Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
Showing posts with label holocaust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label holocaust. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Forties Era 'Science Man' : anything Mother Nature can do, I can do better
Mechanical and Synthetic autarky
With extensions of his limbs and mind, with machines and beaker flasks, 1940's Civilized Man could top any physical feat that nature's most noblest creatures could ever hope to do.
And he had a fist full of recent new world records to prove it.
For in this new era of unending progress, man could now fly higher than an eagle, deeper than a whale, move faster than a cheetah.
Dig deeper than any mole, live higher up a mountain than any polar bush.
Sure a penguin lived at the edge of Antarctica, but had any penguin gone to the South Pole - or the North ?
Had he, had he ??
Smelter fires hotter than any volcano, electrical sparks bigger than any lightning strike.
On and on it went : even man-made silk finer than any mere worm could weave.
Designer meals (and soon, designer babies) better than mother could ever make.
Who needs Mother Nature consuming calories when her jobs could be done better by engines and beakers ?
So, about those plans to "kill off all the smallpox virus on the Earth, as 'life unworthy of life' "?
Just a start, buddy, just a start ....
Planet-wide planned genocide of Jews superlatively unique
Every every recent Summer Olympics about seven billion unique individuals lend at least half an ear to its ongoing results.
But about ten seconds after the starter's gun goes off during the 100 metre sprint for men, we with television sets learn about someone who is superlatively unique : the fastest human on the entire planet (at least for a few weeks).
Were the Nazis' WWII efforts to kill the Jews 'unique' ?
Of course - all genocides are unique - all events, like all individuals, are unique.
But the overall tenor of the secretive Nazi intentions, never carried out fully, suggested that they eventually intended to kill every last Jew on the entire Earth, just as if they were smallpox viruses.
Unlike say Rwanda's Tutsis, huddled together handily in a relatively small area, Jews were to be found in practically every country on Earth, so an effort to kill all of them required an extremely ambitious plan to conquer the whole Earth first.
The geographic sweep of this genocide marks it as unique in human history to date.....
But about ten seconds after the starter's gun goes off during the 100 metre sprint for men, we with television sets learn about someone who is superlatively unique : the fastest human on the entire planet (at least for a few weeks).
Were the Nazis' WWII efforts to kill the Jews 'unique' ?
Of course - all genocides are unique - all events, like all individuals, are unique.
But the overall tenor of the secretive Nazi intentions, never carried out fully, suggested that they eventually intended to kill every last Jew on the entire Earth, just as if they were smallpox viruses.
Unlike say Rwanda's Tutsis, huddled together handily in a relatively small area, Jews were to be found in practically every country on Earth, so an effort to kill all of them required an extremely ambitious plan to conquer the whole Earth first.
The geographic sweep of this genocide marks it as unique in human history to date.....
Era of Progress mental blinkers refused to recognize very early pre-modern-human Art,hidden in plain sight
This is the story of a possibly missed opportunity to prevent the 1940s Holocaust , a story that began way back in 1891-1892.
Dutchman Eugene Dubois was the first scientist to deliberately look for the beings that existed between 'the apes and modern humans' .
He and many other scientists were convinced there was only one intermediate species and that it must exist only in the tropics because they felt that humanity was most closely related to Orangutans and Gibbons and these species are found only there.
Gibbons walk upright far more often and far more easily than do chimps for example.
But Darwin stuck to his counter intuitive conviction that humanity was closest to the knuckle-walking chimps and since the chimps live only in Africa, humanity must have emerged there first. (Again Darwin was eventually proven right !)
So determined was Dubois that he shifted careers and got himself posted to remote Dutch Indonesia.
In 1891, at Trinil on the island of Java, he did indeed discover very early humanity - the famous "Java Man", now known to be an (estimated 500,000 year old) example of Homo Erectus.
Homo Erectus lived throughout Africa and the warmer parts of Eurasia between 2 million years and 70,000 years ago.
By contrast our own species, the Homo Sapiens species, are seen as becoming modern (in anatomy and in behavior) only about 50,000 years ago.
The first claim is based on comparing the shape and heft of ancient and recent human skeletons from before, during and after that important 50,000 year divide.
Since the presence of ancient human skeletons "fossils" is absolutely key to claiming that a site once held humans, this is not a controversial argument - human bones are one of the most preserved and undisputed artifacts of early human life.
But human artifacts of cloth and leather, even paint on rock walls are rarely found intact from hundreds of thousands of years back.
So that means that one of the key problems about also claiming that people dead hundreds of thousands of years ago could hold abstract thoughts like we do today is that few abstractly thought out objects survive that long a period of time.
But artwork carved into stone, bone or ceramics is a rare form of abstract thought made visible as art that can survive the ages.
Seeking such art marks was thus - or rather it should have been thus - Job One for everyone seeking Early Man.
But that presumes that in the Age of Progress that anyone was eager to find out just how far back modern-human-like behavior had existed and that simply wasn't so.
Humanity in the Age of Progress created the metaphor of a long ladder, rather than a long ramp, to describe how they imagined 'Progress' had proceeded upwards, throughout time, from the ancient simple stupid bacteria to the big complex smart civilized European male.
Ladders presume wide distinct ('clearcut' - to use a term much favoured by Howard Florey) gaps between each ladder step - rather than the infinitely gradual continuum of a ramp.
This allowed human elites in the Era of Progress to see what they wanted to see : wide yawning gaps between men and women, educated and uneducated, white and black, man and animals, man and ape, man and the stone age men.
Seeing a common humanity between Stone Age Man and modern Man might have forced Aryans to also see a common humanity with their Jewish neighbours.
So despite Dubois's specimen of extremely early man being an unique find for a very long time, it wasn't studied as intently as one might think.
In fact, most scientists dismissed it outright, sight unseen -- tending to feel it was a late model of ape or an early model of modern homo sapiens - not an intermediate stage human at all.
But if they had looked at all seriously at the relatively few mollusc shells left by these extremely rare early human remains, they would have seen clear and unusual marks that couldn't have been done by Nature or ape-like beings.
Very sophisticated tools and reasoning were used to open the shellfish without ruining the meat inside.
And abstract art marks were scratched on one shell.
Both of these were hidden ----- in plain view.
But it isn't ever enough for science to merely discover things - what unconscious preconceptions scientists bring to bear upon their discoveries hampers what they will see.
A hundred and twenty years later, a new generation of scientists looked at the same shellfish and finally saw the clearly visible tool marks and art marks.
Because they were open to the possibility that modern humans weren't in fact as unique as human hubris had long thought.
Because they were willing to at least ask if ancient humans might have had abstract thoughts.
One can at least wonder if the Holocaust would ever had happened if the Age of Progress had been open - 50 years before the Holocaust - to seeking to see if early Intermediate Man could possibly share a common humanity of abstract thought with such exalted Aryan philosophers like Hegel and Kant....
Dutchman Eugene Dubois was the first scientist to deliberately look for the beings that existed between 'the apes and modern humans' .
He and many other scientists were convinced there was only one intermediate species and that it must exist only in the tropics because they felt that humanity was most closely related to Orangutans and Gibbons and these species are found only there.
Gibbons walk upright far more often and far more easily than do chimps for example.
But Darwin stuck to his counter intuitive conviction that humanity was closest to the knuckle-walking chimps and since the chimps live only in Africa, humanity must have emerged there first. (Again Darwin was eventually proven right !)
So determined was Dubois that he shifted careers and got himself posted to remote Dutch Indonesia.
