Readers of my various blogs probably already know the names Robert Solow and Trevor Swan.
They are the two economists who first came up with today's simple, precise, predictable, lucid explanations why human society is always going to keep on getting richer and richer and richer: the endless growth theory.
(Sic ---- very very Sic....)
Solow actually got the so called 'Nobel Prize in Economics' for his version, but even he admits Swan should have got one too, for his earlier version.
These theories are 'simple' for orthodox economists anyway --- the best I can do to describe these theories is to say that they turn on a quasi-religious Faith in the total interchangability of things like capital and labour and resources.
So no surprise that Solow is best known for using his theory to explain why the world can, in effect, "get along without any natural resources".
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But Trevor Swan's my Target for Tonight.
He quite accurately used Mecanno Sets as his metaphor to describe the Modern Orthodox viewpoint on the interchangability of units of capital.
I, myself, actually date the rise and fall of Modernity from the rise and fall of those once popular construction kids for kids that Modernist parents gave their children to explain how the world worked.
That is how much I agree with Swan that , to misquote William Safire, they served as the "Mecannonic Metaphors of Modernity".
When the parents started having doubts about this explanation - during the mid 1960s - they stopped giving the kits as gifts and most of the companies went bankrupt.
There were dozens of established brands worldwide : in the English speaking world, Mecanno,Erector,Lego and Dinky are usually considered the most popular.
They first emerged about the time (around 1910) that Ernest Rutherford modified John Dalton's explanation that the 100 or so different elements are made of indivisible tiny objects, unique to each element, that he called atoms.
That meant if your nation had no atoms of something vital like chromium, you couldn't have military armour or be a superpower.
Not so, said Rutherford - the truly elemental objects are a few things like electrons, neutrons and protons.
An element is simply an unique ratio of these three objects - take some atoms of something dirt-common like carbon apart and then reassemble the sub atomic bits into a different ratio and hey presto : chromium metal till the cows come home.
Transmutation of atoms: instant superpower status.
Similarly, Mecanno sets can be cars one day and houses the next: a perfect way to prepare Modernist children to become grownup chemists or physicists.
This fairy tale should have unravelled when Physics discovered that far from there being just three stable indivisible lumps of Mecanno Magic, there were actually hundreds of sub atomic bits and they almost all seemed to have very short and very changable existences.
Rather than being stable Lego blocks, these sub atomic particles were more like the fabled Universal Solvent which transmuted and dissolved any container built to hold it.
But you already knew this intutively, didn't you ?
All those multi-billion dollar containers we call nuclear reactor buildings have a very short life, as the uncontrollable sub atomic particles transmute and weaken anything and everything wrapped around them.
This is the real - economic - reason why nuclear energy would be a total flop out in the real world if we taxpayers no longer subsidized them to the tune of billions and trillions of dollars because we believed the big lies Bad Faith Science has told us for 75 years.
But Bad Faith Science remains bloody but unbowed --- the internal science world moved on but the external public metaphor lives on: that ultimately Reality is simple, stable and predictably controllable - just as long as we scientists got lots of funding (and lots of prestige and respect as the controllers of this controllable world).
Martin Henry Dawson was a minor scientist, but he was a good faith scientist: when he saw that the evidence under his microscope didn't fit the theories he had been taught, he changed his theories.
He collected variants on commensal oral strep the way that some pre-war physicists collected sub-atomic particles.
But unlike the physicists, this physician altered his social behavior as a scientist, as a result of this new evidence he collected.
His wildly pleomorphic Strep bacteria, dissolving any straitjacket that medicine tried to put them in, was the microbiological Life-oriented equivalent of the chaotic, unpredictable world that sub atomic particles reveal at the micro level of Matter.
Dawson saw penicillin has coming out of this disorderly dynamic pleomorphic (aka shape-changing/morphing) world of competing fungi and bacteria struggling just to survive; his opponents saw it as just something one could quickly assemble in a factory, out of interchangable chemical parts , just like Mecanno sets....
Who was right?
In truth, Dawson ---- in myth, high technology science brought us penicillin.
Like I always sing, " Charles Manson stole penicillin from the penicillium - I'm here to steal it back..."
