tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30072387078108764072024-02-08T01:42:44.860-04:00the cedar AND the hyssopMichael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.comBlogger916125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-9184588634157984612013-06-16T17:03:00.001-03:002013-06-16T17:03:58.476-03:00Annette Baker Fox : the survival of the avirulent state in a Virile AgeBacteriologist (Martin) Henry Dawson and Political Scientist Annette Baker Fox doubtlessly never met, but both of their life's work was not as dissimilar as it might seem at first blush.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/annette-baker-fox-survival-of-avirulent.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-30996602909775591382013-06-10T20:15:00.000-03:002013-06-10T20:36:11.774-03:00It was the very ORTHODOXY of their economic theories that doomed Hitler,Tojo and MussoliniDevotedly orthodox economist Robert Solow won the 1987 Nobel Prize basically for just one very famous 1974 quote, taken a bit out of context:<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"If it is very easy to substitute other things for natural resources, then there is, in principle, no problem. <i>The world</i>, in effect, <i>can get along without natural resources</i>."</span></blockquote>
<br>
But since he was born in 1924 and was only nine when Hitler came to power, he can hardly be blamed for acting as Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo's unofficial economic advisor.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/it-was-very-orthodoxy-of-their-economic.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-71375195177734667602013-06-09T10:09:00.002-03:002013-06-09T11:04:39.741-03:00Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .<br>
<br>
For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual <b>Aryan Race</b> --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/dawsons-commensality-supplies.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-6171059199641484672013-06-08T13:48:00.001-03:002013-06-09T09:38:02.960-03:00Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually liveThirties<b> Reductionism</b> said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the <i>Protons</i> that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.<br>
<br>
Thirties<b> Reification</b> said that <i>Human</i> <i>Progress</i> is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.<br>
<br>
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-progress-and-protons-missing.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-27442667214804390332013-06-05T11:41:00.002-03:002013-06-05T11:51:52.402-03:00Modernity : CONCRETE Dams vs ABSTRACT Delusions ...When was Chopin born, when did he die, where did Chopin end and his brother begin ?<br>
<br>
All concrete questions we can definitively answer.<br>
<br>
That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.<br>
<br>
But <b>imagined communities</b> - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/modernity-concrete-buildings-vs.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-80676360416094673112013-06-05T10:50:00.000-03:002013-06-05T11:47:12.187-03:00Not from our war : "Second Front in the Soviet Far East , NOW !"Dream on.<br>
<br>
Shamefully, there was no public Western pressure put on Stalin to open any sort of Second Front on Japan from the North, during the desperate days of mid 1942 <i>or ever after</i>.<br>
<br>
<i>Ever after</i>, as in : no major postwar historical school has ever focused on this baneful fact.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/06/not-from-our-war-second-front-in-soviet.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-69348630629766874342013-05-30T11:38:00.002-03:002013-05-30T11:44:21.948-03:00Could "Small is Beautiful" have topped 1930s bestseller lists ?He is a brilliant young economist, regarded as one of the best of his generation--- educated at Berlin and Bonn and at the London School of Economics, given a <b>Rhodes Scholarship</b> to study at Oxford and Columbia University, where he is hired as a lecturer.<br>
<br>
He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.<br>
<br>
No wonder then that this wunderkind's PhD, <b>"Small is Beautiful",</b> is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic <i>and </i>an epoch-making book.<br>
<br>
Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/could-small-is-beautiful-have-topped.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-43455588161275559932013-05-30T09:15:00.000-03:002013-05-30T09:19:18.570-03:00Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".<br>
<br>
So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.<br>
<br>
Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/must-progress-inevitably-get-mightier.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-79227213961651568052013-05-29T22:36:00.000-03:002013-05-29T22:39:42.407-03:00Islands and WWII : did anything else important happen (yawn) ?For hundreds of millions of avid newspaper readers during WWII, an atlas was essential to follow the conflict's global course.<br>
<br>
Never more so because of the fact that most of the battles - yes, <i>most</i> of the battles - took place over, around and <i>on</i> islands - with some of the most heavily fought-over islands being almost incredibly tiny.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/islands-and-wwii-did-anything-else.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-46948766313397957892013-05-29T12:42:00.001-03:002013-05-29T12:48:50.575-03:00a Commensal history of WWII includes the small and the great, the hubristic and the nimbleTo render the sprawling activities of WWII palatable to digestion (because even the most devoted of readers have their limits) the tendency of authors is to show the war as seen through the eyes of the Great Powers and the Great Men.<br>