In 1891, at Trinil on the island of Java, he did indeed discover very early humanity - the famous "Java Man", now known to be an (estimated 500,000 year old) example of Homo Erectus.
Homo Erectus lived throughout Africa and the warmer parts of Eurasia between 2 million years and 70,000 years ago.
By contrast our own species, the Homo Sapiens species, are seen as becoming modern (in anatomy and in behavior) only about 50,000 years ago.
The first claim is based on comparing the shape and heft of ancient and recent human skeletons from before, during and after that important 50,000 year divide.
Since the presence of ancient human skeletons "fossils" is absolutely key to claiming that a site once held humans, this is not a controversial argument - human bones are one of the most preserved and undisputed artifacts of early human life.
But human artifacts of cloth and leather, even paint on rock walls are rarely found intact from hundreds of thousands of years back.
So that means that one of the key problems about also claiming that people dead hundreds of thousands of years ago could hold abstract thoughts like we do today is that few abstractly thought out objects survive that long a period of time.
But artwork carved into stone, bone or ceramics is a rare form of abstract thought made visible as art that can survive the ages.
Seeking such art marks was thus - or rather it should have been thus - Job One for everyone seeking Early Man.
But that presumes that in the Age of Progress that anyone was eager to find out just how far back modern-human-like behavior had existed and that simply wasn't so.
Metaphor of Progress as abrupt ladder steps rather than gradual ramp
Humanity in the Age of Progress created the metaphor of a long ladder, rather than a long ramp, to describe how they imagined 'Progress' had proceeded upwards, throughout time, from the ancient simple stupid bacteria to the big complex smart civilized European male.
Ladders presume wide distinct ('clearcut' - to use a term much favoured by Howard Florey) gaps between each ladder step - rather than the infinitely gradual continuum of a ramp.
This allowed human elites in the Era of Progress to see what they wanted to see : wide yawning gaps between men and women, educated and uneducated, white and black, man and animals, man and ape, man and the stone age men.
Seeing a common humanity between Stone Age Man and modern Man might have forced Aryans to also see a common humanity with their Jewish neighbours.
So despite Dubois's specimen of extremely early man being an unique find for a very long time, it wasn't studied as intently as one might think.
In fact, most scientists dismissed it outright, sight unseen -- tending to feel it was a late model of ape or an early model of modern homo sapiens - not an intermediate stage human at all.
But if they had looked at all seriously at the relatively few mollusc shells left by these extremely rare early human remains, they would have seen clear and unusual marks that couldn't have been done by Nature or ape-like beings.
Very sophisticated tools and reasoning were used to open the shellfish without ruining the meat inside.
And abstract art marks were scratched on one shell.
Both of these were hidden ----- in plain view.
But it isn't ever enough for science to merely discover things - what unconscious preconceptions scientists bring to bear upon their discoveries hampers what they will see.
A hundred and twenty years later, a new generation of scientists looked at the same shellfish and finally saw the clearly visible tool marks and art marks.
Because they were open to the possibility that modern humans weren't in fact as unique as human hubris had long thought.
Because they were willing to at least ask if ancient humans might have had abstract thoughts.
One can at least wonder if the Holocaust would ever had happened if the Age of Progress had been open - 50 years before the Holocaust - to seeking to see if early Intermediate Man could possibly share a common humanity of abstract thought with such exalted Aryan philosophers like Hegel and Kant....
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Painting a picture of Reductionism
Reductionism, a theory of extreme simplicity that seeks to account for everything in the universe, is, as usual with such "terrible simplicities", itself a very complicated piece of philosophical and scientific reasoning.
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Not the sort of thing, one might think, to easily or accurately summarize in a single big mural painted on the wall of some museum of natural science.
But not so.
All those museum murals of (drum roll please !) of The Marvelous Pageant of Life's Inevitable Progress, as made infamous by Stephen Jay Gould's withering critique, were - I argue - actually a portrait of the applied Theory of Reductionism.
Put another way, the fundamental reasoning behind the entire Era of Progress was actually "Reductionism-in-Action" in the sphere of Life ---- evolutionary progress towards inevitable ever greater complexity being an unconscious example of half-understood Reductionism.
So let us first review Reductionism.
Its most militant fans really believe (even if they don't publicly admit it) that one short sharp law about the motions of sub-sub-atomic articles (The Theory of Everything) will enable them to predict/control every activity in all the larger objects in the universe above the sub-sub-atomic level.
They will eventually know - far in advance and far far away (sitting in some multi-billion dollar taxpayer paid lab in Stanford) what I am about to say in the rest of this sentence (which is far more than I currently know).
Why hasn't aroused womanhood put all these men (and they are almost all men, rather like the Freemen on the Land movement) in a padded cell in Stanford, rather than in an expensive lab?
Beats me.
Here is how they say it all works.
Random (thermal) motion of various fundamental bits and bobs (fermions and bosons) eventually bangs themselves into bigger bits and these bigger bits in then bang themselves together into atoms and then these atoms bang together into bigger bits like CO2 and H20.
Sunlight energy then bangs these tiny molecules into simple sugars which link together to produce the beginnings of life and eventually lead to the bacteria.
Bang a few single celled bacteria together and you have a simple multi-celled beings and eventually you will have a multi-celled being called Einstein.
Much the same tale is used to account for the rise of entire massive galaxies from a few incredibly tiny fermions and bosons banging on (probably in some ancient physics lecture hall) back 14 billion years ago.
The alternative theory to Reductionism is that you will need to discover new laws to account for each new bigger grouping of the original fundamental particles.
Because, other physicists argue, at each new phase of matter, different and unexpected qualities have emerged that could not have been predicted by using the original theory of everything and simply multiplying everything up by a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion etc.
Now Reductionists don't deny that each new grouping together of smaller sub assemblies of matter and energy leads to a more complex bigger entity - far from it.
That is their basic claim ---- that bigger is inherently more complex : a granite boulder is the basic complexity of fermions and bosons multiplied by a trillion times a trillion and so collectively it can do more complex things.
But in explaining that complexity,they say we can de-construct it down to some very basic and simple motions multiplied trillions upon trillions of times.
And again another in their key claims ---- simply knowing the simple motions will let them predict/control the bigger more complex motions.
Still other scientists agree with the Reductionists that big objects are but the sum of trillions of tiny objects' basically simple motions but say that almost nothing useful can be predicted as a result of assuming this, at least in real time and with real world budgets, as a result.
(And this is putting aside the unexpected unpredictable complexities arising in each new phase of matter.)
But back a hundred years ago, this Reductionism was all heady stuff to the pre-naturally naive and the optimistic.
They believed that atoms' purpose was not to lead an independent existence long before and long after Man's 15 minutes of fame.
Instead, they were around simply to serve Man and to become Man - not existing as independent atoms - but bonding together into first small doublets and ultimately huge polymer molecules.
Similarly with all Life before Man.
Bacteria and all other life not Man were like skins discarded by individual snakes as they grew ever bigger.
So after two bacteria had banged together to produce the first multi-celled being, the rest weren't really needed on the voyage to the stars and should be killed off.
Ditto the monkeys and apes once they had spawned the beginnings of the human species - they were all now 'useless mouths'.
Not so atoms, elements, fermions and bosons - we would still need them to make humans and everything humans planned to synthesize the proper way, after God screwed it up so badly the first time.
Now not even the most extreme Reductionists in the physical sciences ever claimed CO2 and H2O had ceased to
physically exist after they had made the first simple sugars.
