Laplacian Skygods versus the penicillin groundlings

Pierre-Simon LaPlace won eternal fame - or is that infernal infamy ?- for his claim that if one could but climb up high enough to survey all the atoms in the Universe, then one could perfectly predict all the future as well as perfectly explain all of the past.

Keep that thought in mind as one reads how Adnan Morshed, in surveying the leading edge of the optimistic Thirties in his book "Impossible Heights : Skyscrapers, Flight and the Master Builder", sees everywhere the conjunction of the sleek  and oh so eugenically ideal airplane & skyscraper.

They are both symbols and enablers of Man's new ability to survey - and hence control and change - all of the world he sees below him : Man as the Master Builder of "The World of Tomorrow".

Even Carl Norden could be fitted into this system -- for his Norden bombsight operated from 5 miles up could also re-build the world below : first breaking many eggs before making some new omelettes.

Hum, didn't the 1930s also have some guys in tights and capes flying about high above us, also re-working the morals of the world for the better ?

So Morshed also throws into the epic brew the figure of the Super Hero as a sort of Super Builder.

One can well imagine that Pierre-Simon himself is back, among the undead - inhabiting all these dreams.

The Master building plan ultimately consisted of replacing the drag of having to co-exist with and beg off of imperfect Nature with the freedom of 100% perfect synthetic autarky.

And what better place than to perform this new alchemy than from the top floors of these sleek shining metal, glass and concrete skyscrapers?

Bit hard ,though, to fit that other wonder of that age into this schema - because penicillin was first scraped off the slimy below-ground basement walls of some big buildings in central London.

Far from Olympian Heights indeed - in fact nearer Hades than Heaven.

More groundlings than Skygods .

Janus is normal thought of looking both to the right and to the left.

But maybe it is better in the case of wartime Manhattan to think of Janus as looking both skywards and away with the atomic bomb's 'go it alone ' synthetic autarky and also downwards, to the soil, with penicillin's open commensality with Nature...

un-superheroes : Earthlings --- not super heroes , not Skygods

Joe and Willie , PBI , not Captain America or Bomber Command.

Down in dirt , muddling through , boots on the ground .

When hyper-modern technology fails : send in the shovels ...

"DENIER science" aims for the stars : but sometimes hits London instead...

To Stars..or LONDON

A whole lot of Denier-Watchers themselves deny that DENIERS even have have "a science" - mostly because they insist that deniers deny and disbelieve the basic tenets of "Science".


Well obviously I strongly disagree with my good pals or this blog would have no purpose!

Not C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" but rather "Two Sciences"

Let me begin my friendly disagreement with them, by myself denying there is any one thing called "Science" .

Instead, I see ( per Canadian Allan Schnaiberg's famous distinction) two main types of science : Production science aka science of the first law of thermodynamics (wildly optimistic skygod science) versus Impact science of the second law of thermodynamics (cautiously grounded earthling science.)

Production science is very good at building rockets but is very indifferent as to the tragic consequences when they fall on London and Brussels rather than ascend to the stars ( to re-use an old, old gag about Nazi-American patriot Wernher Von Braun !)

Denier science is indeed "building" our human civilization but it is also killing our human civilization and our planet, in the process.

My job - as I see it it - is to stop them and I hope you will consider  starting up efforts to stop them as well.....

Are there any limits to human efforts to control Nature ? Blue Sky scientists don't see any...

think tank "boiler room"

But today's Grounded scientist disagrees strongly. Perhaps they are simply tired of seeing this "there are no limits" line pushed endlessly by politicians, think tanks and retired scientists like some old fashioned high pressure "boiler room" scam.

I deliberately chose the metaphors of Skygods vs earthlings (rather than entitle my book and blog something like "Blue Sky Science vs Grounded Science") because I dreaded how few people would choose to read a book with an academic snoozer of a title.

Blue Skys and Sky Gods

But Skygods would indeed tend to be "high" up in the blue sky as much as earth-lings would tend to indeed be ground-ed individuals, so I hope no one is misled by my title as to my serious objectives in researching and writing the book and blog.

My wish is that you find the book a real page turner, a character-driven "narrative non fiction"  and an all around barn burner of a good read.....

Allan Schnaiberg's 1980 nightmare : pollution-producing SkyGods vs impacted-upon earthlings

SkyGod Machine in earthling Garden

In the1970s, the Canadian-born sociologist of environmentalism, Allan Schnaiberg , was the first to detect the emerging split in popular Science that this blog (also Canadian-born) is devoted to exploring ; so a man well worth honouring.


But as I have written in an earlier post in SVE, I didn't stumble upon Schnaiberg's seminal concept until I chanced upon the work of Myanna Lahsen --- thanks to the wonders of Google search.

She casually mentioned the concept of earlier-dominant production science versus the contested rise of today's impact science, as if all her readers would know what it meant.

But I didn't --- or rather I did.

It sounds an awful lot like my concept of earlier (pre-war) SkyGod scientists versus later (post-war) earthling scientists.

I eventually traced the meme back to Schnaiberg and a time period almost 40 years ago.

Long past overdue, then,  for the concept to be a commonplace and a cliche in the vocabulary of every warmist earthling environmentalist green.

Basically it can be seen as a variant of my beloved contrast between the fundamental second law of thermodynamics (matter and energy gets less and less useful to humanity (aka more and more of it becomes useless  particulate pollution and heat pollution) and the derivative first law of thermodynamics.

The sciences of half-truthfulness...

The first law says (as a half truth) that matter and energy can't ever be destroyed but only changed into alternative forms.

A half truth because converting the concentrated energy in the gasoline that powers your Piper Cub into ever so slightly heating the entire Universe does not destroy that energy --- but it certainly ruins for all time its further usefulness for humanity.

