If the gameplan of the Manhattan atomic Project is followed once again, foreigners will do most of the heavy lifting while America will gets most of the credit, the profits and the protection.
If we continue to rely on Vannevar Bush's way of thinking, of relying upon good old Chip and Buffy (and Gordie Gekko) down at the good old country club, we'll never solve this crisis.
We need an inclusive effort, not an exclusive one --- we need Emily Lazarus's vision of a Big Tent Manhattan, a coalition of the all the possible talents around the world, to save the whole world.
And let us never forget that the very first man-made global environmental crisis was the global fallout of atomic radiation from that supposedly so wonderful Manhattan atomic Project...
Showing posts with label manhattan project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manhattan project. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Penicillin-for-all was Emily Lazarus's Big Tent Manhattan while the America-only atom bomb was Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" Manhattan
Janus Manhattan 1945 : one secret Manhattan project to make an atom bomb only for America and another public Manhattan project to make penicillin for all.
One was Big Science for the few and the other was small science, nay tiny science, "homemade hope', for the many.
It almost was as if the ghosts of Emily Lazarus and Gordon Gekko were duking it out for the soul of Manhattan, America and the world...
One was Big Science for the few and the other was small science, nay tiny science, "homemade hope', for the many.
Big Tent Manhattan versus Greed is Good Manhattan
It almost was as if the ghosts of Emily Lazarus and Gordon Gekko were duking it out for the soul of Manhattan, America and the world...
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
The side of the Big Battalions brought us a mushroom cloud. And Death.
Also from Manhattan, the side of the small battalions brought us fungus juice. And Life.
Two very different Manhattan Projects indeed ....
Two very different Manhattan Projects indeed ....
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Posts factual backstory to a fictionalized ("based on actual events ") libretto
I well recall the very first time I first read, in the book "YELLOW MAGIC", how five gallon carboys of incredibly delicate penicillium slime effluent were daily - and carefully - taxied through NYC's hellish traffic all the way from Brooklyn to a hospital at the top of Manhattan.
All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.
At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".
Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.
But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.
Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).
But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?
I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.
I began to see a sung-through pop-idiom musical, designed to be performed by amateur young people - High Schoolers and University undergraduates, or in church youth groups.
The musical would be set entirely in Dr Dawson's Presbyterian Hospital,in the period between October 1940 and August 1944 (with the final scene, in May 1945, set at his other hospital, the Goldwater).
In each of the musical's thirty scenes, the actors not singing at any particular moment would miming silently but broadly the appropriate physical activities for that scene.
The supporting actors would play many different roles, but within one broad type, indicated by three different colored garbs : patients and their families' green johnny shirt, good guys' white lab coat, bad guys' blue suit jacket top etc.
But the few actors playing the main roles ---representing (a) key individuals who were also (b) present through most of the four and a half years of the actual events --- would remain the same.
The facts of the story says there were only about seven - two patients and the four to five members of Dawson's tiny team.
Dawson's real life opponents were very many and each appeared in his part of the hospital too infrequently to be accurately cast as Dawson's 'main opponent' in the musical.
Think of them as a broad collective, "The Suits", rather than anyone living breathing individual.
A huge screen at the back of the stage would play faux newsreel type film footage, setting the contemporary context that month of the war for each scene.
I have long felt that amateur-oriented plays that force all would-be actors to be part of the live drama excludes many amateurs who might convincing play roles, if put in a situation where their role is filmed without a live audience, in little bitty takes, with opportunities for many retakes and then 'fixing in the edit.'
So this all this background newsreel material should be obviously recreated, clearly faux and well 'guyed up', to fit in with the staginess of the rest of the musical.
The volume of these backstage pre-recorded "voices & sfx off" would automatically dip down ("ducking") whenever the front stage live actors sing or talk in brief asides.
Spoken asides only, because there is no dialogue but plenty of feisty alternating singing duets and trios.
A single scene might have as many as six different solo voices and I very much see the voices as being untrained and of widely different timbre and singing capability.
This differing vocal timbre and vocal capability will help muchly to convey the conflict between the differing stakes for each person in each scene.
Instrumentally, the verse, chorus, bridge, intro, outro, solo etc remains much the same on each repeat but the lyrics above won't (though their vocal melody remains the same.)
But these differing lyrics will remain lyrically coherent because they remain fixated upon the same issue/conflict, merely expressed slightly different takes on it, upon each repetition.
