Thursday, October 20, 2011

the OTHER Manhattan Project

The problems of 'Doctor D', 'Miss H' and of Charlie don't seemed to have loomed up very large in the work of historians, novelists, composers or movie makers in the 75 years since those problems first began.

Set along the mean hospital corridors of an America almost as much at war with itself as it was with the Axis, these problems seemed then - and seem to most now - far too small to consider posing alongside the grander epic themes of WWII.

But one person's hill of beans is another's monumental ground changer and I guess I am just one of those guys.

The physical bullets may have stopped flying but I think World War Two's real battle - which I think was an intellectual battle - goes on as strong as ever.

Did I actually say 'intellectual battle' ?

Silly me - I of course meant a battle between scientists - with scientists like Heinrich Himmler on the much bigger side.

That battle was all about confronting the messy,untidy,unequal variety one finds in Nature and in human society: it was all about whether we should celebrate it or should we seek to eliminate it.

We all think we know the relatively few who sought to tame and eliminate variety and diversity during World War Two, but is this actually true - or is it simply the propaganda of the victors talking ?

The story of 'Doctor D' (Doctor Martin Henry Dawson) should make us question the easy division of the participants in World War Two into two neat piles of the good guys and the bad guys.

The world is still divided between those scientists (and citizens) who think reality is fundamentally, at its base, simple, predictable and hence perfectible - and those who see it as irreductibly unpredictable and hence endlessly variegated.

The big battle today is over humans' ability to change the climate for better or for worse .

Back then, the big battle was over whether we want to create, at the point of a syringe, a volk democracy of equally healthy and strong people or whether we can learn to accept a messy hierarchy of differing talents and healths among human kind.

I hope Dawson's story will not merely seem like ancient history but rather will move people to look again at our current environmental disputes in a different light....

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The problems of three little people ...

... at the height of WWII --- and how their solution changed our whole world for the better, forever.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Don't let my modest manner fool ya

Intellectually, I am damned immodest.

I don't think of us greens/ environmentalists as alternatives at all.

We hold the only accurate view of Reality -- it is our opponents that have a delusional scientific grasp on Reality.

This has been true since the 1920s, at least ; does it need a century to go by before they acknowledge this ?

We can only blame the teaching professions for the fact that kids in the 21st century still leave school stuffed full of the non-truths of the 19th century, by-passing the insights of  20th century science altogether.

If the human species is to survive, teachers must change - or go....

This post came from an old deleted blog called

Friday, June 10, 2011

2011: creation of clash of 1840s darwin/dalton versus 1940s dirac/dawson

The "Four Ds" are not "The Four Divas" but two groups of conflicting scientists who laid the ground for the world most of us are destined to live , reproduce and die in - the 21st century.

John Dalton and Charles Darwin, scientists from the 19th century, still bulk out 21st science education for most of us, thanks to the ego issues of the teaching class, who can not accept that the world is not fully composed of definite answers to definite questions.

But our century is actually the dialectic result of the WWII clash between the scientific certitudes of Darwin and Dalton colliding with the scientific uncertitudes promoted by Paul Dirac and Henry Dawson, scientists definitely of the 20th century.

Plenty of irony in the latter pair.

Dirac's QUANTUM PHYSICS said the behavior of a billion radioactive atoms are predictable in true Daltonian fashion, but  the activities of any one individual radioactive atom is not.

In contrast, Dawson's QUORUM BIOLOGY agreed that a single individual bacteria was as dumb as Darwin said all the"primitive races" were, but that collectively a billion bacteria were collectively (and unpredictably) smart in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Both agreed that the smallest entities of matter and life were not as stable and as dumbly inert as civilized man had assumed.

Conversely, WWII itself seemed proof enough that civilized man was not as smart as he had thought.

From above, such Phaetons as Albert Einstein fell back earthward, while from inside the ground itself, Penicillium rose up in our esteem to meet Einstein midway to dine with him at Life's commensal table...

Thursday, June 9, 2011

What this Blog is about

Henry Dawson's tiny AKTION 4F team and his research into QUORUM BIOLOGY were hopeful first steps towards restoring sanity amid the horrors that Phaetopia released during World War Two.

I want to salute and critique other such worthy efforts - usually in the form of recommendations of books (or book-like objects such
as online PDFs of thoughtful articles ) .

Some may offer hope by (A) presenting alternatives to Phaetopia and some may offer hope by (B) simply making us more aware of the salient elements of Phaetopia, as it existed at its height and that still exist 'among us' .

This is NOT a 'book review blog'.

Book reviews only review ( ie sometimes praise, sometimes pan, sometimes only summarize)  new books ,that are currently
widely available, for sale, in commercial outlets.

Which is to say they are very much a part of the book marketing world and play by its rules.

My books might not even be books, they usually won't be new, and if out-of-print and only available in a library, may not even be for sale.

I won't recommend my own books on this blog, but I will say they will all fail the conventual book reviewers' sniff test in at least one vital area : they will be widely and permanently available, but will be available free , not sold !

They are also intended to offer hope, After Phaetopia, by method A or B, as cited above...

