The other Manhattan Project (1940-1945) was Henry Dawson's ultimately successful effort to "Defend the small, in a Time of the Big".
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Saturday, August 10, 2013
In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science
During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
"Lawrence J Malone" "Katherine M Malone" "Patricia Malone" "Jean Malone" : whatever happened to 1943's "Penicillin Baby" ?
I often wonder what ever happened to the family of the once briefly world famous "Penicillin Baby", Patricia (Patty) (Pat) Malone, after their fleeting two months of sudden fame from mid August to mid October 1943.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...
 |
| Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943 |
Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Penicillin Baby Patricia Malone survives !
In earlier posts I had mentioned that "The Penicillin Baby", little two year old Patty Malone, whose fight against a fatal staph disease had gripped all of North America for six weeks between August 12th and September 22nd 1943, had finally died of her disease in mid September 1943.
But perhaps it isn't true.
Monday, August 5, 2013
WWII: 2 billion moral decisions
Morally, for Earth's two billion individuals in those years, WWII (1931-1946) was about one thing and one thing only.
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?
Sunday, August 4, 2013
It's Milton's AGAPE not the Greek AGAPE...
I have been going backwards and forwards in my mind - and in my heart - about the exact spelling (and pronunciation) of my book title.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
WWII as a baseball game between Modernity and Reality (and 'Reality Bats Last' )
WWII was (and it wasn't) a battle royal between the belief that reality is a lot more simple and predictable than it looks at first glance and the belief that reality is much more complex and much less predictable than it looks at first glance.
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Smart phones & Dumb Cops : why WWII revelations are history not journalism
Tiny, high resolution , sound and colour motion cameras - like those found in even the cheapest of today's smart phones, didn't exist back in WWII.
Tiny (but noisy) 8mm color motion cameras did exist then, but were rare and needed good strong summer daylight to work well. The ability to record sound and film together in one compact package simply didn't exist for another 25 years .
The closest equivalent to the Internet and YouTube back then were the newsreel firms but these handful of global firms were under firm government censorship control in peace as well as in war.
Dumb cops - like the dumb cops in the Nazi extermination camps - could get away with a whole lot of evil back then, assured that at best a few grainy black and white stills might get smuggled out.
Tiny (but noisy) 8mm color motion cameras did exist then, but were rare and needed good strong summer daylight to work well. The ability to record sound and film together in one compact package simply didn't exist for another 25 years .
The closest equivalent to the Internet and YouTube back then were the newsreel firms but these handful of global firms were under firm government censorship control in peace as well as in war.
Dumb cops - like the dumb cops in the Nazi extermination camps - could get away with a whole lot of evil back then, assured that at best a few grainy black and white stills might get smuggled out.
Dr Kenneth Deeth , Canadian Armoured Division Medical Corps : penicillin just in time
In 1997, a Hengelo Netherlands doctor named W Y Sijtsema published (in Dutch) an article about the earliest known use of penicillin to save a life in his country : a very moving story and one with with a Canadian connection.
(I mean a connection beyond Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson's monumental pushing and prodding that got wartime penicillin going in the first place.)
Sijtsema's article title is translated (in English) as "Penicillin: Just in Time".
After his doctor father Jan M Sijtsema passed on, W Y discovered some interesting dusty files in his father's attic, concerning a young new mother dying of childbed fever just after delivering a son, in early May 1945.
(I mean a connection beyond Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson's monumental pushing and prodding that got wartime penicillin going in the first place.)
Sijtsema's article title is translated (in English) as "Penicillin: Just in Time".
After his doctor father Jan M Sijtsema passed on, W Y discovered some interesting dusty files in his father's attic, concerning a young new mother dying of childbed fever just after delivering a son, in early May 1945.
A war story for women : the story of the OTHER Manhattan Project
I fully expect many more women than men will read my book "Heart and Mind Agape - a Good News story from the bad news war".
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
Men already have tens of thousands of books and films written about WWII, detailing all its violence, death and pain.
Do we really need to read yet another book about a baby being vaporized in the war's concluding big bang ?
Why not a war-ending true story that has a newborn baby nosily whimpering at her mother's breast after that mother was saved from death, just in time, by salvation dropping from the skies like Manna ?
"Penicillin : Just in Time" , a movie just waiting to be made
Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
The world in September '39 : as divided as it had ever been, as divided as it had always been, as divided as it always would be
Seventy five years on, we still can see the differing value systems that divided modern liberal and conservative capitalist from modern communist and socialist from modern fascist and nazi.
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
Modernity's fear : not the Wrath of God or Nature, but the Wrath of Neighbours
The claim that the 19th century saw the "Death of God" is so well known that it is easy to overlook that the Victorian Age also came to accept the claim of the "Death of Nature" as well.
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
Sir Charles Lyell came up with this particular claim, though he was always quick to say that he still believed in God, despite most of his friends in Science no longer doing so.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Francis W Peabody : agape starts in the mind and moves to the heart
In the mid-1920s a busy dean of medicine, among many other things, briefly addressed a student body.
And then a year or two later he died, the early victim of fatal sarcoma.
Normally a dean of medicine from 80 years ago is remembered, if at all, only as one name among many underneath the long lines of dusty portraits in the hallway leading up to the office of the current med school dean.
But in fact Francis W Peabody lives on, bigger than he ever was in real life, because of a very short phrase he spoke to that student assembly, just one of the many things he did in the course of a short but very busy, productive life.
And then a year or two later he died, the early victim of fatal sarcoma.
Normally a dean of medicine from 80 years ago is remembered, if at all, only as one name among many underneath the long lines of dusty portraits in the hallway leading up to the office of the current med school dean.
But in fact Francis W Peabody lives on, bigger than he ever was in real life, because of a very short phrase he spoke to that student assembly, just one of the many things he did in the course of a short but very busy, productive life.
Friday, July 26, 2013
A Low Dishonest War
Auden's phrase "a low dishonest decade" is - rightly - taken to mean The Dirty Thirties, but he first used that phrase in a poem written during the opening days of WWII , which he correctly saw as a direct consequence from the debased (lack of) ideals of the 1930s.
Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade, because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.
Indeed 'a low dishonest war' did follow the low dishonest decade, because most of humanity fails to rise to the challenge and change its spots.
The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy
Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".
Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.
I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?
For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
a GOOD NEWS story from what bad news war ?
Many people noting the unusual capitalization of the title of this blog post might begin to figure what it is all about. But even most of them will still be left wondering, "What bad news war , aren't all wars nothing but bad news ?"
Regular readers of my blogs, of course, will be in no doubt that I am referring to but one war in particular : The Good War, that war fought by The Greatest Generation Ever, aka WWII.
Regular readers of my blogs, of course, will be in no doubt that I am referring to but one war in particular : The Good War, that war fought by The Greatest Generation Ever, aka WWII.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Raymond Loewy, High Modernity's Greatest Scientist ??
Raymond Loewy's vision of a cannon-blast propelled rocket liner in 2039 propelling passengers from New York to London in an hour, was the star turn of the fabled 1939 New York's World Fair --- beloved by the public, the media and most significantly, by the scientific establishment.
That is if we can take scientific silence for assent.
The scientific community are like bullies all over : the victims of their anger are always carefully chosen to be much smaller and much weaker than themselves.
That is if we can take scientific silence for assent.
The scientific community are like bullies all over : the victims of their anger are always carefully chosen to be much smaller and much weaker than themselves.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Technology makes planes that fly ; Science merely makes claims that MIGHT fly
The DC-3 , a plane that technologists designed 80 years ago, is still flying in commercial airlines around the world despite the fact that the last civilian units were built over 70 years ago.
Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !
Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Group love and Group think --- formula for a disaster : or WWII
It is well accepted that an excessive group love, for the so called Aryan Race, led Germany on endless wars of conquest and that excessive groupthink by Hitler's inner circle defeated an hope of permanent success in those conquests.
I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.
I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....
I want to suggest that group-love and group-think are intimately related and equally doomed and that by contrast, an expansive openness to others, all others - as individuals and as collectivity, in need or not in need - is the best way for humanity to survive in a dynamic uncertain world.
I plan to contrast the WWII career of little known doctor Henry Dawson, with his manhattan project to save SBE patients by de-weaponizing penicillin, with the mistakes made by those WWII excessive lovers of their own groups and their groupthink, in both the Axis and Allied camps ....
Dawson rebukes the "bystanders" of the Allied "coalition of the UN-willing"
In 1939, the British and French empires were initially unwilling to honour even the letter of their solemn pledge to come to the aid of Poland if it was attacked.
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
And they remained in no mood to truly honour the spirit of that pledge and provide serious help to the Poles.
But - pushed by some bold MPs in the British Parliament - they at least (and at last) declared war on Hitler and thus began the formation of the coalition of people that finally stopped him.
And these two empires did so without themselves being attacked by Hitler's forces.
Let us always honour them for at least that.
For all the other nations in the ultimately victorious Allied "Coalition of the Unwilling" only took up arms against Hitler when his forces attacked their own nation.
And then they defended their homeland against him with a fiery determination.
Militarily impressive but morally indefensible.
Because until then, the sight of Hitler (and Mussolini and Tojo) attacking neighbour after neighbour the previous ten years had left the bulk of these people strangely unmoved.
They loved their own collectivity (group-love) oh fully well , but not their neighbours (no agape self-less love for them).
Often their narrow group-love went beyond the indifference of bystanders to an active dislike of neighbours as a collectivity and as individuals.
So the battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil would have had very few participants, if Hitler and his Axis trio had only restrained themselves.
Just a few aggressors, a few victims and a few defenders ----- along with a whole bunch of "bystanders" , as such conduct is referred to in books on the (Jewish) Holocaust.
Maybe it is past due time that we extend the use of this term "bystander" to cover the conduct of most people on most aspects of WWII - in particular their global inaction during the long ,slow buildup to the formal declaration of war.
We bystanders stood back and did nothing while Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ,Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece and Yugoslavia got gobbled up by bigger bully neighbours.
It took two Axis mistakes to finally get the American people into the ultimate fight of good versus evil .
One was the stupid Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbour along with the British and Dutch eastern empires , and the other was the even stupider personal decision of Hitler to declare war on America.
So there never was any internal moral impulse that moved the bulk of Americans to 'do the right thing'.
But individual Americans did try to do the right thing : I intend to focus on the largely unknown agape efforts of Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
Conventionally, Agape, the English word, means openness in general, including openness to new experiences and ideas ; Agape, the Greek word, means openness to others' needs .
My sense of Dawson's efforts was that his agape-ness showed a very broad 'openness to others' , open both to their individual needs and to their individual experiences and ideas.
His WWI efforts to help those wounded in combat extended to his 1930s and 1940s concern for the forgotten institutionalized chronically ill.
He was clearly open to others in need ; this is why he started to grow his own penicillin to try and save the dying SBE patients.
They had been abandoned to die by an American wartime medical establishment seeking to emulate how the wartime Nazis would treat their own SBE patients.
