"7.8% unemployment figures work of Satan" says GOP, "Act of Providence" retort Dems

I lowered it to 7.8% !

We admit its not a headline you're ever likely to see soon in an American newspaper.


But SVE asks, "why not expect such headlines in what is supposedly the most religious nation on Earth?"

Yesterday the latest US unemployment figures came out.

For about 50 previous months, the figures had always been suitable for tin hatters (Republicans) in the US , even praiseworthy: because the figures confirmed the tin hat belief in "what a mess Obama was making of the economy".

But now yesterday's hint of better days led the tin hatter conspiracy -prone GOP to charge it was a top secret secular conspiracy to favour Obama, involving tens of thousands of civil servants and businesses - about half of them not even Democrats.

There are several other alternatives.

The figures are actually correct.

There is a conspiracy, all right - of aliens.

There is a conspiracy of Satan and his band of devils. Or a conspiracy by God and His angels.

Even the GOP would dismiss the idea that aliens are to blame.

But equally quickly, even the most evangelical among the Tin Hats would also dismiss the idea that God or the Devil influenced the latest unemployment figures.

Even as recently as WWII, most of the governments of the Allied nations could direct that a national day of prayer or thanks be held after a disaster or a victory and expect it would be a widely attended and be an uncontroversial event.

Enough voters - even if only the elderly voters of 75 years ago, ie those raised in times of mid-Victorian piety - still believed strongly in Acts of Providence for the rest of society to think it wise to go along with the gag.

But not anymore.

Is America actually the LEAST religious nation on earth ?

Now for half of the population - they call themselves conservative, I call them blue sky optimists - Nature/Reality is too simple to really hurt Man and the God/Satan doesn't exist and so that only leaves other humans to hurt them.

Dismiss the possibility of your own error and imperfections, dismiss  the existence (or Free Will) of God/Satan, dismiss the complexity of Nature/Reality, who or what else is there to blame when things don't go the way you ordain them to be ?

Conspiracy theories are not irrational, if your underlying assumption is that neither Nature/Reality nor God/Satan can seriously harm you.

It is is your underlying assumption that is brain-dead - not the reasoning thereafter.

The unemployment figure truthers of 2012 are the fallout of the loss of faith in God and loss of fear of Nature that accompanied the rise in the belief in "reified-science" in 1812 : 200 years ago....

Roof and Rhetoric share a word sense

Stalingrad's bubble

Just as a roof shields us from the reality of the external world - allowing us to live in our own physical bubble, so rhetoric can convince us that the facts of physical reality don't exist - even outside our physical bubble.

Mental bubbles sometimes burst : see Stalingrad, the Battle of

It can help create a mental bubble seemingly more powerful than any physical shelter - until we run out of fuel, food and ammo , as at Stalingrad.....

Are the supposedly eternal and universal laws of nature nothing but Reified Rhetoric ?

Of course they are - can't you tell by the way I posed the question ?

I was using rhetoric --- we all do - particularly scientists.

I emphasize that point because so many scientists claim they do not.

This, in itself, is a highly effective bit of rhetoric.

But when you start deluding yourself thinking that if you and enough of your colleagues say something often enough it must be true (rather like Hitler and his General Staff after the Fall of France) you are in danger of reifying your rhetoric into something that is no longer an airy claim but now a solid fact.

We can't ever know if the laws of the universe are in fact eternal and universal and it needn't matter.

No matter unless you treat science as a theology - in which case you reify limited human suppositions into unlimited universal laws.....

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.


But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.

 So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of  low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.

Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".

Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...

This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.

 A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.

D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.

But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.

Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.

 They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......

1850: Claude Bernard, Homeostasis and the birth of "Optimistic" Modernity

Hubris of the Skygods...

It is probably no coincidence at all that Modernity is conventionally dated to 1850, the same year that french doctor Claude Bernard first speculated publicly that all advanced life forms - like modern mankind - excel because of complex internal systems to keep them shielded from drastic changes in the external world.


This became the founding tenet of the medical research area called Physiology, which dominated medical research in terms of its elite status and output of publications - until after WWII.

In 1929, leading (American) physiologist Walter B Cannon named that tenet "homeostasis" - the ability to maintain their internal bio-chemical functions at equilibrium becoming the essence of all advanced beings.

Unwisely the metaphor was later extended to (or did it come from ?) economics (the self-correcting market etc) and to geology, chemistry, you name it.

