Liberty without Limits is the Law of the Jungle & the Law of the Strong

    Let's re-phrase that: unbridled Liberty is the law-lessness of the Jungle and of the Strong.
     The Liberty Movement, always powerful not never in power, has never had to admit this fact of life.
    God deliberately gave humanity a world and universe with limits - both biological and material - for a reason.

   HE felt that given Free Will but left to our own moral resources, we would tend to display as much hubris as we do altruism.
    So we humans - even today in the 21st century - get tired,  get hungry and thirsty, get sick, get bored, age,weaken and die.
   Only in the virtual world of the human imagination - the fetid world of the libertarian mind - does the human will inevitably triumph over material and biological restraints.
    If Hitler had been content to merely dream of (or perhaps write about) Operation Barbarossa, instead of trying it out in the real world outside the Fantasyland of Libertarian self-centredness, he might have pulled it off.
   A sort of German ATLAS SHRUGGED.....

Rex Tillerson Poster Boy for the Church of Latter Day Modernity

"One step forward, a zillion steps back, smile at the camera and you're doin' The Exxon-Mobil  Jack".

Yessiree Bob, as I could have predicted*, the new boss of Exxon-Mobil has accepted that climate change is happening .

But (a) he says that worries about it are well and truly overblown and (b) he also says it will all be quickly,quietly, cheaply, efficiently engineered right back out of existence.

Rex Tillerson was expected to be a decisive change from the last CEO of Exxon-Mobil, the lanterned-jawed Lee Raymond.

But after he beat back a pitch from the Rockefeller family to have the Exxon gang spend a little more on alternative fuels, he confirmed he was at least the mettle of his former, ultra-combative, boss.

Tillerson is born in Wichita Falls Texas (not to be confused with Wichita Kansas, birther spawning grounds of the Denier Movement but close enough for most green people.)

 He is an engineer, a Presbyterian and a Eagle Scout's sort of Eagle Scout.

He is a baby boomer, just a spot over 60 in age.

Postmodern in age, modernist in mindset.

On Wednesday ( June 27th 2012) he told the Council on Foreign Relations that climate change was an engineering problem with an engineering solution.

Keep on burning fossil fuel to help the poor move out of poverty, he pleads before the council in his best Al Jolson stance.

And when farms get dry and coasts get flooded as a result?

Move the poor out of those areas too.

Its all a matter of social engineering.

Great Howard Scott , Bat Boy :  1930s era "Technocracy Incorporated" lives !

To a hammer everything is a nail - to an engineer, there are no rights or wrongs - its all just engineering "problems" demanding engineering "solutions".

Final  solutions .......

*  er, as I  did  predict, just a few hours ago

DOOMERS versus DENIERS : they're already killing each other

   Any reader of the media can't help but notice the increasing number of fatal collisions between tiny compact cars and great big pickup trucks.
   We do need pickup trucks filled with tools and supplies to make our economy run - but how many of these like-shiny-brand-new 5 year old pickups are bought just to drive the He-man of the family to and from his desk job ?

   Many of us have friends (we'll call them DOOMERS) who are convinced that carbon pollution is fouling the atmosphere and killing the planet ---- but they still keep on driving a carbon-spewing car instead of walking or taking a bus  --- but to make amends, they buy a car as small as possible.
   Other of our friends (they, we will call DENIERS) are 'scientific libertarians' ---- loudly denying the setting of any limits or restraints on their personal and economic behavior ---- they have responded to the looming carbon pollution disaster by deliberately buying the biggest, heaviest, highest pickup truck they can afford.
   Thumbing their two ton noses at the DOOMERS.
   Unfortunately this means that car accidents, when they occur, are more likely to be fatal - at least to the DOOMERS - the DENIERS usually get away with scratches.
   How many lives would be saved, how many won't lead miserable and expensive lives in a wheelchair the rest of their lives, if only more of us gave up on cars ?
   Does Christianity and Cars ever mix ? Ditto for other ethical religions.
   One car wonder what pickup truck St Luke the Physician drives...

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.


But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.