But Dawson was open to the pioneering idea of using natural penicillin made by the lowly penicillium mold .
All the other doctors expected penicillin could only be made by man-made efforts.
I think he did so because his studies on commensal oral bacteria had opened his eyes to the versatility of the humblest types of lifeforms.
Because when we approach others in a spirit of Dawson-like agape-ness, we not only seek to help them when they are in trouble, we also cherish them when they are not - because they have interesting ideas and experiences that we do not have and we are never smug that our group has all the answers.
Agape-ness gives us clarity as well as charity....
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink
In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.
By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.
It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.
But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.
It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.
It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.
But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.
WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.
Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.
In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.
They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.
An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.
Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.
At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Some conversations, a couple should never have to have...
It was a private conversation , so we can only imagine what was said, based upon our knowledge of the events discussed and the personalities of the pair.
Marjorie, always a bit of a coquette , never more than when she has news like this, came in to talk to Henry just before New Year's Eve 1940 :
"I've been to see the doctor and..." a teasing, girlish lilt leaves the sentence unfinished.
Henry has a more subdued personality while also being much more intense. With a ready wit.
A dry,wry ,sardonic sort of wit, very much in the scottish presbyterian style.
So typically he simply says, in a quiet throwaway voice:
"...And so have I..."
Marjorie, the flow of her expected storytelling interrupted, reacts with surprise :
"Why Henry, whatever for ?!"
(Because after all, Henry himself was a highly regarded medical doctor.)
"No. Marjorie, you go first."
Marjorie proceeds to tell Henry the hardly unexpected news, given her obvious manner : they are to have a new baby, in September or October of next year.
It will be their third - a late child, because their others (Shirley and Keith) were born in 1928 and 1930.
Marjorie will be almost 38 when the baby is born, Henry just turned 45.
But parents their age are much more likely to immediately start calculating just how old they will be when baby is in some expensive university.
No couples more so than the Dawsons, themselves both were educators and very well (and very expensively) educated.
Both are likely to be retired by the time this third baby finishes its first of several degrees.
Yet it was already looking like they won't have enough money to provide a good education to their two existing children.
In fact it was the only issue the two ever fought about.
"You're always helping other people's children - isn't past due time you started helping your own children ? By opening a downtown private practise like all your friends ?"
Part of the problem was that a post-graduate education takes time and money and so Henry was 33 before he had his first steady job, and that at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy.
He had only gotten tenure as a professor four years earlier, at the last possible opportunity : obviously then he was not one set for the fast advancement lane.
His real problem - if there was one - was he lived only for his science work and had no aptitude for well paid medical administration or making lots of money working with well-to-do private patients.
Marjorie had a job but it was low paying and her obviously good education and drive had to be set against the fact she had a severe congenital hip defect, which despite many childhood operation hadn't been able to be set right.
She needed a cane sometimes, and a special driving license, and the problem was only going to get worse with time.
But enough about the good news.
There was no way to sugarcoat Dawson's news and he wasn't inclined to either over-dramatitize it or lie about it.
(To his wife anyway, his children needn't have this hanging over their crucial teenage years.)
"You remember the odd way my eyes and face have been looking the last month ?"
Marjorie had .
But she had put it down to Henry trying to do his day job and be a good father and husband --- while simultaneously completing the editing of the big book, deal with his father's recent death and above all, by throwing himself headfirst into his latest scientific project.
Oh the Project ! Above all, Henry's unilateral snap decision to advance its pace by about three months : the straw that broke the camel's back, in Marjorie's mind.
Marjorie was not alone in thinking he should have gone slow on his latest project , at least until the big book was back from the printers and in the subscribers' hands.
But Henry had been unmoved, saying death couldn't wait until the beginning of the next semester.
So now this.
"Well", said Henry, "I read a little." " On the possible causes of those - unusual - set of facial features, because I had never seen anything like them before as a doctor."
"After just a bit of reading, I quickly went to see a specialist - a neurologist."
"Oh."
"It is early days and there be another explanation , or it might only be a minor version of these diseases - but it is starting to look like either a brain tumour or MG : Myasthenia Gravis..."
A quiet, in-drawing, "oh" from Marjorie.
But Henry wasn't quite finished:
"...and I hope to God, its a brain tumour."
A much louder "OH!" this time from Marjorie, because what could be worse than brain tumours ?
Brain tumours, with their intensely painful headaches and their usual quick deaths, possible operation or not.
But what is MG - or rather more importantly, what was MG as seen from the point of view of 1940?
In 1940, it is now certain that many people had mild cases of MG but never saw the inside of a hospital about it . They never knew they had it and generally as long a life as anyone else.
It was not easy to diagnose this autoimmune disease in 1940.
We now know that it happens when our own body creates antibodies that inadvertently interrupts the chemical process that sends signals along our nerves.
But we still don't know what agent triggers the body to create such antibodies in the first place.
It is easiest to detect when it involves the nerves of the eyes and the face : the combination of a flattened smile, distinct facial sagging and drooping eyes is pretty unique.
Repeated use of these nerves and muscles appears to 'tire them', though what is actually happening is a build-up of the antibodies at the nerve interceptors.
Frequent rest periods will stop this process and restore these nerves and muscles' function and the face will appear normal looking --- for a while, until the build-up occurs again.
But often the mouth muscles are involved and then we see a nasal voice and uncontrollable drooling.
It is hard to get a good cough and it becomes difficult to swallow water or food successfully.
Despite this, there is no loss of reflexes, no lack of the senses mental or physical ,no lack of coordination and above all no generalized sense of fatigue.
The disease is not 'progressive' itself ,(progressively getting worse over time), and seems to go away after these localized tired muscles are rested.
So why did a Canadian study, published at the time of Dawson's disease ,discover that on average MG patients lived only four and a half years and had a miserable and painful life over that period ?
The key word is "patient" : only those with severe enough symptoms to become hospital MG patients were counted in those statistics and these patients almost all had bulbar muscle and sometimes even respiratory muscle involvement, in addition to eye and facial issues.
The bulbar muscle affects above all that complicated dance we must all do, all the time, whenever we attempt to swallow and breath at the same time.
Mess it up and food and water end up our nose or in our lungs and we become prone to death by pneumonia either from bacteria or from faulty aspiration of solids into our lungs.
Call this death from the top of the lung.
Some patients even have reduced function of the various 'outside' muscles that support lung function : the muscles of the diaphragm, thoracic and upper airway. Call this death from the bottom of the lung.
By 1940, most patients that were diagnosed with the severe forms of MG and who lived very near good medical care survived the first few of what were called immediately life-threatening "MG Crisis." (Basically a breathing crisis.)
But each crisis left damage to lung and heart and so while the disease itself wasn't really "progressively getting worse", one still died a painfully slow death from the side affects, as each repeated crisis left one more vulnerable to the next one.
By 1940, there was a drug that helped, but its side affects were bad enough ,particularly as correct dosage was in an early stage , to make many patients wish for the quick,quiet release of death instead.
Also by 1940, there was treatment in iron lungs - only decades later was it realized this made the condition fatally worse ,not better, because the air pressure process was moving in the wrong direction (it was negative not positive.)
Unfortunately, this single simple change (a flick of a switch) came too late to save thousands; not arriving at his Henry's own Presbyterian Columbia hospital, for example, until 1962.
Finally by 1940 a brand new surgery process showed a cure for about a half of the severe cases - the other unaffected half were mostly men in Henry's age bracket, for whom it did nothing and only left them further weakened by a major operation.
Still in 1940, there was a flicker of hope, for even the most severe examples of MG.
It was the simple fact that drug, iron lung treatment and surgery were all literally brand new and could only be expected to improve dramatically over time and perhaps spur even better ideas.
If 1940 MG patients could totally change their lifestyle, they might live long enough to be around for the better treatments when they arrived.
But when Marjorie asked Henry what did a patient need to avoid to be spared the worst of MG, she had to cry out in anger.
The things be avoided were all the things that Henry liked to do in excess !
Always had, always would :
Repetitious eye and muscle use, such as reading medical journals, peering into microscopes or talking with patients to get detailed patient histories.
Working long hours into the evenings, weekends and holidays, without proper food ,water or rest, in hot chemical-filled atmospheres.
Working in environments where virulent throat and lung bacteria are common.
"Henry, you just have to stop all your involvement in this project - leave it to someone else - think of your children, above all the new baby."
"I don't want to be raising three kids on my own in four and a half years , not on my tiny salary and this bad hip."
Marjorie was entirely typical of people all around the world in 1940 and it was people like Henry who were - Thank God ! - the lonely exception.
She cared, truly cared, for example, about all people starving in the French and later Greek famines.
But she was like Henry's colleagues who admired his moral sense but decried his lack of a sense of proportion , of knowing when to stop.
"You've made your point - and it is a good one - but now it is time to move on."
Henry was willing, even eager, to move on - or even more likely not to have gotten involved in the first place - if only there was someone else to do the job right.
For Henry Dawson was no volunteer, no charismatic leader at the front line, spurring others on.
But he was of a type, a not un-common type : a 'stepper into breaches' -------- but only when he was needed.
"If I stepped back, you know that this part of the project would die."
"Sorry, bad choice of words - those young lads in Ward G-East would die."
"I do care about my family and friends, but someone in this darned world has to also care about strangers too."
So, with eyes badly drooping but jaw firmly set, Henry wearily got up.
He had a needle to give ; a very special needle of his very special new home grown drug.
The needle won't contain much of the drug despite months of unremitting hard work and it probably won't save this particular patient.
But it offered the negro lad hope and shown him at least someone cared .
After he gave the youth his needle, Dawson would sit for him a while - not just to see if it had an effect , though that is what he told his colleagues.
He would sit with him because the young man was all alone and he was dying and because it was New Year's Eve.
The young man would be all alone and dying and all around him he could hear the sounds of young student nurses and young student doctors merrily celebrating new beginnings and the New Year.
So Dawson would sit with him through the celebrations and talk with him, maybe share a little something with him.
And do so with dignity : because now he , too, would grow to know what a re-occurring ever-worsening fatal disease feels like.
From the inside.
So there they sat, in the dark of New Year's Morning, January 1st 1941 : dead men , waiting .....
Marjorie, always a bit of a coquette , never more than when she has news like this, came in to talk to Henry just before New Year's Eve 1940 :
"I've been to see the doctor and..." a teasing, girlish lilt leaves the sentence unfinished.
Henry has a more subdued personality while also being much more intense. With a ready wit.
A dry,wry ,sardonic sort of wit, very much in the scottish presbyterian style.
So typically he simply says, in a quiet throwaway voice:
"...And so have I..."
Marjorie, the flow of her expected storytelling interrupted, reacts with surprise :
"Why Henry, whatever for ?!"
(Because after all, Henry himself was a highly regarded medical doctor.)
"No. Marjorie, you go first."
Marjorie proceeds to tell Henry the hardly unexpected news, given her obvious manner : they are to have a new baby, in September or October of next year.
