Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWII

England and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war,  not all on their tiny , tiny own.

Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.

Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.

In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.

In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.

If you don't know that there actually is a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.

Back in the Science-obsessed Thirties, the age-old and realistically grounded moral sense that it was right and proper to come to the aid of the babies of perfect strangers melted away, melted away before this mistaken 'book' fact that "Bigger is Better".

The Japanese and Germans had seemingly appeared to be the next new 'coming thing' , a view their early surprisingly fast and cheap victories only enforced.

But 'scaling up' their early victories proved impossible, as the real Science of Size revealed that their earlier logistics were bound to fail over the vast new regions that they planned to conquer and then hold.

Small and weak peoples, already conquered and defeated, had proven to have more life in them than anyone expected.

They successfully logistically harassed the German and Japanese  until they reduced these over-extended Great Powers to the point where their eventual military collapse before the forces of the Allied coalition became relatively easy.

Meanwhile the Allied coalition had many members, either nominally still neutral or nominally actual co-belligerents, who gave only a few leases on a little of of their land for others to make into vital military bases or provided scarce strategic natural resources, both provided at very good prices to themselves.

But at least none of them needed to be occupied to keep them on side.

Occupied by hundreds of thousands of scarce combat troops to hold each of them and to keep their Resistance partisans at bay , as was the case for everyone of the nations inside the Axis 'coalition of the conquered and subjugated'.

Others in the Allied coalition - the 'Free' armed forces - were the small but very committed volunteers forces of the many governments-in-exile from countries under Axis rule, small forces who provided far more fighting energy than their mere numbers would indicate.

The UK, USA and USSR dominated the Allied coalition, but try to imagine how successfully they would have been if everything had been reversed.

Try to imagine if if the Axis coalition had been as successful as the Allied commensal coalition of the big and the small became, with even China teaming up with Japan in a war against the white powers.

And then try to imagine if the UK had to do without her empire and commonwealth, if the Americans had to do without their banana republics of the Americas, and the USSR had had all of the many nations on its non-western borders in hostile action against her.

Who would have won WWII then ?

COMMENSALITE versus COMMENSALISM: c'est simple

   You've heard of commensalism, no matter how vaguely.
   It was born in 1874 , about the time some natural historians/ naturalists re-birthed themselves as biologists ----- so it is very much part of the sacred dogma in the Church of Biology.

   I'll define it this way (hopefully in a way that most biologists would approve): you are peacefully eating your dinner and minding your own business, and I come up and start eating your food, without as much as a 'by your leave' or 'I beg your pardon' - and if I neither pay you or shot you after I finish eating, then I am a commensal and I practice commensalism.
   Ugh ! Sounds pretty attractive, doesn't it ?
   Wait, wait , it gets worse ---- in this definition, albeit unofficially, all commensals are weak and tiny and stupid while their forgiving hosts are big and strong and smart.
   And kind, very kind.
   Is this stuff real or what ? Are biologists drinking their own koolaid or what ?
   Well ,if you view reality from a top of an Ivory Tower like a sort of Professorial Harry Lime, all lifeforms beneath you are nothing but dots, and yes you can view commensality (the other word) in this severely deranged fashion.
   Commensality, both the word and the concept, are thousands of years old - which is to say, thousands of years older that the 1874 neologism of commensalism.
   Today's concept of commensalism remains perhaps the best prism we have, into the soul of 19th century Social Darwinism, Eugenics and that biologist manque chappie, A. Hitler.
   It's mean, it's heartless and it's totally inaccurate.
   Commensality can be mean and heartless too.
   If it is closed commensality, it means only your kinda people ever get invited to dine with you on $16 orange juice --- if the rest have no food and starve, that's tough --- am  I supposed to be my Chadian sister's keeper?
   Ie, the caste system as practiced in India or at any golf and country club here, is closed commensality.
   Canada's food aid policy under the heartless Harper's conservative party is closed commensality too - the only food aid he intends to voluntarily give out, is to nations that do not really need it.
   Jesus - no word if he was ever a biologist , or a conservative , and I sure hope not - practiced open commensality.
   You remember - Him inviting civic servants (tax collectors) and HOs ( ladies of that oh so fertile crescent) to break communion with him - the nerve !
   Global commensality - my 2012 neologism - is different yet again, yet strangely related to Jesus and  to the biologists.
   Like Jesus's vision, it is very open - only open, this time, to all life on the planet.
   Not an open invite commensality though - more like "we're all stuck in this together, get over it, suck it up, adapt" type of globally-open commensality.
   Like the biologists' vision, it still involves the very big and the very small in commensal relationships.
   Yes, some of  the small do still sponge off the big - but in turn all of the big sponge off all the small.
   More accurately, most of the very small could survive very well if the big never existed --- but all the big would die in months if none of the very small ceased to exist.
   So, global commensality is this blog's name ---- and its game.
   Modernity - the science of humanity in the 150 years between the Reform Act of 1832 and the Diversity legislation of the early 1980s  - saw all life other than AWGs as mere dots, in Harry Lime's sense of that word.
   Man - and I do mean man not woman - viewed reality from the top of a horn of ivory, as in a dream.
   Man was a sky god, above and outside Nature.
   Think of modernist science as limit-DENIERS, and you won't go far wrong.
   By contrast, our post-modern world increasingly accepts humanity is embedded fully into nature at the ground level, with this planet our only lifeboat - and with us depending on all other life for our continued survival.
   This blog is on the side of this new science and these new scientists.....