For example, a patient gets bad news and expresses horror about her situation the first time her verse music comes around, then resignation the second time and finally a renewed commitment to fight it on on the third go around.
The music below her vocalizing, in terms of melody, metre , tempo, etc sounds roughly the same but is actually subtly different - going from minor to major, faster slower, etc to reflect her changing mood.
Basic opera stuff really (cantabile and cabaletta) but the music and the lyrics are more like Michael Stipes's verses in such songs as World Leader Pretend or Night Swimming.
It is singing but it sounds almost like conversational ad-libbed thinking aloud.
Currently, opera and musicals, to my mind, are self-hobbled by making an earlier technical requirement (the need to be profitable required big theatres which meant big voices before the era of microphones) into an aesthetic choice towards prioritizing big voiced singing.
I simply want them to embrace microphones in the same way they embraced electric lighting and the use of the internet to sell their tickets.
But before you can fictionalize a real life story, your potential Musical goers must know that real life story --- because half the fun is seeing it compressed artistically to wring out every last emotional bone in it.
So this blog's fact-correct posts (the more narrative ones in particular) will do that.
I don't plan them to become a book in the conventional sense ( but again as they are all in the Public Domain, for the Public Good, so others are free to do just that).
But for times away from a connection to the internet (and for those people who simply hate reading anything lengthy online), I will bundle the six or so character vignettes that represent the events of each scene seen from a wide number of perspectives, into little EPUBs and printable PDFs of about 10,000 words each.
Five acts, each representing about a year's worth of events but also representing the real life 'ups and downs' in the real life dramatic arc.
Thirty scenes, each set on one particular day but incorporating the backstory since the last scene ; each with about six separate character vignettes.
About 300,000 words in total.
The libretto to the "based-upon-actual-events" Musical, I will eventually publish, as a book, albeit into the Public Domain.
I will try, in words, to describe the music I hear for each set of lyrics.
But I doubt very much that I will actually try to write out the musical notes ----- or try to sing the complete demo of the Musical.
Let others fill out my skeleton ----- or reject it entirely.....
All in a desperate effort to save lives and how, despite best efforts, the material often arrived destroyed and perhaps another life lost as a result.
At that moment, I shouted out to Rebecca : "MOVIE, MOVIE, MOVIE - finally a science story just made for the Big Screen !".
Too often a movie about an incredibly important science breakthrough has to compress time and 'gussy-up' the long drawn out and usually boring activities to make it dramatic enough for the camera.
But Dr Martin Henry Dawson's little Manhattan Project was a story so incredibly cinematic they would actually have to tone it down to make it seem creditable.
Others, I am sure, will make movies of Dawson's efforts (lots of movies because my writing has all been assigned to the Public Domain).
But I won't take any part in it : why set my sights so low ?
I began to see that Dawson's tale was really the tip of a much bigger story and that cinema's commitment to realism would only graze the surface of its emotional core.
I began to see a sung-through pop-idiom musical, designed to be performed by amateur young people - High Schoolers and University undergraduates, or in church youth groups.
The musical would be set entirely in Dr Dawson's Presbyterian Hospital,in the period between October 1940 and August 1944 (with the final scene, in May 1945, set at his other hospital, the Goldwater).
In each of the musical's thirty scenes, the actors not singing at any particular moment would miming silently but broadly the appropriate physical activities for that scene.
The supporting actors would play many different roles, but within one broad type, indicated by three different colored garbs : patients and their families' green johnny shirt, good guys' white lab coat, bad guys' blue suit jacket top etc.
But the few actors playing the main roles ---representing (a) key individuals who were also (b) present through most of the four and a half years of the actual events --- would remain the same.
The facts of the story says there were only about seven - two patients and the four to five members of Dawson's tiny team.
Dawson's real life opponents were very many and each appeared in his part of the hospital too infrequently to be accurately cast as Dawson's 'main opponent' in the musical.
Think of them as a broad collective, "The Suits", rather than anyone living breathing individual.
A huge screen at the back of the stage would play faux newsreel type film footage, setting the contemporary context that month of the war for each scene.
I have long felt that amateur-oriented plays that force all would-be actors to be part of the live drama excludes many amateurs who might convincing play roles, if put in a situation where their role is filmed without a live audience, in little bitty takes, with opportunities for many retakes and then 'fixing in the edit.'