PS: Some might argue that Mecanno bits - or electrons and protons - are pretty pleomorphic themselves: they can be made into a car or a house or a bird.
But Dawson's bacterial transformations did not change one of a hundred trillion trillion strep bacteria into one of a hundred trillion trillion staph bacteria .
Any even if he did - why should we care - do really need one more staph bacteria and one less strep bacteria ????
Rather his cars, in effect, became like a house while remaining a car, ie they were hybrids - something truly new.
They had many (pleo) shapes (morphs), ie diferent shapes with different biological effects, while still remaining bacteria.
So, for example, they could become part bacteria and part fungi.
As when some fungi took up, via HGT, the bacteria genes to make a penicillin-like antibiotic , adapted it into today's penicillin and then turned it against bacteria...
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
4Fs, Women and the Grace of God
Con Mensa is Latin for 'at' 'a table'.
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
In time this led to Middle Age Latin's term commensalis and hence to English as commensal, meaning "dining at (sharing) a common table."
Christianity used the term to describe Jesus's deliberate and very public breaking of traditional taboos against sharing one's own table with those people you deemed unworthy.
Biologists, at least some biologists, expanded this concept to mean that all life forms were interconnected and interdependent on each other for survival on Planet Earth.
But most biologists ( the modernists and atheists in particular) severely limit the meaning to just those inferior beings that live on us and off of us, but who neither harm us or help us.
These small beings, in this harsh utilitarian view, are at best only tolerated, at least until we can find a way to eliminate them entirely, so we won't have to share anything with anyone.
But more and more biologists, heck more and more people, are coming to see that we will never succeed in being the only species on Earth.
They see that, like it or not, if we are to merely survive on this planet, we will need to struggle to get along with other beings, as best we can.
The intolerant Age of Modernity, constantly and fruitlessly seeking 100% perfect and purity, is every day relaxing its grip on our minds and more and more of us are comfortable slipping into the new Era of Commensality.
And not a minute too soon, if this planet is going to survive all that Modernity has done against it.
So it doesn't seem out of place to study and honor an early band of pioneers in "dining together at a common table" : Martin Henry Dawson's PEN "G" team of 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God.
(You might remember that this was originally intended as a cheap crack against Women and 4Fs, (and God !) by the historian of Vannevar Bush's in/famous OSRD, Dr Irvin Stewart, in his Official History, "Organizing Scientific Research for War" , bottom of Page 107.)
I quote: "Laboratories cannot be run by 4Fs or women or by the Grace of God alone." This is Stewart while talking about the OSRD committee devoted to medical research which had the public money and jackboot mentality, after the war and after Dawson was safely in his grave, to seize all the American credit for producing natural systemic penicillin .
In fact, the OSRD wasted the war fruitlessly seeking the Nirvana of man-made synthetic penicillin, while servicemen and civilians around the world were needlessly dying of infections natural penicillin could have cured.
It was the pushing and prodding of Dawson upon his citric acid-producing partner, Pfizer, that produced the bulk of the wartime penicillin, not the OSRD's favorite Big Pharma, Merck.
George W Merck himself spent the bulk of the war creating ever more terrible diseases to kill people, while leading America's germ warfare program.
So it was left to little science, not Big Science, to give us PEN "G".
This little team of humans and tiny beings brought us natural systemic penicillin, that great boon to humankind, against fierce resistance along the mean corridors of 1940s American Science, none meaner than down at the OSRD....
Sunday, February 12, 2012
4Fs,Women & the Grace of God
Modernity, BIG MO, was soooo very big during the years of WWII.
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
It was supported by the vast majority of the world's middle classes
and by all sorts of elites, from low to high, left to right, everywhere.
Above all, it was the value system of all the men running the world's governments and that mattered greatly, for at a time of Total War, no government burked any opposition.
But if it was big, it was big like a ballon and just as easily pricked and deflated.
Modernity finally had a war it could call its own and it was messing it up totally - in its own terms and certainly in the view of many ordinary individuals.
It might seem ready for a rebuke.
