the LIBERTARIANS versus the LIMITERS

     I find the term 'denier' just a tad oblique: what these people deny, most fundamentally,is the idea of any limits on their freedom, aka humanity's potential, all bow down.
     (This is the latest variation of the age old war over the limits, if any, to the physical manifestations of humanity's rational and imaginative mental powers.)
    I prefer a variety of terms, some of them my neologisms, others are commonplace and readily understood.
    For example, Libertarians versus Limiters (rather than Deniers versus Doomers).
     Libertarians are fully comfortable with - only comfortable with - the familiar 'old shoe' of 19th Century Science of  Newton and Dalton and Darwin and Euclid that is still the only science being taught in most 21st century schools.
     By contrast, Limiters being those who ignore their high school teachers and who accept the latest findings of the science that there are definite biological and material limits (restraints upon) to humanity's potential.  
    Or Cartesians (dualists who see Man above Nature) versus Commensalists (Humanity entangled within Nature.)
    Why not Pie-in-the-Sky Utopians/Idealists versus Down-to-Earth Realists?
   Lab scientists versus Field scientists, aka Natural Philosophy versus Natural History?
    Plato versus Aristotle.
    Small "l" liberals versus small "c" conservatives.
    And finally - and obviously - Cartesian Sky Gods versus down-to-earth Earthlings.
    While it is an age old battle, this century is different.
    Because it is no longer simply a case of one philosopher debating another philosopher.
     Rather it is the fact that one side is, at last, fully able to try out its theory upon the world and the other side is busy crying out " Please God - dont ! - your experiment will go deadly wrong and destroy the only lab - the only world - that Humanity has."
   I will report this battle fully, fairly, but always from the general side of the commensalists, limiters and earthlings, making no bones that I am hoping ,above all else, to alter the course of that battle in my side's favour....

This un-civil war of words is "The News Story of the Century" and it is 3000 years old ...

    On one side : the SKY GODs , utopians clinging to outdated science, all to bolster their denial of any limits to humanity's potential in a limitless Universe.
   On the other side: the EARTHLINGs, realists accepting the newest science, believing that the Earth is a rare, perhaps unique, human-friendly planet that nevertheless operates under biological and material restraints that must be obeyed.

   On the question of whether humanity's carbon pollution of the atmosphere will change our climate in highly de-stabilizing ways, these two sides are better known as Deniers versus Doomers.
    I believe the new science brings us much good news along with the bad.
    The new post 1945, post-modern science's central metaphor of global commensality says that 'all life on Earth dines at one table, shares but one lifeboat' , that all life survives by taking in each other's laundry - recycling scarce biological resources over and over.
   It reassures us that Life has endured some hard knocks on Earth over the last 4 billion years, but it has surmounted them and flourished - by not having its grasp exceed its reach, Robert Browning to the contrary.....

Still raging : the age-old war over the limits - if any - to human potential

      HALIFAX - By all-party agreement in the legislature, it is the law in Nova Scotia that no one can express doubts in public that enormous amounts of oil will not be soon found off Nova Scotia's shores.
     So naturally the news that the province's last remaining oil refinery is to close or become a terminal only, hit many people here very hard.
   Because, because, because of who owns that that oil refinery.

   It is/was owned by Canada's largest oil company Imperial Oil, which itself is owned by the world's largest DENY-ME-NOT oil company Exxon-Mobil , aka Standard Oil The First, the House than John D Rockefeller built.
     If the biggest guys in the oil biz are having doubts about Nova Scotia's future oil prospects, shouldn't the natives on shore, awaiting their $24 in beads and trinkets, be getting a little worried?
   Exxon-Mobil, it is fair to say, are the most utopian corporation on a planet hardly short of utopian businessmen.
    It had funded virtually all of the usual suspects in the carbon pollution denial business and officially, at least, in public , at least, they see a bright future for oil for a long,long time and feel sure, if there is any carbon pollution of the atmosphere, human ingenuity can easily solve it.
    They are thus this planet's principal SKY GODS, Utopians who view human potential as essentially limitless.
    By contrast, those who embrace the metaphor of Global Commensality are Realists who fully accept that humans are mortal biological beings, with constant biological needs, living on a small rare human-inhabitable planet that is, none the less, materially restrained in most ways.
    Deniers versus Doomers ?
    More accurate, by far, to see this civil war as being between
Utopian sky gods, high * in the sky above Nature, versus down to earth Realistic earthlings.....

