Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.
And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.
The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.
HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.
And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?
There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.
All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.
All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.
Ironic, isn't it ?
Monday, August 31, 2015
The Age of Progress was inevitably also the Age of Big
Michael B Schiffer (The Portable Radio in America) is fighting an uphill battle and he knows it.
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Schiffer is hoping to show the rich history of success by American engineers at making extremely small and portable radios (and hearing aids) before WWII and before the transistor and before the Japanese.
I think his book and all its documentation makes his case - in spades.
But Schiffer is frank is stating the postwar American customer generally wanted no part of anything small - not in cars and not in radios or TVs ----- or in hydro dams, bridges, aircraft, bombers or battleships.
In a an era of Progress and Manichean Modernity, the Bigger was very much the better.
Microbes were small and hopelessly primitive --- Man and his works were big and clever.
Ipso Facto.
The cult of the small and the miniature, seen most fully in our present world of electronics, only truly came to the fore when the phrase "this is the microbes' world and we humans are just visiting" became a commonplace.
It may be a coincidence but I don't think so.
Like the TV detective always says, "I don't believe in coincidences"....
Microbes can reproduce a million times as fast as humans - or a thousand times as slow
Wait, wait a minute - you ain't seen nothing yet folks - there's more, lots more !
They can live almost without water, live in salty brine or strong acid, resist radiation, survive extreme hot and cold, and the high pressures of the deep underground, live in the dark, live inside incredibly tiny holes in rock.
They can share all their billions of different genes through the process of horizontal gene transfer, HGT, a sort of loosey goosey world wide library system where everyone is both author and patron.
No globe wide catastrophe in four billion years has been able to kill them.
No wonder, if we recall they can remain in suspended animation for perhaps millions of years, without any food or water, inside extremely hot or extremely cold bare rock, just patiently waiting for Churchill's broad sunlit uplands to reemerge.
Of course, on October 15th 1940, almost no one would have believed any of this, even if it had been gathered in one popular account for all to read.
For "The Symmetry of Progress and Manichean Modernity", circa 1940, simply demanded that the brilliance of civilized Man is to be balanced and framed by the stupidity of the primitive Microbe.
Martin Henry Dawson's pioneering injections of mold-made penicillin into patients on October 16th 1940 began the slow drip drip drip that eventually ended that delusion.
Of course the many war time activities of Europe's biggest civilization also helped...
They can live almost without water, live in salty brine or strong acid, resist radiation, survive extreme hot and cold, and the high pressures of the deep underground, live in the dark, live inside incredibly tiny holes in rock.
They can share all their billions of different genes through the process of horizontal gene transfer, HGT, a sort of loosey goosey world wide library system where everyone is both author and patron.
No globe wide catastrophe in four billion years has been able to kill them.
No wonder, if we recall they can remain in suspended animation for perhaps millions of years, without any food or water, inside extremely hot or extremely cold bare rock, just patiently waiting for Churchill's broad sunlit uplands to reemerge.
Of course, on October 15th 1940, almost no one would have believed any of this, even if it had been gathered in one popular account for all to read.
For "The Symmetry of Progress and Manichean Modernity", circa 1940, simply demanded that the brilliance of civilized Man is to be balanced and framed by the stupidity of the primitive Microbe.
Martin Henry Dawson's pioneering injections of mold-made penicillin into patients on October 16th 1940 began the slow drip drip drip that eventually ended that delusion.
Of course the many war time activities of Europe's biggest civilization also helped...
Sunday, August 30, 2015
What if penicillin was a Paradox, rather than a miracle ?
Google penicillin + miracle together and you get over a third of a million references, in English alone.
So wartime penicillin was clearly one of God's miracles, n'est c'est pas ?
But what if it was one of God's paradoxes instead ?
We all recall how much GK Chesterton loved to talk about God's paradoxes and how freely he added many of his own.
Adolf Hitler love to 'talk' too - rants usually.
All too often about how Jews were fungoid growths and fungus ferments.
Adolf and German right wing culture of his era generally all had a real mania for seeing Jews as literally being cultural fungus pathogens bent dissolving the German organic society.
During WWII, the Nazis saw the entire war as being about a fungoid growth taking the world by storm ---- with the Aryan race resisting it all the way, in a case of it being either them or us.
That proved to be the case, because in 1945, the Nazi Aryan vision was totally defeated and penicillin did indeed take the entire world by storm....
"Isn't it ironic," sings Alanis M.....
