Friday, April 29, 2016

Where does selling microbes, at bottom of tree of life, as 'only destructive', leave humans at bottom of HUMAN tree of life ?

First, turn of the century high school science teachers lecture school kids that bacteria and mold only destroy, and never sustain, life and so they must be all killed.

Then when they grow up, politicians quoting science insist that humans at the bottom of the human tree of life (Negroes, Jews, Slavs, etc) are also solely destructive and ---

---- and we all know what happened : Auschwitz and WWII ....

all Biology is syncretic symbiosis --- the rest is just stamp collecting

It has long been established that all life on earth lives in a state of involuntary global commensality.

That is, we all dine at a common table -- dining off each other's table scraps consisting of a few precious materials (water, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, etc) biologically recycled through the world over and over.

But what is this "we" thing anyway - does it mean 'humans collectively' or does it not refer to the "we" of a single human body, that is in fact made up of trillions of cells from many widely differing species ?

And if we probe deeper, do we not find that even the "human" genome of the-surely-still-solely-human part of the human body is also a chimera, a syncretic assembly of genome bits from a variety of other species ?

Life is really very convoluted together : from dining together to dying together...

Methinks its time for a bit of an Evolutionary Reboot, Charlie ....

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Hitler's antipathy to a Manhattan he never visited stemmed from his pre-war memories of polyglot multi ethnic Vienna

Hitler's hatred for a Manhattan that he had never even visited is quite remarkable.

Even in the failing days of his Reich, his regime wasted much scarce time and resources on trying to create ever more fantastic new weapon delivery systems to bomb and burn Manhattan to the ground from many thousands of miles away.

The best explanation for all this was that for Hitler, this hatred, as was so often with Hitler, was both deeply personal and deeply private.

It all actually stemmed from all those down on his luck years, roughing it on the street, in a city far far away from the Hudson River : pre-war Vienna.

the children of modern minor aristocracy all have PhDs, but still can't ward off the untutored genius

In the old days, even when you became a hereditary aristocrat because you sort of 'earned' your great power and wealth by your sheer talent, drive and aggression, deep down you knew it was very unlikely your kids and grandkids were going exhibit all that drive.

In part because growing up wealthy and established tends to take the edge off of drive and aggression.

So in the past, for tens of thousands of years, you ensured your dumber and lazier kids and grands would share in your own achievements long after you were dead by investing in lands, lots of it.

steam trains, ships & border guards invented together

Let us try to capture the full blown sexual-political panic never far below the surface of your average middle class Victorian paterfamilias :
"The deeper that the miscegenating steam ship and train try to penetrate into our hitherto virgin territories around the globe, the faster we must have border guards and passports erected to parry their thrusts and keep those territories pure."
It might all be just a big coincidence that nationalism rhetoric became rampant at the very moment when easy international travel for the masses first became practical , but as the TV detective says, 'I don't believe in coincidences'....

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Pure Modernity's silos of specialization and speciation : Aryan & Jew, Political Science & Economics, Professional & Laity

Panic-stricken wealthy educated Victorian era humanity invented Pure Modernity (a counter-revolution against impure reality) with its rigidly separated silos of pure races, pure breeds, pure nations, pure species, pure food & water, pure professions and pure academic disciplines, all in the same day.

Nay, all in the same afternoon....

Manhattan was the place, '45 was the date : pure modernity becomes impure modernity

R.I.P. Pure Modernity : 1875 - 1965


In 1945, with the twin failures of Auschwitz to liquidate Manhattan and of chemists to best the slimy penicillium, Pure Modernity ascended from its apogee down down in an abrupt death dive, down to its nadir  in 1965.

We now live in a new era, an era of Impure Modernity.

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

scientifically public versus scientifically popular

Despite many 'just so' stories to the contrary, an even half way determined scientist trying to change a current paradigm can always get scientifically published - even if only as one of the published abstracts of papers verbally delivered at a minor local meeting of a nationally important scientific society.

I am thinking specifically of a particular scientist from 1930s upstate NY and his paper "Virulence for mice of certain pneumococcus strains following induced specific type transformation".

