industrial Auschwitz vs artisan Penicillin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ending the Enlightenment Project with deeds, not words

There are two academic puzzles in dating the ending of the Enlightenment Project precisely to 1945.

One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.

The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.

No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.

Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.

Both men of deeds, not of words.

Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....

Move over Mengele ; We're Number One , We're Number One !

    Hotly-contested Canadian election after election goes by and Canadians lament the results don't even rate a squib in most foreign news media.
   Diplomats inform them that Canadians rate below "watching paint dry", even below Belgians and the Swiss, in the most boring things on Earth contest.
   But not anymore, and for this, Canadians can lift their voices to the Heavens and in one loud voice proclaim : "Thank you Mr Harper - thank you, thank you, thank you !!!!"

   JAMES HANSEN is the best known and most respected scientist on the "human carbon pollution of the atmosphere is causing grievous climate change" brief.
  When he decides to pen an opinion piece in the pages of the New York Times, his comments get amplified and repeated in all the nations of the world's major media, bar none.
   Oops !
   Bar one ---- Canada.
   Maybe it's something he said.
   Maybe it's because he said that if Canada does proceed on its present course and fully develops its tar sands, it's "game over for the climate", for civilization and for 50% of all species.
   Hansen's opinion piece pointed out a fact that is rarely noted (at least in the servile mainstream Canadian media) : all the carbon bound up in the tar sands of Canada is twice the amount of all the carbon pollution we have already added to the atmosphere from all the nations' use of petroleum, throughout all of history.
   For years, we've been taught that Dr Joseph Mengele and his Nazi pals were the biggest threat to civilization and the planet.
  "Well, you'd sorta expect that kinda of thing from the Prussians now wouldn't you ?" went the sneer.
   "I mean - well - the Prussians aren't like Canadians, now are they? Not like that northern blessedly Peaceable Kingdom at all."
   No, the Prussians are not: they have stopped their nuclear plants and are devoting much of their highly respected brainpower to solar and wind science.
   By contrast - and thanks to Stephen Harper and that nice old couple down your street who put up a Tory sign in the last election - the Canadians are no longer considered 'boring' by their worldly neighbours.
   Forget "Apocalypse Now" - its "Apocalypse Eh !" - death by tar mixed with maple syrup.
   No, now words like 'evil' and 'mass murder' are what come to mind when other nations' citizens, investors, immigrants and tourists think of Canada.
  We're Number One, We're Number One, We're Number One    !!!!!!!!!!!!  ....

DENYING humans need other life for our survival

Michael Marshall

Taking on those who denying global warming is small change - they are hardly worth refuting.

The source of their specific example of denial ---  the ultimate DENIAL --- "the father of all denial" , is denying that we humans are totally dependent on other life for our continuing survival.

This highly popular, highly respectable,  form of DENIALISM is found everywhere.

For but one example --- it is found among the leading elements of our new economy --- the executives of the  biggest firms of the internet.

Top executives from corporations like Google, Amazon, Microsoft are leading the non-government charge into space --- and away from all the Earth's messy problems.

The latest delusion is that we can continue to consume (but not recycle) the world's limited surface supplies of minerals, because a new source will open up when we mine asteroids.

Success will look like all those pre-war sci fi covers, with all of us living inside plastic domes, on the barren poisoned surface of some planet ( maybe even our own) and surviving by converting minerals into food and air and water and all else a civilization needs.

In fact, we here on Earth lack no resources - not even energy - if we learn to recycle what we already have.

Sorry, I meant we lack no natural resources , because of course we lack lots of common sense.

Particularly among the ranks of science, among the people we should be trusting to expose quasi-scientific nonsense.

Oh, and they do -- if the object of their public scorn is somebody powerless touting non-science oriented nonsense -- ie someone, above all, who could not be seen as a fellow scientist.

But they are very reluctant to lower the tone of science debate by
publicly taking on science-oriented nonsense.

It is almost as bizarre as if a fact-finding group of  well-respected
Jewish scientists had visited Doctor Mengele at Auschwitz in 1943 and now had to release a public report, but were torn between being horrified and yet reluctant to publicly scorn a fellow scientist in public.

Bigger than the fate of any one ethnic group are now at stake --- the 'DENIERS of LIMITS' are threatening the fate of all the human race --- yet they fail to face public criticism from the those scientists who claim that they believe humanity must learn to live within limits.

This is where I feel this blog must come in.

I will try not to attack the DENIERS too much - they are the broad side of the barn on this issue.

Instead I will focus on "outing" those scientists who privately scorn the DENIERS, but are reluctant to say so clearly in public.....