Or that they ceased to have a moral right to exist after having done so.
And no biologist ever really claimed that bacteria and apes had ceased to have an actual physical existence after they led to bigger more complex beings.
But these murals on museum walls clearly indicated their ( and our grandparents') Age of Progress belief that they ceased to have a moral right to exist.
These murals - taught as life lessons to generations of school kids - literally painted and justified the Holocaust, years before it actually happened.
These murals painted the reality of all Life as consisting of a series of panels left to right.
Bacteria on the lower left, small, inmobile, down in the bottom slime.
At centre left, a panel would show perhaps small reptiles.
Apes on higher ground, knuckles dragging on the ground, in the very middle panel, at middle height.
At centre right, a panel would show a buck naked coal black Aboriginal holding a crude spear and crouched down.
At the upper right panel, an upperclass rich white man in a smart suit, standing upright at the window of a skyscraper penthouse, gazing pensively out at his factory workers way down below.
In reality, in the very middle panel, we'd we'd still see apes, small reptiles and bacteria and in the rightmost panel, Man(civilized and"primitive"), ape, small reptile and bacteria.
Bacteria have always been around, are still around, and far outnumber anything bigger than themselves.
They are no mere long discarded skin in the evolution of a snake.
And in perhaps an even sharper blow to the preening of Progress and Reductionism, while the bacteria are indeed the oldest form of life, they are not the simplest possible form of life nor the most numerous.
The viruses are much simpler and much more numerous - every bacteria potentially harbours dozens or even hundreds of them.
Life and Evolution does not progress at all in any ordered march to greater and greater complexity, discarding everything simpler in turn.
It sprawls.
Truly successful life simply lives - it simply reproduces living viable offspring to carry on.
How it (collectively) meets that ever evolving challenge is totally up to it - it can grow smaller, go bigger, or remain the same size and evolve new genes and drop others.
Today's more accurate Pageant of Life would be a truly huge electronic pixel board, running in basic time from left to right, with each grouping of pixels presenting a different species by individual members' physical size and the total number of individuals in it.
Each second of real time would represent a hundred thousand years of time.
It would be a violently flickering screen, with all sizes and no sizes and complexities and non complexities of species going in and out of existence in every second we look upon it.
There would be no discernible hint of Progress ever upwards to civilized Man.
And no human smoke of six million Jews disposed of like discarded snake skins ....
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
The Plenticide of Closed Commensality
The Nazis were very concerned - even in the depths of their upcoming defeat - about maintaining the social welfare, health and well being of all their citizens - without fear or favour.
The catch ?
An extremely closed commensal definition of just who was a (good) (full) (healthy) German citizen ---and who was not.
No physical or mentally handicapped, no left-wingers, no queers, no mixed race black-German kids, no Jews, no half or quarter or one drop of blood Jews, no Romas, no pacifists, no chronic congenital criminal or moral deviants of any sort.
On and on and on - "Goebbels The Crip" only escaped with his life because, well just because.
I don't quite know how ole One Ball himself survived this ever tightening noose around all those Germans who weren't quite good enough to dine at the Aryan closed commensal table .
Perhaps the Nazi Plenticide Machine just ran out of time before it could begin eating itself....
The catch ?
An extremely closed commensal definition of just who was a (good) (full) (healthy) German citizen ---and who was not.
No physical or mentally handicapped, no left-wingers, no queers, no mixed race black-German kids, no Jews, no half or quarter or one drop of blood Jews, no Romas, no pacifists, no chronic congenital criminal or moral deviants of any sort.
On and on and on - "Goebbels The Crip" only escaped with his life because, well just because.
I don't quite know how ole One Ball himself survived this ever tightening noose around all those Germans who weren't quite good enough to dine at the Aryan closed commensal table .
Perhaps the Nazi Plenticide Machine just ran out of time before it could begin eating itself....
Monday, December 29, 2014
Enough already about War's impact on Nature : what about Nature's impact on War ?
With only the very best of intentions, environmentalists have tended to focus on what war does to nature - say for example, in reviewing the impact of leaking oil from the thousands of oil tankers sunk at the sea during war in the last 120 years.
But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.
But in fact, the reverse is true.
History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.
But bad weather leading to bad harvests works just as well : the course of the Nazi Holocaust follows more exactingly the wavering course of the annual German domestic harvest results than it ever does the wavering course of the brain chemicals inside Adolf Hitler's head.
In 1939, no side expected WWII to last so long and cost so much in lives and material : what really prolonged it on both sides was modernity's failure (in peace as in war) to calculate in the truly awesome powers of climate and geography compared to the still puny powers of man's ideologies, demographies and technologies.
Viewed this way, WWII becomes less a contest of man against man, of ideology and technology against ideology and technology and more an unequal donnybrook between man-the-feeble and Mother-Nature-The-Mighty.
My blog and book series, un-superheroes, will provide many such weather/climate/geography examples from our LAST global disaster, WWII, because our current global disaster is once again a man versus climate fight - one where the speedy application of any past learned lessons could literally save our lives ...
But again, totally unintentionally, all this effort tends to show Man as all-powerful (here in a war mode busy destroying nature) and Mother Nature as basically an endless victim.
But in fact, the reverse is true.
History is replete with examples where Mother Nature has effortlessly shattered the over-arching hubris of war-makers : any number of history-changing examples spring to mind - usually where unexpected bad weather destroys the plans of invasion fleets - on the water, in the air, over land.
But bad weather leading to bad harvests works just as well : the course of the Nazi Holocaust follows more exactingly the wavering course of the annual German domestic harvest results than it ever does the wavering course of the brain chemicals inside Adolf Hitler's head.
In 1939, no side expected WWII to last so long and cost so much in lives and material : what really prolonged it on both sides was modernity's failure (in peace as in war) to calculate in the truly awesome powers of climate and geography compared to the still puny powers of man's ideologies, demographies and technologies.
Viewed this way, WWII becomes less a contest of man against man, of ideology and technology against ideology and technology and more an unequal donnybrook between man-the-feeble and Mother-Nature-The-Mighty.
My blog and book series, un-superheroes, will provide many such weather/climate/geography examples from our LAST global disaster, WWII, because our current global disaster is once again a man versus climate fight - one where the speedy application of any past learned lessons could literally save our lives ...
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Reality : 'parsimony' or 'plentitude' ? ---- Modernity and Commensality's choices
Both parsimony and plentitude are well worn terms (with relatively precise meanings) within the world of science ---- but buttressing each scientific term are two long standing but wildly varying philosophies of life that we all must chose between.
The two philosophies agree just once : in both accepting that current - readily observable - reality does appear to be very dynamic and complex.
But only one philosophy accepts that this vision of ever-dynamic complexity is probably as about as accurate a version of reality that we humans are ever likely to get.
The other philosophy derides that view as a 'false consciousness' and craves to find a much simpler , more predictable, stable and controllable reality buried somewhere deep in that heaving surface morass.
I think it is fair to say that the Era of Modernity (1875-1965) chose the philosophy of parsimony and the Era of Commensality (1965- ?) has chosen the philosophy of plentitude.
For parsimony sees reality as akin to thermoset polymers and says that there are always winners and always single best solutions.
And that moreover we can readily determine them and congeal them for all time.
While plentitude sees reality as rather like thermoplastic polymers and says there are no winners or losers - just ever-plastic life in all its complexities.
It says that history has shown we haven't had much happiness when we set out to exalt the winners and to holocaust the losers....
