Forget the 1% versus the 99% : try the .2ppm versus the rest of us !

   Interstate 495 (I 495) is much better known as "THE BELTWAY", as in 'opinion inside the Beltway'. That is because I495's 64 miles of asphalt is solely devoted to encircling Washington DC and its inner suburbs.
  What goes on inside that tiny 'bubble of hot air' has a far greater effect on the cultural - and thus political/social/economical and biological - life of the globe than all the rest of the world combined.
  Opinion makers (opinion-takers?) from all around our planet take their cues from what is said or not said/ done or not done inside that tiny blessed circle.

   Or is that Washington DC's "Blesse' Circle" ?
    3300 squares miles of self importance : versus 200,000,000 square miles left for the rest of us.
   So ".2 parts per million" rules the rest of the mix.
   You may have heard of the "RESISTING THE GREEN DRAGON", an evangelical front organization actually partially
funded by Big Oil and orchestrated by those " Beelzebubs of the Beltway" --- the lobbyists.
   It is yet another example of the astroturfing efforts of the Reality-Deniers.
   Some people say that cars goes around and around that Beltway.
   Untrue: what actually goes around and around is the money-changers of the 21st century.
   The Beltway is really a 'money loop' turning semi-clean money into very dirty money.
  In the case of the Reality-Deniers, that money is running through cutouts and front men to secret numbered bank accounts in offshore havens, with impressive-sounding organizations existing physically only as separate box office numbers, together with agents and their handlers and fellow travellers riding along side.
  On and on and on ---- including all the rest of the Cold War spy world --- as revealed in endless government commission reports and lurid 'fictional' novels.
   Michael Crichton had his own lurid novel about a shadowy spy world of green environmentalists ---- isn't past due time, that others rip this astroturfing story from the headlines and do up some novels of these Reality-Deniers and their Liars-For-Hire...

con:FUSION of deuterium & tritium : moderated by KOOL-AID of course - which its promoters will later drink ...

   Is there anything one can do to convince GCR to back nuclear fission plants?
   Sure : just threaten to develop nuclear fusion plants, instead.

   Today's nuclear plants -fission nuclear plants- are just extraordinarily expensive ,but low tech, kettles to boil water.
   Fusion plants will use even more expensive means to boil water - technology so high tech we haven't even invented it yet and probably never will.
   And the expense ?
   Don't get us started !
   Besides of which we already have a near-perpetual, safe, cheap (free) source of endless amounts of fusion energy.
   We call it the SUN.
    It is safe fusion energy because it is 93 million miles from us.
    It is cheap because the SUN does up fusion right - it does it in a power plant a million miles in diameter, not in the tiny little human sized boxes con:fusion promoters plan to use.
   The money the world of Know-Nothing political leaders and Say-Anything physicists has been throwing at fusion power for the last 70 years would have given us high efficiency/cheap photocell panels from Pole to Pole.
   But the mantra of the Limit-Deniers is ,as always : "Anything the SUN of GOD can do, we can do better...."

NORMA SALAH, first Nova Scotian saved from death by PENICILLIN

67 years ago on July 24th 1944, the Halifax Chronicle Herald newspaper reported that Norma Salah had been snatched from the jaws of death by the new miracle drug PENICILLIN, which had just been released (in limited amounts for only the gravest cases) to  Canadian civilian hospitals, starting on the 12th of that same month.
   Norma was probably the first, or among the very first Nova Scotians, to have their lives saved by the world's most beloved medicine.
  Today's newspapers here mention the tragic death - from stabbing - of  a Norma Salah ,age 77.

   I haven't confirmed it, but it seems at least highly probable, that she is that same little girl from all those years ago.
   If so, what a sad ending to such a hopeful start in life....

DAWSON & RADIOACTIVITY : conceived on the same day (Nov 8 1895) ?

