tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19630958223770770292024-02-07T18:55:33.098-04:00All life is family(And family is complicated.) What happens when pure science hits impure reality ?Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.comBlogger1094125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-79481075679463271652014-01-06T12:54:00.000-04:002014-01-06T13:07:36.781-04:00World over Word : Penicillin's twelve lost years end with an (applied) ampoule , not an (theoretical) article ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
(Martin) Henry Dawson left no private papers, so his biography must be one of deeds not words.<br />
<br />
It actually suits the man : he was a natural history type scientist, not a natural philosophy type.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
He lived in the material world , not in the thrusting scientific elite's world of verbal jabs and written rhetorical skills.<br />
<br />
No airey castles in Spain, only down to earth reality.<br />
<br />
Dawson didn't earn our undying gratitude by writing academic papers about penicillin's potential, writing research grants about penicillin's potential or talking up penicillin's potential .<br />
<br />
He merely, <i>swiftly and silently</i>, stuck a needle full of the stuff he had made himself because Big Pharma won't , into
a dying man and thereby ended penicillin's dozen years of drought.<br />
<br />
No life has ever been saved by a peer-reviewed article alone - it takes hard work and real medicine at the end of a a real needle to do that.<br />
<br />
Admire , if you must , Nobel Prize winning Alexander Fleming's verbal skills in publicly dismissing penicillin's use as a lifesaving agent for 14 wasted years.<br />
<br />
But also honour Dawson's silent skill in proving him wrong, by saving Charlie Aronson's life, 75 years ago next year ....<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-67850547328699160662014-01-06T09:45:00.000-04:002014-01-06T09:45:07.372-04:00World over Will , 1939 - 1945 : Matter over Mind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
By all contemporary accounts, it was the lack of actual photos and movies of actual deaths (from anywhere inside the vast numbers of German concentration , POW and mass elimination camps) that prevented the many public verbal and written accounts of the Holocaust from being believed while it was happening.<br />
<br />
After all, anti-Semitic acts and talk actually went up ,<i> not down, </i> in the Anglo-American world during WWII.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Many in the Allied camp - perhaps 25 % - seriously blamed the "Jew-dominated FDR government" for creating the war, while many others accused Jews of shirking front line combat to remain home as war profiteers instead.<br />
<br />
So it was the extensive newsreels of British or American troops examining the dead and dying , most mere skeletons, in the <i>western</i> concentration camps that finally got through to the Home Front doubters about the millions killed in the invisible <i>eastern</i> extermination camps.<br />
<br />
I suspect that it was less the fact of their deaths ( seventy million had already died from the war worldwide) than the pictures of their starved condition that finally got through to people.<br />
<br />
All the detail-filled verbal and written contemporary accounts of the Holocaust , even when they came from the lips of people like Churchill (not really regarded by anyone, not even Nazis, as 'a stooge of the Jews') were dismissed as mere artifacts of the will and the mind .<br />
<br />
All the world's population had six long years to become used to the near total disconnect between what they could actually see at work or all around them, versus the public (verbal/written) propaganda told about it.<br />
<br />
But the mid to late 1945 newsreels were too long, too many and too varied to appear easily doctored -- they were artifacts of the real world and of matter and they were readily and strongly believed.<br />
<br />
What better proof then for my thesis that <b>The mental Will</b> might have started the war on all sides, but that it was <b>The material World</b> that actually won out in the end....?<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-18355770907412491622014-01-03T09:58:00.000-04:002014-01-03T10:03:50.040-04:00Nature bowls last : Matter over Mind, 1939-1945<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Sir Charles Lyell as intellectual godfather to Leni Riefenstahl's "<b>Triumph of the Will</b>".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Who would have known ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But it was Sir Charles, in a 1863 book, who first summarily dismissed materialism as a philosophy with a single memorable phrase : "MIND OVER MATTER".</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He opined that all the evidence from evolutionary progress ('ever onward to those broad sunlit uplands') indicated that the mind was gradually but steadily winning dominion over mere matter obstacles.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Oh yes, what Canadian can forget that 'dominion' was <i>word de rigueur</i> for English language intellectuals in the sunny 1860s ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">'Mind over Matter' : Lyell's memorable catchphrase came to sum up Modernity's essence for the populations and leaders of the Allied, Axis and Neutral camps during WWII.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So, in its spirit, on the very first day of the war, headlines all the world over (incorrectly) blatted "<b>German tanks maul Polish horses</b>".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But in the dying days of the European phase of the war no such headlines came out, that by the Spring of 1945 , now "<b>Polish horses haul German tanks</b>".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The tanks were disguised as Polish peasant haywagons, en route to their last role as hull down pillboxes in the battle for the German heartland.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Germans had no more gasoline for the tanks and in any case had run out of engine spare parts to re-start them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">German morale was still high..... but motor oil supplies were very low.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Japan : ditto, ditto.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There legions of schoolkids and grandmothers destroyed all the sacred pine trees they could find, all to extract the basis of very little, very crude, airplane gasoline from their roots.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The German tankers were desperate to get their tanks into hidden position before the Soviets arrived, but the Polish horses took their good old time, re-fueling along the sides of the road, eating the Spring's first tender shoots.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war - for Germany at least - was no longer moving along at Man's Blitzkrieg tempo, but rather at Nature's own pace.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">'Matter over Mind' , at last ....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-4481238286193353722014-01-02T16:19:00.002-04:002014-01-02T16:25:01.269-04:00Nature bowls last , 1939-1945<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Treat your enemy as subhumans ---- as the Axis regarded its Slav and Chinese opponents and as the Allies regarded the Japanese.<br />
<br />
Regard many of your allies and colonies' citizens as not much better.<br />
<br />
Combine that with regarding your national own working class in almost as dismissive terms.<br />
<br />
All this certainly widens the scope of what the people who ran WWII from the top regarded as aspects of 'the natural world', rather than beings fully civilized humans like themselves.<br />
<br />
So when I say that Nature bowled last, Nature's bowling could run a very wide gamut indeed .<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Not just freezing cold and machine-ruining dust, or harvest failures or microbial resistance to sulfa drugs.<br />
<br />
Not just what five thousand of Nature's kilometres really means to an overtaxed human logistic system.<br />
<br />
It moves onwards to include all those lowly Slav and Chinese peasants who turned into deadly partisans --- rather than simply turning turtle as predicted.<br />
<br />
It is working class East Enders defying the uncaring 'Teflon Winnie' to turn Tube Stations into the effective bomb shelters he had failed to provide.<br />
<br />
And it is immigrant and minority American patients and families,together with their GPs ,"acting up" to defy the penicillin-denying medical elite of the OSRD/NAS death panels.<br />
<br />
