A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.

We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .

WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.

A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms -  scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.

Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.

Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.

So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.

And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.

And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.

In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.

And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.

And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.

So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.

But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...

"The Last sometimes are First" : confounding Modernity's 'terrible simplifiers'

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo all had a first rate science education at their gymnasiums (the advanced sort of high school common outside of North America) .

One that in their generation was reserved only for the elites destined to run the world in all fields of endeavour.

If these four became Jacob Burkhardt's much feared 'terrible simplifiers', we should lay much of the blame at the feet of their gymnasium science teachers who taught them everything there was to know about seeing reality through the terrible scientific lenses of simplicity.

But the steps from this sort of scientific education to becoming 'mass murderers in the name of science' is not inevitable.

Because Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson had a similar science education.

However, during in the lead up to WWII, he chose instead to become one of science's first complexifiers.

He announced over and over to a collective scientific yawn, that when it comes to modifying genetics, sometimes (and totally unexpectedly) the Last (the bacteria) came First, besting the efforts of science's smartest men in the universe....

Sentiment follows the Science : the world as a bystander, as Bullies Hitler & Stalin beat up the small

We can't hope to explain the moral inactions of the modern world during WWII by simply referring to the postmodern sentiments of  seventy five years later or the premodern sentiments of seventy five years earlier.

That Hitler, Stalin and Tojo invaded small country after small country after small country while the world's peoples did basically nothing, unless and until their own nation was under direct attack, is a fact.

A fact as known to the people of 1940 as it is to us in 2015.

But a fact must first fit into a generally accepted system of explanation to be fully 'understood' : call that system of explanation a global worldview, hegemony, ideology, ethos, sentiment --- what have you.

Modern sentiment (or lack thereof) followed upon Modern Science

I believe most of the educated middle class during the Modern Era did greatly 'regret' that the small and the weak were nothing but road kill beneath the advancing wheels of the biggest civilizations.

But they regretted the small and the weak's demise with a faint shrug of their shoulders --- they firmly believed that the 'Laws of Nature', as demonstrated by modern Science, simply meant the demise of the small was inevitable and could, at best, be only delayed but never stopped.

Their demonstrated lack of 'sentiment' towards WWII's weak and the small was at least consistent with their existing scientific beliefs.

Postmodern sentiment followed postmodern science

By contrast, in the Fall of 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson felt his own scientific research indicated precisely the reverse view of the 'Laws of Nature'.

He felt that in History's long run, the small and the weak tended to vanquish the big and the complex.

The tiny bacteria, for instance, surviving all over the world for four billion years and counting versus the huge dinosaurs : where are they today ?

Dawson's willingness to give up his own life, that Fall of 1940, to see that wartime penicillin was extended to all those dying for lack of it, is usually explained as the result of his great sentiment towards 'the plight' of the weak and the small.

But it could also be argued - it is so argued, at least by me - that his sentiment towards the weak and the small followed precisely his growing (postmodern) scientific understanding of the resilience of the weak and the small ...

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

WWII : the warlords as scientists ...

Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes

The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.

Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.

FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.

Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.

Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.

So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.

And Nature ?

Yawn !

An inert, passive backdrop.

Or was it ......?

WWII: 2 billion moral decisions

Morally, for Earth's two billion individuals in those years, WWII (1931-1946) was about one thing and one thing only.

It was this : should they remain as neutral, pacifist, bystanders to a long series of international bullyings - or should they become interventionalists and fight to protect the weaker and the smaller ?

This way of looking at WWII emphasizes that nations were not the only active participants in this conflict, regardless of many academic and popular historians make that claim explicitly or implicitly.

So Spain might have been officially Neutral during WWII , but semi-unofficially many of its men went off to fight with the Axis against the Russian communists while a few others slipped away quietly and volunteered to fight in the Allied armed forces.

Britain was always a combatant on the Allied side, but it too have its divisions of opinion among its citizens.

It had its willing and unwilling conscripts, its eager volunteers and and its turncoat traitors.

