Ramzi Yousef - and the British - mustn't be allowed to forge the last word on Manhattan's wartime role

Yes, a thousand times yes, many of the events that birthed the Atomic Bomb that killed 250,000 did in fact occur on Manhattan and in the surrounding Greater New York City area.

But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.

Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.

Moral equivalency : the Nazi Hunger Plan and Allied bombing of civilians

Not enough has been said about how Axis and Allied in WWII were motivated - first and last - by fears of the dysgenic consequences of another WWI style war.

To Germans, WWI was lost by the British blockade starving an undefeatable (militarily) Germany into surrender.

Not that Germany hadn't tried to remain well fed by starving the peoples of the lands it occupied - but clearly, as civilian Germany had still gone hungry and lost the war, they hadn't been nearly rapacious enough.

That wasn't about to happen in WWII  ---- the Hunger Plan against the Slavs and the Holocaust against the Jews were proof of that.

The Allies saw WWI as an event where the fittest sons of the fittest families had disproportionally died in combat while the unfittest stayed well fed and safe at home - safe at home to multiply endlessly.

An "Open Letter" to people who OPPOSE next year's celebrating 75 years of Antibiotics

While there are huge numbers of people out there who adamantly oppose vaccines flat out, most people only oppose the mis-use or over-use of antibiotics - as do all doctors and scientists.

But a few people quietly oppose antibiotics totally : those in the natural health field ,  who'd rather you'd spend your health dollars on healthy natural foods that keep your natural immunity at 100% efficiency.

Perhaps this lack of opposition to all antibiotic use, compared to the opposition to all vaccines, it is a measure of how stupid we humans can be at times.

Why else do we give a much greater weight to a drug that immediately cures us from an ongoing painfully fatal disease than we do to a vaccine that years earlier quietly prevented us from ever getting painfully and fatally sick in the first place ?

My mother, licking plates clean - and poor suffering Belgium

My only emotional link to Edith Cavell and Belgium is through my mother, back in the late 1950s.

My mother was born in Hungary and lived mostly on Windsor Ontario's public relief all during Canada's Dirty Thirties.

But she was an anglophile of a sort (read all of the Hornblower series at age ten !) and somewhere she had picked up that the starving-est people in the world - in the minds of middle aged Anglo Canada of the 1950s at least - were the Belgians.

"Finish all the food on your plate", she would constantly scold us , "Think of the starving Belgians."

So we did think of them - as best as our six year old minds could - and licked our plates clean.

To this day (my mother now dead) , I still think that not finishing your plate is akin to, but worse than , a war crime ...

Must we still CRINGE to London (and New York) ?

Must we in the backwaters of the former British empire still wait until London tells us its okay to mark the 100th anniversary* of the day that the news of nurse Edith Cavell's execution flashed around the world ?

And what if they forget and they don't - what then - must it go un-noted ?

And must we wait until New York tells us in the rest of the grateful world that it is okay to celebrate the 75th anniversary* of the birth of the Age of Antibiotics in their city ?

And what if New York forgets , like London , and does nothing - what then ?

Nova Scotia's glory days were actually during the cringing days when it was still a British colony  - its rapidly aging and declining population ensures it is ever faster becoming a global backwater.

But if I in backwater Nova Scotia want to join with other global backwaters to start the ball to mark Cavell's and Penicillin's big anniversaries , nothing should stop me.

And it won't !

* In both cases , the exact same day ---- October 16th 2015 

(The British have just announced Cavell will appear on a five pound coin)

Public Anniversaries linked to the exact same day : Edith Cavell's execution AND the Birth of Antibiotics AND the first peacetime Draft

Because Public Anniversaries tend to be marked in increments of 25 years after the event ( 25, 50, 75, 100 years later and so on) , big public events separated by a neat division of exactly 25 or 50 years apart tend to become quite linked in the public mind.

In Canada , because the two seminal events of nationality - Confederation in 1867 and the victory of the Canadian Corps at Vimy in 1917 - happened exactly 50 years apart , their celebrations always occur in the same year and are always mentally linked together as well.

Similarly , WWI (the war to end all wars) and WWII (its rematch) both began in the month of August exactly 25 years apart so these beginning anniversaries are always chronologically and mentally sadly linked together.

Like tens of thousands of young men and women world wide* , Dr Martin Henry Dawson symbolically started his military and medical career in high moral outrage on the morning of October 16 1915, when the newspaper story of nurse Edith Cavell's execution in Belgium first arrived on the world's breakfast tables.

The Axis/Allied plenticides of life and compassion

I see strong links between WWII and our current (human-driven) "Sixth Extinction" laying waste to the plenitude of Nature.

 The eugenic Nazis believed that the plenitude of humanity needed drastic pruning - starting with the Jews and Slavs.

 Their plenticidal crime was against the right of all humans to exist. 

The eugenic Allies/Neutrals told us to stifle our plenitude of compassion for the weak and the unfit - to limit our compassion to the fate of our own 'fit' .

 Their plenticidal crime was against compassion for strangers. 