In this six year long stage drama, the 'natural world' scenery ends up eating even the hammiest of 'human world' actors....</div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-91765438805895519562013-12-31T14:10:00.001-04:002013-12-31T14:25:38.757-04:00"Teflon Winnie vs the Tubers" : Richard North tells how THE FEW replaced THE MANY --- and why<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I read all (or at least major portions) of about 1000 books a year, year in and year out.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> 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 <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-many-not-the-few-9781441131515/"><b>"The</b> <b>Many not The Few"</b></a> (Bloomsbury Press) , I hope you realize this is not something I do lightly or frequently.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dr North really tears into the university myth of The Few (The Few also being mostly, and not so coincidentally, university lads).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">You already know the Myth's script and its rarely well hidden subtext.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Those (oh so few) RAF fighter pilots. On their high tech steeds . (Tally Ho !) Who prevented the German invasion of Britain. And saved Civilization. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While craven trade unionists cowered deep underground . In defeatist Tube Stations, refusing to come out. To do a honest day's work. For a honest day's pay.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It all reads as if rehearsed from a 1940s Young Conservative pamphlet - which in fact is where it did originate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But why then is it now mostly coming out of the mouths of tweedy history professors who usually swear intellectual allegiance to some brand or other of academic Marxism ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I suspect this is because eugenics hasn't died away at all but gone <i>sotto voce</i> and gotten tenure , only to re-emerge as academic specialization .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No more eugenic chances for a truly pure Aryan race.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> But still hopes can be entertained for a pure history of the Battle of Atlantic <i>and</i> a pure history of the Blitz<i> and</i> a pure history of the Battle of Britain - all providing jobs, with pensions, for the specialists in these three areas.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And then along comes a miscegenationist like Richard North to muddle all three battles together - <i>just as Hitler himself and his planners did</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I will return again to this book again and again in the future, in particular looking at what its research methods mean for bottom up history versus top down history, but for today let us look at that continuing marvel : <b>Teflon Winnie</b>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No matter how much new academic research comes out in published history (specialist peer-reviewed articles by history professors) about the failings of Churchill during WWII, it seems to have no impact on popular history ( generalist book reviewer reviewed book, usually <i>also</i> written by history professors).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There the wartime propaganda myths still form the frame to fit awkward new facts into.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Historians are trained to give paramount credit to (a) contemporary (b) official (c) paper records .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But during Total War , government re-writing history on the fly (censoring bad news even from government ministers and bally-hooing semi-fictional accounts of victories) is usually seen as more important than combat itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(North's book is basically 300 pages of examples of this claim, taken from the PR Battle over the Battle for Britain.) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So why then should historians treat (scant) wartime government records (found in a very hard to access Archives) on the wartime bombing of Belfast over the abundant locally collected recent records of that tragic event , found on a website that all can access ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Oh I guess I answered my own question - didn't I ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Top level government officials' public and private papers remain ,in practise, easily open only to prominent (full professor level) academics or to assistant professors with a healthy grant and a good set of letters of recommendation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Self-serving and incomplete they are, but very respectable when cited in the endnotes of an academic journal article.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But citing the URL of the painstakingly abundant recording of the details of every ship sunk in WWII , day by day, ocean by ocean, maintained on an open website by a bunch of dedicated amateurs is simply not on, not in a serious paper - even if that URL contain information that can be found no where else.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One good example of how self serving and incomplete the official records can be are the Nobel prize winning volumes produced by Churchill on the history of WWII , as seen by about the only senior leader of the war to remain alive and at large.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These hugely influential volumes set the framework for writing about WWII because Churchill, at that time, had access to key records that no one else had.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And when those records didn't support his claims, he just made things up, certain that the Cabinet Minutes would never be opened up - or not until long after he had frozen his version of the truth into intellectual concrete.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Teflon Winnie</span></h3>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So Teflon Churchill never had a disaster personally stick to him - he always found someone else to blame, always claimed he had urgently minuted about the problem months before it became a full crisis, so he was not at fault.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Only now, with the wartime cabinet papers being released, can we check his 1948-1949 claims against the actual record.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And just as the 1940 RAF kill claims proved as phoney as a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea, so too has Churchill in many areas.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Never more so than in the great "ACTING UP" of 1940, when hundreds of thousands of working class Londoners defied guards to occupy the Tubes and the fancy hotels of London, to protest the lack of safe bomb shelters, like the ones Hitler had already provided <i>his </i>cities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Churchill had repeatedly led the charge to use force to pull the Tubers out - but when the protest became too big, he rushed to the head of the crowd to claim he had led it all along.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No evidence has emerged to support his mass of hot air on this major morale crisis - all points to the exact opposite.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why was Churchill so willing to condemn brave people to horrific weeks of nights in unsafe and uncomfortable Anderson huts ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Because Churchill always had his Second Front.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It's just that it came from the left of Normandy's beaches, from the mass of mostly young, mostly grammar school educated, voters demanding not just a victory of returning to the halcyon days of 1936 Jarrow , but moving forward into some bright new future.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A wiser Tory like Baldwin or such might have agreed with the young, but Churchill was a hard liner on what position he took at a time (his whims varied hour by hour).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This time all his instincts said that any , <i>any</i> , recognizing of the rights of ordinary people to have a say in the running of their lives was the beginning of the end for his style of Toryism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So no,no ,no to any British public announcing of war aims and no accepting that the masses in the Tubes were <i>vox populi</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> Instead the deliberate PR effort to paint them as working class cowards, saved by a few upper class flying officers in the RAF.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Naval destroyers and Bomber Blenheims might have served instead as models, but they were collectivist fighting machines - but the solo pilots of the Spitfires were all gentlemen and gentlemen only .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So they alone were hoisted as the solo saviors of Britain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It didn't pay out for Teflon Winnie on Race Day in 1945, but it did in subsequent elections for the Conservatives - and still does.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Thanks to a lot of help from left-leaning historians....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-69600615208787039602013-12-27T05:56:00.000-04:002013-12-27T06:12:42.644-04:00Mite is Right - Might is Right. Both ? Or Neither ?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There are niches enough for all : the large, medium and the small.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Or by the current evidence that humanity is well equipped, mentally and technologically, to instantly blow itself all up.<br />
<br />