 In fact, if that waste heat in the air helps heat up the entire atmosphere --- en route to the frozen reaches of the universe --- it is likely to ruin all of humanity as well.

Similarly, impact science is fundamental science while production science is but a half truth science derived from it.

Production science produces a machine which makes lots of widgets, very cheaply and profitably - apparently the end of story.

Impact science visits that once-successful widget machine cum factory in the town of Anywhereville Quebec and discovers that the factory is throwing off deadly pollution that is ever so slowly poisoning the employees at the widget factory. As a result, they are producing less widgets per hour.

It is this, not unfair competition from the Japanese, that is the real cause of the factory owner's declining profits.

Production science is about The Machine, Impact Science is about The Machine in the Garden, with both garden and machine complexly interacting with each other in unpredictable ways.

(Hat tip to Leo Marx for re-applying his famous meme!)

Deniers cum skeptics who deny change in geology, biology, climate and physics  still only see science in the simplistic terms and certitudes of production science.

Warmists accept that changes happens and happens unpredictably and are much less sanguine about our ability to correct our own mistakes in time to prevent real harm.

Climate deniers - I steadfastly affirm in the face of zillions of scientist-bloogers who argue to the contrary - do believe in Science.

But it is the older, out-dated, hubristic SkyGod science - not current earthling science .....

Popular science is the 99.99% of us who DON'T read the journal NATURE

unread by 99.99% !

The world's most important science journal is read by.... almost nobody.

 The British weekly publication NATURE , the most influential science journal by far in the world, sells only about 50,000 copies but its publisher says around 400,000 read it one way or another. So by its own count, less than .01% of the world reads it.

But NATURE is considered required weekly browsing for all professional scientists, in part to to maintain a credible claim that they are professional scientists.

So indirectly, via NATURE's readership, we have some gauge of just how few professional scientists there are in the world.

About the widest possible definition of a scientist says they regularly do scientific research that gets published in credible peer-reviewed journals in their field of endeavour.

It doesn't say they must be paid for doing so, and it does allow for those who could successfully publish their research, if military or commercial powers didn't prevent it, if only temporarily.

It admits that those who write about, administer or teach science may have once been active research scientists and could be so again, so that while not currently professional research scientists, they are at least highly credible critics of published research.

They must number in the range of millions.

Next are those science-trained professionals who only do "hands on" production science or impact science in government or industry but who can read and evaluate articles in their own area of expertise : again they must number in the range of millions, even tens of millions.

Then there are the students in university level science courses   who are able to usefully assess a published journal article in their own field of interest : they number in the tens of millions.

All together, perhaps 70 million out of a total world population of 7 billion can make some sense of some of the back page articles in the journal NATURE : the scientific "1% " .

But for the rest of us, the 99 % of us , we need the raw data of those dense and turgid articles filtered and translated by science populariziers.

The editors of NATURE, in the front pages of the journal, do a pretty good job of rendering their back page articles into lay language and assessing why these highly specialized reports of research in obscure areas of science nevertheless matter for the 7 billion "rest of us".

Other science journalists and science book writers also try to render - second hand - what NATURE's articles really mean for the non-professional 99% of humanity.

Among the "us" in the 99% or the 99.99% are the most powerful people in the world : presidents of countries or of corporations, generals, publishers of newspapers , activist movie and rock stars .

We , by our power, our money or (for most of us) by our votes and buying dollars will decide most of the big science issues : not NATURE.

This is hard - in fact impossible - for most lifers in professional science to believe.

"Let us bring forth the real-world facts, as predicted by a successful lab-theory, and what more needs be done ?" they cry.

Maybe, once. Maybe once, most of the science-besotted middle and upper classes in the world would have automatically accepted anything NATURE reported at face value (the religious and the peasantry might have scoffed, but who cares about their opinions ?)

But that was before 1945, and 1965, and 1995 . The popular image of Science has undergone two - opposing - and profound changes.

For about one half of the world, the old, pre-1945 image of the scientist remains the same - only today's real-life scientists don't live up to that image.

For the other one half of the world, the old style scientist has been rejected completely and they rather like the new post-war style of scientist.

All this matters, because both sides do not accept or reject new scientific articles based on their own internal scientific evidence, but rather more based on how they feel about the sort of person who delivers them.

In other words, "if they don't like the messenger, they shoot down the message".

The three filters of Science

This blog is concerned about how science evidence is thrice-filtered, rather like Gaul or Saint Peter's Rooster.

First by the multi-person filter of the scientist, his or her employer-superiors and the journal editor cum referees.

Successfully passing through this filter, private science is now public ( published) science.

Next up on the filter machine are the popular Science gatekeepers : the editors and journalists who decide whether this new research gets splashed, downplayed or even ignored in popular science periodicals and in newspapers and on TV.

Finally past this second filter, how do we, the remaining 98% of humanity, assess it ?

If it is first only widely reported in the UK Guardian newspaper that Tasmania is now seeing tropical fish thanks to human climate change, and then this news item is re-published in a hacked up and mocking manner by the Wall Street Journal , the readers of that latter newspaper are likely to deny its truthfulness as mere "warmist claptrap science".

We are the third and final filter ---the biggest one of them all.

How, and why, do we assess this particular - specialized - bit of new scientific research the way we do ?

We don't - we have a few vivid, semi-permanent, images of "Science" in each of our heads and we simply run every new bit of data against those few rigid memes : and then we award a simple pass or fail.

Fundamentally, whether we prefer our scientists to be pre-war SkyGods or post-war earthlings is the only filter we have to assess all the immense amount of science-related news items that hits us weekly.

