"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....

Zyklon B and Penicillium C : as Auschwitz tries to eradicate one 'Fungoid Growth', Brooklyn's Pfizer bring another to worldwide prominence

Why 'Jewish Penicillin' in the world's largest Jewish city actually is penicillin !

Hitler fiercely believed the world's Jews were all evil agents bent on ceaseless cosmic dissolution, with their chief targets the world's most organic civilizations - above all the Aryan Race.

So when he hurtled the abusive term 'fungoid growths' at the Jews in one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, it had an almost literal rather than figurative meaning.

That is because it is indeed the fungus molds who are Nature's prime agents at dissolving organic material.

(Dissolving their tough chemical bonds and thus releasing their building blocks to rejoin the earth's greatest resource cycles involving elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur etc.)

The Nazis and their intellectual fellow travellers around the world were, above all, fixated on maintaining rigid social, ethnic, gender boundaries at a time of great social fluidity.

So it is not at all surprising that proto-Nazi HP Lovecraft saw the world's greatest evils as looking like shapeless, boundary-less, oozing fungal slime.

He (and the Nazis) all failed to see that their hoped-for world of total stability and non-decay/non-renewal would be lifeless in its lack of variety and so fragile that it would be likely to fail to surmount any sudden small change from outside.

So, in Nazi controlled Europe, synthetic Zyklon B gas was used to take the lives of over a million of the Jewish 'fungoid growths'.

But in the largest Jewish city of New York, in those same years, other nature-made fungoid growths were blessing the world with the life-giving gift of penicillin.

Now that's something that is almost poetic in this symmetry .....