NAIF deniers : believe in Manhattan Project, deny Climate Change

Deniers don't, not really.

Don't deny the reality of bad climate change.

They merely deny that there aren't quick, easy, cheap solutions ("another Manhattan Project") to any 'weather problems' that might arise.

They're born naifs and optimists - still believing in Santa and the Tooth Fairy.

On one hand, it seems easy to understand why Oklahoma Senator J. 'Pollyanna' Inhofe wants to go into the history books as being the world's most powerful climate change denier.

Inofe hits bad financial climate change

Anything has to be better than being known, after he is dead, as the man at the helm when Quaker Insurance hit financial climate change and went down with all hands.

But a closer look at the man's public utterances suggests a child who remains a true believer in all the patriotic platitudes he heard while growing up , during WWII.

Paul Fussell's "WARTIME"

I am too young to have heard any of the Home Front platitudes disguising the truth about combat abroad --- my father is (just) old enough to know, as a veteran, a little of their grim realities.

But our Jimmy falls between two stools - too young to learn of wartime's combat zone chicken-shit and horror - too old to grow up hearing all the revisionist accounts about the various Allied moral failings of WWII.

His brain addled by years of patriotic uplift Hollywood musicals --- possibly the only American of his generation to have never seen a Film Noir.

Andy Hardy is about to chair the world's most powerful legislative committee dealing with climate change.

Oh goody !

Today's Conflicted Boomers : typical of any Transitional Generation

The main reason why the long dead Adorno and Horkheimer still get the big bucks in intellectual currency, while you and I pal pick about for chicken feed, all comes down to a mimeographed collection of turgid speculative essays the pair circulated among a few friends at the end of WWII.

At the time, all the rest of the world was beaming in self-satisfaction about Modern Science's obvious success (here insert A-Bomb) at beating back 'Barbaric Age' Axis science.

But Adorno and Horkheimer alone suggested that Janus Year 1945 really meant that the world was now in a 'transitional era' between a fading Modern Science (aka 'modernity') and a rising postmodern world.

But as the humble mimeographed nature of their book (The Dialectic of the Enlightenment) suggests, the pair were completely ignored at the time.

So what was first noted about all the kids being born between the early mid-1940s to the early mid-1960s was simply that : their extraordinary large numbers : hence 'Boomers'.

But would their highly unusual behavior during their plastic formative years been any different if their birth numbers had been considered 'normal' or low ?

I argue not.

The coincident fact that the peak of the transitional era's passing turbulence coincided with the Boomers' crucial formative years would have produced 'The Sixties' irregardless.

At the time, 'The Sixties' social conflict was neatly explained away by simply pointing to the Boomers' extra large numbers as sufficient explanation.

So the transitional nature of The Sixties was never recognized.

In particular no one looked at who all was retiring at the world's High Schools and Universities, instead of looking simply at who was newly coming in as students -- and then promptly protesting.

For in all times of transition, tides go out just as much as they come in.

Unlike their parents raised in unconflictedly modern schools - or their children raised in unconflictededly postmodern schools - the boomers got it from both barrels.

Early on : taught by moderns; later on : taught by post moderns : who now to believe ?

Before 1989, those Boomers who took the postmodern science way of viewing physical reality dominated their peers and the news pages.

But I argue that since "The End of The Cold War", those Boomers who went on to rule the world after 1990 - and who still do rule our world -  held more to the older 'modern science' way of viewing physical reality.

I argue their rise to power was itself transitional .

Mostly due to others abruptly retiring, due partly to old age but mostly because of satisfaction at completing their life work : defeating Communism.

The new bosses, like the old bosses, were a hard,mean,uncharitable lot but their target and hence its solution, had greatly changed.

Their target was now environmentalists, not communists .

No longer was conflict over direct questions of ideology, basically 'trickle down' theories versus claims of 'human equality of access to basic life necessities'.

Now the conflict had become modern production science confronting postmodern impact science (over climate change in particular) to use Allan Schnailberg's highly influential formulation.

The dying-off Old Guard (the Modernist cum Greatest Generation) could find almost none among the Gen X and Millennials to carry on their battle against their true mortal enemy, the postmodern majority among the Boomers.

But not all Boomers resolved the conflict between modern and postmodern schooling in 100% favouring postmodernity.

This minority, the Rogue Boomers, (Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott come to mind) swallowed their internal doubts (that as conflicted Boomers they must have had) and made a big career advance - nailing their Boomer colours 100% to the fading modernist cause.

For these relatively young leaders have always found most of their votes among those much older than themselves - rather than among their peers.

But the older voter is always a constantly wasting resource.