So wartime penicillin was clearly one of God's miracles, n'est c'est pas ?
But what if it was one of God's paradoxes instead ?
We all recall how much GK Chesterton loved to talk about God's paradoxes and how freely he added many of his own.
Adolf Hitler love to 'talk' too - rants usually.
All too often about how Jews were fungoid growths and fungus ferments.
Adolf and German right wing culture of his era generally all had a real mania for seeing Jews as literally being cultural fungus pathogens bent dissolving the German organic society.
During WWII, the Nazis saw the entire war as being about a fungoid growth taking the world by storm ---- with the Aryan race resisting it all the way, in a case of it being either them or us.
That proved to be the case, because in 1945, the Nazi Aryan vision was totally defeated and penicillin did indeed take the entire world by storm....
"Isn't it ironic," sings Alanis M.....
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Which would you rather have injected into your veins : fungus piss or piss from a guy with VD ?
Seemingly not an attractive choice is it but most people learned to take in all in stride as long as you weren't too blatant about it.
Most people during WWII had to make do with semi-purified fungus excrements (aka penicillin) injected into them.
An unlucky few got the penicillin extracted (sic) from the urine of men with VD at the Marine Hospital on Staten island who had just received penicillin.
From 40 to 60% of the original penicillin injected into us, leaves in our urine four hours later, completely unharmed.
The extraction was supposedly very simple, according to Dr LH Sophian, admittedly a very well regarded medical scientist.
(Basically making the urine even more acid by adding very strong HCL acid and then adding some acetone and chilling the mix in a fridge for 4 hours and then separating penicillin from acetone into water) and yielded up to 30% of the 40%-60% excreted.
That is 12% to 18% of the original penicillin.
But I doubt that the result could have been as pure as the original penicillin, itself already pretty impure.
Because if the result was at all pure, given such a supposedly easy extraction method, all the Allies' wartime drug industry would be busy extracting penicillin this way, on a commercial basis.
And very odd, when for 20 years the world's doctors and scientists were united in being repulsed by the mere thought of injecting natural fungus piss into humans, they said nothing about the idea of injecting VD filled "piss penicillin" into the same human veins...
Most people during WWII had to make do with semi-purified fungus excrements (aka penicillin) injected into them.
An unlucky few got the penicillin extracted (sic) from the urine of men with VD at the Marine Hospital on Staten island who had just received penicillin.
From 40 to 60% of the original penicillin injected into us, leaves in our urine four hours later, completely unharmed.
The extraction was supposedly very simple, according to Dr LH Sophian, admittedly a very well regarded medical scientist.
(Basically making the urine even more acid by adding very strong HCL acid and then adding some acetone and chilling the mix in a fridge for 4 hours and then separating penicillin from acetone into water) and yielded up to 30% of the 40%-60% excreted.
That is 12% to 18% of the original penicillin.
But I doubt that the result could have been as pure as the original penicillin, itself already pretty impure.
Because if the result was at all pure, given such a supposedly easy extraction method, all the Allies' wartime drug industry would be busy extracting penicillin this way, on a commercial basis.
And very odd, when for 20 years the world's doctors and scientists were united in being repulsed by the mere thought of injecting natural fungus piss into humans, they said nothing about the idea of injecting VD filled "piss penicillin" into the same human veins...
The acorn becomes an oak : October 16th 1940
Adults of a certain age were all quite small when they first learned the acute difference between those two very similar sounding medical words that adults like to use : antiseptic and antibiotic.
For when we scratched our knee falling off our trike, Mom washed it, put an orange antiseptic that stung like heck and then gave us a kiss and a cookie.
We had long forgotten the spill before the orange washed off and the scratch healed.
But then one dread-filled summer's afternoon, the whole house was extremely tense as neighbours filed in. whispering low.
"Spinal Meningitis".
Suddenly old Dr Mattison, who never ever made housecalls, came speeding up the drive on two wheels and ran up the steps two at a time, dragging his black bag.
Without as much as even a curt hello, he drew a big needle out of his bag and plunged it deep into little sister and held his thumb full down until it emptied.
Then, after a profound release of pent up air, he casually tapped Mom on the shoulder and in an unnaturally loud voice said , "Marg, where's your manners, how about a cuppa ?"
No one but no one ever dared call Mom 'Marg' and she looked momentarily shocked, but then she shook all over, gave off a relieved laugh and scurried off to the kitchen.