* High, only in the pharmaceutical sense, of course....
  

Harper: Let those Eastern Bastards DROWN in the Dark

     HALIFAX  Threats of rising sea levels kinda look different at the American University of Calgary, the intellectual uterus of the Deny-Me-Nots* and the Sky Gods* currently running the Canadian national government.








     The University of Calgary is a kilometre above sea levels and so feels little of the worries that shoreline residents here in Halifax are experiencing over the rising ocean level threats caused by human carbon pollution of the atmosphere.
     (The biggest single site source of that carbon pollution: Alberta's Tar Sands...)
     So forget Premier Ralph Klein and his promise to enjoy watching 'Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark'.
    Now Calgary can sit back and watch as the east 'drowns in the wet'.
    Mind you, if southern Alberta prove to be as bone dry as climate science scientists think it might become, thanks to northern Alberta's Tar Sand carbon pollution, a little of that wet might go down a treat at a 2040s era suds night at UCal's Economic Department....

     ******  Okay we differ - alright ?!
     You call it the climate change war, between deniers and doomers.
    I say that is just a part of a much bigger and older war- the age-old battle over Limits, a battle between Sky Gods and Earthlings.
   I am on the side of the Earthlings : because accepting 'global commensality' as reality means accepting that we humans are deeply embedded within all life on earth and all life on earth dines at one table, sharing a strictly limited recycling of scarce biological resources.
   The High Modernists continue to act like Sky Gods, believing humans are high above Nature and above Nature's biological restraints and material limits.

     I always wonder if the leading Deny-Me-Nots were spoiled rotten as young children, because their highly vocal objections to any sort of restrictions on their rights to do as they please with their dog, their truck, their woman and their planet seems at times pathological or at the very least, deeply rooted in their primeval subconscious.
    The rumours of High Modernity's death in 1945 have been greatly exaggerated. High Modernity still wins the support of the majority of humanity.
  What happened in 1945 and again between 1968-1973, was that its Hegemony was challenged.
   Now there is an ever-growing minority, maybe you among it, who reject it and all its claims.
    If so, please continue to read "Global Commensality NEWS", to learn more about the good news prospects for our planet....

Science under the microscope: the old BIG question versus the new BIG question

   GCR is not at all interested in the old BIG question that animated so many researchers for so many years : how exactly are scientific discoveries  made ?
   The new BIG question for ordinary citizens/activists as well as for those academics in the areas of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPST), is this:

 How exactly are scientific discoveries made popular ?

   Not made public, mark you well : how are they made popular - popular enough in some cases to overthrow the old paradigms of not just professional scientists but of all world culture.
   In particular, GCR is driven to find out why the startling discoveries made in science between 1895 and 1935 are still not popular science.
    Popular as in, 'found in public school teaching and textbooks' or as in 'found in the mindsets of politicians,newspaper editors and CEOs - not to mention their voters,readers and customers.'
  Why did it take the Apocalypse of 1945 to even begin the process of popularization?
   And if Modernity did fall in 1945 as 'everybody* claims', why is it still alive and well in the 2010s - in fact, a very fit competitor to its fresh young replacement - Global Commensality ?
   (*Albeit the Deniers yet have not addressed this question, but rest assured - when they do ,they will deny this consensus as well. )
   Peering through this historical prism, GCR tends to see the current debate between Deniers and Doomers as a re-hash of the old,old debate between Sky Gods and Earthlings, from the time of WWII...

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....

SKY GODS versus the earthlings : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

There is a famous story - possibly part of Hollywood's  Apocrypha -  about how the dross that we used to see on TV actually came to be.

