Hate hides behind gates but Hope is a boundless community

When Canada's first elected Jewish politician, Ezekiel Hart, tried to take his seat in Parliament back in 1808, he was kicked out - something was covering his head, the more conservative minded MPs complained.

Whether its 1917 or 2015, hate comes with frontiers designed to keep new ideas out

Briton (cum Canadian cum American) Anglo Saxon Supremacist Peter Brimelow and Australian (cum British cum Canadian) dog whistle wedge electioneer Lynton Crosby are the past and present intellectual inspirations for Canadian politician Stephen Harper.

Digital Niqabs of angry male commentators

What names and personalities lies behind the physical niqabs of the few young women who wear them in public in Canada ?

Human equivalents to microbial HGT : Open Access, Open Data, Open Source, PD, Copyleft, Creative Commons ?

There are many reasons for the microbes not just surviving on this planet for four billion years but also dominating it.

Horizontal Gene Transfers (HGT) as a model for human survival

Incredibly small, usually immobile, fragile bags of mostly water : they hardly sounds like creatures capable of giving advanced human civilization, circa the 21st century, a vital formula for surviving the worst the Cosmos can throw at us.

Nova Scotia-born Dalhousie graduate awarded Nobel for Physics

It is fair to say that Canadian-born scientists have had fewer than expected Nobel Prizes in physics - only two.

Both, interestingly enough, were awarded to scientists born in tiny Nova Scotia.

Allies reluctant to help the small and weak - even more reluctant to let them help

Dawson offered 'hope for all' --- with 'help from all'

The WASP patricians (FDR and Churchill among many) running the Allied show during WWII could find it embarrassingly hard at times to bend down to help small and weak peoples in desperate need.
But at least this wartime task fitted in with their peacetime traditional notions of patrician obligation to extend charity to others.

What they and their ilk couldn't accept at all was the truly radical idea of accepting charity offers from the weak and the small designed to help them, the rich powerful leaders of rich powerful nations, not to lose the war against the Axis.

So they'd repeatedly indicated they would rather lose the war to fellow white man (Hitler) than win it with masses of darkie infantry troops.

'Share the wealth' with the small via a meagre trickle down, was always much more to their taste than to fully share responsibilities (and power) with the small.

At first glance, Dr Martin Henry Dawson's wartime Manhattan-based project to try and save 'the least of these' in medical priority lists, 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' (the young patients dying from SBE) seemed to fit in well with the patricians' notions of charity to the weak and small.

This despite the fact that it involved saving a category of patients that the patricians of the medical elite had already decided would be among the first to die by 'benign neglect', as they began triaging the priorities in the Allied war medicine effort.

But Dawson also totally rejected the medical consensus to wait for a medicine made by the white man, even if it only came after the war, rather than use medicine made by Nature's 'darkies of the darkies', the tiny microbes.

He gladly turned to them instead and these small and weak beings successfully made the medicine that saved both the small and weak in wartime and also the healthiest, wealthiest and most powerful among us in peacetime : natural penicillin.

Eighty five years later, we're still waiting for White Man's artificial penicillin and the little darkie bugs are still making natural penicillin and all the other beta lactam antibiotics that form the bulk of our defences against fatal infectious diseases.

If we had instead waiting for the WASPs to get their act together, most of us would have died on infections by now....

'Hope without Borders' , 'Hope without Frontiers' --- the other Manhattan Project is STILL not finished

In late 1943, many people all over the Allied world rightly got very furious when they realized that the new hope that lifesaving penicillin represented was only going to unfaithful husbands and boyfriends who had got a dose of the clap overseas.

Hope without Frontiers

For Dr Henry Dawson's Manhattan-based 'penicillin-for-all' Project which began in the Fall of 1940 actually hoped to do two 'good things', first do something good for all of the small of the world and secondly, to do good by also inviting in all the small of the world to help make it happen.

All this really to make a much larger point to the Allied leadership.

That point was that a military-only approach to defeating the Axis wasn't likely to work, if the Allied coalition remained as small as it was in 1940 and remained as non committal as it was in putting its back into it.

In addition then, the Axis needed to be combatted, the Allies rallied and the Neutrals brought on side by also fighting on the moral front.

And here the world was quite rightly cynical that all of Winston Churchill's high sounding radio rhetoric and all the paper behind FDR's Atlantic Charter was really just 100% NATO : no action, talk only. 

