They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.
Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.
Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.
It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.
Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.
So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.
Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.
In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.
Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.
He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nazi. Show all posts
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Modernity failed (and eventually faded) when synthetic penicillin failed
Forget what books and movies, your teachers, professors, parents and grandparents all tell you about WWII's "hands across the water" holy war against the utterly evil Nazi values:
A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.
Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.
But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.
But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.
That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.
On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.
On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.
A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.
That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.
It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .
So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.
It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !
But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.
Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.
But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.
And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.
If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...
because no nation in WWII ever went to war against the Axis unless and until they were first directly attacked by the Axis : on the factual evidence, they warred against the Axis solely in self defence.Except, of course, for the empires of England and France --but :
if the peoples of these two superpowers still claim that they went to war solely on behalf of the small victims of the Axis, their subsequent actions would hardly prove that assertion -- as generations of Polish (and Jewish) academics are rightly eager to point out.The problem was that the values of the Axis were but an extreme form - but still fully recognizable - of the same values of Modernity espoused by the middle class of every 'modern' nation on earth in that era .
A world wide middle class culture as largely indifferent to the lynching of Blacks in Georgia USA as to the lynching of Jews in Georgia USSR.
Those values were somewhat under attack during the Great Depression period.
But recent research has revealed that the WWII years were unexpectedly a time when protest against such un-charitable values was actually muted - not heightened - by the military conflict against the nations applying those values in their most extreme forms.
WWII's ideological war that didn't parallel the military war
But I think there was still one all-out ideological battle during WWII, one that ended in the defeat of the Modernity values that fuelled the Axis and led in time to our open commensality led era of post-Modernity diversity and tolerance.
That battle was over who/what would provide the bulk of the Allies' D-Day penicillin.
Synthetic Penicillin to be the Poster Boy of WWII's Terrible Simplicities
On one side were hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe , assembled by the Allied scientific establishment which believed that man-made synthetic penicillin simply had to be better and cheaper than anything stupid Nature could come up with.
On the other side, an invisibly small team in a backwater ward at Columbia Presbyterian hospital whose leader Martin Henry Dawson said 'don't count the old and the slow and small microbes out so quickly - they just might be able to do it better and cheaper and quicker'.
A lot was at stake : for all of the towering edifice of Modernity was actually sustained on a single slender stock of pure conjecture.
That conjecture was that the biggest, most swiftly advancing, most complex human civilizations at the cutting edge of Life had to inevitably be smarter that the oldest,slowest, smallest microbes that began Life three billion years earlier -in each and every area.
Reductionism was the ideology of Modernity.
It saw the basic bricks of life or reality as being simple and simple minded .
So complexity/intelligence had to grow out of these bricks being assembled into ever bigger entities in a single straight upward line : complexity growing steadily upwards from a single electron to the Hoover Dam, from a single penicillium 'yeast' cell to a tenured chemist with a PhD.
It was true that there was an infection-filled war on and any sort of life-saving penicillin was greatly needed - now !
But the Allied scientific elite would unconsciously rather lose the military war to their (fellow modernist) Nazi opponents than lose the much more important ideological war to the despised slime cells on the question as to who could better make the vital lifesaver : sophisticated Man or stupid microbe.
Feel free to substitute Negro, Jew, Oriental, aboriginal, woman, homosexual, cripple for microbe to better appreciate their deepest physic fears.
But in the end, by D-Day 1944 and beyond, all those genius-level chemists had totally failed - and have still failed, seventy five years on : a single yeast penicillium cell still makes penicillin cheaper and better than by any human synthetic method.
And from that same basic wartime penicillin G, still made in the tens and tens of thousands of tons today by those incredibly tiny yeast cells, we humans create almost all the infection fighting antibiotics we have today.
If the human small and the slow and the old and weak have more respect today than they did in 1940 - and they do, much much more - it won't hurt to thank the first ones who gained that reluctant respect : the penicillium yeasts cells ...