And for the first and only time in your life, you saw Dad burst into tears, balled like a baby, as Doctor Mattison patted baby sister's on the head repeatedly and said, "you'll be alright" until the ambulance arrived.
That is the difference an antibiotic makes.
But just as even a mighty oak started as a tiny acorn, so too the most famous of all antibiotics, penicillin, started out as a harmless antiseptic rather than a mighty life-saving antibiotic.
For the first twelve years of its existence as a medicine, its prolonged childhood of the soul, penicillin was only used occasionally, dabbed as an antiseptic on external infections, with usually modest results.
But seventy five years this Fall, on October 16th 1940, at NYC's famous Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, Penicillin finally climbed out of short pants and into long pants as it was injected for the very first time in a dying patient with the intention of saving his life.
That patient, Charles Aronson, was a young man dying of then invariably fatal SBE, the form of heart valve disease caused by earlier bouts of Rheumatic Fever.
That pioneering dose of penicillin, ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics, must of helped because unexpectedly Charles lived and returned to a useful working life.
An in that instant, an acorn became an oak....
For when we scratched our knee falling off our trike, Mom washed it, put an orange antiseptic that stung like heck and then gave us a kiss and a cookie.
We had long forgotten the spill before the orange washed off and the scratch healed.
But then one dread-filled summer's afternoon, the whole house was extremely tense as neighbours filed in. whispering low.
"Spinal Meningitis".
Suddenly old Dr Mattison, who never ever made housecalls, came speeding up the drive on two wheels and ran up the steps two at a time, dragging his black bag.
Without as much as even a curt hello, he drew a big needle out of his bag and plunged it deep into little sister and held his thumb full down until it emptied.
Then, after a profound release of pent up air, he casually tapped Mom on the shoulder and in an unnaturally loud voice said , "Marg, where's your manners, how about a cuppa ?"
No one but no one ever dared call Mom 'Marg' and she looked momentarily shocked, but then she shook all over, gave off a relieved laugh and scurried off to the kitchen.
And for the first and only time in your life, you saw Dad burst into tears, balled like a baby, as Doctor Mattison patted baby sister's on the head repeatedly and said, "you'll be alright" until the ambulance arrived.
That is the difference an antibiotic makes.
But just as even a mighty oak started as a tiny acorn, so too the most famous of all antibiotics, penicillin, started out as a harmless antiseptic rather than a mighty life-saving antibiotic.
For the first twelve years of its existence as a medicine, its prolonged childhood of the soul, penicillin was only used occasionally, dabbed as an antiseptic on external infections, with usually modest results.
But seventy five years this Fall, on October 16th 1940, at NYC's famous Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Centre, Penicillin finally climbed out of short pants and into long pants as it was injected for the very first time in a dying patient with the intention of saving his life.
That patient, Charles Aronson, was a young man dying of then invariably fatal SBE, the form of heart valve disease caused by earlier bouts of Rheumatic Fever.
That pioneering dose of penicillin, ushering in our present Age of Antibiotics, must of helped because unexpectedly Charles lived and returned to a useful working life.
An in that instant, an acorn became an oak....
When both pigs and badly crippled birds fly, the only miracle we humans chose to notice involves the pigs
One definition of God's miracles is that they must defy gravity, as with pigs that fly, or involve defying some one or other of God's ten thousand or so commandments of science.
But what if God sometime choses to follow His own scientific commandments but merely gild their lilly a bit beyond normal expectations?
What we catholics like to call miracles in the third degree.
As in the crippled bird returning to nest, or when a crippled plane successfully returns to base.
Or when the penicillium arrived to usher in a kinder gentler post-modern era just at the very moment when Manichean Modernity was really going postal.
These unnoteworthy quiet 'miracles', in the human metaphorical sense, might turn out to have been God's miracles as well...
But what if God sometime choses to follow His own scientific commandments but merely gild their lilly a bit beyond normal expectations?
What we catholics like to call miracles in the third degree.
As in the crippled bird returning to nest, or when a crippled plane successfully returns to base.
Or when the penicillium arrived to usher in a kinder gentler post-modern era just at the very moment when Manichean Modernity was really going postal.
These unnoteworthy quiet 'miracles', in the human metaphorical sense, might turn out to have been God's miracles as well...
What if Penicillin really was a miracle ?
What if we never find the mis-laid personal account from Henry Dawson, finally explaining the reasons for the other Manhattan Project, because that document never actually existed.
Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.
Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.
I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.
Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.
Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.