The two philosophies agree just once : in both accepting that current - readily observable - reality does appear to be very dynamic and complex.
But only one philosophy accepts that this vision of ever-dynamic complexity is probably as about as accurate a version of reality that we humans are ever likely to get.
The other philosophy derides that view as a 'false consciousness' and craves to find a much simpler , more predictable, stable and controllable reality buried somewhere deep in that heaving surface morass.
I think it is fair to say that the Era of Modernity (1875-1965) chose the philosophy of parsimony and the Era of Commensality (1965- ?) has chosen the philosophy of plentitude.
For parsimony sees reality as akin to thermoset polymers and says that there are always winners and always single best solutions.
And that moreover we can readily determine them and congeal them for all time.
While plentitude sees reality as rather like thermoplastic polymers and says there are no winners or losers - just ever-plastic life in all its complexities.
It says that history has shown we haven't had much happiness when we set out to exalt the winners and to holocaust the losers....
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Holocaust Studies (and Jewish genealogy) ignoring the Jews saved from 'death by deliberate neglect' planned for them by hostile ALLIED medical establishments ?
"Code Slowing" New York Jews to a certain death during height of Holocaust - and the dying Gentile who saved them
During the darkest days of WWII - at the height of the Holocaust - Charles Aronson , Miriam Laskowitz, Penny Mehler and Otto Morowitz all faced a death sentence as sure as any issued by the Nazis.
They were children of immigrants growing up in crowded homes in the NYC area during the late 1910s and 1920s , at the height of the deadliest phase of acute Rheumatic Fever.
As a result all had badly damaged heart valves and now as young adults during the war years, faced certain death from the uniformly fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis).
Taking a page out of the Nazi handbook , Anglo-American medical elites were using the excuse of 'war necessity' to deny them the medicine that could save these Jewish lives.
Yet as other Jews around the the world were dying from battlefield bullets or in secret gas chambers , these New York City Jews (and ultimately tens of thousands of other Jews worldwide very like them) , were plucked from death and given a new life.
As the result of a selfless act of agape from a dying Gentile doctor.
This Canadian-born doctor gave up his own life to save the lives of strangers - and changed our whole world for the better - forever.
I mention these patients' names only because they have already been already made public long ago , by Gladys Hobby in her seminal account of the exciting saga of wartime penicillin (PENICILLIN : MEETING THE CHALLENGE).
Hobby was one member of Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny medical team at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (today's CUMC) who had laboured for five years to save these four and dozens of others.
These four can not be all the wartime Jews plucked from death by the direct and indirect efforts of Dr Dawson's tiny team - it is just that they are the only names I currently know.
And that is almost all I know about them - they have vanished from history.
Next year - October 16th 2015 - will mark the 75th anniversary that the first of these Jews (Charles Aronson) was saved from death by Dr Dawson's hospital-brewed natural penicillin - an event that also ushered in our era of life-saving antibiotics.
Jewish Genealogy in the New York City area
I appeal to those involved in New York City area Jewish genealogy , to New York City medical personnel with an interest in medical history and to all those scholars researching Jewish death and survival during WWII .
Please consider helping to mark the 75th anniversary of the world's first ever penicillin shot (Manhattan Oct 16th 1940) by turning your eyes and skills towards recovering some of this lost story of Jews saved from certain death.
Beginning with recovering the stories of Charles, Miriam, Penny and Otto and their families ...
Charles born about 1913
Miriam born about 1920
Otto born about 1914
Penny born about 1932
Based on my assessment of their penicillin treatment patterns and Gladys Hobby's whereabouts upon retirement , I believe all four were living in the greater NYC area in the mid 1940s (ie including the near-by parts of New Jersey) and the last three were still living there circa 1980 as she prepared her book.
Penny's last name might be Mahler. There is always a distinct possibility that all these names are actually their middle names (or that they are their first names but their families knew them by other names.)
After all , the Dawson patient who was received the world's first penicillin shot was recorded as Aaron Alston , but was known as Leroy to family and friends and he always wrote his name as A. Leroy Alston !
I think that Charles might well have died in the 1950s - for a child and man who cheated death at least six or more times, a by no means bad fate ....
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Oh Oh , Diversity & WWII : have I said a bad word ?
My claim that Martin Henry Dawson championed diversity in both microbiology and in humanity during WWII strikes many as simply incredible and non-credible.
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.
It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.
But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All" thirty years earlier.
Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.
And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.
So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?
We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.
And why not ?
What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.
People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....
Monday, January 6, 2014
World over Will , 1939 - 1945 : Matter over Mind
By all contemporary accounts, it was the lack of actual photos and movies of actual deaths (from anywhere inside the vast numbers of German concentration , POW and mass elimination camps) that prevented the many public verbal and written accounts of the Holocaust from being believed while it was happening.
After all, anti-Semitic acts and talk actually went up , not down, in the Anglo-American world during WWII.
Many in the Allied camp - perhaps 25 % - seriously blamed the "Jew-dominated FDR government" for creating the war, while many others accused Jews of shirking front line combat to remain home as war profiteers instead.
So it was the extensive newsreels of British or American troops examining the dead and dying , most mere skeletons, in the western concentration camps that finally got through to the Home Front doubters about the millions killed in the invisible eastern extermination camps.
I suspect that it was less the fact of their deaths ( seventy million had already died from the war worldwide) than the pictures of their starved condition that finally got through to people.
All the detail-filled verbal and written contemporary accounts of the Holocaust , even when they came from the lips of people like Churchill (not really regarded by anyone, not even Nazis, as 'a stooge of the Jews') were dismissed as mere artifacts of the will and the mind .
All the world's population had six long years to become used to the near total disconnect between what they could actually see at work or all around them, versus the public (verbal/written) propaganda told about it.
But the mid to late 1945 newsreels were too long, too many and too varied to appear easily doctored -- they were artifacts of the real world and of matter and they were readily and strongly believed.
What better proof then for my thesis that The mental Will might have started the war on all sides, but that it was The material World that actually won out in the end....?
After all, anti-Semitic acts and talk actually went up , not down, in the Anglo-American world during WWII.
Many in the Allied camp - perhaps 25 % - seriously blamed the "Jew-dominated FDR government" for creating the war, while many others accused Jews of shirking front line combat to remain home as war profiteers instead.
So it was the extensive newsreels of British or American troops examining the dead and dying , most mere skeletons, in the western concentration camps that finally got through to the Home Front doubters about the millions killed in the invisible eastern extermination camps.
I suspect that it was less the fact of their deaths ( seventy million had already died from the war worldwide) than the pictures of their starved condition that finally got through to people.
All the detail-filled verbal and written contemporary accounts of the Holocaust , even when they came from the lips of people like Churchill (not really regarded by anyone, not even Nazis, as 'a stooge of the Jews') were dismissed as mere artifacts of the will and the mind .
All the world's population had six long years to become used to the near total disconnect between what they could actually see at work or all around them, versus the public (verbal/written) propaganda told about it.
But the mid to late 1945 newsreels were too long, too many and too varied to appear easily doctored -- they were artifacts of the real world and of matter and they were readily and strongly believed.
What better proof then for my thesis that The mental Will might have started the war on all sides, but that it was The material World that actually won out in the end....?
Saturday, August 10, 2013
In a world war obsessed by 1A nations, soldiers and scientists, Henry Dawson dared to defend the worthiness of 4Fs... and 4F science
During WWII (1931-1946) a whole series of countries cum bullies - among the Allies as well as among the Axis - almost totally consistently choose to only attack those nations or peoples they judged weaker than themselves.
Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.
It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.
Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.
In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.
Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.
Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.
So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."
Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.
But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.
By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.
By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.
Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.
Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.
But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.
This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).
So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.
If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.
But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....
Britain, for example, shamefully refused to attack Germany with its potentially much larger Commonwealth army manpower and felt the war could be won by invading weaker Italy instead.
It also choose to starved the prostrate peoples of occupied Europe by blockade , rather than attack Germany directly with all that Commonwealth army manpower, in hopes this also would win the war, along with success in Italy.
Only twice, both times in December of 1941, did bullies deliberately choose to attack someone they believed was stronger than they were : when Japan and then Germany declared war on America , a nation with by far the biggest economy in the world and also by far the hardest country to invade.
In partial explanation of all this bully behavior, it was the Age of Modernity, when the majority of powerful opinion was firmly convinced that Evolution was unidirectional and always consolidating into fewer (and ever bigger) entities.
Fewer ever bigger animals and plants, fewer ever bigger buildings, ships and dams ,fewer ever bigger corporations and cities , fewer ever bigger nations and empires.
Ever bigger and bigger, ever better and better : so that the destruction and absorption of the smaller and the weaker was simply inevitable.
So what we might now regard - in post hegemonic times - as the shameful behavior of virtually all the nations and people of the world, two billion standing around as bystanders at a holocaust or a schoolyard bullying session, they then regarded as sad but inevitable, "letting Nature take its course."
Henry Dawson didn't agree and he put his strong disagreement into actions.
Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson never said why he did what he did, why he went so far out on a limb to do what he did or why he willingly gave up his life to aid his efforts.
But concrete deeds walk, while abstract talk ... just talks.
By his deeds, we can see that Dawson clearly thought even the 4Fs of the 4Fs were worth saving at the height of Total War, particularly when his side was fighting, after all, opponents who thought they weren't worth saving.
By his deeds, we know he clearly thought tiny 4F science had its own virtues, even during a war when Science, like skyscrapers, was thought only to get better when it got bigger.
Seventy five years on, his solitary figure looks now like the sensible one, while his many opponents - basically the vast majority of informed opinion - now look to be sadly hubris-ridden and totally lack in the imagination to see beyond the obvious.
Dawson didn't say 'small was beautiful' and 'big was bad', partly because he didn't say anything at all.
But he definitely acted as if he had concluded that Evolution as progressing in all directions : as often decomposing into tiny viruses as it was consolidating into big dinosaurs.
This could be because any acute observer of Life on Earth, and Dawson was acutely open to everything, would be forced to conclude that reality had indeed given the planet a dynamic mix of stability niches (aiding the existence of large entities) and instability niches (aiding the existence of small entities).
So an eternal global commensality of big and little entities was inevitable.
If Dawson had lived and had been in good health he might have formally stated what he believed and the lessons we might learn from his successes.
But he didn't, so we must tease them out : from his deeds....
Monday, June 24, 2013
If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...
One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
If we seek hints from High Culture, it is noteworthy there have been no highly regarded movies,plays or novels about the project to divert the originally planned use of uranium fission , as a sort of superboiler, into becoming a super weapon instead.
But many non-fiction books have been written about the atomic project's supposedly 'dramatic' events.
All evade the awkward truth that without a genuine moral dilemma experienced by any key actors, there can be no real drama.
By contrast, immediately after the war, a very good movie came out about an effort to 'maximum profitize' penicillin, probably the closest peacetime and civilian equivalent of the Allied wartime effort to weaponize penicillin.
Clearly this 'crime' was regarded by the filmmakers (and more crucially by viewing audiences world wide as well) as almost the post war equivalent of the Holocaust and as the very symbol of the maximum evil possible.
For THE THIRD MAN was universally regarded as a classic on the day of its release and has stood the test of time, recently being voted the best British movie of all time - not bad for a black and white movie old enough to receive its Old Age Pension.
So its claim that any attempt to de-sanctifying 'the sacred penicillin' is the ultimate in evilness still seems to hold up as credible to modern audiences.
Just imagine then how that public would feel if they knew that the original narrow Allied plans for penicillin (and DDT), if unaltered, could have resulted in a greater loss of human life than even the Holocaust ?
Course unaltered, the far longer and far bigger and far more savage WWII should have seen even deaths due to misery,hunger and disease at war's end than even WWI.
As it was, the shorter, smaller WWI still lost millions at war's end to the Spanish Flu in the West and Typhus in the East.
Many millions did die at the end of WWII : but tens of millions of deaths could have been in the cards, if penicillin and DDT hadn't been available in sufficient amounts to serve all the world, not just Allied frontline troops as originally planned.
Thus Henry Dawson's lonely but ultimately successful effort to keep penicillin de-weaponized did help to reduce the possible high death toll at the war's end.
And we all should be grateful for that....
If you could only pick one Manhattan Project ...
One Manhattan Project, procuring the weaponization of atomic fission, was the biggest project of the War. The other Manhattan Project,confounding the weaponization of penicillin, was the smallest. But if you had to choose just one , which one would it be ?
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Civilization, 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.
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Hitler and his strongest critics agree: Holocaust unique because it sought to kill an entire ethnic group
I don't agree.
I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.
I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.
Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.
He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.
Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.
Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as sixty million highly different individuals.
We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.
We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die, back into individual stories.
We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.
Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......
I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.
I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.
Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.
He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.
Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.
Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as sixty million highly different individuals.
We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.
We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die, back into individual stories.
We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.
Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
1939-1945 : Nesvizh Jews fight for life, at home and abroad
While Jews in the democratic West during WWII were unwilling to do something even as minor as chaining themselves to government fences ( a la the suffragettes) to protest the mass killing of their counterparts in Europe, this did not mean that other Jews were not fighting for their right to life in those years.
Consider the brave Jews of Nesvizh.
Ninety percent of the Jews of that small city, 60 miles south west of Minsk (today part of Belarus, then part of Poland), were killed by the Germans, in one day, in October 1941.
The remaining 600, locked in a tiny ghetto, resolved to try an armed breakout, rather than die quietly.
The forests were right next to the city and the ghetto and once the Jews were in the woods, filled with lethal partisans hidden behind dark trees, the Germans and their helpers quickly lost their dutch courage and gave up the chase.
On July 21 1942, hearing a police company of Nazi collaborators was coming to kill the remaining 600, the Jews started their break out.
Yes, most got killed in the process, but perhaps 10% of the 10% got away to try and survive the grim and short lives of forest partisans.
Maybe a handful of the original 6000 survived to the end of the war.
Nevertheless, this tiny ghetto was the first, or one of the very first, groups of Eastern European Jews to fight to the death in an effort to stay alive.... and is widely honored worldwide today for doing so.
Particularly by those children of Western Jews who know their own parents and grandparents, under far more safe circumstances, did basically nothing, certainly nothing so bold and courageous, during WWI to hinder the Nazi efforts to kill all of the world's Jews.
Most of the Jewish people of Nesvizh survive today as the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people of that shtetl who emigrated to places like New York in the brief window of opportunity between the 1890s and the start of WWI.
We still know very little about this man, the very first person to receive lifesaving penicillin-the-antibiotic (systemic penicillin) and who did so on October 16 1940 in New York.
We do know a fair bit of his medical history, but as to Charles Aronson himself, we only know he was born about 1913.