Monday, May 18, 2015
Plenticidal Revulsion (reductionism, reactionism) must always be simple - "terribly simple" - because Reality never is
The reaction thrown up by Plenticidal Revulsion (Lovecraftian Revulsion being the best known literary representation) must always and only seeks to see in its place a single, simple, pure vertical hierarchy and hegemony.
All others at the bottom, me at the top.
For the very idea that a plentitude of hegemonies and hierarchies can even exist along different planes of reality is what the revulser fears the most - not the competing ideas contained within those various hegemonies.
For "simple" and "single" (and "pure") are but different ways of saying the same thing, just as "complex" and "mixed " basically say the same thing.
The forcing all of reality into their 'terribly simple' procrustean bed by those most revulsed by the new plentitude accounts for virtually all the horrors done in the era of Plenticide (1870s-1960s).
And until late in 1942, Leni Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Terribly Simple" seemed to lie within the revulsers' grasp....
All others at the bottom, me at the top.
For the very idea that a plentitude of hegemonies and hierarchies can even exist along different planes of reality is what the revulser fears the most - not the competing ideas contained within those various hegemonies.
For "simple" and "single" (and "pure") are but different ways of saying the same thing, just as "complex" and "mixed " basically say the same thing.
The forcing all of reality into their 'terribly simple' procrustean bed by those most revulsed by the new plentitude accounts for virtually all the horrors done in the era of Plenticide (1870s-1960s).
And until late in 1942, Leni Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Terribly Simple" seemed to lie within the revulsers' grasp....
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Non-Aryans under Modernity : from ally to enemy to input
One can't imagine youthful (second generation) Nazi scientists being content with merely removing the hair, teeth and skin from all the world's 'unfit', before burning their bodies for fuel, in the manner it was done way back in papa's day.
Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.
There second generation Nazi physicists would ensure that these 'unfit' bodies would be reduced down (again that quintessential Modernity concept) to pure simple atoms.
Then each element's atoms would be collected separately, using the same technique that separated and gathered the fissionable uranium for the Bomb.
These pure atoms could then be be reassembled by second generation Nazi chemists into any synthetic material their blond beastly minds could imagine : artificial foodstuffs, in the form of 'Fuhrer Burgers', even.
What the Nazis and their kin would be so willing to do with all the humans that failed 'out of the medals' in The Race of Progress, other youthful modern elites would be even more eager to do to Nature.
For let us look at the visual material that helped formed the intellectual world of these second generation modernity elites : the futuristic illustrations from all the world's Science fiction magazines and Popular Science non-fiction magazines.
Near universally they display future human existence as consisting of living under vast glass domes on barren planets devoid of anything green or of any animal and insect.
(And certainly no microbes either).
No shade trees because shade is now better provided for by artificial means. And besides shade trees were potential enemies competing for the valuable trace elements in the rocky soil of this planet that are better converted into the substances that humans really want.
So any new planet invaded by Aryan Man would be quickly stripped of anything biological that might form a threat or be a competitor for the planet's valuable minerals and energy sources.
Modernity's Aryan Man is just so smart, the Future's gotta get out of his way or at least hide in the shadows and wear Shades.
No need anymore for humanity (what's left of it, after the Great Winnowing of the unfit) to modestly live commensal-style within Nature.
No need to supplicant oneself and gracefully accept good ideas coming from anywhere and everywhere, be it Jewish science, Roma music or microbial antibiotics.
For Hubris and Scientism be the only gods now ...
Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.
There second generation Nazi physicists would ensure that these 'unfit' bodies would be reduced down (again that quintessential Modernity concept) to pure simple atoms.
Then each element's atoms would be collected separately, using the same technique that separated and gathered the fissionable uranium for the Bomb.
These pure atoms could then be be reassembled by second generation Nazi chemists into any synthetic material their blond beastly minds could imagine : artificial foodstuffs, in the form of 'Fuhrer Burgers', even.