As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.
But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?
What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.
Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....
*************
*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey
Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.
Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.
I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.
Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.
Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.
As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.
But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?
What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.
Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....
*************
*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Way out of his comfort zone
I was not truly 'surprised' that the normally highly diffident Dr Martin Henry Dawson broke his own team protocol and became the first person in history to inject an antibiotic (dirty natural penicillin) into a patient, 75 years ago this October 16th.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
"Can you tell a rich guy's poo from a poor guy's poo -- or a civilized poop from a primitive's poop ?
Yeah, me neither.
And telling the difference between human poo and animal poo doesn't get any much easier.
We are all animals, all excrete, all age, all die, all decompose.
Yeah, we humans do think and dream (more accurately, we humans think and dream more than do other animals) but it doesn't seem to have increased our evolutionary luck.
No dumb critter ever came up with a way to mutually assure their species would all instantly die in a nuclear war.
Cleanliness and purity, elegance, beauty, symmetry, equilibrium are all just concepts the old religions and the new religion (Science) use to convince us that the religiously pure and the civilized don't really poop and don't stink, don't age, die and decompose.
The sight and smell of poop and fungoid growths always make that sort highly uneasy or even irrationally angry, because those sights and smells remind them that our mental defences are just that : mental --- totally unable to arrest the inevitable physical processes of our bodies.
And here is where our ability to think hurts and doesn't help : the animals simply poop and move on.
We humans agonize about it, deny it and even organize mass killings of "stinky" Jews, Gypsies, Blacks and Spics around it....
And telling the difference between human poo and animal poo doesn't get any much easier.
We are all animals, all excrete, all age, all die, all decompose.
Yeah, we humans do think and dream (more accurately, we humans think and dream more than do other animals) but it doesn't seem to have increased our evolutionary luck.
No dumb critter ever came up with a way to mutually assure their species would all instantly die in a nuclear war.
Cleanliness and purity, elegance, beauty, symmetry, equilibrium are all just concepts the old religions and the new religion (Science) use to convince us that the religiously pure and the civilized don't really poop and don't stink, don't age, die and decompose.
The sight and smell of poop and fungoid growths always make that sort highly uneasy or even irrationally angry, because those sights and smells remind them that our mental defences are just that : mental --- totally unable to arrest the inevitable physical processes of our bodies.
And here is where our ability to think hurts and doesn't help : the animals simply poop and move on.
We humans agonize about it, deny it and even organize mass killings of "stinky" Jews, Gypsies, Blacks and Spics around it....
Wednesday, August 26, 2015
"a Nazi's work is never done"
I know, I know, the phrase is usually "a woman's work is never done".
It refers to the repetitious nature of traditional women's work done in the home .
Woman know well its endless cycle of cleaning house, shopping, cooking, cleaning up dishes, washing clothes, washing children and ironing hubbie's clothes ---- on and on.
And then start it all over again the next day ---- and for all the days, weeks, months, years and decades after that.
Futile --- like trying to sweep back the ocean.
But the Nazi men self-selected for themselves the sort of work normally reserved for women in a very real sense when they took on the task of keeping both 'the home' of Germans and the German Volk 'family' 100% pure and 100% clean --- free from any sort of human 'germs'.
And it would have been a task that would never ever have stopped, even if Nazis had won the war and they had killed off all the world's Jews.
A new bogeyman would have been invented, to blame, to fear and to seek out and kill.
Meanwhile even if the Aktion T4 had killed all the defectives and even if the concentration camp system had killed off the 'politicals' and the 'asocials', each new generation would just breed some more, to be once again hunted down and killed.
And smelling out all the mixed babies created by illicit sex in dark corners, between Germans and forbidden races and ethnicities - between dark haired pure Germans and impure blonde Poles - oh don't get me started on that one says Himmler.
As G&S once sang, a compulsive obsessive mass murderer's lot is not a happy one.....
It refers to the repetitious nature of traditional women's work done in the home .
Woman know well its endless cycle of cleaning house, shopping, cooking, cleaning up dishes, washing clothes, washing children and ironing hubbie's clothes ---- on and on.
And then start it all over again the next day ---- and for all the days, weeks, months, years and decades after that.
Futile --- like trying to sweep back the ocean.
But the Nazi men self-selected for themselves the sort of work normally reserved for women in a very real sense when they took on the task of keeping both 'the home' of Germans and the German Volk 'family' 100% pure and 100% clean --- free from any sort of human 'germs'.