So this all this background newsreel material should be obviously recreated, clearly faux and well 'guyed up', to fit in with the staginess of the rest of the musical.
The volume of these backstage pre-recorded "voices & sfx off" would automatically dip down ("ducking") whenever the front stage live actors sing or talk in brief asides.
Spoken asides only, because there is no dialogue but plenty of feisty alternating singing duets and trios.
A single scene might have as many as six different solo voices and I very much see the voices as being untrained and of widely different timbre and singing capability.
This differing vocal timbre and vocal capability will help muchly to convey the conflict between the differing stakes for each person in each scene.
Instrumentally, the verse, chorus, bridge, intro, outro, solo etc remains much the same on each repeat but the lyrics above won't (though their vocal melody remains the same.)
But these differing lyrics will remain lyrically coherent because they remain fixated upon the same issue/conflict, merely expressed slightly different takes on it, upon each repetition.
For example, a patient gets bad news and expresses horror about her situation the first time her verse music comes around, then resignation the second time and finally a renewed commitment to fight it on on the third go around.
The music below her vocalizing, in terms of melody, metre , tempo, etc sounds roughly the same but is actually subtly different - going from minor to major, faster slower, etc to reflect her changing mood.
Basic opera stuff really (cantabile and cabaletta) but the music and the lyrics are more like Michael Stipes's verses in such songs as World Leader Pretend or Night Swimming.
It is singing but it sounds almost like conversational ad-libbed thinking aloud.
Currently, opera and musicals, to my mind, are self-hobbled by making an earlier technical requirement (the need to be profitable required big theatres which meant big voices before the era of microphones) into an aesthetic choice towards prioritizing big voiced singing.
I simply want them to embrace microphones in the same way they embraced electric lighting and the use of the internet to sell their tickets.
But before you can fictionalize a real life story, your potential Musical goers must know that real life story --- because half the fun is seeing it compressed artistically to wring out every last emotional bone in it.
So this blog's fact-correct posts (the more narrative ones in particular) will do that.
I don't plan them to become a book in the conventional sense ( but again as they are all in the Public Domain, for the Public Good, so others are free to do just that).
But for times away from a connection to the internet (and for those people who simply hate reading anything lengthy online), I will bundle the six or so character vignettes that represent the events of each scene seen from a wide number of perspectives, into little EPUBs and printable PDFs of about 10,000 words each.
Five acts, each representing about a year's worth of events but also representing the real life 'ups and downs' in the real life dramatic arc.
Thirty scenes, each set on one particular day but incorporating the backstory since the last scene ; each with about six separate character vignettes.
About 300,000 words in total.
The libretto to the "based-upon-actual-events" Musical, I will eventually publish, as a book, albeit into the Public Domain.
I will try, in words, to describe the music I hear for each set of lyrics.
But I doubt very much that I will actually try to write out the musical notes ----- or try to sing the complete demo of the Musical.
Let others fill out my skeleton ----- or reject it entirely.....
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Progress = Plenticide
In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
Sunday, May 10, 2015
A Complicated Triumph
The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.
For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.
One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.
We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.
A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms - scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.
Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.
Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.
So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.
And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.
And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.
In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.
And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.
And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.
So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.
But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...
For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.
One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.
We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .
WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality
By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.
A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms - scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.
Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.
Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.
So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.
And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.
And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.
In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.
And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.
And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.
So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.
But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Manhattan natural penicillin Project a psychological antidote to the mental horrors unleashed by the Manhattan synthetic nuclear Project
In 1945 and 1946, many thoughtful people began realizing that human ingenuity had produced a nuclear bomb system powerful enough to kill an entire planet - a green (rather than merely a mineral-containing) planet that they had never really regarded as alive enough and fragile enough to be killed , until now.
For they began realizing that what Manhattan's Bomb's explosive force, searing heat and mutation-causing radiation could do to humans it could also do to all other living things.
They began to realize that meant that the few humans lucky enough to survive both the nuclear blasts and the following radiation clouds would still slowly starve to death .
The instantly blast & heat-killed would end up being the truly lucky ones.
Because if all the plants and animals were totally dependent on our good sense not to be burned and boiled to death in a human nuclear holocaust, we were still as equally dependent upon them, for our basic survival needs.