Soon Boomers, more and more, will become the true older voter (because voting falls off sharply after age 75 - and all of the Greatest Generation will be over 75 in 2016's presidential election year.)

Because of their higher - age-related - turnout, Boomers will be the key voter up until the climate crisis's tipping point.

The fate of our world will thus turn not on a conflict between nations, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders or even generations - Fox and CNN to the contrary.

It will turn on a conflict within a highly conflicted transitional generation : the Boomers ....

Boomers, let the epitaph on our collective headstone read thus : "From the Greater Generation , One MORE Good Thing : the Boomers' Successful March to save the Climate"

Let's not rest on our laurels --- because if the climate is lost , so is all our legacy, along with all our grandchildren and their grandchildren.

If we mess this one up now, what was the point of all the others ?

Boomers : the 'Greater Generation' or the generation that precipitates the ending of the entire human experiment ?

Come on Boomers, we can do so much better !

We were supposed to be the generation from whom great things were expected.

Instead (somebody, somewhere, certainly not humanity itself) will remember us merely as the pathetic little generation that ended the entire human experiment for all time in a great big global meltdown.

Some of us Boomers will do so actively (big shout out to PMs Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott !)

But most of us will merely passively help end the human experiment : apparently we Boomers are not ones for much passion --- or commitment.

We'll just be inert Netflix Potatoes, as the equivalent of our parents' war against Nazi values grinds on outside our comfortable living rooms.

What we do - or don't do - on harmful human climate change, not Elvis, Rock 'n' Roll or Civil Rights Marches, will end up being what defines us Boomers.

Yes, we're all a little older, a little slower : the youngest of us are almost fifty and the oldest are in their early seventies - but we're not dead yet, not yet in the nursing home.

We still have time to do that One Great Thing that we all promised the world way back when....

Boomers : self indulgent, self centred - or a generation from whom great things are expected ?

Well, fellow Boomers - its 'do or die' time - literally.

Because some of us actually are --- dying of old age, having enjoyed our full three score and ten.

And as for "Never trust The Man" (or The Woman) or anyone over thirty : we are all well well over thirty -- even the very youngest of us is over fifty.

We run the world - as prime ministers, CEOs, generals, publishing magnates - we own its wealth - we hold its tenures and its Nobel Prizes, write its most widely read daily columns and books-for-thinking people.

That great thing of which it was long expected we were to do : its here, been here, is almost gone.

Its 'deciding the fate of the world' - for now and forever.

Great enough a thing for ya ?

We can stop and reverse - NOW ! - the ever increasing amount of human carbon waste we are pouring into the sky - stop the rush to an irreversible tipping point and climate meltdown - or do nothing.

Or worse - we can help throw a few more coals on the barbie/bier.

We can make a terrible crisis even worse by listening, once again, to our childhood teachers, our TV sets, all those upbeat books and magazine articles from our childhood .

All those lies about how the Manhattan nuclear Project won the war, that it is now providing us energy too cheap to meter and how it can be a future model for big bold plans to change the shape of the earth and the shape of the weather.

(Today we call it geo-engineering, but back then it was called just plain civil engineering : for example, plans to melt both Poles with nukes, changing the weather --- and then farming the results.

That was just a proposal - meanwhile the Manhattan nuclear Project had changed our weather ; now those once so cheerful April showers  glowed in the dark all over the world --- filled with baby-killing strontium 90 fallout. Oh joy !)

So even as little bitty boomer kids we knew a different tale : we fully understood that the helplessness felt by the hero of the film The Invasion of the Body Snatchers got 1950s reality just about right.

We knew the Manhattan natural penicillin project that saved our baby sister wasn't made from coal tar, air and water like Man-made nylon and DDT all the other things the chemists were always dreaming up.

It and dozens of other marvellous life-saving antibiotics were made naturally - made by some of the smallest, weakest beings in existence.

Made definitely by the moral lowest of the low, the 4Fs of the 4Fs of the natural world : bottom-of-the-barrel smelly slime oozing in the dankest darkest corners of our collective basements.

We kids had learned if we held our noses and checked our gap and morality reflexes and worked with the slimiest part of Nature, instead of against it like the nuke boys, good things happened to good and bad children alike.

So what is it going to be boomers : Door #1 --- geo-nuke the world, all to save it ?

Or door #2 ----accepting nature as having an equal right with humans to co-exist on this planet and take a little advice from their 3.5 billion year success story at surviving on this planet ???

Sustaining our climate disaster : 'talkin' about my generation' --- the hyper-active Rogue Boomers ruining our planet, with our passive help

True : we didn't start the fire - blame the beginnings of our carbon burning frenzy on our parents, grandparents and great great great grandparents.