It will be their third - a late child, because their others (Shirley and Keith) were born in 1928 and 1930.
Marjorie will be almost 38 when the baby is born, Henry just turned 45.
But parents their age are much more likely to immediately start calculating just how old they will be when baby is in some expensive university.
No couples more so than the Dawsons, themselves both were educators and very well (and very expensively) educated.
Both are likely to be retired by the time this third baby finishes its first of several degrees.
Yet it was already looking like they won't have enough money to provide a good education to their two existing children.
In fact it was the only issue the two ever fought about.
"You're always helping other people's children - isn't past due time you started helping your own children ? By opening a downtown private practise like all your friends ?"
Part of the problem was that a post-graduate education takes time and money and so Henry was 33 before he had his first steady job, and that at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy.
He had only gotten tenure as a professor four years earlier, at the last possible opportunity : obviously then he was not one set for the fast advancement lane.
His real problem - if there was one - was he lived only for his science work and had no aptitude for well paid medical administration or making lots of money working with well-to-do private patients.
Marjorie had a job but it was low paying and her obviously good education and drive had to be set against the fact she had a severe congenital hip defect, which despite many childhood operation hadn't been able to be set right.
She needed a cane sometimes, and a special driving license, and the problem was only going to get worse with time.
But enough about the good news.
There was no way to sugarcoat Dawson's news and he wasn't inclined to either over-dramatitize it or lie about it.
(To his wife anyway, his children needn't have this hanging over their crucial teenage years.)
"You remember the odd way my eyes and face have been looking the last month ?"
Marjorie had .
But she had put it down to Henry trying to do his day job and be a good father and husband --- while simultaneously completing the editing of the big book, deal with his father's recent death and above all, by throwing himself headfirst into his latest scientific project.
Oh the Project ! Above all, Henry's unilateral snap decision to advance its pace by about three months : the straw that broke the camel's back, in Marjorie's mind.
Marjorie was not alone in thinking he should have gone slow on his latest project , at least until the big book was back from the printers and in the subscribers' hands.
But Henry had been unmoved, saying death couldn't wait until the beginning of the next semester.
So now this.
"Well", said Henry, "I read a little." " On the possible causes of those - unusual - set of facial features, because I had never seen anything like them before as a doctor."
"After just a bit of reading, I quickly went to see a specialist - a neurologist."
"Oh."
"It is early days and there be another explanation , or it might only be a minor version of these diseases - but it is starting to look like either a brain tumour or MG : Myasthenia Gravis..."
A quiet, in-drawing, "oh" from Marjorie.
But Henry wasn't quite finished:
"...and I hope to God, its a brain tumour."
A much louder "OH!" this time from Marjorie, because what could be worse than brain tumours ?
Brain tumours, with their intensely painful headaches and their usual quick deaths, possible operation or not.
But what is MG - or rather more importantly, what was MG as seen from the point of view of 1940?
In 1940, it is now certain that many people had mild cases of MG but never saw the inside of a hospital about it . They never knew they had it and generally as long a life as anyone else.
It was not easy to diagnose this autoimmune disease in 1940.
We now know that it happens when our own body creates antibodies that inadvertently interrupts the chemical process that sends signals along our nerves.
But we still don't know what agent triggers the body to create such antibodies in the first place.
It is easiest to detect when it involves the nerves of the eyes and the face : the combination of a flattened smile, distinct facial sagging and drooping eyes is pretty unique.
Repeated use of these nerves and muscles appears to 'tire them', though what is actually happening is a build-up of the antibodies at the nerve interceptors.
Frequent rest periods will stop this process and restore these nerves and muscles' function and the face will appear normal looking --- for a while, until the build-up occurs again.
But often the mouth muscles are involved and then we see a nasal voice and uncontrollable drooling.
It is hard to get a good cough and it becomes difficult to swallow water or food successfully.
Despite this, there is no loss of reflexes, no lack of the senses mental or physical ,no lack of coordination and above all no generalized sense of fatigue.
The disease is not 'progressive' itself ,(progressively getting worse over time), and seems to go away after these localized tired muscles are rested.
So why did a Canadian study, published at the time of Dawson's disease ,discover that on average MG patients lived only four and a half years and had a miserable and painful life over that period ?
The key word is "patient" : only those with severe enough symptoms to become hospital MG patients were counted in those statistics and these patients almost all had bulbar muscle and sometimes even respiratory muscle involvement, in addition to eye and facial issues.
The bulbar muscle affects above all that complicated dance we must all do, all the time, whenever we attempt to swallow and breath at the same time.
Mess it up and food and water end up our nose or in our lungs and we become prone to death by pneumonia either from bacteria or from faulty aspiration of solids into our lungs.
Call this death from the top of the lung.
Some patients even have reduced function of the various 'outside' muscles that support lung function : the muscles of the diaphragm, thoracic and upper airway. Call this death from the bottom of the lung.
By 1940, most patients that were diagnosed with the severe forms of MG and who lived very near good medical care survived the first few of what were called immediately life-threatening "MG Crisis." (Basically a breathing crisis.)
But each crisis left damage to lung and heart and so while the disease itself wasn't really "progressively getting worse", one still died a painfully slow death from the side affects, as each repeated crisis left one more vulnerable to the next one.
By 1940, there was a drug that helped, but its side affects were bad enough ,particularly as correct dosage was in an early stage , to make many patients wish for the quick,quiet release of death instead.
Also by 1940, there was treatment in iron lungs - only decades later was it realized this made the condition fatally worse ,not better, because the air pressure process was moving in the wrong direction (it was negative not positive.)
Unfortunately, this single simple change (a flick of a switch) came too late to save thousands; not arriving at his Henry's own Presbyterian Columbia hospital, for example, until 1962.
Finally by 1940 a brand new surgery process showed a cure for about a half of the severe cases - the other unaffected half were mostly men in Henry's age bracket, for whom it did nothing and only left them further weakened by a major operation.
Still in 1940, there was a flicker of hope, for even the most severe examples of MG.
It was the simple fact that drug, iron lung treatment and surgery were all literally brand new and could only be expected to improve dramatically over time and perhaps spur even better ideas.
If 1940 MG patients could totally change their lifestyle, they might live long enough to be around for the better treatments when they arrived.
But when Marjorie asked Henry what did a patient need to avoid to be spared the worst of MG, she had to cry out in anger.
The things be avoided were all the things that Henry liked to do in excess !
Always had, always would :
Repetitious eye and muscle use, such as reading medical journals, peering into microscopes or talking with patients to get detailed patient histories.
Working long hours into the evenings, weekends and holidays, without proper food ,water or rest, in hot chemical-filled atmospheres.
Working in environments where virulent throat and lung bacteria are common.
Emotional work-related stress.
"I don't want to be raising three kids on my own in four and a half years , not on my tiny salary and this bad hip."
Marjorie was entirely typical of people all around the world in 1940 and it was people like Henry who were - Thank God ! - the lonely exception.
She cared, truly cared, for example, about all people starving in the French and later Greek famines.
But she was like Henry's colleagues who admired his moral sense but decried his lack of a sense of proportion , of knowing when to stop.
"You've made your point - and it is a good one - but now it is time to move on."
Henry was willing, even eager, to move on - or even more likely not to have gotten involved in the first place - if only there was someone else to do the job right.
For Henry Dawson was no volunteer, no charismatic leader at the front line, spurring others on.
But he was of a type, a not un-common type : a 'stepper into breaches' -------- but only when he was needed.
"If I stepped back, you know that this part of the project would die."
"Sorry, bad choice of words - those young lads in Ward G-East would die."
"I do care about my family and friends, but someone in this darned world has to also care about strangers too."
So, with eyes badly drooping but jaw firmly set, Henry wearily got up.
He had a needle to give ; a very special needle of his very special new home grown drug.
The needle won't contain much of the drug despite months of unremitting hard work and it probably won't save this particular patient.
But it offered the negro lad hope and shown him at least someone cared .
After he gave the youth his needle, Dawson would sit for him a while - not just to see if it had an effect , though that is what he told his colleagues.
He would sit with him because the young man was all alone and he was dying and because it was New Year's Eve.
The young man would be all alone and dying and all around him he could hear the sounds of young student nurses and young student doctors merrily celebrating new beginnings and the New Year.
So Dawson would sit with him through the celebrations and talk with him, maybe share a little something with him.
And do so with dignity : because now he , too, would grow to know what a re-occurring ever-worsening fatal disease feels like.
From the inside.
So there they sat, in the dark of New Year's Morning, January 1st 1941 : dead men , waiting .....
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Is Oscar Schindler proof that God has a sense of humour ?
The fact that the scoundrel Schindler personally rescued more Jews than did almost any canonized or beatified "Prince of the Church" is a particular vivid example of an ancient Bible claim.
The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.
Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs, at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.
They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.
Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !
Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.
Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.
In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.
One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?
Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.
Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.
Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.
But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .
If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.
Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)
The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.
This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.
This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.
(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)
War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.
War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.
Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.
They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.
In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.
Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.
Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.
But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.
Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.
( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )
Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.
At least, this is all food for thought....
The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.
Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs, at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.
They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.
Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !
Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.
Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.
In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.
One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?
Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.
Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.
Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.
But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .
If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.
Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)
The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.
This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.
This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.
(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)
War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.
War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.
Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.
They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.
In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.
Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.
Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.
But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.
Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.
( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )
Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.
At least, this is all food for thought....
Monday, July 8, 2013
WWII : more troops , longer war, but only 1/3 number of VCs
Canada had almost twice as many troops in WWII as in WWI, and it was a world-wide war that lasted 50% longer than the first war, but despite all this, Canada had less than 1/3 as many VC winners.
It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy) is often offered up as the excuse.
Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.
Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members high up in the flak-filled skies.
The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all, in WWII than in the earlier war.
The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .
But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......
It is only given for bravery in face of the enemy, so the fact that combat was far more mechanized in WWII ( ie fought at long distances from the enemy) is often offered up as the excuse.
Dropping bombs from 20,000 ft might seem then to eliminate you from ever receiving a VC in theory --- but not in practise.
Bomber crews actually did get VCs ---- for trying to save fellow crew members high up in the flak-filled skies.
The other view - mine anyway - is that people were less selflessly brave, over all, in WWII than in the earlier war.
The character of virtually all the world's western-influenced population changed - for the worse - after WWI .
But not as a result of WWI , merely as the result of death carrying off the holders of older Victorian views on selflessness, replaced by the young bearers of the up-to-date, modernist , scientific, view of the proper morality:
"Be quick to defend your own national group to the death (and beyond) - but ignore or despise all others' cries for help."
In the 1930s and early 1940s, Philip Marlowe's mean streets were world wide......
Bystanders make Bullies : in schoolyards or in World Wars
When Tojo, Mussolini and Hitler first crawled out from under their rocks and set to work, the nations they led were relatively weak and ally-less, particularly compared to the combined 'rest of the world', a world that professed to oppose them root and branch.