This long forgotten and quietly rebellious scientist, Dr Albert H Harris of Slingerlands NY, at least got his views published.  IE, it was scientifically public, so I was at least able to find his paper's abstract online seventy five years later.

Darwinism fails to explain Aryan defeat in two wars

When you combine military prowess, scientific and industrial strength, national cohesiveness, demographic numbers and strategic location, it is clear, that in both world wars, all the world regarded the Germans as the single most fit 'race' on Earth.

So according to popular Darwinism's view of existence as being an eternal enlarged case of mortal man to man combat, with the best man always winning and the weaker man always dying, Germany was scientifically bound to win out.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Dawson knowlegable only about bacteria colonies : but this was a FEATURE, not a bug

Back in the bad old days, most scientists thought bacteria existed as most senior university tenured bacteriologists had willed them to exist : as a conveniently pure strain of free living planktons in an ocean of tasty lab medium.

Much lower ranking scientists also interested in bacteria frequently saw them mostly out in the 'real world' (say on our teeth or as pond scum) living in densely crowded mixed colonies.

Who was 'more' right ?

Bacteria with a body, in the human sense, no nucleus required

Today I want to consider the wider implications of the discovery of a bacteria strain that does not live, as many bacteria do, in a co-ordinated colony of many closely packed bacterial cells under specific conditions but then normally lives as a dispersed group of fully independent separate individuals.

Instead this particular strain of cyanobacteria (earlier known as blue-green algae) is an obligate multi-celled being, which means that it looks and acts rather like us humans  ---- at least for bacteria.

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Stalin & Darwin agree : "Evolution in One Country"

Nice to see good old Charlie & Joe finally paired up.

Joe is famous for advocating socialism within a single country --- Charlie for advocating evolution only within a single species.

Horizontal socialism and horizontal evolution simply wasn't on.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Evolution by Inclusion : taking and receiving

In the world of HGT ( the horizontal gifting of genetic material between different strains or species) there is a big but frequently un-remarked difference between symbiogenesis and natural transformation versus conjugation and transduction.

In the first two instances, the receiving being voluntarily took up the foreign DNA itself, either by swallowing a living being whole or by gulping down some of the DNA from a dead or secreting foreign being.

In the latter two cases, an invader forces some foreign DNA upon the receiving being, a situation frequently called 'infectious heredity'.

Dawson's Evolution by Inclusion vs Darwin's Evolution by Exclusion

Neo-Darwinism aka Modernity claimed Evolution only happened by Exclusion.

"Pushing Air" : pushing my agenda

Yep, surely no surprise here : I have a personal agenda I am pushing.

And it is not just air.

In my view, no matter how useful, science that is merely 'published' is frequently ignored, and forever --- only when the new becomes 'popularly scientifically published' does it start doing things and changing things.

Friday, April 22, 2016

must see Danish movie, "Pushing Air" : when're you willing to ask anyone for help, everyone benefits ...

One Prob.

They haven't actually filmed it yet -- in fact they don't know that they are going to do so.

But they will.

That's because it is an uplifting true story from backward Copenhagen of 1952 with so many dramatic but true events in it, all just made for the cinema screen that even Hollywood couldn't dreamt them all up.

Microbes are doubly secret

Firstly, and by definition, microbes are unusually secret to us humans because they can't be seen by our naked eyes.

Bacteria best Humans in on/off Switches

There are many many reasons why microbes were the first,will be the last and are currently the most dominant life-form on Earth and throughout the entire Universe.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Seven - seven only - living bacteria cells discovered on Mars

Despite dozens of probes sent to Mars annually for the next forty years, no more bacteria was ever found.

How should mainstream science assess this discovery?

This is actually only my thought experiment, but the way I feel sure this news would be assessed by most scientists is that it definitely and triumphantly disproves that odious religious claim that life is unique to Earth and by extension, it disproves all religion as well.

12 photos of Martin Henry Dawson from the 5 decades of his life

From conception to premature death, Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson, 1896-1945, was on this earth for half a century and I have found a dozen or so photos of him (below this brief intro),
with at least one from each decade of his life.