We are very lucky that in 1944 much of his complicated medical history was abstracted by his doctor in a published article because today's America would let us know nothing of this man born a 100 years ago.
America is a country where it is much easier to buy an assault rifle then it is for a historian to get any personal information about historical figures.
But importantly we do know a fair bit of the career of his doctor (Dr Henry Dawson) , particularly with regard to the disease that Charlie Aronson was being treated for (subacute bacterial endocarditis) (SBE).
Prior to Charlie, Dawson had never treated SBE and obviously , at that point, no one had treated anyone anywhere with systemic penicillin.
From these few scant facts, we can make a few educated , aka statistical, guesses about the identity of Charlie.
Because some academics have studied the matter thoroughly, we have a pretty good idea of how ordinary (non well-to-do) New Yorkers picked the solutions to their medical problems in 1940.
The densely populated centre of New York City is also home to one of the world's largest arrays of hospitals and doctors in the world.
A short bus ride in any direction in the three mile circle around your home threw up lots of possible healers.
Even the poorest weren't short of choices - many NYC hospitals and doctors were also research oriented and if you submitted to their new therapy trials, you got (hopefully) cutting edge treatment for little or no cost.
Generally, distance was a big factor : since so many good hospitals lay close at hand in every direction, so why go further only to find your family and friends can't easily visit you daily ?
The exception was if a doctor or hospital was very famous for its special advanced treatment of a particular fatal disease : then people would come from all over the continent or the world, desperate for a possible lifeline.
Dr Henry Dawson ,and systemic penicillin, in October 1940, were the furthest possible from that sort of fame in the case of SBE.
In October 1940, nobody had a cure for SBE : when you got very sick with it, you went to any old hospital and patiently waited to die from this 99% invariable fatal disease.
So in looking for a patient named Charles Aronson, born around 1913, who attended Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan in October 1940, the first place to look is in the recent release of the 1940 federal US census, seeking a man of that name and age living pretty close to the hospital.
As it happens, the only man having that name and age in the 1940 census living within a few miles of Columbia- Presbyterian lived very close indeed: two miles away at 1202 Vyse Avenue in the (South) Bronx.
(The handwritten census indication of the street is often misread as Nyse Avenue (sic!).
Most - but not all - of the people in New York City in 1940 named Aronson were recent Jewish immigrant families from The Pale of Russia , places like today's Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Places like Nesvizh.
The Charles Aronson born around 1913 living at 1202 Vyse Avenue, has a brother Samuel, a sister Lillian, a mother Olga and a father Alex.
Vyse Avenue, in 1940, was home to a closely knit community from the Minsk and Nesvizh areas and so when we see an Alex Aronson from the Bronx on two lists of members of a Nesvizh landsmanshaften, we may well have something.
(Landsmanshafts were Jewish fraternal organizations based on all members being former residents of a very small part of the Old World. Think of it as a big neighbourhood emigrating en masse and re-constituting itself in another country. It functioned as a hometown collective self-help, burial and social organization.)
The 1940 census says that Alex and Olga were born in the former Russian Empire in the late 1880s (and Minsk/Nesvizh was certainly part of that Empire back then.)
Charlie and his siblings were all born in New York and I feel we can safely speculate that Olga and Alex migrated to New York as twenty year olds just before WWI and started their family there.
The 1940 census tells us not just ages and birthplaces and current residence, it tells us of the education, occupations and incomes of all on the census.
Luckily the youngest Aronson of this family , Samuel, was asked a few more questions - in particular he said his childhood home language was Jewish (Yiddish), indicating this family was in fact Jewish.
Alex had 3 years of school, worked as a machine operator making ladies cloaks, earning $1400 a year ( a typical skilled working class wage in that year.) Olga had no formal education and worked at home as a homemaker.
Samuel had one year of college and was looking for work as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Lillian had 4 years of High School and made $900 a year as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Charles also had 4 years of High School and was making $950 a year working as a teletype operator at a newspaper.
Perhaps at a gentile newspaper but far more likely at a Jewish newspaper.
If this Charles Aronson was the same one who received history's first ever shot of antibiotic and went on to recover from invariable fatal SBE not just once but twice, it was remarkable he had so much education and had a skilled job.
Because the SBE Charlie had had many close calls with death and permanent disability.
When he was eight,in the early 1920s, Charlie had gotten Rheumatic Fever (RF) , which until 1960, the leading case of death in school age children.
His was an unusually severe version, as it hit the cells of his joints, the cells of his heart and the cells of his nerves.
He was lucky not to die - most poor kids at that time did die outright from this severe an attack.
Then he went right on to get a severe attack of the post WWI worldwide epidemic of a mysterious sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, not at all to be confused with the disease caused by the tropical tsetse fly.
Today the evidence points away from what was originally seen as the cause, flu, and towards an auto immune response to particular strains of strep bacteria causing a case of strep throat weeks or months before the onset of this particular disease.
Rheumatic Fever is another in a whole series of auto-immune diseases caused by some people's particular gene set over-reacting to certain strains of strep throat bacteria.
Thanks to Oliver Sacks, most people today know far more about sleeping sickness than do they of Rheumatic Fever, and most know that while many died of the initial attack, others survived it only to become victims of permanent post-infection parkinsonism.
Such was SBE Charlie's unlucky fate.
Still he survived two should-be fatal attacks by strep before 1940 and remarkably he would survive two more should-be fatal attacks by different strep bacteria between 1940 and 1944.
And a life-threatening stroke : a cat of more than just nine lives !
These latter strep were the normally harmless mouth strep bacteria than can invade damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever and almost always (before systemic penicillin) kill the patient : the dreaded SBE.
Attacks to your nerve cells such as hit Charlie twice, can give a person temporary or semi-permanent mental, emotional and behavioral issues.
The Nazis in particular feared those with this form of sleeping sickness and their Aktion T4 murder teams usually sought out and killed such people, even when the person generally functioned as a hard working tax paying citizen.
Such as poor Martin Bader, who was murdered by German doctors in late June 1940.
This was the very same time as two American doctors, Dawson along with Dr Karl Meyer, were first learning of penicillin's unknown systemic potential from unpublished verbal reports from an American student forced to leave Oxford University after the Fall of France.
Already the two were thinking of it for a new use as a life-saving therapy.
Dawson was a humanitarian doctor but in addition his particular private research interest was oral strep diseases.
Charlie may have been a last minute attention to the initial SBE penicillin trial (despite Dawson not having enough penicillin for one, let alone two SBE patients) because he had survived both RF and sleeping sickness and now was under attack from strep bacteria for a third time.
Charlie never faced direct assault from Nazis as did his remaining relatives in Nesvizh, if that is where indeed his dad came from.
But Charlie's life was threatened by Nazi-like thinking by the American medical elite, who felt, like Himmler and Hitler, that SBE patients, particularly if they also suffering from parkinsonism, were just useless mouths to feed in an all-out total war, and so should be left to die---- in this case, by deliberate neglect.
They ordered doctors not to waste penicillin on SBE patients.
Charlie and Doctor Dawson fought back - not with guns - but Dawson did break the wartime laws and did steal scarce government controlled penicillin, all to keep SBE patients alive.
His "ACTING UP" finally provoked a national and then international public reaction against the Allies' Nazi-like attitude to SBE patients and penicillin.
The character of Allied penicillin also changed at that moment - from a secret weapon of war, to a public and universal life-saver.
Dawson himself was dying of an auto-immune disease from 1940-1945 and did not live to see the end of the Nazis, but Charlie did.