This idea of evolutionary Progress was , in practise , further defined into the assumption that the only thing Big and complex, <i>in an otherwise simple universe</i>, were upper class western-oriented males .<br />
<br />
People of colour, and other minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, children, the handicapped --- all were absorbed under the rubric of being potentially small and weak and unneeded on this evolutionary voyage.<br />
<br />
This assumption guided the leadership of the Allies, Neutral and Axis nations of WWII - until it ended in disaster for all.<br />
<br />
Instead we must accept that we are all, Big and small, stuck here together on Lifeboat Earth , willy nilly, <i>family</i> : we Big can't divorce the small - and they can't divorce us.<br />
<br />
We don't have to love each other - lambs and lions lying down together - but we must learn to accept the inevitably and agree to get along.<br />
<br />
Accepting the fact is step one on Humanity's long course of post-Hubris recovery....<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-56725581864373530162013-12-26T15:47:00.000-04:002013-12-27T05:42:24.250-04:00Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Part One : the backstory</h3>
<br />
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 <i>earlier</i> Democratic administration.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.<br />
<br />
Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be <i>actively</i> killed off.<br />
<br />
He had wanted to do much earlier, but judged it would be politically risky internally.<br />
<br />
Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.<br />
<br />
Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.<br />
<br />
This roll back could lead to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .<br />
<br />
(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?", is the totally wrong question </h3>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"<br />
<br />
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?<br />
<br />
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.<br />
<br />
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .<br />
<br />
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.<br />
<br />
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."<br />
<br />
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.<br />
<br />
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.<br />
<br />
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.<br />
<br />
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.<br />
<br />
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.<br />
<br />
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.<br />
<br />
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.<br />
<br />
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.<br />
<br />
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.<br />
<br />
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.<br />
<br />
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.<br />
<br />
The WPB proposed that enough <b>wartime </b>penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.<br />
<br />
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .<br />
<br />
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.<br />
<br />
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.<br />
<br />
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.<br />
<br />
He fought them , won and so changed history ....</div>
</div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-29088211265150724452013-12-26T11:08:00.000-04:002013-12-26T11:08:09.527-04:00why STORY PAPERS, aka MUNROs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
the STORY PAPERS<br />
<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
(Read more about what exactly is a story-paper)<br />
<br />
So, just like Dawson's agape penicillin, the "All Life is Family" series of stories will be freely available to everyone, particularly to people who could not normally afford to buy them.<br />
<br />
Consider them more like "Tracts for our Commensal Age" than your typical commercial New York Times bestselling potboiler .<br />
<br />
The story of Dawson's project is actually a pretty big story (almost as big as the global war itself).<br />
<br />
So rather like a short story cycle or roman fleuve , it will be broken into maybe sixty or so smaller ones, at natural internal climaxes.<br />
<br />
This is all with the intent to make it easier to read or download each story-paper freely.<br />
<br />
Each of those sixty or so story-papers will treat its particular chief protagonist fairly, but I hope the cumulative effect from the clash of their different takes on reality circa WWII, will provoke as much reflection as enjoyment in the reader.<br />
<br />
The Dawson project stories can all be freely read , in their entirety , as scattered and intermittent posts and remained archived and available forever on this blog.<br />
<br />
Thankfully, the blog will have an index page to make finding all of them , in the proper chronological order, very easy.<br />
<br />
Directing your mobile browser to my blog will be the best way to read them on tiny mobile phone screens.<br />
<br />
But in addition, each blog post on Dawson's project will have a link to Google Docs, to download the free PDF of the story-paper.<br />
<br />
Thus journal readers will also be able to download all the sixty or so stories ,as a 21st century story-paper.<br />
<br />
A 19th century story-paper was simply today's tabloid newspaper but devoted 100% to non-news stories.<br />
<br />
With no expensive hardcovers or binding or spine for a title, the story-paper was unattractive to regular booksellers but distributed to subscribers by mail, it was the cheapest way to get literature to a mass public.<br />
<br />
Distributing Dawson's stories this way will be in homage to him and to my university's (Dalhousie) chief benefactor, story-paper publisher George Munro), who did so much to democratize print and literature for people of all incomes.<br />
<br />
Like myself, Dawson also attended Dalhousie.<br />
<br />
In addition he was raised in the same Pictou County Scottish Presbyterian tradition as was Munro.<br />
<br />
Those these 21st century story-papers have been made into downloadable pre-imposed PDFs, for easy printing out as a complete chapbook-sized work, individually and without charge.<br />
<br />
Because they are all in the Public Domain, like agape penicillin , you are free to copy them, pass them on or adapt them - even bind them into bigger 'books' and sell them for profit under your own name if you wish.<br />
<br />
Just spread their message of hope, as if it was a penicillium spore in the wind.<br />
<br />
And I won't mind : because passing on their message of hope - not making money - is what matters.<br />
<br />
Each story-paper will be illustrated by my own color drawings , designed to 'degrade gracefully' (as computer types are wont to say) into black, white and gray illustrations.<br />
<br />
This is to make them suitable for economic printing on black and white printers or for reading on older ebook readers.<br />
<br />
Both the electronic blog posts and printed story-papers have the advantage of being 'open all night' and of being readily accessible all around the world.<br />
<br />
Now there is a big disadvantage in not making these stories into a conventional for-sale 'book'.<br />
<br />
Very few book reviewers, whether working for a big newspaper or running their own small not-for-profit blog, will review a free (and worse: PUBLIC DOMAIN !) series of related stories.<br />
<br />
It isn't just book reviewers who vote for capitalist parties at election time either - you'd be surprised just how adamantly left wing and green reviewers favour for-profit books and authors and despise not-for-profit authors.<br />
<br />
Altruism and book reviewing simply don't seem to mix.<br />
<br />
I believe the reason is that even non-paid book reviewers all secretly hope to become paid book reviewers one day and they know that will be totally depend upon reviewing the sort of commercial books from publishers that buy ads in their employers' media outlet that ultimately go back to pay book reviewers' wages.<br />
<br />
('Scratch my back and I will scratch yours'.)<br />
<br />
No doubt the professionals were just as suspicious in 1940 of Henry Dawson's motives : what was really in it for him , beyond all that phony 'amateur' altruism ?<br />
<br />
So I will have to direct publicity about the series' message past the professional and wannabe professional book reviewing community and onto any and all potential readers.<br />
<br />