 So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of  low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.

Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".

Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...

This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.

 A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.

D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.

But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.

Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.

 They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

Post 1875-1965 Scientism's "SHATTERED CONSENSUS" : esteem-lowering news for McKitrick & Michaels

    Don't you sometimes wish you could actually meet a "junior" Fellow from one of those long-winded think-tanks?
   Or maybe just a hail-fellow-well-met type of fellow?
    When everyone is a "Senior", no one is a "Senior", my mom used always say.
   Is bluster and bombast just something they mix in the Kool-Aid ?
   Anyway, where was I ?
   Oh yes, crying crocodile tears over the losses in the all-important self esteem department for those two white guys, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels.

    There is indeed a "Shattered Consensus", or rather a Shattered Hegemony, as we political science types learned to say once we stopped reading with our fingers and breathing through our mouths.
   From about 1975 to about 1965 , by no coincidence about one lifetime for an upper middle class male who never got his hands dirty down on the shop floor, there existed a perfect harmony of hegemonies between those powerful within politics, economics, sciences and the intellectual arts: and they called it "The Cult of Scientism".
   Or sometimes : "The Cult of High Modernity".
   It didn't end exactly in 1945 with Auschwitz and Hiroshima, as is usually advertised, but it was quite wounded.
    Still it gamely hung on until all its generations' Professor Emerituses and Chairman of the Boards finally died - about the same time that all those late Sixties striking grad students got new jobs ----- as 1970s profs.
    I have never found any more faithful followers of the cult of Scientism then those who know nothing about 21st century science.
    I mean economists ,obviously in that dig - all those nobel prize winners recalling their childhood smatterings of of 19th century science, who believe that we can do very nicely without any natural resources at all. (Shout out to good old Robert !)
    It is this longing for the good old days of the untenured giving universal obedience to the dictums of academic Scientism, that I see as the engine behind the Deniers' animus.
    We don't step and fetch like the old days and they don't like it - all this guff about denying climate change is just eyewash : these denier boys really do believe the world is doomed - which is why they're backing free enterprise efforts to move the 1% to Mars.
   Moving to Mars - Mars Colonies - now that is one crack-potted scheme the Deniers never deny.....

WWII Starvation Diets of Nurse Lila Coolen and Doctor Valentin Falthauser : can you tell the difference?

Forget Robert "Willie" Pickton, considered to be Canada's most prolific serial killer.

He simply doesn't deserve that title.

I mean , by his own admission, he only killed 49 people - almost invisible people - prostitutes,many of aboriginal descent, who almost no one cared about when they went "missing".

('Missing': aka killed, ground up and used to feed pigs that were later sold as pork, Sweeney Todd fashion...)

No, Canada's and North America's most prolific serial killer was an intimidating mountain of a woman called Lila Coolen.

The infamy of her crimes should  rival those of Lise Koch, the real life Shewolf of the SS , but they don't.

In fact ,among many older Nova Scotians,( but never of course on the record), she remains almost a saint, a martyr to the medical establishment.

They continue to feel that she did a lot of good, saved a lot of families and young women a lot of shame, rid the world of a lot of useless trash.

It is unknown how many hundreds of people she had killed --- because these people were well and truly invisible - the invisible of the invisible --- lacking even birth certificates.

Now Coolen is a very rare name in North American overall --- the USA has 1000 times more people than the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia, but there are more Coolens in Halifax than in all of America.

Rare to the point of invisiblity in America, Coolen by contrast is a very old and very common name along the South Shore region ofNova Scotia.

To locals - and until the retirement boom, almost everybody there was a 'local' , she 'was one of us' , not a 'CFA' (Come from Away) ,like her Oregon-born husband William Young.

William was merely an appendage to his domineering wive, whose secret to staying out of prison all her long life was precisely that she operated her own personal vertically-integrated Auschwitz in her hometown area of Fox Point-East Chester along that South Shore region.

The South Shore was never a home to immigrants of any sort ; a place where almost all the local families had intermarried with each other, where everybody was relatives to almost everyone and all knew each other's darkest family secrets.