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
But when in fact that whole wide world stood around the schoolyard just watching as bystanders ,without intervening, we gave the bad guys their very first triumph.
Albeit these were triumphs over very small victims, but it gave them the confidence to move on and upwards, to successfully take on ever bigger victims and to take on ever more of them at the same time.
The three were always bullies-in-waiting, from birth, but it was the in-actions of we bystanders which gave them room to grow in self confidence, brutality and hubris.
In bullyboy genocide, it always takes two types to tango : one active bully and many in-active bystanders...
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Modernity: Have we got it Wrong ? Rigid not Fluid ?
The usual claim that Modernity represents an extraordinary degree of change and dynamic uncertainty must butt its head against the co-current rise of hyper-rigid nationalism in the same time and space.
This newly reified term, nationalism, was generally based upon a single ethnicity, which was usually coded at the time, incorrectly, as "race".
No longer were all citizens of France or Germany regarded as French or German by simple reason of being legal citizens.
Instead a hopelessly il-defined and yet paradoxically rigid innate quality made you either part of The Glorious French Race or not.
Not, meant you belonged to another nationality slash ethnicity cum race.
You had no choice to say that you shared a number of different groupings varying upon your politics, religion, main language , place of birth and parentage.
Individuals effectively ceased to be individual and had to be members of , and hyper-loyal to , a particular block of humanity, the Italians or French, etc.
Contrast this to the Middle Ages's Christians who saw the Jews not as a solid group to be put to the sword, but as a group of individuals - some sinners and some saved - depending upon whether or not they individually accepted Christ and were baptized.
So WWI's vestiges of chivalry and empathy and altruism were not crowded out by old fashioned and immoral individual selfishness ( which was not any more common or any more popular than it has always been).
No, they were replaced by a new supposedly highly moral form of group selfishness.
People protested that concern for your kin had always been ruled morally legitimate - all that had changed, under Modernity, was that there were a lot more kin in your vastly enlarged German/British/Russian family.
By contrast, a pretty Russian or a handsome German was no longer a possible marriage mate for a French youth , as an attractive fellow human being who just happened to - currently - speak different and go to a different church.
Now different ethnicities might as well been different species and marriage with other ethnicities seem dangerously close to bestiality.
Not only were you rigidly placed in one ethnicity - from birth and fixed rigidly for all time - but your entire ethnic group was also rigidly and permanently set in a hierarchy of worthiness, from valued to useless.
So, regardless of the actions of individual Italians, individual combat units or individuals battles, Italians as a group were dismissed ,in advance, as permanently bad soldiers.
In this bizarre moral universe of Modernity,two billion human beings around the world saw the big nations beat up the little nations and did nothing, but each rushed loyally into fearsome combat the moment their own nation was itself attacked.
Each warrior felt he or she was on some moral high road but they were not.
For if Hitler hadn't attacked Russia and declared war on America, Europe would probably still be under his descendants' heel.
Altruism was at a very low ebb between 1931 and 1946 and so all the more reason to honour it where ever and when ever it was found...
This newly reified term, nationalism, was generally based upon a single ethnicity, which was usually coded at the time, incorrectly, as "race".
No longer were all citizens of France or Germany regarded as French or German by simple reason of being legal citizens.
Instead a hopelessly il-defined and yet paradoxically rigid innate quality made you either part of The Glorious French Race or not.
Not, meant you belonged to another nationality slash ethnicity cum race.
You had no choice to say that you shared a number of different groupings varying upon your politics, religion, main language , place of birth and parentage.
Individuals effectively ceased to be individual and had to be members of , and hyper-loyal to , a particular block of humanity, the Italians or French, etc.
Contrast this to the Middle Ages's Christians who saw the Jews not as a solid group to be put to the sword, but as a group of individuals - some sinners and some saved - depending upon whether or not they individually accepted Christ and were baptized.
So WWI's vestiges of chivalry and empathy and altruism were not crowded out by old fashioned and immoral individual selfishness ( which was not any more common or any more popular than it has always been).
No, they were replaced by a new supposedly highly moral form of group selfishness.
People protested that concern for your kin had always been ruled morally legitimate - all that had changed, under Modernity, was that there were a lot more kin in your vastly enlarged German/British/Russian family.
By contrast, a pretty Russian or a handsome German was no longer a possible marriage mate for a French youth , as an attractive fellow human being who just happened to - currently - speak different and go to a different church.
Now different ethnicities might as well been different species and marriage with other ethnicities seem dangerously close to bestiality.
Not only were you rigidly placed in one ethnicity - from birth and fixed rigidly for all time - but your entire ethnic group was also rigidly and permanently set in a hierarchy of worthiness, from valued to useless.
So, regardless of the actions of individual Italians, individual combat units or individuals battles, Italians as a group were dismissed ,in advance, as permanently bad soldiers.
In this bizarre moral universe of Modernity,two billion human beings around the world saw the big nations beat up the little nations and did nothing, but each rushed loyally into fearsome combat the moment their own nation was itself attacked.
Each warrior felt he or she was on some moral high road but they were not.
For if Hitler hadn't attacked Russia and declared war on America, Europe would probably still be under his descendants' heel.
Altruism was at a very low ebb between 1931 and 1946 and so all the more reason to honour it where ever and when ever it was found...
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ...
Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.
Consider this :
In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.
At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !
Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.
This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.
However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.
Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.
He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE, because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.
Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.
If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.
Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.
Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.
This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.
I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.
Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".
His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).
He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.
He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.
This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.
So why did he do it ?
I don't know.
But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.
But he did far more than that.
His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.
Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.
By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.
One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.
Dawson seems to fit all four categories.
And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.
Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....
Consider this :
In late December 1940, Dawson got both some very good news and some very bad news from the doctors.
At age 45, he would be a father for the third time : Hurray !
Albeit his wife was in her forties , was physically handicapped and earns only a small salary.
This matters, because Henry had also just been told he has Myasthenia Gravis, a very serious auto immune disease that in the early 1940s generally killed within four and half years.
However, if he kept shorter hours, cut back on his stressful activities, stopped working around strong chemicals and ate and slept healthier, he might eke it out until better treatments came along.
Instead, Dr Dawson chose to plunge in ever harder into his self-chosen war task: bad chemicals, lots of stress and all.
He was trying desperately to save the lives of "The 4Fs of the 4Fs" : young people needlessly dying of the disease SBE, because they were judged by the powerful to be only a burden in a time of Allied Total War.
Dying because the medicine that could save them (penicillin) was being reserved instead to use as a weapon of war.
If this sounds eerily like a more subtle version of Hitler's infamous T4 Aktion, you won't be far off.
Dawson's tiny little project was a sort of Aktion 4F, a moral counterblast at both the Allies and the Axis.
Now Dawson had a great moral right to do what he did with penicillin (including stealing scarce government-issued penicillin in a time of war !) because he was the first person in history to use it to try and save a life ( actually two : two SBE patients) - penicillin he had grown and processed himself.
This happened before America was at war, but at a time when the nation's medical and scientific leadership was hardening its heart in preparation to be as ruthless as Hitler, when and if Congress ever chose to fight him.
I believe Dawson reacted against this moral hardening of the arteries, seeing it as the absolutely worst way to win the "hearts and minds" battle against Hitler's ideas.
Dawson was cautious, modest and retiring - his High School yearbook would have voted him "The Least Likely to Rebel".
His own field of expertise was miles and miles and miles away from SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis - a then invariably fatal heart disease).
He had never before ventured into making and purifying a brand new unknown drug.
He was regarded as a bit of a cracked pot by his colleagues with regard to his own personal research projects, which tended to limit his ability to draw in people into this Aktion 4F project.
This project of altruism literally killed him in the end - but he was not a religious believer so the basis for his extreme act of alturism is hard to find.
So why did he do it ?
I don't know.
But I do know he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
SBE became one of the most curable of fatal diseases, thanks to Dawson's pioneering efforts.
But he did far more than that.
His project forced the Allies to change their War Aims - to stop treating penicillin as a weapon, kept in short supply only for curable Allied frontline troops.
Instead he forced them to seriously mass produce it and to start treating it as something that should be available for all, regardless of race, color or war status.
By late 1944, penicillin had become the ultimate symbol of that highly elusive "good" the Allies had been promising would surely come about , if only all the neutrals of the world got off the fence and helped defeat Hitler.
One explanation on why Dawson did it and how he did it, is that God sometimes picks cracked pots and non-believers ,together with the weak and the foolish, to do big things and confound the Mighty and the Wise.
Dawson seems to fit all four categories.
And certainly the Age of Modernity, the Age of WWII, was the most hubris-bound age ever ; if any age ever needed confounding it was that one.
Dawson and God and penicillin and 4Fs : it just sounds like a Match made in Heaven to me ....
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Hitler vs Henry Dawson : why contrast these two scientists ?
War historians are unlikely to ever be happy with a Hollywood movie presenting WWII as "The Battle between Ultimate Evil and Ultimate Good".
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Like us ordinary laypeople, they can all quickly find the human who best represented ultimate evil , but again like us, they can't settle on the exact nature of this thing called ultimate evil : what was the common thread uniting all of its obviously horrific deeds?
But the war historians know too much (and have spend too much of their careers detailing all the many Allied moral failings we'd much rather forget) to find any one human representing all of what little 'ultimate good' can be found in that long sorry mess of a moral conflict.
Sure, Winston and Franklin both talked a good line, but the historians know that these two leaders' actions too often failed to be in the same universe as their soaring rhetoric, let alone be found reading from the same page.
The fact is that despite all of its death and destruction, 1939-1945 represented Planet Earth's far-from-total-war, a war that most of the world's nations sat out, most of the time.
If sitting out the battle of absolute good and evil was itself evil, than there was a lot of it going around.
Because the sad truth is while we today all agree that a big country like Germany invading a small neighbour just to steal and enslave is a great moral wrong, well worth going to war to stop, the world of our grandparents obviously didn't think so.
Many nations didn't think so in September 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, or in October 1935 when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Not even in March 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia after specifically promising the world it would never do so.
They retained that opinion right up until September 1945.
WWII movies remain intensely popular world wide but most nations must enjoy them vicariously, because of the fact that their own nation did not really fight in WWII, but instead chose to sit out what today is regarded as the greatest moral conflict of all time.
Hard to imagine, for example, how much pride Mexico's 100 million citizens can take in the bathetic fact that the grand total of three (3) of their grandfathers died in combat in WWII .
Still that was a lot more combat (Brazil aside) that all the rest of Latin America's two dozen democracies saw put together.
Almost all the nations of the world remained neutral while dozens of small nations were gobbled up by big nations.
Almost all the rest remained *"effectively neutral" , unless and until their own soil was invaded.
(* "Effectively neutral" is a term I use to account for the many nations who 'declared war' on another nation but didn't go into actual combat against them -- their declaration of war was not a moral but rather a diplomatic decision, usually so they won't be kept out of the UN at the war's end.)