But we are the generation in charge now - in fact the generation in charge when the global (rather than local) dangers of the Big Smoke first became apparent to all but those of closed minds.

So the responsibility for ruining paradise is really upon us, the Boomer Generation - those of us born roughly between the early mid Forties and the early mid Sixties.

We'll be the ones still in charge when the CO2 and elevated temperature levels rise so high they tip us into irreversible disaster.

Most of us - in fairness - believe in human induced climate disaster and worry what can be done.

But we worry and fret so completely passively that we might as well not even show up o to be weighed on the moral scales.

Meanwhile some of us Boomers are moral monsters - hardly sleeping or taking vacations we are so busy thinking of new ways to dig up, transport and burn ever more carbon, ever faster.

These rogue Boomers run countries as Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators (pardon my redundancies), run big international corporations, run big international media empires.

But they are a minority - albeit a very active and self confident minority - and they only get away with it because we in the vast Boomer silent majority let them, all because we hold our own convictions so lightly and feebly.

They - the rogue Boomers - privately admit, in their heart of hearts, that human carbon emissions are changing the climate.

But they remain (both publicly - and much more crucially, privately) convinced that real world human engineering can quickly, cheaply, easily overcome any problems that the egghead scientists in their ivory tower labs can detect.

Yet another postwar Manhattan Project will solve any problem.

Telling indeed that the people most convinced of the efficiency of WWII bureaucracy were the ones who never personally suffered through it's chickenshit, to use the words of Paul Fussell, who did know of it first hand.

I would say it was the youngest of the young adults from the WWII - those too junior to know of the mid level real world frustrations - together with all those too young to know much (or anything) personally of WWII.

They are the ones who fell hardest for the carefully cultivated postwar myth of the efficiency of the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's secretive, un-democratic, throw big money at any problem approach.

That meant almost everyone in the  postwar world born after 1920 initially bought into Vannevar Bush's Big Lie.

Over time, personal experiences with postwar bureaucratic failures and revelations about what really went on in WWII converted many us to becoming a Doubting Thomas about the touted advantages of another Manhattan (nuclear) Project type operation to solve anything.

But clearly the rogue Boomers (in terms of personality: action-oriented unreflective, shallow types) never got the memo : because most never ever read a book - or ever changed their mind - after college.

What I think I can bring to the effort to fight to save our climate before it is too late is all the research work I have done on the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's little-known alter ego : the Manhattan (penicillin) Project.

It was everything - in almost every detail - that the nuclear project was not and so it offers, I believe, a way out of our climate dilemma ....

1945: Janus Manhattan's legacy for Boomer kids - the paths of nuclear death or penicillin life.

Now which path they take to deal with (or not to deal with) climate change will decide the fate of all of us

1945 : discoveries perfected in ever janus-like Manhattan had helped end the war on a high note.

Now those discoveries (the Manhattan nuclear Project and the Manhattan penicillin Project) presented the children about to form the Boomer Generation two warring choices about how best to deal with physical reality.

The old way - as personified by the non-democratic way of the A-Bomb effort. The way of Modernity, The Enlightenment and The Plenticide : overpowering Nature to force it to do Man's will.

The new way - as presented by the tiny teams working to develop natural penicillin freely sharing information (and penicillium spores) amongst themselves. The way of postModernity, of global commensality and acceptance of plentitude. Working with, not against, Nature so there was a future for humanity on a shared vibrantly green planet.

2015 : now these boomer kids are in charge, the boss.

As world leaders, as voters, our major wealth holders, in senior positions everywhere.

Their decision now on climate change (choosing door one - the top down secretive violent ways of the a-bomb project) (or choosing door two - the open democratic ways of the natural penicillin project) will decide all our fates.....

dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"

An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:

(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)

Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.

But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.

We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.

We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.

Only our selfish wills.

We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .

That janus year in the eternally janus city.

The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.

By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.

Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.

We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.

On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.

With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.

We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.

But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.

Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.

As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.

My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...

Since Manhattan Project caused first global environmental crisis, it can hardly solve the new one ...

If your baby isn't dying from an overdose of Strontium 90 from mother's breast milk , it isn't for want of trying on the part of the permanently teenage males who brought us the first Manhattan Project.

They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.
That's the thing about dumb fucks - they can't stop harming even themselves .

Thankfully some of them became enlightened before they died (and a wrathful God forcefully did it for them).

But what then is the excuse of the permanently twenty something male (once again !) down the street who emerges from his make believe world of super hero comic books just long enough to earnestly inform us that "... another Manhattan Project , maybe in geo-engineering , will quickly solve any climate problem - if that problem actually exists...".

Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as 20/20 non-hindsight ....