My biographical subject ,Martin Henry Dawson ,("Manhattan Misfits") rebuked all three. His Manhattan Project ("Penicillin-for-All") originally hoped to save just a few strangers from an eugenic and heartless Allied medical establishment. 

It ended up rousing a nation and changed our whole world for the better -- forever.

Specialist - in depth - beat reporters - or just cheerleaders, captured by their sources ?

In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.

Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !

Why Charlie ? Why Miss "H" ?

Between September 1940 and April 1945, pioneering penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson treated about three dozen patients with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) or acute bacterial endocarditis (ABE).

So out of those three dozen patients , why on earth did I decide to focus on just two - one young man (Charles Aronson) and one young woman (Miss H H) ?

Oh Oh , Diversity & WWII : have I said a bad word ?

My claim that Martin Henry Dawson championed diversity in both microbiology and in humanity during WWII strikes many as simply incredible and non-credible.

"Triumph of the Unfit" : a WWII book whose heroes are women, Jews, blacks, cripples and immigrants

There are plenty of WWII books and sometimes even documentaries about the WWII experiences of minorities and the unfit.

Just not popular ones - not the ones promoted by the Big Six , Five , Four book publishers and the Big Six, Five, Four, Three TV networks with lots of gloss and big bucks for publicity.

The biggest readers of the glossy books and high-budget TV shows about WWII (War porn) are basically the same people who are big viewers of Fox News and big listeners of Talk Radio and big supporters of the Tea Party.

Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?

The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...

To answer my title's question : of course not.

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.

Morally and metaphorically, my book is about the 97 pound weakling who sticks a needle into the guy who once kicked sand in his face - saving his life !

In every book I have ever read about WWII , the small (4F)(unfit) (weak) get deadly sand kicked in their face by big bullies --- at home* as well as abroad --- for six long years.

Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.

(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)

But I think there is one exception:

The unlikely triumph of a small group of American 'unfits' who defied both Allied and Axis Eugenicists  (and their own physical failings) to bring us the blessings of cheap, abundant Penicillin-for-All .

All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.

It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .

A school musical for freaks, geeks, nerds, losers, misfits , the terminally uncool and the terminally shy

All the kids up on stage in way too many high school, college or Sunday school musicals are the same kids that run (ruin ?) the rest of school life.

You know the ones .

All they of the conventionally smart mind, faces neatly symmetrical & teeth gleaming white, from a family with money, physical fit and socially attractive and exhibiting a very successful love life.

My musical will be different - it is a sort of a "Revenge of the Nerds" but on a much, much higher moral plane and based upon a true story from WWII.

(I know - I know - won't the social studies department just love that !)

Action 4F hooks up with Action T4 : Allied and Axis eugenic ethics 'mate like minks' during WWII ...

Action T4

It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.

They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.

Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.

The NSA's worst nightmare : the 21st century's samizdat : paper ! : thumb drives, home printers & A6 pocket-concealable books

My A6 downloadable home-printable books (tracts ? booklets ?) are a deliberate 21st century continuation of the famous Little Blue Books , a multi-million selling series American books of social and cultural subversion that were insanely popular from the 1920s to the start of WWII.

Finally , a "GOOD NEWS STORY" from the bad news war

WWII was the disease,"Agape" penicillin its only cure.

 A dying doctor fighting off his own body and government.

Hanging on just long enough to change our world for the better - forever....

Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related

So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.

Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.

Big Pharma -Kos : sacrificing WWII's bumpy SBE patients as scapegoats to restore a streamlined conscience

Pharmakos were those unfortunates in Ancient Greece who happened to be poor and crippled and without any local, prosperous, relatives to succour them, who were thus forced into slavery, begging or petty criminality.

When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.

Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.

The three types of humanity in the early 1940s --- at least as people 'at the top' saw it

In 1940, those people with all the cultural hegemony and economic power found it intellectually easy to divide the world into just three groups.

Type A (themselves) were the smallest group : male and middle aged (generously if vaguely defined as lying between the immature young adult and the senile/impoverished elderly) and from their culture's dominant (and usually majority) ethnicity & religion and middle class or well educated and physically, mentally and morally 'fit' .

Type C , always a poor and repressed minority (and forming a majority only of history's victims of witch-hunts and scapegoating), were all those who fitted in none of these five categories.

Members of Type B , by far the largest group, fitted in at least one of these five categories and so could share , at times, the feeling that they were some small way part of Type A's in-group --- this is how the tiny Type A group maintained its social hegemony over the vast majority of people outside it.

Ie all whites, no matter how poor and uneducated, were in some sense were usually judged superior to even well educated blacks.

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

Unfitting-in : Penicillin-for-All overcomes the Allied-Axis groupthink

The academic cum scientific consensus supporting eugenics was once as widespread as the academic cum scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change is today.

I point this out , despite the fact that I do personally believe human activity is altering the climate and I do not believe that the concepts fit and unfit can ever be anything other than temporary and relative labels in a particular circumstance.