To the Polish government at the beginning of the war, Charlie was a Polish citizen living overseas.
No country in the world had a worse war than the Poland of the 1939 boundaries.
The Allies with great consistency treated it as badly in 1945 as they did in 1939, matching the Nazis stroke for stroke.
It is satisfying to know that at least one citizen of Poland was treated fairly during WWII, treated as fairly as every individual should be treated all the time, and that the result of his being treated with compassion, penicillin became about the only good news story that ever did come out of that bad news war ....
Consider the brave Jews of Nesvizh.
Ninety percent of the Jews of that small city, 60 miles south west of Minsk (today part of Belarus, then part of Poland), were killed by the Germans, in one day, in October 1941.
The remaining 600, locked in a tiny ghetto, resolved to try an armed breakout, rather than die quietly.
The forests were right next to the city and the ghetto and once the Jews were in the woods, filled with lethal partisans hidden behind dark trees, the Germans and their helpers quickly lost their dutch courage and gave up the chase.
On July 21 1942, hearing a police company of Nazi collaborators was coming to kill the remaining 600, the Jews started their break out.
Yes, most got killed in the process, but perhaps 10% of the 10% got away to try and survive the grim and short lives of forest partisans.
Maybe a handful of the original 6000 survived to the end of the war.
Nevertheless, this tiny ghetto was the first, or one of the very first, groups of Eastern European Jews to fight to the death in an effort to stay alive.... and is widely honored worldwide today for doing so.
Particularly by those children of Western Jews who know their own parents and grandparents, under far more safe circumstances, did basically nothing, certainly nothing so bold and courageous, during WWI to hinder the Nazi efforts to kill all of the world's Jews.
Most of the Jewish people of Nesvizh survive today as the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the people of that shtetl who emigrated to places like New York in the brief window of opportunity between the 1890s and the start of WWI.
Charlie Aronson
We still know very little about this man, the very first person to receive lifesaving penicillin-the-antibiotic (systemic penicillin) and who did so on October 16 1940 in New York.
We do know a fair bit of his medical history, but as to Charles Aronson himself, we only know he was born about 1913.
We are very lucky that in 1944 much of his complicated medical history was abstracted by his doctor in a published article because today's America would let us know nothing of this man born a 100 years ago.
America is a country where it is much easier to buy an assault rifle then it is for a historian to get any personal information about historical figures.
But importantly we do know a fair bit of the career of his doctor (Dr Henry Dawson) , particularly with regard to the disease that Charlie Aronson was being treated for (subacute bacterial endocarditis) (SBE).
Prior to Charlie, Dawson had never treated SBE and obviously , at that point, no one had treated anyone anywhere with systemic penicillin.
From these few scant facts, we can make a few educated , aka statistical, guesses about the identity of Charlie.
Because some academics have studied the matter thoroughly, we have a pretty good idea of how ordinary (non well-to-do) New Yorkers picked the solutions to their medical problems in 1940.
The densely populated centre of New York City is also home to one of the world's largest arrays of hospitals and doctors in the world.
A short bus ride in any direction in the three mile circle around your home threw up lots of possible healers.
Even the poorest weren't short of choices - many NYC hospitals and doctors were also research oriented and if you submitted to their new therapy trials, you got (hopefully) cutting edge treatment for little or no cost.
Generally, distance was a big factor : since so many good hospitals lay close at hand in every direction, so why go further only to find your family and friends can't easily visit you daily ?
The exception was if a doctor or hospital was very famous for its special advanced treatment of a particular fatal disease : then people would come from all over the continent or the world, desperate for a possible lifeline.
Dr Henry Dawson ,and systemic penicillin, in October 1940, were the furthest possible from that sort of fame in the case of SBE.
In October 1940, nobody had a cure for SBE : when you got very sick with it, you went to any old hospital and patiently waited to die from this 99% invariable fatal disease.
So in looking for a patient named Charles Aronson, born around 1913, who attended Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in upper Manhattan in October 1940, the first place to look is in the recent release of the 1940 federal US census, seeking a man of that name and age living pretty close to the hospital.
As it happens, the only man having that name and age in the 1940 census living within a few miles of Columbia- Presbyterian lived very close indeed: two miles away at 1202 Vyse Avenue in the (South) Bronx.
(The handwritten census indication of the street is often misread as Nyse Avenue (sic!).
Most - but not all - of the people in New York City in 1940 named Aronson were recent Jewish immigrant families from The Pale of Russia , places like today's Poland, Ukraine and Belarus.
Places like Nesvizh.
The Charles Aronson born around 1913 living at 1202 Vyse Avenue, has a brother Samuel, a sister Lillian, a mother Olga and a father Alex.
Vyse Avenue, in 1940, was home to a closely knit community from the Minsk and Nesvizh areas and so when we see an Alex Aronson from the Bronx on two lists of members of a Nesvizh landsmanshaften, we may well have something.
(Landsmanshafts were Jewish fraternal organizations based on all members being former residents of a very small part of the Old World. Think of it as a big neighbourhood emigrating en masse and re-constituting itself in another country. It functioned as a hometown collective self-help, burial and social organization.)
The 1940 census says that Alex and Olga were born in the former Russian Empire in the late 1880s (and Minsk/Nesvizh was certainly part of that Empire back then.)
Charlie and his siblings were all born in New York and I feel we can safely speculate that Olga and Alex migrated to New York as twenty year olds just before WWI and started their family there.
The 1940 census tells us not just ages and birthplaces and current residence, it tells us of the education, occupations and incomes of all on the census.
Luckily the youngest Aronson of this family , Samuel, was asked a few more questions - in particular he said his childhood home language was Jewish (Yiddish), indicating this family was in fact Jewish.
Alex had 3 years of school, worked as a machine operator making ladies cloaks, earning $1400 a year ( a typical skilled working class wage in that year.) Olga had no formal education and worked at home as a homemaker.
Samuel had one year of college and was looking for work as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Lillian had 4 years of High School and made $900 a year as a machine operator making ladies belts.
Charles also had 4 years of High School and was making $950 a year working as a teletype operator at a newspaper.
Perhaps at a gentile newspaper but far more likely at a Jewish newspaper.
If this Charles Aronson was the same one who received history's first ever shot of antibiotic and went on to recover from invariable fatal SBE not just once but twice, it was remarkable he had so much education and had a skilled job.
Because the SBE Charlie had had many close calls with death and permanent disability.
When he was eight,in the early 1920s, Charlie had gotten Rheumatic Fever (RF) , which until 1960, the leading case of death in school age children.
His was an unusually severe version, as it hit the cells of his joints, the cells of his heart and the cells of his nerves.
He was lucky not to die - most poor kids at that time did die outright from this severe an attack.
Then he went right on to get a severe attack of the post WWI worldwide epidemic of a mysterious sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, not at all to be confused with the disease caused by the tropical tsetse fly.
Today the evidence points away from what was originally seen as the cause, flu, and towards an auto immune response to particular strains of strep bacteria causing a case of strep throat weeks or months before the onset of this particular disease.
Rheumatic Fever is another in a whole series of auto-immune diseases caused by some people's particular gene set over-reacting to certain strains of strep throat bacteria.
Thanks to Oliver Sacks, most people today know far more about sleeping sickness than do they of Rheumatic Fever, and most know that while many died of the initial attack, others survived it only to become victims of permanent post-infection parkinsonism.
Such was SBE Charlie's unlucky fate.