'Weaponizing' the Wind

The Allies actively 'weaponized' the wind to increase the lethalness of two death-creators during WWII (fire bombs and atomic radiation) and had fall back plans to use it with two others (chemicals and germs).

The Axis did weaponize the wind with the latter two (Japan with germs and Italy with chemical gas).

But it may be said that the elites of these modern nations all did so very, very reluctantly --- even secretly.

For handing over some of their total powers over life and death to Nature (the wind) was as about as comfortable for these male elites of superior races as it would be if they offered to share those powers with women, the poor , the unfit and the lesser races.

For pre WWII modernity was all about illusions of total control and total precision and total predictability and the wayward wind held none of those attributes.

How modernity really wanted to fight WWII was with the Norden Bombsight, able - it was claimed - to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 25,000 feet.

 The Norden and its equivalents in long range land artillery, battleship guns and long lance torpedoes would make victory swift, almost bloodless and cheap.

WWII , of course, was anything but.

So a year or two into the unexpectedly long war, most modernist elites reluctantly - and secretly - changed tack.

Germ and gas (wind-carried) warfare had never been totally ignored but were quite low in priority - now more money was poured into secret efforts to make them workable weapons of war --- if desperate need required it.

National leaders went on parroting in public their bomber commanders' line that precision use of high explosives would take out vital enemy industrial assets without killing many civilians - but more and more mixed in with the (in)precise HE bombs were largely un-publicized fire bombs.

The HE was really only there to calm public and armed forces consciences ---- and to 'open up' buildings so the fire bombs could work better with the far more inflammable material inside.

If the weather had been dry enough and the wind was just right, and enough fire and HE bombs fell in the centre of a very big city in a short enough period, a self-sustaining firestorm could do far more damage than any single WWII atomic bomb was capable of.

The updraft from the intense concentrated burn drew in air/oxygen from all sides at ground level - creating intense winds and mimicking exactly the bellows that allows primitive furnaces of wood charcoal (think civilian wood framed homes) and lots of oxygen to effortlessly melt ores and metals... and human bodies.

Once having gotten over their public (and private) distaste for using imprecise fire bombs to mostly kill civilians rather than to destroy hard-to-hit factories, elites on the Allied side looked again at nuclear radiation which they had earlier rejected.

(Earlier very modest funding had really been directed at the possibility of nuclear boiler engines for ultra long range submarines.)

It had always been easy to powderize low grade nuclear material (even just enriched ore) and drop it into the wind over a huge city as basically a terror radiation weapon.

But now the claims by some that atoms could be used in a bomb that had HE like blast effects and fire and radiation effects was irresistible for some in the Allied elite.

The public would be lied to and told the new bomb worked by old fashioned blast effects and precision - indeed the atomic bombs were dropped with the aid of the Norden bombsight - but in fact they would mostly kill by wind-fed fire and wind-carried fallout radiation.

Man just had to claim WWII victory at Hiroshima - not Nature.

But Nature listens to no master and Axis-intended radiation dropped at Hiroshima was instead wafted back into Allied children's milk all over the world.

The 'Victory Bomb' was actually our very first man-made global weather cum environmental disaster.

Still think our current climate change disaster can be easily solved by just another 'Manhattan Project'  superhero quick-fix ??

Silent Majority Boomers - not their parents - running (and ruining) this planet

I've changed my thinking - at least a little.

The unacknowledged divisions within the Boomer Generation

I still believe that the most extreme and the most vocal supporters of climate change denial are older people - men mostly - in their eighties - people who were teenagers at the very apogee of Modernity and who thus naturally find it hardest to change ingrained habits.

Rupert Murdoch is a prime example of this sort of 'changed reality'  denier.

But Murdoch and his generation aren't running and ruining this world - at least not officially.

My generation - the Boomers - is.

Clearly not all of us Boomer kids fully absorbed the obvious lesson from WWII : that there actually are limits to even supermen's ability to control reality.

Not all of us Boomers - not by a long shot - successfully made The Transition from the old ways of thinking (ones that had fueled the Enlightenment Project for nearly 500 years) to the needed new ways of thinking.

These Boomers weren't the most vocal or most visible part of the Boomer generation (recall the Sixties protests), but like their parents before them,  they formed a powerful - if largely reticent - silent majority.

Some of these silent majority Boomers are now prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, media publishers etc but most are not.

They are simply voters and consumers who might even (feebly) talk the new talk - but when it comes to their pocketbook at the gas pump and the ballot box, walk (or rather drive) the old walk.

And if we can't help them make The Transition - and soon ! - subsequent generations might never get a chance to live out their expected three score and twenty five ...