And it would have been a task that would never ever have stopped, even if Nazis had won the war and they had killed off all the world's Jews.
A new bogeyman would have been invented, to blame, to fear and to seek out and kill.
Meanwhile even if the Aktion T4 had killed all the defectives and even if the concentration camp system had killed off the 'politicals' and the 'asocials', each new generation would just breed some more, to be once again hunted down and killed.
And smelling out all the mixed babies created by illicit sex in dark corners, between Germans and forbidden races and ethnicities - between dark haired pure Germans and impure blonde Poles - oh don't get me started on that one says Himmler.
As G&S once sang, a compulsive obsessive mass murderer's lot is not a happy one.....
clean and pure are 100% or they are dirty and impure
The 'One Drop Rule' --- the American laws that if you had ever had any non-white fore bearers in your distant past, one drop of black* blood in you, then you were not 100% pure white and hence had to be completely black instead, are now seen by most as a great moral evil.
They were also very good examples of the dangers of relying upon logical thinking that avoids checking in on the real world.
Those laws were all based upon following up the consequences leading from their primary assumption, the seemingly unambiguous definition of the word "pure".
(*In Whites Only Australia and in Latin America, interestingly, the tendency was if the person had one drop of white blood then they were white --- equally real world absurd but in the other direction.)
The problem was that definitions like clean and pure are those Platonic words of absolute absolute - things can only be 100% pure or 100% clean or they are no longer pure or clean, by definition*.
(*Pure : not mixed with any other substance.)
And because avoiding having a few stray atoms of other matter cling to even the purest of scientific samples is impossible, nothing in the real world is really pure or really clean.
At best, it can only be relatively clean and relatively pure --- or equally convincingly, it can only be described as relatively dirty and relatively impure.
All matter, including us humans, is therefore really arranged on a long continuum made up of varying shades of grey --- not 100% clean white and 100% dirty black.
Unmodified words like clean and pure therefore are best understood as the external manifestations of an internal mental affliction.
They are also examples of a long history of thinkers seeking to impose unreal Platonic and universal definitions upon our shared real world, all in order to salve an internal and personal mental condition suffered by only themselves and their fellow afflicted.
Prozac relief by dictionary, as it were.
Thinkers who tend to see the world in broadly Platonic ways all suffer from a common mental condition shared by many others, that of having a marked intolerance for ambiguity.
We recognize this affliction also among people who are politically conservative, or rigid in personality, or among a common subset of scientists, philosophers and mathematical-oriented types.
And to these poor people, the fact that words like clean and pure have no real world equivalent is beyond cognitive acceptance.
And to some of these afflicted folk in our recent past, the mere fact that anyone competent in both logic and with a knowledge of history could demonstrate that if we humans all came 'out of Africa', then we must all have at least 'one drop of Negro blood' in our distant past, was totally without consequence.
They badly need mental relief and this law used to provide it --- for everyone was now back to being either fully black or fully white, neatly reflecting the way these afflicted folk viewed the entire world.
These 'one drop' laws has been abandoned (in theory) but interestingly the FBI (as you might have guessed !) still does not recognize mixed race as a self definition - one is either white, black or yellow etc.
The FBI is now in the 21st century and recognizes and accepts many things that it didn't in the past --- but along with its fellow afflicted sufferers in conservative parties and in branches of academia, accepting ambiguity is not one of them....
They were also very good examples of the dangers of relying upon logical thinking that avoids checking in on the real world.
Those laws were all based upon following up the consequences leading from their primary assumption, the seemingly unambiguous definition of the word "pure".
(*In Whites Only Australia and in Latin America, interestingly, the tendency was if the person had one drop of white blood then they were white --- equally real world absurd but in the other direction.)
The problem was that definitions like clean and pure are those Platonic words of absolute absolute - things can only be 100% pure or 100% clean or they are no longer pure or clean, by definition*.
(*Pure : not mixed with any other substance.)
And because avoiding having a few stray atoms of other matter cling to even the purest of scientific samples is impossible, nothing in the real world is really pure or really clean.
At best, it can only be relatively clean and relatively pure --- or equally convincingly, it can only be described as relatively dirty and relatively impure.
All matter, including us humans, is therefore really arranged on a long continuum made up of varying shades of grey --- not 100% clean white and 100% dirty black.
Unmodified words like clean and pure therefore are best understood as the external manifestations of an internal mental affliction.