Just as the concepts of "inevitably left wing universities" or "inevitably right wing universities" are equally fleeting when set against the breath of time and were highly dependent on particular circumstances to be accurate.

Once , in many cities the only polling precincts that FDR ever lost were the university precincts - whereas today the only precincts won by losing Democrats in many cities are the university precincts.

Politics in the UK before our current era of post-modernism revealed much the same thing - the weakest seats for Labor used to be the university ridings.

Widespread groupthink (consensus) , particularly one that finds favour among the powerful , can always benefit from a ton of criticism by misfits, the unfit, the non-conformist, the naysayer and doubter, the gadfly, iconoclast and the deviant.

And if that consensus has a core of merit it will survive --- and in an improved form.

But when the current academic cum scientific consensus was that all such critics are ipso facto 'useless mouths' and 'life unworthy of life', as in the case of attempts to criticize eugenic modernity, what we have here sir is global groupthink on bad acid and in spades.

Under such circumstances , genuine differences of opinion become genetic-ized and biological-ized such that anyone who does not agree that only heterosexual married families with kids are 'normal' is probably themself a genetic deviant homosexual and shouldn't be allowed to reproduce -- let alone argue their case.

Similarly, capitalists and racists removed any potential criticism from the poor and minorities in advance by regarding them all as biologically unfit and hence unworthy of life let alone the right to criticize.

Eugenic supporters described many - quite openly - as biologically 'unfit'.

But eugenic supporters failed to admit that they also regarded these biologically 'unfit' as 'unfitting-in' with white Anglo Saxon Protestant middle class values - of not being team players in the great groupthink....

Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All

Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.

Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.

WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Misfits : despite Allies, Penicillin-for-All

Elites physically and mentally fit but morally unfit ....

Morally, WWII was a truly sordid war where in all the world's nations (with just a few sturdy exceptions) only fought the Axis if the Axis attacked them first.

Certainly that was the case of the two biggest neutrals or non-interventionalists, the USSR and the USA ,but it applies to all but the British Commonwealth as well.

And even in the Commonwealth , in places like Eire, Quebec, Afrikaner South Africa, Congress India et al, hundreds of millions were unwilling to fight the Axis.

Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude

"Too much information".

Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.

Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.

They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.

But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time  and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries  , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.

The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization  had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.

"Inside Agitators" : rebuking the Allies and Axis to bring us Penicillin-for-All

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, together with leading industrialist Floyd Odlum and doctors Thomas Hunter and Dante Colitti were - socially - 'insiders' of a sort in the Anglo-American establishment running the Allied side of WWII.

But all five were also physically handicapped in some significant way and so had an empathy for what others - establishment outsiders with physical and intellectual handicaps - were experiencing as the Allies took on aspects of the Nazis' harshly utilitarian approach to winning a Total War.

The MORAL miracle of WWII's Penicillin-for-All

In the context of WWII's values (on both sides) , the reality* of wartime Penicillin-for-All truly was a miracle - a moral miracle.

Correspondingly, it really is no surprise that this  miracle could only have been conceived by a bunch of 'misfits' doing a moral end-run around the 'normal' elite of America and Britain.

Misfits Acting Up : despite the Allies , Penicillin-for-All

What many call Eugenicide I call Plenticide.

That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".

It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.

Acting Up : even if you can't , sometimes you simply must

This story* is not a conventional adventure story --- where the hero and heroine are always handsome and physically fit.

Fit is important, because doing the right thing always seems to be both physically and emotionally arduous.

But in this story, the villains are villains precisely because they think of themselves as handsome and physically fit.

And based on that slender intellectual reed, they then go on to act like they regard anyone who isn't handsome and fit as having no right to be treated as a full member of the human family.

Why it took the efforts of seven "lives unworthy of full life" to finally bring penicillin to the rest of us ...

The selfless five of The Seven

Regard closely , if you will, the personal circumstances of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, his teacher wife Marjorie Dawson, doctors Dante Colitti and Thomas Hunter, industrialist Floyd Odlum.

For none of these five (out of the total of seven key - and handicapped - individuals who brought us all penicillin) actually needed penicillin in the early 1940s .

All would have had extra-privileged access to the scarce medication if they had needed it.

So their actions were purely of agape love for others, rather than as part of a patients' advocacy group.

So why were these few , a mere one out of five hundred million of all the people living on the planet in 1943 - so willing to "Act Up" to see that all those dying for lack of wartime penicillin should receive some of the new lifesaver ?

"Acting Up" : how we got wartime penicillin, despite the Allies ...

Wartime penicillin (discovered in 1928)  actually had two miracles.

The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.

Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...

WWII as a triumph of small science

Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science  --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.

But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.

With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science ,  not Big Science.

One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.

Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.

This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.

And then we all benefit.

Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.

This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases  --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.

So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.

Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.

Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.

The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.

(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)

The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.

(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")

If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.

If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.

Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.

Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.

Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the  hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.

If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.

D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production,  the war would be over.

The Seven Crips

The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.

Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.

Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.

Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.

The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).

The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.

