Noir's Children : the teenagers who MADE Mo go Po

Noir's Children (my particular birth cohort of 1940-1956) those of us born 'after the Fall of France but before the Rise of Elvis' - were virtually unique in being perfectly comfortable living inside TWO whales .

Those two whales being the Modernity (Mo) of our childhood and early teen years and the emerging Post Modernity (Po) of our late teen years and early adult years.

We still remain unique in this regard - we are old enough to remember believing in our elders' tattered Modernity but with minds not so rigidly formed we couldn't also take on the attributes of an emerging Post-Modernity - which was the only reality our younger siblings ever knew first hand.

My cohort did not just feel the transition from one era to another : we were that transition.

Modernity only died when it failed to reproduce itself in its young

For it was our failure to carry on the ideas of Modernity as we matured that condemned Modernity to a slow sad certain death as our  still-faithful elders died off, one by one.

Why our post WWII birth cohort - and not any earlier birth cohorts - came to reject the centuries-old Enlightenment Project is the subject of this blog and of my book projects .

And like many exciting things, it all begins in wartime Gotham  - where the reigning American Super Hero was not the comic books' Superman, Batman or Captain America but rather a squat balding middle aged Dutch-Swiss-American called Carl Norden.

His invention , a bombsight that was claimed to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from three miles up - was going to end the war ( even end all wars) quickly, cheaply and with minimum loss of civilian lives.

As a result, the British and American governments of the day in 1940 saw no need for spending serious amounts of taxpayers' monies on either atomic bomb or penicillin development.

In their experts' eyes, the atomic bomb was serious overkill (literally) and life-saving penicillin, rather like old fashioned infantry riflemen, wasn't really going to be needed in a short modern war of minimum casualties.

The best laid plans .....

Deniers NEVER deny problems - merely deny that they can't be as easily solved as Superman jumps over buildings...

Take human-originated baneful climate change : climate deniers don't deny that it could exist, merely that if and when it emerges, it will be a quick job for Batman , Spiderman or Captain America to clear up.

Nobody who makes a living solving problems (and let's see , that includes all politicians, all business people, all experts & professionals, all generals, church leaders, on and on) ever denies that problems (their very bread and butter) don't exist.

Far from it -- they are far more likely to see problems where none exist (widespread satanic cults eating our babies anyone ?) or over-exaggerate those that do exist (just as police chiefs always seem to see a growing crime wave just before proposed budget cuts.)

The only thing that most deny is the problems can't be solved or solved relatively easily.

I use that weasel word 'relatively' because expert-problem-solvers-for-money always walk a thin line.

So their pitch to clients has always to be something like this : "your problem is worse than you thought (boo) but it is solvable (hurray) but it is going to cost you some money and time (boo) , but not a whole lot of time and money."

The key word is 'solvable' - lets leave it to the courts to resolve why too much time and too much cost and and too little success emerged from so many of such promises.

Solvable is a post birth of science term , because you still see relatively few religious leaders guaranteeing success : its all "God's ( or the gods') will be done".

So while scientists today appear to be on the side of the angels on combatting baneful climate change (with climate deniers the spawn of the devil) , we must pony up and admit the deniers are sustained intellectually by scientists - not by pre-science thought like that from the world's ancient religions .

That is why this newsletter will attack scientists far more than climate deniers, in my effort to help awake the world to possibly unstoppable climate change....

Is Super-Hero violence the only way to "do good" ?

If you are a parent , grandparent or loving care-giver, you can't help but worry about the moral values the entertainment media is trying to foster upon our very young : the claim that one has to be big and powerful and violent , a comic book styled Super Hero , to do good.

"Un-Super heroes" is an attempt to offer an alternative vision : to tell a true story from 1940s Gotham when agape love , not super hero violence, brought about as much good as this world has ever seen.

The original Penicillin - Penicillin G - remains naturally grown and hence un-patentable.

Because of that , it is that rarest of drugs - cheap, abundant , safe and highly effective and so it enabled the world to reduce those pools of long endemic deadly bacterial infections among the world's poorest and most powerless.

It greatly - and directly - benefitted the poor and weak of course.

But then , in a form of Herd Immunity , it also greatly benefitted all the rest of the world - indirectly - by cutting off the flow of deadly strains of common bacteria.

Diseases like Rheumatic Fever, long the leading cause of school age deaths (Polio killed comparatively few , by contrast) quickly became a word in a dusty history book , rather than the cause of your grandchild's death.

Ten billion of us - so far - have better healthier lives as a result of  a series of miraculous events begun in Gotham City on October 16th 1940.

Dr Martin 'Henry' Dawson - himself dying from a terminal illness - gathered around him a tiny team of unfits and misfits.

That little team was dedicated to combatting the Allied consensus that natural penicillin was unfit to be used as a mainstream medicine - and that some unfit patients were to be Code Slowed to death , to better aid the war effort against Hitler.

Dr Dawson argued we can never really hope to beat Hitler by racing him to the moral bottom - killing off the unfit to aid the war effort was already well underway in Germany under the name of Aktion T4.

Our best rebuttal was to publicly demonstrating that we still care for our most weak and powerless --- even under the demands of Total War.

Dawson held off his own failing body and his own government  just long enough to see his vision of abundant natural penicillin-for-all grip the global imagination .

So WWII, despite its terrible scenes of hunger and homelessness, did not see global epidemics like WWI's war-ending Spanish Flu that killed tens of millions.

Now is that epic enough a tale for a child raised to think that only mighty Batman is fit enough to save a world in woe ?