PURITY, like Nature, that had to be fabricated, subsidized, sustained and nutured

Technology, like impurity and reality, just is : it was Science, High Culture, Purity and Tradition and Free Enterprise and Nationalism and Nature that had to be invented, subsidized and nurtured...

Monday, May 30, 2016

Lies, damned lies and peer-reviewed scientific articles

In a perfect world, elementary grade school kids could be set an series of simple arithmetic problems, based on the information contained within any number of peer-reviewed articles, published in highly reputable scientific journals, on the early wartime production of penicillin by penicillium fungus.

After all the basic arithmetic is dead simple, but unfortunately the  scientists were allowed to fudge the vital numbers , time and again, all to better flatter the humans nominally in charge of the penicilliums' production, the patients be damned.

Subsidizing the Inevitable

Why did tight-fisted Depression Era middle class taxpayers so willingly subsidize the sterilization of their less well off neighbours, particularly in the name of the inviolate Law of Nature that stated the superior races (themselves) would inevitably triumph over the weak (their neighbours), with or without the need to sterilize the weak and the poor ?

Why do we still spend tax dollars to make Nature naturally natural, again ?

Making 1920s Better Babies and Fitter Families with ...Theda Bara, Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino ???

I have been enjoying Ewa Luczak's "Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination".

Perhaps you are like me, with your first language English, but not the sort of English written by most professors of English these days.

If so, you will absolutely love the limpid English of Ms Luczak, whose first language is Polish and who, despite the limpidness of her English, is a fully tenured professor of English.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Penicillin vs Auschwitz : microbial inclusion vs civilized exclusion

Auschwitz ("killing your way to genetic purity") was civilization by exclusion's apogee.

"natural-penicillin-for-all"   vs  Auschwitz's "civilization-for-just-some"


As much as Manhattan's penicillium slime produced lifesaving (the gift of HGT and of microbial inclusivity) was its nemesis...

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Monday, May 23, 2016

Hippies better at making war than making love ?

You all remember the Hippies  and their peace, love, and understanding. All that lovely-dovey, huggy-buggy inclusion stuff.

Placing flowers down the barrels of rifles : hardly prime war-winning material, the entire draft dodging deserting lot of them.

Not so.

Because the last Big One (DOuble'ya DOuble-ya Two) was actually won by the Allies' inclusive values greatly besting the contrasting exclusionary values of their more war-like opponents in the Axis.

The GREATER efficiency of Dawson's impure Manhattan penicillin

Biochemist Dr Karl Meyer's original idea in early September 1940, one approved by his three helping team mates, was to work towards the man-made synthesis of plentiful amounts of pure penicillin within about six months  ----and only then test it clinically on human patients.

Until then,the job of his microbiologist team mates Dr Henry Dawson and Dr Gladys Hobby, assisted by Meyer and his lab tech Eleanor Chaffee, was mostly to grow some penicillium mold and harvest the natural impure penicillin.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

WWII's Microbial Intelligence & Civilized Stupidity

The Intellectual History of WWII, according to Luke


We must never forget that the people actually running WWII, men in their fifties and sixties, all still thought of Germany (despite the temporary aberration of Hitler) as the most advanced civilization on Earth, in fact the most civilized nation ever.

And why not ?

WWII's Auschwitz & Penicillium : "The Elevated, base, & The Base, elevated"

An elaboration of my elevator pitch about my book, "Impure Manhattan,Auschwitz Antidote", written in the form of a blog post...


It is much much too hard today, with most of our top science and top musical artists coming out of the US, to really accept that before WWII everyone considered that all the best science and the most distinguished (classical) music came from the German culture.

But it was definitely so.

That is why the late 1945 revelations that the wartime rumours about Auschwitz understated its actual horrific intent, were such a particular intellectual shock for those who came of age before WWII.

Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Snyder/ Black Earth : vertical Race exclusivity versus horizontal Jewish inclusivity

Unlike most other book reviewers I have read to date, I fully support Timothy Snyder's key claim in his newest work on the Holocaust, BLACK EARTH.

WWII turned prewar moral certitudes totally upside down

In 1945, it was revealed that the very top of Modernity's Great Tree of Being had given us the worst killing machine ever (in the form of Auschwitz) while the very bottom of that Great Tree of Being had given us the best lifesaver ever (in the form of Penicillin).

In Hitler's strictly B&W world, strictly modernist world, gray was the ultimate evil

Because in Hitler's B&W world, if fungus had a color, it would be that gray.

Fungus (or rather fungus like behavior), for Hitler, was the ultimate evil.

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Clean Fill is dirt, but never 'dirty'

All across the southern American Black Belt, that arc of dark black upland soil where the short staple cotton grows so profitably, there are still plenty of modern day plantations with modern day massas and field hands and that makes it as good a place as any to define what Pure Modernity did and didn't mean by 'dirty'.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

joe stalin Popular science vs joe friday Published science

Don't get me wrong - I love joe friday Published science, usually generated by junior nobodies, particularly when it is long on assembled evidence and short on windy conclusions.

Its pontifical Popular science - the kind mostly generated by the established famous scientists (Science's thumb-suckers-in-chief) - that really gets me in the long and curlies.

