The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues

In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.

They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.

Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.

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.

Fred & Henry Dawson spanned Modernity's biggest to the smallest

After 1930, Frederick James (Fred J) Dawson was the eldest (in the talk of children : "the biggest") of the surviving Dawson children and and Martin Henry (Henry) Dawson the youngest ("the smallest").

Appropriate then that engineer and heavy construction magnate Fred built some of the biggest things on Earth that had ever been made by living beings.

In the very demanding geography of rugged British Columbia he successfully built gigantic bridges, long highways and tunnels, military airports, large hospitals and deep water piers --- even helped build entire frontier towns like Kitimat.

In the 'bigger, faster, higher is always better' culture of Modernity, he clearly was one of the heroes of the most complex and advanced forms of civilized progress.

And appropriate too that Henry was a microbiologist, a scientist who specialized in studying lifeforms far too small to see with the naked eye.

Invisibly small and helplessly immobile sacks of liquid, ancient beyond time, Henry's microbes seemed almost too simple and too weak to even foot the bottom left hand corner of "The Arrow of Progress" that brother Fred's construction feats topped in the upper right hand corner.

But little brother Henry saw them as capable of creating incredibly complex structures, far more complex than any others had imagined possible.

Even more complex, in some ways, than the very big but comparatively straight forward structures that his big brother built.

And while brother Fred constructed enormous institutions to house the chronically ill (such as Vancouver's East Lawn Riverview) Henry beavered away inside similar chronic hospitals , trying to help the weakest and smallest in society because he felt his society was too quick to write them off.

Perhaps, like me, you are beginning to see a suggestive pattern in all this...

Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.

Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.

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.

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.

"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.

The 'sixth' extinction was supposed to be the Jews ...

Natural history (also known as pre-modernity and post-modernity) wears muddy boots and does fieldwork, cumulatively demonstrating the existence of 400,000 different species of beetles - so far.

They are always filling up the gene pool.

Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.

Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...

Postmodern God's inordinate fondness for Beatles

Perhaps the old folks were right after all, and the deconstructionists wrong : perhaps popular postmodernity did not slowly and silently seep into our world like rising damp but instead arrived suddenly , on the Radio and the TV, with a noisy bang or a clang.

Putting the "pop" back into dating the rise of "popular" postmodernity : Beatlemania, November 1963

Because while the plenticidal modern world showed a decided un-fondness for beetles (and all other forms of exuberant natural fecundity), the postmoderns just as conversely show a decided fondness for the ever varying diversity of Nature.... and Beatles.

Modernity's separate spheres for bacteria and, of course, for women and blacks

Until the rise of postmodernity in the early 1970s, most women viewed themselves as not at all "very like men in their shared humanness", but rather as definitely existing in a separate and in many ways superior sphere.

Blacks, the handicapped and bacteria - on and on and on - also existed in some of Modernity's many 'separate' spheres --- but these spheres were usually viewed as more clearly inferior.

Martin Henry Dawson, post his discovery of bacteria DNA HGT, didn't necessarily see bacteria as being that however ...

Quantum Physics at elementary school, in the 1950s & 1960s

It didn't happen, not in Canada - at least not in my imperfect memory.

The question is why ?

Why was it not introduced to kids in those decades --- or even in this decade more than a hundred years after it first arrived on the scene ?

savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn

Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?

Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.

How HGT helped end Modernity

It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.

But is this in anyway accurate ?

Wartime Manhattan's "Double V" triumphs

Synthetic plutonium ( in the world's biggest killing machine) and non-synthetic penicillin (in the world's smallest lifesaver) were the twin - and Janus-like - triumphs of wartime's two Manhattan Projects.

A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.

At Columbia-Cornell Medicial, pre-war modernity ain't dead yet

The website for New York City's Columbia-Cornell medical centre is finally touting the two famous universities' involvement in the triumph of wartime's natural penicillin.

So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.

For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.

October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'

One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.

Lots and lots of babies.

How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this,  after a decade of steady decline ?