(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)

But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.

People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.

The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.

So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.

The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.

The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.

Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.

And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .

A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.

The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.

Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.

Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.

And there it might of ended.

But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.

A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.

The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.

Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.

Small science ?

Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.

That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.

And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....

Oct 16 '40 : Dies Mirabilis , marking 75 years of Antibiotics and Draft registration

I might just do an Erik Larson and interweave Jack Kerouac and Martin Henry Dawson's experiences of that Dies Mirabilis, October 16th 1940, together in one book - and not separately as two books ...

Oct 16 '40 : for Jack Kerouac, a 1A's first ever Draft registration day was eventful ...

October 16th 1940 : Dies Mirabilis

As a husky football player from a poor family ,  John "Jack" Kerouac was not earning his usual drinking money that day by being part of the team of Columbia U football players hauling about tins of graphite or uranium for Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi's forerunner to the Manhattan Project .

Yes this gridiron hero drank.

Lord he drank , drank mostly to drown out memories of the painful prolonged death of his saintly slightly older brother Gerald,  from Rheumatic Fever in 1926 when Jack was only four.

Rheumatic Fever - and not the rather more famous polio - was far-and-away the leading killer of school age children, but it tended to kill the poor mostly .

(And because New York book editors are themselves rarely poor,  we don't hear much about this Sword of Damocles that hung over America's families for almost a hundred years.)

So with no tins of uranium to muck about, our future Poster Boy of the Beat Generation was instead enthusiastically obeying his legal requirement to be part of the historic registration process for America's first ever peacetime draft .

Oct 16 '40 and the 4Fs : Draft rejects them , Antibiotics succours them

I will have two books in my 'Agape Penicillin' series out in early 2015 -- they will be published simultaneously and hopefully reviewed together...

"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 years of Draft Registration : rejecting the 4Fs"

"Oct 16 '40 -- 75 Years of Antibiotics : succouring the 4Fs"

Aaron Alston - Antibiotics pioneer on '40 draft count but not on '40 census ?

In the Spring of 1941 *, the US Census discovered a major embarrassment : it counted far fewer young black men in April 1940 than did the draft registration process in October of that same year, only five months later.

Three percent of draft age men were missed by the census overall, but a whooping 13% of blacks - an even higher difference in the correct count in inner city places like Harlem New York.

This (fiscally important) undercounting of the poor and minorities has never really stopped and probably never will --- not if Republican congressmen have any say in the matter.

But it might mean a little bit of information on Aaron Alston may still be found found on the (sealed) US draft registration card made out for Alston October 16 1940 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center , the same day he was becoming one of history's first antibiotics patients.

Oct 16 '40 : marking 75 years of Antibiotics AND of Draft Registration !

The Draft (conscription) process tends to implicitly lay bare the utilitarian instrumentalism that form the true backbone of most civilizations - the values Christianity rose to oppose.

This is because how most ordinary people chose to interpret the results of draft board medicals.

They tend to regard only those people judged draft board 1As (as fit enough to fight for their country or to work in heavy war industries) are deemed worthy of full public praise and honour.

Draft Registration, October 16th 1940 : 75 years Young !

Due out in early 2015 is my book about the origins of America's 75 year old peacetime draft registration process.

It is another in my series of books on "Agape Penicillin".

If my book about the 'Dawning of Antibiotics' on October 16 1940 focuses on the 4Fs among America's youth, this book will focus instead on the 1As among her youth.

But I do not think it is odd or a coincidence that both events share the exact same 75th anniversary, right down to the day.

"Antibiotics, October 16th 1940 : 75 Years Young !"

My first book on "Agape Penicillin" ,  due out early in 2015 , is all about the brave Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Dawson) who first gave us penicillin the antibiotic.

It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.

I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.

I can confirm George M Conant of Middletown NY was third antibiotic patient in history !

A page one story in the Middletown Times Herald * of June 2nd 1941 recounts the details of flour mill salesman George M Conant's long and very dramatic  battle against subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE).

 That battle unfortunately ended in death, in New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian "Medical Center" on May 31st 1941.

Small town newspaper journalists everywhere , all take a bow : because this is the very first report, ever , detailing the fate of an individual patient receiving our now routine "antibiotics".

Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection

The known published facts are few

All the contemporary (1945 era) newspaper and book accounts - written by (or coming second hand from) participant eyewitnesses to the events themselves - make it clear that Martin Henry Dawson's first SBE/penicillin patient was a "negro" "man".

And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".

The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.

And that is all the published accounts show.

But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...

Is the male-dominated media biased as to which historical events get commemorated ?

The answer - unfortunately - is yes : male-dominated news coverage is still very gender-biased.

When it comes to commemorating violent versus beneficial historical events , it usually proves that male journalists are from Mars and the women from Venus.

And since most executive editors and executive producers are still men , guess which kind of historical events are splashed about and which get merely 'noted' ?

Wartime New York had two Manhattan Projects - one pioneering death-dealing atomic bombs and the other pioneering life-saving penicillin.