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Half Breeds don't begin when an aboriginal and an european marry, but when we NOTICE

Miscegenation is just 'breed out of place'


It was only when the Victorian Age's growing addiction to pure modernity led them to put Aboriginals in a pile way over there and Europeans in a pile way over here that they then noticed that the children of a marriage between a native and what ? (an alien ?) were a hybrid, the half breed.

For centuries earlier, most people hadn't really noticed anything 'unusual' happening.

As Bruno Latour meant to say, the harder the pure modernists tried to separate humans from nature and worthy 'real' humans from unworthy sub-humanity, the more they created new hybrids were none were (noticed) before ....

Fort McMurray : WORSER forest fires 'start here'

First, a hat tip to decisively defeated former Premier Darrell Dexter of Nova Scotia, the person most credited with making the phrase "X start here" a rich resource for satirists of all stripes.

Now we all agree that forest fires did not start happening just because humanity decided, fairly recently, to burn up all of the world's coal, oil and gas as fast as they could.

But the human decision to go on burning all that fossil carbon even after being warned that it would lead to global warming and stronger winds did lead directly to the fact that today's forest fire seasons around the world start much earlier and end much later.

Impure + Manhattan : Oxymoron ?

Most of the world has always admired and even envied Manhattan and wished they could be among its residents, if only for a year or two.

Agreed, a significant minority of us has also always hated and loathed Manhattan and wished they could bomb and burn it to the ground.

Still, on balance, 'Manhattan' has long been seen as a highly positive word.

While 'Impure' has usually been seen as a very negative word.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Ecological Uniformitarianism leads to ecological einsatzgruppen

Its a rhetorical claim of 'absolute truth' that I never tire of repeating : Charles Lyell, not Charles Darwin, was the true intellectual father of Hitler and of Pure Modernity.

Monday, May 2, 2016

NATURE has never been WILD : Fred Pearce & the New Wild

Published last year by Boston's Beacon Press, Fred Pearce's eye-opening new book,  "The New Wild", has had a little controversy, but unfortunately, not nearly enough.

Conservationists, eugenicists, racists and ecologists (pardon the redundancy) should be raging, blood red in interview and post, over its message - but they're not.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Where does selling microbes, at bottom of tree of life, as 'only destructive', leave humans at bottom of HUMAN tree of life ?

First, turn of the century high school science teachers lecture school kids that bacteria and mold only destroy, and never sustain, life and so they must be all killed.

Then when they grow up, politicians quoting science insist that humans at the bottom of the human tree of life (Negroes, Jews, Slavs, etc) are also solely destructive and ---

---- and we all know what happened : Auschwitz and WWII ....

all Biology is syncretic symbiosis --- the rest is just stamp collecting

It has long been established that all life on earth lives in a state of involuntary global commensality.

That is, we all dine at a common table -- dining off each other's table scraps consisting of a few precious materials (water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, etc) biologically recycled through the world over and over.

But what is this "we" thing anyway - does it mean 'humans collectively' or does it not refer to the "we" of a single human body, that is in fact made up of trillions of cells from many widely differing species ?

And if we probe deeper, do we not find that even the "human" genome of the-surely-still-solely-human part of the human body is also a chimera, a syncretic assembly of genome bits from a variety of other species ?

Life is really very convoluted together : from dining together to dying together...

Methinks its time for a bit of an Evolutionary Reboot, Charlie ....

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Hitler's antipathy to a Manhattan he never visited stemmed from his pre-war memories of polyglot multi ethnic Vienna

Hitler's hatred for a Manhattan that he had never even visited is quite remarkable.

Even in the failing days of his Reich, his regime wasted much scarce time and resources on trying to create ever more fantastic new weapon delivery systems to bomb and burn Manhattan to the ground from many thousands of miles away.

The best explanation for all this was that for Hitler, this hatred, as was so often with Hitler, was both deeply personal and deeply private.

It all actually stemmed from all those down on his luck years, roughing it on the street, in a city far far away from the Hudson River : pre-war Vienna.

the children of modern minor aristocracy all have PhDs, but still can't ward off the untutored genius

In the old days, even when you became a hereditary aristocrat because you sort of 'earned' your great power and wealth by your sheer talent, drive and aggression, deep down you knew it was very unlikely your kids and grandkids were going exhibit all that drive.

In part because growing up wealthy and established tends to take the edge off of drive and aggression.

So in the past, for tens of thousands of years, you ensured your dumber and lazier kids and grands would share in your own achievements long after you were dead by investing in lands, lots of it.

steam trains, ships & border guards invented together

Let us try to capture the full blown sexual-political panic never far below the surface of your average middle class Victorian paterfamilias :
"The deeper that the miscegenating steam ship and train try to penetrate into our hitherto virgin territories around the globe, the faster we must have border guards and passports erected to parry their thrusts and keep those territories pure."
It might all be just a big coincidence that nationalism rhetoric became rampant at the very moment when easy international travel for the masses first became practical , but as the TV detective says, 'I don't believe in coincidences'....