He was a very serious and very studious man.

Very diffident, polite and modest in his dealings with his seniors (a man easily and perpetually under-estimated) but earnest and intense in public presentations and in private he had a dry biting wit and could always see the ironic humour in various situations.

Almost all the photos that I have found to date, from a wide array of social settings, reflect that that he seemed to have been inwardly serious from a very young age.

It may be that his facial appearance reenforced this part of his nature - compared to his parents and four older brothers, he was noticeably wider in the jawline than them, even as a child.

But his family did find one photo of him relaxed, laughing and holding a drink. And not surprising for a young boy from a very pious evangelical Presbyterian family who went away to the trenches of WWI, he even sometimes played poker and let the other players call him "Hank"!

His wive Marjorie was the near total opposite, a social charmer and so a good foil to Henry, usually able to get him to unbend and laugh.

Young Martin Henry Dawson in the early 1900s

McGill Resident 1920s Martin Henry Dawson

very sick Martin Henry Dawson, age 45, May 1942
Martin Henry Dawson McGill 1919
Yearbook Business Manager Martin Henry Dawson 1912

Martin Henry Dawson 1915  Cdn Medical Corps

1916 soldier Martin Henry Dawson
Martin Henry Dawson McGill Med grad 1923
1936 Passport Martin Henry Dawson
relaxed Martin Henry Dawson late 1930s
Blackstone portrait Martin Henry Dawson 1938
to attract Society patients 1938 Martin Henry Dawson


Modernity, R.I.P. 1945 : its delusions destroyed by human scientific "magical thinking" at the top and "microbial intelligence" at the bottom

Germany was long considered both the most scientific and the most cultured of all major human civilizations --- the very apogee of Modernity.

Proof positive, proclaimed Modernity's leading lights, that all the intelligence and civility in the Tree of Life was at the very top among the leading human nations --- and that all its stupidity and murderous intent was at the very bottom with the pathogenic microbes.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

How scientistst lick ass to prosper : Koch's Postulates (for help making microbes look stupid as your bosses need them to be)

Most of pre-Auschwitz "Mainstream Science" (not its technology - its technology was wonderful !) was Junk Science.

Modernist Mainstream Science, to put it in military terms, secured its place at the right hand of Civilization's throne by successfully mis-interpreting (at the strategic/big picture level) the new data it gathered up so accurately at the operational and tactical  level.

Rather like Hitler's military, it won every battle and lost every war.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

antivivisectionists among Modernity's earliest, loudest critics - supporters of microbial intelligence among its last, quietest ---- and most effective

Life-saving doctors killing and inflicting pain upon the weakest of sentient beings (animals) in the interests of "Science" began in the 1850s with Claude Bernard.

It thus well proceeded life-saving doctors doing the same to the weakest of humanity (the poor, weak and minorities) in the name of "Eugenics" beginning in the 1910s.

'Gene Pool' dates from after Auschwitz, says NGRAM VIEWER

Google's wonderful little Ngram Viewer lets you plot variations in the number of published references to a term over time.

Its results are not perfect but usually strongly suggestive.

It says it could find no references to the use of the term "gene pool" until the early 1950s (but does find scientist L C Dunn using it in a 1946 book).

This confirms my sense that the term was very rare before Auschwitz because the concept behind the term was viewed negatively until then.

How closed-minded is YOUR parachute ?

As Liverpool's Hugh Mosher reminds us (and the wartime 'natural or synthetic' penicillin battle between Henry Dawson and Howard Florey rather confirms) our minds are like parachutes.

They can only save lives when they are fully open - while a closed mind, like a WWII closed parachute, totally fails to save...

Monday, April 18, 2016

Dynamic racially "impure" Manhattan : Sterile racially "pure" Auschwitz

Hitler, along with much of the educated world at the time, felt that America was certain to go down the tubes because of its free and easy racial mixing, above all in Manhattan.

Hitler was convinced that once his murderous programs had made Germany fully Aryan and fully racially pure, it would soar even higher than it already had, in culture and in technology.