Both will be celebrating their seventy five anniversaries next year but it is quite likely that you will only see news stories about one of them.

Agape's TRINITY : dawning the Age of Antibiotics , October 16th 1940 , New York City

To female members of the media reading this blog : 

Another 16th day , July 16th 1945 , is considered the dawn of the Atomic Age , our new age of possible instant global death , and it is a day well marked by (male) historians and (male) journalists alike.

But who marked then - who will mark now (because its seventy fifth anniversary is next October 2015)  - of the dawning of a more hope-filled and life-saving age, our current Age of Antibiotics ---- if not you ?

Fungus cloud rises 35,000 ft over New Mexico desert as Oppenheimer intones "I am become death , destroyer of nations"

The Boys Own Manhattan Project

Trinity's famous FUNGUS cloud

The seminal image of the other Manhattan Project, the Boys-Own version , is of a lethal fungus cloud radiating forth , roiling and boiling as it ascended to 35,000 feet above the New Mexico desert . Down below , Dr Robert Oppenheimer intoned portentously "I am become Death, destroyer of nations".

Doctor Mom's Manhattan project 

Lifesaving MONSTRANCE of penicillium

Dr Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project ( the Doctor-Mom's version) also had its seminal image , also of a fungus radiating forth.

It was held aloft like some sort of Roman Catholic monstrance (albeit by devout Presbyterian layperson Dr Gladys Hobby in New York's Presbyterian hospital !) to offer hope and succour to SBE patients facing imminent death.

This lifesaving fungus radiated forth in all directions over a large Petri dish, with its golden droplets along the wedge lines in the green blue mold looking like the rays of the sun itself.

Two wildly different fungus , two wildly different faces of Janus Manhattan.

When the UVic Press was just a photocopier, stapler and a paper cutter...

Browsing in the stacks of one of my local university libraries a while back,  I discovered that the "academically-correct police" there had missed a few 'bad taste' errors from the past in their pogrom to get rid of unread books.

It was a massive three volume monograph from the University of Victoria (BC) Press -- about 200,000 words in total -- dating from the mid-1980s.

That is a big work by any standards - for an academic work or a commercial novel.

Interesting to me (and shocking to many) it was just three simple staple bound (aka saddle bound) volumes with soft paper 'selfcovers'.

Martin Henry Dawson (1896-1945) : died much too young , so billions won't

When ten billion of us - so far - have lived longer and healthier lives because of Dr Dawson's agape sacrifice, it would seem that some stone monument to mark his brief time on Earth is neither fully adequate -- or required.

Martin Henry Dawson : The Agape Naturalist

In WWI , Philip Bent VC and Henry Dawson MC displayed great physical courage under enemy fire when they put themselves in lethal danger to rally their men to close a dangerous break in the Allied lines.

This was 'agape' valour in that they did not risk their lives simply for the men in their battalion whom they knew well (kith and kin) but rather they selflessly risked their lives for the entire overall Allied cause.

In WWII , Dawson displayed agape physical courage and moral courage .

Moral Courage --- this doctor tested on himself first - not on some helpless dying woman ...

First to receive penicillin needle : Henry Dawson, October 15 1940, Columbia Presbyterian medical center, New York

Despite this, Canadian-born (Martin) Henry Dawson wasn't actually a patient.

He was instead the lead investigator of this particular American penicillin research team.

He was merely following an old tradition that says a truly caring doctor doesn't first test a potentially dangerous new therapy upon his patients , but rather upon himself.

It is a tradition that Dawson's main penicillin rival, Australian Howard Florey - entirely in character with his self-serving nature - declined to follow.

Finally ---- a penicillin movie with a genuine hero - a North American hero to boot !

My book series will be the first books - ever - about the dramatic events of wartime penicillin that will feature a North American, Canadian-American Martin Henry Dawson, as its chief protagonist.

And it will thus be the first ever to feature a genuine hero as its chief protagonist.

Penicillin G : its very low price has given all of us a quasi Herd Immunity against many once endemic infections

I would claim my book a complete success if it only got a single favourable review on Amazon.com - if that review came from Ramzi Yousef himself.

Recall that in 1993, Ramzi became the first to attempt to blow up the World Trade Center, hoping to kill tens of thousands to revenge those killed by the Atomic bombs of the best known wartime Manhattan Project.

I want Ramzi Yousef and others akin to him worldwide to see that like most things in life, Manhattan is Janus-faced.

Yes it has a Gordon Gekko side, but it also has its Emma Lazarus side.

Plutonium 239, with its half life of more than 24,000 years is atomic Manhattan's dubious gift of death that keeps on giving.

But inexpensive natural penicillin ,the wartime gift from the other face of Janus Manhattan, is a gift of life that just keeps on giving.

Beginning in 1940, in a selfless act of Agape, a dying Manhattan doctor, Henry Dawson, sacrificed his own life to try and save the lives of ten others, insisting (against the Allied governments' dictates) that wartime penicillin should be produced and released in quantities enough for ALL humanity.