The REAL 1% versus 99% debate....

Michael Marshall

Move aside, 'OCCUPY MOVEMENT'.

The rich 1% versus the poorer 99% isn't as critical a debate as this simple biological fact:

Without agriculture (& aquaculture/commercial fishing) , the world ,in the best of climate conditions, can only feed 1% of the current humans upon it.

Hunter-gatherers we might have to become again, in the event of some Man-Made-Disaster like a full nuclear winter.

In a place like Nova Scotia with about a million people, one percent is about 10,000 hunter-gatherers eking out just enough food to  survive at sustenance level.

To confirm this, ask yourself how many aboriginals lived in all of Nova Scotia when white Europeans arrived 500 years ago ?

Ten thousand residents seems about right - even optimistic - but the climate then was harsher than it is now, and many animals and plants hadn't yet returned to the almost-an-island after the last Ice Age.

Nuclear Winter's harsh coldness in summer/lack of sunshine/drought -- all could cripple photosynthesis on land and in the sea, even if it just lasted one season.

(Need we add the post-nuclear-war effects of acid rain, radiation and extreme high loads of deadly UV rays to this disaster for green plants?)

Humans store so little food normally, that during that year without a harvest we would eat what little seed crop we have to merely survive and then be even worse off when the sun arrived back to greet us cheerfully next season.

We know this to be a fact as certain as that sun rising in the morning, because that is the way thousands of local and regional famines have worked, or rather not worked, throughout history.

That is the delicate and fragile foundation that our whole great human urban high tech civilization actually rests upon.

Remind me again who is commensal and who is host, down here on planet earth ......

If only SIR ISSAC NEWTON had been a BIOLOGIST...

Michael Marshall

If only  NEWTON had been a full time scientist .

Rather than being a fulltime NEW AGER and just a part time scientist.

I'll grant one to the camp of the DENIERS, I do believe that there was a concerted effort (yes, a conspiracy of a sort) among generations untold of eminent scientists, to studiously ignore exploring too much about the life of their most famous scientist.

 An effort centred among the members of Britain's famous ROYAL SOCIETY.

Today, shorn of his contributions to physics and math, Newton is liable to come across as a total nutbar and fruitcake.

But he was not untypical of many earlier - and even - current eminent scientists.

Still, this is a post about his useful work in science - the solving of two-body problems.

Briefly, Newton came up with a way to successfully predict (albeit only roughly accurately) the effect on the motions of two objects of their mutual gravitational attraction to each other.

Typically - and I say crucially - the two bodies are very unequal in size (mass, actually).

Sun and Earth ; Earth and Moon.

It replicates many unequal relationships in human society and  flattered the bigger body in those relationships as merely reflecting a fact of nature, a LAW of Nature, for God's Sake !

Man and wife, parent and child, boss and servant, master and slave, white man and black man, A1 people versus 4F people.

On and on.

Oh yes, one more.