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Pure Modernity's silos of specialization and speciation : Aryan & Jew, Political Science & Economics, Professional & Laity

Panic-stricken wealthy educated Victorian era humanity invented Pure Modernity (a counter-revolution against impure reality) with its rigidly separated silos of pure races, pure breeds, pure nations, pure species, pure food & water, pure professions and pure academic disciplines, all in the same day.

Nay, all in the same afternoon....

Manhattan was the place, '45 was the date : pure modernity becomes impure modernity

R.I.P. Pure Modernity : 1875 - 1965


In 1945, with the twin failures of Auschwitz to liquidate Manhattan and of chemists to best the slimy penicillium, Pure Modernity ascended from its apogee down down in an abrupt death dive, down to its nadir  in 1965.

We now live in a new era, an era of Impure Modernity.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

scientifically public versus scientifically popular

Despite many 'just so' stories to the contrary, an even half way determined scientist trying to change a current paradigm can always get scientifically published - even if only as one of the published abstracts of papers verbally delivered at a minor local meeting of a nationally important scientific society.

I am thinking specifically of a particular scientist from 1930s upstate NY and his paper "Virulence for mice of certain pneumococcus strains following induced specific type transformation".

This long forgotten and quietly rebellious scientist, Dr Albert H Harris of Slingerlands NY, at least got his views published.  IE, it was scientifically public, so I was at least able to find his paper's abstract online seventy five years later.

Darwinism fails to explain Aryan defeat in two wars

When you combine military prowess, scientific and industrial strength, national cohesiveness, demographic numbers and strategic location, it is clear, that in both world wars, all the world regarded the Germans as the single most fit 'race' on Earth.

So according to popular Darwinism's view of existence as being an eternal enlarged case of mortal man to man combat, with the best man always winning and the weaker man always dying, Germany was scientifically bound to win out.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Dawson knowlegable only about bacteria colonies : but this was a FEATURE, not a bug

Back in the bad old days, most scientists thought bacteria existed as most senior university tenured bacteriologists had willed them to exist : as a conveniently pure strain of free living planktons in an ocean of tasty lab medium.

Much lower ranking scientists also interested in bacteria frequently saw them mostly out in the 'real world' (say on our teeth or as pond scum) living in densely crowded mixed colonies.

Who was 'more' right ?

Bacteria with a body, in the human sense, no nucleus required

Today I want to consider the wider implications of the discovery of a bacteria strain that does not live, as many bacteria do, in a co-ordinated colony of many closely packed bacterial cells under specific conditions but then normally lives as a dispersed group of fully independent separate individuals.

Instead this particular strain of cyanobacteria (earlier known as blue-green algae) is an obligate multi-celled being, which means that it looks and acts rather like us humans  ---- at least for bacteria.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Stalin & Darwin agree : "Evolution in One Country"

Nice to see good old Charlie & Joe finally paired up.

Joe is famous for advocating socialism within a single country --- Charlie for advocating evolution only within a single species.

Horizontal socialism and horizontal evolution simply wasn't on.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Evolution by Inclusion : taking and receiving

In the world of HGT ( the horizontal gifting of genetic material between different strains or species) there is a big but frequently un-remarked difference between symbiogenesis and natural transformation versus conjugation and transduction.

In the first two instances, the receiving being voluntarily took up the foreign DNA itself, either by swallowing a living being whole or by gulping down some of the DNA from a dead or secreting foreign being.

In the latter two cases, an invader forces some foreign DNA upon the receiving being, a situation frequently called 'infectious heredity'.

Dawson's Evolution by Inclusion vs Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion

Neo-Darwinism aka Modernity claimed Evolution only happened by Exclusion.

"Pushing Air" : pushing my agenda

Yep, surely no surprise here : I have a personal agenda I am pushing.

And it is not just air.

In my view, no matter how useful, science that is merely 'published' is frequently ignored, and forever --- only when the new becomes 'popularly scientifically published' does it start doing things and changing things.

Friday, April 22, 2016

must see Danish movie, "Pushing Air" : when're you willing to ask anyone for help, everyone benefits ...

One Prob.

They haven't actually filmed it yet -- in fact they don't know that they are going to do so.

But they will.

That's because it is an uplifting true story from backward Copenhagen of 1952 with so many dramatic but true events in it, all just made for the cinema screen that even Hollywood couldn't dreamt them all up.

Microbes are doubly secret

Firstly, and by definition, microbes are unusually secret to us humans because they can't be seen by our naked eyes.

Bacteria best Humans in on/off Switches

There are many many reasons why microbes were the first,will be the last and are currently the most dominant life-form on Earth and throughout the entire Universe.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Seven - seven only - living bacteria cells discovered on Mars

Despite dozens of probes sent to Mars annually for the next forty years, no more bacteria was ever found.

How should mainstream science assess this discovery?

This is actually only my thought experiment, but the way I feel sure this news would be assessed by most scientists is that it definitely and triumphantly disproves that odious religious claim that life is unique to Earth and by extension, it disproves all religion as well.

12 photos of Martin Henry Dawson from the 5 decades of his life

From conception to premature death, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, 1896-1945, was on this earth for half a century and I have found a dozen or so photos of him (below this brief intro),
with at least one from each decade of his life.