Still it does seem oddly poetic that BIG MO was able to be piqued by such as a small, sorry, odd of misfits as Dawson's little team was.
It does make for a sort of "the little project that could" ,come from behind, underdog, type story.
But, for once, all true ...
Helping MO go CO : 4Fs, Women and the Grace of God ...
In the short term,during his tragically short life, Martin Henry Dawson and his tiny band did nothing more than pique the supporters of Modernity.
Annoyed them, but nothing else.
But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.
Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.
(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)
In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.
So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...
Annoyed them, but nothing else.
But over the longer term, Dawson's Pen "G" team were in the first ranks of those easing Modernity, 'The Father Of All Evils' , off the global stage and replacing it with our new world of Commensality.
Their natural penicillin triumph was the first in a long series of blows that replace the hitherto dominant chemical cartels with today's biotech giants.
(A mixed blessing, admitably, but still a turn away from Man as the Be-all of all Knowledge to a recognition that we have much to learn from Nature.)
In the long run, it was Dawson's HGT DNA that was the fatal blow, coming from the direction of Science rather than from post-Auschwitz morality, that finally did in (Social) Darwinism.
So, beyond saving the lives of a few World War II SBE patients and beyond finally kick-starting natural penicillin production worldwide during that war, Dawson's efforts had a far longer term, far wider, affect that is worth honoring...
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Project "BIG" brought down by the smallest imaginable opponents...
Enraptured by Platonic delusions,the Modernity Project imagined Life to be basically stabilizable and hence oriented to the K-selected and the Very Large.
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
Peaked Modernity or Piqued Modernity ?
Both, actually.
World War Two, 1939-1945, was both the Apogee and the Nadir of the Enlightenment-Modernity Project.
In '21st Century-Speak', 1945 saw Peak Modernity staring down at a long, slow, slide into oblivion.
In the early 1940s, most middle class members of world civilization supported the Modernity project, almost without question.
But the war wasn't going as predicted, on any side.
And while 'Power Over Others' isn't really intrinsic to Modernity ( Pol Pot did pretty good in that department with pre-modern shovels and sticks), Precision is truly intrinsic to Modernity.
Put simply:
"Modernity without Precision is not Modernity".
The flustered Modernity supporters had enough self-created problems of imprecision of their own, without needing a dying doctor and his tiny team flaunting their own defiance of Modernity in everyone's face.
Martin Henry Dawson piqued Peak Modernity.
In return, Peak Modernity supporters, when it came to write the official and semi-official histories of World War Two, never forgave him.
But our world, today, looks a lot more like his than it does theirs, so I guess he got the last laugh....
PS: a note to grammarians : I look forward to explanations to flustered writers not to confuse 'Peking Modernity' with 'Piquing Modernity'. Puns, you gotta love 'em ---- at least if you read me !
World War Two, 1939-1945, was both the Apogee and the Nadir of the Enlightenment-Modernity Project.
In '21st Century-Speak', 1945 saw Peak Modernity staring down at a long, slow, slide into oblivion.
In the early 1940s, most middle class members of world civilization supported the Modernity project, almost without question.
But the war wasn't going as predicted, on any side.
And while 'Power Over Others' isn't really intrinsic to Modernity ( Pol Pot did pretty good in that department with pre-modern shovels and sticks), Precision is truly intrinsic to Modernity.
Put simply:
"Modernity without Precision is not Modernity".
The flustered Modernity supporters had enough self-created problems of imprecision of their own, without needing a dying doctor and his tiny team flaunting their own defiance of Modernity in everyone's face.
Martin Henry Dawson piqued Peak Modernity.
In return, Peak Modernity supporters, when it came to write the official and semi-official histories of World War Two, never forgave him.
But our world, today, looks a lot more like his than it does theirs, so I guess he got the last laugh....
PS: a note to grammarians : I look forward to explanations to flustered writers not to confuse 'Peking Modernity' with 'Piquing Modernity'. Puns, you gotta love 'em ---- at least if you read me !
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wartime Manhattan's OTHER 4F project...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson 's PEN project (producing natural
penicillin systemics to save the lives of tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.
No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.
But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.
I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.
'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.
And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.
Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.
And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.
Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.
Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.
Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.
John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.
And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.
I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....
penicillin systemics to save the lives of tossed-aside SBE patients) was only one of the two projects in wartime Manhattan that was centred upon the 4Fs.
No one, then or now, would disagree that Dawson was focused upon trying to save the lives of certain neglected 4Fs,above all else.
But my argument that the MED project, aka Leslie Groves Manhattan Engineering District project to build and drop an atomic bomb upon civilians,was focused on 4Fs will produce a hot disagreement among most.
I intend to demonstrate that the bloody mano-a-mano combat in the trenches of WWI, between the 1As of the world's civilized powers, led to the view among the eugenically-oriented majority of the civilized middle class that such warfare was extremely dysgenic for the 'race'.
'If war must happen,and sometimes it must', they reasoned,' it must be waged by our sides' 1As safe inside big machines'.
And it must waged upon the enemy's figurative 4Fs of the 4Fs : those too old, too young or too sickly to fight and living safely ,well behind the frontlines.
Clouds of gas, or of germs, or of radiation or of fire would descend upon the cities of the enemy and kill enough of these 4Fs until their frontline 1A relatives surrendered, without our frontline 1As having to fire a shot.
And our homefront 4Fs would also assume an unwitting combat role - the sickly poor, seeking charity medical care, would instead be experimented upon with prototypes of these deadly clouds, so we perfect them before we tried them upon the enemy 4Fs.
Ellen Welsome's THE PLUTONIUM FILES details these chilling medical experiments inflicted upon some of America's weakest, by the MED project.
Aktion T4, the Nazi war upon their Aryan weak, was the testing ground for their later war upon Jews, Poles,Gypsies et all in the Holocaust.
Just as the Nazis invoked a collective punishment upon innocent 4F civilians for the deaths of their 1A troops by the Resistance , killing 100 4F civilians for every one 1A soldier killed, so too America vowed to revenge the 2800 1As killed at Pearl Harbor a 100 times over by bombing Japanese civilians.
John Dower's WAR WITHOUT MERCY details that revenge against rather than fighting for life-sustaining values was what motivated most of America (from top leaders down to ordinary citizens) during World War Two.
And at least 280,000 Japanese civilians did die in the two atomic bomb blasts --- collective punishment indeed.
I won't claim to be telling a wholly new tale - just presenting it in a light rarely seen before....
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
The Right of Life
The Manhattan Engineering District aka The Manhattan Project aka The Bomb, was the biggest scientific project of WWII and indeed one of the biggest of all time.
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The OTHER Manhattan Project...
... Establishing the Right of Life.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Dr Martin Henry Dawson wasn't the most publicly articulate of individuals, to put it mildly.
However, his public deeds have stood in, just fine, for his lack of public words.
In the late Fall of 1940, I think he saw his prominent university, together with the American scientific establishment and his government, begin to act a bit like an Nazi , in their admirable attempts to stop the Nazis.
He may have felt that the minute we start acting like the Nazis, they've already started to win the war.
It probably started when he saw a Parkinson-afflicted patient named Charlie Aronson, probably a Russian or Polish born Jew, being set to lower priority (in the informal triage system), when it came to seriously treating his SBE disease.
This was because Dawson's university medical school, along with all of American medicine, began putting much less emphasis on Social Medicine (the strong helping the weak and the sick) and much more on War Medicine (the strong helping the fit and the strong).
If you want to see it as the American Right using the upcoming war as an excuse to turn back the advances of the American Left in the area of health care, few historians are going to call you wrong.
Dawson had the conventional Jello-like morality of his 134 million other fellow Americans - the sort of morality that publicly disapproved of the mass killing of Jews but stopped short of doing anything direct and immediate to stop it.
And he was dying of a terrible disease that literally sapped all of his strength.
Nevertheless he successfully defied his government at the height of its powers and moral authority.
Dawson succeeded in getting many others to ACT UP and defy the wartime government as well, until it bowed to massive public pressure and returned the Right Of Life to the weakest of its citizens.
He made sure his Natural penicillin would save Charlie and all the world's sick, in war as in peace ---- and it still does.