For all that bold talk of replacing natural foods, water and biologically-produced materials with synthetic substitutes was just windy talk : it was all highly dependent on there remaining a civilized, industrial, scientific, technological, world left to produce those chemical synthetics.
Fortunately, Mother Nature still had a lot of low tech surprises of her own to offer us : one had only to look at Manhattan's natural penicillin and all those other powerful life-saving antibiotics emerging from jungle dirt and spoiled market fruit.
These thoughtful people began to relax - at least a little : there was hope and there was an alternative to the modern science's madness.
Janus Manhattan : home to the modern and to the postmodern science Projects ....
For they began realizing that what Manhattan's Bomb's explosive force, searing heat and mutation-causing radiation could do to humans it could also do to all other living things.
They began to realize that meant that the few humans lucky enough to survive both the nuclear blasts and the following radiation clouds would still slowly starve to death .
The instantly blast & heat-killed would end up being the truly lucky ones.
Because if all the plants and animals were totally dependent on our good sense not to be burned and boiled to death in a human nuclear holocaust, we were still as equally dependent upon them, for our basic survival needs.
For all that bold talk of replacing natural foods, water and biologically-produced materials with synthetic substitutes was just windy talk : it was all highly dependent on there remaining a civilized, industrial, scientific, technological, world left to produce those chemical synthetics.
Fortunately, Mother Nature still had a lot of low tech surprises of her own to offer us : one had only to look at Manhattan's natural penicillin and all those other powerful life-saving antibiotics emerging from jungle dirt and spoiled market fruit.
These thoughtful people began to relax - at least a little : there was hope and there was an alternative to the modern science's madness.
Janus Manhattan : home to the modern and to the postmodern science Projects ....
Saturday, March 7, 2015
35 word Elevator Pitch about a thesis
Why do so few thesis end up as the basis of mega billion dollar Hollywood blockbusters, Emmy-winning TV series, enduring Broadway musicals or global chart-topping hit songs ?
Just maybe, because after working on a thesis for ten solid years, their authors find it hard to reduce it all to a mere ten second and thirty five word elevator pitch.
But here it goes anyway :
Manhattan's Janus-headed "Double V" victory (atomic bomb autarky vs penicillin commensality) that ended the last global disaster (WWII), still hobbles the boomer generation as they now lead our world and must confront the new global disaster, the Sixth Extinction.
Just maybe, because after working on a thesis for ten solid years, their authors find it hard to reduce it all to a mere ten second and thirty five word elevator pitch.
But here it goes anyway :
Manhattan's Janus-headed "Double V" victory (atomic bomb autarky vs penicillin commensality) that ended the last global disaster (WWII), still hobbles the boomer generation as they now lead our world and must confront the new global disaster, the Sixth Extinction.
Tuesday, March 3, 2015
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.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
A "Double V" triumph indeed : one a victory by humanity against Nature and the other a victory of humanity with Nature.
And they were victories by the Allied world alone - unlike radar and jets, scientific and technological breakthroughs that the Allies shared with the Nazi war machine.
a Janus-headed Victory
As a school kid of the postwar era (and in tandem with every other schoolchild of my generation), I was educated to illogically savour that conflicted Double V triumph.
To share both in the victory of the big and powerful against the small and weak atom ----- and in the victory of the big and the powerful together with the small and weak microbe.
But the illogic of that yoked Double V couldn't hold together forever and by the time of my young adult years , it had begun to give way.
For what academics call the eras of Modernity or of Postmodernity can be better - more succinctly - described as synthetic autarky against Nature or non-synthetic commensality with Nature.
The inconsistent character of the Double V triumph over the last global disaster (WWII) explains the inconsistent response of my generation , the counterculture generation, as it leads the world and faces the current global disaster , The Sixth Extinction.
A counter culture well over thirty and that has become "The Man"
A generation convinced it should never trust anyone over thirty , never trust "The Man", is itself well over thirty and is itself "The Man".
Because the children born between 1941 and 1966 are now the ones within the dominant voting years - those citizens most likely to vote, the voters between the ages of 50 and 75.
This age group will now determine elections all over the world by dominating the numbers of the relatively few voters who consistently bother to get out and vote.
And we simply don't know how this generation of voters and leaders - my generation - will react on the question of preventing The Sixth Extinction.
For the generation that marched for civil rights for minorities, gays, women, the handicapped and marched against nuclear war has - by and large - not marched to defend the Earth against the rapacity of advanced human civilization.