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Quantum Physics,Quorum Biology confound Phaetopia

Phaetopia seems a big word - its not.

I made it up recently - its a neologism - which is a big word  that means a 'newly invented word or phrase.'


Neologisms is what writers do - or should do - expand the language with new vivid and useful words that describe new concepts that the writers hopefully also came up with.


Phaeton Man (aka Modernity Man) is exactly like his ancient counterpart.


Both, while messing about with the Earth when they were specifically told not to, end up making some parts of it too hot and dry and others too cold and wet.


World War Two was a chance for Phaeton Man to really feel his oats, strut on a world stage and throw his weight around.


At the macro level, he came apart at Stalingrad and Guadalcanal where frostbite or heat stroke mixed it up with starvation and led to cannibalism and defeat.


The whole world - even children - could see this smashup.


But in addition, during that same War and albeit at a micro level and virtually unseen except inside university classrooms and laboratories, Phaeton Man's grandest delusion --- that he could control the inert building blocks of mass/energy (the atom) and life (the cell) went totally and permanently west.


Quantum Physics  said there was no stable reality inside the inside of the inside of an atom to control - heck there might not even be any reality there that we mere humans could ever understand.


People like Einstein, who sort of understood Quantum Physics didn't like this at all - famously called it "spooky action at a distance" and spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully trying to prove it wrong.


But quantum entanglement is still with us and has tended to clip the wings of the sort of physicist who is tempted to play God...


It is very well known but is very poorly understood - even by physicists who believe in it and spent their lifetimes studying it.


Henry Dawson's life work (Quorum Biology) - which was coming to a summing up point at his Fall of 1943 Columbia Genetics Department Seminar only because he knew he was dying, is much less known but ultimately is also much much easier to understand.


However easy it is to understand, it remains awfully hard for the Phaeton Men still among us to accept.


Think of it, pace Einstein, as "spooky action" right inside us, right beneath our noses, as opposed to happening off at the other side of the Universe.


Dawson's thesis, simply put was this:


 that the biggest civilized nations of Man were less smart than Man thought they were and that the smallest, weakest, oldest bits of life, the bacteria, were a lot smarter than Man could imagine them to be in his worst nightmare.


He said he had shown that oral commensal strep bacteria ,living inside Man as their habitual home, acted collectively in a form of collective intelligence, to evade the fiercest blows of the human immune system by being the ultimate shape shifters.


A group of bacteria, after collectively polling each other and achieving a quorum of agreement (hence the name QUORUM BIOLOGY) could run the gambit from L,R,S,M and B forms.


L cells had no cell walls and evaded our  immune system by being totally invisible in terms of having no known antigens.


R cells, the normal type of strep bacteria on our body (more or less living peacefully on our throat skin but not inside our throat skin) had a cell wall but no sugar capsule - our body thus recognized they were in a harmless ,non-invasive, phase.


The invasive S type had a cell wall and a medium thick sugar 'cap' and were the dreaded bacteria found deep in our internal organs.


The super invasive M type had a cell wall and a really thick cap and could really move through our skin defenses ---- but their cap consisted of a rare biological material normally only found in humans - our body thought they were us .


The B type had a cell wall but no individual cap - they had put sugar goo to work to create an entire house that didn't let big white cells and such in to hurt them, but let tiny food, water and water in and out along internal channels.


Think of it as a sort of tiny ant colony living on your teeth as plaque or as a endocarditis vegetation on your heart valves, as in SBE - Dawson's Bete Noire.


And Dawson had already shown, between 1928 and 1933, that strep bacteria had a quorum call at times of crisis and collectively agreed to toss all their genetic housekeys into a blanket and play house with each others' kin.


This was called by him, Transformative Horizontal DNA and it made a total mess of Darwin's prim and proper Vertical DNA inheritance.


I'll edit this lot later - off to work now !






The 


















Tuesday, May 31, 2011

a poem: "After the Bombers"

After the Bad Penny,
... an emerald sign,
above our lake of fire

a poem : "After the Bombers"

modernity pours
lakes of fire from up above ;
while Unnoticed,
Beneath our feet,
a green sign
appears...

Saturday, May 7, 2011

post MODERNITY is pre COMMENSALITY , n'est pas ?

This blog argues that while the Peak of Modernity was the New York's World's Fair of 1939, Modernity was heading for its Nadir by 1945.

But !

But still hasn't hit its nadir yet - more than sixty five years later .

Post Modernity, which is the only world that the majority of the world's population (human, plant, animal,microbe) has ever known, is a hybrid existence.

It has elements of both the older Modernist Age and the newer Commensal Age co-existing in somewhat parallel streams, rather than having the two ideologies contesting each other directly and continuously.

This blog's job, as I see it, is to hasten MODERNITY out the door.

And, of course, to hasten on Commensality, before Modernity burns up this planet and renders the whole question moot.

But there is no way I am going to sprout cliches that we are "standing on the threshold of a totally new world, etc,etc."

All my talk of "LIFE 2.0" is rhetoric, not a fact.

We are changing, we have been changing and will go on changing forever.

No revolution - no revolution truly worthy of that name - will ever be televised : it will drift in slowly like early morning fog, speaking a language of its own new invention.