Still he survived two should-be fatal attacks by strep before 1940 and remarkably he would survive two more should-be fatal attacks by different strep bacteria between 1940 and 1944.
And a life-threatening stroke : a cat of more than just nine lives !
These latter strep were the normally harmless mouth strep bacteria than can invade damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever and almost always (before systemic penicillin) kill the patient : the dreaded SBE.
Attacks to your nerve cells such as hit Charlie twice, can give a person temporary or semi-permanent mental, emotional and behavioral issues.
The Nazis in particular feared those with this form of sleeping sickness and their Aktion T4 murder teams usually sought out and killed such people, even when the person generally functioned as a hard working tax paying citizen.
Such as poor Martin Bader, who was murdered by German doctors in late June 1940.
This was the very same time as two American doctors, Dawson along with Dr Karl Meyer, were first learning of penicillin's unknown systemic potential from unpublished verbal reports from an American student forced to leave Oxford University after the Fall of France.
Already the two were thinking of it for a new use as a life-saving therapy.
Dawson was a humanitarian doctor but in addition his particular private research interest was oral strep diseases.
Charlie may have been a last minute attention to the initial SBE penicillin trial (despite Dawson not having enough penicillin for one, let alone two SBE patients) because he had survived both RF and sleeping sickness and now was under attack from strep bacteria for a third time.
Charlie never faced direct assault from Nazis as did his remaining relatives in Nesvizh, if that is where indeed his dad came from.
But Charlie's life was threatened by Nazi-like thinking by the American medical elite, who felt, like Himmler and Hitler, that SBE patients, particularly if they also suffering from parkinsonism, were just useless mouths to feed in an all-out total war, and so should be left to die---- in this case, by deliberate neglect.
They ordered doctors not to waste penicillin on SBE patients.
Charlie and Doctor Dawson fought back - not with guns - but Dawson did break the wartime laws and did steal scarce government controlled penicillin, all to keep SBE patients alive.
His "ACTING UP" finally provoked a national and then international public reaction against the Allies' Nazi-like attitude to SBE patients and penicillin.
The character of Allied penicillin also changed at that moment - from a secret weapon of war, to a public and universal life-saver.
Dawson himself was dying of an auto-immune disease from 1940-1945 and did not live to see the end of the Nazis, but Charlie did.
To the Polish government at the beginning of the war, Charlie was a Polish citizen living overseas.
No country in the world had a worse war than the Poland of the 1939 boundaries.
The Allies with great consistency treated it as badly in 1945 as they did in 1939, matching the Nazis stroke for stroke.
It is satisfying to know that at least one citizen of Poland was treated fairly during WWII, treated as fairly as every individual should be treated all the time, and that the result of his being treated with compassion, penicillin became about the only good news story that ever did come out of that bad news war ....
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Dinosaur Sex: Big Oil & Big Media exchange bodily fluids and deny link drought and climate change
 |
| Under-reported last Holocaust too ! |
It seems that America's biggest media are under-reporting the recent spate of severe drought in the USA ( surely a very big news story to their viewers and readers) and in particular, are ignoring the evidence of its connection to human-caused climate change.
But then these are the same media that under-reported the last Holocaust as well.
Digging up fossil fuel is as dead an industry as daily print newspapers, so perhaps it is only natural both industries are getting horizontally "pumped" and exchanging bodily fluids during their terminal hours in the hospice....
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Hubris vs Science : tired of denying the Holocaust and Climate Change - why not deny DNA , ego-prone Republican DAs do it all the time
 |
| DNA-DENYING DAs |
Yep, the truth . But when swollen ego denies DNA and innocent men fry, its way beyond a laughing matter about "Truth is from Venus and Egos are from Mars."
The Chair is warmism going too far.
Why can't some men just can never admit they are wrong and say they are sorry ? Poor toilet training ? Dropped on their head while a mere child ? Forced to eat all their peas - or spinach ? Whatever.
No surprise to find that some of the worst offenders are Republicans, who spend their off hours away from denying DNA t denying climate science.
Why do Republicans hate Science so ? Do your think Chris Mooney is on the money about the reason for their animus against logic, reason and rationality ?
I cam across this story off of BYLINER and Conor Friedersdoff's list of "The Top 101 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories of the Year" .
Deep digging keeps some papers alive...
A deep,deep story on "DNA-Denying-DAs" by the NY TIMES's Andrew Martin .
Read it and weep. And rage.
With deep-digging stories like these, newspapers aren't dead yet - even if the Halifax METRO is......
Monday, August 13, 2012
Newspapers report Global Warming like they did the Holocaust : urge caution, await further confirmation
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| We didn't report the LAST holocaust either |
Why not just cut and past what past editors at your paper wrote at the first discovery of an intact Nazi death camp , like the infamous Lubin-Majdanek back in the summer of 1944 ?
As today with climate change, most editors then studiously ignored the reports of dozens of senior western reporters.
In this case, the reports of those who personally visited this Soviet-liberated hell-horror in the summer of 1944.
"Let us not jump to conclusions and hasty actions." "Let us seek further and further and further confirmation." "We need more - yet more - and more - and more eye witness reports ." "We need more and documented proof."
Rather like playing out to the bell, in a game of sport, when your team is ahead.
On and on it went - to the end of the war and beyond.
Some still deny, still await further definitive proof, more documents, still seek 110% total certainty.
Sound familiar ?
Delay, delay, delay ; deny, deny, deny.
No wonder so many Jews ,then and now, felt that the Allies' unspoken wish was that the Nazis would do their dirty work for them (if only the newspaper editors could be relied upon to stall the story getting wide - and angry - coverage, until it was far far too late.)
And we know how well the press did do its (non) job.
Fortunately, none of those publishers, editors or reporters has been allowed to sleep easy in their graves on this one.
Thousands of otherwise fine people are remembered only today for "Blowing the Big One" .
No "ongoing news peg" has been so thoroughly studied and dissected from all angles, day by day, in all papers, in all countries as has the non-reporting of the Holocaust, 1939-1945.
A thousand book-length theses have been written on it, country by country, newspaper by newspaper - all the guilty named and dismembered.
About a dozen new theses are written every year on the subject - and probably will be till the end of time.
Or perhaps not.
Because there is all the new non-reporting, the new skeptical shoulder-shrugging, lip-curling in denial, the new could careless-ness, the new un-reporting of a new Holocaust.
This time the non-reported-seriously story is how all humanity is sleep-walking itself to its own globe-sized crematorium .
And it will become a New Generation's ready thesis material.
Time-transport the Terrence Corcorans of this world back to 1939-1945 and watch them counsel delay and inaction..
All of the Terrence Corcorans of the world will be dead by then, but haste not to erect monuments to their undying honor : they will be remembered - yes, fulsomely - but in disgust and horror.
Just as their fore bearers of 1939-1945 are today.
I personally do not doubt that if Terrence had been an editor back in 1939-1945, he would have counselled " much more detailed research and no hasty calls for action".
This, despite the news about Majdanek merely confirming five solid years of earlier reports of Nazi mass killings of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
He just seems to be that type of guy. Now he will deny this, as it is de rigeur to support the Jews today among his type of political thinkers.
But based on how he is not covering the Second Holocaust, why should anyone believe his claims about how he would have covered the First Holocaust ?
Poetic justice then, his final fate at the hands of the historians : their wheels may grind exceedingly slow, but they grind exceedingly fine and his actions during The Second Holocaust will be caught between them forever and ever.
And may I add, in my old-fashioned Catholic way : Amen .....
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