The personal is political, is public
Over the years, as a political and environmental activist, I have puzzled , read and researched over this inconsistent failure within my generation.
I was eventually driven back to my earliest school years and beyond, in seeking an answer.
For I am fully a child of wartime Janus Manhattan.
Someone who grew up totally in awe of the synthetic atomic power from massive power plants that would soon power my future but also totally in awe of the life-saving antibiotics derived form Nature's smallest and weakest, medicines that had repeatedly saved the Strep-afflicted lives of my family and I .
Janus Manhattan's Children, the book and the blog , thus is as much a private memoir as a public history .
The first volume will take in the years 1940 to 1946 and will be a history of wartime's Janus-headed Manhattan Projects--- a period of time when I wasn't even born to be an eye witness but one that shaped decisively my postwar upbringing.
The telethon that changed my life
The second volume will cover from July 1957, when my first childhood memories of public events began to September 1961 when I began reading adult-oriented news magazines and adult-oriented books, becoming rather adult-like, virtually overnight.
It will centre around a simply fabulous B&W* telethon for Rheumatic Heart Disease I saw one night in those years and never forgot.
(In both senses of that term !)
And don't ask me exactly where or when - I can't remember with any certainty but the fact that I thought, at the time, that the filmed people might be dead ghosts suggests Victoria BC ,between 1957 and 1959,when I was very little - only between the ages of five to eight.
My family just caught the telethon one evening when the weather was iffy but just right --- so we could get American TV from across the border loud and clear.
It was a new-to-me mix.
First, working class - minority - teenage rheumatic heart victims cum musical singers, very much alive and lively, testifying emotionally at the front of the stage.
In between singing a heady mix of gospel or blues or rock and rock or country.
As a middle class kid living in a middle class neighbourhood, these were not (yet) 'my kind of people'.
Awkwardly 'assisting' them were some upper middle class doctors and head nurses.
Directly behind and above them was ghostly-silent historic film footage of when they were very sick teenagers in hospital, dressed all in scary white garments like their doctors and nurses.
Figures I have said that the small me wasn't certain were not actual dead ghosts with the people up front these ghosts brought back one night to assist this charity telethon.
Meanwhile the on-stage band nosily riffed away, like a congregation at a Pentecostal church, commenting on both the silent film action and the emoting singers.
Altogether, it simply blew me away -- I was never a big fan of music as a small kid but this oratorio like blend of fact-based talk and emotional singing and playing was much more my cuppa.
The first early - miracle years - of antibiotics, kiddies, wartime suddenly stopped being something remote and distant that my parents and teachers had often talked about without ever exciting me - to something very real, very close, very scary and yet very hopeful.
In a sense the telethon simply retold the events of Volume I, but from a child's mind view rather than from the viewpoint of an adult author.
Volume two will thus be more of a personal - childhood - memoir, reflecting upon the impact public events had on the awaking of my pro-commensality conscience.
Both are works that I am driven to research and write.
Driven as much by my own private attempts to understand my own generation's upbringing as by shared public concerns over our fate - concerns held by many before and after my own generation ...
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb
For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.
A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.
Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !
Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.
But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?
One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.
This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.
This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.
We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?
Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.
So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?
The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.
The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).
Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.
There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.
But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.
So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.
During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.
Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.
In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.
If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.
Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.
But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.
Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?
In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?
Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?
Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.
Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.
Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.
Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.
Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....
A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.
Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !
Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.
But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?
One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.
This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.
This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.
We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?
Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.
So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?
The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.
The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).
Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.
There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.
But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.
So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.
During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.
Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.
In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.
If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.
Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.
But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.
Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?
In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?
Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?
Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.
Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.
Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.
Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.
Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Researchers - not data - change
The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.
But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.
For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.
But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.
They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.
But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.
I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.
And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.
I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.
After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/
But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.
For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.
But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.
They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.
It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky
But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.
I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.
And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.
I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.
After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945
Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
Friday, January 23, 2015
WWII Columbia filters natural penicillin AND natural uranium
It is easy to see how Columbia University's two wartime Manhattan Projects differed : after all one saved countless thousands of lives while the other one caused countless thousands of deaths.
But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.
Because, in truth, most of the top Allied physicists focused all their pride on the Washington State based efforts to artificially synthesize Plutonium to make endless amounts of nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.