It also had a great many citizens ("funk holers") who laid low, kept their mouth shut and who did as little as possible with regard to working in the war economy to shorten the war and thought only of ways to make money and keep safe.

 Many of them were quite prepared to make nice with either the British or the German government, depending on who won the war.

 I say WWII lasted 15 years .

For me, it really began in Manchuria - attacked in 1931 by Japan while 2 billion other earthlings basically did nothing to stop it.

Its mid-point was the infamous Munich Agreement in late 1938, again a sell-out of a small nation, a sell-out agreement cheered to the walls by 2 billion earthlings.

Even the formal ending of the war didn't stop the deaths.

In 1946, Moldova , a small food-producing part of the USSR, saw many of its farmers semi-deliberately starved to death despite a surplus of food produced.

This was because Moscow took most of Moldova's food to send to Eastern Europe so the Russians could play the role of food-delivering liberators, even if it meant that their own people back home starved.

Fearful of making the large republics like the Ukraine hate Moscow even more for yet another deliberate famine, Stalin chose to pick on a small republic - one he knew couldn't bite back effectively.

Other governments knew of general famine situations throughout the USSR in 1946 but little real noise was made urging Moscow to feed its own first and let America surpluses fed soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

So Stalin bullied Moldova and again another bully got away with it.

Hirohito, Hitler and Stalin : Bully - Bully - Bully.

Many people said, between 1931 to 1946, that these affairs were just 'schoolyard fights' in distant lands and no concerns of theirs : they chose to be non-interventionalists, chose not to help the smaller party.

But when a High School senior / beefy football star beats up a little girl in the primary grade and chooses to do so in the schoolyard, we should call it for what it really is : a savage case of bullying.

The kids who silently stand around watching an uneven schoolyard 'fight' all grow up one day : and they then stand around silently while Germany beats the hell out of Belgium and Greece et al.

Bystander children become adult bystanders at a whole series of holocausts enacted out in the global schoolyard.....

WWII : From Manchuria Incident to Nagasaki, NEUTRALITY was majority position of world's sovereign nations

The idea that Hitler, Tojo, Stalin and Mussolini are among the most evil leaders of all time - and that people like them must be stopped at all costs - is a relatively recent idea.

It is an idea promoted by people like you and I, who statistically speaking,  weren't likely even alive when WWII ended.

Thus we never had to do the hard-lifting of deciding just what to actually do, or not do, about these obviously aggressive tyrants.

Our parents, grandparents, and great-great-great grandparents obviously felt - and above all acted  - quite differently than what we claimed we would do , in similar circumstances, today.

My book - The Hyssop and The Cedar - is an effort to explain why this was the case.

Because, starting in late 1931 and onto early 1942, ( ie roughly for one decade) the lands of China, Ethiopia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxenburg, France, Britain, Greece, Yugoslavia, the USSR, America , Australia were all attacked, one after another, by aggressive neighbours acting without cause.

As well, the lands of many of the colonies of Europe and America, from Newfoundland, through Africa to Asia and the Pacific, also came under land attack by aggressive neighbours.

In addition , the shipping of many neutral nations out on the High Seas were sunk without warning and their crews killed.

Throughout all these fourteen long years of violence, from September 1931 till September 1945, many nations still never did find any reason in morality to want to band together with other nations to bring these world-wide bandits to justice.

Other nations only declared war (or agreed to be called co-belligerents) in the battle against these tyrants in the last months of the war, just so they won't be left out of the trade agreements to be formulated by the post-war United Nations !

Generally, this latter group did not offer any actual combat support against the tyrants or merely offered a token number of warriors as late and as slow as possible.

An amazing number of countries we now honour for their war service actually only declared war on the tyrants , when they were themselves directly attacked by them.

Only the British and French Empires quickly declared war on another nation (Germany) simply because it attacked a smaller neighbour (Poland) , and even here France became neutral again less than a year later.

