On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.
The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.
It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.
The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.
It even went further than that.
It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.
Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.
"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Modernity: the 500 Year Reich
In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.
It hardly started out that way.
Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.
Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .
But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.
In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.
Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.
And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.
What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?
Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....
It hardly started out that way.
Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.
Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .
But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.
In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.
Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.
And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.
What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?
Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....
Thursday, April 11, 2013
a frank Polk in the eye of American media : award for truth-telling named after a serial liar...
There is no higher award for professional journalistic truth-telling than the annual GEORGE POLK AWARDS, named after an American reporter who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in civil war torn post-war Greece.
Awkward then that an amateur historian, Richard B Frank, has uncovered that George Polk totally faked his heroic war record as a pilot , created a long trail of mendacity that got him this prized overseas truth-telling job in the first place !
Hundreds of mainstream media that know of Frank's extensive investigative work on Polk have declined to report upon it.
What they have done instead is highly praise Frank's prize winning book on Guadalcanal, a book where Polk is a featured participant : as a ground crew officer.
Praise is all very wonderful, but as an amateur historian myself, I'd rather journalists read my book and damned this account of Polk the ground crew officer, then not read it and still praise it .
Finally a small national alternative media outlet published Frank's account and his supporting documents.
But still nothing from America's mainstream media (and nothing from its ever loyal, ever flaccid, running-lapdog-of-the-north that I could find either) ....
Awkward then that an amateur historian, Richard B Frank, has uncovered that George Polk totally faked his heroic war record as a pilot , created a long trail of mendacity that got him this prized overseas truth-telling job in the first place !
Hundreds of mainstream media that know of Frank's extensive investigative work on Polk have declined to report upon it.
What they have done instead is highly praise Frank's prize winning book on Guadalcanal, a book where Polk is a featured participant : as a ground crew officer.
Praise is all very wonderful, but as an amateur historian myself, I'd rather journalists read my book and damned this account of Polk the ground crew officer, then not read it and still praise it .
Finally a small national alternative media outlet published Frank's account and his supporting documents.
But still nothing from America's mainstream media (and nothing from its ever loyal, ever flaccid, running-lapdog-of-the-north that I could find either) ....
Monday, April 8, 2013
Evolution of tanks - like the Evolution of Life - is all about compromises and niches
Reality is so varied and changing (in ways we humans will never ever be able to totally control or predict) that Evolution continuously throws up many successful ("fittest") evolving life forms to fill its many and evolving niches.
I was reminded, again, of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.
The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.
High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line, thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.
Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.
To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.
But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.
Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.
They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.
It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.
With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.
In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.
Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".
It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.
But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.
Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.
And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.
They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.
And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.
But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.
Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.
The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....
I was reminded, again, of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.
The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.
High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line, thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.
Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.
To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.
But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.
Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.
They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.
It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.
With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.
In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.
Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".
It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.
But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.
Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.
And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.
They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.
And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.
But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.
Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.
The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....
"This key is fit". Bad grammar but good modernity.
This key is 'fit'.
One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.
When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.
The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.
The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.
"Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.
But the phrase "the key is fit", with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.
Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).
But it does not.
That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?
The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.
In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.
It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.
I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.
But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.
It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.
Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.
No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.
Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.
Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....
One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.
When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.
The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.
The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.
"Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.
But the phrase "the key is fit", with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.
Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).
But it does not.
That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?
The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.
In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.
It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.
I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.
But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.
It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.
Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.
No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.
Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.
Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....
Sunday, April 7, 2013
1945 : Triumph of the Weak ; Mite is Right
If the triumph of post-1945 postmodernity over pre-1945 modernity means anything , it means the unexpected triumph of the mite-y over the mighty and the triumph of the weak over the wise.
And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.
Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...
And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.
Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Ironic convergent property of Modernity : collectivist thrust from reductionism !
Politically, Modernity (1873-1973 RIP) , had a strong collectivist thrust, exalting the collective nation, race and planet over the individual being.
At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.
The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......
At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.
The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......
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