"I have a vision, a vision", says the bigtime TV producer as he 'does lunch' with some hapless TV writer , "I see a man in a dusty pickup truck somewhere in the South West". "Can you write a series around that?"

And of course Mr Big Time will later make the big dough and the big fame as the 'creator' of the series concept, while the writer ends up eating baloney in some low rent motel.

Well I ,too, "have a vision, a vision" for my book - in particular - the book cover.

The book cover background is a gradient of subdued blood red at the top changing slowly into a subdued green yellow at the bottom.

In big letters across the top, filling the width - in the garish colors of every 1940s Sci Fi cover - will be the words:

SKY GODS

(All in upper case.)

In fact, everything about the book cover is designed to evoke and guy-up those over-the-top 1940s Sci Fi covers : from the unsubtle flat bright primary colors to the razor-jawed heroes and ravishing women.

Immediately below and under that lettering will be three bombers, equipped with the supposedly war-winning NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, rising in an arc from left to right, filling the width, dropping bombs into the blood red sky,flames and smoke.

Inside the bombers, of course, are all those 20 year old Pierre-Simon Laplace-like bombardiers, coolly sealing the fates of tens of thousand of invisible civilian 'dots', from 25,000 feet up.

Next are these words, in a little smaller type and only occupying the center of the width:

versus

And a line below them , again in smaller type but this time filling the width:

the earthlings

(Yep, all in lower case.)

Below and under the words is an image of three patients in wheelchairs, arms linked upwards in a victory gesture, surrounded by  three cheering friends.

On the left, its Charlie (Aronson) the first ever patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic, with Dr Tom Hunter (polio survivor) to the left of him, leaning on his ever-present crutches.

Despite his polio and those crutches, American student Hunter still coxed the Cambridge team against Oxford , at a time and place when winning the Nobel prize was almost as good as winning the rowing cup...

Charlie is a life-long sucker for any life-threatening illness the strep bacteria can throw at him but has survived them all - including his second bout of the normally invariably fatal SBE - once again responding well to Dawson's penicillin.

This cat may have used up a lot of his nine lives but he is about to need one more - a severe stroke (which he will again survive) awaits him a week or two from now - but for today, he is grinning broadly.

A shit-eating grin. And why not?  There is much to celebrate and Charlie has been along for the long ride, right from the start.

 Charlie has a penicillin bottle IV and the over-sized bottle is well above him, casting a big yellow circle of light against the subdued green (1930s hospital green) background.

If the glow looks like a solar monstrance in some dimly lit Orthodox church, well that is no accident.

In the center is Doctor D (Martin Henry Dawson) the doctor who brought the world the naturally grown penicillin that we still use today.

He had worked for years with the musty-moldy smelling soil bacteria and fungi that give us natural penicillin and his lab and office literally had a freshly-turned earth smell so calling his tiny team 'the earthlings' seems oddly appropriate.

He is dying, dying of MG (Myasthenia Gravis) , has been dying  almost ever since he started this penicillin project back in September 1940.

One characteristic of MG is that patients with really severe cases undergo many life-threatening Myasthenic Crises , where breathing becomes almost impossible.

 Even after they are stabilized, they remain on Oxygen Bottle Assist and are kept in a wheelchair until the crisis has truly passed. This is one of those times.

Dr Hunter is not just Dawson's clinical assistant in the penicillin project, he is also Dawson's personal physician - helping his boss save others' lives or saving his boss's own life, as circumstances dictate.

But today is Dr Dawson's personal day of triumph.

He has heard that his arch opponents, Dr Alfred Richard and Dr Chester Keefer, have finally thrown in the towel and will now permit penicillin to be used in thousands of American and Canadian civilian hospitals.

It is late April 1944, and penicillin has yet to undergo its first mass clinical trials ( that will only come about on June 6th, on the beaches of Normandy) but already, thanks to Dawson's example, PFIZER is producing more naturally-grown penicillin than anyone could ever have thought possible just months earlier.

Meanwhile Dr Richards's fair haired child, synthetic penicillin, still seemed as distant an illusion as ever, despite all the taxpayers' money thrown at the problem.