As a result it was a land of mutual, genteel, blackmail ensuring that everyone's family secrets remains forever secret.

The highly rational and modernist Willie Picton made sure to profit even from 'the squeal of the pig' of his crimes, by turning his victims into pig swill after he had sexually tortured and killed them.

Just as the modernist and rationalist Nazis first worked their victims to the skin and bone on a starvation diet,then 

took all their property and valuables , next removing their hair and gold teeth and then using what little fat that was left in their bodies as fuel for their crematoriums.

Lila Coolen didn't miss a trick either.

Auschwitz is famous for neither being a killing camp or a work camp but rather being both - a fully vertically integrated modernist factory.

Lila Coolen aimed to be equally efficient in extracting money from the weak and suffering.

North American families were loath (are loath ?) to see their children raised by people of another faith: which meant that Jewish families, no matter how wealthy ,could rarely hope to get a child by legal adoption.

Well-mannered North American families also would do almost anything rather than admit one of their own had had a child out of wedlock.

Lila Coolen made money on both (all) sides of these social 'problems'.

She made women (and their families) pay a small fortune to have their out of marriage babies in the privacy of her East Chester Maturnity Home.

If the mother was too poor to pay much, she could slave away at the home as almost unpaid staff, till the debt was paid off.

If possible, Lila Coolen would try to have the mother give up the baby - she would then charge the mother money for looking after it for life.

In fact most of the babies, the lucky babies, were auctioned off, mostly to wealthy American Jewish families willing to risk an illegal adoption.

World War Two for Lila Coolen forever remained the happy memory of the fat years : at $6,000 a baby she was raking it in .

Remember, FDR started the process to build the 

Atomic Bomb with a $6000 grant ---- that was big money back then.

To get equivalent buying power, 1940 income versus 2012 income, you might trying multiplying that by 30 to 1.

Between 1937 and 1947 ,Lila Coolen banked a cool $3.5 million on the sale of babies alone ---- don't forget she was also raking it from the unfortunate mothers as well.

But those profits were never enough - they never are for your modern modernist are they ?

More profits could be squeezed out of the living ---' there was no pressing need for real medical staff was there? ' , said this Seven Day Adventist missionary.

The rural poor in her community lapped up her digs at the expensive, uppity, urban-educated medical establishment.

Cleaners were rare on site too, --- but the nurseries weren't filthpits said Ms Coolen, 'we're just county basic, not big city fancy' .

But what to do with those babies born 'defective'  and 'deficient' as we were wont to say in those happy pre-PC days?

And what about those darkish babies, born out of mixed race breeding?

Well a lot of North Americans thought both should be gassed to death by the State.

But they said so quietly, because most people won't quite go that far in their eugenic fervor.

How far they did go was far enough, in any case.

Lots of people thought that neither defective babies or babies of mixed race ( who they thought had the worse genes from both parents) had long to live anyway - an early death was inevitable.

So, the feeling was that if a defective or mixed breed baby was already dangling at the end of a long rope, what harm could it possibly be if some kindly medical 

personnel tugged gently at their tiny ankles to ease them into the next world?

Our Seventh Day Adventist missionary Lila Coolen certainly agreed.

It is rumoured she might have killed a few of the spoiled merchandise outright - by placing a pillow over their tiny heads.

Yes, Lila Coolen did have a wicked temper and she might have occasionally have been merely trying to quiet a squalling/ hungry/ cold /dying/ baby by soothing them with the closest available pillow.

But that was too brutal and too obvious a process to employ en masse --- suffocated people - even babies - tend to show the means of their death upon their faces.

Better to merely 'freshen' the defectives, by putting them in unheated rooms with inadequate clothing and bedding  and then  feed them only on molasses water.

They'd usually be dead in a week or two - quick enough.

Then, quick as a bunny, into a nice butter box they went 

for the brief but decent burial in a big field, right next to the Seventh Day Adventist cemetery in Lila Coolen's hometown of Fox Point a dozen miles away.