That will mean asking all sorts of people, from professors to pastors, to read it , talk it up, review it and to pass it on to others.....<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-65058637011132942062013-12-25T14:17:00.001-04:002013-12-25T14:17:46.131-04:00The subterranean sewers of DARK MONEY killing our future<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A long awaited peer-reviewed <a href="http://drexel.edu/~/media/Files/now/pdfs/Institutionalizing%20Delay%20-%20Climatic%20Change.ashx">study</a> 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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A world they simultaneously claim they wish to leave to their grandchildren...</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">and to our grandchildren.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The old school of social Darwinists, those active in Henry Dawson's era, loudly and proudly proclaimed their merciless world vision of bulk and greed.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But my era's school of social Darwinists will only proclaim their faith <i>sotto voce ---</i> and even then largely in secret.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> They clearly fear the disapproval of someone - perhaps maybe their own dear grandchildren ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Since this is Christmas Day, I might be permitted to tell you, just once, why I believe in a merciful Christ. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I do , because that belief <i>also</i> allows me to believe in a merciless eternal Hell ---- and that some people are on Earth are going there.....</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-86608000719909738842013-12-24T13:55:00.001-04:002013-12-24T14:14:13.688-04:00Print in 50 years : Downloadable pre-imposed PDFs , aka MUNROs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book "as we know it now" will be dead in 50 years, but the book itself will not be dead, far from it.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I publish my own journal and write occasional book reviews, but I have also worked in four different bookstores for a dozen years and am a lifelong avid reader, so I hope I have seen the issue from various sides.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I insist that the book, Phoenix-like, will be revived as downloadable pre-imposed PDFs, (what I have labelled as a 'MUNRO') to produce <b>story papers</b> or even slim saddle bound books inside the ultimate reader's own home.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Today the average copy of a print book or magazine is written here, edited there, printed over there, shipped out to a warehouse, shipped to thousands of stores, shipped unsold back to the warehouse and then finally shipped out to be pulped.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In addition, the meaningful contents have often been deliberately padded up in size till it is at least 250 pages thick , to be profitable and or convenient to handle for conventional literary agent, publisher ,book critic, book store and library.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the world of culture, print book publishing is like the Alberta Tar Sands in its impact on our planet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the commercial model of my alternative scheme, a customer would pay online for a link to a downloadable PDF of the book or magazine which they will print out in their homes or offices on their own <b>duplex*</b> computer printer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">*The scheme doesn't need "printing on two sides at once" (duplex) printers to work - that just makes it easier.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The key is that the PDF is already <b><i>pre-imposed</i></b> , in printing industry lingo , so it will read in correct order, when simply taken out of the printer and quickly folded in on itself like a conventional newspaper, magazine or booklet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To wit : imagine an A4 or letter sized piece of paper as printed in 4 'page' panels - two to each side and then it is folded in the middle of the longest dimension.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So in a 64 printed page magazine, one side of a sheet of paper has page 64 on the left and page 1 on the right, flipped over, page 2 is on the left and page 63 is on the right.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">64 printed pages from only 16 sheets of A4 paper.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The assembled pages no more need staples or a stiff cover stock cover than your everyday daily paper needs them to remain together ; thank friction of rough paper on rough paper for that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If it is unbound by anything but friction, technically it isn't a book but a <b>story paper</b> --- a book in the form of a daily newspaper, in a sense.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Any history of publishing will reveal just how big this story paper format once was and how savagely the fearful elites opposed this democratization of literature.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Now there is a limit to the number of sheets that hang together in this fashion without need for a sophisticated trimming operation : perhaps 80 printed pages is the limit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Still if the paper size is upped to A3 or tabloid (11x17) (my home printer is that size and I bought it in 2013 for $150 Cdn), we do thus end up with a magazine sized product that can hold about 50,000 words in a two column layout - enough for a lot of novels or non fiction works.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But I expect most books will be printed on A4 paper and produce novella sized work of about 20,000 words.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As in Victorian times, 'books' might be once again produced in three or more volumes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yes, the end reader must come up with a dollar or two for their own paper and ink , but the market will see the price for the link is set at below an equivalent of today's $5 to $10 dollars.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Some of us, very old, can remember having to cut the pages of books we brought ourselves, or only receiving the text block of a book and having to have a cover put on ourselves at a book binder.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Somehow, we survived.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The competition is bookstores with incredibly expensive machines that can print out thick "perfect bound"* books very slowly and expensively one at a time, when the customer requests them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">* Ie, books with a thick square spine.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bookstores and book publishers hate/fear slim staple bound publications and teach us all quality literature and intellectual thought can't live within them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Is this is because anyone can make them - and then what will <b><i>they</i></b> do for a living ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Strange when we consider all the good literature and intellectual heft that has traditionally come out of the slender , staple bound, <i>magazines</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If the Book Trade can be believed, the literary or intellectual quality of a work falls off alarmingly, when the material is shifted from a lot of small pages in a book to a few big pages in a magazine. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bosh, a cartel is a cartel whether it involves drug company presidents in a smoke filled backroom or cosy publishers,booksellers and critics laying down the rules in public at a wine and cheese salon ..... </span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-17983497731346790842013-12-23T20:23:00.000-04:002013-12-24T11:32:03.068-04:00Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is a grim race against time --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG <i>really</i> got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-70967319454084656082013-12-22T20:44:00.001-04:002013-12-22T20:44:54.374-04:00Modernity's K-selected eugenic monoculture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If we limit our understanding of<b> K-selection</b> to an old high school biology class, of <b>eugenics</b> to what the Nazis did (75 years ago) and of <b>monoculture</b> to what North American farmers are doing today , we will miss this trio's intimate connection to that old old old peasant's adage : <i>'never put all your eggs in one basket' </i>.....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-74057342876164113772013-12-22T19:31:00.000-04:002013-12-22T19:59:36.129-04:00Restoring the small , to a monoculture of the Big, 1939-1945<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a moral argument it was very old , with lots of powerful support still.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maybe not an argument as old as Methuselah, but surely as old as Jesus.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But as a scientific argument it was quite new, without any influential scientific supporters.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It argued that there was no hierarchy of worth in biology based on bigger size or greater physical complexity : big and small were but equal variations on Life, each cast to better fit particular niches.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And it said that that, strictly speaking, the small were <i>much more successful</i> than the big in terms of sheer survival --- the only criteria that biology, rather than ethics or theology , could legitimately measure .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">They been around much, much longer, had vastly greater numbers of individual members, inhabited more niches and had survived all the worst disasters that Nature had thrown life on Earth, unlike the Big.