Since 1940, Martin Henry Dawson's selfless act has indirectly benefited ten billion of us -- all through a form of quasi Herd Immunity against formerly dreaded bacterial infections.

Because of Dawson's moral argument,  penicillin G is today not just our best loved and most effective lifesaver.

It is also are cheapest and this has allowed poor people not normally treated for lack of money to be cured .

This in turn means that the untreated don't act as reserve pools of virulent strains that have kept these dreaded killers endemic or epidemic for millenniums.

Matter over Mind - Wild over Will , decided WWII

Germany : lost a war it should have won through inefficiency or lost a war it couldn't have won at 110% efficiency ?

The majority of old school (modernist) authors on WWII (men mostly 70 years or older) will go to their graves unbending from a belief that human factors, not material factors , decided WWII.

Because basically they are still modernists at heart and that is what modernists do - or did .

WWII : high moral action forsaken for high morale puffery

High morals or High morale : diverse ways to win WWII

Where Henry Dawson and a few others differed most strongly from the mainstream of civilian thought in WWII was his concern that his side could best win the war with high morals --- rather than just with high morale.

why Henry Dawson rather than Henry Alline

The revisionist's temperament

By my fifth year in school, I found it almost impossible to resist the urge to publicly expose the difference between cherished myth and actual reality, regardless of the negative effect on my already diminished popularity.

This constant urge to revise and to debunk has made me a sort of historian,  at least by temperament.

Thin books or fat journals ? Hard to tell !

For a time I thought my Dawson series of books would come out in parts of a periodical magazine :

Triumph of the NATURAL

"The Mills of Nature" will start up its longer (6000 word) articles with a series that puts together a natural world oriented account of WWII.

If that all sounds very Olympian , rest assured it will be instantly sharply brought down to earth.

That is because the series will be told through the eyes of just a single individual,  who himself barely got out of town during all of WWII.

You will read of the wartime experiences of New York City based Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was a decorated Canadian WWI hero and the leading DNA and Penicillin pioneer.

But Dawson couldn't re-join the military in WWII ,as he had hoped , because he was slowly dying of an auto immune disease throughout the war.

But even if he had gone overseas he couldn't have told this big a story.

Because oddly enough , no frontline military general or overly-busy national leader ever had as intimate an overview of the entire war as a well connected and media-hungry New Yorker.

New York city was the world's biggest , richest city and its biggest port.

It was thusthe war's biggest transfer point for both cargo and both in and outbound troops (not to mention all the just-passing-though VIPs).

This alone made it home to the war's best informed and most varied gossip.

New York was also a wartime city with the world's most varied and freest media.

But that isn't enough to pick out Dawson.

Many equally well-read among the eight million New Yorkers would also seem qualified to tell this tale.

However, in what turned out to be an unexpectedly long war of attrition, the question of sustaining manpower numbers and morale became the paramount question above all others - on both sides.

And so as it happened, the very contrary minded and penicillin-pioneering Dawson ended up becoming very close to the turning point of this vital issue.

This chance of fate , combined with his unusually wide WWI war experiences and his endless curiosity as a reader and listener makes him a wonderful subject to tell Nature's side of the war through.

Admittedly, it is a risk to use the eyes of a homebound dying man to tell the story of a war spread over all the world.

But few military events of WWII could have had a bigger impact on our own post war world than the penicillin events personally initiated by this hometown-bound and dying doctor.

His story over that six year period will be told in about sixty vignettes , collected into six series parts , all determined by six decisive breaks in Dawson's actual WWII experience.

Major parts' titles and their individual time periods :

I : Discarding the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1939 to the Fall of 1940

II : Exalting the Small :  roughly from the Fall of 1940 to the Fall of 1941

III : Betraying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1941 to the Fall of 1942

IV : Agitating the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1942 to the Fall of 1943

V : Denying the Small : roughly from the Fall of 1943 to the Fall of 1944

VI : Triumph of the Natural : roughly from the Fall of 1944 to the Fall of 1945

story papers as model for 21st century books

 21st century U-print 'story papers'

I worked long enough in bookstores to realize that our current book publishing system is very badly broken and probably the most climate-destroying of all the culture industries.

WWII as a preview of the Sixth Extinction

The most frequent contribution most of us (scientist or laity) make to the public debate about the Climate is to discuss our beliefs about changes that may  (or may not) happen sometime in the future , when human hubris collides with natural reality.

Unfortunately , that leaves more than enough "ifs and maybes" for many other citizens to permanently tune out on this all important public debate.

By contrast, The Mills of Nature discusses what actually did happen in the recent past , when pure human hubris really did get seriously stuck axle deep in the dirt of natural reality.

To protect the guilty and the inept , WWII history has normally been told back to front : 'the Allies won the war in 1945 --- and here is how it all happened'.

It becomes distilled down a human drama between six extremely ham-ish actors, all judged more than capable of eating the scenery.

Cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors"

Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, FDR and Tojo were still better known for extraordinarily skills in speech-making and morale-raising than for any administrative prowess they might have had. 

