The Allies weaponizing penicillin was as morally wrong as appeasing Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia on a platter , and for exactly the same reasons.
The Allies totally failed to see that giving everything to the mighty and nothing to the weak was exactly what caused the war in the first place: weaponizing penicillin was not going to win the war but rather cause Allies to lose the moral peace.
'Eugenicide with an English accent' was not a moral counterweight to Hitler's values, but merely an Anglo-Saxon cousin of his.
Henry Dawson realized, very early on in the Fall of 1940, that any cause willing to save the lives of its very weakest, such as the SBEs, even during a Total War, would be a cause worthy of dying for.
By contrast, any cause that was only a weak 'me too' of its enemy's morality wasn't going to get 20 year old infantrymen up and out of their foxholes with any alacrity when the whistle blew.
Justice is only truly just when it is as fair to the weak as it is to the mighty, as fair to the foolish as it is to the wise : but God knows it isn't easy to make each new generation of humanity realize this.
The Germans, Japanese, Soviets did have a cause they believed was worthy of dying for, perverted as it was ---- one reason why as individuals and in small groups, they were usually much better troops than any of their opposing Allied troops.
Interestingly, the free Polish troops were also considered to be braver than the other Allied troops : they knew they were going to have to fight very hard to secure the postwar fate of Poland - to keep it out of Allied Russian as well as Axis German hands.
They lost, thanks to FDR - but Dawson didn't.
Penicillin was de-weaponized , albeit only by loud public demand and against government wishes, and the Allies narrowly escaped being accused, postwar, having having caused a war crime of omission....
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Frank Vertosick : the genius within even the smallest and weakest
I would like to highly recommend you read a book by the neuro-surgeon and author Frank Vertosick, The Genius Within, which makes it clear that while the mighty might indeed be wise, the weak are by no means always foolish.
Individually, nothing and nobody, from sub-atomic particles, human brain cells to bacteria and ants are particularly noteworthy in the area of intelligence.
Doubt me in the case of humans ? Then why not throw your newborn baby out in the woods and let it fend for itself from birth.....
But as bundles of information gathering linkages in all directions, networks frequently react intelligently to the external environment in ways that enhance their continued survival and success.
Put in other words, their reaction to external threats and potentialities is more successful than mere dumb luck averages should allow.
Sounds like intelligent responses to me......
Individually, nothing and nobody, from sub-atomic particles, human brain cells to bacteria and ants are particularly noteworthy in the area of intelligence.
Doubt me in the case of humans ? Then why not throw your newborn baby out in the woods and let it fend for itself from birth.....
But as bundles of information gathering linkages in all directions, networks frequently react intelligently to the external environment in ways that enhance their continued survival and success.
Put in other words, their reaction to external threats and potentialities is more successful than mere dumb luck averages should allow.
Sounds like intelligent responses to me......
A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'
Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.
This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.
So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.
Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.
By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public (scientifically published) Science .
They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.
Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality, were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.
In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.
Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.
By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.
And more than a century later, still is.
In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .
Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.
Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.
But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.
Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....
This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.
So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.
Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.
By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public (scientifically published) Science .
They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.
Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality, were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.
In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.
Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.
By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.
And more than a century later, still is.
In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .
Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.
Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.
But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.
Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....
Modernity : "Might is Correct"
Modernity's claim that "Might was Right" (and correct) is a significant expansion from the Bible's mere temporary linking together of the two separate entities, the Mighty and the Wise, for the purpose of warning of hubris.
Now, under Modernity, the Mighty were (and invariably were) the Wise, by definition, simply for being mighty.
"Hubris will write the definitions from here on in, thank you very much." (!!!)
To be wise is not to be the truth, but to be able to seek it out and successfully separate it out from the non-truth and thus to be worthy.
The wise could triage truth from non-truth, could put truth and non-truth in a clearcut, eternal and universal vertical hierarchy of worthiness.
In addition, by definition, to be weak and small (beings) was to be foolish, unwise , unable to discern truth from non-truth, unworthy.
Under Modernity, big nations would indeed have more Nobel price winners, per capita, than small nations.
But for Modernity, small physical nonliving objects like atoms were the core of The Truth, seen as something able to be reduced to a few simple explanations about the motions of a very small number of very small, very simple, very stable, objects.
Truth was seen as eventually being contained in a short simple all-encompassing "Theory of Everything" : a few laws of physics would explain and predict everything in the past, present and future Universe, up to and including the workings of the human mind.
Modernity's Universe of Worthiness saw a tiny number of very big objects (the Great Powers nations : perhaps only Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) and a tiny number of very small objects (perhaps only the atoms of the most usually elements : oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and iron, because the others could be atomically transmutated upon request.)
First those humans and nations unworthy of life were dispatched, then plants, animals and microbes regarded as weeds and pathogens.
Finally all plants, animals and microorganisms were dispatched, defined as useless competitors, competing over limited space and valuable atoms.
Now, working on a surface as sterile and as wide-open as the surface of Mars, Modernity could really start with a clean slate.....
Now, under Modernity, the Mighty were (and invariably were) the Wise, by definition, simply for being mighty.
"Hubris will write the definitions from here on in, thank you very much." (!!!)
To be wise is not to be the truth, but to be able to seek it out and successfully separate it out from the non-truth and thus to be worthy.
The wise could triage truth from non-truth, could put truth and non-truth in a clearcut, eternal and universal vertical hierarchy of worthiness.