Deniers NEVER deny problems - merely deny that they can't be as easily solved as Superman jumps over buildings...

Take human-originated baneful climate change : climate deniers don't deny that it could exist, merely that if and when it emerges, it will be a quick job for Batman , Spiderman or Captain America to clear up.

Nobody who makes a living solving problems (and let's see , that includes all politicians, all business people, all experts & professionals, all generals, church leaders, on and on) ever denies that problems (their very bread and butter) don't exist.

Far from it -- they are far more likely to see problems where none exist (widespread satanic cults eating our babies anyone ?) or over-exaggerate those that do exist (just as police chiefs always seem to see a growing crime wave just before proposed budget cuts.)

The only thing that most deny is the problems can't be solved or solved relatively easily.

I use that weasel word 'relatively' because expert-problem-solvers-for-money always walk a thin line.

So their pitch to clients has always to be something like this : "your problem is worse than you thought (boo) but it is solvable (hurray) but it is going to cost you some money and time (boo) , but not a whole lot of time and money."

The key word is 'solvable' - lets leave it to the courts to resolve why too much time and too much cost and and too little success emerged from so many of such promises.

Solvable is a post birth of science term , because you still see relatively few religious leaders guaranteeing success : its all "God's ( or the gods') will be done".

So while scientists today appear to be on the side of the angels on combatting baneful climate change (with climate deniers the spawn of the devil) , we must pony up and admit the deniers are sustained intellectually by scientists - not by pre-science thought like that from the world's ancient religions .

That is why this newsletter will attack scientists far more than climate deniers, in my effort to help awake the world to possibly unstoppable climate change....

Open Commensal Publishing : because on climate change , pace President Obama or the NAS , 7 billion heads are better than one or even 2000

Open Commensal Publishing simply means that anyone should have a right to publish --- without either commercial , professional or academic gatekeepers pre-censoring that right.

Laws of Libel still apply.

And peer (and non-peer) reviews still happen under this approach --- as they do now, after publication --- whether that publication was pre-vetted or not.

Self published works , to many of us alert to typos and woefully inaccurate fact-reporting , seem to be no better and no worse than the work published after vetting by commercial editors, press gallery journalists with journalism degrees, and by academic editors and pre-publication academic reviewers.

The best have never needed a commercial publisher , a journalism degree , tenure or a PhD to be able to contribute to a culture's intellectual life.

The second-best, however, do.

They need that validation, to reside behind the wagons of some sort of aristocracy - to feel proud to be inside its closed commensal publishing, to be able to offer up whatever it is that they are capable of.

Too too often professionalism is merely the last refuge of the second best.

I have never sought that refuge but I also number myself as one of those second best, as perhaps you are too.

We second best and second rate never can tell where the true flashes of untutored and unfettered genius will briefly emerge and then vanish ---- and we can't afford to stifle any of them , not with the state this planet is in right now.

Open Commensal Publishing is simply the Cabinet of All the Talents needed to address our current global crisis ....

Unfitting-in : Penicillin-for-All overcomes the Allied-Axis groupthink

The academic cum scientific consensus supporting eugenics was once as widespread as the academic cum scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change is today.

I point this out , despite the fact that I do personally believe human activity is altering the climate and I do not believe that the concepts fit and unfit can ever be anything other than temporary and relative labels in a particular circumstance.

Just as the concepts of "inevitably left wing universities" or "inevitably right wing universities" are equally fleeting when set against the breath of time and were highly dependent on particular circumstances to be accurate.

Once , in many cities the only polling precincts that FDR ever lost were the university precincts - whereas today the only precincts won by losing Democrats in many cities are the university precincts.

Politics in the UK before our current era of post-modernism revealed much the same thing - the weakest seats for Labor used to be the university ridings.

Widespread groupthink (consensus) , particularly one that finds favour among the powerful , can always benefit from a ton of criticism by misfits, the unfit, the non-conformist, the naysayer and doubter, the gadfly, iconoclast and the deviant.

And if that consensus has a core of merit it will survive --- and in an improved form.

But when the current academic cum scientific consensus was that all such critics are ipso facto 'useless mouths' and 'life unworthy of life', as in the case of attempts to criticize eugenic modernity, what we have here sir is global groupthink on bad acid and in spades.

Under such circumstances , genuine differences of opinion become genetic-ized and biological-ized such that anyone who does not agree that only heterosexual married families with kids are 'normal' is probably themself a genetic deviant homosexual and shouldn't be allowed to reproduce -- let alone argue their case.

Similarly, capitalists and racists removed any potential criticism from the poor and minorities in advance by regarding them all as biologically unfit and hence unworthy of life let alone the right to criticize.