The Poles will also quickly tell you that the English and French, even then, did not come to the direct aid of the Polish nation.

If we take 1932 as the first year where Japanese aggression (involving China in this case)  could and should have been stopped, all nations on earth have a sorry 'war' record : the USSR, for example, only declared war on this aggressor in the very last days of the war.

In the case of Mussolini and Italy, 1935 was the first year it invaded a peaceful neighbour (Ethiopia) and again every nation on earth shows a sorry record in rushing to help this little kid against a stronger schoolyard bully.

In the case of Germany, early in 1938 it invaded its peaceful neighbour Austria and no one did anything.

(Yes, many Austrians wanted Hitler as their leader but probably most of them, if given a a free and fair vote, would have voted to remain an independent nation.)

America, as a prominent example of a sorry neutral, probably would never have declared war on Hitler, if he hadn't done the hard work for them by declaring war on the USA himself first.

One by one the weaker nations and colonies of the world were picked off by stronger schoolyard bullies while good grey people (our dear relatives) averted their eyes and dismissed it as just another squabble in the schoolyard.

Why ? Was their moral values that different than ours ?

I would argue not. But I also argue that their moral values had been gravely weakened by the scientific understanding they had gained at High School and university.

The middle aged adults who ran the world between late 1931 and  early 1942 had all completed their High School education before Queen Victoria died , and were the first generation on Earth to have had to pass standardized science exams to graduate.

A little book knowledge is a dangerous thing and never more so than the four years of Victorian Era Scientism they had to endure to graduate.

In retrospect, Victorian Scientism was as adolescent and as naive as the teens it tried to teach.

It saw the then new idea of  Evolution as demonstrating, beyond all doubt , that life forms and societies proceeded, inevitably, ever upward to bigger and more complex forms, with weaker beings and societies equally inevitably (and regrettably) dying away.

One has to only read all that period's laments for the inevitable falling away of Canada's aboriginals to see how people felt this sad process could hastened or perhaps slowed by much human effort - but never ever stopped, not in the long term.

Nature ruled !

And perhaps regrettably, Science had proven that the study of Nature revealed that (like it or not) Might is Right, Bigger is Better, God is on the Side of the Bigger Battalions, only the Strongest Survive : on and on with the Victoria platitudes permitting strong aggressors to pick off weaker neighbours.

So one can be sure that the picking off of the world's smaller and weaker nations did not go uncommented upon in that long ugly decade between late 1931 and early 1942.

It was accompanied, I am for sure, by a lots of long drawn out sighs and endless helplessly shrugged shoulders.

But in the end, WWII proved not to go the way expected by the Great Powers on all sides.

 As their Modern Science was seen to falter again and again and again, so too faltered the public faith in Modern Morality and in Modernity itself.

Slowly but surely, as the human world changed its scientific understanding, its moral actions also changed.

Slowly, starting around 1945, our (great) grandparents began the slide out of the Modern Era and into our present day Post Modern Era.....

Genes-o-cide only covers some of the crimes of Hitler,Stalin and Tojo : Triage-cide instead ?

It was Stalin who got the West to agree that the UN definition of genocide shouldn't including killing everyone belonging to a political, economic or social group.

(Clever - because that was exactly the sort of mass killing that Communists, rather than Fascists, much preferred ---- not that Communists didn't kill ethnic groups like the Poles as readily as Hitler killed economic groups like German trade unionists.)

Gene-o-cide or Genetic-cide betrays its dusty old Modernity roots : the focus on the "fact" that people are fixed forever by their forebearers' genes, so as to remain your enemy even into future unborn generations.

Hitler acted upon those ideas - insisting that killing Jewish and Roma babies would prevent them coming back as adult destroyers of the Aryan race.

Stalin, too, often killing the children of those he deemed traitors claiming they were tarred by their erring parents' brush.

The Soviets definitely won this dictionary war ---- today most of us limit genocide to killing people related genetically, rather than seeing it extends to masses of murdered people only related by all holding the same party or trade union or football team card.