<br>
And as seen through the eyes of those wisest of Wise Men, the scientists.<br>
<br>
A commensal history of 1939-1945 should <i>also</i> start with a war between a handful of Great Men and Great Powers, because that is the way it all began.<br>
<br>
But, to be fully accurate, it should also end in a confused co-mingling of the actions of the decisive small as well as those of the chastened great.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-commensal-history-of-wwii-includes.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-6103459551178641612013-05-27T18:43:00.001-03:002013-05-27T18:47:08.572-03:00Coalitions, not Combat, lost and won WWIIEngland and pre-1937 Germany definitely started and then attempted to direct World War Two throughout , but they certainly didn't win or lose this truly world-wide war, not all on their tiny , tiny own.<br>
<br>
Instead, two vast world-sized coalitions under their nominal direction - one truly commensal and the other just national imperialism by another name - won and lost the war.<br>
<br>
Germany and Japan built far, far, far better fighting machines but lost out totally to the Anglo-led nations, simply because of the Axis inability to form genuine working partnerships with all the people worldwide who were initially willing to back Fascism back in 1939-1940.<br>
<br>
In the beginning Japan and Germany seemed to have had 'Science' on their side : most of the educated world resignedly believed that Nature and Darwin had revealed that in the long run, bigger was always better, always beating down the small and the weak.<br>
<br>
In other words, they had a baldly naive and a highly hubris-inflated sense of what the Science of Size actually told us.<br>
<br>
If you don't know that there actually<i> is</i> a well founded Science of Size, then you won't be prepared for the upcoming mega-sized re-match of WWII, when popular Hubris again collides with unpopular Reality, this time over the question of climate.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/coalitions-not-combat-lost-and-won-wwii.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-1826865453125643262013-05-24T12:04:00.000-03:002013-05-24T12:05:45.786-03:00WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance MovementsIt is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.<br>
<br>
(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the <i>commensality of reality</i> till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwiis-mighty-and-wise-confounded-by.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-82949263418566598432013-05-22T15:14:00.000-03:002013-05-24T11:22:52.623-03:00WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists<b>Reductionism</b>, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.<br>
<br>
It <i>has</i> totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.<br>
<br>
But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, <i>more or less</i>, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to <b>construct</b> new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.<br>
<br>
It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called <i>laws</i> of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwii-constructionists-vs-naturalists.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-28347993767802611192013-05-22T14:08:00.001-03:002013-05-22T14:28:14.365-03:00WWII Brooklyn to be home to war's biggest killing machine or war's smallest life-saver ?In the end, the Borough of Brooklyn (NYC) became home to both : the Iowa class of battleships <i>and</i> the home of most of the war's penicillin.<br>
<br>
But it had been a near run thing ; this battle over the moral soul of Brooklyn.<br>
<br>
After all, from the beginning of the war, the leaders of the Great Powers (Churchill, FDR,Tojo,Stalin and Hitler) were determined to show the world what the greatest entities on Earth could do, if they set their mind to it.<br>
<br>
WWII is proof that they succeeded in spades .<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwii-brooklyn-to-be-home-to-wars.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-28898384743919755892013-05-16T15:13:00.000-03:002013-05-16T15:18:38.702-03:00BAZOOKA, not A-Bomb or V-2, most important new weapon of WWIIBecause the Great Imperial Powers who began and fought WWII had done so under the mantra that "<b>bigger is better</b>", they were hardly shaken by the emergence (near the war's end) of the A-Bomb and the V-2, surely two of the biggest, most expensive and complex weapons systems ever built up to then.<br>
<br>
For the emergence of these style of weapons merely supported their post-1945 expectations of eternal dominance over other smaller nations and over their own colonies and subservient satellites.<br>
<br>
With 20/20 hindsight, they should have been much more worried about other much smaller, much cheaper, much simpler weapons that emerged out of WWII : like the <b>bazooka </b>, above all.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/bazooka-not-bomb-or-v-2-most-important.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-41647699863702869912013-05-15T11:24:00.000-03:002013-05-15T13:13:23.836-03:00'A warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' : still the best medicine<b>"The hyssop and The Cedars" </b>is a book about health during our past most recent man-made Apocalypse : occasionally it is about doctors and pharmaceuticals, but mostly it is not.<br>
