the WHY of eugenics : enough with the 'what' already

Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced  (be made public) anytime anywhere.

But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.

Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide

Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.

It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.

LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift

Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.

Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.

"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".

And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.

(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).

A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.

"All Quiet on the Home Front, WWII" --- Why?

Historians, as a group, are beginning to reverse themselves over their earlier contention that the postwar civil rights, feminism, gay rights movements (et al) were born during the social protests and social advances of WWII.

They did so because a closer look at the hard evidence for this earlier claim reveals the actual reverse : the war period, as a time for civil protest, was as deathly quiet as the early Cold War period of roughly 1946-1956  ----- and far quieter than the activist years of the Great Depression and of course during the civil rights era of 1956 -1966.

Why this Wartime Quietism ?

"The Last May be First." Or Last. Or anything in between. It all depends.

Unparalleled horrific cruelties befell the world immediately before, during and after WWII .

That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.

In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".

Modernity simply faded when its Old Believers stopped breathing and its Young Initiates stopped believing

Despite all the commentary to the contrary, there is actually no hard evidence that the western world really changed its views on racism and eugenics after the revelations of Auschwitz.

It just could be that the people who had always opposed it got much more vocal and those who had always espoused it learned to curb their tongues ----- at least in public and in public opinion surveys.

What if God was an architect ?

What if the God with an inordinate fondness for beetles (400,000 species and counting, so far) was an architect of domestic buildings : what would those homes look like ?

I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.

What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".

And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?

I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.

Streamlining Plentitude : 1939-1940 World's Fair's ominous legacy for postwar generation

For years now, I have been cheered when recalling how eagerly so many in my generation (the postwar boomers) marched in the streets to promote human diversity and variety.

But for just as many years, I have been mystified why they then remain so silent - like bystanders at a schoolyard bully beating -  as Nature's diversity and variety faces mass extinction by human actions ... and inactions.

Streamlining moderne medicine for war : jettisoning Alston and Aronson September 1940

Whatever strength the movement for Social Medicine (medical care for the small and the weak, even when they can't pay much) might ever had have had in the Anglo Saxon democracies, pretty well died with the Fall of France in June 1940.

Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb

For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.

A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.

Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !

9.5 Theses about climate DENIERS

It is hard to nail something up , on the internet , but here it goes anyway :

(1) I believe - as a percentage - more Protestants than Catholics deny human climate change and that they do so more vehemently.

Reality : 'parsimony' or 'plentitude' ? ---- Modernity and Commensality's choices

Both parsimony and plentitude are well worn terms (with relatively precise meanings) within the world of science ---- but buttressing each scientific term are two long standing but wildly varying philosophies of life that we all must chose between.

The two philosophies agree just once : in both accepting that current - readily observable - reality does appear to be very dynamic and complex.

But only one philosophy accepts that this vision of ever-dynamic complexity is probably as about as accurate a version of reality that we humans are ever likely to get.

The other philosophy derides that view as a 'false consciousness' and craves to find a much simpler , more predictable, stable and controllable reality buried somewhere deep in that heaving surface morass.

I think it is fair to say that the Era of Modernity (1875-1965) chose the philosophy of parsimony and the Era of Commensality (1965- ?) has chosen the philosophy of plentitude.

For parsimony sees reality as akin to thermoset polymers and says that there are always winners and always single best solutions.

And that moreover we can readily determine them and congeal them for all time.

While plentitude sees reality as rather like thermoplastic polymers and says there are no winners or losers - just ever-plastic life in all its complexities.

It says that history has shown we haven't had much happiness when we set out to exalt the winners and to holocaust the losers....

Two Tier Internet the Johnson-Reed Bill of its day : plenticiding "digital plentitude"

Modernity (1875-1965), the mean-spirited ideology that was a panicky response to all the plentitudes that global modernization and advances in science had thrown up , has a lot of faults to its credit.

One of the most infamous was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Bill, an Act that shut New York City's Golden Door for over 40 years.

Republican Albert Johnson ,along with fellow Republican David Reed, had foundationed that Bill's restrictions upon their racist cum social Darwinist cum eugenic cum anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-catholic philosophy.

Why did they fear the new plentitude so much ?

Perhaps because an expanded plentitude of choices and voices and decisions seems to overwhelm as many people (something about their brain chemicals ?) as it inspires many others.

As a result, they seek artificial ways to restrict Natural Plentitude.

Immigration restrictions and eugenic measures in general was one of them.

Rejecting ballot box and work place democracy because it gave everyone a voice to argue and debate the actions that past elites were used to have simply obeyed, was another.

Today, digital has many many things once so expensive and difficult , easy and cheap - even free.

Today the democracy of digital plentitude has made writing an e-book, blog ,web petition , even a science or academic article, much easier than ever.

More importantly, waving the results in front of people all over the entire world - thanks to the digital internet - is instant , easy, free  and effective.