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The biological sense of the survival of the fittest for each particular niche had morphed , by the 1930s, into the belief that it was the survival of the fit ( one size to fit all niches), with fit being code for big and powerful.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The small, human and non human , were becoming seen as losers and a waste of space - life unworthy of life.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Henry Dawson joined many many others in opposing this idea on moral grounds.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But he was basically all alone in contesting it scientifically, based on what he had discovered in his small lab.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He was far too cautious a personality to be successful contesting the opposing vision by mere words.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But his is a biography of deeds --- against all odds, he succeeded in fatally shattering that vision.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He did so by simply embarking on an attempt to save the lives of just ten people, over the opposition of his own colleagues, his own wartime Allied government and his own failing body.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But thanks to the quixotic effort that Dawson began in 1940, ten billion of us, so far, have had our lives immensely improved : Bread cast Upon Waters, indeed !</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-81415573779232379392013-12-22T12:41:00.001-04:002013-12-22T16:30:35.219-04:00WWII : an EUGENIC war , on both sides - nay, all sides<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>A truly moral Nuremberg Trial would have considered the war conduct of the Allied and Neutrals, as well as that of the Axis...</b></span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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 <b>4Fs</b> it could find and then tossing them in open pit graves or into furnaces.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(Cite here the Holocaust, Aktion T4 and the Hunger Plan.)</span><br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eugenic Triages from all sides of WWII</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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 <i>avoid</i> killing any of their <b>1As</b> if they could at all help it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The British scientists and the military had been united as one with British politicians is disclaiming any need for British troops to invade Germany to fight German troops there.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of September 1939, but it was not until the sixth year of the war and during the last months of the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">European part of that war, that British 1A males finally engaged in deadly combat with 1A German males on German soil.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(The whole war might have ended in months not years, if only the vastly larger manpower pool of the French and English empires had been conscripted into a ground army intent on invading western Germany while the bulk of her army was in the East , invading Poland.)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Instead, they said, naval blockades and aerial bombings and denying new lifesaving medicine would kill enough women, children and elderly in Occupied Europe and Germany to make the young male German 1As want to voluntarily surrender, far in advance of any British invasion with ground troops upon German soil.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Of course, the Neutrals did the best eugenic job of the lot in preserving their own 1As and not diluting them with any 4F gene pools.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">They did so by (A) not joining the effort to defend the weak and the small and the innocent and by (b) not letting any of the weak/small/innocent into their countries as hapless refugees.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The dysgenic myth of WWI</span></h3>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was claimed by avid eugenists during WWI (and by most educated people after the war ) that only the best had died in the Great War while back home the cripples and mentally deficient had breed like rabbits.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No evidence was put forth to support either of these claims - it seemed so common sensical.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In fact by the end of it, the Great War had killed millions of men who either had been or would have been rejected as 4F material at the start of the war - a war this big cut a wide swath through all men with two legs, from 18 to 45 , in most combat nations.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And the evidence shows in fact that the physically and mentally challenged people around the world and through all the ages marry <i>less</i> frequently and have kids <i>less</i> frequently than the average population.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is pretty hard to marry and raise a family without first having a steady well paying job - as most of us who are physically and mentally fit already know first hand.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How much harder for those with mental or physical challenges ?</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So, absorbing this false lesson , all the post WWI world's elites sought to avoid wars where their 'best' took on the 'best' from a nation of equal or greater demographic and military power.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This didn't mean no more war - it just meant that post WWI nations tended to attack nations smaller than themselves or to invade countries bigger than themselves that they thought were divided internally or were inept as warriors.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So Germany and Japan invaded Russia and China under reason one, while Japan attacked America under reason two.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And in any and all cases, nations tried to <b>first</b> win wars by killing or terrifying or starving/freezing the civilians of an opposing nation of a size similar to their own, rather than in engaging in direct combat with that nation's armed forces.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But because eugenics was invented in the victorious Allies's nations and only later taken up by the Axis and Neutrals, anything vaguely universally eugenic about the whole war was strictly excluded from consideration at Nuremberg - only crimes unique to the Axis were considered crimes against humanity.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Trust me on this one, every school child one hundred years from now will know WWII to be an eugenic war from push to finish - and on all sides ....</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-11982034516758898312013-12-19T18:31:00.000-04:002013-12-19T18:47:31.381-04:00Henry Dawson as the Margaret Atwood of medicine : heterogeneous survival<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Margaret Atwood made famous the old quip that Americans want to leave the wilderness a <b>success</b>, while Canadians are merely grateful to leave it a <b>survivor</b>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">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.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These are incredibly tiny , often immobile, beings who yet are successful in attacking their human hosts and frequently even kill them , despite the army of human medical opponents ranged against them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the alpha male world of medicine circa 1940 , virulence = success.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But Dawson was more interested in how these tiny beings persisted in <b>surviving</b> <i>with</i>, <i>on</i> and <i>in</i> us , despite our bodies' best efforts to detect and kill them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Because virulence is very much a two edged sword for bacteria : it may kill the host and then where do the successful bacteria live ? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Or it might provoke a counterattack on the virulent bacteria that kills all of them but ignores their non-virulent kin.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dawson seems to have been agnostic on the whole division between virulent and avirulent : merely seeing endless varieties of sub-strains among his chosen area of focus : oral commensal strep bacteria.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">His team (as well as others) gave the different appearing sub strain bacteria </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">colonies letter descriptions : R , S , L , M.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">His team members later went on to study others that have been given names instead, such as vegetative/biofilm, dormants and persisters.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">R were rough in colony appearance and didn't seem virulent in many species - unlike the smooth looking S colonies, while the mucoid M were very virulent in some species.