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.