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...



Touting microbial intelligence -- against a hegemony that required them to be stupid

Henry Dawson was a very early (1920s -1940s) pioneer in demonstrating - and then promoting - the claim of microbial intelligence against a fearful Modernity hegemony dependent on disbelieving all such claims.

HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicry, biofilm communities, bacterial 'persisters', 'wall-less' bacteria : Dawson was frequently the first - or among the very first - to investigate these forms of microbial intelligence.

Yawn, right ?

These are all still cutting areas of biological research today but hardly pose a existential threat to the intellectual hegemony of today.

But imagine yourself as a scientist like Dawson, inside the pre-war white male protestant-oriented european-origin professional middle class culture, a group that had clawed itself into positions of wealth and power on top of what they saw as the hierarchy of life.

Progress was a smooth unbroken ever upward path from ancient tiny stupid microbes at the bottom to the bigger white european-originated civilizations of today.

No wonder that this group half consciously feared 'inside agitator' Dawson and his claims that in some areas , the microbes supposedly at the very bottom of that hierarchy, were actually far superior to the white european professional males supposed to be at the very top.

For example, his belief that the penicillium could make penicillin far better than even hundreds of the best human chemists could ( sometime he proved up during WWII and remains true to this very day.)

Now microbes, intelligent or not, were likely to be trying to get university tenure --- but their kissing cousins at the bottom of the modernity hierarchy of worthiness : the darker races, women, gays, the handicapped, etc might start - and that would never do.

Intellectually, Dawson's claims were a far graver intellectual threat to the elites of WWII's world than anything Hitler or Stalin could dream up....

Sunday, March 20, 2016

Bad People : German Military and German Nazis

From the late 1860s until sometime in the late 1960s, the general German military culture was excessively fearful -- and extremely wicked as a result.

It was far far too willing to see civilian snipers behind every glint of light reflecting off a farm pond and far far too willing to shoot masses of civilian hostages in a panicky response.

Only when German baby boomers finally rose to command posts in the postwar German military did this terrible period finally end.

We saw this sort of behavior in France in the 1870s, in South West Africa in the 1900s and in Belgium during WWI ---- long long before the Nazis took power.

Plenty of the crimes that the German military committed during WWII hardly need to be laid at the feet of the Nazis alone.

One could of course be a Nazi and a military man --- but it wasn't necessary to be so to be evil during the war --- plenty of non-Nazi military men and non-military Nazis demonstrated this time and again.

Too many books & movies about non-Nazi German violence


I argue that from 1945 and until the1980s, most in the world focused on the plentiful examples of non-Nazi type violence rather than Nazi-specific violence.

I mean focusing on the shooting of civilian hostages, firing up churches crammed with civilians in a village allegedly harbouring guerrillas in times of combat stress, together with all the concentration camp dead  - dead socialists, trade unionists and political opponents.

While all armies of the world have been guilty of such extreme behavior on occasion, it is generally agreed that it was nowhere as casually practised as in the German military culture of the 1860s-1940s (the Japanese 1930-1945 aside).

Every other army felt it had never act as the Germans did against tiny Belgium, only a few days into the war.

Other nations' outrages against civilians have usually come months and years into fighting stressful wars against guerillas, staring at invisible death lurking in the shadows.

We were comfortable raging on about German and Japanese behavior of this sort then because our own conscience is pretty clear.

Only very slowly did we come to accept that the Nazis had layered a whole new type of murderous violence over the traditional German military brutality.

And this one was based on a scientific ideology that we in America and Britain invented and put into practise and only then imported into Germany and Japan.

Modernity is Eugenics is an obsession with purity and certainty


It was Modernity (or Eugenics - I do not seen one iota of difference) that we had developed as an unconscious response to the inconvenient scientific truths that the un-coordinated forces of modernization kept throwing up.

The Nazis had killed tens of millions of people for eugenic reasons - believing that these people were genetically inferior and an impure threat to the pure Master Race.

Jews of course, but also communists, gays, Gypsies, Negroes, alcoholics, the mentally & physically challenged, the work shy and the habitually petty criminal.