A mere handful were more forthright : Germany, Japan , along with Italy and sometimes Russia were the obvious big territory-seeking aggressors.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia in Europe - together with Thailand and Burma in Asia- were some of the small jackal nations who saw a chance to take land from some of the other small nations around them if they nominally joined in with the war started by the big aggressor nations.
Noteworthy that even the big aggressors too all remained neutral , if they at all could, when one of the others in their group invaded a small neighbour.
Only two nation-empires fought WWII without themselves either being invaders or being invaded : England and France, and even this nearly didn't happen, as is well known.
Worth remembering that even these two sat out the earlier invasions of small nations undertaken by Japan, Italy and Germany.
So if examples of absolute good existed in WWII, it can't found in the conduct of any individual nation on Earth, but only in the activities of individual individuals.
Hitler was always at pains to show how conventionally his scientific racist theories were and that all he did new was to put into action what other scientists had only ever talked about.
Taking Hitler at his consistent word, from his word in 1919 to his last word in1945, on the scientifically conventional nature of his thinking and actions, I then sought out a contrasting figure whose scientific views were as far as possible from being conventional in 1939.
They had to not just to greatly contrast with Hitler, they had to join in with Hitler and put their scientific beliefs into concrete political action.
This because most scientists (conventional or otherwise) fail to take their scientific beliefs outside the lab and into the thick of the real world.
Henry Dawson's Aktion 4F project, that lesser known Manhattan Project, was as far opposed as it was possible to be to Hitler's Aktion T4 project, which I take to better represent the core of his thinking that his Holocaust of the Jews.
The Jews, to Hitler, were but a subset of the weak and foolish human germs Hitler saw as infecting the volk body : the Aktion T4 hoped to kill them all.
Dawson's Aktion 4F sought to remind the Allies that they couldn't hope to really defeat Hitler's thinking if they simply did to the Allied weak and small as Hitler was doing the weak and small in Europe.
It doesn't really matter in 2013 that Dawson's actions in WWII were far smaller than the actions of the British Conservative Party or the German Nazi Party : whose ideas of 75 years ago, as opposed to actions of 75 years ago, best reflects the majority's way of thinking today ?
I don't think Winston Churchill won WWII, not if by that you mean that his prewar views are reflected in our postwar world --- but Henry Dawson's prewar ideas certainly are.....
Friday, June 28, 2013
The "Absolute Destruction" .... of germs and insects
I don't mean germs and insects as metaphors for 'Hebs, Commies or Japs' --- I mean real life insects and germs in relationship to the modernists' much anticipated day when these tiny pests were no longer are around to bother mighty Man.
No longer around, period : their absolute destruction ensured.
Isabel Hull's multi prize winning book "ABSOLUTE DESTRUCTION" works best when it gets down to her thesis as to just why the Imperial Military of Germany was so particularly brutal, particularly against innocent civilians, in its heyday from 1860s to 1920s.
We always knew the Huns were brutes, we just never knew why.
She shows that the German military elite was relatively unrestrained by German parliamentary opinion or general German public opinion - unlike the case with the equally bloody-minded British military, which was sharply restrained by critics back home, particularly during the Boer War.
I like her thesis , crassly enough because it fits my own thesis so well.
My thesis is that all the ideologies of the early 20th century, seemingly so different from each other at the time, a century on all look like subtle variants of one overarching modernist world view.
'Bigger is better' and 'Might is right' were the flavours of the day.
But just how all these (very hasty) ideologies actually played out in real time very much depended on how strong the opposing pre-modernist thought patterns (Christianity, basically) still were --- in different societies and in different decades.
As is well known, Imperial Germany exalted the reified State over the individual enormously and its constitution ensured almost that there be almost no civilian oversight of the military.
The same idea was slavishly taken up by the German Army worshipping Japanese militarists 50 years later.
The military in both nations thought only of winning wars by the total destruction of the enemy (every single last member of the enemy society if need be) ---- never thinking how to handle the resulting peace.
Or reflecting upon whether anyone could ever ensure the total destruction of anything but a tiny opponent.
To the Japan and Germany empires, it mattered little that their opponents, consisting of the British, French, American, Chinese and Russian empires, are all empires that were vastly bigger than their own empire.
Bigger, each in isolation, let alone all banded together.
But the Japanese and German elites felt that human brainpower and sheer willpower would surmount any material or spatial deficits.
When it came to thinking of their human opponents, let us quickly say that the the other empires were not anywhere as stupid as the Japanese and Germans, not by any means.
The Soviets and Americans had no plans to wipe out every last member of other nations.
(Other political parties' entire membership - yes, maybe !)
But when it came to viewing the total destruction of bugs and microbes as do-able, all the modernist ideologies proved just as naft-headed as the Axis.
After all, it was the 1930s head of the British MRC , an equivalent of today's American NIH, Edward Mellanby, who looked briefly at the new Sulfa drug and opined expansively he could see a day soon when there would be no more infections or hospital beds assigned to them.
(Just as bacterial resistance to the new Sulfa was proving him wrong wrong wrong.)
Equally daft was the American Surgeon General , circa 1967, claiming we can close the books on infection thanks to antibiotics ----- just as bacteria began resisting them wholesale.
And how many experts saw DDT as the way to get permanently rid of endless bugs and insects that caused diseases and ate crops ?
Like the collectivity of individuals that was the Russian Empire, bacteria and insects as a vast collectivity are just too big a target for us humans to ever permanently beat.
Like the rich and the poor and the big and the small, they will always be with us, in eternal commensality.....
No longer around, period : their absolute destruction ensured.
Isabel Hull's multi prize winning book "ABSOLUTE DESTRUCTION" works best when it gets down to her thesis as to just why the Imperial Military of Germany was so particularly brutal, particularly against innocent civilians, in its heyday from 1860s to 1920s.
We always knew the Huns were brutes, we just never knew why.
She shows that the German military elite was relatively unrestrained by German parliamentary opinion or general German public opinion - unlike the case with the equally bloody-minded British military, which was sharply restrained by critics back home, particularly during the Boer War.
I like her thesis , crassly enough because it fits my own thesis so well.
My thesis is that all the ideologies of the early 20th century, seemingly so different from each other at the time, a century on all look like subtle variants of one overarching modernist world view.
'Bigger is better' and 'Might is right' were the flavours of the day.
But just how all these (very hasty) ideologies actually played out in real time very much depended on how strong the opposing pre-modernist thought patterns (Christianity, basically) still were --- in different societies and in different decades.
As is well known, Imperial Germany exalted the reified State over the individual enormously and its constitution ensured almost that there be almost no civilian oversight of the military.
The same idea was slavishly taken up by the German Army worshipping Japanese militarists 50 years later.
The military in both nations thought only of winning wars by the total destruction of the enemy (every single last member of the enemy society if need be) ---- never thinking how to handle the resulting peace.
Or reflecting upon whether anyone could ever ensure the total destruction of anything but a tiny opponent.
To the Japan and Germany empires, it mattered little that their opponents, consisting of the British, French, American, Chinese and Russian empires, are all empires that were vastly bigger than their own empire.
Bigger, each in isolation, let alone all banded together.
But the Japanese and German elites felt that human brainpower and sheer willpower would surmount any material or spatial deficits.
When it came to thinking of their human opponents, let us quickly say that the the other empires were not anywhere as stupid as the Japanese and Germans, not by any means.
The Soviets and Americans had no plans to wipe out every last member of other nations.
(Other political parties' entire membership - yes, maybe !)
But when it came to viewing the total destruction of bugs and microbes as do-able, all the modernist ideologies proved just as naft-headed as the Axis.
After all, it was the 1930s head of the British MRC , an equivalent of today's American NIH, Edward Mellanby, who looked briefly at the new Sulfa drug and opined expansively he could see a day soon when there would be no more infections or hospital beds assigned to them.
(Just as bacterial resistance to the new Sulfa was proving him wrong wrong wrong.)
Equally daft was the American Surgeon General , circa 1967, claiming we can close the books on infection thanks to antibiotics ----- just as bacteria began resisting them wholesale.
And how many experts saw DDT as the way to get permanently rid of endless bugs and insects that caused diseases and ate crops ?
Like the collectivity of individuals that was the Russian Empire, bacteria and insects as a vast collectivity are just too big a target for us humans to ever permanently beat.
Like the rich and the poor and the big and the small, they will always be with us, in eternal commensality.....
UK made sure others died in WWII, rather than her own citizens
More people died in WII than in WWI, but not every combatant nation of WWII suffered worse (or even as badly) as they had in WWI.
The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.
It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.
Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.
Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.
Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.
(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)
Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.
Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).
The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.
Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.
Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.
It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.
With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.
The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.
But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.
They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.
In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......
The UK was the first in and last out of WWII, the only nation at war continuously the whole world war.
It was a far more deadly war and lasted for the UK, six years rather than four.
Its population during the last war was slightly larger than it was in WWI.
Yet, surprisingly, only about one third as many people died.
Dividing the total number of deaths (divided by the total number of war years) into the total wartime population , I get a figure for what I call the intensity of war deaths, one that is about one fifth as great for WWII as it was for WWI.
(Producing the percentage of total population who died in the war each year ---- admitably a very crude indice ---indicating one person in 200 died each year of WWI, versus one person in 1000 died per year in WWII.)
Put another way, in WWI the UK experienced a lot more total deaths over a slightly smaller population over only two thirds as many years of war.
Put yet another way, I am saying that 60,000 deaths spread over 10 years of war in a population of 250 million people (USA/Vietnam War) feels much less bad than to have a population of 2.5 million experience 800 deaths over a one week period (Israeli Jews/Six Day War).
The number of dead the UK experienced in head to head clashes between the Germany Army and the British Army in North West Europe for one month in 1940 and again for 11 months in 1944-1945, was very tiny set against the total of people dead as result of WWII.
Yet in a way, it was the key death-toll event of the entire war.
Because defeating the German Army upon German soil was the only way to end WWII quickly and at a minimum loss of life upon all sides.
It took six years for the UK to do to the German Army what it should have done in six weeks in 1939.
With Germany out of the war in 1939, Italy and Japan would never have gone on their quests for world wide conquest.
The French and British empires in combination in 1939 had a far far far far larger manpower pool to draw upon that the Germans so any land army war would have gone to the Allies in the end.
But a vast conscripted infantry/artillery-based army of British and Dominion working class enlisted men, in combination with millions of conscripted darkie soldiers from the colonies, all demanding benefits for having saved the Empire, was totally unacceptable to the British elite.
They wanted a war won by a few big very expensive machines, driven by a few well educated middle class very white British men : bombers, battleships and tanks.
In the event, they got their 'middle class war' and lost the support of their Dominions and Colonies in the process : hoisted on their own high tech petards in the end......
Kathy Kelly : an enduring voice in the wilderness against the weaponization of medicine
Kathy Kelly ,an American woman about my age, has packed about two dozen lives into her life when I have barely managed to have one.