They found this far more exciting than Columbia's painful war-long efforts to filter out tiny amounts of natural U-235 from its more plentiful kissing cousin natural U-238.
Similarly, the Allies' top chemists found the thought of artificially synthesized penicillin far more exciting than they did thinking about ways to aid the painful efforts to separate tiny amounts of pure natural penicillin from all other metabolites thrown up by the penicillium fungus.
(Though I must remind readers that while U-235 won't go BOOM if it remains mixed with U-238, natural penicillin - like the Vitamin C in oranges - works equally well pure or if still mixed with the rest of the penicillium juice.)
Both the natural uranium bomb and natural penicillin needle ended up being the classic understudy Plan Bs, the ones that came in at the last minute to save the Allied bacon when the synthesists failed to deliver as promised ...
But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.
Because, in truth, most of the top Allied physicists focused all their pride on the Washington State based efforts to artificially synthesize Plutonium to make endless amounts of nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.
They found this far more exciting than Columbia's painful war-long efforts to filter out tiny amounts of natural U-235 from its more plentiful kissing cousin natural U-238.
Similarly, the Allies' top chemists found the thought of artificially synthesized penicillin far more exciting than they did thinking about ways to aid the painful efforts to separate tiny amounts of pure natural penicillin from all other metabolites thrown up by the penicillium fungus.
(Though I must remind readers that while U-235 won't go BOOM if it remains mixed with U-238, natural penicillin - like the Vitamin C in oranges - works equally well pure or if still mixed with the rest of the penicillium juice.)
Both the natural uranium bomb and natural penicillin needle ended up being the classic understudy Plan Bs, the ones that came in at the last minute to save the Allied bacon when the synthesists failed to deliver as promised ...
Saturday, January 3, 2015
1945 Janus Manhattan gives boomer children a morally muddled legacy
The mixed birthright of The Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : nuclear death/penicillin life
But those who felt that Janus tug and pull most intensely I believe were my generation (cohort more accurately) : those of us born between 1940 and 1956.
This is because we few felt the waning of Modernity and the dawning of Postmodernity in our very bones as it all happened during our crucial formative years when our personalities were as plastic as our rapidly growing bodies.
We are starting to die off now and it is time to put into the historical record exactly what it felt like to be the healthiest most scared generation of children ever ....
dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"
An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:
(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)
Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.
But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.
We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.
We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.
Only our selfish wills.
We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .
That janus year in the eternally janus city.
The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.
By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.
Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.
We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.
On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.
With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.
We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.
But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.
Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.
As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.
My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...
Friday, January 2, 2015
Manhattan's janus children, transitional era boomers born 1940-1956
I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.
Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.
Because we all knew that if the MANHATTAN nuclear PROJECT didn't kill us from instant global death then the MANHATTAN penicillin PROJECT would likely ensure we'd live out our allotted three score and ten or more.
Everyone alive after 1945's janus-like delivery of atomic bombs and penicillin shots is in some sense Janus Manhattan's children - because we all have had our lives potentially lengthened and shortened by those twin warring developments from Columbia University's campuses in 1940s Gotham.
So to say we have absolutely no interest in this subject, is really to say that we have no interest in where we came from - or where we are going ...
Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.
Because we all knew that if the MANHATTAN nuclear PROJECT didn't kill us from instant global death then the MANHATTAN penicillin PROJECT would likely ensure we'd live out our allotted three score and ten or more.
Everyone alive after 1945's janus-like delivery of atomic bombs and penicillin shots is in some sense Janus Manhattan's children - because we all have had our lives potentially lengthened and shortened by those twin warring developments from Columbia University's campuses in 1940s Gotham.
So to say we have absolutely no interest in this subject, is really to say that we have no interest in where we came from - or where we are going ...
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city
Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.
It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.
To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.
Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.
But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.
(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)
Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.
For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.
Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.
So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.
And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.
Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?
It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.
To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.
Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.
But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.
(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)
Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.
For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.
Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.
So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.
And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.
Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?
'Running against New York City' secret of OSRD and NAS wartime success in Washington
In 1940 New York City and New York State were at the very height of their power in the United States.
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.
But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.
In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.
So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.
The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.
They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.
More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.
So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.
They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.
Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.
J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.
If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.
But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.
But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.
In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.
So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.
The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.
They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.
More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.
So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.
They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.
Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.
J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.
If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.
But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....