In biology, we find Newton's earth and moon replicated in the biologists' naft idea of biological commensality.

"Two-bodied commensality".

The bigger body, Man, has a meal.

Uninvited at Man's table, his physical body, is some tiny body - the commensal microbe.

They eat some of Man's food, but do not harm him ( disease) or help him (generating vitally needed vitamins for human survival inside Man's intestines).

It is a nice simple - stupidly simple -flatteringly untrue image.

In fact, in the real world, Life is run on a infinitely complex three-bodied model - the equation of which neither Newton nor anyone else ever solved perfectly, or even solved imperfectly for very long.

For Man, by mass and number, is in turn but a tiny commensal upon the entire world population of microbes who keep us fed with oxygen and vegetation/meat foods.

Without other life to feed us, we would starve because neither our current genes nor our current science allows us to breath and eat in a world of methane and sulfur -- unlike some of the microbes.

Now in a real world three-bodied problem, the three bodies would all interact with each other - and we definitely do interact with the local microbes upon us and with all the microbes living on the globe  around us.

Our commensals sometimes do kill us and sometimes do help us ---indirectly.

We push them into it, by consuming antibiotics.

Some antibiotics kill off the commensals'  competitors - so they in turn can move into us and cause disease.

Or we kill off our harmless commensals with our antibiotics and their replacements are not harmless but pathogens - we thus learn the harmless- useless- commensal actually indirectly helped us by keeping the deadly alternatives off our skin and out of our throats.

We also pump trillions times trillions of microbe-sized fatal doses of
fatal antibiotics into the general environment every year ; we raise the temperature of the air and the land and the water via our greenhouse gases and thus by our actions we kill some and promote others among the world's microbes.

Just between these three bodies,calculating the interactions would
still boggle Newton's brain.

Now 'three-bodied' is just a scientific cum classroom metaphor.

 Because really life and reality is a many-bodied problem: a many,many,many-bodied problem.

Getting it exactly right - even once - probably boggled even God's mind.....

KEPLER 22-B, write back if you read this.....

Michael Marshall

It will be at least 1200 years before we get your fastest reply, so I might not be around to read your missive.

Still, don't they say that it is the thought that counts ?

There may well be human-like life on planet KEPLER 22-B but it is 600 light years away from us --- which is probably why they don't come to visit us very much.

But writing?  Is it too much to ask that you at least write your fellow-humanoids once in a while?

Tell us how things are on KEPLER 22-B, or least how they were , 600 years ago.

It'll be like us getting a note from 800 AD Gaul talking about the start of the Dark Ages but by the time we get it, we're seeing the start of the Renaissance and the end of the Dark Ages.

Worse, by the time they get our reply, they are in  21st Century France and are so, homme, post this Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modernity thing.

"We're all so commensal now, mec."

Humanoid to Humanoid conversation can get a little disjointed at such long distances apart - talk about your troubling long distance romances !

His picture is of a young handsome guy and you get your hopes up , until you remember he's been dead, for like what ? - at least 550 years !

And your love letter is going to be read by his descendants 600 years later - that is if they can still read that old-fashioned version of their language.

I - personally - couldn't care less if there are rafts of livable planets out there, filled with people almost exactly like us --- except they are dead/were dead 600 years earlier.

But clearly this sort of stuff gets a lot of SKY GOD scientists excited - a lot more excited apparently than tidying up the ecological mess they - and they alone - created on this planet.

This earthling find this disaster-bound planet exciting enough to handle ---- I don't want to waste time visiting  -or even trying to talk to - to any other planet that is 600 or more light years into my distant past....

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....

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....

Martin Henry Dawson's lifework- Lobar Pneumonia,Rheumatic Fever,SBE : when hosts overreact

MARTIN HENRY DAWSON 1896-1945

When harmless tiny bacteria called S. pneumococcus living peacefully in your throat get blown the equivalent of 1000 miles deep into our lungs - they panic.

Who won't?

More fatally, so does our body's immune system.

Like a latter day 'Bomber Harris', the immune system 'area bombs' our lungs - too often the collateral damage is us.

S. pyrogenes bacteria is so used to surviving in us, its only home on Earth, that it begins to look like us - and when our immune system overreacts to a case of strep throat, it might start attacking our heart tissue instead of the long since defeated strep throat : the result is often- fatal acute Rheumatic fever.