Killed not because they were political opponents or 'criminals' but purely because they were seen as infectious germs or fungi of impurity and thus potential weakeners of the Aryan bloodline.

Many in the rest of the world had talked of their states killing these sort of people but it had remained only talk - though doctors and nurses certainly killed many, off the books.

But strict laws against these types of allegedly non-worthy people had certainly in put into practise in the West - ever increasing until about 1943 during the war years, not falling away after the 1920s, as postwar academic apologists for western eugenics frequently claim.

Many such existing practises continued right into the 1980s, even if no new laws were passed after 1943.

Modernity the science was all about purity concerns - be it in food and medicine in household and personal cleanliness - as well as in race and blood.

And we need to start admitting this awkward fact...

Manhattan Crude cures Pure Hate

What could possibly make ordinary Germans murder Jewish babies in cold blood  ?

Only a truly obsessive fear that even a single surviving Jewish baby would irretrievably pollute the purity of the the entire Aryan Master Race.

Modernity Science was the Science of Purity


A hatred that seems well beyond normal rational belief today but was inspired back then by a scientifically semi-respectable belief that if even a single drop of Jewish blood (the 'fungal growth' as Hitler called the Jews) was injected into the blood of the white race, it would render it all permanently impure.

Gresham's Law transmuted into 'blood talk' : 'bad blood inevitably drives out good blood'.

In America, and elsewhere in the world, it led to widespread and harsh miscegenation laws and the infamous 'one drop' rule : in Germany it led to the Holocaust.

Purity obsessed fear and hatred : literally 'pure hate'.

Chemistry's Gordon Gekko bested by Emily Lazarus


But now about its cure :

Natural penicillin, produced by the slimy little stupid little fungus, is still  (eighty eight years after the first attempts to synthesize it) the only base for almost all of our lifesaving antibiotics.

The concentrated and well funded efforts of the smartest humans in the Universe have totally failed to best the chemical work of these tiny weak stupid lifeforms.

Note well that impure natural penicillin (the penicillin of wartime) is basically the pee and poop of fungal growths and to work must be injected into the bloodstream to work its miracles.

This alone would have given the eugenically minded Allies and Axis plenty of 'one drop' nightmares.

But more importantly, the humiliating failure to synthesizing man-made penicillin spelt the death of a belief in the an German Master Race more certainly than anything else did .

Even - I argue - than the world's reluctant acceptance that the Holocaust happened when and just like Polish Jewish had always claimed it did.

As a schoolchild in the 1950s, I heard all about antibiotics being made by tiny stupid microbes not big small human chemists and I heard nothing at all about the Holocaust.

Check your own school day memories, if you are old enough, to confirm my memories - or consult the work of the many historians researching the postwar reception of the story of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was not big news until the 1980s.

Only then, when the guilt-free 'born after 1940' adult baby Boomers were finally in charge : the new ones now heading up TV news units, the new school administrators and the new newspaper/book publishing editors .

Now finally, the world could talk freely about the Holocaust (and the Boomers' parents & grandparents' collective failure to stop it.)

I claim Penicillin trumped the Holocaust because the true crowning glory of the White Aryan Master Race, back in the years before 1945, was that they were widely considered to be the world's best chemists.

They were going to totally replace Mother Nature and lead us into a wonderous Synthetic Autarky : the famous 'meal in a pill' etc.

(Best in the world : hey why stop there ? They were thought the best chemists in the whole wide Universe.)

They were the Gordon Gekkos of the chemical universe.

Re-assessing the Holocaust's impact on birth of Post-Modernity


Until Manhattan Crude.

This Emily Lazarus styled chemistry approach - created by the tired hungry huddled refuse of the biology world - destroyed the Aryans' & Modernity's whole basis of  belief.

The belief that the world was sorted into two and only two groups, the new big smart and the small ancient stupid.

That in turn led to a conviction that pure man-made synthetic penicillin had to inevitably best the offerings of the tiny stupid little fungal growths lifeforms that the Aryan chemists considered,  like the Jewish 'fungal growths', as 'life unworthy of life'.