In addition, by definition, to be weak and small (beings) was to be foolish, unwise , unable to discern truth from non-truth, unworthy.
Under Modernity, big nations would indeed have more Nobel price winners, per capita, than small nations.
But for Modernity, small physical nonliving objects like atoms were the core of The Truth, seen as something able to be reduced to a few simple explanations about the motions of a very small number of very small, very simple, very stable, objects.
Truth was seen as eventually being contained in a short simple all-encompassing "Theory of Everything" : a few laws of physics would explain and predict everything in the past, present and future Universe, up to and including the workings of the human mind.
Modernity's Universe of Worthiness saw a tiny number of very big objects (the Great Powers nations : perhaps only Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) and a tiny number of very small objects (perhaps only the atoms of the most usually elements : oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and iron, because the others could be atomically transmutated upon request.)
First those humans and nations unworthy of life were dispatched, then plants, animals and microbes regarded as weeds and pathogens.
Finally all plants, animals and microorganisms were dispatched, defined as useless competitors, competing over limited space and valuable atoms.
Now, working on a surface as sterile and as wide-open as the surface of Mars, Modernity could really start with a clean slate.....
Commensal thoughts were parents to the Humanitarian penicillin deed ...
Before 1945 and the rise of post-Modernity, it was rare for scientific doubts to turn into humanitarian actions, but Martin Henry Dawson's wartime efforts against the weaponizing of penicillin was an important exception.
From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .
His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.
As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.
But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.
Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.
If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.
Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.
All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.
Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.
But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.
Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.
Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.
Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.
Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.
Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.
So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.
But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.
He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.
His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.
He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.
Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.
But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....
From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .
His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.
As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.
But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.
Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.
If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.
Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.
All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.
Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.
But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.
Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.
Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.
Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.
Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.
Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.
So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.
But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.
He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.
His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.
He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.
Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.
But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....
WWII : was Nature REALLY on the side of the bigger battalions ?
The distinguishing claim of the Age of Modernity was that Nature was on the side of the bigger battalions : a claim that finally received a definitive physical (rather than verbal) response from Nature, in the years between 1939 and 1945.
This is why we mark 1945 as the start of the new Age of post-Modernity, because unlike Chesterton's Christianity, Modernity has been tried - and failed.....
This is why we mark 1945 as the start of the new Age of post-Modernity, because unlike Chesterton's Christianity, Modernity has been tried - and failed.....
Friday, April 26, 2013
"Failure to stop Famines invariably dooms Dynasties" say Chinese-influenced cultures
If so - and I happen to agree with the Chinese - than nothing doomed the British, French and Nationalist Chinese Empires like their failure to prevent or solve the man-made famines of 1943-1945 in Bengal, Tonkin and Honan.
Most educated people are starting to know of the famine in Bengal of 1943-1944 , just as others learn more of the Hunger Winter famine in 1944-1945 in the west of the Netherlands.
We have long known hunger was widespread in the Axis world from all the 1945 photographs of skin and bone prisoners released from hundreds of POW and concentration camps around the world.
We've heard about starving Jews in ghettos and the starvation death of most of the enormous city of Leningrad.
But few know of the huge famine in Greece in 1940-1941 , with blame starting with the Axis and ending with Britain's coalition cabinet (the other Allies didn't really deserve much if any of the blame).
Even less is known about the huge famine in Vietnam (Tonkin) in 1944-1945 under the French and Japanese watch.
A few, older, people know of the horrible famine in Honan Province, under Nationalist Chinese control in 1943-1944 because an eyewitness, American writer Theodore White, wrote about it at the time.
But because the mechanized battles of tanks and guns and bombs seem so exciting to read about from a comfy armchair (rather than to actually live and die through), few writers write best sellers on the biggest human battle of WWII : just getting enough to eat to go on living .
Modernity's horde of tame writers do up Modernity's mechanical successes a real treat : but they avoid its biggest failure : its inability to do something as basic as keeping granddaughter feed and grandmother warm.
Maybe post-modernist writers can handle that WWII story much better.....
Most educated people are starting to know of the famine in Bengal of 1943-1944 , just as others learn more of the Hunger Winter famine in 1944-1945 in the west of the Netherlands.
We have long known hunger was widespread in the Axis world from all the 1945 photographs of skin and bone prisoners released from hundreds of POW and concentration camps around the world.
We've heard about starving Jews in ghettos and the starvation death of most of the enormous city of Leningrad.
But few know of the huge famine in Greece in 1940-1941 , with blame starting with the Axis and ending with Britain's coalition cabinet (the other Allies didn't really deserve much if any of the blame).
Even less is known about the huge famine in Vietnam (Tonkin) in 1944-1945 under the French and Japanese watch.
A few, older, people know of the horrible famine in Honan Province, under Nationalist Chinese control in 1943-1944 because an eyewitness, American writer Theodore White, wrote about it at the time.
But because the mechanized battles of tanks and guns and bombs seem so exciting to read about from a comfy armchair (rather than to actually live and die through), few writers write best sellers on the biggest human battle of WWII : just getting enough to eat to go on living .
Modernity's horde of tame writers do up Modernity's mechanical successes a real treat : but they avoid its biggest failure : its inability to do something as basic as keeping granddaughter feed and grandmother warm.
Maybe post-modernist writers can handle that WWII story much better.....
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