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.