Eugenic supporters described many - quite openly - as biologically 'unfit'.

But eugenic supporters failed to admit that they also regarded these biologically 'unfit' as 'unfitting-in' with white Anglo Saxon Protestant middle class values - of not being team players in the great groupthink....

WWII as a preview of the Sixth Extinction

The most frequent contribution most of us (scientist or laity) make to the public debate about the Climate is to discuss our beliefs about changes that may  (or may not) happen sometime in the future , when human hubris collides with natural reality.

Unfortunately , that leaves more than enough "ifs and maybes" for many other citizens to permanently tune out on this all important public debate.

By contrast, The Mills of Nature discusses what actually did happen in the recent past , when pure human hubris really did get seriously stuck axle deep in the dirt of natural reality.

To protect the guilty and the inept , WWII history has normally been told back to front : 'the Allies won the war in 1945 --- and here is how it all happened'.

It becomes distilled down a human drama between six extremely ham-ish actors, all judged more than capable of eating the scenery.

Cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors"

Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, FDR and Tojo were still better known for extraordinarily skills in speech-making and morale-raising than for any administrative prowess they might have had. 

But the current historical consensus about WWII argues they were just the kind of leadership needed to fight this sort of war.

So we end with this intimate human drama , a clash between the six men fronting the six biggest civilizations, played out for us above the footlights .

Meanwhile, far back at the ranch , Mother Nature is nothing but an uninteresting and inert painted backdrop.

However, there is another way to tell the story of WWII.

It proceeds more conventionally, from front to back, detailing what Allies, Axis and Neutrals actually thought would happen, day by day, and then contrasting that with what actually did happen.

As a result, it ends up telling a far more downbeat story.

Now we can clearly see human ambitions, on all sides, stymied time and time and time again by natural forces.

 And  by humans that each side regarded as less than fully civilized and thus less than fully human - people in some sense also seen by most as 'just another part of the natural world.'

Nature (and 'these people of the natural world') turned out to be very far from inert --- for six long years it resists Civilized Man's vaulting ambitions at every turn.

So for but one example , over and over again a bad - natural - harvest of the lowly potato in Germany led to the human decision to see that more Slavs and Jews further East were starved or shot to death.

Even now, few us really believe it was Generalissimo Stalin , rather than General Frost and General Mud, who really saved Russia in 1941.

So once again cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors".

But this time , read it with the accent on scenery and not on actors .

I hope you find this Green history of WWII  a humbling and healing affair.

Yes it does cut us down to size before the vastness of an ever turbulent Mother Nature .

But hopefully it will also help us give the lesson on the dangers of Climate Change, before we get to the final exam....

1943 : UK overheats the heavens.... while Bengal starves

Churchill always claimed that the UK just couldn't spare the shipping needed to help feed the starving millions in British Bengal in 1943.

But it turns out that what Bengal's would-be rescue ships were really needed for was to bring the millions and millions of gallons of overseas petroleum to the UK, to feed the FIDO systems set up around British airfields beginning in 1943.

Burning petroleum at a rate as high as one to two hundred thousand gallons of fuel per hour, per airfield, was used to create an artificial climate above the airfields - literally burning off the ever-present British fog so bombers could take off and land in all kinds of weather, night or day.

Climate Change and Global Warming, RAF-style.

For those lanky, metallic, mechanized citizens of the British Empire must be feed at all costs, even if the darker human citizens of the Empire must starve to make it so.

The relentless logic of Modernity ....

America sure loves its minutemen and riflemen - except during wartime

MOS 745 (circa 1780)

Do you accept - or do you deny - gun control and climate change?

Do you think that wartime penicillin should just be for healthy young  scallywags who cheat on their wives but are still fully combat-ready or do you think it should be "wasted" on the dying of all nations, races and creeds ?

Some things never change and the skygods and earthlings still mix it up to oppose each other as much today on gun control and climate change as they did back almost 75 years ago on the best uses for wartime penicillin.

Skygods sure love their guns and sure believe in an America where every man had a gun handy, to defend his family or his nation at a minute's notice.

One can't see much American culture without noticing the omnipresence of two very old symbols from yesterday in this land of tomorrow : the Revolutionary Era Minuteman and the post-Civil War Western rifleman.

It was much the same during WWII, where ads and movie iconography always focused on the modern day minuteman cum rifleman : the Army MOS 745 , the infantry trade of rifleman.

But reality spoke quite differently.

Any one moment in time, only about one American in one thousand (that's about 150,000 people) were actually up in the combat lines, fighting, as MOS 745s.

A few more were in the pipeline waiting their turn, while the vast bulk of America was - in the most profound sense - merely holding the rifleman's cloak.