They are also examples of a long history of thinkers seeking to impose unreal Platonic and universal definitions upon our shared real world, all in order to salve an internal and personal mental condition suffered by only themselves and their fellow afflicted.
Prozac relief by dictionary, as it were.
Thinkers who tend to see the world in broadly Platonic ways all suffer from a common mental condition shared by many others, that of having a marked intolerance for ambiguity.
We recognize this affliction also among people who are politically conservative, or rigid in personality, or among a common subset of scientists, philosophers and mathematical-oriented types.
And to these poor people, the fact that words like clean and pure have no real world equivalent is beyond cognitive acceptance.
And to some of these afflicted folk in our recent past, the mere fact that anyone competent in both logic and with a knowledge of history could demonstrate that if we humans all came 'out of Africa', then we must all have at least 'one drop of Negro blood' in our distant past, was totally without consequence.
They badly need mental relief and this law used to provide it --- for everyone was now back to being either fully black or fully white, neatly reflecting the way these afflicted folk viewed the entire world.
These 'one drop' laws has been abandoned (in theory) but interestingly the FBI (as you might have guessed !) still does not recognize mixed race as a self definition - one is either white, black or yellow etc.
The FBI is now in the 21st century and recognizes and accepts many things that it didn't in the past --- but along with its fellow afflicted sufferers in conservative parties and in branches of academia, accepting ambiguity is not one of them....
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Penicillium mold upends our notions of Science and Progress says 1952 medical editorial
— Editorial , American Journal of Public Health, March, 1952.
Is there a stranger chapter than this in the
whole history of scientific progress?
Ten years ago, "mold" was a faintly repulsive fungoid growth which sometimes caused the spoilage of food products.
The very word "moldy” implies something “musty,
fusty, and stale.”
Today, the blue mold is recognized
as a synthetic chemist of the first order— a
friend and benefactor of the human race.
I just discovered this editorial in an old copy of a county medical society journal but it said then what I have always thought about the wartime penicillin drama....
Penicillin "J" : instead of the body and blood of a rural carpenter's helper
What if "Jew-Boy Jesus" came back during WWII & The Holocaust and no one even noticed ?
If instead of being a humble (but still very human) rural carpenter's helper offering the world's suffering His body and blood, this time He came back as a mere household pest.
Came back as that ever annoying blue green mold that ruins so much of our food and clothing.
Yes, as a 'fungoid growth', to paraphrase someone infamous.
And instead offering up His body and blood, this time the world's suffering and hurting got His poo and pee.
Because that is what the scientific consensus in that interwar period thought was the purpose of fungus secondary metabolites, like the life-saving penicillin - mere excretions of post-metabolic waste.
(Poo and pee, in words that even ankle-biters like Sam down at the daycare would understand.)
The Double Miracle of penicillin "J".
In the face of Hitler's horror, a truly avenging Jewish Penicillin "J".
Saving lives and busting human hubris wherever it went.
Now of course many religious people think God is far too rational and level headed to do anything as hair-brained as that.
Myself, God is totally mysterious and free-spirited and loving and He just might.
For morally, for the most innocent of humanity-- its children, WWII was a truly desperate time, with the adult human ego and hubris on all sides of the conflict raging unchecked.
And desperate times do call for desperate (or at least inspired) measures....
If instead of being a humble (but still very human) rural carpenter's helper offering the world's suffering His body and blood, this time He came back as a mere household pest.
Came back as that ever annoying blue green mold that ruins so much of our food and clothing.
Yes, as a 'fungoid growth', to paraphrase someone infamous.
And instead offering up His body and blood, this time the world's suffering and hurting got His poo and pee.
Because that is what the scientific consensus in that interwar period thought was the purpose of fungus secondary metabolites, like the life-saving penicillin - mere excretions of post-metabolic waste.
(Poo and pee, in words that even ankle-biters like Sam down at the daycare would understand.)
"J" as in Jewish or Jesus ?
The Double Miracle of penicillin "J".
In the face of Hitler's horror, a truly avenging Jewish Penicillin "J".
Saving lives and busting human hubris wherever it went.
Now of course many religious people think God is far too rational and level headed to do anything as hair-brained as that.
Myself, God is totally mysterious and free-spirited and loving and He just might.
For morally, for the most innocent of humanity-- its children, WWII was a truly desperate time, with the adult human ego and hubris on all sides of the conflict raging unchecked.
And desperate times do call for desperate (or at least inspired) measures....