This is why, in science as in economics , this blog is focussed on the 99%  , not the 1% .....

why earthlings should leave Think Tanks to the libertarian SkyGods

Helping others murder our planet - with our own tax dollars !

For every one dollar in annual income that earthling oriented (aka green,steady state, perhaps a few of the left) think tanks have, the SkyGod libertarians have $1000.

There are about 10,000 think tanks world wide and most of the ones we could even begin to call earthling (and Earth) friendly are small in income, small in numbers, in uncertain health or already effectively moribund.

The vast number that are both very rich and very active in their strident advocacy are the libertarian denier tankers.

We earthlings only add our considerable credibility ( precious and scarce) to the alleged legitimacy of the thousands of denier tanks by supporting the idea of think tanks in general.

If instead, we steered totally clear of them - instead of trying to feebly compete within their world - we could then strongly denounce them and all of their works as that of the Devil.

This is because all advocacy think tanks are but a money laundering scheme.

Albeit the sort of money laundering Yale and Oxfords grads would get into : morally dubious but perfectly legal (who writes the laws after all ?) and highly profitable for all concerned.

Life was so much more straight forward in the 1940s.

Just before election day, the boss put a little piece of paper in your pay packet, telling you that if you voted for Party X on Tuesday, you could kiss your job good bye on Friday - and then he signed it.

He ran ads in the newspaper saying the same thing - and he signed it.

Flash forward to today.

Now the super rich 1% have their tax free family foundations donate to tax free charities called strident advocacy libertarian think tanks.

The think tank then pays an unknown denier with just enough degrees to be called "a scientist" or "an academic" to "author" a "book" and then do a "book tour" of the world denying climate change at think tank sponsored "seminars".

Since the super rich own or control all the big media, they ensure their employees "cover" these meetings like the dew, and then splash the contents on their front pages and TV screens for all of us to endure.

Just imagine how ineffective a denial would be that insists burning coal does not cause smoke pollution , if delivered by a coal mining heiress  in all of her newspaper chain ?

Even Stephen Harper might see through that gauze !

Now imagine if our obese heiress choose instead to launder her money through foundations to think tanks and tame publishing firms and tame newspapers.

So now it appears that a 'disinterested, objective' academic had delivered this 'balanced review' of the evidence for and against coal's atmospheric effects and rendered a reasonable verdict in favour of the innocent coal mines.

All are opinions but not all opinions are EQUAL

Look there is already a place for people who claim to be either (or both) academics and scientists : it is called inside peer-reviewed papers.

The best science and academic journals demand so much transparency on your data, funding and conflict of interest that 99.999999999999999% of advocacy think tank research would never make it past this first hurdle.

Next your toughest critics are asked to tear your actual data apart and if the editor doesn't feel you answered them effectively, you're dead.

Pass these two stages and the hardest by far still remains : "is what you are saying truly new and if so is it global enough in IMPACT to make other people outside your narrow field waste their time to read it ?"

Getting a paper into NATURE or SCIENCE or about 10 to 20 others is rather like how a Patent Office should work - but rarely does - patents then would only be issued for truly new and workable processes.

The advantage of a paper in NATURE for over-busy  journalists is obvious : it has been pre-vetted, you don't have to read it or think about it, merely act as a public steno and paraphrase its abstract to your readers.

Journalists who are over-busy and under-intellectualized dig themselves even deeper into the quicksand : they don't bother to check to see if the paper they are being pitched has seen a peer-review, they don't read the paper.

They read the author's CV , if it is more impressive than the journalist's, then they are regarded as an expert and even an academic and a scientist.

So an economist whose life work has been Iowa pork belly futures is allowed to spout off opinions about climate changes effects on the ocean currents of the  South Pacific.

I spout off opinions - all the time, I am a blogger - but I never claim to be an expert/scientist or an academic on the subject : just a blogger with an opinion.

And, by design, I have no CV full of  expert credentials .

Most journalists trying to assess the value of my opinion need both time and the ability to contrast it with the widely held scientific or academic consensus on the subject, before they could tell if it is worth them passing on to their readers.

My blog opinion then is in the same position as a big think tank's new policy paper : it is merely a bucket of spit until conventional peer review or a bunch of smart competitive journalists or perhaps the entire blog-o-sphere has assessed it thoroughly.

All this takes much time, thinking , researching, reflecting , re-reading and reflecting again.

It is a process, not an event ; it is ongoing and never stops.

It is all just opinions or hunches.

Sometime those hunches come in fancy dress : theories or hypotheses.

But all - from dashed-off blogger rant to cover article in NATURE - are just opinions.

But some opinions, like reports from NATURE or SCIENCE or LANCET or the IPPC have a much bigger and deeper consensus around them than others : thoroughly peer-reviewed articles from the biggest journals and the biggest international panels.

Think tank funders - the greedy libertarians - crave that sort of prestige and credibility.

But being lazy as well as greedy, libertarians want all of that  without going through all the rigour and dreaded transparency of peer-review.

Libertarianism ( and think tanks) is the natural home of the hard-to-get-along-with academics who tank in the world of collegiality.

the poet Longfellow had great advice

If we earthlings let them, they will fall back on the pseudo academic halo of the think tanks.

But we shouldn't let them ; we should abandon all of our side's feeble think tanks and denounce the entire concept of think tanks as intellectual money laundering.

To paraphrase the poet Longfellow:  if Gina loves Priscilla of the Desert, great - but she should tell Priscilla herself - not pay some john inside Canberra's The Triangle to do it for her.

Gina, go pimp your own opinions ......

