Roof and Rhetoric share a word sense

Stalingrad's bubble

Just as a roof shields us from the reality of the external world - allowing us to live in our own physical bubble, so rhetoric can convince us that the facts of physical reality don't exist - even outside our physical bubble.

Are the supposedly eternal and universal laws of nature nothing but Reified Rhetoric ?

Of course they are - can't you tell by the way I posed the question ?

I was using rhetoric --- we all do - particularly scientists.

I emphasize that point because so many scientists claim they do not.

This, in itself, is a highly effective bit of rhetoric.

But when you start deluding yourself thinking that if you and enough of your colleagues say something often enough it must be true (rather like Hitler and his General Staff after the Fall of France) you are in danger of reifying your rhetoric into something that is no longer an airy claim but now a solid fact.

We can't ever know if the laws of the universe are in fact eternal and universal and it needn't matter.

No matter unless you treat science as a theology - in which case you reify limited human suppositions into unlimited universal laws.....

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.

1850: Claude Bernard, Homeostasis and the birth of "Optimistic" Modernity

Hubris of the Skygods...

It is probably no coincidence at all that Modernity is conventionally dated to 1850, the same year that french doctor Claude Bernard first speculated publicly that all advanced life forms - like modern mankind - excel because of complex internal systems to keep them shielded from drastic changes in the external world.

Hitler was all about "The Triumph of the WORD" , not of the WILL : rhetoric = results

Triumph of mere WORDS ?

Add Churchill, FDR and Tojo to that sorry mess. All of the leaders of the biggest combatants of WWII felt that the war would be won when their opponents' morale and will was broken - not by good (bad ?) old-fashioned occupation of the opponents' home territory.

Duhig's Penicillin saved lives where Alexander Fleming failed - because of - not in spite of - "poorer" technology !

GLAXO's moral lowpoint: April '43

Briefly - very briefly - in April 1943, at the height of all the suffering and the dying of WWII, Glaxo the drug company had a tremendous technological success and an enormous moral failure.

"Race",before DNA, was BLOOD : literally. The hidden subtext behind penicillin's 15 year delay.

BLOOD was destiny, before DNA

The discovery of different blood types in the early 20th century allowed the science of eugenics to 'claim' a scientific basis for denying marriage between people of different colours, because it meant the mixing of their blood.

Raylene Rankin, September 15th 1960 - September 30th 2012 : the voice of Cape Breton

RISE AGAIN !

Raylene Rankin, of the Rankin Family singing group, will always be best remembered for her soaring rendition of "Rise Again", the island's unofficial anthem, in the 1985 Cape Breton Follies.

The voice of  Hope for Capers....

It was the first time most of us outsiders first took note that something new and good was coming out of "bad news" Cape Breton.

Rise again !....

1940's ISOLATIONISTS abandoned Europe's 4Fs and America's 4Fs

1A =  53%

From 1938 till 1941, Europe's small and weak nations - its 4F states - were gobbled up one after another, while the majority of Americans sat on their hands and did frack-all.

Republicans: ABORTING the 47%, before they are born, will greatly reduce the federal deficit

ABORT the 47% ???

Eugenicists , such as Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, believe in putting all their eggs and sperm in 53% of the baskets , writing off (permanently) those who are down today (but who might be up again tomorrow).

Aside from VEGEMITE, what did Aussies Gray & Duhig have that Alexander Fleming totally lacked ? (Moral Fervour)

6 million might have lived

In the Fall of 1943, fifteen years after Nobel Prize winner Alexander Fleming proved that penicillin - at least his method of making penicillin - could NOT save lives, two intrepid Aussies using his very same penicillin strain and his very same methods (right down to the use of Seitz asbestos filter pads) plucked a half dozen patients from the jaws of certain death.

If Penicillin was a Scottish DETECTIVE MURDER MYSTERY ....

Alexander FLEMING

.....Alexander Fleming would be the Scottish copper who finds the murder.

But Henry Dawson would be the Scottish copper who finds the murderer .

Henry Dawson and the cart before the horse

Martin Henry Dawson

It could be totally wrong to say that Martin Henry Dawson broke every rule in the book, during an ultimately successful effort to bring penicillin-as-we-know-it into an uncaring world.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and the MORAL INVENTION of 4F penicillin ---- during a 1A war (PART 1)

Thalidomide has had 9 lives...

Is it truly unfair that only Paul Gelmo initially invented Sulfa-the-(useless)-chemical, but is was Gerhard Domagk , 25 years later, who won the Nobel prize for Sulfa?