Because an equilibrium of regular rhythms ever returning to a central norm was indeed the central tenet of "optimistic" Modernity.

But Cannon and Bernard,being very "optimistic" modern and hence, by definition, being very human-oriented ,had all their work focussed on stand-in humans : cats, dogs, rats killed in the cause of defining homeostasis.

Mammals in other words : and indeed all mammals do keep their internal system at a constant temperature, for example, compared to the temperature changes of the greater world outside their bodies.

But most other beings do not : fish,frogs, snakes, trees, bacteria all let their internal temperatures align with that of the outer world ---- frugally saving immense amounts of energy in the process.

And there you have it : Bernard and Cannon were really - you knew it all along didn't you ? - doing the work of the energy corporations, by making the vast amounts of (fossil) energy consumed by modern humans seem to be the natural and indeed the preferred natural way of the world: industrial homeostasis.

For the modern factory came along about the same time as Claude Bernard's key insight did : in the 1850s.

Imagine it is 1850 and it is winter and midnight, so not surprisingly, it is dark, cold, wet and windy outside.

But inside the factory, the back shift is humming right along : there are the lights and heat of a midday in Spring and the roof and walls are keeping the wind and rain out.

In earlier times, such weather would force humans into inactivity - as it still does frogs and many others.

But now, thanks to non-renewable fossil energy, human employees ( rather like individual cells within a mammal body) can hum along productively 24/7/365 inside the "skin" of a modern factory.

Man's niche now seems to be everywhere, when viewed from such a building (particularly if this "building" is given wheels or propellers and can fly through the deepest sky or water, crawl across sandy deserts and wet jungles or climb up snowy mountain tops and down deep underground mines.

(Or even fly into deep Space.)

But is it ?

Industrial homeostasis is really spelt Hubris.....

Extremophiles - usually bacteria but including many other microbes and very tiny plants and animals - occupy the most extreme niches imaginable as well.

But they have done so for hundreds of millions of years - even billions of years.

Man will cease to do so the minute the fossil fuel needed to maintain the artificially climate inside the building and inside his body runs out.

But these tiny beings survive at the eternal temperatures, PHs, etc of their very hostile niche and yet find enough food energy to survive and reproduce.

Homeostasis seems to tell Man we can ignore the reality of the external world and live in our own bubble, but it is a bubble that is buoyed aloft on a puff of strictly temporary hot air.

In World War Two, two great scientific nations, Germany and Japan saw their troops starve freeze and fry to death when food and fossil fuel ran out at the ends of their lines of conquest.

While these Supermen died, invisible bacteria all about them  exalted as, once again, The Meek inherited that little bit of the Earth....

Hitler was all about "The Triumph of the WORD" , not of the WILL : rhetoric = results

Triumph of mere WORDS ?

Add Churchill, FDR and Tojo to that sorry mess. All of the leaders of the biggest combatants of WWII felt that the war would be won when their opponents' morale and will was broken - not by good (bad ?) old-fashioned occupation of the opponents' home territory.


By talk, words, spin, PR, propaganda, censorship : psych warfare, not bullet-firing weapons.

But it all didn't work, did it?

FDR and Churchill invested the plurality of their war spending on the bombing of cities but failed to break the will of the Germans as much as Hitler's Blitz failed to break Britain.

Tojo and crew dreamed one decisive naval victory at sea would break the American will and force them to agree to letting Japan have its rightful place in the South East Asian sun.

No such defeat came, but even if it had, it don't have done anything but toughened the American will to defeat Japan - and as that will could have used quite a bit of toughening up, such a victory for Japan would have been very Pyrrhic in the end.

Hitler and the Germany Army assumed a few smashing victories in encircling Russian armies would break the will of the Russians, leading to the overthrow of the government and Russia would fall like a ripe plum into German hands.

Who knows what might have happened had Germany captured Moscow in 1941 ---- but the Panzers never really got there : Russian mud and Russian snow don't have ears or eyes and so ignored all the Nazi news of imminent Russian defeat.

WWII proves physical Reality Bites mere rhetoric

People do respond to bad news (and so morale can be broken) but physical reality does not.

Ultimately it was long distances and bad weather (leading to equipment failure and shortages of everything from food to shells to fuel) that frustrated and defeated most armies and navies in WWII --- not their human opponents.

The WORLD defeated the WORD......