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">R had normal bacterial walls, but S and M also had extra jelly-like capsules that made them harder to eat by our white blood cells, if they got in our blood system.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To over-simplify , R forms, <i>because</i> they lack a thick jelly cover , do much better at clinging to our throats and surviving long term by being low key and avoiding entering our blood streams.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">L forms ,named after the Lister Foundation in London where they were first discovered, are wall-less. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The strong but flexible wall of a bacteria (a wall beyond the sack like skin that all cells must have to be a cell ) is usually considered the secret to the bacteria world's successful survival as Life's oldest and most widespread form.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So a bacteria without a wall is a real curiosity - it seems to survive in places of calm where the water around it doesn't suddenly get very salty or very un-salty (to describe vital things <b>osmotic</b> as simple as possible ).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Its lack of bacterial wall even fools the human immune system into considering it not a harmful microbe but rather a part of us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That film of bacteria we can easily feel on our unbrushed teeth is a <b>biofilm</b> .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When it lands on our previously slightly damaged heart valves, it becomes bigger and harder (literally heart valve calculus) often called a vegetative form and in both cases, provides a safe home for various types of bacteria and their sub strains.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We could call them B or V type bacteria.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dawson started studying them when he started his pioneering use of penicillin to cure vegetative type endocarditis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some sub strains, his team members were the very first to discover in 1942, are naturally slow growing and survive antibiotics because they normally only hit bacteria that are actively growing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These P types are called now called persisters and they make both teeth bacteria type endocarditis and TB truly awful diseases to fully conquer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Others deep inside the biofilms don't grow at all normally and are called dormant (D type).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They will happily grow when the normal bacteria population closer to the surface of the biofilm have all been killed by antibiotics , leaving more food for the dormants to eat.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Wow : R,S,M.L,V,P,D forms --- where will it all end ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Who knows?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The point Dawson was trying to make was that bacteria weren't really invaders, seeking only to enter Man to kill him, but extremely tiny creatures to whom a human adult body was literally the same size to them that the Earth is to us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They saw us merely as home - just as we regard the Earth .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes a sometimes comfortable and sometimes hostile home - just as Earth often is to us - and seemingly they survived life's ups and downs by being 'careless' in their eugenic practises, as least as seen by eugenically-minded humans in the 1930s.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There were, in fact, no perfect pure bacteria clones ---- nothing an Aryan superman would recognize as perfection --- instead they shockingly seemed to tolerate all kinds of cripples and defectives in their population.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Because as the environment varied, what was a defect one day (slow growing or no growing, no capsule, no wall) was a means of survival the next day as the formerly virulent fell like ten pins all around them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dawson didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the bacteria world as "useless mouths and life unworthy of life" anymore than he later didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the human world either.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dawson's close examination of how messily but effectively Reality
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">really works proved much more accurate than all the armchair theories of the purist scientists, like Hitler or Einstein....</span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-56864360435035901052013-12-15T11:19:00.000-04:002013-12-15T11:24:16.893-04:00Dawson's Follies...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">... have improved the lives of ten billion of us , so far.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><b>Dateline Manhattan</b> : Something green and life-nurturing is brewing down the mean corridors of wartime science...</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the stereotyped description of the biggest teaching hospitals of the mid twentieth century, there is always a strict hierarchy cum pecking order of prestige, power and authority.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the top were the surgeons, particularly those who had combine high technical skill with the cool ability to save lives under very rushed emergency conditions ; brain surgeons operating on newly discovered operable brain tumours probably being at the top.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the bottom were the staff in the hospital's day or outpatient clinics, dealing with chronic non-life-threatening conditions - aging-related (osteo) arthritis patients being the classic example.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Henry Dawson was the director of one such arthritis day clinic, at New York's world famous CUMC (Columbia University Medical Centre).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But this clinic work was not the reason why his bemused colleagues referred to his 'Follies' , far from it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">His was a pioneering clinic and he was a nationally and even internationally respected expert in arthritis, well regarded for his common sense caution over the possibility of quick cures.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Not much for <i>a prior</i> hypothesises, he preferred the naturalist's method of gathering all sorts of data from hundreds of cases, to see if any common 'tendencies' emerged.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No, it was Dawson's private (non-day job, non-grant approved) scientific interests that bemused or angered his fellow medical scientists.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A traditional boon granted to the staff of hospital labs was the right to work on their own private research projects on equipment and in lab corners
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">not in current use.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A boon usually available to the staffer in his off-work hours : evenings, weekends and holidays (hence the term EWH Research).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">His day job bosses didn't directly oversee this research if the staffer had something like tenure and nor did senior members of the discipline ride shotgun on it by controlling the issuing of grant money, as is done today.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nevertheless , the hope was that while this private research might be on the fringes of conventional science, its aim was ultimately to be useful.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And here Dawson seemed to have crossed some sort of line.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">He was seen as being too interested in both <i>avirulent</i> commensal bacteria and in <i>avirile </i>4F patients.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">An applied scientist if there ever was any, a medical researcher was expected to be only concerned with <b>virulent</b> pathogens , ones that actually could kill or harm patients.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">'Best leave the study of avirulent bacteria to the basic scientists in university biology departments'.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And so between the Spring of 1939 and the Winter of 1941 , the medical elite in America steadily moved staff and money away from the New Deal's emphasis on social medicine - helping to heal the avirile 4Fs in society - towards medical research directed towards helping 'our soon to be fighting boys' (the virile by definition 1As from the draft boards) .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This elite, being mostly Republicans sympathetic to popular eugenics and thus privately and publicly hostile to FDR's social medicine, they eagerly welcomed using the excuse of preparing for the upcoming war to shift emphasis away from this silly 'socialized medicine' stuff .</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And they even had FDR's backing , as he publicly said he was no longer Doctor New Deal but now Doctor Win the War.