I am fascinated why a dying man was able to do so when so many better known, more motivated, more experienced social activists and critics failed in their wartime efforts to make the government do right.
I have come to believe the answer lies in his private, personal research project.
From 1926 till his death in 1945, Dawson was privately consumed by his fascination as to how weak, tiny, brainless bacteria and other microbes managed to co-exist and even flourish in a world seemingly dominated by beings much larger and smarter than they.
Dr Dawson did pioneering work in some of the most seminal Biology of the 20th Century : HGT DNA/Quorum Sensing/Microbial Mimicry/Biofilms.
He began to feel that the tiniest beings are very clever indeed, perhaps in some ways, even cleverer than the largest , smartest beings on Earth: us.
Through this work, over time, I think he began to fundamentally doubt the human counterpart to this: that it was unfortunately inevitable that Might was Right in the workings of human affairs
as well.
It was his new science, as critical to our understanding of our world today as Paul Direc's new science proved to be, that allowed Dawson to dispute the dictates of Charles Darwin and John Dalton
that drove the governments of Hitler and FDR.
It was his understanding of this new science that gave his moral jello the firm backbone of the latest science and led him to stubbornly oppose the entreaties of all his colleagues .
For they based their morality upon an older - and in Dawson's eyes - much discredited science.
I believe it was his newly found scientific certitude that enabled this most uncharismatic of men to become a moral beacon to others...
I believe it is a truism that while the Flag may follow the Constitution, the Supreme Court follows NATURE and SCIENCE .
Which is to say that our understanding of the ultimate reality, today mediated through the Lens of Science, is what generates and gives force to our sense of morality.
So it that when our scientific view of the world changes, as it did for Dawson, so does our sense of what is right and wrong, with sometimes powerful consequences...
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Berlin T4 ; Manhattan 4F
If World War Two was anything, it was War Among the Big Battalions.
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Berlin's T4 project, the killing of hundreds of thousands of weak and small and 'useless'
Ayran GERMANS by other Ayran Germans - all through the war years, is the clearest example that even above nationality, race,religion and class, world war two's killing focused upon the killing the small.
Small was definitely not beautiful or fashionable back then.
Small people and small nations were speed bumps beneath the wheels of the mighty and the wise.
All of Civilization - be it Japanese, Russian, German or American agreed on this Cult of the Big.
However ,Martin Henry Dawson seems to have had a quarrel with this consensus within World Civilization, during those six dreadful years of war without mercy or chivalry.
So what did his 'small three' of October 1940 have in common ?
Well what The Spazz (Charlie Aronson), The Slime (the tiny penicillium cell factories producing his pencillin ) and The Ramshackle Pilot (Dawson's makeshift penicillin-producing pilot project in the corridors of Columbia Presbyterian) all had in common was that they were small and weak and foolish , at least by the dictates of the day.
The Fall of 1940 saw Columbia Presbyterian turn to offering War Medicine courses : now how to aid the war efforts of the 1A /fit was the new priority --- not in helping heal the 4Fs/unfit.
Charlie was dying of the then incurable terminal disease SBE and was a 4F of the 4Fs to his draft board.
A useless mouth and a drain on an overtaxed medical economy, in many doctors' minds - and some were even enboldened enough to say so publicly.
Even worse Charlie was a victim of post sleeping sickness parkinsonism - a spazz in 'non politically correct speak'.
Already, in Germany doctors were killing his kind if their names were something like Martin Bader (and not Adolf Hitler- himself a parkinson sufferer!).
Charlie was 'small' in the medical priorities of the time.
Next ,the slime. 'Natural' was not 'in' in those years - instead artificial/synthetic/man made/ chemically-made were all the buzz.
Civilizied opinion was firmly of the thought that penicillin shouldn't be talked up unless (and until) it was safe under a profitable manmade patent in a chemical factory.
Fermentation by microscopic ( bacteria-sized tiny) little biological factories seemed so inefficient, wasteful, dirty, impure.
Why you could make it up at home, without high tech factories and chemists with PhDs.
That was vaguely threatening to the professional class and anyway, it was so old fashioned - like farming for our food.