Raphael Lemkin the Jewish Polish lawyer who first coined the term genocide more than 75 years ago, wanted it to encompass the mass killing of any group that had something in common - in both their eyes and in the eyes of their killers.

His occupation - he was a Polish lawyer - was a favorite group to kill, much sought out by both Germans and Russians : for being ethnically Polish and for being economically upper middle class and for being intellectuals and for being potential leaders.

Thrown in being Jewish as well and presto : you have five good reasons to want him dead.

Unfortunately for academics doing head counts, you can only kill someone once - so what column of dead exactly would you have placed Mr Lemkin, if he had been killed in Timothy Synder's Bloodlands during WWII ?

Triage-cide  rather than genetic-cide ?

He would have been, above all else, yet another individual killed by global Modernity's craving to mass triage its way into a permanently perfectly frozen Utopia.

Triage-cide might well be a more accurate word to describe the intent behind all of these highly varied killings done by all these highly varied killers, all of whom saw themselves as modernists .....

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"......

1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental

Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.

Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.

But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.

Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.

Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.

Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.

Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.

Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.

Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.

Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !

Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.

As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.

Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.

More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.

Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.

In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.

The "Not So Good" War : September 1931- December 1941

The Good War began December 11th 1941 when Adolf Hitler persuaded a reluctant American Congress to declare war against the evil of Nazism.


It lasted three years and eight months, from when America  declared war on the evilness of Nazi Germany until August 1945, when America defeated the evilness of Tojo's Japan.

It is the war between the armed forces of morality and the armed forces of evil that American TV chooses to celebrate endlessly.

Infrequently discussed - in America - though perhaps not in the rest of the world, was the ten years and three months of The Not So Good War.

It began with the manufactured Manchuria incident in September 1931 that allowed Japan to brutally invade China without any reaction from the armed forces of morality.

Eventually it involved  two dozen countries being invaded by aggressive neighbours without any action taken to defend them by the armed forces of morality.

That all changed when Hitler's declaration of military war against America on December 11th 1941, forced Congress and America to defend itself against this new military threat.

But this realpolitik approach to dealing with the worst evilness the world has ever known didn't make for good propaganda, both during the war and ever since, and so the War of Good against Evil was created - mostly, it must be said, on a Hollywood backlot set at the time

And ever since then, mostly it has been created in popular American history books, films and TV documentaries.

The big problem is that in any branch of any  public library, there will also be literally hundreds  of books, films and TV documentaries about the Holocaust and their basic line - to their authors' credit - is that America knew all about the Holocaust and did nothing while it was happening.

Hard to reconcile these two very popular "popular history" subjects , the Good War and the Holocaust , isn't it ?

It is almost as if the victims of all those years of the Not So Good War have become honorary Holocaust victims, with the six million dead European Jews also standing  in for millions more dead all around the world who America also knew about at the time but did nothing to help.

Because in many ways, the Not So Good War carried right on through December 11th 1941, on and on well past the official end of WWII.

Then 1939-1945 could best be seen as a six year effort to violently subjugate the Polish people, begun by Hitler, but when he proved to be not up for the job, was finished by Stalin, with the complicity of Churchill and FDR.

The Good War, by this reckoning , was just an cosmetic overlay over a series of episodes between a group of superpowers, with smaller nations mere pawns in the conflict .....

Majority of Americans remain silent as Woodrow Wilson's legacy is brutally destroyed : 1938-1941

Thank God Almighty that Adolf Hitler declared war on America, because without it, would America have ever gone to war against the greatest evil the world has ever known ?

The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.

The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might  had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.

Now that too was all gone.

Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.

Conflict between nations ???!!!

When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.

I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.

So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.

Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.

And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.

This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...

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

ABORT the 47% ???

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


But tomorrow, some of the surviving 53% might also be down  and hence would also be written off,  in ever new rounds of 'tough love'.