The stupid doing what the smartest couldn't upended that comfortable belief system --- at least among the very young, who had no skins in the earlier game.

In time the young moved their suspicions into action - the mid 1965s rejection among many young of scientific racism and modernity science in general : cue the resulting battles for greater rights for blacks, jews, gays, women, children - on and on.....

Saturday, March 19, 2016

crude hope against a PURITY-driven holocaust of death

'Crude Penicillin', not to put too fine a point on it, is basically fungus slime poop & pee.

In addition, it, like all early penicillins, must be injected into the human blood stream and can not swallowed as a pill.

That it was history's best and safest lifesaver and was potentially readily available at the start of the war still did not prevent the world's doctors and patients from rejecting it en masse before late 1943.

They'd rather die first.

the dreaded Fungal Growths


'Better Dead than Slimed' : the human blood stream was the fount of humanity and should never be polluted, least of all by the awful fungal slime.

So said H.P. Lovecraft, A. Hitler and a whole bunch of others.

Recall that WWII was a war that saw America forbid the pooling black and white Red Cross blood out of widespread fears that even 'one drop' of black blood would pollute the white race.

That was also wider reluctance throughout the Allied world to take advantage of their superior demographic numbers to quickly defeat the Axis, if that meant granting members of the 'darkie' races a heroic combat role in defeating Hitler et al.

Because then the pure white races would lose caste against the dirty darker races.

Overseas, Germany and Japan murdered people for 'sharing bodily fluids' with peoples of inferior races, fearing race pollution as America with sharing blood.

The Axis also of course murdered tens of millions of people - entire 'races' - for being 'impure' inferiors, also out of fear they might pollute the purity of the master races.

mainstream Modernity science must share the blame


Scientists were no better --- above and beyond their private fears about miscegenation and racial impurity, declining founder stocks etc - they simply couldn't accept, as Modernity scientists, that the small primitive ancient microbes could possible produce a miracle lifesaver when the world's smartest whitest European male chemists could not.

The big new complex human civilizations just had to be shown to be superior to these dumb little 'darkies' of the biology world by synthesizing a man-made penicillin, or once again the white races would lose caste, in the eyes of the human 'inferior' races, if not in the absent eyes of the microbes.


enter Dr Dawson


Dr Dawson, who ran a arthritis day clinic, (in hospital-speak, the bottom of the medical pecking order)  had never shown any research interest in SBE (sub-bacterial endocarditis) a disease usually preserved for cardio departments.

Nor had he ever shown any research interest in bringing forth new medicines (broadly defined as being either biologicals like vaccines or chemical like sulfa pills).

His lab area of interest and research speciality was in studying all the unexpectedly sophisticated ways that non-virulent commensal bacteria had to survive the best attacks the human body could mount against them.

In the years before WWII and for a long time afterwards, his interest was viewed as rather like that of a white man 'going native' --- medical bacteriologists were supposed to be narrowly focussed on simply killing virulent bacteria and ignoring their non-virulent 'carrier' cousins.

Dawson's clinical interest, outside the lab, was in ensuring that chronic ill poor people, patients also at the bottom of the traditional teaching hospital pecking order, got the research effort that their numbers and suffered should justify.

He was part of a broad 1930s movement called Social Medicine that simply meant a belief in directing life-saving medical resources to all very sick people, regardless of whether or not they could pay for all of it.

So already we can see that Dawson had an strong - and atypical - interest in defending the interests of two underdogs.

In the Fall of 1940, Dawson returned to his teaching hospital, the world famous Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre, to discover that the conservative majority of the medical community were using the excuse of preparing American medicine for war (after the unexpected Fall of France that summer), so called War Medicine , to roll back Social Medicine's advances achieved in the heady days of the New Deal.

Eugenics, disguised as 'War medicine'


In reality it was Eugenics, positive and negative, pure and simple.

War medicine was all about using the guise of war necessity to devote more scarce medical resources to the top (1A in the Draft) genetic material in the nations : positive eugenics .