What the Nazis and their kin would be so willing to do with all the humans that failed 'out of the medals' in The Race of Progress, other youthful modern elites would be even more eager to do to Nature.
For let us look at the visual material that helped formed the intellectual world of these second generation modernity elites : the futuristic illustrations from all the world's Science fiction magazines and Popular Science non-fiction magazines.
Near universally they display future human existence as consisting of living under vast glass domes on barren planets devoid of anything green or of any animal and insect.
(And certainly no microbes either).
No shade trees because shade is now better provided for by artificial means. And besides shade trees were potential enemies competing for the valuable trace elements in the rocky soil of this planet that are better converted into the substances that humans really want.
So any new planet invaded by Aryan Man would be quickly stripped of anything biological that might form a threat or be a competitor for the planet's valuable minerals and energy sources.
Modernity's Aryan Man is just so smart, the Future's gotta get out of his way or at least hide in the shadows and wear Shades.
No need anymore for humanity (what's left of it, after the Great Winnowing of the unfit) to modestly live commensal-style within Nature.
No need to supplicant oneself and gracefully accept good ideas coming from anywhere and everywhere, be it Jewish science, Roma music or microbial antibiotics.
For Hubris and Scientism be the only gods now ...
Saturday, April 11, 2015
October 1940's Waves of the Future : Henry Dawson's vs Anne Lindbergh's
No book - not even Hitler's Mein Kampf or Stalin's Foundations of Leninism - so outraged Dr Martin Henry Dawson as early October 1940's The Wave of the Future by the quasi Christian author Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.
And in the end, he won.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.
And in the end, he won.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Anne Lindbergh writes off the small and the weak
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
In the long run, more accurate science chases out less accurate science
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
Originally, Allied wartime penicillin intended only for the first, not the last
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
Thursday, November 13, 2014
When middle class eugenicists saw Democracy itself as 'unfit' , so did the pulp and comic books
From about the 1890s onwards, a whole generation of people who proudly thought of themselves as progressive - indeed Progressives - saw Democracy itself as evolutionary 'unfit'.
At least officially , they were opposed to despots --- as being far too redolent of the bad old (Catholic) medieval times and Eastern cultures.
But modern progressive bureaucratic expert dictators were much more their cuppa.
In their moments of despair , they longed for a reign of 'experts', who would objectively look at all the 'facts' and dispassionately render the best decision for all concerned, to replace corrupt politicians bribing the uneducated unwashed with middle class tax dollars.
More often, the middle class reformers around the world simply wanted these all-powerful unelected experts to forcefully restrain the corrupt politicians and their working class electorate.
A national or international version of the 'strong City manager and weak Mayor and Council' system gaining converts all over North America.
Who bought into this idea ?
Who didn't ? At least until the late 1960s .
The fascists , communists and Nazis all took this idea up.
Academics in the Humanities who really should have known better, aped the rhetorical claims of the physical scientists around them , espoused this ideal of self-evident facts, experts, dispassion and objectivity.
The once grubby, argumentative, partisan journalists, now seeking respectability's higher wages, stopped thinking for themselves and became stenographers, seeking only scientific objectivity based on observing the W5.
The university (half) educated , increasing dominating all aspects of life, also backed the professors, scientists, journalists (and intellectuals generally) in supporting the reign of experts.
Technocracy Inc , a once very popular North American political movement of the between the wars period, tried to resemble the newly fashionable business corporation in name but then proposed that politicians and corporate businessmen both be replaced by teams of experts : thinking scientists and doing engineers.
The best studied example of such bureaucratic expert dictators in action is that of the corrupt Robert Moses regime in power over New York for half a century.
He was put into his position of almost unlimited powers and no democratic checks upon his behavior by the politicians and the voters themselves !