The results of WWII - and the seventy years since - hasn't confirmed those beliefs, far from it.

Aristocracy as the thermosetting plastic of social positions

The first person in any exalted aristocratic line got there by doing something notable, at least in the eyes of then currently powerful.

But those talented people's children and children's children needn't do something notable to retain that exalted position.

That after all is the whole point of any aristocracy : it is the outward physical expression of a secret mental belief in the sheer randomness of great talent and of the rare chance that a particular great talent will be in perfect sync with the wishes of the contemporary powerful.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Future Nobel for Soren Overballe-Petersen ?

Followers of this blog will know that Henry Dawson began pushing the importance of the fact that bacteria could take up loose bits of genetic material (now known to be DNA) from their environment and incorporate in their genome, way back in 1928.

Dr Overballe-Petersen claimed much the same thing in 2013, eighty five years later.

So why should the world even care ---- let alone give the man not just a medal, but the most valued medal around ?

Henry Dawson, Scientific 'Persister'

First, let me explain my little in-house joke.

You see, "persister" bacteria were first discovered by Gladys Hobby and others, while working as part of Henry Dawson's wartime "impure penicillin" team.

And so perhaps discovered by Dr Dawson as well. Though his name wasn't on the original paper, as he was away receiving major medical treatment when it was first publicly presented.

The concept of "persisters" is fairly well known in Science - but only among microbes, not among scientists themselves.

Intellectually, same sort of people deny the importance of HGT & various holocausts

While only a very, very, small minority still publicly deny "The Holocaust", a lot more people deny the connectedness and the importance of the many genocidal holocausts of the 19th and 20th century.

Just as many (usually other) people still deny the importance or frequency of HGT, Horizontal Gift Transfers of fragments of DNA from one species or strain of life to another species or strain of life.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Most rural kids 1890s probably saw motion pictures before they saw a photo in the local paper

To be precise, we know that in 1888 a some lucky factory employees audience in Leeds England saw several motion picture performances, well before they or anyone else had ever seen a single (halftone) photo in even the biggest national newspapers, books or magazines.

And this in what was the richest and most advanced civilization on earth.

You might expect still photos in books and newspaper to be easier to achieve than motion film but you would be quite wrong.

Modernity began with 1870s reaction to a Canadian-owned NYC newspaper half-tone

Traditional emphasis on Victorian Era globalization and modernization always focuses on speed - faster travel of things & beings having weight and faster communication of immaterial things : images & ideas.

I think this is totally wrong - it was the shock of the totally new, not merely the faster old, that marked this disruptive process of modernization - and led to the counter-reaction we know as Modernity.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Doctors asked to assist at suicides for same reason they're asked to assist at executions

Doctors are usually hired to use their scientific expertise to save lives but that fact hasn't made them any less popular to employ to salve the consciences of people who are about to kill - kill others or even themselves.

Doctor assisted suicides in Canada, doctor observed executions in America, or doctor conducted Aktion T4 and Holocaust murders in Germany ----- having a doctor about makes violent death seem almost like a medical procedure and eases consciences big time.

Look, if you want to kill yourself or others, just do it yourself  and man up and take full responsibility.

Don't drag in others to spread the blame about.

God isn't fooled....

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Modernity Faithful : Rex Murphy

Modernity is all about faith, not facts --- its about you what you want to think is true and not what is actually true.

Case in point, commentator Rex Murphy and seemingly everybody at Canada's CBC, that James Fenimore Cooper of news accuracy.

Popular Eugenics : Gr 8 Grammar

For an entire school year, I endured Nova Scotia's Grade Eight grammar circa 1964-1965, a subject taught at a level that wasn't at all like brain surgery or rocket science only because it was much much harder.

Much harder that is, than any other subject a thirteen year old student usually was expected to comprehend ---- or ever should have been expected to comprehend.