But a "Big Tent" approach, one that honestly sought to invite in all the small and the weak in the world into the Allied effort, as helpers and as people to be helped, would remove that impression.

Penicillin diplomacy, the flying of penicillin around the world to save lives, regardless of their race, gender or social status, would be the quickest (and frankly, the cheapest) way to make that claim credible.

Dawson's unwavering conviction came from his belief that his scientific results was superior to that of the current "pop science" consensus.

That consensus basically held to a view, however cloaked in soft sawder and velvet, of the 'survival of the fit', that might was always right, bigger was always better, God always on the side of the Big Battalions.

This consensus gave anyone of empathy and conscience the resigned sense that, regrettably, the small were Nature's inevitable losers and couldn't be saved even with the best will in the world.

Dawson felt he had a new explanation (what we today call HGT) as to why the small (microbes) were still around two billion years later while the mighty (dinosaurs, for example) were but a passing flash in Nature's pan.

Basically HGT, to put it into human terms, was as if the microbes opened up the biggest of Big Tents in times of crisis, rather than running blood tests on the few they trusted to fight the fight (the human and Allied/Axis approach).

HGT allowed genes traditionally viewed as 'useless' and unused by human researchers, say the ones to allow microbes to resist an antibiotic, to spread very rapidly among all the various and very different microbes species - horizontally.

As result no microbe species is at all pure, all are totally mixed hybrids - and judging by two billion years of survival, all the better for it !

(I might add that the extended penicillin family genes also spread, via HGT, from bacteria to bacteria and then into the fungus family as well.)

Penicillin without borders

Think of HGT as spreading hope throughout the entire microbe world, regardless of borders or frontiers.

It might just be the meme we need to adopt today if the Earth and humanity is to survive human created ecological disaster....

Can WASPs save the Earth all by themselves - or are they ruining it, all by themselves ?

The world's environmental problems are way too big for 5% (or is it 4% or less ?) of the world's population who are WASPs (people like good old like Chip and Buffy down at the old country club) to solve all by themselves.

In fact I think one can argue that it was the WASPs who initially caused most of those problems.

The Republicans' mentally-gated community 

But the Republican Party, the Canadian Conservative party and other fellow travellers aren't dealing with these pressing environmental and climate issues.

They're too busy instead trying to shore up the privileged positions still held by the dwindling number of WASPs in the global Anglosphere and in North West Europe.

Its hopeless really, right from the start, mostly because the WASPs aren't breeding anymore - down to one or none kids per couple.

We simply can't afford to let 5, 4, 3 or 2 percent of the world's brains dominate the solutions to problems that their forebears largely caused.

Conflict of interest, for a start.

But, moreover, what the Earth really needs is a Big Tent of all possible talents working up a set of possible solutions, not some half-baked scheme casually thrown together over drinks inside a shrinking mentally-gated community of aging WASPs.

Because perhaps the best single solution to our global climate disaster might have been inside the head of a little three year old 'terrorist' that the Canadian Conservative Party won't let in and instead left to drown on a Turkish beach...

The right to wear kool-aid Orange hair, harper Blue tattoos up and down your arms, Green safety pins or a bright Red niqab ---- I support a girl's 'right to party' , anyway she wants to

And if I help lose an election for saying that, so be it -------- so fracking be it.

For a truly 'big tent' country should know no frontiers .....

Dawson's 'Penicillin without Frontiers'

If Vannevar Bush and Winston Churchill had had their way, penicillin would have become a secret and exclusive weapon of war, just as DDT and atomic energy became during WWII.

But penicillin escaped this fate, thanks to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's "Big Tent"  Manhattan Project.

Dawson thought that natural penicillin - cheap abundant "PD" penicillin - should be made available to all in the world in need of its lifesaving properties.

Particularly during a total war against a evil Axis.

As a concrete example of how the Allies really were different from Hitler - and not just differing only in their high-sounding (but ultimately hollow) rhetoric.

Doctors without Frontiers didn't emerge formally for twenty five years after Dawson's premature death, but if he had lived, he would have cheered its birth to the rafters....

Janus Manhattan : a Big Tent or a Big Gate ?

Isolationist Manhattan and Isolationist America began right after WWI, when American voters rejected the League of Nations, rejected the idea of the whole world working together as a team, giving their 110%, to solve conflicts and prevent war.