But the current historical consensus about WWII argues they were just the kind of leadership needed to fight this sort of war.

So we end with this intimate human drama , a clash between the six men fronting the six biggest civilizations, played out for us above the footlights .

Meanwhile, far back at the ranch , Mother Nature is nothing but an uninteresting and inert painted backdrop.

However, there is another way to tell the story of WWII.

It proceeds more conventionally, from front to back, detailing what Allies, Axis and Neutrals actually thought would happen, day by day, and then contrasting that with what actually did happen.

As a result, it ends up telling a far more downbeat story.

Now we can clearly see human ambitions, on all sides, stymied time and time and time again by natural forces.

 And  by humans that each side regarded as less than fully civilized and thus less than fully human - people in some sense also seen by most as 'just another part of the natural world.'

Nature (and 'these people of the natural world') turned out to be very far from inert --- for six long years it resists Civilized Man's vaulting ambitions at every turn.

So for but one example , over and over again a bad - natural - harvest of the lowly potato in Germany led to the human decision to see that more Slavs and Jews further East were starved or shot to death.

Even now, few us really believe it was Generalissimo Stalin , rather than General Frost and General Mud, who really saved Russia in 1941.

So once again cue the headline : "Scenery Eating Actors".

But this time , read it with the accent on scenery and not on actors .

I hope you find this Green history of WWII  a humbling and healing affair.

Yes it does cut us down to size before the vastness of an ever turbulent Mother Nature .

But hopefully it will also help us give the lesson on the dangers of Climate Change, before we get to the final exam....

WWII : the warlords as scientists ...

Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes

The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.

Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.

Homo Proponit

Man Proposes ,1939 - 1945

The wars and the killings started by the Axis began in 1931 in Manchuria and carried on in full flood until at least 1946-1947,  as it played itself out in a series of local but bloody civil wars or wars of national liberation.

At least fifteen full years of non-stop bloodletting somewhere in the world, directed or started by the Axis.

Despite all of this, what makes the very much shorter six years of WWII (September 2 1939 -September 2 1945) truly unique in humanity's long run of war and violence is not the record number of people who died, nor the attempted industrial mass murder of all Jews, all Romas and all Slavs.

the mysterious ways of Martin Henry Dawson ...

God Only Knows why Henry Dawson did what he did - because no one else does ... probably not even himself 

Next year will be ten years that I have been at it, trying to figure out why Henry Dawson did what he did and I am still no further ahead.

1870s Modernity -- fluid or rigid - or both ?

Modernity: Have we got it Wrong ? Rigid not Fluid ?

The usual claim that Modernity represents an extraordinary degree of change and dynamic uncertainty must butt its head against the co-current rise of hyper-rigid nationalism in the same time and space.

WWII's war of the 1As upon the world's 4Fs

The Jews in the mind of the  Nazis : not un-natural but rather  hyper-natural

WWII started out , on all sides, with at least this in agreement : in part, it was to be a military conflict fought out exclusively between various groups of physically healthy, literate , law-abiding,  heterosexual, white men.

Which is to say, the military part of the war was to be exclusively between 'civilized men'.

All the rest of us, the vast majority of us : children, women, 4Fs, colored folks of all kinds, queers , cripples, crooks - on and on - were to remain nearly inert and invisible : acted upon rather than actors.

Just part of the neutral (natural world) backdrop to this ongoing human drama happening under the stage lights.

1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...

1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...

"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.

Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing,  as they struggled to lead all humanity ?

Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?

Ramzi Yousef : here's the beatific side of wartime Manhattan ...

When asked why he hoped his 1993 bomb inside Manhattan's World Trade Center would kill all of the 50,000 people at the complex, the chief planner of the attack, Ramzi Yousef, said the planned massive carnage was partly to avenge the 250,000 Japanese killed by the bombs of the Manhattan Project.

It is true that the current wartime image of Manhattan does present a particularly Mars like character.

God's mysterious - not to say even humorous - ways ...

A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

when chickenhawks fantasize about war ...

War medicine was from Mars, Social medicine from Venus ?

The very word "war" medicine seems to stir something vaguely Mars-like, deep within the soul of the chickenhawk doctor or scientist.

Successfully conceiving ,in an academic lab at the University of  Chicago, a way to reduce combat deaths from shock seems to transport one almost up to the frontline evacuation hospitals, directly under hostile fire.

Being there, doing it, roughing it , all sweaty and virile-like : medical science with the smell of the locker room and the men's shower stall about it.

the fit warring upon their opponents' "unfit" : WWII in a nutshell

Eugenically speaking, WWII was a Proxy War.

Opposing groups of the high tech 'fit' warred mostly upon their opponent's low tech 'unfit' population.

All in the hopes this would cause their opponents to surrender without much direct (dysgenic) combat between the opposing 'fits'.

So - for example - German civilians on German soil were bombed for six full years before British troops* finally fought a badly faded German Army on German soil,  in the dying moments of WWII.

WWII's middle class delusion - that only the morale of less civilizied is easily broken

Morale-krieg : breaking the will or the wild ?