She should have a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bravely confound the reality of the continuing weaponization of medicine in the case of Iraq.
Yeah, I know : you totally believed the Tooth Fairy when it swore that the UN specifically exempted medicine from its near-total embargo of goods in and out of Iraq.
Which is why, no doubt, an excess of a half million kids in that country died premature deaths - just from the sheer joy at hearing that news.
A country with a good record at rapidly improving child mortality rates suddenly nosedived the other way : and let us not forget the echo effect upon Iraq children of future generations whose parents were under-fed during their crucial early growth years under the sanctions.
For famine is the gift that goes on giving.
Food and pure water are always the best medicine.
But when they are in short supply, drugs and medical machinery needs to step in.
When, however, these also are either in very short supply or in the case of medical machinery , broken down from lack of parts - even a nominally less severe famine, in terms of calories, kills far too many by indirect means.
Food, pure drinking water chemicals, winter clothing and home heating fuel, non-damaged shelters : all are forms of natural medicines, as effective or even more so than antibiotics in keeping kids alive.
Weaponize them and you kill all ultimately --- but the poor, the weak, the elderly and the youngest and nursing mothers - they usually die first.
Government leaders and combat soldiers get their rations and clothing allowance right up to the last.
And let us not forget governments reacting to embargoes by rationing their remaining scarce chemicals and fuel and steel to go to tanks and explosives and aviation fuel instead of to tractors pulling steel plows for food.
All governments respond to embargoes by cutting their weakest citizens off first, and keeping the elite and the military going to the bitter end.
Always have ; always will.
And that bitter end is almost always the destruction of that armed forces and government - not the death of all the state's weakest citizens.
Killing the weakest is immoral - and since it is so ineffective in ending any war, doubly immoral because it is both bloody and bloody inefficient.....
She should have a Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bravely confound the reality of the continuing weaponization of medicine in the case of Iraq.
Yeah, I know : you totally believed the Tooth Fairy when it swore that the UN specifically exempted medicine from its near-total embargo of goods in and out of Iraq.
Which is why, no doubt, an excess of a half million kids in that country died premature deaths - just from the sheer joy at hearing that news.
A country with a good record at rapidly improving child mortality rates suddenly nosedived the other way : and let us not forget the echo effect upon Iraq children of future generations whose parents were under-fed during their crucial early growth years under the sanctions.
For famine is the gift that goes on giving.
Food and pure water are always the best medicine.
But when they are in short supply, drugs and medical machinery needs to step in.
When, however, these also are either in very short supply or in the case of medical machinery , broken down from lack of parts - even a nominally less severe famine, in terms of calories, kills far too many by indirect means.
Food, pure drinking water chemicals, winter clothing and home heating fuel, non-damaged shelters : all are forms of natural medicines, as effective or even more so than antibiotics in keeping kids alive.
Weaponize them and you kill all ultimately --- but the poor, the weak, the elderly and the youngest and nursing mothers - they usually die first.
Government leaders and combat soldiers get their rations and clothing allowance right up to the last.
And let us not forget governments reacting to embargoes by rationing their remaining scarce chemicals and fuel and steel to go to tanks and explosives and aviation fuel instead of to tractors pulling steel plows for food.
All governments respond to embargoes by cutting their weakest citizens off first, and keeping the elite and the military going to the bitter end.
Always have ; always will.
And that bitter end is almost always the destruction of that armed forces and government - not the death of all the state's weakest citizens.
Killing the weakest is immoral - and since it is so ineffective in ending any war, doubly immoral because it is both bloody and bloody inefficient.....
Killing non-enemy civilians rather than enemy soldiers is ALWAYS a war crime
From the Napoleonic Wars in the 18th century to the Sanctions against Iraq in the 21st century the Anglophone countries (led by the English) have shown a consistent preference for killing non-enemy civilians from a safe distance over risking their own precious necks killing enemy soldiers in face to face combat.
Clearly this is cowardly behavior, but is it also immoral ?
Whether or not targeting non-enemy civilians over enemy soldiers is illegal under international law is pretty irrelevant : if the voters in the erring nation and general world opinion don't hold strong views on this breach in international law, there will be no real consequences for that nation's leadership.
By the way, I am avoiding the highly vexing question of the morality of killing members of an enemy nation who have been forcibly conscripted to work in war-related activities versus those who have been forcibly conscripted to actually fight as soldiers.
Because one has only to think of WWII Japan, forcing all of its young children and elderly grandparents to gather pine roots to make aviation fuel for fighter bombers attacking American troop ships, to realize that there is no absolute division between totally innocent civilian and totally guilty soldier in a Total War, only a long grey continuum.
Just who are these "non-enemy civilians" who are killed ?
(And let us not be evasive and just claim that they died of hunger and stress related disease or from bombing, as mere byproducts of an action aimed at the enemy ---- as if their deaths came as a total surprise.)
They are the citizens of neutral countries, occupied countries, your side's colonies and perhaps even citizens of your own country.
I say citizens because sometimes the military of all these countries also die as byproducts of actions aimed at enemy countries - yes their job is military but they die, in a very real sense off-duty, as if civilians.
Very few if any nation on Earth for the last 100 years or so actually routinely feeds itself entirely on the food grown on its own soil.
Most trade food they grow too much of , in exchange for food they can't grow at all or only grow seasonally.
Even America sells grains and meat to buy bananas and coffee and the rest of the world must do far more than that to feed their people.
A blockade of even just one small enemy country never just stops there.
This is because they usually can still hope to get their imports in and exports out by buying and selling with a nearby intermediate neutral country (or whole variety of neutral countries) who act as a mere transit point and middleman between that enemy country and all the rest of the neutral countries in the world.
Meanwhile even the companies in the country at war with that enemy country feel they should still be able to sell to neutral countries.
But their government frets that their neutral-bound goods will actually and ultimately end up, via a series of neutral intermediaries, in the hands of the enemy !
At the very beginning of September 1939 only three relatively small countries were in direct total war : Germany versus France/England. Poland was being swallowed up and the rest of the world was neutral or quite distant from direct combat.
But it still felt like a globe-encompassing war, right from day one, to the whole world.
Why ?
Let's not overdo the Phoney War versus Blitzkreig War comparisons in the Fall of 1939.
Because even before their ultimatums expired, the French and English had in place a highly efficient world-wide blockade system while the Germans were caught red-faced with their scarce civilian shipping mostly stuck in enemy or neutral ports.
Worse, many of the elements of their own blockade system not yet even manufactured, let alone be up and working.
Shipping on the High Seas, all over the world, from a hundred countries and colonies, was already being stopped by France/England and sometimes by Germany and questioned about their cargoes and their destinations.
World Trade (trade essential for virtually every country's mere national survival) was totally disrupted and this immediately meant hunger for many.
Poorer people in all the world's countries are quickly vulnerable when they are thrown out of work because their country's export trade, in which they work or depend upon, is no longer there.
Perhaps in time alternatives are found for all and in the mean time middle class people can live off their savings, but the very poorest feel hunger within weeks.
As happened after the declaration of WWII : even in English and French colonies, as well as in the poorer neutral countries in Europe.
In practise everything is embargoed , in and out : everything is seen as a war-related material, even things like food and wool and leather.
Just before WWI , Germany produced almost all of the world's surgical instruments and life-saving medicines : the Allied embargoes their sale abroad so that even their own military and civilians suffered, let alone the rest of the world.
In WWII, the Allies held a monopoly on penicillin and intended to kept it from everyone but their least-injured of frontline troops.
In Iraq, they kept all medicines and medical supplies from that country - from insulin to antibiotics to surgery instruments.
Iraq soldiers died as a result - but even more so, so did poor children and the poor elderly because whatever supplies did slip in, always and per usual went first to high government officials and the moderately afflicted frontline troops and then a little trickled down to the well off and well connected.
The civilian death toll from the Iraq sanctions equalled that of WWI's blockade and approached that of WWII's blockade.
Invading Iraq, getting rid of the government and then getting out, would have been the most moral thing to do.
As it would have, vis vis Hitler, in WWII.
But the English keep on getting away with imposing immoral (and perhaps even worse ineffective, so additionally immoral) blockades rather than having an army big enough to directly and quickly engage and defeat the enemy.
It just has to stop......
Clearly this is cowardly behavior, but is it also immoral ?
Whether or not targeting non-enemy civilians over enemy soldiers is illegal under international law is pretty irrelevant : if the voters in the erring nation and general world opinion don't hold strong views on this breach in international law, there will be no real consequences for that nation's leadership.
By the way, I am avoiding the highly vexing question of the morality of killing members of an enemy nation who have been forcibly conscripted to work in war-related activities versus those who have been forcibly conscripted to actually fight as soldiers.
Because one has only to think of WWII Japan, forcing all of its young children and elderly grandparents to gather pine roots to make aviation fuel for fighter bombers attacking American troop ships, to realize that there is no absolute division between totally innocent civilian and totally guilty soldier in a Total War, only a long grey continuum.
Just who are these "non-enemy civilians" who are killed ?
(And let us not be evasive and just claim that they died of hunger and stress related disease or from bombing, as mere byproducts of an action aimed at the enemy ---- as if their deaths came as a total surprise.)
They are the citizens of neutral countries, occupied countries, your side's colonies and perhaps even citizens of your own country.
I say citizens because sometimes the military of all these countries also die as byproducts of actions aimed at enemy countries - yes their job is military but they die, in a very real sense off-duty, as if civilians.
Very few if any nation on Earth for the last 100 years or so actually routinely feeds itself entirely on the food grown on its own soil.
Most trade food they grow too much of , in exchange for food they can't grow at all or only grow seasonally.
Even America sells grains and meat to buy bananas and coffee and the rest of the world must do far more than that to feed their people.
A blockade of even just one small enemy country never just stops there.
This is because they usually can still hope to get their imports in and exports out by buying and selling with a nearby intermediate neutral country (or whole variety of neutral countries) who act as a mere transit point and middleman between that enemy country and all the rest of the neutral countries in the world.
Meanwhile even the companies in the country at war with that enemy country feel they should still be able to sell to neutral countries.
But their government frets that their neutral-bound goods will actually and ultimately end up, via a series of neutral intermediaries, in the hands of the enemy !
At the very beginning of September 1939 only three relatively small countries were in direct total war : Germany versus France/England. Poland was being swallowed up and the rest of the world was neutral or quite distant from direct combat.
But it still felt like a globe-encompassing war, right from day one, to the whole world.
Why ?
Let's not overdo the Phoney War versus Blitzkreig War comparisons in the Fall of 1939.
Because even before their ultimatums expired, the French and English had in place a highly efficient world-wide blockade system while the Germans were caught red-faced with their scarce civilian shipping mostly stuck in enemy or neutral ports.
Worse, many of the elements of their own blockade system not yet even manufactured, let alone be up and working.
Shipping on the High Seas, all over the world, from a hundred countries and colonies, was already being stopped by France/England and sometimes by Germany and questioned about their cargoes and their destinations.