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But Dawson's comeback was that using the excuse of 'war necessity' to throw the weak under the bus was exactly what Hitler did (in his notorious Aktion T4 program) and weren't we supposed to be <i>opposed</i> to his values ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So his bosses grumbled and restrained but his not stop the work of this respected tenured polite member of their staff.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the end he was forced to use the corridors of his hospital to house the five gallon bottles of agape penicillium he had brewed up.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But he still could extract enough under these conditions so hostile to the production of penicillin , to treat his pioneering series of '4Fs of the 4Fs'.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">These were young men with subacute bacterial endocarditis (the invariably fatal SBE that tended to befall the survivors of the then endemic Rheumatic Fever) that wartime medicine had directed should be <b><i>'</i></b><i><b>code slowed'</b></i> into an early grave.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Himself dying from an autoimmune disease, Dawson kept at it, in the face of the overt hostility of his colleagues.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eventually, ordinary GPs, patients' families and ordinary journalists all "ACTED UP" on behalf of his project to see that wartime penicilin was made available to all those dying who could benefit from it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dawson died as the European part of the war was ending but not before knowing his tiny EWH project had changed world history.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ten billion of us, to date, can only agree ....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-14825192412192610802013-12-14T09:28:00.000-04:002013-12-15T10:04:15.327-04:00The purist science...this side of Heaven : fabricating the scientific canopy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">As a Christian may I quickly say that I prefer my atheists to lose all of their religion, not just<i> some</i> of it.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Replacing a transcendental God with human gods cum masters of the universe cum lords of the human kind , is to combine the worst aspects of religion and atheism, with all the good bits of both left out.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When scientific discoveries (made out in the field by dirt-on-the-hands science) destroyed what Peter Berger calls the <b>sacred canopy</b> for most people in the western world , theoretically oriented scientists (natural philosophy indoor types rather than the dirt-on-hands natural history types) set about erecting a <b>scientific canopy</b> in its place.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This immediately set up an internecine war within science.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Because, after all , hands-on science had just discovered about how complex, dynamic and intermingled Reality really was, and this was the direct and immediate reason for the decline in the public belief in a simple, predictable, stable cosmos set up by a clockmaker God.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So to immediately claim, without proof , that a few fundamental laws in fundamental physics had been more than enough to create our simple, predictable, stable cosmos together with all human culture, might be thought to take a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the theory boys.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But such is the basic human need to believe that Life and Reality are simple and orderly and purpose-driven , it must be said that the theory boys had all the initial innings.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That is , until 1945 or thereabouts....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-2644051152883547542013-12-13T18:55:00.001-04:002013-12-13T18:55:17.563-04:00WWII : pure science collides with impure reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If anyone learned the key science lesson of WWII, it wasn't the adults of the day.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Rather that science lesson was partially absorbed by children born in 1938 and afterwards , children too young to share the glow most in the Allied world felt about the supposed leading role science played in defeating the Axis.<br />
<br />
I say partially because wartime science was generally blamed by these young people only for <i>deliberately</i> promising and then succeeding in killing as many people as it possibly could possible , particularly killing as many civilians as possible.<br />
<br />
When its actual biggest scientific and moral failures were for what it promised both sides during the war but then didn't deliver.<br />
<br />
Sins of omission rather than sins of commission.<br />
<br />
So <i>bad</i> efficient science merely replaces <i>good</i> efficient science in the baby-boomer academics' eyes, when a more accurate and devastating charge is to say pure science was, and is always, overwhelming inefficient.<br />
<br />
As it must be, as long as it continues to deny that reality is inevitably and invariably dirty , mixed , intermingled and impure.....</div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-33564620801958809892013-12-12T15:26:00.000-04:002013-12-12T15:28:22.169-04:001939-1945, as a cure for overweening science ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 30px;">"The </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold; line-height: 30px;">best</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 30px;"> way to get a </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold; line-height: 30px;">bad law</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 30px;"> repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 30px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">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.</span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">If 'commanded' is the right word for what actually transpired.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">What an unholy, immoral, mess it was, too.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">Six years later, even the partisans of modernist science cum scientism must have felt a bit more humble (though they never really recanted, not even on their deathbeds).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">But fortunately, even they must eventually all die out and the generation after them, born 1940 or later, never really bought into modernist science's hubris-filled visions.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">The period 1945 - 2015 marks a period of transition : the men of scientism gradually aging and gradually tiring of the game while the new generation gets bolder and bolder in denouncing the earlier generation's utopian visions.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 30px;">What comes after , Heaven alone only knows....</span></span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-77048794485590269142013-12-12T15:09:00.003-04:002013-12-12T15:11:32.632-04:00People born between 1930 -1938 probably rare as PMs or Presidents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Look at two of Britain's more recent Labour PMs : Callaghan born in 1913 followed by Blair born in 1953 --- a 40 year spread !<br />
<br />
No wonder then that the socialist Callaghan supported the maintenance of the British empire while the centrist Blair (and his conservative opponent John Major) did not.<br />
<br />
They were simply generations apart.<br />
<br />
I think the reason for the absence of those born in the 1930s is because they were either too <i>young </i>to convincingly support WWII's values from personal experience and too <i>old</i> to convincingly oppose WWII's values from lack of any personal experience with it.<br />
<br />
And I think the key date in the changeover was 1990 : a date by which virtually all WWII veterans had to have retired from powerful positions at the top of the workforce because they had reached 65 .<br />
<br />
Also a year when baby-boomers too young to share the war hype finally were old enough to be taken seriously as the national leader.<br />
<br />
A <i>baby-boomer</i>, in my definition, is someone who is more exercised by why the Allies did so little to prevent the Holocaust (a story revealed post 1945) than they are emotionally stirred by stories of the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk of 1940.<br />
<br />
I think you'd have to be born in 1929 or earlier to really get caught up in the emotional high of 1940's Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain --- only a few children in 1940 who were younger than ten would really understand what all the fuss was about.<br />
<br />
A person born in 1935 (a <i>tweener</i>) was simply both too young for the Dunkirk spirit and too old for the Woodstock spirit...</div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-76464250369881547282013-12-12T10:15:00.000-04:002013-12-12T14:05:40.233-04:001943 : Africa's poorest get penicillin BEFORE well-to-do in America and England<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<b>George Marshall Findlay</b> (1893-1952) , together with Kenneth R Hill and A MacPherson, brewed up his own crude penicillin in 1943 to apply upon the open ulcers of the dreaded disease Yaws on West African sufferers and got great results.<br />