   Dr Martin Henry Dawson was born on August 6th 1896 and was conceived about 9 months earlier.
    Early November 1895, in all likelihood.
    About the very same time ,in fact, when Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-Rays (November 8th 1895).
    This event, in turn, led almost immediately (less than three months later) to the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity - perhaps the single most astounding discovery in science in the 19th century.

    Spontaneous (and random and unpredictable) radioactivity, it was determined after much effort, was merely the visible sign of an even more astounding natural event: atoms of one element in the process of becoming atoms of another element.
   Alchemy's magic of transmutation, brought to life.
   Think of it : what can that familiar chemist's word - elemental - possibly mean if not 'fundamental' and 'indivisible' and 'stable' ?
   Now all that had seemed universal and eternal and stable was revealed to be but a passing fancy.
   And it happened, not as Science said all Reality happened, IE in a deterministic way, but rather merely upon Mother Nature's whim !
   The certitudes of two thousand years of science, philosophy and mathematics trembled.
   Most people successfully ignored radioactivity's strange implications for how all Mankind understood Reality to focus instead on its superficial charms.
 Until that morning in Hiroshima, on August 6th 1945, (which would have been - strange coincidence - Dawson's 49th birthday) when 'all this strange radioactivity stuff'  reared up and destroyed an entire metropolitan city,  with but a single bomb.
   Now the entire world sat up and finally paid full notice - almost 50 years to the day from the original discovery.
    A few - too few - even sat down that summer day to really ponder the philosophic implications of radioactivity's spontaneity and thus ipon its ability to destroy our sense of how we had thought the Universe worked.
  Pity that : because this was an ability far beyond even its now proven powers to destroy life and matter.
   Dr Dawson's lifework was not  at allabout radioactivity - but as it happened his life spanned radioactivity's critical first years almost exactly : something that makes things much easier for the biographer of Dawson or of Radioactivity.
    Yet Dawson was involved in 'transmutation', as it happens, in fact involved in a fundamentally critical way.
   But not radioactivity's transmutation of matter and energy (the stuff of Physics and Chemistry) but rather in DNA's transmutation of life and organization (the stuff of Biology).
   The only beings that can as yet (humanity is working on it) transmutate DNA and hence Life are the microbes - and the lives of microbes was Dawson's lifework.
   The research that led to the discovery of what Dawson called  'bacterial transformation' (of DNA) began like the story of radioactivity in the mid-1890s.
 Questions began to be asked about cases of bacterial variations so extreme as to sound more like the spontaneous creation of new species and a mere variation on a given theme.
   But in orthodox biology circles that was a big no-no:  had not Darwin himself said the creation of a new species would take millions of years to emerge, not an hour or two ?
   The most unsettling implications of Dawson's work - like radioactivity's most profound implications - were successfully ignored then - in fact, still are.
   If 1945 was the year of Auschwitz , the A-bomb and of Penicillin, it was also the year of transformative DNA as well  : annus mirabilis indeed ...

Big but Simple, Small but Complex, the paradoxes of PO-MO Science refutes central tenet of MODERNITY

   Modernity was birthed in the late 19th century ,when Darwinian Biology saw a definite, if meandering, directionality to progress, leading through random activity into self organization - onward to ever bigger and hence ever more "complex" beings .
  This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
  Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
  But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.

     Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
 For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of  atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
   So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
   What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
   A mystery.
   But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
   It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
   But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
    Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
   These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
   Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
   Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
    So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
   But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII  (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
   Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
    Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
   However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
 The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
   (That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
   The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
   Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously.     Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
    The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
    Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
   The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
   Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching  Dawson's old DNA stuff.
   Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
    But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well  from zoology and botany.
  Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
   A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
   The weak, as it turned out,  might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....

MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....

WWII caused by Bad Faith Scientists preferring "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" to "TRUTH,TRUTH,TRUTH"

   After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was   perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.

   Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
   (Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
    It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
   There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
   Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
   It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
   They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well  respected for doing so.
   Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
  They were thus dependent highly on public good will.