'Tankers' have the money , bloggers have the brains

Asymmetrical journalism : bloggers besting 'tankers'

A red broadband and three cords , located somewhere in a bedroom in the hinterland backwaters , may not seem equal to all the corporate firepower concentrated in the Think Tank phalanxes of  Washington, London, Canberra and Ottawa.

But didn't Mr Bono also evoke having "The Truth" in his definition of asymmetrical "punk" journalism ?

I am sure he did.

The battle ground is Climate Change, the stakes (a big cliche, but still true) "The Fate of the Earth" .

Libertarian Think Tanks

There are hundreds of wealthy libertarian Think Tanks world wide that deny that "Man"  has caused potentially irreversible Climate Change, indeed deny any limits on "Man's" ability to quickly get out any jam He or nature might have... temporarily ...created.

It will probably take tens of thousands of part-time bloggers, in tens of thousands of bedrooms,  to successfully combat this Life-killing philosophy -- but I am sure we can do it.

They have the money true ; but after all , we have the beauty and the brains....

Worldwide re-alignment of parties and voters underway

Successful parties with no membership to speak of.

Many of today's most successful parties - like the Australian Labour Party -  are a mile wide and an inch deep.

This party is but a house of cards - many of its branches have almost no members but still collectively elect a Labour member, as they have unbrokenly for over a hundred years.

Read Rodney Cavalier's POWER CRISIS  read it , and if you are still part of the same-old-same-old left wing (why?) ---- weep.

It and its equally ancient rival, the Liberals, pretend to exchange blows on issues fought over since before the start of the 20th century, but when it gets down to it both are quite content to advise their voters to vote for each other, rather than for their dreaded common enemy - the GREENS.

Meme of the Day : Human Exceptionalism

I can easily foresee a new political alignment in Australia over the issue : for or against Human Exceptionalism --- indeed, in all the world's democracies.

We all know that Americans like to claim that they are an exception to every restraint that afflicts other human societies.

Now, in an inflationary move, many people on both the outdated right and the outdated left, are claiming that every bit of humanity is an exception to the material and biological restraints that limit all other life on Earth.

The human mind and will triumphing over mere matter - or lack there of.

Call these people yesterday's skygods -- I doubt they ever will.

Their opponents do see that human life faces the same restraints that all other life has always faced - our brains give us a double-edged sword - the smarts to do things better than plants or animals - and the greed that never lets us stop when we should.

These are today's earthlings: committed to seeing humanity as deeply embedded within the web of life, dining at a common table ( aka global commensalists) on the only lifeboat life has in this universe.

I see every election in twenty years coming down to a referendum on Human Exceptionalism, disguised or overtly.....

Earthlings is not a doc I could watch - but you should

While we are on the subject of books or movies I did not name skygods vs earthlings after, I did not name it after the doc Earthlings.

I had never heard of it until fairly recently.

I have tried to watch it but since I fled half the scenes in Wizard of Oz as just too scary, I really couldn't handle much of it.

Most other people seem to feel they can watch it gradually, in bits, and ended up learning much from it to unsettle even the most animal-friendly human.

My actual earthling point of reference, in naming my blog, was the new earth smell that newly dug WWI trenches had - as well as smell that penicillium mold has.

This uniquely earthy smell united the two wars of Doctor Martin Henry Dawson : as a World War One infantryman and his unique World War Two effort to turn his hospital into a life-saving penicillin farm.

In both wars, airmen high in the air got the skygod glamour (and hubris) , but it was earthling guys embedded deep in the dirty,smelly,humble earth that actually did the heavy lifting that finally ended the bloodshed.....

Why the rise of the DENIERS is the best news for GREENs in 40 years

Soul Mates

If you are a physical scientist - or think like a physical scientist - the unexpected rise of the number of passionate climate change Deniers has to seem both a disappointment and a nightmare.

You had assumed that if only the world had sufficient evidence of human-caused global warming, then all nations would respond rationally and quickly move to change their behavior, if only out of selfish interest in their own survival.

But, seemingly, the more scientific evidence that is released, the more Deniers that have emerged out of the woodwork - each new one more angrier than the others, as if emboldened by the signs they are not alone but rather representative of a silent (slight) majority.

But if you are a more politically minded Climate Change believer,
(we'll call you a Green, for sake of argument) the rise of the Deniers is the best news your rag tag movement has had since it was formed in the 1970s, almost 40 years ago.

Because to you, the Deniers are almost (almost) soul mates.

You both care - passionately - about Climate Change, albeit from opposing sides of the debate.

This makes a welcome relief from Greens trying to engage the other political parties.

These parties  usually make 'mouth movement sounds' about worrying and caring about climate change --- but then quickly turn to more familiar divides from the 19th and 20th century.

Yep, the good old Left/Right divide.

These politically minded people don't hate or fear Greens, may even admire their passion and commitment a little.

But damagingly, they largely dismiss them as a one-issue party, seeing them as more a protest group than a real multi-issue political party.

the old Left/Right Divide

They ignore Greens ---- the worst thing that can happen in politics.

Let me contrast this with the democratic socialists.

In most countries they were almost immediately seen as the major threat to the existing parties, even when their popular vote and seat winning was almost non-existent.

Only the United States (which characteristically preferred to fear secret conspiracies from the Communist socialists) tended to ignore its homegrown democratic socialist parties.

In Canada, in the early 1960s, in older, rural areas - like the Maritimes where I grew up, democratic socialists got very few votes except in the industrial or mining areas.

 But they were never ignored.

Socialism was seen as a fully relevant alternative to capitalist parties in modern,urban, industrial cities --- but were just dismissed as irrelevant in the Maritimes' pre-capitalist, rural culture.

It was fully relevant intellectually (elsewhere), but currently irrelevant electorally (locally).