World Trade (trade essential for virtually every country's mere national survival) was totally disrupted and this immediately meant hunger for many.
Poorer people in all the world's countries are quickly vulnerable when they are thrown out of work because their country's export trade, in which they work or depend upon, is no longer there.
Perhaps in time alternatives are found for all and in the mean time middle class people can live off their savings, but the very poorest feel hunger within weeks.
As happened after the declaration of WWII : even in English and French colonies, as well as in the poorer neutral countries in Europe.
In practise everything is embargoed , in and out : everything is seen as a war-related material, even things like food and wool and leather.
Just before WWI , Germany produced almost all of the world's surgical instruments and life-saving medicines : the Allied embargoes their sale abroad so that even their own military and civilians suffered, let alone the rest of the world.
In WWII, the Allies held a monopoly on penicillin and intended to kept it from everyone but their least-injured of frontline troops.
In Iraq, they kept all medicines and medical supplies from that country - from insulin to antibiotics to surgery instruments.
Iraq soldiers died as a result - but even more so, so did poor children and the poor elderly because whatever supplies did slip in, always and per usual went first to high government officials and the moderately afflicted frontline troops and then a little trickled down to the well off and well connected.
The civilian death toll from the Iraq sanctions equalled that of WWI's blockade and approached that of WWII's blockade.
Invading Iraq, getting rid of the government and then getting out, would have been the most moral thing to do.
As it would have, vis vis Hitler, in WWII.
But the English keep on getting away with imposing immoral (and perhaps even worse ineffective, so additionally immoral) blockades rather than having an army big enough to directly and quickly engage and defeat the enemy.
It just has to stop......
Thursday, June 27, 2013
WWII's Opium Wars : Britain's efforts to weaponize life-saving penicillin
The shabby ways in which the Churchill Conservatives, coupled loosely with Republican friends in the American OSRD, conspired to weaponize life-saving wartime penicillin should not surprise anyone with any historical knowledge.
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
Britain was a past-master at using life-strangling blockades of someone else's civilian population to substitute for the possible combat deaths of the officer sons of the British elite.
Napoleon had been defeated by just such a blockade policy and the Opium Wars against China had shown just how effective covert drug warfare can be in de-stabilizing a nation's populace.
(A lesson hardly lost on the OSRD's successors in the CIA et al.)
But Churchill and Britain were playing with fire when they attempted to severely limit the production of penicillin and restrict its use to only those frontline Allied sick combatants deemed recoverable for further combat.
Because in the 1940s we did not have the arsenal of about 100 viable antibiotics that we have today.
We had only a half dozen members of the Sulfa drug family and they were all rapidly failing --- due to overuse bringing on rapid bacterial resistance.
Wars bring on sudden pandemics - like WWI's horrific Spanish Flu.
One wonders what would the world response had been to Sir Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of British politics) if tens of millions of people had needlessly died, before penicillin production was brought up to speed ?
The world was very lucky indeed that Henry Dawson was not so callous as Churchill and the Allied scientific establishment on the turning a precious lifesaver into a weapon of war...
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
the long AND the short AND the tall : the eternal commensality of the big and the small (and God blesses 'em all)
It is typical of the hubris of us individual humans and our individual human societies to always imagine that we alone are big and mighty and wise and that all other beings are small, weak and foolish.
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.
Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.
From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.
Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.
Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.
Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.
For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.
The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.
Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.
That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....
A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.
But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.
The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.
Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.
From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.
Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.
Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.
Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.
For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.
The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.
Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.
That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....
Allied war crimes of attrition vs Axis war crimes of aggression
Let us first always remember that it was the Germans, together with the Italians and the Japanese, who started WWII and created its spiral of ever increasing tit for tat violence.
Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.
That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.
The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.
And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.
But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.
One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.
Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.
I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !
But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.
It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.
Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.
The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.
Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.
Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.
The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.
The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.
How successful ?
Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.
In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.
And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.
For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.
Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?
I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.
Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....
Without the aggressive invasions of this Axis trio, the western Allies would never have done to Europe .... what they routinely did to the dark people of smaller, hotter nations and colonies.
That is to say, imposing total blockades of food, fuel and life-saving medicine upon the civilians of occupied Europe---- and then bombing and shelling them as well, killing many and "de-housing" many others.
The Allies committed these war crimes of attrition reluctantly and carefully, but they did it from 1939 to 1945: causing the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians from occupied lands in the process.
And it was all legal, strictly legal, at least under the international law in place during WWII.
But perhaps partly as result of the brave wartime disobedience of William Douglas Home (brother of the later British (Tory) Prime Minister) at the siege of Le Havre, postwar conferences made the starving of civilians in siege situations illegal.
One classic example of Allied war crimes of attrition were the mass starvation of newly-occupied Greece in 1940-1941 --- a starvation deliberately not relieved by Churchill , against the wishes of most of his Allies and of American elite public opinion.
Another was the extensive aerial and naval bombing of factories and transport facilities in occupied cities from 1940 to 1945 , despite the widely known knowledge that it was always wildly inaccurate - killing outright hundreds of thousands of occupied civilians.
I have already mentioned the siege of German-occupied Le Havre in 1944, where the British refused the German request to evacuate the civilians : the British hoped the slow starvation of the French civilians beside them might convince the hardened SS troops to surrender quicker !
But denying the knowledge of new life-saving medications and disease-reducing insecticides to the civilians of occupied lands is a entirely unknown example of Allied war crimes of attrition, but that doesn't make it any less true.
It is why I consistently refer to the high level Allied efforts to keep penicillin and DDT secret and restricted to frontline Allied troop use as their weaponizing , despite my listening audience's doubting stares.
Out of their homes thanks to Allied bombing, denied food and fuel by the Allied blockade, stressed by Nazi atrocities and oppression ,many Europeans were increasingly vulnerable to classic war diseases like typhus, which alone killed more than combat did, through all the big wars up to WWII.
The traditional insecticides used to try and stop typhus were much less effective a method than the new DDT and while the Sulfa family have worked well to prevent most killer infections between 1937-1942, there were to be no new Sulfa drugs coming along, and this at a time when bacteria was becoming rapidly resistant to Sulfa.
Thus a potential medical catastrophe was looming , bigger even than the double whammy of the Western Spanish Flu and Eastern Typhus that killed more at the end of WWI than did war combat itself.
Denying knowledge of the possible cure to occupied Europe would only make the catastrophe worse.
The wartime weaponizing of atomic fission to make bombs rather than electricity was opposed by a large number of very prominent scientists , yet failed totally.
The wartime weaponizing of penicillin was opposed by one - dying - middle rank medical scientist and yet was successful beyond his wildest dreams.
How successful ?
Take the example of 1949's THE THIRD MAN, recently voted the best British movie of all time.
In it, 'cheap, safe, abundant penicillin for all' is regarded as the mark of every civilized society and "the man who dared water the workers' penicillin" becomes the epitome of ultimate evil.
And thus we get an explanation as to why war hero Winston Churchill (the Harry Lime of wartime penicillin) so badly lost the 1945 British General Election.
For Churchill, the architect of the Allied war of attrition, simply could never understand the public's objection to his weaponizing of penicillin.
Why did the dying, modest Dr Henry Dawson succeed in confounding the weaponizing of penicillin when the very energetic Leo Szilard and others failed to do the same with atomic fission ?
I suggest the reason was not in their differing moral values, though this is part of the answer.
Instead, I argue that it was Dawson's greater scientific conviction of the rightness of his actions, based upon his theory of "the eternal commensality of the big and the small", that made his opposition much earlier, much more consistent and and much more unyielding.....
Monday, June 24, 2013
If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...
One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
Sunday, June 16, 2013
WWII : began and ended September 2nd 1939, at 11 pm ....
Is it not a good general rule that Great Powers, once they had finally and formally declared war on another Great Power (as opposed to simply invading and gobbling up various small powers ) do not withdrawn from that fight until they themselves were either defeated or successful ?
Recall how WWII almost never began:
After an extremely hostile reception in the British parliament to his last minute attempts to avoid fulfilling his promise to go to war with whoever invaded Poland, Neville Chamberlain and his cabinet met in a mood of grim determination , abetted by an ominous thunderstorm from Mother Nature.
They finally voted, late on that evening of September 2nd 1939, to send Hitler a blunt ultimatum --- one with a very short response time, after which they would immediately declare war on Germany.
This turned a local war between a Great Power and a small power, one not greatly different from Hitler's smoothly successful earlier invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939, into a full blown global war.
The UK actually declared war on September 3rd, but almost all historians agree that it was this cabinet decision the evening earlier that really launched WWII.
WWII, they say, certainly didn't begin with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, or the invasion of Eithopia by Italy in 1935.
A world war needs formal war declarations between at least two Great Powers to truly make it so.
A formal war declaration between two fairly equally sized Great Powers ensures that the resulting conflict would be long, fiercely fought and a global fight.
So they see WWII as growing by a few key dates :
In 1939 the French empire joins the British empire in declaring war on the German empire.
In 1940, the Italian empire declares war on the British and French empires.
In 1941, the German empire declares war on the Russian and American empires, and Japan declares war on the American, British and French empires.
The Russian empire declares war on the Japanese empire in the dying moments of WWII, in August 1945.
But I will argue that there was in fact only one key date : September 2nd 1939.
If Great Powers don't seek a compromise peace after formally going to war with another Great Power - and WWI and WWII certainly suggests this to be the case - then WWII began with this formal war declaration of the UK to Germany which had to end with the defeat of one or the other side.
But could we predict which one would win on September 2nd 1939 ?
I say yes : the UK.
In 1939, the UK's global strength was not really its Empire.
Instead it was really anchored by several - distantly remote from Western Europe - clusters of British-oriented but nominally independent Dominions.
In the White Dominions, most of the population in control were fairly recent immigrants from the UK : think of them as the UK abroad rather than as reluctant colonies ever willing to change sides to go with the new winner.
India, for example, might have abandoned Britain if she was really on her uppers.
The white Dominions really being (at least in 1939) extensions of Britain itself, would not give up so readily.
So Germany would first have to defeat all of the British Isles and Eire --- perhaps a fairly do-able task in 1940.
But then they would soon have to take on all of Canada and Newfoundland, filled with fleeing diehards from the UK, if they wanted to feel permanently secure.
(And probably America too, if at some point it seemed Germany might defeat Canada.)
And then South Africa and the nearby White dominated British African colonies.
And then Australia and New Zealand and their mandate territories.
It was as if Napoleon thought he could defeat four (4) different Russias in succession.
Churchill or Britons of his ilk (and there were many of them) if they did lose the UK to Germany, would not just give up.
Instead they would fight a slow delaying rear guard action from Dominion to Dominion confident that Hitler's racist policies would wear out his welcome fairly quickly, no matter how much of the world he held by force of German arms.
But if Hitler had attacked only the French empire and Britain for some reason had remained neutral, would the French overseas territories have fought on and on after the Fall of France?