Since 1965 was the very last year of the Age of Modernity and of Exclusion, this grammar course was in fact the last throw of the era of popular eugenics.

modernization is mongrelization is unconscious involuntary syncretism

Modernity , I always insist, was the self-conscious (hence the capital "M") and panicky response of the global educated middle class to the insistent , insidious, unconscious, involuntary, syncretism and mongrelization of modernization (hence the small letter "m").

The faster the lingo of the Jewish-Negro-Italian crooners seduced its way inside their children's psyche via Tin Pan Alley sheet music and records (and later via the radio and the movies) the faster their parents passed Jim Crow segregation laws against Negroes within and against darkish Immigrants without.

The Whiteys claimed - at the time - that they feared a day when the dark, red and yellow races took over completely and nothing of the white culture would remain.

I personally doubt that any of them believed that, even back then.

What they feared more - because they saw it happening daily - was the increasing miscegenation of both their culture and of the culture of the foreign seeming Negroes & Immigrants into something new : a syncretization of all cultures.

As in laying down Negro rhythms and ostinatos over European harmony and instrumentation.

If this process happened fastest in big cities, the bigger the better, we needn't struggle to suggest why.

In an isolated Mid West small town with just one strong radio signal on the dial, that station played whatever the advertisers among the small town power elites wanted - the German-oriented classic music styles familiar from their parents' original North West European cultures.

But in big city Memphis, every child with access to the family radio when Ma and Pa was out, could twist the dial and pick up sounds from the local black station - by sheer accident - and then get hooked on its infectious vigour and sass.

The term 'modernization' refers to the technology of the new go-anywhere -and-everywhere pipelines of for-profit communication and transportation.

By contrast, the term 'mongrelization' refers to the two way content that filled that go anywhere pipeline.....








Monday, April 11, 2016

what Age of Exclusion excluded (mostly) was complexity and uncertainty...

Our post-1965 Age of Inclusion is learning to include uncertainty along with all the other minorities in its considerations - and this is a very good thing at a time when the Globe faces its first ever existential crisis brought on by the wilful hubris of sentient beings.

Hubris is what flourishes whenever uncertainty and complexity is deliberately excluded from conscious thought - as it did in the Age of Exclusion from 1875 to 1965.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Human Fragility : why most people (white & colored) can't accept that small weak microbes can be as intelligent as them

Oh yes, a big hat tip to Dr Robin DiAngelo who proposed the term "white fragility" to describe how few white people can address claims that 'we whites all benefit indirectly from systemic racism' without exhibiting extreme mental & emotional distress.

I feel some the same way as Dr DiAngelo, whenever I observe the reaction after I claim that Henry Dawson's scientific career was devoted to proving up the fact that life's simplest, smallest and weakest beings - the microbes - exhibit intelligent behavior.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

North American-style ethnic cleansing

North America hardly needed to go all the way to South African style overt apartheid, or East European murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns, to keep its unwanted ethnic minorities out of nice WASP upper middle class suburbs.

faith-based Age of Exclusion (1875-1965) vs current fact-based Age of Inclusion

During WWII, Allied governments and virtually all of their voters took it as an article of faith that when those governments passed new wartime laws banning any form of discrimination, that ipso facto all such discrimination was yesterday.

They didn't bother to check to see if frontline decision makers actually obeyed the new law.

Purity & Dirt always in a vertical hierarchy, not horizontal continuum

"Pure-ness", that rhetorical term much beloved by Scientism, is never in fact allowed to exist in the horizontal continuum that its definition implies.

Lateral pure-ness *


That is, seeing a former mixture now separated into all its various pluralistic diversities ; 'pure but equal' substances in a chemically inclusive democracy.

Friday, April 8, 2016

I was a child in the 196th decade, the Fifties years, from 1951 to 1960 - I became an adult in 1961

My childhood ended when I began reading grownup-oriented newspapers, magazines & books in early September 1961, just before my tenth birthday.

So my childhood was a Fifties childhood.

It is by far and away the decade I feel closest too.

I say so despite being a bona fide 'Youth in the Wild Sixties', because I always felt that the dramatic youth actions of the 1960s followed inevitably on from the unique times experienced by Fifties ankle-biters.