Today, the position in the Maritimes is reversed --- socialism is seen as fully relevant, if not increasingly dominant, electorally.

But intellectually it is irrelevant : seen as a mildly more reformist version of the other mixed economy parties which themselves have moved their positions closer to those of the democratic "socialists", in practise if not yet in rhetoric.

Left or Right still exist in rhetoric, but are irrelevant in practise.

Their ideologically passion has all drained away.

The only ideological passion found on Earth today is not found in the chat rooms of leftish or rightish parties.

Instead, it is found outside our current formally organized parties, in the chat rooms of the environmentalists and their sworn enemy/soul mates, the deniers.

The old Left/Right divide was global in its dimension but not in its substance.

the new Global divide

Both left and right agreed on their underlying hegemony: Modernity's industry and technology would grow an ever bigger pie.

One Hegemony : Modernity but two ideologies : Socialism and Capitalism.

Because Left and Right then fought viciously over who deserved more of that ever growing pie : workers or bosses ?

The fight then, intellectually at least, was an internal family squabble (albeit played out with real guns in much of the world).

Worrisomely, the current divide between Green and Denier is much wider : they live within wildly different, parallel, hegemonies in our post-hegemonic world.

This conflict could easily end in bloodshed - not just between the sides, but within both camps..

Our best hope is that many of the deniers turn out to be mild skygods, really more like high technology-consumed Earthlings and that many of the greens do not reveal themselves to their green brethren as having skygods beliefs.

(Briefly - too briefly - an Earthling is committed fully to staying on planet Earth no matter what , while a Skygod is willing, nay eager, to ditch Earth 1.0 and start a new Earth 2.0 on Mars or elsewhere.)

The second thing that is different about the new global divide is that it literally a division of opinion about the Globe - its condition now and where that condition is headed.

So now we have an entire world divided ideologically and this is very new. Remember the Canadian Maritimes - it could ignore the Left/Right wars because it was only fitfully a part of a modernizing, urbanizing, industrial world.

Most of the world in the first half of the 20th century - albeit  poorer in income and education and in serious demographic decline - fitted in that category : they could avoid having a serious pony in the Left/Right divide.

But who can avoid having an interest in and an opinion on the fate of the planet they live on ?

Wait, wait !

It gets even more complicated. Because we are not just 6.7 billion onlookers in this battle : we are 6.7 billion foot soldiers in it as well.

It is our individual lifestyle and consumption habits that will settle this issue : not the tiny bit that national government politicians can do to alter our consumption habits (and still win re-election).
William Wordsworth's take

I am a political science graduate, a long time political activist, organizer and candidate, with a strong interest in the history of politics and I can tell you this is not like anything the world has seen before.

It is a whole new ball of wax and I am just so excited to be here as it happens, exploring it as it unfolds, rather than simply reading about what my fore bearers experienced, from a history book.

Our post-1989 world feels, to a Green, like it must have felt to Radicals in the post-1789 world, or to Socialists in the post-1889 world: simply alive with pregnant, exciting, new possibilities.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!--Oh!

Opinion divides on our troubled "Lifeboat Earth" : Bail It or Bail Out ?

Earthlings say that Lifeboat Earth is sadly afflicted --- by Climate Change above all, but also by all sorts of other rapes against our Earth's biosphere.

 But if we but start right now to change our ways, there is still time to gradually bring our planet back from the point of no return.

Bail it ; bail it for all your worth !

It is the only lifeboat that we know of in the Near Universe (or beyond) that sustains Life, all life, from the biggest human civilization right down to the smallest bacteria.

Skygods will say, in sequence, a number of things:

Our world is robust, not troubled, this is just a blip in Nature and the Earth will right itself, if left alone (particularly if left alone by the Left.)

Then : yes we have few - minor - problems caused by human technology but new human technology can just as easily solve it.

Relax !  Go back to drinking the Kool Aid, its fine, we're just stopping to pick up some more ice.

Next, as conditions hit a crisis that even reaches inside their 'gated world' : The investment 'climate' on Earth 1.0 has worsened - time to de-invest and time to re-invest in Earth 2.0 on Mars --- but only if government creates the right 'investment climate' for private capital to save Humanity.

 Time to bail out !  ...... but if only if the taxpayer bails out the carbon companies, first .....

VICTORIA's CHILDREN : skygods versus earthlings

      Queen Victoria's long reign is frequently divided into two periods.
       The Early Victorian Age was from 1837 when she became Queen until 1870 and the end of her 10 years of mourning over the death of her husband Albert.
       1870 is generally regarded as both  the low point - and turning point - of her popularity.

      Because in the second period, Victoria I became uniquely popular world wide.
      So while this period from 1870 to her death in 1901, is usually labelled as The Late Victorian Age, it doesn't represent a diminishment of the age.
      Rather - and rather ironically - it came to represent what we think of today as characteristic of the most exuberant form of Victorianism.
    Part of the reasons for that characteristic exuberant flavour was the astonishing technological breakthroughs made in the 1870s and 1880s in many different areas of daily life.
    It was Queen Victoria's unfailing optimism and unflagging interest in new inventions that made these potentially-disturbing new machines socially respectable in this extremely carefully cosseted age.
   SVE is particularly interested in the scientists and technologists of this late victorian period, the generation born between 1870 and 1901, Victoria's children :  *skygod technology versus earthling science* .
    As I like to say, SVE is all about those scientists born after the birth of the dynamo and dead before the birth of disco : the men and a few women who ran our world between 1939-1945, if not before that, and who dominated intellectually until the mid-1960s ...