Penicillin "J" , the OTHER Manhattan Project
What if Jesus came back during WWII, and no one even noticed ?
What if God was a blob like none of us, just a smear upon a subway wall...or tenement hall ?
WWII as "dirty" penicillin vs ethnic "cleansing" and racial "purity"
What if Jesus came back - during WWII - and no one even noticed ?
But no, not this time as a simple carpenter's helper, slouching into town as 'a dolt on a colt'.
Because humble as that act was, it didn't really curb human hubris for very long.
No, this time, to really rub some salt of humility into the open wound of overweening hubris, He comes back as a blob.
Just a smear on a subway wall, or tenement hall, HP Lovecraft's moldy smelly slimy smear relentlessly spreading all over your favourite pair of boots, in some dark dank closet.
Penicillin "J", only now, coming out of the closet, to offer hope in a time of horror.
Tiny hyssop, in a time of giant Cedars ...
WWII Europe : Ethnic Cleansing was next to Godliness, for small and big nations alike
Not all the world violently reduced their ethnic minorities at the point of a gun during and at the end of WWII : only its most civilized portion : Europe !
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
Monday, August 24, 2015
In a world that is finite, is bigger better or just fewer and hence more fragile to unexpected change ?
Are we safer with a small gene pool of only the most useful genes or with a big gene pool filled with genes we haven't yet seen any value in ?
The world we live in is indeed finite, and this allows us to imagine two extreme earthly biospheres, set along a continuum of numbers of beings from high to low.
One is a biosphere sustaining a trillion trillion trillion tiny microbes and one is a biosphere sustaining a hundred thousand big blue whales.
A tendency towards bigger entities, in a finite world, must always tend to fewer entities compared to a tendency, in a finite world, to see more of the smaller entity.
A single species populating the earth with hundred thousand blue whales represents a very small set of underused genes for a biosphere to meet the crisis of a pronounced trend to hotter climate, leading to the drying up the oceans.
But a trillion trillion trillion microbes probably represents a million distinct species and an enormous amount of underused genes to allow this biosphere to successfully adopt to a much hotter climate.
The 1940s complaint against preserving and even expanding the existing gene pool came down to the philosophic and scientific virtues of simplicity (aka overcoming personal ambiguity anxiety with a PhD) --- it was messy and untidy to have all these junk genes lying about the garage - simply 'pick the best and bin the rest'.
This implied that the future, like the present and the past, was simple, stable, predictable, controllable ---- a notion that you either accepted or rejected.
Most scientists in 1940, perhaps even today, accepted the future was simple and predictable.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson did not ---- his was a messy garage, just filled with junk genes that you never knew might come in handy some day....
October 1940 : purifying or preserving the Gene Pool of 'useless' penicillium & SBE genes
Is the world safer by minimizing or maximizing the Gene Pool ?
In the Fall of 1940, American Science renewed its century long efforts at triaging and then discarding much of the world's gene pool; this time under the new guise of a sudden need for "American Military Medicine Preparedness".
It was a movement, ironically enough, that was mostly led by conservative Isolationists among the scientists, men who had long opposed military intervention to help the little peoples of Europe from the evil axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
These conservative Isolationists had long opposed intervening to help the little peoples of America as well (opposing Social Medicine for example) so they could not be accused of inconsistency, merely of heartlessness.
That Fall, they gave off plenty of indications that the stripping down for military preparedness meant the final death of Social Medicine.
No good news for the young patients suffering from then invariably fatal SBE.
The conservative isolationists considered that even if the SBEs survived one bout, eventually another would certainly kill them.
Meanwhile the SBEs just consumed lots of scarce medical resources without any prospects they would recover enough to become useful servicemen or do productive work in war industries.
With many conservative doctors believing that SBE, along with most diseases afflicting the poor and minorities, were highly genetically based, it could even be asked why even bother keeping them alive long enough for them to breed and pass on their defective genes to another generation of the collective human gene pool ?
Weren't the SBEs' genes something rather to purify and discard out of the human gene pool ,by a strict policy of deliberate government neglect, and wasn't the excuse of a planning for a Total War the best time to start doing so ?
Even lower on the conservatives' scale of genes worth retaining than those of the SBEs were the genes of that common household pest, the blue green penicillium mold.
If obtaining adequate amounts of lifesaving penicillin meant keeping the genes alive of the slimey mold that originally made penicillin, many were against it.
Better that human chemists, the smartest in the universe, quickly bested the slimey little chemists and made better penicillin cheaper and faster and far more predictably.