In the mid 1920s, America erected an anti-immigration Big Gate in New York harbour, to keep all sort of darkish people out.

Emma Lazarus's Big Tent Manhattan faded, replaced by Gordon Gekko's Gated Manhattan.

Soon refugees from Hitler's terror were also being kept out, as American Isolationists (the majority of the American population) worked overtime to appease Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo.

Medical Isolationists was also strong trying to defeat Social Medicine on every front.

Basically because Social Medicine advocates, people like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, fundamentally see no borders, trying to help those in need where ever they might be, totally anathema to Isolationists and Appeasers.

Wall Street was even worse on the appeasement front, happily selling Hitler the technology and parts he needed to build his Amerika bomber and A9/A10 to bomb.... Wall Street.

No,isolationist capitalism won't ever bury itself ---- but bomb itself ?

No problem....

Dead nations never rise again? Hitler and Longfellow certainly felt so about Zion (Emma Lazarus disagreed, as did Henry Dawson regarding the 'certain' deaths of his Jewish SBEs)

When Emma Lazarus read Longfellow's otherwise moving poem about the old Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhone Island, she hated the concluding line that - with Social Darwinistic finality - flatly stated that dead nations (ie Zion) never rise again.
Emma promptly wrote a poem on the same Newport Jewish cemetery that said, au contraire, America was the new Zion.

I like to think that Dr Henry Dawson caught a little of Emma's determined spirit in his own later Manhattan Project when he told his critics that his (frequently Jewish*) SBEs were 'swimming, not drowning'.....

*By surname, I'm convinced that four of the six SBE patients of his for which we have names, were Jewish...

A NEW Manhattan project to solve our human-caused environmental crisis ? Oh God !

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...

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.

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...

Foreigners worked behind barbed wire fences to build atomic bomb and V2 rocket that America and Germany later claimed as totally their own

Allied America was not terribly different from Axis Germany when it came to employing hands and brains from dozens of foreign lands, often behind barbed wire fences, to do the heavy lifting for a super weapon they then had the chutzpah to claim as fully their own.

The atomic bomb project represented one vision of the future of world, one where the many labour so the few can benefit : think of it as country club Manhattan.

Big Tent Manhattan

Dr Henry Dawson also invited the small and the many in to labour on his Manhattan project as well.

But in this case, he worked to ensure that the benefits of that project (natural lifesaving penicillin) went as well to the small and the many, not just to the few that the Allies had originally intended it for.

His vision was of a world consisting of 'coalition of all possible talents' working to benefit all : think of it as Big Tent Manhattan.

So did Janus Manhattan's 1945 beacon shine dividedly forth to a tired and huddled world.

What, in the end, was that beacon to reveal : a vision of a Big Tent for all, be they powerless or powerful ----- or a vision of an exclusive country club, just the powerful ?

Fourth Wave Feminism : older, less educated, rural, conservative, white men oppose niqab because (wait for it !) it "oppresses women"....

Not because their deepest nightmare is the thought the darkie immigrants might someday re-populate the lands their aryan ancestors had wrestled away from its darkie aboriginals a century earlier, in a sort of a 'Revenge of the Melanin'.

Rather familiar to anyone writing about the opponents of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, this particular brand of hypocrisy.

As in the Fall of 1940, when American medical Isolationists used the excuse that they were preparing for the possibility of intervening to help the small people of Europe (albeit many years too late), as an excuse to stop intervening to deal with the health issues of the small people of America...

I refuse to go especially to places, just in the hope that the trip might reveal what residents of that place looked ,and acted like, almost a century before ...

I'd never go on a walk or a run just for the sake of running and walking, but I will walk anywhere in any weather, if walking gets me to something I want to go to.

(I am also very cheap and hate to pay for taxis and its almost the same when it comes to spending money on our  quite cheap local transit service.)

So I didn't take any special trips to Pictou, Truro, Montreal,Vancouver, Detroit, the UK, New Jersey and New York City, etc, to research the life and times of Martin Henry Dawson.

Oh yes, I have been to almost all the places of great significance in Dr Dawson's short life, but only in passing, while attending to other affairs.

But if my brother hadn't got serious ill, I doubt I would have ever travelled to NYC, en route to his home in Belfast Northern Ireland, for example.

I guess I don't want to get into the bad journalistic habit of over-selling the claim that viewing the exteriors of the buildings of 2016 Truro will tell you a great deal about the interior lives of the residents of 1896 Truro...