Nobody much , in reality, actually wanted to be a real life rifleman or minuteman in good old WWII.

Dressing up and playing a Minuteman was lots of fun

As a result, the few MOS 745s America could obtain were almost all conscripts : generally those who were the poorest in life skills and formal education and often (a real shocker !) smaller and thinner than the non-combat boys in the rear echelons of the war.

This is why so much of the Allied debate over wartime penicillin involved these MOS 745s : they were so very few in number.

And so if the one-in-a-thousand American who was a MOS 745 was out of combat-readiness only temporarily because of something that penicillin could quickly fix, then the other 999 out of a 1000 Americans who weren't riflemen and didn't want to be riflemen, were much in favour of giving him scarce penicillin.

That was much better than "wasting it" (to use Winston Churchill's own infamous words) on some gravely wounded MOS 475 who was never was going to be able to fight again - even if he did survive his infection.

They call that rational instrumentality, and it was the hallmark of the Age of Modernity :' use 'em and then toss 'em aside like a used condom, the minute they are of no further use to you'.

Pretty sickening isn't , what granddad and grandma were up to  (morally speaking) back between 1939 and 1945: doesn't it make you want to just go off somewhere and wash your hands till they bleed with some good strong soap ?

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

Horse and Buggy Era political party "isms" vs today's new scientific reality : not up for the job ?

I am pro MULTIPLE choice !

Our electioneering rhetoric is, as always, as flexible as an Etch A Sketch ( big shout out to Mitt Romney !)


 But once in government, our party ideologies, those beloved "isms" of Liberalism, Conservatism and Socialism, are as rigid and unchanging today as at their birth 150 to 200 years ago - when the Horse and Buggy, not the Airbus A380, reigned supreme.

There you have our prolonged Global Climate crisis in a nutshell : Science has moved on in the 150 years since the exuberant Mid-Victorian Era and its naive optimism about Man's ability to control Reality, but our political "isms" remain locked in some dusty time warp.

By education, I am a political scientist, but my abiding interest is in physical science ---- but with the proviso that I view all science as political !

When I say Science has changed, I lie.

Oh yes, public (formally peer reviewed published) science has changed greatly since the 1860s : moving from an overwhelming emphasis on PRODUCTION science (science of the hubris-laden first law of thermodynamics) to a new emphasis on IMPACT science (science of the more-somber second law of thermodynamics).

But popular (aka public school science) science has not changed a pinch since the days of total Anglo Saxon Protestant dominance of science.

Newton, Dalton and Darwin still reign supreme and nothing of dour 20th century science, let alone that of the 21st century, dares stain the ever-optimistic laboratories and textbooks of your average high school science course.

Like Carthage, our current high school science boosterism 'must be destroyed' .

The writing and selecting of Public School textbooks ( physical and social science texts above all) are not really in the hands of teachers and scientists ---- they reveal instead the dead weight of the political-commercial elites who really run departments of education and district school boards.

All they ask of high school textbooks is that they are "uplifting" and "positive" (Service Club Boosterism science, as it were).

Ever more and more of that time-old Mid Victorian optimism that science can do almost anything and even if it (temporarily and locally) messes up ,science can also step in to fix the mess.

See it as a case of an ever more optimistic frantic whistling, past our current 'grave' climate graveyard.

If we truly want to save the planet and prevent global climate disaster, setting our sights and scopes on our truly God-awful high school science Babbitry would be an pretty good place to start......

Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change

Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE !

Ossian ?!  A fake bard from 250 years ago ? What on earth , heaven and the multi-varient Universe does he have to with denying Global Warming  - you're barmy !

Ossian , son of Fingal, is albeit inadvertently , the only-begetter of the hatred thrown up against the revolutionary changes he directly brought in and against the general idea (that he also brought in) that things are always changing and always changing in unpredictable ways.

In this case the hatred is against climate change, but worry not, in time this eternal fear of un-certitudes and against the greys of reality will move on to new targets.

Ossian - if you still remember anything from high school or university  -is that 1760s fake creation from the otherwise-obscure James MacPherson that is generally agreed to have sparked the reaction against 18th century Classicalism that we now call 19th Century Romanticism.

If you were only half listening to your teachers you do recall the terms but deflate them to only referring to literature and , maybe, the visual arts.

Wrong, wrong, wrong !

They were not "just" art movements or even - slightly bigger - "political ideologies".

They were the ultimate biggies : all encompassing worldviews held - in their day - by most anybody who was anybody as just common sense, pure and simple.

Hegemonic hegemonies, in other words.