Behind Dawson is his wife Marjorie - born with a bad hip, which no amount of painful operations have helped and she must often use a cane to get about - today is one of those days.

Over to his right, also hooked up to a strangely glowing yellow penicillin IV bottle high above her, is HH , the young woman for whom Dawson broke the law and took on all his colleagues and the wartime American government --- all in an effort to save her.

The stolen penicillin was never enough and the course of her illnesses, as Dawson was wont to say, was 'stormy' .

Even as she beat off the SBE , the spread of its infectious fragments through her blood stream had cost her an eye and the use of her ovaries. But now thanks to new bigger supplies of penicillin there seemed to be no more pockets of infection hiding anywhere in her body and she would soon be discharged home.

She too had the same shit-eating grin as Charlie and all the others. Again, why not ?

It was the story of  her dramatic recovery - and of the normally meek and mild Dr Dawson actually stealing wartime government penicillin to save her - that had spread like wildfire through the 10,000 member strong medical community in tri-state New York and had led to further dramatic incidents that finally broke the penicillin story worldwide and brought PFIZER on side.

To her right is an unremarkable looking man - an accountant of a man - also holding onto his two crutches for support.

His name is Floyd Odlum and he is one of the richest men in the world  ---- and one of the best known  husbands-of  in the world.

An odd combination.

His wife is Jackie Cochran - glamerous, smart, tough, one of the world's fastest, best, pilots - winning all kinds of speed records and even beating the world's best test pilots at their own game.

Floyd?

He may look like a mild accountant but who said accountants can't also be smart ?

For he made all his money during the Great Depression, when everyone else was losing their shirts.

Super-Rich, a strong Republican - but also a real patriot with an eye for  helping the little guy.

So the Big-Corporation-Owner-to-end-all-Big-Corporation-Owners has the unlikely job of trying to see that small businesses got a few crumbs from the war contracts going almost exclusively to the nation's top fifty corporations - because without contracts and their material allotments these small businesses would have to fold up.

The awesome stress of trying to work inside The Beltway has given him an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which brought him to Dawson, because Dawson's, real, day, job is to head up a famous Arthritis Research Clinic.

 Odlum began getting involved in the beginnings of a patient-centred American Arthritis organization -- which kept him connected with Dawson.

 He had grown interested in, and supportive of, Dawson's small pioneering home-grown penicillin project: even helping him to recover, after a grave operation that failed to cure Dawson's MG.

So, the image I wish to leave you with is six cripples - six people who should be 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' . Losers.

 Losers and worthless 'dots' , in the eyes of the SKY GODS in particular.

But far from being despondent with their fate - the six 'crips' are grinning ear to ear  ---- and why not ?

For the wartime triumph of naturally-grown penicillin is a signal Triumph of the Weak , well set to rebuke the Triumph of the Strong doctrine promoted by Sky Gods all over the world during the war.

Finally, at the bottom of the book cover, in as big a font as the one used for SKY GODS is:

1939-1945

Now, let's see if that very tiny visual artist stuck inside of me is actually capable of pulling this all off...

Original of SKY GODS versus the earthlings:1939-1945

Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....

SKY GODS or earthlings : WWII's choices ...

Michael Marshall

My last blog, contrasting NORDEN MODERNITY to GEOSMIN COMMENSALITY was very long - and longwinded.

Maybe I can be more succinct.

Spread over an eighty acre corridor in Harlem, two very different projects at Columbia University during the WWII period laid out wildly different visions for humanity and its future on this planet.

Heavy stuff !

One Columbia University project, the massive Manhattan Project, was a last minute patch or kluge to the centerpiece of the Allied war effort, which was that high altitude bombing with that NORDEN BOMBSIGHT could end the war quickly and cheaply.

Quickly and cheaply, yet with minimum deaths for Allied A1 military personnel and for enemy and occupied  4F civilians.

The NORDEN, out in the real world, proved a military and moral disaster, but the A-Bomb painted such broad strokes that it could destroy entire cities (and end the war) , even when the NORDEN used to aim it once again missed.