He was a very serious and very studious man.

Very diffident, polite and modest in his dealings with his seniors (a man easily and perpetually under-estimated) but earnest and intense in public presentations and in private he had a dry biting wit and could always see the ironic humour in various situations.

Almost all the photos that I have found to date, from a wide array of social settings, reflect that that he seemed to have been inwardly serious from a very young age.

It may be that his facial appearance reenforced this part of his nature - compared to his parents and four older brothers, he was noticeably wider in the jawline than them, even as a child.

But his family did find one photo of him relaxed, laughing and holding a drink. And not surprising for a young boy from a very pious evangelical Presbyterian family who went away to the trenches of WWI, he even sometimes played poker and let the other players call him "Hank"!

His wive Marjorie was the near total opposite, a social charmer and so a good foil to Henry, usually able to get him to unbend and laugh.

Young Martin Henry Dawson in the early 1900s

McGill Resident 1920s Martin Henry Dawson

very sick Martin Henry Dawson, age 45, May 1942
Martin Henry Dawson McGill 1919
Yearbook Business Manager Martin Henry Dawson 1912

Martin Henry Dawson 1915  Cdn Medical Corps

1916 soldier Martin Henry Dawson
Martin Henry Dawson McGill Med grad 1923
1936 Passport Martin Henry Dawson
relaxed Martin Henry Dawson late 1930s
Blackstone portrait Martin Henry Dawson 1938
to attract Society patients 1938 Martin Henry Dawson


Modernity, R.I.P. 1945 : its delusions destroyed by human scientific "magical thinking" at the top and "microbial intelligence" at the bottom

Germany was long considered both the most scientific and the most cultured of all major human civilizations --- the very apogee of Modernity.

Proof positive, proclaimed Modernity's leading lights, that all the intelligence and civility in the Tree of Life was at the very top among the leading human nations --- and that all its stupidity and murderous intent was at the very bottom with the pathogenic microbes.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

How scientistst lick ass to prosper : Koch's Postulates (for help making microbes look stupid as your bosses need them to be)

Most of pre-Auschwitz "Mainstream Science" (not its technology - its technology was wonderful !) was Junk Science.

Modernist Mainstream Science, to put it in military terms, secured its place at the right hand of Civilization's throne by successfully mis-interpreting (at the strategic/big picture level) the new data it gathered up so accurately at the operational and tactical  level.

Rather like Hitler's military, it won every battle and lost every war.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

antivivisectionists among Modernity's earliest, loudest critics - supporters of microbial intelligence among its last, quietest ---- and most effective

Life-saving doctors killing and inflicting pain upon the weakest of sentient beings (animals) in the interests of "Science" began in the 1850s with Claude Bernard.

It thus well proceeded life-saving doctors doing the same to the weakest of humanity (the poor, weak and minorities) in the name of "Eugenics" beginning in the 1910s.

'Gene Pool' dates from after Auschwitz, says NGRAM VIEWER

Google's wonderful little Ngram Viewer lets you plot variations in the number of published references to a term over time.

Its results are not perfect but usually strongly suggestive.

It says it could find no references to the use of the term "gene pool" until the early 1950s (but does find scientist L C Dunn using it in a 1946 book).

This confirms my sense that the term was very rare before Auschwitz because the concept behind the term was viewed negatively until then.

How closed-minded is YOUR parachute ?

As Liverpool's Hugh Mosher reminds us (and the wartime 'natural or synthetic' penicillin battle between Henry Dawson and Howard Florey rather confirms) our minds are like parachutes.

They can only save lives when they are fully open - while a closed mind, like a WWII closed parachute, totally fails to save...

Monday, April 18, 2016

Dynamic racially "impure" Manhattan : Sterile racially "pure" Auschwitz

Hitler, along with much of the educated world at the time, felt that America was certain to go down the tubes because of its free and easy racial mixing, above all in Manhattan.

Hitler was convinced that once his murderous programs had made Germany fully Aryan and fully racially pure, it would soar even higher than it already had, in culture and in technology.

The results of WWII - and the seventy years since - hasn't confirmed those beliefs, far from it.

Aristocracy as the thermosetting plastic of social positions

The first person in any exalted aristocratic line got there by doing something notable, at least in the eyes of then currently powerful.

But those talented people's children and children's children needn't do something notable to retain that exalted position.

That after all is the whole point of any aristocracy : it is the outward physical expression of a secret mental belief in the sheer randomness of great talent and of the rare chance that a particular great talent will be in perfect sync with the wishes of the contemporary powerful.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Future Nobel for Soren Overballe-Petersen ?

Followers of this blog will know that Henry Dawson began pushing the importance of the fact that bacteria could take up loose bits of genetic material (now known to be DNA) from their environment and incorporate in their genome, way back in 1928.

Dr Overballe-Petersen claimed much the same thing in 2013, eighty five years later.

So why should the world even care ---- let alone give the man not just a medal, but the most valued medal around ?

Henry Dawson, Scientific 'Persister'

First, let me explain my little in-house joke.

You see, "persister" bacteria were first discovered by Gladys Hobby and others, while working as part of Henry Dawson's wartime "impure penicillin" team.