"Houston we have LIFE - a million years away"

    When Mariner 4 snapped its pics of Mars in July 1965, the delusion of humans living on other planets should finally have died - but it didn't.
    Bad ideas need perpetually teenage boys with bad arithmetic skills - an item never in short supply.

     Now some astronomers are willing to bet their primary lens to support their belief that they have discovered an "Earth-like" planet, 100% certain to hold "Life".
   I think they are being way way way too conservative - "Life" - if you mean simply bacteria - probably doesn't need anything as human-friendly as Earth to survive upon.
   But if in fact - wink, wink/ nudge,nudge you really mean Life=Humans, and I think most of these scientists do mean that but lack the courage to say so, then I think they are dreaming in Technicolor.
   Kool-Aid colored Technicolor.
   Take GLIESTE 581G, a planet that astrophysicist Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz says  is 100% certain to contains "Life" and is also "Earth-like".
   No taxpayer-elected politician in today's or tomorrow's Congress is going to blew trillions of dollars into the air , simply to see if some invisible bacteria are clinging to grains of sand deep in some gully on Glieste 581G, so the key to this press-announcement of professor Vogt is the really that magic-dust word ,"Earth-like".
   We humans being hubris-ridden from birth, we instantly associate "Earth-like" with "humans-will-like-it-there".
   Glieste 581G doesn't seem, on closer examination (albeit at a very great distance) to be a near-exact Earth-clone, which is what human-like life probably needs to survive and enjoy itself.
  And distance from us ?
  Well, its a 400 trillion kilometre trek to get there and back.
   At about the fastest speed we have ever put an object into space (not one holding human cargo) that is a million year trip to get there and back.
    One million years of deep space cosmic radiation falling upon the lucky human colony inside that Star Trek vehicle ----- won't the DNA in their sperm and eggs be well and truly fried by time they arrive !!
     That is why I am an Earthling and why the Skygods are my sworn enemy: they all seem to be scientist-wannabes with too much calculus and not enough arithmetic....
 

the LIBERTARIANS versus the LIMITERS

     I find the term 'denier' just a tad oblique: what these people deny, most fundamentally,is the idea of any limits on their freedom, aka humanity's potential, all bow down.
     (This is the latest variation of the age old war over the limits, if any, to the physical manifestations of humanity's rational and imaginative mental powers.)
    I prefer a variety of terms, some of them my neologisms, others are commonplace and readily understood.
    For example, Libertarians versus Limiters (rather than Deniers versus Doomers).
     Libertarians are fully comfortable with - only comfortable with - the familiar 'old shoe' of 19th Century Science of  Newton and Dalton and Darwin and Euclid that is still the only science being taught in most 21st century schools.
     By contrast, Limiters being those who ignore their high school teachers and who accept the latest findings of the science that there are definite biological and material limits (restraints upon) to humanity's potential.  
    Or Cartesians (dualists who see Man above Nature) versus Commensalists (Humanity entangled within Nature.)
    Why not Pie-in-the-Sky Utopians/Idealists versus Down-to-Earth Realists?
   Lab scientists versus Field scientists, aka Natural Philosophy versus Natural History?
    Plato versus Aristotle.
    Small "l" liberals versus small "c" conservatives.
    And finally - and obviously - Cartesian Sky Gods versus down-to-earth Earthlings.
    While it is an age old battle, this century is different.
    Because it is no longer simply a case of one philosopher debating another philosopher.
     Rather it is the fact that one side is, at last, fully able to try out its theory upon the world and the other side is busy crying out " Please God - dont ! - your experiment will go deadly wrong and destroy the only lab - the only world - that Humanity has."
   I will report this battle fully, fairly, but always from the general side of the commensalists, limiters and earthlings, making no bones that I am hoping ,above all else, to alter the course of that battle in my side's favour....

This un-civil war of words is "The News Story of the Century" and it is 3000 years old ...

    On one side : the SKY GODs , utopians clinging to outdated science, all to bolster their denial of any limits to humanity's potential in a limitless Universe.
   On the other side: the EARTHLINGs, realists accepting the newest science, believing that the Earth is a rare, perhaps unique, human-friendly planet that nevertheless operates under biological and material restraints that must be obeyed.

   On the question of whether humanity's carbon pollution of the atmosphere will change our climate in highly de-stabilizing ways, these two sides are better known as Deniers versus Doomers.
    I believe the new science brings us much good news along with the bad.
    The new post 1945, post-modern science's central metaphor of global commensality says that 'all life on Earth dines at one table, shares but one lifeboat' , that all life survives by taking in each other's laundry - recycling scarce biological resources over and over.
   It reassures us that Life has endured some hard knocks on Earth over the last 4 billion years, but it has surmounted them and flourished - by not having its grasp exceed its reach, Robert Browning to the contrary.....

Harper: Let those Eastern Bastards DROWN in the Dark

     HALIFAX  Threats of rising sea levels kinda look different at the American University of Calgary, the intellectual uterus of the Deny-Me-Nots* and the Sky Gods* currently running the Canadian national government.








     The University of Calgary is a kilometre above sea levels and so feels little of the worries that shoreline residents here in Halifax are experiencing over the rising ocean level threats caused by human carbon pollution of the atmosphere.
     (The biggest single site source of that carbon pollution: Alberta's Tar Sands...)
     So forget Premier Ralph Klein and his promise to enjoy watching 'Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark'.
    Now Calgary can sit back and watch as the east 'drowns in the wet'.
    Mind you, if southern Alberta prove to be as bone dry as climate science scientists think it might become, thanks to northern Alberta's Tar Sand carbon pollution, a little of that wet might go down a treat at a 2040s era suds night at UCal's Economic Department....