<br>
For the truth is that *<i>food*</i> was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.<br>
<br>
Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.<br>
<br>
After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.<br>
<br>
But let us also never forget the warm smile.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-warm-meal-warm-bed-and-warm-smile.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-53614124245115041522013-05-14T10:43:00.002-03:002013-05-14T10:46:16.661-03:00High School Science : 'Home of the Hubris' , STILLScience (the resulting name for the 150 year old victory of Natural Philosophy over Natural History) is widely accepted to be primarily <b>pedagogical</b> in nature.<br>
<br>
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/high-school-science-home-of-hubris-still.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-59015106538208634552013-05-14T09:47:00.001-03:002013-05-14T11:03:04.595-03:00Henry Dawson vs Newton, Dalton & Darwin...During his brief life, (Martin) Henry Dawson managed to have three seemingly wildly different careers : in the Military during WWI, in Academic Science in the interwar years, and in Popular Science during WWII.<br>
<div>
<br></div>
<div>
But these differences are only apparent , not real.<br>
</div><a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/henry-dawson-vs-newton-dalton-darwin.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-23386086355221528342013-05-10T11:10:00.000-03:002013-05-10T11:15:50.439-03:001945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern ScienceHitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.<br>
<br>
But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly) <i>modern</i> and <i>scientific</i> crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.<br>
<br>
Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called<b> DNA</b>.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/1945-as-apogee-and-nadir-of-modern.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-53167016886190642982013-05-07T17:23:00.000-03:002013-05-07T17:45:39.491-03:00WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively <b>recent</b> idea.<br>
<br>
It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking, weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.<br>
<br>
Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do<i>, or not do,</i> about these obviously aggressive tyrants.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwii-from-manchuria-incident-to.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-36344923817166643702013-05-06T14:47:00.003-03:002013-05-06T14:47:52.128-03:00Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).<br />
<br />
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-8423433947054243282013-05-06T14:41:00.000-03:002013-05-10T08:28:05.345-03:00WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.<br>
<br>
Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.<br>
<br>
They mis-read the <b>Atomic Energy</b> fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap <b>Natural Penicillin</b> and <b>Auschwitz</b>'s gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwii-as-apogee-and-nadir-of-modern.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-43146001950712258822013-05-06T09:28:00.000-03:002013-05-06T09:56:36.537-03:00WWII : began with "Bigger is Better - Inevitably" and ended up in "Global Commensality"At the <b>1939 New York's World Fair</b> , it seemed only common sense that life started out as tiny simple-minded microbes and inevitably ended up both bigger <i>and</i> smarter, with beings like us being the prime example.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/wwii-began-with-bigger-is-better.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-91610253338281726222013-05-05T22:36:00.002-03:002013-05-05T22:40:03.388-03:00Henry Dawson never changed his mind about the Overdogs, but the World did ...The idea that Nature favours the ubermenschs and <b>overdogs</b>, that 'Might is Right' , were pretty well universally accepted, albeit sometimes resignedly, in 1939.<br>
<br>
Henry Dawson, drawing much different conclusions from his decade long study of the constantly varying battles of Human-Bacteria Commensality, certainly didn't agree.<br>
<br>
He gave at least equal odds to all the untermenschs and the underdogs of our natural slash human world.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/henry-dawson-never-changed-his-mind.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3007238707810876407.post-11124689736642104972013-05-04T10:00:00.000-03:002013-05-04T10:42:57.431-03:00Civilization, regarded as a "Cartwright Machine"A "Cartwright Machine" is a powerful and unique way, created by famed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, of looking again at all of Humanity's machines , mental as well as physical.<br>
<br>
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.<br>
<br>
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.<br>
<a href="http://skygodsversusearthlings.blogspot.com/2013/05/civilization-regarded-as-cartwright.html#more">Read more »</a>Michael Marshall http://www.blogger.com/profile/11630172571231508804noreply@blogger.com0