And so perhaps discovered by Dr Dawson as well. Though his name wasn't on the original paper, as he was away receiving major medical treatment when it was first publicly presented.

The concept of "persisters" is fairly well known in Science - but only among microbes, not among scientists themselves.

Intellectually, same sort of people deny the importance of HGT & various holocausts

While only a very, very, small minority still publicly deny "The Holocaust", a lot more people deny the connectedness and the importance of the many genocidal holocausts of the 19th and 20th century.

Just as many (usually other) people still deny the importance or frequency of HGT, Horizontal Gift Transfers of fragments of DNA from one species or strain of life to another species or strain of life.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Most rural kids 1890s probably saw motion pictures before they saw a photo in the local paper

To be precise, we know that in 1888 a some lucky factory employees audience in Leeds England saw several motion picture performances, well before they or anyone else had ever seen a single (halftone) photo in even the biggest national newspapers, books or magazines.

And this in what was the richest and most advanced civilization on earth.

You might expect still photos in books and newspaper to be easier to achieve than motion film but you would be quite wrong.

Modernity began with 1870s reaction to a Canadian-owned NYC newspaper half-tone

Traditional emphasis on Victorian Era globalization and modernization always focuses on speed - faster travel of things & beings having weight and faster communication of immaterial things : images & ideas.

I think this is totally wrong - it was the shock of the totally new, not merely the faster old, that marked this disruptive process of modernization - and led to the counter-reaction we know as Modernity.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Doctors asked to assist at suicides for same reason they're asked to assist at executions

Doctors are usually hired to use their scientific expertise to save lives but that fact hasn't made them any less popular to employ to salve the consciences of people who are about to kill - kill others or even themselves.

Doctor assisted suicides in Canada, doctor observed executions in America, or doctor conducted Aktion T4 and Holocaust murders in Germany ----- having a doctor about makes violent death seem almost like a medical procedure and eases consciences big time.

Look, if you want to kill yourself or others, just do it yourself  and man up and take full responsibility.

Don't drag in others to spread the blame about.

God isn't fooled....

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Modernity Faithful : Rex Murphy

Modernity is all about faith, not facts --- its about you what you want to think is true and not what is actually true.

Case in point, commentator Rex Murphy and seemingly everybody at Canada's CBC, that James Fenimore Cooper of news accuracy.

Popular Eugenics : Gr 8 Grammar

For an entire school year, I endured Nova Scotia's Grade Eight grammar circa 1964-1965, a subject taught at a level that wasn't at all like brain surgery or rocket science only because it was much much harder.

Much harder that is, than any other subject a thirteen year old student usually was expected to comprehend ---- or ever should have been expected to comprehend.

Since 1965 was the very last year of the Age of Modernity and of Exclusion, this grammar course was in fact the last throw of the era of popular eugenics.

modernization is mongrelization is unconscious involuntary syncretism

Modernity , I always insist, was the self-conscious (hence the capital "M") and panicky response of the global educated middle class to the insistent , insidious, unconscious, involuntary, syncretism and mongrelization of modernization (hence the small letter "m").

The faster the lingo of the Jewish-Negro-Italian crooners seduced its way inside their children's psyche via Tin Pan Alley sheet music and records (and later via the radio and the movies) the faster their parents passed Jim Crow segregation laws against Negroes within and against darkish Immigrants without.

The Whiteys claimed - at the time - that they feared a day when the dark, red and yellow races took over completely and nothing of the white culture would remain.

I personally doubt that any of them believed that, even back then.

What they feared more - because they saw it happening daily - was the increasing miscegenation of both their culture and of the culture of the foreign seeming Negroes & Immigrants into something new : a syncretization of all cultures.

As in laying down Negro rhythms and ostinatos over European harmony and instrumentation.

If this process happened fastest in big cities, the bigger the better, we needn't struggle to suggest why.

In an isolated Mid West small town with just one strong radio signal on the dial, that station played whatever the advertisers among the small town power elites wanted - the German-oriented classic music styles familiar from their parents' original North West European cultures.

But in big city Memphis, every child with access to the family radio when Ma and Pa was out, could twist the dial and pick up sounds from the local black station - by sheer accident - and then get hooked on its infectious vigour and sass.

The term 'modernization' refers to the technology of the new go-anywhere -and-everywhere pipelines of for-profit communication and transportation.

By contrast, the term 'mongrelization' refers to the two way content that filled that go anywhere pipeline.....








Monday, April 11, 2016

what Age of Exclusion excluded (mostly) was complexity and uncertainty...

Our post-1965 Age of Inclusion is learning to include uncertainty along with all the other minorities in its considerations - and this is a very good thing at a time when the Globe faces its first ever existential crisis brought on by the wilful hubris of sentient beings.

Hubris is what flourishes whenever uncertainty and complexity is deliberately excluded from conscious thought - as it did in the Age of Exclusion from 1875 to 1965.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Human Fragility : why most people (white & colored) can't accept that small weak microbes can be as intelligent as them

Oh yes, a big hat tip to Dr Robin DiAngelo who proposed the term "white fragility" to describe how few white people can address claims that 'we whites all benefit indirectly from systemic racism' without exhibiting extreme mental & emotional distress.