Monday, December 29, 2014
Manhattan's OTHER Project : Gotham's penicillin un-superheroes (and why they are ignored by academics)
If another secretive, undemocratic, big science Manhattan Project is more likely to cause a global environmental disaster (think nuclear winter or geo-engineering) than prevent it - then does the experiences of wartime Gotham have anything at all to still teach us, as we face global climate meltdown ?
Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.
Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.
Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.
Now I sometimes joke that the only reasons the Scandinavians didn't give a joint Nobel Peace Prize to Stalin and Hitler was because the Nordics ran out of time - the guys died first.
But joking aside, the Nobel prize choices have rarely stood up well to the test of time.
Admittedly, Mr Nobel's naive requirements that everything significant that is discovered or invented was brought to mass use or mass knowledge by no more than three (still living) individuals does force the Nobel prize selection committees into mindless contortions.
Still - what of earth were the Nordics thinking - or not thinking - when the medicine committee gave the 1945 Nobel prize for penicillin to Fleming and Florey ?
After his 1928 discovery, Alec Fleming's main contribution was to tell everybody within earshot (for 15 wasted years) that penicillin would only work if used as a topical antiseptic (it doesn't work well there) and would NEVER work if taken internally (when in fact it works miraculously well there.)
Moreover he said it would never be useful for patients until artificially synthesized when in fact it never has : all clinical penicillin and the bulk of all of today's antibiotics (yes even today !) are still derived from natural penicillin made by fungus.
In this particularly obtuse claim, he was more than fully supported by chemist manque Howard Florey.
In fact Florey led the Allies' wartime charge to repeatedly try and to repeatedly fail to make penicillin by artificial (patentable) methods, rather than to simply produce enough natural (public domain) penicillin to meet current desperate wartime needs.
And Florey and Fleming, both strong supporters of the Conservative Party, fully backed the Conservative politicians in Britain's wartime coalition government who wanted to limit wartime penicillin production to only lightly wounded front line troops.
None for severely wounded troops or any home front civilians in Allied nations and colonies; none for civilians in Neutral, Occupied or Enemy countries - none for Allied POWs, let alone for enemy POWs !
All this because it had been determined that diverting British resources to set up enough British natural penicillin bottle plants in unused buildings to supply all military and civilian needs for the world (and thus to secure a postwar Pax Britannica based on this wartime humanitarian effort) would cost about ten million pounds.
And that was also enough for at least one or two more additions to Bomber Command's already many heavy bomber squadrons.
Since 1932 and Prime Minister Baldwin's famous speech, it had been become the 40th Article of the Conservative Party faith that 'the bomber always gets through' and that destroying people and not saving them was the Conservative way to the moral high ground and winning any war.
But what really made wartime penicillin the world's best known/best loved medicine is that as the last dying act of the New Deal, a new Pax Americana had suddenly made cheap non-patented (natural) penicillin abundantly available to all - wartime friend and foe alike.
But none of these good guys , none of the Americans (and a Canadian) centred in NYC who were mostly responsible for this boon to humanity, ever received a Nobel Prize or public acclaim for the miracle of cheap-penicillin-for-all : only the bad guys.
Because the good guys' approach couldn't have been more different than the atomic Manhattan project.
They were open about their intentions and pragmatically and morally committed to saving the little guy. They wasted little taxpayer money and resources and instead combined a 'little science' approach with a ruggedly low tech engineering style.
All of this was anathema to academics (including non scientists like historians) who wanted to ballyhoo the supposed wartime triumphs of heavily taxpayer funded basic science-big science as a way to getting the taxpayer to permanently fund their postwar hobbyhorses.
So - in a brazen conflict of interest and in violence to the known facts - academics have tended to give all the penicillin acclaim to the big science advocates (cum penicillin bad guys).
To those who were actually most dedicated to keeping wartime penicillin a much delayed, scarce and patented exclusive drug.
So Drs Florey and Fleming in Britain , along with Drs A N Richards and Chester Keefer in the States , got all the acclaim.
Logrolling is what they call this sort of stuff it in politics - I don't know what they call it inside the ivory tower bunker : false weighting of the scales of evidence maybe ?
Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.
Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.
Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.
Now I sometimes joke that the only reasons the Scandinavians didn't give a joint Nobel Peace Prize to Stalin and Hitler was because the Nordics ran out of time - the guys died first.
But joking aside, the Nobel prize choices have rarely stood up well to the test of time.