But then, by the 1850s, Romanticism lost much of its short lived hegemony and a highly self-conscious opposing movement emerged (counter-romanticism/pro-classicalism) and was called - by its critics - Late Victorian Scientism.

But it had to share the stage with Romanticism which had by then lost its self-conscious 'movement' nature and merged into simple common sense.

Today most all of us hold bits and pieces of both Romanticism and its Scientism critics inside of us, all in a glorious muddle.

Where we all differ - and all 7 billion of us do differ - is in the proportions of these two we hold inside us as the basis for all our other beliefs.

To Deny is to be anti-Romanticism

Deniers - it is fair to say - are highly un-Romantic , highly pro-Scientism , not withstanding their attacks on today's living, practising, scientists.

The rapid and rabid popularity of MacPherson's "beautiful poetic forgery" across all of Europe, alarming the powers-to-be everywhere.

Hard to imagine poetry doing that today - but think of alarms over Rap lyrics or the reaction against Pussy Riot, to see we scribblers still have the potential to alarm our barely-literate superiors every time we put pen to paper.

Ossian's poetry emerged in the extreme North West of Europe - as far away as possible from Europe's civilized roots in the extreme South East of the continent - Greece and Italy.

Add to this geographic affront to good taste and breeding , was the fact that this was the work not of Greek aristocrats with education and breeding , but of untutored peasants, living in dire poverty under harsh - not azure blue - skies.

Worst of all, the young everywhere - particularly those with the most education and breeding - loved the stuff , tossing aside their millennium old classic texts with disdain.

This Ossian stuff - they said - was the work of pure genius - pure untutored genius !

Genius - then being using for the first time in our modern day sense of the word, was bad enough.

But its association with untutoredness - no,  more than that - its association only with untutoredness, was literally Revolutionary, in the widest sense of that over used term.

For this poetry literally revolved - flipped - all previous values on their heads : day was now night, black was now white.

Rude, untutored, uneducated, genius (aka street smarts or native intelligence) was now set ahead of highly (highly expensively) educated people from old families of good breeding and manners.

Think of the same situation today - for very little has changed , at least on the untutored side.

When almost everybody today has to have a certificate of some sort to make a living (even ditch diggers need their heavy equipment operating papers ), some people still get fabulously rich, important and admired, without any sort of certificate.

They even make a point of flaunting their relative lack of professional education or institutional accreditation to account for their success.

They are the same people that arose to threat classicalism and the aristocracy in Ossian's day: entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and entertainers/artists.

Who hasn't seen one's friends, people with too much money and not enough self-honesty, sending their lazy dolts of children off to get highly expensive education to obtain a MBA,PhD, MA in creative writing, BJ or MFA because the kid - when pushed - pretends to a faint interest in 'doing' that sort of thing for a living.

From expensive pre-school, to expensive post doc living expenses subsidies, with expensive educational toys,summer camps, tutors and educational trips to Europe in between, modern parents spent a million 2012 dollars to give their kid 25 years of the best possible education of the old breeding and Grand Tours sort.

The only change is that starting in the 1850s, the need to know the classics to be considered a highly educated part of the natural aristocracy was gradually replaced by a need to know some form of science - say hard like chemistry or soft like economics.

Their kids now know everything that is already known about the past and present of their chosen field: and is not the past and present, a la Charles Lyell , a reliable guide to the future ?

(In reality, all this is really just a way to avoid heavy inheritance taxes on your death, by spending as much of it as possible - now - on your kids' education. You are hoping to ensure the family's wealth and influence moves forward in time via education rather than by inheritances.)

Today's professionals are yesterday's classical aristocracy in a new guise

These are the "heavily-tutored competent". Aka the professionals.

(For I think you could fairly abstract the whole point of this post as me claiming that yesterday's aristocracy: classicalism: professionalism: today's aristocracy.)

But then some uneducated immigrant with chutzpah and drive blasts well past your precious kid's MBA or a tiny garage and an lone inventor discovers what a university full of PhDs like your son could not, or a street kid's painting, writings or comic turn makes her a famous personality while your daughter puts her MFA to work teaching uncaring high school kids in some small city in the Mid West.

Those fracking, fracking, damn untutored geniuses - it just isn't fair !

These guys know nothing of the present or the past - thus leaving them open to make lots of mistakes - and to discover the future.

Bruce Springsteen, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson : all have recently blasted well past kids with 25 expensive years of good education.

They represent as much unplanned, unpredicted, uncertain, mercurial change as Ossian did yesterday or the Climate will for tomorrow - and they are all equally hated by well educated professional deniers cum competent nobodies * of every generation.....

* Our think tanks are just filled with the well breed well educated second rates of this world : little wonder they envy the sudden rises of those superstars of academia the climate scientist.