If it is as the mainstrean mythology says, that it was only Modern Civilization that stood between us and an eternal Nazi hell, why then has Modernity been tossed aside like a used condom ?
Why then has the blessed savior been replaced by what ? - the same sort of eco-anti-modern trash that the no-smoking, teetotalling, vegetarian Hitler himself peddled ?
Well of course there is always the alternative explanation : that Hitler and Stalin and Tojo et al were fully modern figures.
Unfortunately they were all too fully modern figures, people who took Modernity's values to their logical conclusions --- until the civilized world reared back in revulsion at the god they had cast up and worshipped.
In this explanation we got through WWII with our modernist hegemony all in one piece (more or less) but in the calmer post war waters we began a long slow reassessment of the values we had taken for granted for more than a century.
And, by the 1979, we were prepared to say that we are totally changed from what we had been in 1939, 40 years earlier.
We are post all the modernity stuff, past it ,well past it.
It was grandpa's stuff, not ours.
But if we were sure of what set of values we didn't hold, we seemed far less certain of what new values we now did hold.
Christ people,people : soon the world will have been post-modern longer than it ever was bloody modern !
What are we for people ?? We have got to stop defining ourselves by what we are against.
Small 'g' greens the world over aren't going to have any real impact until we greens sort this WWII thing out.
We'll get no where until we answer the really big question: was it Modernity that saved the day in '45 - or was it the sort of thing that got us into trouble in '39 in the first place ????
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
WWII: Modernity Bites. (Until Nature bites back...)
Most people who died because of WWII , died of hunger or the diseases caused by it.
That is more than (a) the number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat or (b) civilians and soldiers killed by execution.
None, or almost none, of these tens of millions who died from hunger would have died if their friends or enemies had had huge surpluses of food bursting their warehouses.
It was FOOD - bog ordinary, plain old food , that dominated WWII - from before the war, to after the war and all points in between.
Food - not Life, not Land, not Oil, not Power - dominated the war
and its decision making.
Food - in its very materialness - dominated a war and a world that had predetermined that in a Modern Age, the Mental Will dominated over a Material World.
The mind was over and above and beyond the material world.
If WWII established one thing , it was that this simply wasn't so.
Mother Nature - in the form of the annual weather - casually tossed the wartime ambitions of Humanity about like they were kids' toys.
Good weather/ good harvests and millions of those intended for deliberate death might get an additional lease on miserable life.
Bad weather/ bad harvests and governments found ever more diabolical ways to export hunger onto those less powerful .
And make no mistakes, ALL governments exported hunger onto the weak : Axis, Allied and Neutrals alike.
There were foodie heroes everywhere throughout the war; heroic individuals who never fired a gun to defend their land but who nevertheless ignored government callousness and worked to feed all , weak and strong.
We should honor them but we don't - not until more women write the big books about World War Two.
By big books, I mean those books that try to see the big picture of the war ; those works of synthesis that get at those overarching
issues that rise above all the individual incidents that made up the war.
Food - the largest motivating force animating WWII - simply doesn't interest many men : its just there; laid on by the womenfolk, like washing-up.
Most male historians prefer to write about guns rather than butter but if female historians won't write about butter, then who will ?
Adam Tooze and Lizzie Collingham for a start: two historians (one male, one female) who have ordered their global histories of
WWII around weather and harvest yields.
THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION and THE TASTE OF WAR are two books I recommend all read: Collingham's book is a much easier read but Tooze's book gives the dollar and cents figures to back up Collingham's more impressionistic claims.
Read them both and you will never again look at WWII through the eyes of the mainstream mythology.
They will make you very angry I hope - this is good - anger can lead to activism.
Time is short, we have a burning planet to save , to save from ourselves.
Because we must first change how we think and how we feel, before we can hope change how we can co-exist within the world....
That is more than (a) the number of soldiers and civilians killed in combat or (b) civilians and soldiers killed by execution.
None, or almost none, of these tens of millions who died from hunger would have died if their friends or enemies had had huge surpluses of food bursting their warehouses.
It was FOOD - bog ordinary, plain old food , that dominated WWII - from before the war, to after the war and all points in between.
Food - not Life, not Land, not Oil, not Power - dominated the war
and its decision making.
Food - in its very materialness - dominated a war and a world that had predetermined that in a Modern Age, the Mental Will dominated over a Material World.
The mind was over and above and beyond the material world.
If WWII established one thing , it was that this simply wasn't so.
Mother Nature - in the form of the annual weather - casually tossed the wartime ambitions of Humanity about like they were kids' toys.
Good weather/ good harvests and millions of those intended for deliberate death might get an additional lease on miserable life.
Bad weather/ bad harvests and governments found ever more diabolical ways to export hunger onto those less powerful .
And make no mistakes, ALL governments exported hunger onto the weak : Axis, Allied and Neutrals alike.
There were foodie heroes everywhere throughout the war; heroic individuals who never fired a gun to defend their land but who nevertheless ignored government callousness and worked to feed all , weak and strong.
We should honor them but we don't - not until more women write the big books about World War Two.