All the thousands of objective journalists in that 'media capital of the world' never once cottoned onto Moses' corrupt system because he was always issuing press releases proclaiming his purity - and a press release is a fact, is it not ? - and so should be reported as is/ where is, dispassionately.
And so it was - for fifty dark dirty years.
So this belief in expert dictators pushing weak democratic practises out of the way was so strongly 'in the air' in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century.
Little wonder then that it strongly , if unconsciously , influenced the writers of pulp fiction and comic books who never wrote directly about bureaucrats.
Instead they wrote about Zorro, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and Batman --- instead.
And about nominally democratic community after community that was besot by some complex-seeming evil that the community members were unable to democratically and collectively resolve.
In comes a masked lone ranger , an expert --- with the gun or the fist.
Shazam ! A quick stern-but-fair bit of extreme violence and the evil doers are dead and the problem solved - forever.
The solution and the problem were both actually quite simple, weren't they ?
The lone ranger super hero moves on , to clean up the mess in other democracies.
So let us revise Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team seeking penicillin-for-all , as seen by his Republican Party-leaning scientific opponents : unfit doctors, unfit black and Jewish patients, unfit natural penicillin in an unfit democracy....
At least officially , they were opposed to despots --- as being far too redolent of the bad old (Catholic) medieval times and Eastern cultures.
But modern progressive bureaucratic expert dictators were much more their cuppa.
In their moments of despair , they longed for a reign of 'experts', who would objectively look at all the 'facts' and dispassionately render the best decision for all concerned, to replace corrupt politicians bribing the uneducated unwashed with middle class tax dollars.
More often, the middle class reformers around the world simply wanted these all-powerful unelected experts to forcefully restrain the corrupt politicians and their working class electorate.
A national or international version of the 'strong City manager and weak Mayor and Council' system gaining converts all over North America.
Who bought into this idea ?
Who didn't ? At least until the late 1960s .
The fascists , communists and Nazis all took this idea up.
Academics in the Humanities who really should have known better, aped the rhetorical claims of the physical scientists around them , espoused this ideal of self-evident facts, experts, dispassion and objectivity.
The once grubby, argumentative, partisan journalists, now seeking respectability's higher wages, stopped thinking for themselves and became stenographers, seeking only scientific objectivity based on observing the W5.
The university (half) educated , increasing dominating all aspects of life, also backed the professors, scientists, journalists (and intellectuals generally) in supporting the reign of experts.
Technocracy Inc , a once very popular North American political movement of the between the wars period, tried to resemble the newly fashionable business corporation in name but then proposed that politicians and corporate businessmen both be replaced by teams of experts : thinking scientists and doing engineers.
The best studied example of such bureaucratic expert dictators in action is that of the corrupt Robert Moses regime in power over New York for half a century.
He was put into his position of almost unlimited powers and no democratic checks upon his behavior by the politicians and the voters themselves !
All the thousands of objective journalists in that 'media capital of the world' never once cottoned onto Moses' corrupt system because he was always issuing press releases proclaiming his purity - and a press release is a fact, is it not ? - and so should be reported as is/ where is, dispassionately.
And so it was - for fifty dark dirty years.
So this belief in expert dictators pushing weak democratic practises out of the way was so strongly 'in the air' in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century.
Little wonder then that it strongly , if unconsciously , influenced the writers of pulp fiction and comic books who never wrote directly about bureaucrats.
Instead they wrote about Zorro, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and Batman --- instead.
And about nominally democratic community after community that was besot by some complex-seeming evil that the community members were unable to democratically and collectively resolve.
In comes a masked lone ranger , an expert --- with the gun or the fist.
Shazam ! A quick stern-but-fair bit of extreme violence and the evil doers are dead and the problem solved - forever.
The solution and the problem were both actually quite simple, weren't they ?
The lone ranger super hero moves on , to clean up the mess in other democracies.
So let us revise Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team seeking penicillin-for-all , as seen by his Republican Party-leaning scientific opponents : unfit doctors, unfit black and Jewish patients, unfit natural penicillin in an unfit democracy....