On WWII's equivalent of the internet, no one knew that Dawson's project was a dog

Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' might not have been hurt as much as one might think by being before the age of the internet and with tight wartime censorship keeping its successes out of the scientific and popular media.

In times of little real (uncensored) news and with the official version too upbeat to be trusted, person-to-person gossip is often reviewed as perhaps most reliable source of information around.

Gossip has no airs.

The gossip of the poor sounds the same as the gossip of the rich : it removes money and power from the conversation, it is the true 'Great Leveler' rather like today's internet.

Doctors don't gossip, of course : too unprofessional - and in times of war - too un-patriotic as well.

But as every patient knows, they sure do consult each other a lot - and thank God for that !

So it all comes down to the same thing really.

News of Dawson's penicillin success in beating the unbeatable SBE did indeed spread, by doc-to-doc 'consults', rather like wildfire through dry grass, all over the very large medical fishbowl in tri-state NYC, in the Spring and Summer of 1943.

When one well browned off young medical professional went to Citizen Hearst's largest paper to plead for some of this miracle cure, an evening paper that was the largest in North America and syndicated all over, the rest was history.

In 2015, it is clearly not wartime and so equal-to-rich-and-poor-gossip will never elect Canada's federal Green Party.

But the internet could - because on it, no one knows you are a dog or a barely above the fringe party.

But no, the Greens head out, every election, deliberately looking for walls to bloody their head against.

Local candidate signs is probably the biggest single election expense in Canada, bar none.

The Greens don't have enough money to buy enough, big enough, slick enough, signs or enough volunteers to put them up quickly or enough supporters who can find their website quick enough to request the 'tipping point number of signs early on' to really move votes to the party locally.

Leaflets ? Ditto. Too few, too unslick, too few volunteers, too slow to get them printed.

The same with all printed material - the media only wants slick PDFs of your party platform and a dead cow can bang those out as good as the fifty million dollar conservative party machine.

Matching the big guys big and busy local campaign HQs - ditto.

Matching the big parties' constant national leaders' tour requires your own jet and a huge advance organization and enough supporters to provide the constant rent a crowds.

The Greens can't do it, so shouldn't do it.

But what the official party can do and the unofficial supporters should also do - in spades - is create those short snappy, hard hitting, funny, posters, ads, testimonials, streeters, rants, songs, etc etc that go viral, cost nothing but brains and sweaty hard work.

You know the ones that never seem better or worse - when viewing online or by mobile - that the best the slick Toronto ad boys do for the two big parties.

Free - did I also mention they are free to make and free to post online ?

Who will this hurt?

Well the majority of the people in every party spend the majority of their working days pleading for enough money to pay their salary and a minority actually doing something to increase thir party vote.

Parties mostly operated by amateurs of good will will mean these people will have to get a real world job.

Even Stephen Harper had a real job - in a mailroom, once.

For a few months.

Turning him back into an amateur might unleash his well developed sense of humour which he now keeps well hidden.

I'd love to see him in the Youtube mode, of course along side 50,000 Green activists...

Dawson not asking why the move to WWII was started but rather asking - and answering - why it wasn't stopped

In the 1930s, Germany and Japan had big appetites and the means to war, at least upon smaller others near-by, to satisfy them.

Italy merely had a big appetite.

This we are all taught in school --- 'the causes of WWII'.

But is this a truly complete explanation for all of WWII - above all for its extraordinary long length and the almost surprising defeat of the victorious Axis ?

If 'the-rest-of-the-world-combined' had been seriously willing to war with 1930s Japan, Italy and Germany to stop their aggression, even 1940s Japan, Italy and Germany, the Axis would have been quickly defeated.

The Axis simply had far too little manpower and far too little strategic resources , even far too little capital resources such as existing factories, science labs, locomotives and merchant vessels - let alone enough tanks, planes and battleships.

What these three nations did have, along with their fellow travellers around the world, was boundless will power and self confidence produced by the conviction that Science and Nature was on the side of their aggression.

That ------ and the fact that their very large (but also very reluctant) opponents basically agreed with them on the science of the matter.

Martin Henry Dawson's 'other Manhattan Project' had nothing really new to say as to why WWII was started.

But by successfully challenging the science that united Allied and Axis, it had plenty to say as to why it wasn't stopped ....