Because already 40% plus of the entire world has some access to the internet.

That figure will soon rise to become near universal.

It will even be higher in the poorest most rural parts of the world than it is in the richest precincts of Manhattan .

If we can judge by the history of radio and TV , poorer rural people will crave mobile phone internet , even over cars or better homes, as the substitute for all the big city music concerts and first run movies they will never see.

The same sort of moral panic that led to 1924's Johnson-Reed Bill is already underway, fermented by the same sort of people : once-comfortably powerful white middle class professional males.

Who are they ?

Editors - like Johnson - this time fearful that anyone can write a better piece of journalism than their journal-degreed selves can , amateurs writing news reports from on the spot locations and with local on the spot insight.

Only by demanding that the only accurate news is that coming from the limited page output of our traditional print media can we Old Guard create a gatekeeper to hold the voice of journalistic democracy at bay.

Top line tenured professors ,used to having their names and university's status get their articles into the higher cited journals , now fearful that OPEN ACCESS will destroy all that.

They eagerly resist the OPEN ACCESS threat offered up by more junior, more productive, colleagues by demanding tenure still requires publishing hardcover books in the humanities and pre-publication peer view in prestige print journals for the physical sciences.

Why 300 very expensive copies (the usual print run today) of a scholarly book is better value to scholarship than an OPEN ACCESS e-book available in endless numbers world wide is left unsaid.

After all 300 copies does not go very far when the world has 300,000 libraries of higher learning !

But enough about the restrictive practises from cartels of old university professors and even older newspaper editors.

Business CEOs , old pros at cartels restricting trade to raises prices and profits, also fear new digital rivals destroying their comfortable lives.

They eagerly support the big telecoms who seek a two tiered internet - where money talks once again and the poor and foreign voices will once again be free to sleep under the digital highways's bridge ---- that is once again shut out.

Once again ,locking the digital Golden Door ....

Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names

When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.

But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.

And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.

Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.

It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.

Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.

You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....

* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .

It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.

Why, after 4 billion years, most bacteria STILL can't swim

Back in the Modern Era (1870s -1960s , gone but hardly lamented) a strong proof for Darwin devotees' claims that bacteria were incredibly primitive was the established fact that after 4 billion years of existence, most bacteria still couldn't swim.

Couldn't move at all in fact , most of them.

Forced to go wherever currents of wind or water moved them.

How unbearably crude !

Actually, of course, a moment's reflection suggests that what these ardent Darwinists were actually saying was that Evolution didn't really work.

Because a few bacteria species actually do move under their own power - and many other species threw up mutations in the past that could move.

But in terms of evolutionary (reproductive) success , over an entire world, over 4 billion years , on the evidence , bacteria that had to rely on sheer caprice and chance to find food, water and shelter did far better than bacteria that could deliberately move with precision to where their senses' predicted food would be.

That should have served as a warning to Modern humanity but of course it didn't.

(Cue WWI and WWII's dashed war plans and ill-founded war predictions).

The bacteria results would be as if a handful of USAAF fighters had been sent out on random sweeps over Germany in early 1945 (and told to strafe any defenceless train they came across by chance).

And postwar studies indicated that these chance encounters, impossible for the harried Germans to counter, did far more than destroy the heavily leveraged German transportation system than did all the costly and carefully planned 1000 bomber raids plodding along predictably to massively defended Ruhr rail marshalling yards.

(Yes ? Oh the postwar studies do suggest that the fighters did do more ??!!)

But humanity ignored the bacteria and instead retained an absolute faith was put in our human abilities to beat the odds of chance by basing our distant future on precise and predictive plans.

In physics, still really emotionally wedded to Newton despite the quantum revolution , this was best seen in the science of ballistics.

The point of pride was the Norden bombsight, supposedly able drop a bomb in an enemy pickle barrel from 15,000 or more feet up.

From a plentitude of non-military objects below, the Norden would precisely destroy only the military target that bomber leadership planned to takeout today.

In chemistry, a similar urge to "plenticide the plentitude" was seen in the science of synthesis.

Chemists would replace all the many 'imperfect' natural materials in one particular area (women's fabrics for example) with one perfect, human-made, plastic substitute.

In biology, almost all agreed that while God might have an inordinate fondness for beetles ,
most biologists did not.

So planned precise genetics would weed out all the imperfect beetle species and aid the reproductive efforts of the few remaining - perfect - beetle species judged useful to Man.

After the beetle surplus had been cleared up, more precise plenticide would weed out the plentitude of humanity as well.

If natural evolution can be compared to a global stock market, then it can be said that Modern Era humanity really didn't trust the judgement of the marketplace .

The Moderns, in capitalist America or Stalin's Russia, both preferred a natural economy devised down to the nth detail using planned, precise, predictable evolution.

Soon it was expected , all children would be IQ tested not long after birth and the best - the geniuses-in-waiting - would be heavily tutored , sparing no expense.