Rolling back Social Medicine was negative eugenics - devoting less scarce medical resources to diseases mainly striking the worst genetic material in the nation (read : minorities & immigrants). less for the 4F diseases of 4F people.

SBE mainly hit the children of inner city minorities and immigrants, 4F inferior stock in eugenically minded people's eyes - so it was ruled not a military priority disease and SBE patients died as a result, denied the penicillin that Dawson had proved was the only cure for their hitherto invariable fatal disease.

By contrast, Polio hit the children of the white middle class suburbs mostly, and since these were de facto 1A type genetic stock, research on this disease actually increased a dozen times over during the war.

Now young people who already had SBE or Polio weren't ever going to be drafted or even sent to do hard labour in war plants. So neither disease was a 'military priority' disease, unlike something like typhus or rheumatic fever - traditionally potentially deadly epidemic diseases under military camp conditions.

But why then was one disease denied the best treatment during the war and another given ever more research dollars during that same war, except through eugenic thinking that was really based on viewing the world as either being of worthy ethnic groups and classes or being of unworthy ethnic groups and classes ?

Wasn't that the very thing that the Allied accused their Axis opponents of promoting ?

Dawson certainly thought so and in his quiet diffident but firm way, he determined to put not one but two shots against the Allies' bow.

October 16th 1940


On October 16th 1940, his bosses would be away from ever looking over his clinical shoulder.

That day was registration day for America's first ever peacetime draft registration - a process we still have with us, by the way.

The entire university complex was as closed as it could ever be, to ensure the world saw that Columbia's students and professors were 110% patriotic and all registered eagerly.

Dawson's team was either too old or too female, so didn't have to register.

Instead Dawson opened our current Age of Antibiotics, by injecting life-saving crude (highly impure) penicillin that the humble little fungus had produced and his tiny team had lightly concentrated, into the bloodstream of two SBE patients - a black and a jewish youth.

A 4F level medicine made by 4F microbe chemists and a few 4F amateurs, injected into two 4F patients ---- on a day otherwise all about America's 1A youth.

"Take that !"

Unworthy medicine made by unworthy microbes for unworthy - and indeed for all - patients : the first shall be last and the last first indeed.

it would take four years, but in the end, the Allies blinked, changed tack and took up the dying Dr Dawson's moral stance ....

Friday, March 18, 2016

Manhattan Crude : Hope for All

Almost a century later, it is beginning to be possible to plausibly claim that 20th century scientific communism, democratic socialism, liberal capitalism and Nazi-fascism were all but variants of one overarching hegemonic ideology among the global educated middle class : Modernity (1875-1965).

Even more amazing was the fact that the hugely self conscious political ideology of Modernity was itself an unconscious reaction against the unexpected consequences unleashed by the inchoate activities of Modernization, itself set into motion (and loosely overseen) by these same global educated middle classes.

Modernization was not just a process of global humanity truly connecting up with itself via new technologies of transportation and communication (fast safe reliable steamships, photography, cheap fast postal service, ship refrigeration and the telegraph are among the technologies always cited.)

Modernization also began demonstrating, in orthodox scientific terms, that all of Life was connected (global commensality) and that indeed Life and all Reality were not just connected but well and truly interconnected and thoroughly co-mingled.

Life and Reality was a Net and a Continuum not something easily divided into various mutually exclusive binary categories.

In the emerging hubris of that global educated middle class, there was an impossibly intellectually wide gulf between the small, weak, simple & ancient microbes at the left hand bottom of the Arrow of Progress and the big, strong, complex and new human European-oriented civilizations at the upper right of that Arrow.

Now their own much beloved Modernization was threatening that self-flattering hubris.

Modernity's emerging obsession with dividing everything into binary opposites and clear divisions (pure and crude, smart and stupid, worthy and unworthy, Man-made science and Mother Nature) was the ever more strident response to this threat from modernization.

WWII was all about 'purity' even within the surface issues : for Hitler Mussolini and Tojo wanted not to just create vast empires.

They also wanted with a clear gulf between their worthy & pure imperial races and the unworthy & crude subject races.

Twenty million Chinese dead, twenty five million Slavic dead and six million Jewish dead revealed what it meant to be viewed as an 'unworthy' subject race.