(The A-bomb together Nature actually did the job : for the winds blow the fallout from the Bomb all over the world, regardless of  Humanity's best efforts to claim that this is entirely a man-made show. Fallout is so down-to-earth ,n'est-ce pas?)

But let us ignore such awkward truths and stick with the 'vision thing' :  call the original Norden plan part of the SKY GOD vision of Modernity.

All life on Earth would be nicely invisible (but still controllable) from 25,000 feet up ; controlled by coolly rational objective men modeling themselves quite self consciously upon PIERRE SIMON LAPLACE.

(Lenin's Omelets could still be made but no one would have to see or hear or smell the human eggs being broken.)

Laplace's vision was that scientific man, with a lot of effort , and thanks to Newton's three laws of physics - could observe the Universe from a place far above it and perfectly predict its past, present and future right down to the level of the atom.

The NORDEN, the assumed crown jewel (and as it turned out the culmination) of 250 years of Newtonian physics,  was just a start on this bold vision.

Modernist males (for this was a very male-centric vision) would become like the Sky Gods and Sky Fathers of ancient legend.

In another part of Columbia University - in the university but never really supported or encouraged by the university, unlike with the Manhattan Project - Martin Henry Dawson also had a vision.

Like him, the vision was unorthodox, humble and (literally) down-to-earth.

Down into the earth, actually.

 This was an earthling Vision of Life : our only possible home was down here on earth, at the ground zero of reality, not building some castles in the sky.

So he formed a commensal partnership with some of life's smallest and weakest beings.

 These were the earth fungi and bacteria whose presence
and 'earthy' smell was so familiar to him from his time in the WWI trenches.

All this so he could help the men and women and children in the figurative trenches of WWII - the 4F individuals overlooked or destroyed by a war that revolved very much around the 1As of intellectual and physical life.

But note first a further uncanny parallel with the much bigger, much badder, Manhattan Project.

His effort was seized upon, at the last minute after being either ignored or depreciated, by the Allied war effort in a determined effort to rescue another centerpiece of their war aims.

Dead soldiers were just that, dead ,said the Allied leadership.

 But soldiers,sailors and airmen seriously wounded and infected could be saved back to useful lives in WWII, unlike WWI, because we have got that wonderful man-made synthetic miracle drug called SULFA.

But the entire family of sulfa drugs - an army themselves with America alone issuing 7000 patents on the sulfa drugs during the war - were not working as promised.

Never fear, said modernist Chemistry,we'll synthesize this new stuff, penicillin, only make it better,  much cheaper and much much more plentiful.

A mini-Manhattan Project of money men and effort failed to produce any synthetic penicillin - or any synthetic quinine for that matter ----Nature did the job so much better, as it turned out.

Dawson's idea of a low tech factory of factories - trillions upon trillions of tiny fungi factories making penicillin inside low cost milk bottles in some underused milk plant - was working well , as GLAXO in England proved in spades.

It didn't use up scarce war-oriented resources or need highly skilled workers --- most of the workers growing and nurturing this precious life-giving crop were - surprise ! - women of child-bearing age.

Great !

Or was it ?

Not high tech enough for this science-run war of flash, glitz and Hollywood press agency.

Not male enough for testosteronic modernist science.

So the trillions of natural fungi penicillin makers were moved out of thousands of milk bottles and put into an extremely expensive milk bottle many stories high, made of scarce stainless steel and run by serious looking men in lab coats.

Now that seriously looked the business !

But it was in fact, just another kluge, a patch : like Newtonian Physics and the Norden , Chemistry had failed and Chemistry - the Queen of Science in the 1930s economy - never looked anywhere but downward from that point on.

(Just compare - if you will - the size of DuPont Chemicals versus the largest of the biotech companies in 1930 with DuPont and the largest of the biotech giants of today : no contest.)

So A-bombs and Penicillin:  two last minute kluges to cover male egos or two of the many planned high tech successes that ultimately won us the war ?

And which way forward: become like SKY GODS or humble and limit our hubris and become more like earthlings ????