If she could the canny Lila, never one to miss a trick, also asked the greiving for money for attending the burial !

Why did Lila never go to jail - and why was she able to end her days gainfully employed by the government teaching the children of Fox Point her twisted,wicked, values ?

There are many, many reasons: none of them flattering to the ordinary, decent, Nova Scotians of her generation.

Most people wanted to know as little as possible about out-of- wedlock pregnancies and illegal adoptions --- her Home solved a messy social problem without forcing people to confront the real issues -- and importantly it kept mom and child off the taxpayer-funded welfare rolls.

Lila did society's dirty work and society was truly grateful.

Sometimes she literally did SOCIETY's dirty work: as in High Society.

A publisher who gets an employee pregnant and then watches as Lila makes the problem 'go away'  isn't likely to turn his investigative hounds on Lila is he?

Ditto for politicians or bureaucrats or church fathers.

Like J Edgar Hoover, Lila collected a lot of secrets for both protection and profit.

She also played up her local South Shore working class roots against them there rich smart ass big city doctors.

Her Seventh Day Adventists community also held similar views about the medical community.

Above all, she relied on the quiet support for 'popular eugenics' that existed among almost all of the Protestant population of the world  from the 1890s to the 1960s.

Rumours swirled that she was 'quickening' the useless babies by underheating their nursery and underfeeding 

them, but this was a traditional practise of baby mills that far predated the rise of formal Eugenics.

Sure, she might be hastening the inevitable deaths of useless babies but so what (insert a Hegelian Shrug here), wasn't their early deaths were going to occur anyway?

So now, when we turn to another part of the Protestant world of the early 1940s and to Nazi doctor Valentin Falthauser, we must ask ourselves, was he in any different from Lila Coolen ?

Similarity number one: like her, he never had to pay for his mass murders.

Similarity number two: he, too, knew how to disguise murder in common local customs : this was a folksy/volksy, downhome, Heimat, sort of murder.

Just as Lila Coolen used the traditional food of rural Nova Scotians, molasses, in her death potions, so too did Dr Valentin advocate the very traditional German peasant foods of potatoes,turnips and cabbage for his 'sure death meals'.

His charges, those institionalized inmates too weak to do enough work to deserve a slightly larger ration (so that they still starved to death but not before putting out some useful work), got only these three vegtables in a watery soup, meal after meal, day after day - until death.

Without protein or fats and without enough trace minerals and vitamins this unrelentling diet usually ensured a death by disease in a few months.

Let the staff gossip to the world outside the Homes - how could Germany's favourite vegetables cause deliberate death ?

The German Aktion T4 program of 1939-1940 was far too industrial for Valentin : all those fatal needles and gassing and the foul-smelling sweet human smoke pouring out of the chimmeys.

Locals complained and gossiped ,until all Germany and all the world knew about it.

It had to be officially stopped but was encouraged to carry on in a decentralized, unofficial basis.

This process which went on even after the Allies ruled Germany, killed far more than the Aktion T4 effort.

Much attention - far too much attention - has focussed on the direct killing aspects of this process.

In a sort of 'Porn of the Holocaust', we learn much about the overdosing of patients with sleeping pills followed up by a big needle-full of morphine if needed.

These deaths were horrible but relatively quick --- much worse were the long slow very painful deaths by starvation on The Falthauser Diet, for two reasons.

I suspect this was the cause of the largest numbers of deaths- and numbers do matter in murder.

More importantly, unlike the relatively uncommon 'death by needle' practiced secretly by some doctors and some 

nurses in every county in every time period, inmate death by slow starvation was common throughout all the world in times of war and want, as a more or less deliberate public policy.

The most common way was to issue piously inmates the same inadequate ration that all others in the nation got -- but unlike most other people, the inmates couldn't garden, buy or barter to get the extra calories between inadequate ration and death.

We must never forget that government leaders' deliberate decisions about food distribution  (ie food triage) which lead to slow death by starvation for millions was what links war heroes Churchill  & Stalin to the war villains Hitler and Tojo (and VALENTIN and LILA) and it is something we all need to talk about.....