     ******  Okay we differ - alright ?!
     You call it the climate change war, between deniers and doomers.
    I say that is just a part of a much bigger and older war- the age-old battle over Limits, a battle between Sky Gods and Earthlings.
   I am on the side of the Earthlings : because accepting 'global commensality' as reality means accepting that we humans are deeply embedded within all life on earth and all life on earth dines at one table, sharing a strictly limited recycling of scarce biological resources.
   The High Modernists continue to act like Sky Gods, believing humans are high above Nature and above Nature's biological restraints and material limits.

     I always wonder if the leading Deny-Me-Nots were spoiled rotten as young children, because their highly vocal objections to any sort of restrictions on their rights to do as they please with their dog, their truck, their woman and their planet seems at times pathological or at the very least, deeply rooted in their primeval subconscious.
    The rumours of High Modernity's death in 1945 have been greatly exaggerated. High Modernity still wins the support of the majority of humanity.
  What happened in 1945 and again between 1968-1973, was that its Hegemony was challenged.
   Now there is an ever-growing minority, maybe you among it, who reject it and all its claims.
    If so, please continue to read "Global Commensality NEWS", to learn more about the good news prospects for our planet....

Science under the microscope: the old BIG question versus the new BIG question

   GCR is not at all interested in the old BIG question that animated so many researchers for so many years : how exactly are scientific discoveries  made ?
   The new BIG question for ordinary citizens/activists as well as for those academics in the areas of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPST), is this:

 How exactly are scientific discoveries made popular ?

   Not made public, mark you well : how are they made popular - popular enough in some cases to overthrow the old paradigms of not just professional scientists but of all world culture.
   In particular, GCR is driven to find out why the startling discoveries made in science between 1895 and 1935 are still not popular science.
    Popular as in, 'found in public school teaching and textbooks' or as in 'found in the mindsets of politicians,newspaper editors and CEOs - not to mention their voters,readers and customers.'
  Why did it take the Apocalypse of 1945 to even begin the process of popularization?
   And if Modernity did fall in 1945 as 'everybody* claims', why is it still alive and well in the 2010s - in fact, a very fit competitor to its fresh young replacement - Global Commensality ?
   (*Albeit the Deniers yet have not addressed this question, but rest assured - when they do ,they will deny this consensus as well. )
   Peering through this historical prism, GCR tends to see the current debate between Deniers and Doomers as a re-hash of the old,old debate between Sky Gods and Earthlings, from the time of WWII...

KEPLER 22-B, write back if you read this.....

Michael Marshall

It will be at least 1200 years before we get your fastest reply, so I might not be around to read your missive.

Still, don't they say that it is the thought that counts ?

There may well be human-like life on planet KEPLER 22-B but it is 600 light years away from us --- which is probably why they don't come to visit us very much.

But writing?  Is it too much to ask that you at least write your fellow-humanoids once in a while?

Tell us how things are on KEPLER 22-B, or least how they were , 600 years ago.

It'll be like us getting a note from 800 AD Gaul talking about the start of the Dark Ages but by the time we get it, we're seeing the start of the Renaissance and the end of the Dark Ages.

Worse, by the time they get our reply, they are in  21st Century France and are so, homme, post this Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modernity thing.

"We're all so commensal now, mec."

Humanoid to Humanoid conversation can get a little disjointed at such long distances apart - talk about your troubling long distance romances !

His picture is of a young handsome guy and you get your hopes up , until you remember he's been dead, for like what ? - at least 550 years !

And your love letter is going to be read by his descendants 600 years later - that is if they can still read that old-fashioned version of their language.

I - personally - couldn't care less if there are rafts of livable planets out there, filled with people almost exactly like us --- except they are dead/were dead 600 years earlier.

But clearly this sort of stuff gets a lot of SKY GOD scientists excited - a lot more excited apparently than tidying up the ecological mess they - and they alone - created on this planet.

This earthling find this disaster-bound planet exciting enough to handle ---- I don't want to waste time visiting  -or even trying to talk to - to any other planet that is 600 or more light years into my distant past....

SKY GODS versus the earthlings : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

There is a famous story - possibly part of Hollywood's  Apocrypha -  about how the dross that we used to see on TV actually came to be.

"I have a vision, a vision", says the bigtime TV producer as he 'does lunch' with some hapless TV writer , "I see a man in a dusty pickup truck somewhere in the South West". "Can you write a series around that?"

And of course Mr Big Time will later make the big dough and the big fame as the 'creator' of the series concept, while the writer ends up eating baloney in some low rent motel.

Well I ,too, "have a vision, a vision" for my book - in particular - the book cover.

The book cover background is a gradient of subdued blood red at the top changing slowly into a subdued green yellow at the bottom.

In big letters across the top, filling the width - in the garish colors of every 1940s Sci Fi cover - will be the words:

SKY GODS

(All in upper case.)

In fact, everything about the book cover is designed to evoke and guy-up those over-the-top 1940s Sci Fi covers : from the unsubtle flat bright primary colors to the razor-jawed heroes and ravishing women.

Immediately below and under that lettering will be three bombers, equipped with the supposedly war-winning NORDEN BOMBSIGHT, rising in an arc from left to right, filling the width, dropping bombs into the blood red sky,flames and smoke.

Inside the bombers, of course, are all those 20 year old Pierre-Simon Laplace-like bombardiers, coolly sealing the fates of tens of thousand of invisible civilian 'dots', from 25,000 feet up.

Next are these words, in a little smaller type and only occupying the center of the width:

versus

And a line below them , again in smaller type but this time filling the width:

the earthlings

(Yep, all in lower case.)

Below and under the words is an image of three patients in wheelchairs, arms linked upwards in a victory gesture, surrounded by  three cheering friends.