The last 'small' was Dawson's ramshackle pilot project, using 700 flasks filled with these trillions of tiny penicillium factories to yield a measly 50 US gallons of penicillin water .
His hospital and university dismissed his efforts and declined to give him a room for his work - and because penicillium, like beer yeast, stop eating if they are moved, this fatally doomed his project in terms of anything like medically useful yields.
That same university did see another tiny pilot project as having great value in a war economy of Big Battalions - so Fermi and Szilard did get the university support to get the Manhattan Project off the ground at Columbia.
If we ever blow up the world (instead of letting global warming burn it up), lets give some of the credit to Columbia.
Columbia made its moral choices and so Dawson had to move his penicillium growths in and out of spare classrooms and labs, wearing him out and killing off his yields.
So a freezing cold and dark fire escape became a makeshift ventilation hood while the hospital corridors stored his carboys of unconcentrated penicillin water.
The new way to develop a new drug like penicillin if you were the doctor first discovering it, even back then,was to quickly to become a consultant to a big drug company, seeking grants and production assistance from them in return for doing the basic science stuff.
You'd share in the resulting patents. But that ended it for you.
Another huge separate set of doctors would run clinical trials.
Finally the FDA would permit the drug company to sell the approved, pre-tested drug.
But it could only sell it only to drug stores, not directly to consumers.
In turn the dispensing druggists would in turn only sell it to patients upon the prescription of a GP doctor, who in turn was acting on the advice of a specialist doctor.
Many, many, many, separate hands would be involved.
Long gone were the days when rural doctors made up medications in competition with small town druggists AND big city drug companies AND metropolitan teaching hospitals --- AND in competition with patients and local healing women made up their own alternative medications.
To Civilization, Dawson was small time in doing everything himself.
But in fact ,he didn't want to do this pilot project - he just didn't give up when Big Pharma proved indifferent --- he saw patients dying needlessly in front of him - small patients.
He pulled a Banting on Big Pharma - called their bluff - it had worked for insulin and it worked, eventually, for penicillin as well.
The substance of Berlin's T4 project was never secret -- its evilness was widely reported in the world media.
Dawson did more than bemoan it - he answered with Manhattan's 4F project.
The three smalls confronted the Belief that 'Might Makes Right', 'Only the Strongest Survive', 'Its the Law of the Jungle' that Big
Battalion Civilization touted unquestioned in 1939.
The (moral) battle was on !
Monday, December 12, 2011
The "Concert Manque" ? or "Three Waller" ?
When asked by a Canadian "what am I
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
working on, I explain, "its a sort of "Billy Bishop Goes To Manhattan".
" I mean a sort of 'Ten Lost Years' or 'Tighten the Traces, Haul in the Reins'".
They generally know what I mean, right away.
But would the rest of the world?
I doubt it.
However most educated Canadians already know how rurally-raised playright John Gray came to conceive of the format for his megahit "Billy Bishop Goes To War".
He did while touring rep theatre in rural southern Ontario.
He couldn't help noticing that most Canadians, deep down, think it is RUDE to spy on people up on stage, through a Fourth Wall Removed.
So he elected to have his actors pretend to be in a Christmas Concert -- and thus have an excuse to directly address the audience before they sing.
But his actors also pretend to be Billy Bishop, so I always felt John held back the full impact of his insight.
A better model might be those successful Canadian folksingers in coffeehouses or 'boite a chansons' who have learned to combine a bit of standup/ monologue cum performance art with their song.
They aren't an actor playing the role of a singer, they are a real life singer who tells stories and evokes the past ( rather than re-enacts it in character) with a few basic props, in both speech and song.
This isn't Fourth Wall Removed at all - it is 'Never Been A Fourth
Wall To Remove' .
A Three Waller - a concert.
But it can go too far.
When the performance only seems to be a concert - because the story telling and evoking is so extensive relative to the singing, and when it is also supported by too many and too obvious sound effects and props,(ie when it goes Broadway-wanna-be) it really is a concert manque, not a real concert, pure and simple.
Now, that's my objective: a Canadian-style talk 'n' sing three waller that doesn't degrade into a full blown concert manque ...
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....
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
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
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