I feel some the same way as Dr DiAngelo, whenever I observe the reaction after I claim that Henry Dawson's scientific career was devoted to proving up the fact that life's simplest, smallest and weakest beings - the microbes - exhibit intelligent behavior.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

North American-style ethnic cleansing

North America hardly needed to go all the way to South African style overt apartheid, or East European murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns, to keep its unwanted ethnic minorities out of nice WASP upper middle class suburbs.

faith-based Age of Exclusion (1875-1965) vs current fact-based Age of Inclusion

During WWII, Allied governments and virtually all of their voters took it as an article of faith that when those governments passed new wartime laws banning any form of discrimination, that ipso facto all such discrimination was yesterday.

They didn't bother to check to see if frontline decision makers actually obeyed the new law.

Purity & Dirt always in a vertical hierarchy, not horizontal continuum

"Pure-ness", that rhetorical term much beloved by Scientism, is never in fact allowed to exist in the horizontal continuum that its definition implies.

Lateral pure-ness *


That is, seeing a former mixture now separated into all its various pluralistic diversities ; 'pure but equal' substances in a chemically inclusive democracy.

Friday, April 8, 2016

I was a child in the 196th decade, the Fifties years, from 1951 to 1960 - I became an adult in 1961

My childhood ended when I began reading grownup-oriented newspapers, magazines & books in early September 1961, just before my tenth birthday.

So my childhood was a Fifties childhood.

It is by far and away the decade I feel closest too.

I say so despite being a bona fide 'Youth in the Wild Sixties', because I always felt that the dramatic youth actions of the 1960s followed inevitably on from the unique times experienced by Fifties ankle-biters.

Note : because we count everything, including time , from 1 to 10 not from 0 to 9, there never was any "year 0" in any known calendar.

Still, despite this obvious fact, most people 'believe' the Fifties were from 1950 to 1959 ---- I go with the math guys and say it ran 1951-1960.

Suits me anyway - I was conceived in 1950, but only born in 1951....

Age of Exclusion 1875--1965 ; Age of Inclusion 1965 --???

The Classical & Romantic Ages at least hint accurately of what they are all about.

Not so the Ages of Modernity & Post Modernity.

Because the Romans no doubt thought of themselves as fully modern - as will humanoids a million years from now, if our species is still around by then.

I think it much better to tag each of these slices of history as "the Age of Exclusion" (culminating with Auschwitz's exclusionary fires of racial purity) followed by "the Age of Inclusion" (beginning with the American Civil Rights Movements' biggest success, 1965's inclusive Voters Rights Act).

Only time will tell, if these terms have any legs....

queen of today's science is Biology : non-man-made chemistry & physics

That Vannevar Bush wanted no biologists on his wartime OSRD team went unremarked at the time, then at the very apogee of Modernity.

After all what could mere non-human living beings ever teach us humans - Masters of the Universe all - about serious chemistry & physics ?

Seventy five years on, it seems apparently quite a lot.

Henry Dawson's 'Impurity Praising Manhattan' was never more than a sizeable minority of wartime Manhattanites

In 1940, most people in Manhattan, as in America - nay in the whole world - felt it best if they lived as much as possible in pure-as-possible exclusionary enclaves - working and playing and marrying their own 'kind', however that always moving target was currently defined.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Modernity faithful dismissed complex scientific discoveries : 'Reality simpler than it looks'

The scientism "faith" of Modernity rose in panicked reaction to the late 19th century's many scientific discoveries revealing unexpected complexities in Deep reality.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Between the wars 'Impure Manhattan' & involuntary inclusivity

The Era of High Modernity, while it really only lasted one lifespan (from 1875 to 1965), was uniquely notable as the period when virtually all of the most powerful people in the world (middle class, well educated urban dwellers of the biggest civilizations) held a decidedly dire Manichean take on Reality.

One of Modernity's leading lights, Baron Howard Florey, was fully typical in frankly preferring things to always be 'clearcut'.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

An Era doesn't die when a US President say so, but only when a humble janitor does so

Nobody, not even the historians and archivists of the US National Park Service know exactly when, by whom and or even why, the tiny plaque bearing Emma Lazarus's now famous poem "The New Colossus" about the Mother of Exiles, was itself moved out of internal exile in some dusty backwater of the Statue of Liberty to the pride of place at the front of the whole ball of wax.

Dawson: first with both 'in vitro' DNA & 'in vivo' Penicillin

Because 'in vitro' research (inside glass test tubes) and 'in vivo' research (inside the body) are considered the polar opposites of each other, it is the rare scientist indeed who scores a notable first in both fields.

So consider the fact that for billions of years DNA had worked its magic solely inside the body, until 1929 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside a glass test tube (in vitro) : dawning the age of direct genetic modification.

Or that for millions of years penicillin had worked its magic solely outside the human body, until 1940 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside the human body (in vivo) : dawning the age of life-saving systemic antibiotics.