Lucky you, you've survived a couple of attacks of Rheumatic fever - except for a scared

heart valve ---- a valve messed up by your own immune system.

Now you've neglected your teeth and gums a little and the gums tend to bleed when you do brush them.

This allows some harmless S. viridans (green strep - the bacteria that makes unbrushed teeth look ,well, sort of green - not actually the reason they are called green strep but a colorful coincidence !) to get into the blood stream and start whirling around your body much faster than the Space Shuttle does with us.

Naturally the green strep panic and start looking for a new safe home before giant white blood cells swallow them for dinner.

All these bacteria can't move - they are basically tiny blogs of jelly who can stick to particular types of human cells, if they have the right kind of adhesive on their surface for that kind of cell and they happen to bump into it and not the wrong sort of cell.

Its all a lot of hapstance.

Hardly your usual predators, right??

Usually, the green strep gets eaten before it makes that safe haven. But for people with scared heart valves, the scar tissue (produced by our immune system - remember ?) is

just the sort of thing that could be that safe haven.

If they make it into these scar areas' depths, while whirling past at space-travel-like speeds, they attach themselves to the scars.

The immune system reacts by creating more scar tissue, which inadvertently prevents white blood cells from getting in and at the green strep.

The green strep start re-creating dental plaque (and tartar) right on the heart valve - taking a biofilm meant for our mouth and teeth and replicating in not too dissimilar circumstances at the heart valve.

A normal biofilm colony eventually lets loose bits of itself in the liquid swirling over it to form mini colonies elsewhere - the green strep on the heart valve do the same.

We call those particular mini colonies 'embolus showers' and if and when they reach a heart/ lung or brain blood vessel with a restricted passage, they will block it and kill us.

Explaining and preventing or curing these three serious/common/fatal diseases was to be Martin Henry Dawson's lifework.

In a sense, he succeeded well beyond his expectations and changed our world , for the better, for ever.

All three dieases are the unexpected side effects of us and our fellow commensals scrambling to adjust to a micro change in our body's environment.

Just as global warming today is making all of the world's commensals scramble to adjust to a macro change in our environment.....

@arcadianrecord

Martin Henry Dawson - the Commensal Doctor

Martin Henry Dawson 1896-1945

S. Pyrogenes/GAS Strep/Hemolytic Strep - whatever you call it, this bacteria is usually regarded as the single deadliest pathogen we humans face over our lifetime.

This is because the list of fatal diseases it is implicated in runs into pages and can involve almost every part of the body,in any age group , in any part of the world.

Paradoxically, S. pyrogenes is only found in humans - it exists no where else - and usually lives peacefully - more or less - in our throats, as it has for millions of years.

It hoes a narrow row - but it hoes it deep and long - it can outwit anything our body or our mind's invention can put up to remove it, as it struggles to get by.

Martin Henry Dawson spent 20 years (all of his tragically short life as a scientific researcher) also hoeing a narrow row, deep and long.

He tried always to remain focussed on one area: the consequences for both of us, human and oral strep, of co-sharing one body so intimately all of our collective life.

A rarity in his day, he tried ,as a medical scientist, to see our body from its bacterial flora's point of view: to study how they wiggled and twirled -genetically- as they struggled to survive in our body's hostile environment.

Some bacteria is only 175 billionths of a metre "tall" - that means the body of an adult male is exactly as big to them as our Earth is to us - they aren't in any way aware they are 'invading' a body - they see us only as a vast hostile & lush world.

Early humans also didn't know they lived in a tiny part of a big sphere of rock that in turn only made up a tiny part of the entire universe - they saw no further than area immediately around them.

It is always worth recalling that we are actually 90% them and 10% us, if you count the number of bacterial cells on us, versus all the cells of our internal organs.

Without any of us, they would quickly die in hours - without them, we would die in a few months.

We must co-exist together, diners at a common table - commensals as a biologist or theologian would say.

Dawson never used that term as far as I know ( he died, after all, in 1945, before the word came into common use in medical or religious circles), but he lived his life as if it was the central core of his being as a scientist.....

@arcadianrecord