On the left, its Charlie (Aronson) the first ever patient to receive penicillin-the-antibiotic, with Dr Tom Hunter (polio survivor) to the left of him, leaning on his ever-present crutches.

Despite his polio and those crutches, American student Hunter still coxed the Cambridge team against Oxford , at a time and place when winning the Nobel prize was almost as good as winning the rowing cup...

Charlie is a life-long sucker for any life-threatening illness the strep bacteria can throw at him but has survived them all - including his second bout of the normally invariably fatal SBE - once again responding well to Dawson's penicillin.

This cat may have used up a lot of his nine lives but he is about to need one more - a severe stroke (which he will again survive) awaits him a week or two from now - but for today, he is grinning broadly.

A shit-eating grin. And why not?  There is much to celebrate and Charlie has been along for the long ride, right from the start.

 Charlie has a penicillin bottle IV and the over-sized bottle is well above him, casting a big yellow circle of light against the subdued green (1930s hospital green) background.

If the glow looks like a solar monstrance in some dimly lit Orthodox church, well that is no accident.

In the center is Doctor D (Martin Henry Dawson) the doctor who brought the world the naturally grown penicillin that we still use today.

He had worked for years with the musty-moldy smelling soil bacteria and fungi that give us natural penicillin and his lab and office literally had a freshly-turned earth smell so calling his tiny team 'the earthlings' seems oddly appropriate.

He is dying, dying of MG (Myasthenia Gravis) , has been dying  almost ever since he started this penicillin project back in September 1940.

One characteristic of MG is that patients with really severe cases undergo many life-threatening Myasthenic Crises , where breathing becomes almost impossible.

 Even after they are stabilized, they remain on Oxygen Bottle Assist and are kept in a wheelchair until the crisis has truly passed. This is one of those times.

Dr Hunter is not just Dawson's clinical assistant in the penicillin project, he is also Dawson's personal physician - helping his boss save others' lives or saving his boss's own life, as circumstances dictate.

But today is Dr Dawson's personal day of triumph.

He has heard that his arch opponents, Dr Alfred Richard and Dr Chester Keefer, have finally thrown in the towel and will now permit penicillin to be used in thousands of American and Canadian civilian hospitals.

It is late April 1944, and penicillin has yet to undergo its first mass clinical trials ( that will only come about on June 6th, on the beaches of Normandy) but already, thanks to Dawson's example, PFIZER is producing more naturally-grown penicillin than anyone could ever have thought possible just months earlier.

Meanwhile Dr Richards's fair haired child, synthetic penicillin, still seemed as distant an illusion as ever, despite all the taxpayers' money thrown at the problem.

Behind Dawson is his wife Marjorie - born with a bad hip, which no amount of painful operations have helped and she must often use a cane to get about - today is one of those days.

Over to his right, also hooked up to a strangely glowing yellow penicillin IV bottle high above her, is HH , the young woman for whom Dawson broke the law and took on all his colleagues and the wartime American government --- all in an effort to save her.

The stolen penicillin was never enough and the course of her illnesses, as Dawson was wont to say, was 'stormy' .

Even as she beat off the SBE , the spread of its infectious fragments through her blood stream had cost her an eye and the use of her ovaries. But now thanks to new bigger supplies of penicillin there seemed to be no more pockets of infection hiding anywhere in her body and she would soon be discharged home.

She too had the same shit-eating grin as Charlie and all the others. Again, why not ?

It was the story of  her dramatic recovery - and of the normally meek and mild Dr Dawson actually stealing wartime government penicillin to save her - that had spread like wildfire through the 10,000 member strong medical community in tri-state New York and had led to further dramatic incidents that finally broke the penicillin story worldwide and brought PFIZER on side.

To her right is an unremarkable looking man - an accountant of a man - also holding onto his two crutches for support.

His name is Floyd Odlum and he is one of the richest men in the world  ---- and one of the best known  husbands-of  in the world.

An odd combination.

His wife is Jackie Cochran - glamerous, smart, tough, one of the world's fastest, best, pilots - winning all kinds of speed records and even beating the world's best test pilots at their own game.

Floyd?

He may look like a mild accountant but who said accountants can't also be smart ?

For he made all his money during the Great Depression, when everyone else was losing their shirts.

Super-Rich, a strong Republican - but also a real patriot with an eye for  helping the little guy.

So the Big-Corporation-Owner-to-end-all-Big-Corporation-Owners has the unlikely job of trying to see that small businesses got a few crumbs from the war contracts going almost exclusively to the nation's top fifty corporations - because without contracts and their material allotments these small businesses would have to fold up.

The awesome stress of trying to work inside The Beltway has given him an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which brought him to Dawson, because Dawson's, real, day, job is to head up a famous Arthritis Research Clinic.

 Odlum began getting involved in the beginnings of a patient-centred American Arthritis organization -- which kept him connected with Dawson.

 He had grown interested in, and supportive of, Dawson's small pioneering home-grown penicillin project: even helping him to recover, after a grave operation that failed to cure Dawson's MG.

So, the image I wish to leave you with is six cripples - six people who should be 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' . Losers.

 Losers and worthless 'dots' , in the eyes of the SKY GODS in particular.

But far from being despondent with their fate - the six 'crips' are grinning ear to ear  ---- and why not ?

For the wartime triumph of naturally-grown penicillin is a signal Triumph of the Weak , well set to rebuke the Triumph of the Strong doctrine promoted by Sky Gods all over the world during the war.

Finally, at the bottom of the book cover, in as big a font as the one used for SKY GODS is:

1939-1945

Now, let's see if that very tiny visual artist stuck inside of me is actually capable of pulling this all off...

Original of SKY GODS versus the earthlings:1939-1945