We will only truly realize that it has arrived ,at the moment of its departure - in the clarity of  hindsight.

I don't know how COMMENSALITY will turn out  and I am very mindful that most future-oriented predictions throughout history have been less accurate than flipping a coin with your eyes closed.

But this blog can (and will) imagine how it might look.

That is, it will express my personal hopes for the shape of the future, without pretending they are predictions worth betting the store upon.

I truly believe that the coming into being of The Commensal Age is already happening, without much conscious action on the part of anyone to make it so.

But I also believe a single individual can help speed it along and shape its path, to the fullest that their talents will allow....

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

MODERNITY stole it from the Beatles - we're stealing it back

Before MODERNITY stole the term 'commensal' and tortured it out of shape , the concept had been used for thousands of years, to describe the particularly unique aspect of Jesus's physical ministry:

his willingness to share his table with just about anybody.

At a time when sharing the salt was only done with one's friends and family, Jesus was eager to be a 'diner at the common table' with just about anyone.

Including - or should I say particularly - those viewed with disdain by the general society.

Like it or not, we must all get along, share and share alike, if we are to survive Jesus told his followers.

MODERNITY Science, a sort of  Stephen Harper clone with a PhD in Biology, turns a stone cold eye to the very idea that commensality actually exists for very long out in the natural world.

But this is to take a normative view of something in which we actually have no choice.

All Life on Planet Earth, willy nilly, is a 'diner at a common table' .

Equally some Life - the human sort - could take all the food on the table and leave the rest of Life to starve to death.

But since humans don't actually produce food but are only parasites on those beings that do, we will soon quickly starve to death ourselves.

MODERNITY hates the thought of being dependent on non-humans but the facts are that we must.

If MODERNITY can't adjust to that fact, then it must go.....

Friday, April 22, 2011

1939-1945: the second WORD war.....

That is not a typo: I am interested in the abject historical neglect of the extent to which WWII was a war fought by words as well as by weapons .

No popular audiences wanted the war, so every leading nation at
war had to woo a large number of audiences.

First it had to deal with the concerns of its domestic population - civilians at home and their 'boys' under arms overseas.

Then your allies - their governments and their restless domestic audiences.

The neutrals - you hoped to move them to allies or away from your opponents to at least true neutrality.

Your opponents' domestic population and maybe even their military and elite.

The occupied people and one's colonial  populations were extremely important.

A moment's attention would lead one to quickly see the need to divide all these big populations into many subsets, each with their own unique concerns and need for unique messaging.

I tend to think very "election-ly" about everything , so I tend to see the war as a six year long election campaign fought between three major political parties (and a lot of lesser ones) for the hearts and minds of the world's electorate.

Each party laid forth its claims of virtue and attacked the others' shortfall between their virtues claimed and their very sorry failings in practice.

The three parties?

The ANGLO SAXON Atlantic Charter (Four Freedoms) Party , the GERMAN SAXON New Order Party and the JAPANESE SAXON Co-Prosperity Sphere Party....

A "glass-half-full" history of WWII

My book was inspired by an important poll of Americans seeking to determine the most important news story of the entire 20th Century.

In 1999, over 36,000 American men and women told the Newseum and USA Weekend magazine that the single most important event of the 20th Century involved a little boy and a baby girl and happened on a tiny island not far off the American coast back in the 1940s.

Actually the men and women divided by gender - the men pointing to the baby boy as story number one  and the women saying the baby girl was the most important.

The men , backed up by tenured, professional, important historians, said that WWII ended in a BANG, and gave a downcast glass-half-empty account of the war's end.

By contrast the women looked up from the diapers and said the war ended hopefully with a WHIMPER, and in their view the glass was half-full.

I too take this view and decided to write a green revisionist history of 1939-1945 that sees the outcome as more hopeful than not.

My view of WWII may owe more to Alexander Pope and Francois
Rabelais than to the academic Dunces of my own era but so be it....

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

a Modernist is anyone who has never changed a diaper...

Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Tojo -  do you think any of those utopian dreamers ever changed a diaper?

WWII through a female-oriented lens...

I am not a female.

My most extensive bout of diaper changing was over 35 years ago, when I routinely changed diapers on adults with mental ages of one or two, in a mental hospital.

Never been a parent.

But neither did I grow up a privileged upper middle class male, waited upon hand and foot while I floated above it all , exalting in my profound thoughts.

Pause here for loud guffaw from Rebecca....

I had led a frugal life, living on a very small income and working at a variety of manually-oriented jobs.

I am very aware of the ability of material limitations to prevent grand ideas ever coming into actual existence.

And I have an ingrained respect for street smarts - be they from adults with a mental age of one or two, from infants with mental ages of one or two, or even when coming from the very humble-seeming bacteria.

Most think that World War Two was the apogee of modern science.

I ,and Adorno, disagree.

I see it was the time when Modernity was finally given its oats and told to 'go for it' .

Modernity then proceeded to 'go postal' and tore itself apart - on the inside .

It took thirty more years for Modernity to start to show its scars --- and it is still not dead yet.

I am here to help kill it - before it kills all of us and all of the Earth...