The British educated middle class, together with those of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Russia and to some extend America, were equally determined during WWII to hold onto all of their subject races within their own imperial empires, not just during the war but afterwards as well.

Hitler's biggest break was the reluctance of his demographically vastly superior opponents in western Europe to bring their subject races vast manpower into play to defeat the Germans.

Allowing their 'darkies' to take the lead role in defeating a nation of fellow white North Western Europeans, they feared, would inevitably lead to de-colonization and frankly Churchill et al would rather risk losing to Hitler than to win with Gandhi.

Just as importantly, the scientist-run blood collection services of all the Allies were just as reluctant to let donated 'darkie' blood be co-mingled with those of the 'white races'.

This was because WWII was also the height of the influence of America's 'one drop rule' laws : the legal ruling that any trace, no matter how remote, of past black, yellow, red or brown ancestry meant that you were black.

Purity and eugenic concerns actually peaked during WWII (in the Axis and the Allied nations) and the post-war academic claim that these concerns started declining in the late 1920s is - to put it impolitely - a Big Lie, designed to protect the guilty among these academics' intellectual forbearers.

HP Lovecraft and Hitler were only two among many who reserved their greatest hatred and fear against the creation of blood impurity by the slimy slippery fungus.

Since crude penicillin is basically fungus poop and pee, is it any wonder that the Allies would rather be killed by the Hitlers and Tojos of the bacteria world than be saved by these fungal darkies of the penicillium world ?

I believe that Dr Henry Dawson, who had previously never displayed or published any evidence of an interest in either SBE patients or in fungus, deliberately choose to employ the 4F 'crude' penicillin to try to save the lives of two 4F minority youths suffering from invariably fatal SBE  on October 16th 1940, the very day set aside to register the 1A among America's youth.

That October, medical conservatives were seizing upon war preparations as an excuse to set aside the much hated effort to promote 'social medicine' for the poor and minorities --- so, for example, during the war SBE youths were to die in benign neglect, denied life-saving penicillin, because the disease was not considered a 'war medicine' priority.

The medical establishment wanted pure man-made penicillin and they wanted it - during the war years - to be preserved for pure 1A troops.

Dawson rightly felt this was no different than what Hitler practised and so deliberately enrolled the unworthy 4F penicillium slime to try save the unworthy 4F SBEs, hoping I believe, to produce a strident reaction from the other side that would lead to a thorough discussion about moral values with the Allied medical and scientific world.

His Manhattan Crude penicillin, made by nearby Pfizer, did indeed save the world from epidemics in the postwar hunger and chaos : antibiotic hope for all.

But more than that, the fact that Dawson's tiny simple crude slime proved a better group of chemists that the Allies' best chemists (who failed then and now to produce any commercial man-made pure synthetic penicillin)
offered the children of the postwar world and unsettling window into a view of the world than that imagined by their Modernity-raised parents and teachers....

Thursday, March 17, 2016

the UNSECRET Manhattan Project

For years, I have been referencing the sub-title to dying Dr Henry Dawson's successful wartime Manhattan-based effort to provide natural penicillin to all as "The other Manhattan Project."

But that leaves it sounding exactly like another Atomic Bomb effort, only worse - perhaps involving chemicals or germs - and only a minority of readers would pursue such a title any further.

I kept that sub-title because I couldn't think of a better (accurate and expressible in one word) adjective, until now.

Bush's exclusive A-Bomb vs Dawson's inclusive penicillin


If the atomic Manhattan Project was notoriously all about secrecy and exclusivity, Dawson's effort was all about inclusivity and publicity : Dawson's team ceaselessly urging others to try DIY natural penicillin production, to quickly produce cheap abundant wartime Penicillin-for-All.

So something like "The inclusive Manhattan Project" was obviously the better sub-title.

But it was one I had always rejected , despite its succinct accuracy, because it sounded too academic and too PC for about half of my potential audience.

But today I suddenly thought, just in passing, about Dawson's effort being the "unsecret" alternative to the very secret atomic Manhattan Project.