Note : because we count everything, including time , from 1 to 10 not from 0 to 9, there never was any "year 0" in any known calendar.

Still, despite this obvious fact, most people 'believe' the Fifties were from 1950 to 1959 ---- I go with the math guys and say it ran 1951-1960.

Suits me anyway - I was conceived in 1950, but only born in 1951....

Age of Exclusion 1875--1965 ; Age of Inclusion 1965 --???

The Classical & Romantic Ages at least hint accurately of what they are all about.

Not so the Ages of Modernity & Post Modernity.

Because the Romans no doubt thought of themselves as fully modern - as will humanoids a million years from now, if our species is still around by then.

I think it much better to tag each of these slices of history as "the Age of Exclusion" (culminating with Auschwitz's exclusionary fires of racial purity) followed by "the Age of Inclusion" (beginning with the American Civil Rights Movements' biggest success, 1965's inclusive Voters Rights Act).

Only time will tell, if these terms have any legs....

queen of today's science is Biology : non-man-made chemistry & physics

That Vannevar Bush wanted no biologists on his wartime OSRD team went unremarked at the time, then at the very apogee of Modernity.

After all what could mere non-human living beings ever teach us humans - Masters of the Universe all - about serious chemistry & physics ?

Seventy five years on, it seems apparently quite a lot.

Henry Dawson's 'Impurity Praising Manhattan' was never more than a sizeable minority of wartime Manhattanites

In 1940, most people in Manhattan, as in America - nay in the whole world - felt it best if they lived as much as possible in pure-as-possible exclusionary enclaves - working and playing and marrying their own 'kind', however that always moving target was currently defined.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Modernity faithful dismissed complex scientific discoveries : 'Reality simpler than it looks'

The scientism "faith" of Modernity rose in panicked reaction to the late 19th century's many scientific discoveries revealing unexpected complexities in Deep reality.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Between the wars 'Impure Manhattan' & involuntary inclusivity

The Era of High Modernity, while it really only lasted one lifespan (from 1875 to 1965), was uniquely notable as the period when virtually all of the most powerful people in the world (middle class, well educated urban dwellers of the biggest civilizations) held a decidedly dire Manichean take on Reality.

One of Modernity's leading lights, Baron Howard Florey, was fully typical in frankly preferring things to always be 'clearcut'.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

An Era doesn't die when a US President say so, but only when a humble janitor does so

Nobody, not even the historians and archivists of the US National Park Service know exactly when, by whom and or even why, the tiny plaque bearing Emma Lazarus's now famous poem "The New Colossus" about the Mother of Exiles, was itself moved out of internal exile in some dusty backwater of the Statue of Liberty to the pride of place at the front of the whole ball of wax.

Dawson: first with both 'in vitro' DNA & 'in vivo' Penicillin

Because 'in vitro' research (inside glass test tubes) and 'in vivo' research (inside the body) are considered the polar opposites of each other, it is the rare scientist indeed who scores a notable first in both fields.

So consider the fact that for billions of years DNA had worked its magic solely inside the body, until 1929 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside a glass test tube (in vitro) : dawning the age of direct genetic modification.

Or that for millions of years penicillin had worked its magic solely outside the human body, until 1940 when Dr Henry Dawson first put it to work inside the human body (in vivo) : dawning the age of life-saving systemic antibiotics.

Friday, April 1, 2016

rarity among Penicillin pioneers, Henry Dawson avoids the "S" word

I have never found a single instance when the first doctor to use penicillin to save a human life, Henry Dawson, ever said that 'further lifesaving with this wonder drug must first await the development of synthetic penicillin'.

Odd that, because that is what those other two penicillin pioneers, Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, always gave as their excuse for their relative clinical inaction with wartime penicillin.

Pecking Order Shocker !!! Lowly day clinic doctor launches Age of Antibiotics

All teaching hospitals display an informal but exceedingly powerful medical pecking order in terms of prestige and access to scarce resources.

At the very very bottom of the food chain are those day/outpatient clinics that serve patients who are both walking ambulatory and suffering from non-acute non-life threatening conditions.