Synthetic man-made penicillin in this war or no penicillin, said Howard Florey, while Alexander Fleming and the Allied medical establishment cheered assent.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly disagreed.
He felt the world would be better off, enriched even, if SBE patients like Bobby Darin was allowed to live, perhaps even to sing, dance and act, rather than to squalidly die from deliberate government neglect.
And his entire scientific career had been devoted to proving up his belief that the small and the weak and the useless 'gene carriers' all had something to bring to the commensal table of global Life.
Dawson had demonstrated more than enough examples showing that the microbe chemists were far far smarter than anyone had ever imagined.
He was not at all sure that the penicillium chemists hadn't polished the production of penicillin to a fine velvet sheen over hundreds of millions of years of trying -- and that the smartest chemists in the universe mightn't be able to beat them in a few frantic months of trying.
No matter how much money and labs and bombast was thrown at the problem.
So on October 16th 1940, a day the nation specifically set aside to triage all the 1A young men in America, Dr Dawson injected natural, freshly squeezed, orange colored penicillium juice into two 4Fs of the 4Fs patients, SBE sufferers Negro Aaron Leroy Alston and Jew Charles Aronson.
A product from rejected microbe genes injected to save some rejected human genes, as Dawson sought (against the grain of 1940s thinking on the topic) to preserve and protest the existing gene pool, not purify it and shrink it.
So began our present Age of Antibiotics - in a wartime scientific dispute over whether it was better to reduce or preserve the world's gene pool.
Dawson and Florey certainly weren't the only ones to dispute this issue : on the wider stage, Hitler certainly had his own take, as did Europe's Jews.
But, as is well known, the Dawson-Florey dispute was the only one that ended happily for humanity ....
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Valuing biodiversity implies we think the Reality they must survive is also diversely dangerous ....
I have based my claim that the world of Science was totally upended during WWII by pointing out that Science circa 1940 valued purity above all else while today's science values diversity above all else and that these two values oppose each other in every possible way.
I am not limiting myself to shallow definitions either : not just to yesterday's eugenic notions of racial purity versus today's natural biodiversity and civil rights supported human social diversity.
I mean that the scientific theories that won near universal support before 1940, regardless of the often tiny amount of physical evidence supporting them, all tended to exalt the pure --- ie the simple, the linear, the stable, the symmetrical and systems in equilibrium in their visions of Reality.
So if Reality was really as simple, stable, consistent, understandable and predictable as these theories claimed, then we could indeed see into the Future and pick the one simple 'right' answer to solve all possible of today's and tomorrow's problems.
We could thus safely and sharply purify and reduce the world's gene pool - by picking the single best corn species and discarding all the second best, for example - confident that nothing could ever go wrong.
Simply pure and definite certitudes for a purely simple certain world.
But then, just for an example, in 1970 America's most important industrial material (their corn crop) was almost all wiped out by a fungus that was finely tuned into killing only this high yielding monoculture crop.
Panic !
Suddenly even the Koch Brothers of this world could see the virtues in gathering and protecting all the bio-diversity found in the many ancient and hitherto 'useless' variants of corn, just to cover all bets in what was suddenly looking to be a world of highly diverse dangers....
I am not limiting myself to shallow definitions either : not just to yesterday's eugenic notions of racial purity versus today's natural biodiversity and civil rights supported human social diversity.
I mean that the scientific theories that won near universal support before 1940, regardless of the often tiny amount of physical evidence supporting them, all tended to exalt the pure --- ie the simple, the linear, the stable, the symmetrical and systems in equilibrium in their visions of Reality.
So if Reality was really as simple, stable, consistent, understandable and predictable as these theories claimed, then we could indeed see into the Future and pick the one simple 'right' answer to solve all possible of today's and tomorrow's problems.
We could thus safely and sharply purify and reduce the world's gene pool - by picking the single best corn species and discarding all the second best, for example - confident that nothing could ever go wrong.
Simply pure and definite certitudes for a purely simple certain world.
But then, just for an example, in 1970 America's most important industrial material (their corn crop) was almost all wiped out by a fungus that was finely tuned into killing only this high yielding monoculture crop.
Panic !
Suddenly even the Koch Brothers of this world could see the virtues in gathering and protecting all the bio-diversity found in the many ancient and hitherto 'useless' variants of corn, just to cover all bets in what was suddenly looking to be a world of highly diverse dangers....
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