Diving Stukas , sirens wailing , bombing city bus stations or strafing refugee columns.

Paratroopers and Fifth Columnists popping up out of nowhere, guns ablazing.

Hard-charging Panzer tanks crushing civilian cars and people while un-announced U-boat attacks in the night sink civilian liners filled with women and children.

Blitzkrieg was clearly Terror-krieg and Morale-breaking-krieg.

But whose morale exactly ?

Philip Bent VC : physical courage of the highest order

Agape Valour has no 'hometown'

The idea that most VCs had one and only one hometown - pace UK Local Government Minister Eric Pickles' idea that their one and only hometown should have a government subsidized cobblestone to mark the one hundredth anniversary of WWI - is factually wrong.

Moreover, it goes against the firm ideas of the lady who set up the standards of the Victoria Cross - Queen Victoria herself.

remembering when wartime Manhattan was from Venus

Now I am become Hope, the Healer of Nations

Thanks to John Gray I can say, in a sideways allusion to his famous book, that wartime Manhattan displayed both a Mars and a Venus side to its Janus-like character and everyone instantly knows what I mean.

the Venus side of wartime Manhattan

In her time - during and after WWI  - nurse Edith Cavell was as famous as Oscar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and all the other WWII "Righteous Among the Nations" combined.

She devoted her life to nursing, mostly in Belgium though she was British herself, and didn't see why WWI should interrupt her practise of trying to save all patients, regardless of whether they were German, Belgian or Allied.

Campbeltown nee Buchanan , 40

"  I'm a clapped out ship at a Halifax pier , the first of Knox's 'volunteers'  "

HMS Campbeltown - formerly USS Buchanan 131 - hero of the famous St Nazaire Raid

Seventy five years ago next September 6th, the wartime naval base of Halifax Nova Scotia made its biggest ever contribution to military history.

 Without even firing a shot.

All because - ironically enough - it was considered the most suitably neutral ground for two former military enemies to publicly seal a handshake of eternal friendship.

Do Nova Scotians still have moral courage ?

I originally wrote this as a 'letter to the editor' to the Halifax Coast Magazine , over the public being offered a chance to name the new city ferry...

----------------------------

"The best test of a truly world-class city is not in the height of its skyscrapers but in the self confidence, cheekiness and swagger of its ordinary citizens: one has only to think of the character of your typical Berliner, Cockney or New Yorker ("Two decades of world-class delusions," Coast feature by Tim Bousquet, July 11 2013).

Now we have been asked to suggest a name for the new harbour ferry and I would like to see it named The Roue. Partly because I think it is a truly catchy name like "the loonie," but also partly to demonstrate that underneath all their bluster, our world-class-obsessed elite are actually far too chicken to swagger.

William J. Roue, who designed the famous Bluenose, also designed many of our harbour's earlier ferries and rode them daily as well, as he lived most of his long life in Dartmouth but worked in Halifax, making ginger ale by day and designing boats by night.

But as francophones and those with an interest in literature will recognize, roue is also a word adopted into English to describe our complicated feelings about someone who is a rakishly attractive, free-wheeling ladies' man. We shouldn't really like him but we have a sort of sneaking admiration for him (or her) all the same.

Imagine when our sophisticated friends come here, on vacation, from the truly big cities of the world and we oh-so-casually suggest that we "take The Roue to Dartmouth." Let them go back home and tell all their friends that the citizens of Halifax have the nerve to call their harbour ferry The Roue!

Would the Nova Scotians of today have enough swagger to carry this off ? Maybe not. But years ago, after watching William J. Roue's first successful design beat the pants off America's best, one humble deckhand boasted - in the best Sam Slick fashion - "the timbers that'll beat her are still growing in the trees!"

Now there's confidence and swagger that's truly world-class."

 —Michael Marshall, Halifax

Agape Love as "brave compassion"

It is unusually difficult to be compassionate when one is also under attack.

I mean not just when enemy bullets are winging your way but also when your entire society, including all your friends and family around you, is seemingly opposing your compassion.

Agape compassion is easy - but Agape valour is very very hard

Agape love is not just 'compassion' - it is selfless limitless compassion for others (including enemies) even onto death.

By definition it seems to be more about limitlessness (of selflessness onto death) than mere normal (limited) expressions of compassion and mere normal (limited) acts of compassion.

Demands that we display agape love thus becomes one of Christ's notorious 'hard' sayings.

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....

Scandal : Writers Union of Canada rejects BLOCKHEAD

Great news !

The Writers' Union of Canada has changed its membership requirements and I am still not allowed in.

For a few weeks there , I feared I might be.

His agape love had no hometown....

(Martin) Henry Dawson was born in Truro but spent his formative years going to school in Halifax and Montreal or saving lives and fighting Huns in World War One France.

He later worked in hospitals in Kentucky and in New York City.

In WWII, he gave up his own life to try and save hundreds of thousands of people - people totally unknown to him and from all over the world - who were dying (needlessly) of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) .