Then it struck me - it might make the perfect subtitle : accurate, succinct, and playing off the universal recognition that the atomic Manhattan project was perhaps the best known secret effort in history.

(I am aware that the Ultra project was kept totally secret for far longer but the Atomic Bomb is much better known in the world for its excessive secrecy.

It revealed a trans-continental ability to enforce secrecy upon an workforce of hundreds of thousands number of participants, a successful scaling up of traditional high tech firms' internal efforts to deny most employees overall knowledge of the firm's entire industrial process by a system of the compartmentalization of knowledge.

With 'compartmentalization', individuals would only be given enough knowledge to manage their tiny cog in the massive overall wheel.)

Dawson by contrast strived constantly to reveal all his homemade/DIY penicillin successes and failures to other agape-motivated 'amateurs' throughout the entire medical and scientific world.

This despite a constant Allied effort to unofficially censor all penicillin efforts, despite pious claims to the contrary.

Most of the success of wartime penicillin and postwar beta lactam (penicillin-based) antibiotics can be laid at the feet of amateur scientists who the official penicillin commercial-scientific establishment coldly rejected.

Amateur penicillin scientists, such as Demerec and Hollander, who suggested mutating natural penicillin strains to find strains capable of producing far more raw penicillin from the same expenditure of labour and expense.

Today, following up on their inspired ( and rejected !) suggestion, we routinely produce 100,000 times as much natural penicillin from the same amount of effort and expense as we did in 1940 !

Dawson and people like Demerec and Hollander were inclusive in both senses : seeking help from all and hoping to give the results to all.

And unsecrecy was key to their efforts...

Monday, March 14, 2016

Help from All : crowd-solving wartime penicillin

Vannevar Bush's wartime atomic Manhattan Project was among the most secret projects of all time yet Henry Dawson's wartime penicillin Manhattan Project was among the most public : crowd-solving at its very best.

Because with human-created global warming we face a crisis even bigger than WWII, we need to ask which wartime Manhattan Project offers the 21st century the best possible solution : embracing secrecy and the advice of a small elite of experts or global openness and the welcoming the wisdom of crowds ?

camel & needle easier than powerful accepting charity from the powerless

The conscience-lite version of the difficult concept of Agape is for us well-off people to give (tax-deductible) charity to distant 'poor' people we don't really like.

So most of find the difficult claims of Agape something we can reduce to manageable size.

Far harder to accept (and far more important than any version of Agape) is Humility --- accepting others as equals to our own modest talents.

Let us discuss humility as a version of 'charity'.

That means an incredibly difficult willingness, among us who are well-off and power-filled, to accept the 'charity' of help and assistance from people who are relatively poor and relatively powerless --- powerless people who might be filled with new and unexpected takes on dealing with life-threatening problems too difficult for us to solve on our own.

Accepting the poor and powerless as equals in problem solving makes it much more difficult to dismiss their right to share in society's wealth and power as well.

This is why even when nations are in life and death struggles of a total war, their existing elites show an incredible reluctance to allow powerless members of their societies to share in the nation-saving activity of  frontline combat roles.

After the war, they know that these minority group combat veterans will remind the 'stay at home/well off' (the two terms are often connected) that they saved their bacon in their nation's greatest hour of need and so deserve a share of their nation's power and wealth.

Modernity's professional/expert/priestly caste elites (medical scientists for example) are among those who feel most threatened by offers of help from amateurs when those experts face an important problem they can't quickly solve.

Here the twin problems solved by the 'amateur' Dr Dawson come to mind : curing incurable SBE and finding the way around wartime science's inability to synthesis life-saving penicillin.

This is because Modernity sold the rest of us two related bills of goods : all problems are simple enough to solve but all problems are also too complex for amateurs to solve.

Modernity meant by this that all reality was made up of 'problems' that were far too complex for amateurs to solve but that were also simple to solve, given enough time, when considered by well-funded, well-paid experts who are shown their due deference.

Solutions dreamed up by untutored geniuses and amateurs threaten their income and status.

Dawson's clarion call of seeking 'Help from All' totally threatened their 'Help only from Experts' .....