Regarding 'the down and out' as permanently down is like a circular firing squad

In this numbers game, after a series of round of recessions and booms,  very few people would be left in America, period - either to pay federal taxes or simply to breath free.

If Hitler had won the war and the world, the Nazis would have had round after round of purification trials, till almost nobody would be left alive - sort of like the Russian Politburo under Stalin or what happened in the last days of the French Revolution.

Purity and perfection tests never end, never are satisfied.

Ditto for Romney and Ryan who, unknowingly, are both advocates of seeing the world through the unvarying spectacles of the K-selecting eugenicist.

The world, to the K-selecting eugenicist, is simple, predictable and static.

In their view of world ecology, the whole world is one big niche, yesterday-today-tomorrow , and their job is to find the beings that best fill that permanent niche and discard the rest.

Commensalists, such as myself, feel differently : call us r-selecting types.

We don't believe in putting our eggs and sperm in one basket.

We see the world as dynamic and unpredictable, always changing.

See it filled with many constantly changing niches that are only partially and temporally filled by many different types of beings: we welcome diversity and feel it to be the best protection possible against tomorrow's unexpected massive changes.

We are not at all surprised to learn that some "pure-blooded" aboriginal tribes were almost totally wiped out by something like childhood measles, with the only survivors being a few "half-breeds", the children of tribe members who married Europeans with built-in resistance to measles.

We prefer to think of them as displaying hybrid resilience, not half-breed decadence, and we think the hard scientific evidence to prove it is on OUR side.

Romney's soaring political rhetoric sounds so good but it is based on outmoded, incorrect, science and when it collides with physical reality, it will always crash and burn....

a Modernist is anyone who has never changed a diaper...

Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Tojo -  do you think any of those utopian dreamers ever changed a diaper?

STALIN lives? at the DUNN ?

I sometimes think that atheists have taken over Oxford University and that they now worship scientists (provided their 'tough minded' enough) instead of God.

Sometimes this means that Oxford have to apply some of Stalin's favorite photographic techniques for making Commissars vanish.

Stalin excelled at first the bullet to the back of the head and then a generous application of photographic varnish to the front of the head ,applied to whatever official photographs that couldn't be tossed.

Wilson Baker was a harmless little man, a devout Quaker peace activist and a darn fine chemist - he's dead but not by any bullet to the head.

But the photo vanishing varnish does apply - he's been erased from the official portrait of the moment of Oxford's University greatest triumph - the (failed) effort to synthesize penicillin during World War Two.

Baker's fault was that his mere presence in an iconic photograph interfered with the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology's panty lines when it came to exalting their best known director, Baron Sir Howard Florey.

Florey is himself dead but he still a real little money maker for the Dunn, Oxford University, Oxford City and the whole bio-med-crazy rich and rapidly growing "Thames Valley".

The original iconic photo is in Britain's National Portrait Gallery, taken in 1944 by Wolfgang Suschitzky at the Dunn in Oxford as part of a a ICI-funded film on Britain's role in penicillin:

I have shamelessly taken this from Robert Bud's book on Penicillin, together with his caption and credit line.

Now here is another almost exactly similar photo, taken this time from Eric Lax's book on penicillin, with its caption and credit line to the Dunn Pathology School.

I don't know about Pathological, but I find this all definitely creepy:

I have made these photos very small ,to save bandwidth, but they sure look alike---- aside from the tighter crop of the Dunn version.

But now look closer at the figure of Florey from the Dunn version:

It sure looks like a bad "insert" job ala Joe Stalin's technique.

And doesn't our Florey's pose look very very familiar , in fact ,iconic to cliche-worthy familiar ?

Ah yes, Florey had no license to inject people.

 The stand-in shot of him using a needle of his famous live-saving penicillin, in lieu of something more heroic, has become a posed-up shot of him and his aide, Jim Kent, needling a mouse in May 1940.

 I think its a law that it must be used in every book and article on Florey,Oxford and penicillin.

Here it is,also from Lax's book, and again provided by the Dunn people:

What do you think ?