Friday, April 1, 2016

rarity among Penicillin pioneers, Henry Dawson avoids the "S" word

I have never found a single instance when the first doctor to use penicillin to save a human life, Henry Dawson, ever said that 'further lifesaving with this wonder drug must first await the development of synthetic penicillin'.

Odd that, because that is what those other two penicillin pioneers, Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, always gave as their excuse for their relative clinical inaction with wartime penicillin.

Pecking Order Shocker !!! Lowly day clinic doctor launches Age of Antibiotics

All teaching hospitals display an informal but exceedingly powerful medical pecking order in terms of prestige and access to scarce resources.

At the very very bottom of the food chain are those day/outpatient clinics that serve patients who are both walking ambulatory and suffering from non-acute non-life threatening conditions.

Thursday, March 31, 2016

Why Oxford University, not Manhattan, to be capitol of Hitler's Anglo empire

Polyglot Manhattan, land of hundreds of different languages and cultures, was decidedly not Sir Howard Florey's cup of tea --- nor Hitler's either.

Both much preferred the purer refinement of Oxford University's environs.

But impure natural penicillin - wartime's penicillin - and still (75 years on) the base of almost all our life-saving antibiotics could never have been manufactured at Oxford or in Berlin.

Both were far too obsessed with purity racial and chemical --- both would still be chasing the chimera of pure synthetic penicillin.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Penicillin as impure , as full of life, as Manhattan itself

It is almost too fitting, almost too paint-by-numbers perfect (and almost too Alanis Morissette ironic) that wartime's life-saving 'impure' natural penicillin came about through the efforts of Dr Henry Dawson in 'impure' polyglot concrete Manhattan, while the failure to produce a 'pure' synthetic penicillin was led by his chief rival Sir Howard Florey from the very refined greenery of Oxford University.

But if, as is frequently claimed, Hitler refused to allow the bombing of Oxford City's strategic Crowley motorworks out of fear it might damage Hitler's dream of Oxford University becoming the capital of Aryan pure Britain, it begins to make sense ....

Impure Manhattan : Pure Auschwitz

The German refiners' furnaces at Auschwitz ,Treblinka, Chelmno and at dozens of other death camps and concentration camps worked day and night, trying to burn off all the dross within the newly enlargened Third Reich, hoping to soon see only pure Aryan gold and silver.

I use terms from the Bible deliberately, because the Nazi ideas were hardly new or unique only to them - far from it.

Monday, March 28, 2016

Modernity : 'up from primeval nano inertness to contemporary macro dynamism'

What a 'rags to riches story' the presiding elites of the Modern Era could - and did - weave about themselves !

Starting out as mere inert atoms and inert microbes and inert African pygmies, they had risen steadily up through the ranks of material life, on sheer talent alone, just as the prophet Charles Darwin had foretold.

Now they were all there at the top : all upper middle class professionally educated urban WASP males, dynamic strivers decisively and creatively running the show in the biggest most powerful most advanced civilizations on Earth.

Hey, in all history, in all the Universe : masters of all they oversee.

Modernity's Arrow of Progress

Modernity's guiding principle (the claim that all reality was predestined to be organized around an ever-upwardly striving linear Arrow of Progress) was simple to lay out.

Simple enough in fact to be laid out on a single simple graph, one showing a 45 degree angled line gently inevitably steadily rising over a piece of Cartesian coordinates gridpaper, of the sort familiar to all of us with some High School math.

It was derived from Charles Darwin's theory that genetically, all Life emerged vertically, with absolutely no possible horizontal genetic linkages.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Impure Manhattan as the antidote to Auschwitz's pure evil

Against the great sin of exclusion (in the name of seeking ever greater human purity and perfection) is the even greater virtue of inclusion.

Never more so than now, when the Earth and the human race face an environmental and existential crisis.

We need the help and the ideas of ALL (the 99 % plus 1) to get us through this crisis -- we can't let the fate of the world rest solely upon the unlimited wealth (but strictly limited brainpower) of just the world's 1%.

Antidote to Auschwitz : Manhattan 'impure'

Modernity's parents & grandparents could have dismissed Auschwitz as simply the work of a few misguided modernist zealots.

In fact, that is what they did do.

But their own kids weren't buying it.


After a war when so much killing was done in the name of Modernity's quest for ever greater human purity and ever greater human perfection, the little ankle biters couldn't help but notice that their teachers and parents had inadvertently offered up a more attractive alternative vision.

It was developed by Manhattan's Dr Dawson, during the war itself.

As out teachers loved to remind us :

"The great good that so many of you kiddies are alive and healthy at all is down to the wonder-working antibiotics, made by dirty slimy no account nothings found in some third rate jungle mud."

It was no contest which one  the six year old me preferred : impure-produced health & happiness over pure evil, any day ...

Friday, March 25, 2016

Dawson's nano-complexity vs Modernity's nano-simplicity

What truly makes one a Post-modernist and not a modernist is a strong acceptance that nanotechnology-sized objects (alive or not) can be extraordinarily complex, despite their very small size in relationship to the largest modern human civilizations.

As in 'sometimes able to do things that objects the size of humans (a billion times bigger) just can not do'.

Modernists, by contrast, felt that large objects just had to be extraordinarily complex and that all smaller objects in the hierarchy of size, be they small Australian Bushman tribes or atoms, just had to be simple.

