"Teflon Winnie vs the Tubers" : Richard North tells how THE FEW replaced THE MANY --- and why

I read all (or at least major portions) of about 1000 books a year, year in and year out.

 So when I break my stride just long enough to strongly urge you to run out and read a copy of Dr Richard North's "The Many not The Few" (Bloomsbury Press) , I hope you realize this is not something I do lightly or frequently.

I guess on some issues (like climate change) , Richard and I might be seen as being on different sides, but I have absolutely no problem raving on and on about this particular book from him.

Mite is Right - Might is Right. Both ? Or Neither ?

There are niches enough for all : the large, medium and the small.

There is no evidence in the Earth's current environment that contradicts the idea that there won't always be room for some big and medium creatures,  above the size of the ever-present microbes.

But the scientific assumption  that the trend of evolutionary Progress is moving in a direction that indicated that only Big beings - ie humans and their herds - will dominate the Earth is hardly borne out by long term evidence.

Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels

 Part One : the backstory

President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death  panels,  but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.

why STORY PAPERS, aka MUNROs

the STORY PAPERS


When a journal celebrates the story of Henry Dawson's 'agape' penicillin ,which he so freely released into the medical public domain 75 years ago, it is best to act similarly.

 So the journal articles of Dawson's project will go into the literary public domain ,as archived html blog posts and as print version story-papers.

The subterranean sewers of DARK MONEY killing our future

A long awaited peer-reviewed study out of Philadelphia's Dexel University by professor Robert Brulle tells an incredibly complex story about the largely secret way the rich and the elderly are working to destroy the world.

A world they simultaneously claim they wish to leave to their grandchildren...and to our grandchildren.

Print in 50 years : Downloadable pre-imposed PDFs , aka MUNROs

The book "as we know it now" will be dead in 50 years, but the book itself will not be dead, far from it.

Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth

As was the case (on both sides) during WWII, we live in a (human) monoculture that worships the BIG and dismisses the small , despite the fact that Nature itself hardly reflects this scenario, in fact, much the reverse.

We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.

Modernity's K-selected eugenic monoculture

If we limit our understanding of K-selection to an old high school biology class, of eugenics to what the Nazis did (75 years ago) and of monoculture to what North American farmers are doing today , we will miss this trio's intimate connection to that old old old peasant's adage : 'never put all your eggs in one basket' .....

Restoring the small , to a monoculture of the Big, 1939-1945

As a moral argument it was very old , with lots of powerful support still.

Maybe not an argument as old as Methuselah, but surely as old as Jesus.

But as a scientific argument it was quite new, without any influential scientific supporters.

WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides

A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...

Now it is well known that Germany spent its second world war preoccupied, not with winning the military war itself, but with eugenically killing all the 4Fs it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.

(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)

Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII

Less well known is the fact that the Allies and the Neutrals were also preoccupied with matters eugenic in the midst of an all-out military war : in this case, a steely determination to avoid killing any of their 1As if they could at all help it.

Naval blockades, aerial bombings and denying the spreading of information about new life-saving medicines and pesticides were the ways the Allied hoped to avoid engaging their 1A young males in hand to hand combat with 1A males from Germany, Japan and Italy.

Henry Dawson as the Margaret Atwood of medicine : heterogeneous survival

Margaret Atwood made famous the old quip that  Americans want to leave the wilderness a success, while Canadians are merely grateful to leave it a survivor.

Henry Dawson, a Canadian doctor, encountered this for real when he went to New York to work among American medical scientists who expected him to focus on virulence in bacteria.

Dawson's Follies...

... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.

Dateline Manhattan : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...

The purist science...this side of Heaven : fabricating the scientific canopy

As a Christian may I quickly say that I prefer my atheists to lose all of their religion, not just some of it.

WWII : pure science collides with impure reality

If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.

1939-1945, as a cure for overweening science ...

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln 

In the end, it turned out that the only way to clip modernist science's wings were to let it fly : WWII was modernist science's first and thankfully, only, world war it fully commanded.

People born between 1930 -1938 probably rare as PMs or Presidents

Try out my thesis in the case of your nation's PMs or Presidents - you'll probably find lots of national leaders  born before 1929 or after 1939 but the decade in between seems to have gotten skipped.

1943 : Africa's poorest get penicillin BEFORE well-to-do in America and England

Not, admittedly , a headline you're ever likely to see soon above mainstream (ie , American and British) penicillin histories , but that doesn't make it any less true.

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality

During the era of modernity, 1870s- 1960s , politics was science and science was politics , both united around the idea that ultimately physical reality was really quite simple and so should human reality be.

"You can't divorce Family" : the failure of eugenic autarky

There are many theories why the world's species all either use "sex between two different but related genomes" or "cloning combined with highly unstable individual genetics" , to reproduce themselves.

Did WII begin when first small nation was attacked or when first big empire was attacked ?

The peoples of the world's last big empires (whether wartime winners or losers) still produce the most books on everything - unfortunately including those on WWII.

Science's internecine war : simplifying production science vs complicating impact science

A production scientist, indoctrinated by parents to keep things neat and tidy and to see things as neat-able and tidy-able , grows up seeing his or her job as a very simple one.

"Dig up uranium as cheaply and quickly as physically possible, full stop".

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...

Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.

Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.

Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science

Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.

So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.

I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.