Admittedly, Mr Nobel's naive requirements that everything significant that is discovered or invented was brought to mass use or mass knowledge by no more than three (still living) individuals does force the Nobel prize selection committees into mindless contortions.
Still - what of earth were the Nordics thinking - or not thinking - when the medicine committee gave the 1945 Nobel prize for penicillin to Fleming and Florey ?
After his 1928 discovery, Alec Fleming's main contribution was to tell everybody within earshot (for 15 wasted years) that penicillin would only work if used as a topical antiseptic (it doesn't work well there) and would NEVER work if taken internally (when in fact it works miraculously well there.)
Moreover he said it would never be useful for patients until artificially synthesized when in fact it never has : all clinical penicillin and the bulk of all of today's antibiotics (yes even today !) are still derived from natural penicillin made by fungus.
In this particularly obtuse claim, he was more than fully supported by chemist manque Howard Florey.
In fact Florey led the Allies' wartime charge to repeatedly try and to repeatedly fail to make penicillin by artificial (patentable) methods, rather than to simply produce enough natural (public domain) penicillin to meet current desperate wartime needs.
And Florey and Fleming, both strong supporters of the Conservative Party, fully backed the Conservative politicians in Britain's wartime coalition government who wanted to limit wartime penicillin production to only lightly wounded front line troops.
None for severely wounded troops or any home front civilians in Allied nations and colonies; none for civilians in Neutral, Occupied or Enemy countries - none for Allied POWs, let alone for enemy POWs !
All this because it had been determined that diverting British resources to set up enough British natural penicillin bottle plants in unused buildings to supply all military and civilian needs for the world (and thus to secure a postwar Pax Britannica based on this wartime humanitarian effort) would cost about ten million pounds.
And that was also enough for at least one or two more additions to Bomber Command's already many heavy bomber squadrons.
Since 1932 and Prime Minister Baldwin's famous speech, it had been become the 40th Article of the Conservative Party faith that 'the bomber always gets through' and that destroying people and not saving them was the Conservative way to the moral high ground and winning any war.
But what really made wartime penicillin the world's best known/best loved medicine is that as the last dying act of the New Deal, a new Pax Americana had suddenly made cheap non-patented (natural) penicillin abundantly available to all - wartime friend and foe alike.
But none of these good guys , none of the Americans (and a Canadian) centred in NYC who were mostly responsible for this boon to humanity, ever received a Nobel Prize or public acclaim for the miracle of cheap-penicillin-for-all : only the bad guys.
Because the good guys' approach couldn't have been more different than the atomic Manhattan project.
They were open about their intentions and pragmatically and morally committed to saving the little guy. They wasted little taxpayer money and resources and instead combined a 'little science' approach with a ruggedly low tech engineering style.
All of this was anathema to academics (including non scientists like historians) who wanted to ballyhoo the supposed wartime triumphs of heavily taxpayer funded basic science-big science as a way to getting the taxpayer to permanently fund their postwar hobbyhorses.
So - in a brazen conflict of interest and in violence to the known facts - academics have tended to give all the penicillin acclaim to the big science advocates (cum penicillin bad guys).
To those who were actually most dedicated to keeping wartime penicillin a much delayed, scarce and patented exclusive drug.
So Drs Florey and Fleming in Britain , along with Drs A N Richards and Chester Keefer in the States , got all the acclaim.
Logrolling is what they call this sort of stuff it in politics - I don't know what they call it inside the ivory tower bunker : false weighting of the scales of evidence maybe ?
Sunday, December 28, 2014
Manhattan Projects cause (rather than end) global environmental disasters
The year of 1945 was an unalloyed triumph for modernity thanks to Allied big science's A-bomb decisively defeating the pre-modernity Axis.
But 1945 was also the start of post-modernity (and hence the start of the decline of the hegemony of modernity).
Because millions of people worldwide were repulsed by what the Modernity Project had done during the war - at Auschwitz , Katyn Forest and Hiroshima - and so had begun looking for ways wherein humanity worked with Mother Nature, rather than sought total control over her....
But 1945 was also the start of post-modernity (and hence the start of the decline of the hegemony of modernity).
Because millions of people worldwide were repulsed by what the Modernity Project had done during the war - at Auschwitz , Katyn Forest and Hiroshima - and so had begun looking for ways wherein humanity worked with Mother Nature, rather than sought total control over her....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...