Not in 1940 , they won't have had.
But those three Dominion clusters, each the size of Western Europe, were the anchors that would have ensured that some British-led coalition would have ultimately defeated Hitler regardless of how luck and his decisions had worked out.
He lost his war the day it began : it just took six years to make it official ....
Recall how WWII almost never began:
They finally voted, late on that evening of September 2nd 1939, to send Hitler a blunt ultimatum --- one with a very short response time, after which they would immediately declare war on Germany.
This turned a local war between a Great Power and a small power, one not greatly different from Hitler's smoothly successful earlier invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939, into a full blown global war.
The UK actually declared war on September 3rd, but almost all historians agree that it was this cabinet decision the evening earlier that really launched WWII.
WWII, they say, certainly didn't begin with the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, or the invasion of Eithopia by Italy in 1935.
A world war needs formal war declarations between at least two Great Powers to truly make it so.
A formal war declaration between two fairly equally sized Great Powers ensures that the resulting conflict would be long, fiercely fought and a global fight.
So they see WWII as growing by a few key dates :
In 1939 the French empire joins the British empire in declaring war on the German empire.
In 1940, the Italian empire declares war on the British and French empires.
In 1941, the German empire declares war on the Russian and American empires, and Japan declares war on the American, British and French empires.
The Russian empire declares war on the Japanese empire in the dying moments of WWII, in August 1945.
But I will argue that there was in fact only one key date : September 2nd 1939.
If Great Powers don't seek a compromise peace after formally going to war with another Great Power - and WWI and WWII certainly suggests this to be the case - then WWII began with this formal war declaration of the UK to Germany which had to end with the defeat of one or the other side.
But could we predict which one would win on September 2nd 1939 ?
I say yes : the UK.
In 1939, the UK's global strength was not really its Empire.
Instead it was really anchored by several - distantly remote from Western Europe - clusters of British-oriented but nominally independent Dominions.
In the White Dominions, most of the population in control were fairly recent immigrants from the UK : think of them as the UK abroad rather than as reluctant colonies ever willing to change sides to go with the new winner.
India, for example, might have abandoned Britain if she was really on her uppers.
The white Dominions really being (at least in 1939) extensions of Britain itself, would not give up so readily.
So Germany would first have to defeat all of the British Isles and Eire --- perhaps a fairly do-able task in 1940.
But then they would soon have to take on all of Canada and Newfoundland, filled with fleeing diehards from the UK, if they wanted to feel permanently secure.
(And probably America too, if at some point it seemed Germany might defeat Canada.)
And then South Africa and the nearby White dominated British African colonies.
And then Australia and New Zealand and their mandate territories.
It was as if Napoleon thought he could defeat four (4) different Russias in succession.
Churchill or Britons of his ilk (and there were many of them) if they did lose the UK to Germany, would not just give up.
Instead they would fight a slow delaying rear guard action from Dominion to Dominion confident that Hitler's racist policies would wear out his welcome fairly quickly, no matter how much of the world he held by force of German arms.
But if Hitler had attacked only the French empire and Britain for some reason had remained neutral, would the French overseas territories have fought on and on after the Fall of France?
Not in 1940 , they won't have had.
But those three Dominion clusters, each the size of Western Europe, were the anchors that would have ensured that some British-led coalition would have ultimately defeated Hitler regardless of how luck and his decisions had worked out.
He lost his war the day it began : it just took six years to make it official ....
Friday, June 14, 2013
Henry Dawson, Leo Durochers and The Virile Age
In 1939, the fiery new manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers set the tone for his famous tenure at the beleaguered team.
The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.
However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.
Hares beat tortoises every time and Goliaths defeat Davids : yes, nice guys are nice and a joy to be around, but nevertheless they finish last every time.
If terminal diffidence is a form of niceness, then Henry Dawson was definitely nice.
Far far too nice nice to be a successful scientist in an age of virile men, what we would today probably call Type A personalities and Alpha Males.
Fortunately for humanity, Dawson combined his extreme diffidence with a stubborn intellectual courage.
Point of fact, most Alpha Males have never expressed an unconventional thought in their lives.
True they make a point of being offensive to nice people and 'ladies' , offensive to conventional niceness.
But alongside of conventional public niceness is an equally large body of semi-public locker room sentiments.
Alpha males merely express publicly what a lot of people say and think in private.
One thinks of General Secretary Henry Dawson's much better known counterpart at the Third International Congress on Microbiology, President Thomas "Tom" Rivers., a favorite among the media.
Old fashioned Southerner Tom was always brutally and colourfully frank about preferring his "boys" , those on his teams of researchers who were within his favoured circle, his "good ole boys".
This in pointed contrast to his other researchers on the team ,left outside looking in : the colored boys, the Jew boys and the gals.
Dawson kept his mouth politely shut about his critics - not just in public but apparently in private as well.
But he was intellectually stubborn, literally onto death.
If he didn't have tenure, he'd give up his career to see his weekend and holiday research completed over the resistance of his boss (Avery).
When he did have tenure, he bucked his critics by not requesting grants and extra facilities.
He knew of the snares in the strings that would come attached to those grants and extra facilities .
He stayed small and on the cheap, but he stayed free.
And if you like semi-happy endings and tortoises, yes he finished first, well ahead of his hare competitors . And then he died.
Died of the disease that crippled him all the time he was proving up the immediate use of wartime life-saving natural penicillin.
If he hadn't remained stubbornly in the race, we'd probably would not have had abundant natural penicillin for WWII's wounded and all those rendered sick in the hunger and dislocation of the war's end.
It turns out that even in The Virile Age, nice guys and 97 pound weaklings finish first....
The Dodgers, Leo Durochers thought, were nice guys.
However, the Thirties were a Virile Age, with no time for tortoises or 97 pound weaklings.
Hares beat tortoises every time and Goliaths defeat Davids : yes, nice guys are nice and a joy to be around, but nevertheless they finish last every time.
If terminal diffidence is a form of niceness, then Henry Dawson was definitely nice.
Far far too nice nice to be a successful scientist in an age of virile men, what we would today probably call Type A personalities and Alpha Males.
Fortunately for humanity, Dawson combined his extreme diffidence with a stubborn intellectual courage.
Point of fact, most Alpha Males have never expressed an unconventional thought in their lives.
True they make a point of being offensive to nice people and 'ladies' , offensive to conventional niceness.
But alongside of conventional public niceness is an equally large body of semi-public locker room sentiments.
Alpha males merely express publicly what a lot of people say and think in private.
One thinks of General Secretary Henry Dawson's much better known counterpart at the Third International Congress on Microbiology, President Thomas "Tom" Rivers., a favorite among the media.
Old fashioned Southerner Tom was always brutally and colourfully frank about preferring his "boys" , those on his teams of researchers who were within his favoured circle, his "good ole boys".
This in pointed contrast to his other researchers on the team ,left outside looking in : the colored boys, the Jew boys and the gals.
Dawson kept his mouth politely shut about his critics - not just in public but apparently in private as well.
But he was intellectually stubborn, literally onto death.
If he didn't have tenure, he'd give up his career to see his weekend and holiday research completed over the resistance of his boss (Avery).
When he did have tenure, he bucked his critics by not requesting grants and extra facilities.
He knew of the snares in the strings that would come attached to those grants and extra facilities .
He stayed small and on the cheap, but he stayed free.
And if you like semi-happy endings and tortoises, yes he finished first, well ahead of his hare competitors . And then he died.
Died of the disease that crippled him all the time he was proving up the immediate use of wartime life-saving natural penicillin.
If he hadn't remained stubbornly in the race, we'd probably would not have had abundant natural penicillin for WWII's wounded and all those rendered sick in the hunger and dislocation of the war's end.
It turns out that even in The Virile Age, nice guys and 97 pound weaklings finish first....
Thursday, June 13, 2013
What would the Commensal Story of WWII look like ?
Can the entire story of WWII ever be accurately and exhaustingly told, except from the point of view of the winning Great Powers like the USA, the UK and the USSR ?
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?
I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth, is just that window ....
Must Estonian historians be forever limited to writing only of WWII's localized impact on Estonia ?
Must we have authors from "BIG-LAND" only talk of the the BIG and writers from "small-land" only talk of the small ?
Or is there a theory that allows anyone (and everyone) to write insightfully about the interactions between the BIG and the small in WWII, interactions that did not ,in fact, all go the way the BIG would have wanted ?
I believe the theory of "involuntary commensality" , the claim that all Life must dine involuntarily at the common table that is Lifeboat Earth, is just that window ....
Monday, June 10, 2013
It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and Mussolini
Devotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. The world, in effect, can get along without natural resources."
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.
However, someone had to do that job and so it was done by virtually all of the 1930s' economists, almost all orthodox to the man or woman.
In the 1930s, as in the 1830s and the 2030s, their theories basically claimed the same thing as Solow's quote, albeit in less frank language.
But you protest that Hitler, Tojo and Musso went to war precisely to obtain the natural resources they didn't have at home.
So surely my claim looks highly incredible on the face of it: they obviously took natural resources very seriously indeed.
But remember that these three planned to steal all those natural resources they didn't have, and steal them away from heavily armed neighbours who didn't want to give them up without a big fight.
Relatively 'natural-resource-less' at the moment their military machine planned to do all the stealing, the three still felt confident they could substitute something else for those missing natural resources like copper, oil and rubber : sheer aggressive military willpower.
Their failure to substitute patriotic energy for petroleum energy should be a lesson to even the dimmest of economic light bulbs, but no.
Acting as if it is still mentally wowing the crowds in some stadium in Nuremberg, orthodox economics still daily proclaims 'the triumph of the human will' over mere material limitations.
So who exactly started the bloodbath of WWII ?
May I suggest you look no further than your local university economics department .
Pity then their ilk never faced a war crimes trial , instead of just their most earnest lay students at the top of Japan, Italy and Germany .....
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"
Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .
For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.
The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.
Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.
But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.
However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.
No wonder his view was ignored.
However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.
And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .
The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector : AND .
Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.
Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND 4F civilians , on both sides of the war
But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.
For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....
For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.
The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.
Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.
But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.
However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.
No wonder his view was ignored.
However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.
And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .
The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector : AND .
Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.
Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND 4F civilians , on both sides of the war
But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.
For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live
Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Modernity : CONCRETE Dams vs ABSTRACT Delusions ...
When was Chopin born, when did he die, where did Chopin end and his brother begin ?
All concrete questions we can definitively answer.
That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.
But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.
One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.
What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?
And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?
Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.
Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.
Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.
Instead, middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.
In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.
"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.
It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.
It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.
My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.
But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.
* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".
All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.
Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.
Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.
I think he has succeeded, don't you ?
All concrete questions we can definitively answer.
That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.
But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.
One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.
What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?
And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?
Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.
Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.
Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.
Instead, middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.
In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.
"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.
It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.
It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.
My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.
But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.
* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".
All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.
Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.
Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.
I think he has succeeded, don't you ?
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