Sunday, March 13, 2016

for powerful, offering charity to powerless far easier than ACCEPTING help from them

The powerful are a tight-fisted lot but they would far rather give charity to all than accept help from anyone


I wish to argue that two seemingly opposed notions (the powerful offering charity to the powerless and the powerful murdering the powerless) are actually very closely related.

Charity should always be, but rarely is, offered horizontally to equals : equal fellow human beings. Too often though, charity is only offered downwards to unequals (and always with the half conscious intent to remind everyone who is on top and who is on the bottom).

And it is always relatively easy to let unequals (life unworthy of a full life) die by neglect ---- or even to go out and directly murder them.

But when the 'powerful' (note well the scare quotes) accept help from the 'powerless', they are tacitly admitting that they both equally relatively powerless before the problem at hand, which is why they are sharing possible solutions in the first place.

And equals find it harder to murder each other.

This is just another way to restate the bald facts that Churchill's imperial milieu would literally rather lose to their fellow white Europeans, the Nazis, than treat the dark Indian sub continent as equals, equals united in defeating the Nazis by sheer weight of superior manpower numbers.

And that Churchill's scientific milieu would literally rather see Allied frontline soldiers die of infection than see the primitive little microbes (the darkies of biology) make life-saving penicillin naturally instead of seeing highly educated white Europeans making it by chemical synthesis.

In the Churchill tradition, only the American powerful were permitted to make and control the nuclear Manhattan Project : no darkies on this set, please.

By contrast, Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project was all about inviting anyone and everyone in the world to find ways to make abundant wartime penicillin as quickly as possible.

With Dawson's Manhattan Project having everyone helping out, instead of  just a small elite, this forced the very reluctant Allies to give the resulting penicillin to all.

For when Help comes from All, it becomes much harder to refuse to allow the Hope of the results to be distributed to All : which is why the 'powerful' are so very reluctant to ask any help from the 'powerless'....

WWII : Suburban Lives Matter. More.

There is no evidence that WWII's 'Total War' efforts seriously held up ongoing research to find a cure for Polio.

Far from it.

No efforts then to temporarily sacrifice suburban WASP kids dying of "not a military priority" Polio, all to see more medical aid went to our unfaithful frontline troops afflicted with rear echelon VD.

As happened with inner city minority and immigrant kids also busy dying during WWII - from "not a military priority" SBE...

Friday, March 11, 2016

Shaw, Pushkin & Melville : freely mixing fact and fiction

While novelists Melville (Moby Dick) and Pushkin (Eugene Onegin) are well known for mixing fact and non fiction in very close quarters, we don't usually accept that almost all playwrights do much the same.

George Bernard Shaw is very much the best known playwright in this regard.

That is because Shaw's (nominally non fictional) prefaces and stage directions describing the fictional characters' lives and the play's fictional locales were all very much longer than the scripts of his fictional plays.


While Shaw encouraged stage directors and actors to freely ignore these non-fictional efforts in order to create their own original staged performances, he hoped lay readers of his plays would read them and the script as all as being of one piece.

What should interest me, if I were a young academic, is the mind-stretching fact that even the bare script of a fictional play also includes non fiction fact.

For while the actor may be playing the role of a fictional military man, he unerringly 'enter stage left' as the script claims at the beginning of Scene Two in every performance and that is a fact - ie non fiction.

Stage directions in fictional dramas about real life characters and events


But let us instead imagine that Shaw had been a playwright oriented to creating fictional scripts based closely on the life and times of real people and real events.

Then, if he was consistent, one should expect his stage directions to become fully non-fictional as they reveal for us the real life and the real settings behind his fictional prose play.

(Or music drama - because Shaw had an equally illustrious career as a music critic as he had as a playwright and in other circumstances, one could easily image his plays as modern operas or musicals. Er, My Fair Lady anyone ?)

If read then as one piece, the entire script/libretto and stage directions would very closely resemble Melville's Moby Dick in its free mixing of fact and fiction reflecting on the reader's understanding of each.

That is, in fact, my aim in my libretto...