Trying to survive ---- after a nuclear war

Most of the world's biggest, best known and best regarded writers and pundits live in big cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and Moscow and they consider it pure nonsense that anyone would survive the direct effects of an all-out nuclear war.

For residents of such global cities, such as themselves, this is undoubtedly so.

But for the rest of us, the peons living outside these cities' various Beltways, we are more likely to die slow lingering painful deaths.

Not from radiation fallout, at least not in the medium short term.

And maybe not from nuclear winter.

But certainly from the massive disruption that an all-out nuclear war would cause to a world grown so dependent upon interconnected networks of huge, highly complicated, machines and the factories that make them.

The energy equipment inside electrical power plants and oil refineries in particular.

"Homemade Hope" : "the least of these" saved "the least of these"

Like H.P. Lovecraft, Adolf Hitler could think of no greater symbol of evil than the fungoid growth, which they both saw as silently and secretively rotting normal healthy life from within.

And as is well known, Hitler considered all the Jews to be fungoid growths.

We must remember he meant it literally, to be taken as a new but fully scientific metaphor, just as the originally exclusively biological term 'fission' became extended to also mean 'nuclear fission'.

How long then would Lovecraft and Hitler have both raged to learn the details of Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project.

industrial Auschwitz vs artisan Penicillin

Dr Josef Mengele'e wartime efforts, aided by an assist from Dr Robert Oppenheimer, almost immediately knocked human-oriented Progress permanently off its pre-war pedestal, as every account of the birth of our post-war/post-modern Era attests.

But would it be heresy to suggest that in the same period, albeit rolled out at a much slower pace, Dr Henry Dawson offered up an sturdy alternative to pre-war progress ?

That is 'out with the old' was as successful as it was, because there was an 'in with the new' alternative waiting in the wings ?

And I do mean 'Alternative' in just the sense that left wingers and right wingers understand that term : Birkenstocks and whole grain bread and all.

Dawson's successful attempts to get the Allies to reverse their war aims for penicillin, from a "secret weapon of war" to "abundant wartime penicillin for all in need", began small and simple and natural.

Writers Hitler, A. and Lovecraft, H.P. thought the ultimate in evil was a fungoid growth.

But 'the other Manhattan Project' took up the despised little creature.

Eventually it, together with "4Fs,Women and the Grace of God", to use a description from a hostile OSRD critic, changed our whole world for the better, for ever.

Not just in what it did ---- but in how it did it, so very different in an era of Big Everything, particularly Big Science:

Un-patented, public domain, back-to-the-land, back-to-nature, small-is-bountiful penicillin.

Kitchen Tabletop penicillin, Homemade penicillin, DIY penicillin, Artisan penicillin, Crude and Primitive penicillin.

Penicillin you could almost imagine being at farmers' markets, or sold from a table at the back of the hall, after the gig....