Simple and thus easy to understand fully, rearrange totally and rigidly control.

Now today's nanotechnology, by definition, is the study of the different behavior exhibited in objects of a size where at least one dimension is 100 nanometres or less.

A nanometre is one billionth of a metre, with, for example, the DNA molecule being at about 2 namometres in width.

Nano-sized objects and nanotechnology matter because while quantum forces affect all size of objects, they don't become dominant until objects get down to that 100 nanometre range in size.

The smallest species of bacteria, when shrunken by starvation, are about that size in width and depth and so are strongly affected by quantum forces.

One can say truthfully, as I often do, that all of Dr Henry Dawson's pioneering work on bacteria between 1925 to 1945 involved the study of 'microbial intelligence' but that is still rather feeble a way to describe the uncomfortable force of his research upon the mind of Modernity Man.

For his research was really the study of microbial nano-complexity cum intelligence.

For if an object only a billionth the size of modern civilized man could display that much intelligence as Dawson's research revealed (HGT, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, Biofilm communities,Penicillium-produced Penicillin), what did that say about the intelligence levels of much larger humans , even if they weren't European, male, middle class, Protestant, educated and living in the biggest civilized nations ?

Modernists shuttered to think ...

Nothing spurs public interest like govt taking over civilian supplies : see Nylons & Penicillin

The mid July 1943 takeover by the US government of the distribution of penicillin, to give most of it to the military, resulted in intense sudden public interest (aka moral panic) in a hitherto little known and even lesser valued medicine.

No one then - or now - bothered to note that the American public, post July 1943, was actually receiving far more, not less, actual penicillin after the government takeover.

That because receiving 'only 20%' of an ever increasing something is always preferable to receiving 100% of virtually nothing.

But we should have seen it coming --- because after the commercial introduction of nylon stockings in May 1940, sudden war rumours that the government was 'taking all of it for parachutes' decisively feed a public panic to get as many of the expensive nylon stockings as they could before they were totally off the market.

Which did happen eventually, but not till two years later.

But media and academics - then and now - delighted in 'Printing the Legend' ---- rather than give us the true facts....

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Science for '50s kids : little 'microbe made' life-savers and manmade 'Big Science' life-takers

Science for kids in elementary school at anytime is - well - pretty elementary.

My science memories as an elementary student (September 1956 - June 1963) were probably as much derived from my home life as from my teachers.
On one hand, my mother talked a great deal of the marvel that it was the little slimy bugs in the jungle soils that gave us all the antibiotics that saved the lives of sick little kids.

I definitely remembering picking up the symmetry of the two 'littles' even if my mom hadn't intended it so deliberately.

The other science I remember picking up so readily was perhaps closer to engineering than to hard science.

The TV news and newspaper pictures I got at home only reinforced what I saw in the school geography textbook pictures - all about of the exciting massive civil engineering projects of canal Seaways and Kitimat townsites.

They fed into more excited talk about all the massive new rocket and airplane projects planned for the 1950s.

The biggest of manmade Big Science in the 1950s of course was atomic power and atomic bombs ---- where cheery news stories about nuclear powered submarines and nuclear electricity 'too cheap to meter' was balanced by Sci Fi TV and films worrying about nuclear and other scientific holocausts destroying all the world.

Starting in 1962, I definitely felt a pronounced change in the atmosphere regarding the value of progress and science : the Thalidomide disaster and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring arrived together with particular force in my home, though still invisible in my school work.

The reason I believe we boomer kids questioned our parents' faith in science and progress well before they did is because we little kids missed the mass of subtle details - the mixed good and the bad - of real life science and only got two widely contrasting extreme highlights : little bug 'kid lifesavers' versus Big People 'kid killers'....

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Synthesis not "more important than Hitler" : Adolf was ALL about synthesis

In 1942, in the worst days of WWII, William Haynes, an American economist and the world's leading expert on the history of plastics, dared to claim that synthesis would be seen as far more important than Hitler or Stalin ----- at least to our future great-grandchildren !

But Haynes was terribly wrong in thinking that then current global total war was somehow totally separated from the ongoing human efforts to synthesize and replace everything flawed in Nature and in Human Nature.

That was all that Hitler and the Nazi ideology was actually about - and one could claim it was much the same with Communism and Fascism.

The liberal capitalist nations followed at a distance in terms of the violence they were willing to commit to forcing the change --- but leading the way intellectually.

Eugenic science, after all, can be best be explained in terms common to the scientific world of plastic research - thermosetting plastic being the goal of the utopian eugenists....

Monday, March 21, 2016

OSRD synthesizes up a simulacra of penicillin success

Why settle for producing actual - lifesaving - wartime penicillin when you can offer up to generations of gullible academics and journalists the simulacra of faked wartime penicillin success instead ?

The OSRD and Vannevar Bush were never better alchemists than when it came to using lots of taxpayers' money and their control over secret files to cook up a plausible cover story for their failure to synthesize penicillin and their years of bitter opposition to the natural production of penicillin.

Losers, with money, to paraphrase Jacque Parizeau, write history...