Duhig's Penicillin saved lives where Alexander Fleming failed - because of - not in spite of - "poorer" technology !

GLAXO's moral lowpoint: April '43

Briefly - very briefly - in April 1943, at the height of all the suffering and the dying of WWII, Glaxo the drug company had a tremendous technological success and an enormous moral failure.

Briefly , Glaxo was the world's largest producer of what little penicillin the world produced, 15 long years after its first discovery. But none of that penicillin - zero - went to directly helping World War Two's sick and the dying.

Instead it was all destroyed by Glaxo chemists, as part of in the war-long futile contest to see what drug company would be the first to see MAN make penicillin, instead of some slimey slime.

Much of the story of wartime penicillin was that sordid story.

The dark dirty story of an contest between alpha male chemists and CEOs and chemists manques (in particular), to see who could get the Nobel prize and the glory and the profit for the patentable total synthesis of penicillin --- rather than submerging all that testosterone in an all out attempt to aid the sick and dying now and fuss over the glory later.

95 % of the wartime penicillin story was shabby beyond belief, but 5% was truly heroic medicine at its best

It is a truly shabby tale ---- as shabby as the war itself.

Alexander Fleming was part of that shabby tale : he never deflected from his 14 year old belief that penicillin might be a good antiseptic ( ie not to be taken internally, as life-saving drugs must be), if and only the chemists learned to synthesize it.

Jim Duhig --- once he had learned how people like Henry Dawson had grown their own clinical penicillin and injected it in a semi-purified state into their patients without killing them - went a further step.

He "downmarketed" his technological requirements and didn't bother to even semi-purify his home-owned penicillin.

The penicillin he injected into dying patients in 1943-1944 was cruder than even the semi-purified penicillin that Fleming dabbed around the open wounds of patients in 1928-1929, 15 years earlier.

Fleming reported mostly failures with his semi-purified penicillin while Duhig's totally unpurified penicillin saved the lives of patients all doctors had placed 'beyond hope' !

How on Earth ?!

All attempts at purifying, concentrating or crystallizing penicillin came at great costs: the harsh chemical techniques destroyed most of the delicate penicillin, the efforts wore out the overworked wartime staff and introduced deadly chemicals into the penicillin (when removing deadly chemicals was the original point of the whole exercise ! )

Duhig focussed his tiny overworked crew into merely making more and more raw penicillin - ie in upping raw production - and then in carefully preserving that delicate lifesaver, until it could be quickly poured into the bodies of dying patients.

Per person-hour of effort, I suspect that Duhig got 10 to100 times as much clinical penicillin as Dawson, Fleming , Glaxo, Merck, Florey et all got for all their hard work.

(Dawson being at the 10x end and Florey at the 100x end.)

Only Robert Pulvertaft, despite working in the desert heat (!) of wartime Egypt, probably did as well in turning raw penicillin juice into saved lives , with the minimum of human effort.

The unconscious, untested, assumption had always been that the other materials in raw penicillin juice would cause a deadly allergic reaction in patients unless purified away.

Never considered - except by Henry Dawson's team - was the idea that raw penicillin's other unknown materials might actually help penicillin work - as they certainly rarely seemed to harm the patient.

The jury is still out on that idea --- but un-purified penicillin did in fact rarely, if ever, harm the patients.

But converting penicillin from a weak acid to a salt ( to stabilize it for longterm commercial storage and sales)  does bring the well known dangers of introducing too much salts into the delicate balance of salts in the heart-blood system.

(Since Duhig's totally un-purified penicillin remained a weak acid and not a salt, he could pump simply tremendous amounts of penicillin liquid into patients' blood without killing them.)

And it was only once penicillin was totally purified and given in high doses did some people - a very few people - start dying from an allergic reaction to ------- to PURE penicillin !

Call it groupthink or tunnel vision, but *eugenics' powers over mid century doctors and scientists was so strong, they never asked the most basic of all science questions.

They never asked themselves, " if a mixture of penicillin and impurities sometimes causes a sharp spike in temperature in some patients, is it caused by (a) those particular patients's body chemistry (b) the impurities (c) or the penicillin itself ?"

If only they had, millions of people might have lived out their full lives, starting in 1928.....

* Eugenics was merely the leading edge of a middle class culture obsessed with purity and a hatred of dirt that went beyond all bounds of rationality : only a Mary Douglas could begin to assess what was really going on in the middle class mind in the mid 20th century.