Friday, July 4, 2014
Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All
Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude
"Too much information".
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love
Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.
But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.
Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.
In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.
The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.
They fed and cared for the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.
The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.
The right kind of German civilian anyway.
Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.
In another well known example of WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.
Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.
The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.
As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.
'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'
But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.
An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.
I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.
More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.
Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.
It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?
In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.
Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.
When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.
Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.
Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.
Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.
How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?
And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?
Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?
Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.
His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.
The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".
Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".
I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.
99.44% pure care, concern, caring.
For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.
To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.
These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.
Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.
A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.
But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.
Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.
Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .
Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....
But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.
Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.
In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.
The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.
They fed and cared for the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.
The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.
The right kind of German civilian anyway.
Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.
In another well known example of WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.
Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.
The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.
As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.
'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'
But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.
An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.
I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.
More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.
Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.
It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?
In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.
Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.
When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.
Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.
Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.
Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.
How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?
And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?
Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?
Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.
His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.
The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".
Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".
I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.
99.44% pure care, concern, caring.
For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.
To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.
These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.
Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.
A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.
But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.
Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.
Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .
Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Henry Dawson's war aims : "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar..."
The Allies, convinced their troops lacked the Nazi and Japanese killer instinct, spent most of the war trying to prove Dawson wrong by demonstrating that they could be tougher than tough.
But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.
But it did eventually work - at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.
Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.
Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.
But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.
The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......
But given their overwhelming advantage in men and material over the Axis, it didn't seemed to be working very fast.
But it did eventually work - at least militarily : only when the Allies seemed sure to win did people in neutral and occupied nations move, ever so slowly, over to the Allied side.
Certainly the moral claims that the Allied raised as to why to support them seemed to have little credibility at home as well as abroad.
Deeds, not words, was what the undecided were looking for - and they found few deeds to reassure them that the Allies wouldn't just be a milder eugenic version of the harshly eugenic Axis.
But in the final days of the long, long war, they saw some reason for hope.
Penicillin the deed
The Allies were beginning to fly penicillin into occupied countries and to neutral sick children and even using it to save the lives of dying Axis POWs : these were deeds, at last, Dawson deeds, not mere empty rhetoric.......
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Like Germany, Howard Florey effortlessly won all the tactical battles, losing only the strategic war to Henry Dawson
 |
| Eugenics was on the side of the Big Battalions... |
That meant making a virtue of denying aid to dying 4Fs, to give it instead to healthy 1As.
But as Hitler had earlier found out to his cost, this was not a position designed to win over the small battalions of the world's hearts and minds.
Dawson's Folly
Dr Dawson's 'folly' - by contrast - was to give up his own life, during a Total War against the Ultimate Evil, trying to save the lives of the 4Fs of the 4Fs, those 'useless mouths' young people with SBE.
His folly was near-universally damned by those in America's scientific and medical elite who knew of it.
Only those who the British call "the punters" : ie, the housewives, the customers and the voters all over the world, approved his idea.
They chose not to judge the Allied Cause by when it ventured into Nazi like behavior (denying aid to the weakest) but only in its better moments, as when it changed its mind and came to the aid of the SBEs' small battalions, aiding the least of these.
A small gesture perhaps, but in the end, more than enough ....
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Major climate denial group says global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy
The Australian-based Galileo Movement is one of the world's biggest climate change denier groups , with a list of scientific advisors that reads like an international Who's Who of the world's best known climate deniers.
Galileo's managing director Malcolm Roberts recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald , that climate change science has been captured by "some of the major banking families of the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal".
In Australia they call terms like that "dog whistle words" because you have to have the mind of a paranoid and the ears of a dog to sense their real meaning.
But I think most of the world already knows these particularly shopworn dog whistle words already.
We haven't watched a lifetime of war movies set in Nazi Germany for nothing.
This was Nazi code too - and also code words for many of their anti-semetic fellow travellers all over the world.