<br />
He had to do it all himself because Britain and America were too busy fighting over how to divided the world into two big markets after they had synthesized penicillin to actually make any serious amounts of (natural) penicillin to save lives in the here and now*.<br />
<br />
*here and now : aka WWII.<br />
<br />
America ,as is well known, has a pathological resistance to ever signing international treaties but there it was , in the middle of an all out war, negotiating a international treaty with Britain on the post war market division for their shared patented synthetic penicillin.<br />
<br />
The two planned an exclusive on the lifesaver even tighter than they planned to have on the A-bomb.<br />
<br />
That meant no encouragement of natural penicillin plants in Africa, South America, India and East Asia .<br />
<br />
The Anglo-American fear was that in these places ready access to very cheap labour and even readier access to cheap sugar cane waste (as a carbon source feedstock) would permit the local crude penicillin to undercut the price of profit-inflated synthetic penicillin shipped in from thousands of miles away.<br />
<br />
But penicillium spores are like the A-bomb's radioactive fallout clouds : no respecter of national borders and international commercial treaties.<br />
<br />
They drifted in and out of Britain and its distant colonies alike and that meant crude penicillin could be made everywhere under cottage industry conditions.<br />
<br />
(Even at the battlefront in Italy by barely trained Canadian medics using potato washings as a feedstock !)<br />
<br />
<b>"All Life is Family" Pt 1. (1939-1945: a cure for science) , </b>will detail all the world-wide WWII efforts to make crude penicillin that it can find.<br />
<br />
All this in an effort to combat the Whig history of wartime penicillin
that strongly suggests that the actual end result - cheap abundant natural penicillin - was what the Anglo-American governments and their medical cum scientific cum commercial elites wanted all along.<br />
<br />
It intends to bring the dreaded "C" word into science talk : conflict , as in conflict between scientists working on the <i>same</i> wartime "side".<br />
<br />
And it will detail scientific winners and losers , again both working on the same wartime side.<br />
<br />
A welcome change from the zillions of WWII science stories that always seem to show Allied scientists beating Axis scientists in a dramatic race against time - when in fact, the evidence is much more mixed as to who did what first -- and whether coming first ever really mattered.<br />
<br />
Yes, the Axis lost the war, but no , it wasn't at all due to their low quality of science.<br />
<br />
Seventy five years after the war, can't we stop re-fighting WWII based on propaganda lies ...</div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-16394599747697187152013-12-11T16:54:00.000-04:002013-12-11T16:54:21.342-04:001945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of </span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">modern science </b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">who had</span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A good year for Scientism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of <b>post-modern science</b>... and hence marks the <i>end</i> of modern science.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Surely then a bad year for Scientism.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for <i>starting</i> the war and behaving so beastly during it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><b>All Life is Family , part one and two,</b> explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....</span></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-72334177563528266382013-12-07T18:28:00.001-04:002013-12-07T18:28:45.773-04:00All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.<br />
<br />
Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.<br />
<br />
Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.<br />
<br />
Let the games begin !<br />
<br />
But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.<br />
<br />
Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).<br />
<br />
In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-28306476480043118642013-12-06T16:43:00.001-04:002013-12-06T16:51:00.049-04:00"You can't divorce Family" : the failure of eugenic autarky<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
This, rather than merely reproducing pure clones of each species' best individual samples , forever and forever.<br />
<br />
But most of those theories boil down to the fact that a highly diverse (dirty) (mixed) population presents less of a static target to incoming diseases and parasites , compared to a select and unendingly stable clone line.<br />
<br />
Eugenic scientists everywhere knew all of this, even in the 1940s, but they thought of themselves as the smartest men and women in the universe and just assumed we humans could beat the odds.<br />
<br />
But even as Germany tried to institute <b>eugenic autarky</b> during WWII, the worm of romantic love and the attraction between opposites , bit its way into their Aryan apple.<br />
<br />
Many an enslaved foreigner and a German woman or a German male occupying troop and an enslaved female from the occupied population ended up falling in love and making babies : mixed babies.<br />
<br />
Just as blood studies of Aryan and non-Aryan blood suggested has always happened in times of war, invasion and conquest.<br />
<br />
(And no, I am not forgetting children born of war rape .<br />
<br />
But remember despite German eugenicists hating this activity and making it among their 'crime of all crimes', it still went on regardless.<br />
<br />
As did the equally hated 'true love matches'.)<br />
<br />
Yes, the Nazis talked much of blood politics but were in the event forced to keep the results of their own Nazi-directed blood typing studies well out of their public rhetoric.<br />
<br />
Because as <b>Rachel Boaz </b>has discovered, those studies totally failed to find pure populations of anyone - friend and foe - to back up their soil and blood rhetoric.<br />
<br />
Interestingly, occupied populations hated the sight of teenage Germans and their own teenagers falling in love and treated these girls and their children worse than they tended to treat the powerful adults who profited so well off collaboration.<br />
<br />
We all recall the news reels of girls with shaved heads - they were actually the lucky ones .<br />
<br />
Many others were shot outright in the local non-judicial killings that happened just after Liberation in every country.<br />
<br />
Purity obsessions don't wear well on German or Frenchman - they should instead admit that opposites attracting does more to keep our species fit than any amount of positive or negative eugenic measures....<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1963095822377077029.post-55875423501892613422013-12-06T12:15:00.000-04:002013-12-06T12:19:15.011-04:00Did WII begin when first small nation was attacked or when first big empire was attacked ?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The peoples of the world's last big empires (whether wartime winners <i>or</i> losers) still produce the most books on everything - unfortunately including those on WWII.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
They all insist that the war began on the evening of September 2nd 1939, when the British parliament indicated strongly to the wavering British cabinet that the British and French empires should declare war on the German empire unless it retreated completely from its Polish invasion.<br />
<br />
But the peoples of smaller nations (and perhaps some of their bolder historians) insist equally strongly that the war actually started eight years earlier.<br />
<br />
That war began on September 19th 1931 when the Japanese empire invaded smaller Manchuria unopposed.<br />
<br />
Japan and other empires then proceeded to gobble other small nations, unopposed militarily, until September 3rd 1939 when British and French bombers began to hit Germany.<br />
<br />
All this matters because it forces us to 'fess up as to what WWII was actually about when it began : not really about big empires attacking small nations (1931 et al) but about big empires attacking other big empires (1939 et al).<br />
<br />
So now we know the intentionality of WWII , but we should not correct one error merely to espouse another : that the end results of WWII for any party were anything like what was intended at the beginning by that party.<br />
<br />
Most all histories of WWII are literally 'one damn thing after another' with no attempt to contrast what each party in the conflict proposed should happen, week by week and year by year, against what actually <b><i>did </i></b>happen.<br />
<br />
And by party, I mean to cast my net as widely as possible to include any individual or organization with opinions on the course of the war.<br />
<br />
If we see WWII as some sort of multi-party SIX YEAR PLAN and judge its results accordingly, we find that everyone's (utopian cum <i>scientific</i>) plans for the war never ever touched reality even fleetingly throughout its long course....<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0