By big books, I mean those books that try to see the big picture of the war ; those works of synthesis that get at those overarching
issues that rise above all the individual incidents that made up the war.
Food - the largest motivating force animating WWII - simply doesn't interest many men : its just there; laid on by the womenfolk, like washing-up.
Most male historians prefer to write about guns rather than butter but if female historians won't write about butter, then who will ?
Adam Tooze and Lizzie Collingham for a start: two historians (one male, one female) who have ordered their global histories of
WWII around weather and harvest yields.
THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION and THE TASTE OF WAR are two books I recommend all read: Collingham's book is a much easier read but Tooze's book gives the dollar and cents figures to back up Collingham's more impressionistic claims.
Read them both and you will never again look at WWII through the eyes of the mainstream mythology.
They will make you very angry I hope - this is good - anger can lead to activism.
Time is short, we have a burning planet to save , to save from ourselves.
Because we must first change how we think and how we feel, before we can hope change how we can co-exist within the world....
WWII's more or less UNITED Front: Neutral/Axis/Allied ...
Books about WWII published in 1945 were eager to tell readers just how very different ,morally, the Allied , Axis and Neutral Nations all were.
Perhaps by 2025, authors will be more willing to tell us what shared values the civilized folks in the Axis, Allied and Neutral nations all had in common.
By then , almost all of the adults who ran WWII will be gone and we can be a bit more honest about the shared values that motivated all sides in the war.
Maybe then we can admit that it was only when those shared values saw their most extreme expressions, did differences and doubts start showing up among civilized humanity .
Most of WWII's civilized humanity had to be forced to rediscover their common embeddedness within Nature.
This only happened under wartime necessity ,when like puppies, they had their noses rubbed into it.
But others, like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his natural penicillin project, spent the war demonstrating that good things happen when Humanity works together with Nature .
Historians have grown ever more despondent about WWII.
They just keep discovering ever more extraordinarily evil things the Axis had intended to do, if they had been more successful
in combat, and they continue to encounter more and more evilly banal things the Allied and Neutral countries did do, during the war.
Fewer and fewer truly good news stories are emerging from the archives of this 'bad news war'.
But I believe Dawson's story truly is good news, for all of us and for all time.
Not because of his wartime act of heroism, no matter how extraordinary it was and how beneficial it was to suffering millions.
Now I think his real, continuing, value to audiences 75 years later, is how he achieved those heroic activities, by working with Nature, not against it.
As we prepare to contest those who, still, believe Humanity is above and beyond Nature , we need stories of pioneers to cheer our hearts and give us courage.
I believe Dawson's story will do just that....
Perhaps by 2025, authors will be more willing to tell us what shared values the civilized folks in the Axis, Allied and Neutral nations all had in common.
By then , almost all of the adults who ran WWII will be gone and we can be a bit more honest about the shared values that motivated all sides in the war.
Maybe then we can admit that it was only when those shared values saw their most extreme expressions, did differences and doubts start showing up among civilized humanity .
Most of WWII's civilized humanity had to be forced to rediscover their common embeddedness within Nature.
This only happened under wartime necessity ,when like puppies, they had their noses rubbed into it.
But others, like Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his natural penicillin project, spent the war demonstrating that good things happen when Humanity works together with Nature .
Historians have grown ever more despondent about WWII.
They just keep discovering ever more extraordinarily evil things the Axis had intended to do, if they had been more successful
in combat, and they continue to encounter more and more evilly banal things the Allied and Neutral countries did do, during the war.
Fewer and fewer truly good news stories are emerging from the archives of this 'bad news war'.
But I believe Dawson's story truly is good news, for all of us and for all time.
Not because of his wartime act of heroism, no matter how extraordinary it was and how beneficial it was to suffering millions.
Now I think his real, continuing, value to audiences 75 years later, is how he achieved those heroic activities, by working with Nature, not against it.
As we prepare to contest those who, still, believe Humanity is above and beyond Nature , we need stories of pioneers to cheer our hearts and give us courage.
I believe Dawson's story will do just that....
Monday, February 20, 2012
NYC medical community , August 1943: Martin Henry Dawson's OPEN SECRET ...
Nothing does more to lower the normally high social prestige of all doctors, than a disease that is 100% incurably fatal.
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
You could argue that no disease is 100% incurable, technically ----
but you would be wrong. Wrong, wrong: dead wrong.
Yes, there is always a tiny number of people who survive even the worst diseases -- but they not 'cured' --- these people survived even if they never saw a hospital or a doctor.
They survived , yes.
But they were not 'cured' by human agency.
Give the credit to God or Mother Nature instead.
No doctor or nurse likes to have to tell patients and their families that there is nothing medically one can do and they should prepare for a tragic death.
Death is painful for all of us - but for medical professionals to have to admit to others that they are powerless and useless adds an extra sting to the unpleasant task.
Normally they get to say "Its Stage Four - the prognosis is very guarded but we will try radiation."
The patient still dies but the family respects the doctor for at least trying.
SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis) was one such invariably fatal and uncurable disease during the war years.