Those falling below a certain IQ score would be 'put to sleep' (by lethal injection).

No more would we fear the untutored genius bubbling up energetically from the underclass , putting all the highly educated offspring of the well-off to shame.

In this perfect world, we would have Pat Boone singing Tutti Fruiti but not Little Richard , Paul Whiteman playing West End Blues but not Louis Armstrong.

Oh Joy !

By contrast, (Martin) Henry Dawson's quixotic efforts to save the 'unfit' SBE patients consigned to a Code Slow death by a heartless Allied medical establishment could be best explained by examining his lifelong interest in 'unfit' bacteria.

Dawson seemed to have felt the human species can't accurately guess what genetic skills might be useful, moment to moment, in a dynamically uncertain world , no more than the much older and much larger number of bacteria species ever could.

Better that we should let 'all life to live', rather than risking our futures by putting all our predictive eggs in one slender genetic basket : a small 'pure' genetic pool was actually a weak genetic pool.

The huge plentitude of life chances seems - on all the evidence that Dawson had  -to demand an equal plentitude of life forms , if life was to survive in the long term.

Because the world actually doesn't change incredibly slowly and so Darwin's predicted incredibly small and slow genetic changes simply couldn't be the main engine of Evolution.

Instead every species is always throwing up a vast variety of varying individuals - many that merely manage to barely survive their species' niche without actually perfectly fitting it.

But when that niche changes rapidly, some of those existing (and formerly ill-fitting) keys now fit this new keyhole much better and now flourish grandly rather than merely surviving.

I shall not credit Dawson with insights beyond the evidence.

I merely observe that Dawson always acted through the twenty years of his prematurely brief scientific career as if he felt that all of life's 'unfit' were worth studying for lessons for 'fitter' humanity , were worth helping to survive.

He always acted as if he suspected carefully planned experiments that had worked in vitro mightn't continue to work as well in vivo - out there in the real world.

The really dynamically complex and fluid real world....

Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...

Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death 

Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.

Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.

This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.

Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.

Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.

(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)

Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.

Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.

But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...

Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.


Conventional human-oriented (infantry and land battle oriented) war was thus not eugenic but dysgenic - killing the fit and preserving the unfit.

A new long range mechanical war directed at the enemy's civilian-operated war factories and their workers was the alternative.

Fit middle class men no longer crawled through the mud - they cooly pushed buttons at the complex command centre of large machines of war : battleships, submarines, bombers, tanks, long range rockets.

They aimed to hit hard and accurate from a long - safe - distance away.

By war's end, tanks could penetrate a half foot of hardened armour from a safe mile away and submarines had torpedoes that could travel 25 miles as could battleship shells.

In the air, bombs were routinely dropped from 25,000 or more feet up and rockets travelled up to 250 miles away to hit cities.

Morally, they were all just stand-off weapons for the squeamish.

Now naval and aerial blockade campaigns could ensure that hundreds of thousands of babies starved slowly to death 2500 remote miles away --- so as not to offend any (diminishing) middle class sensibilities.

German 1A troops were kept fit and fed by starving to death the 4Fs of Eastern Europe.

Britain and America had hoped to never have their 1A troops directly engage 1A Axis troops on German and Japanese home territory.

Killing enough 4F Germans and Japanese by direct civilian bombing and indirect naval blockades should cause the enemy 1A army to surrender first without any need for your own 1A army to be bloodied.

It didn't work in Germany but it sort of did in Japan - after the American A-bomb, in combination with an old-fashioned infantry-led direct land assault by the Russians, tipped the scales.

My stance ?

If you have to defeat an evil-doer by extreme force ( and Hitler, Stalin and Tojo fit that bill) and you have greatly superior population numbers - as the Allies ALWAYS did , the answer is clear.

The means that produces the least deaths among your side and the enemy's side of conscripted soldiers and conscripted civilians is a massive infantry led direct assault on the enemy's home territory on simultaneous multiply fronts.

Britain ,France - even America - were not willing to overwhelm the Axis by large armies - if much/most of the people in those victorious large armies were their colored colonials.

(Let remind you that the largest volunteer army history has ever seen yet was the WWII Indian army.)

If Indian concerns had been addressed and India conscripted at WWII (let alone WWI) levels , the Indian Army might have cowed even Hitler into a negotiated peace rather than be overwhelmingly defeated by 10 million dark Indian infantrymen on German soil.

In WWII, we would rather have lost to fellow white racists than to win by means of a multi-colored armed forces that would give those coloreds the moral means to demand independence or basic human rights.

If the war had to be won by means of people we considered unfit - we'd rather just lose --- the unfits' role in the war were simply to be pliant blockade and bombing victims on the other side.

Luckily , one group of unfits - Dawson's unfits - rejected that role.

Instead these 4Fs repeatly rescued dying 1A soldiers with big needles of cheap, plentiful "Penicillin-for-All" ....

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.


P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.

It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.

Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.

So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...