The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love

Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.

But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.

Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.

In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.

The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.

They fed and cared for  the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.

The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.

The right kind of German civilian anyway.

Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.

In another well known example of  WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from  Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.

Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat  , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.

The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.

 As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.

'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'

But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.

An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.

I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.

More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.

Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.

It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?

In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.

Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.

When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.

Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.

Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.

Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.

How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?

And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C  (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?

Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?

Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.

His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.

The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".

Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".

I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.

99.44% pure care, concern, caring.

For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.

To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.

These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.

Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.

A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.

But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners  just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.

Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.

Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .

Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....

Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."

The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.

But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.

But it did eventually work -  at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.

Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.

Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.

But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.

Penicillin the deed

The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......

Like Germany, Howard Florey effortlessly won all the tactical battles, losing only the strategic war to Henry Dawson

Eugenics was on the side of the Big Battalions...

Howard Florey was a WWII chicken-hawk, so it little surprises that his chosen hobby-horse, Allied war medicine, was vigorously and publicly 'On the Side of the Big Battalions'.

That meant making a virtue of denying aid to dying 4Fs, to give it instead to healthy 1As.

 But as Hitler had earlier found out to his cost, this was not a position designed to win over the small battalions of the world's hearts and minds.

Dawson's Folly

Dr Dawson's 'folly' - by contrast - was to give up his own life, during a Total War against the Ultimate Evil, trying to save the lives of the 4Fs of the 4Fs, those 'useless mouths' young people with SBE.

His folly was near-universally damned by those in America's scientific and medical elite who knew of it.

Only those who the British call "the punters" : ie, the housewives, the customers and the voters all over the world, approved his idea.

They chose not to judge the Allied Cause by when it ventured into Nazi like behavior (denying aid to the weakest) but only in its better moments, as when it changed its mind and came to the aid of the SBEs' small battalions, aiding the least of these.

A small gesture perhaps, but in the end, more than enough ....

Major climate denial group says global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy

The Australian-based Galileo Movement is one of the world's biggest climate change denier groups , with a list of scientific advisors that reads like an international Who's Who of the world's best known climate deniers.

Galileo's  managing director Malcolm Roberts recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald , that climate change science has been captured by "some of the major banking families of the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal".

Dog Whistling to call all the old school Holocaust deniers to join the new climate denier movement

In Australia they call terms like that "dog whistle words" because you have to have the mind of a paranoid and the ears of a dog to sense their real meaning.

But I think most of the world already knows these particularly shopworn dog whistle words already.

We haven't watched a lifetime of war movies set in Nazi Germany for nothing.

This was Nazi code too - and also code words for many of their anti-semetic fellow travellers all over the world.

The Zion Protocols - a fake book - supposedly laid it all out : a Jewish banker plot to take over the world.

We all wondered when the professional deniers of climate change would smear this red herring all over the trail : now we know .....

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

   Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
   Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
   Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
    It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
    Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
   By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
   One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
   But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
   So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
  The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
   What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
   In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
   But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....

* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there  IS  intelligent life on Earth....

SETI travel is the American BARBAROSSA : very long, very cold, very short of food

     "Packing for Mars" (and points east) ?
     Been there, done that - got the t-shirt.
     It says :  "I barely survived OPERATION BARBAROSSA ,winter of 1941-1942".
     Most didn't: survive (or get the t-shirt).
     Cock-eyed optimists and utopian libertarians, the Nazis cheerfully set off on a summer trip to visit the Urals, thinking it would be exactly like all those the articles in the German popular science magazines.

    Cunningly, in those magazines, as in their North American counterparts, the SF is thinly guised as non-fiction, to trap the willingly-gullible.
    The Germans knew the miles involved, knew of the cold and the mud, knew of the desperate food shortfalls that were 'situation-normal' for the USSR.
    Knew them as words and numbers on a page - but couldn't feel them in their bones.
    That bone-chilling opportunity came during the horrible winter of 1941-1942 and the following almost as horrible winters of '42-'43 and '43-'44.
    German and Russian bones litter the utopian path to the Urals to this day.
     Despite this detailed - horrific - object-lesson from WWII, much of the world's perpetual teenagers (scientists with great math skills and zilch in arithmetic skills) seek to emulate Hitler and his mad scheme - this time in the ultra cold and dark perpetually Russian winter of outer space - with deadly radiation instead of snipers to kill the unwary.
    Half of Hitler's brain has been found, it seems - alive - in the heads of our science cum space community.
    Won't you please join in to help them stop hurting themselves - and us.....??