In fact, it was the most common invariably fatal disease in the western world in those years - the invariably fatal form of brain tumors ran a very distant second.
It could hit anyone: anyone can get strep throat anytime in their life, and get it over and over --- from that they could get RF ((Rheumatic Fever) at any time in their life, and get it over and over.
That greatly increased, in turn, their chances of getting SBE, at any time in their life, - and get it over and over, if by some real Miracle, they survived the first bout.
Every medical single doctor came across cases of fatal SBE in their career in those days --- they hated it for what it did to patients and families ( particularly because SBE patients were on the younger side of life usually) and because it made doctors feel powerless.
Now: cue August 1943, and the medical community of greater New York City.
Throw in SBE researchers, ordinary ward nurses, SBE patients, their families and friends, - heck throw in all the patients and families of people with past bouts of RF, just waiting to be told they now have SBE.
On one hand, the government - your government - has publicly and officially said that regrettably Penicillin does not cure SBE.
But this is wartime - who totally trusts the government and media?
The wartime medical slash patient grapevine throughout greater New York City area is alive with a different story: a doctor named Martin Henry Dawson has gotten half a dozen cures off of penicillin for SBE .
"One patient got his SBE back in August 1940, that's three long years ago. And he's still alive !!!!"
Dawson's success, he tells all who ask, is only limited by the tiny amount of penicillin he can steal - that's right - STEAL from the government supplies, to give to his SBE patients.
Doctors from all over the area are visiting him, asking him to help with their SBE patients, promising to steal additional penicillin if he will only help.
Heavens ! One of them is even the President's personal doctor, yes FDR himself !!!!!
Mysterious bottles of bootleg penicillin keep on turning up at doctors' doors, provided by ladies in white --- taken presumably from the city's one pharma plant that is producing penicillin.
None of this is being reported in the local or national media ---strangely a cone of silence has descended on this good news story in the wartime media, which could use a little relief from having to report years of bad news stories.
That is until a young hunchback doctor named Dante Colitti and the purple-paged Hearst flagship newspaper decide to blow the story wide open.
In theory, its just a local NYC story --- but there is an old,old saying in the music biz : "In NYC, there is no such thing as a regional breakout: if a song is breaking in New York, its breaking wide stateside...."
Within days the story is all over North America - and then all over the world - even into wartime Germany and Japan.
I have always been very interested in the differences between knowledge that is private, that which is public and that which is popular.
For example, the Nazi Hunger Plan to kill 30 million Slavs during WWII to free up food was private during the war , the killing of 3 million Polish jews was publicly known during the war while the Nazi killing of 300 people in the little Czech village of Lidice was popularly known during the war.
Open Secrets are an unusual hybrid of the private and the popular - bypassing the public (aka the official/conventional/ mainstream media).
Lots of Nova Scotians (my estimate was 5%) knew, from gossip, the private knowledge that a high public official in Nova Scotia 'couldn't keep his pecker in his pants' when it came to women (particularly young women, unwilling young women).
About one person in twenty could tell me detailed details of the crime when I asked.
That may not sound like much, but I bet fewer than 5% of any given population could tell you much about the top news story in the land, despite it receiving wall to wall coverage in the conventional media.
So it was private, yet popular, yet not public - none of the semi-official media in Nova Scotia (aka the CBC, CTV and the Herald newspaper) had reported anything on it.
The stones may have cried out over the injustice, but no opposition politician, or theologian, professor of ethics, feminist group or police department had gotten exercised over the scandal.
This had a corrosive effect on how ordinary Nova Scotians viewed their supposed moral leadership when the population knew a crime but their leaders did nothing.
I often wonder what led young Dante Colitti to do what he did ---I can't help feeling he wanted to prick this cone of official secrecy as much as he wanted to help save the life of the baby girl in his care...
Sunday, February 19, 2012
The Pleomorphic Strep versus The Mecanno Set
Readers of my various blogs probably already know the names Robert Solow and Trevor Swan.
They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.
(Sic ---- very very Sic....)
Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.
These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of things like capital and labour and resources.
So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can, in effect, "get along without any natural resources".
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.
He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.
I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.
That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".
When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.
There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.
They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.
That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.
Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.
An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.
Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.
Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.
This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.
Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.
But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?
All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.
This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.
But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).
Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.
He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.
But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.
His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.
Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....
Who was right?
In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.
Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."
PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.
But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .
Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????
Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.
They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.
So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.
As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...
They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.
(Sic ---- very very Sic....)
Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.
These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of things like capital and labour and resources.
So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can, in effect, "get along without any natural resources".
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.
He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.
I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.
That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".
When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.
There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.
They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.
That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.
Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.
An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.
Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.
Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.
This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.
Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.
But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?
All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.
This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.
But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).
Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.
He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.
But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.
His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.
Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....
Who was right?
In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.
Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."
PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.
But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .
Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????
Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.
They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.
So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.
As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...
Monday, February 13, 2012
4Fs, Women and the Grace of God
Con Mensa is Latin for 'at' 'a table'.
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
Sunday, February 12, 2012
4Fs,Women & the Grace of God
Modernity, BIG MO, was soooo very big during the years of WWII.
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)