The Zion Protocols - a fake book - supposedly laid it all out : a Jewish banker plot to take over the world.
We all wondered when the professional deniers of climate change would smear this red herring all over the trail : now we know .....
Galileo's managing director Malcolm Roberts recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald , that climate change science has been captured by "some of the major banking families of the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal".
Dog Whistling to call all the old school Holocaust deniers to join the new climate denier movement
In Australia they call terms like that "dog whistle words" because you have to have the mind of a paranoid and the ears of a dog to sense their real meaning.
But I think most of the world already knows these particularly shopworn dog whistle words already.
We haven't watched a lifetime of war movies set in Nazi Germany for nothing.
This was Nazi code too - and also code words for many of their anti-semetic fellow travellers all over the world.
The Zion Protocols - a fake book - supposedly laid it all out : a Jewish banker plot to take over the world.
We all wondered when the professional deniers of climate change would smear this red herring all over the trail : now we know .....
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN
Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.
Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....
* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there IS intelligent life on Earth....
While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.
Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....
* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there IS intelligent life on Earth....
Sunday, June 3, 2012
SETI travel is the American BARBAROSSA : very long, very cold, very short of food
"Packing for Mars" (and points east) ?
Been there, done that - got the t-shirt.
It says : "I barely survived OPERATION BARBAROSSA ,winter of 1941-1942".
Most didn't: survive (or get the t-shirt).
Cock-eyed optimists and utopian libertarians, the Nazis cheerfully set off on a summer trip to visit the Urals, thinking it would be exactly like all those the articles in the German popular science magazines.
Cunningly, in those magazines, as in their North American counterparts, the SF is thinly guised as non-fiction, to trap the willingly-gullible.
The Germans knew the miles involved, knew of the cold and the mud, knew of the desperate food shortfalls that were 'situation-normal' for the USSR.
Knew them as words and numbers on a page - but couldn't feel them in their bones.
That bone-chilling opportunity came during the horrible winter of 1941-1942 and the following almost as horrible winters of '42-'43 and '43-'44.
German and Russian bones litter the utopian path to the Urals to this day.
Despite this detailed - horrific - object-lesson from WWII, much of the world's perpetual teenagers (scientists with great math skills and zilch in arithmetic skills) seek to emulate Hitler and his mad scheme - this time in the ultra cold and dark perpetually Russian winter of outer space - with deadly radiation instead of snipers to kill the unwary.
Half of Hitler's brain has been found, it seems - alive - in the heads of our science cum space community.
Won't you please join in to help them stop hurting themselves - and us.....??
Been there, done that - got the t-shirt.
It says : "I barely survived OPERATION BARBAROSSA ,winter of 1941-1942".
Most didn't: survive (or get the t-shirt).
Cock-eyed optimists and utopian libertarians, the Nazis cheerfully set off on a summer trip to visit the Urals, thinking it would be exactly like all those the articles in the German popular science magazines.
Cunningly, in those magazines, as in their North American counterparts, the SF is thinly guised as non-fiction, to trap the willingly-gullible.
The Germans knew the miles involved, knew of the cold and the mud, knew of the desperate food shortfalls that were 'situation-normal' for the USSR.
Knew them as words and numbers on a page - but couldn't feel them in their bones.
That bone-chilling opportunity came during the horrible winter of 1941-1942 and the following almost as horrible winters of '42-'43 and '43-'44.
German and Russian bones litter the utopian path to the Urals to this day.
Despite this detailed - horrific - object-lesson from WWII, much of the world's perpetual teenagers (scientists with great math skills and zilch in arithmetic skills) seek to emulate Hitler and his mad scheme - this time in the ultra cold and dark perpetually Russian winter of outer space - with deadly radiation instead of snipers to kill the unwary.
Half of Hitler's brain has been found, it seems - alive - in the heads of our science cum space community.
Won't you please join in to help them stop hurting themselves - and us.....??
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