WWII : Jazz Agers pulled the trigger but Victorians pointed the gun

They pulled WWII's trigger, but didn't aim gun

It is true that most of the people that actually, physically, pulled the triggers in WWII were kids of the Jazz Age, born roughly between the Fall of 1916 and the Fall of 1929. Equally true, and rarely acknowledged then or today, is that most of the people pointing those guns were born in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).

Petain, the supreme leader of Vichy France, pour exemple , was born in 1856 ---- a full sixty years before the start of the Jazz Age. In today's France, he'd be an old age pensioner when that Age began!

Then, as now, men aged roughly between fifty and seventy five ruled all aspects of the world as business CEOs, senior government advisors, defence departments chiefs, media barons or simply as owners of most of the wealth.

Jazz Agers pulled WWII's triggers, but those guns pointed by men with High Victorian Age values...

In WWII terms, the men who started and ran the war were men born in the late Victoria Age. Already fully mature young men, in other words, with a full set of Victorian value, when the Victorian Age faded away in the Great War trenches of Western Europe.

But like silent Shingle viruses inside our bodies, they carried on emanating those Victorian values, under the very noses of the new Jazz Age, until these young Victorian men of 1916 died off as very old Victorian men in the 1960s.

Cut to today and the battle over climate change : young versus old ways of thinking about science and humanity's limits.

Rupert Murdoch, for example, was born in early 1931 and his headmasters were themselves fully mature "Victorian Age" young men when Queen Victoria died 30 years earlier in early 1901.

That is to say that we must never ever forget that the elderly climate deniers of today were educated by teachers themselves raised in the "there are no limits to Man's abilities" values of optimistic Victorian Scientism......

Forgotten by design : Victorians loved Sentimentality as much as Social Darwinism

Victorian Values ???

Thanks to libertarians like Thatcher, Reagan and their rich friends who own big media , most people today regard the Victorians as being obsessed with the values of social darwinism : law of the jungle, might is right, god-on-side-of-big-battalions, survival of the fit, red in tooth and claw , things they claim we have forgotten.

But there is no sign, in fact, that these values are not at least as popular today, as in the good Queen's day.

But what has been forgotten, in fact, is that Victorians (or at least many Victorian women) were opposed to social darwinism and took a "Sentimentalist" view of the value of life, human and non-human.

After all, it was the age of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of Little Nell and of Beautiful Joe ( to use an example particularly close to my home.)

Thomas Moore, the Sentimentalist, was at least as popular as Charles Darwin, the Utilitarian, in their day.

Victorian values ( both set of Victorian values) hung on in the late autumn of Victorianism : those years between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the early 1970s, when Victorian Modernity aka Scientism, still held full sway.

It is often forgotten that Victoria herself was raised as a pre-Victorian and that in fact , the truest Victorians were those who knew no other age (say those born between about 1840 and 1900).

People who were fully grown young people when Victoria died did not die with her as if in some immense funeral pyre, but instead lived on  as full-Victorians, until their own deaths in the 1960s.

Jazz Age kids fought & died in WWII ,yes, but Victorians ran it..

Henry Dawson (1896) and Howard Florey (1898) were both fully Victorian figures: the first representing pre-Great War sentimentality to its fullest, the latter a Social Darwinian from birth till death.

Their monumental clash between 1940 till 1945 was thus a clash of differing Victorian values ---- during the years of WWII --- a time that is incorrectly thought to be well past the Victorian Age.

Florey the Skygod ; Dawson the earthling.

I - on the other hand -will argue with my dying breath that the Victorian Age died with the death of the last Victorian , not at all with the death of the Queen herself....

VIRAL meme alert : "Deniers deny denial-conspiracy link, claim conspiracy"

WATERMELONS! Under the bed!

Trust EOR to come up with the funniest take on the whole "deniers-see-conspiracy-in-study-that-links-deniers-to-beliefs-in-conspiracy-theories".


Yes, there ARE people "watching" the deniers...

Got the MEME above in my post title, off the comments section of WTD (WATCHING THE DENIERS) .

If you are at all interested in confronting the Big Lie that denies that Man faces any physical restraints on his greed, I suggest you subscribe to WTD ....

PQ posts SMALLEST PLURALITY EVER for a full-slate Canadian government

smallest plurality EVER !

The PQ set a new record low (31.9%) for the winning government party in Canada on Tuesday - maybe a new low anywhere and anytime in a "first past the post" electoral system.

 (Yes the previous record holder was the provincial Liberals in BC in 1924 (31.3%).

 But as my former Professor Murray Beck was often at pains to point out about "the good old days", many times the major parties chose not to run a full slate and let a nominally "independent" Liberal or Conservative candidate run instead - a independent who soon supported their party once again,  after the election.

 In this case, the true Liberal popular vote , at the first meeting of the legislature,  was a point or two bigger than that of the PQ in 2012).

Impact on Climate Wars at election time ?

Partisanship this loose and fluid gives both sides hope in the ongoing climate wars : because the positions on the question "is the climate changing due to human activity ?" can no longer be resolved by simply counting the party with the most heads in a stable two party situation.

Politics is now very competitive in Canada with no party counting on more than a handful of their faithful to actually remain "faithful" through thick and thin.

The pro global warming vote going solid for one party could spell doom for the smaller but - until now - much more concentrated "climate denier vote"....

"Blue Sky" libertarian think tanks are today's "Boiler Rooms" of deceit

Libertarianism = Blue Skyism

Who says God doesn't have a sense of humour ? How else to explain that in Standard & Poor's dictionary of financial terms, "boiler room" follows immediately upon "blue sky" stock laws?

As grandmother recalled to you when you started to invest a little for your retirement, a "boiler room" is where the conmen operated that sold your grandfather a pile of worthless blue sky (stocks) in return for all the retirement money he had socked away earning a low but safe return in a bank.

If the rate of return on a stock seems too good to be true it probably isn't true --- but instead is just blue sky optimism or fraud.

Washington's (and London,Canberra,Ottawa et al) libertarian think tanks are not frauds - they sincerely believe that their political ideology and economics are firmly based upon the physical reality of the Science they were taught in High School.

And it is.

Unfortunately High School science is not itself based on physical reality, not at least as professional scientists of today understand it to be.

Rather High School science is still - still  - based upon physical reality as understood by the professional scientists of  200 years ago !

By no coincidence, the state-of-the-art science of 200 years ago was far more optimistic and upbeat (seeing nothing but blue skies from now on, skies so blue I gotta wear shades) than the state-of-the-art-science of 150 years ago and later.

Given the choice : either an older science that flattered their self-centered worldview or a newer science that humbled humanity into merely one among many commensalist beings on a resource-limited Earth, guess which one the selfish of the world choose to have taught ?

Clashing thermodynamics

Libertarianism and the First Law of Thermodynamics were spawned on the same rock : just as us post-Scientism commensalists equally favour the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

A Mexican Stand-Off ?

Not exactly ; because the far bigger, unlimited - fundamental - law of the two is the Second Law.

The First Law is but a smaller, derived law : think of it as a special case of relativity versus the general Law of relativity.

Physical reality looks like , acts like, the commensalists' Second Law.

But traditional political parties and traditional economics, both grounded in the science of 1812 are not : this is why our world is in such a mess.

Extremely rhetorically self-flattering , traditional parties and economics win every voting contest among fallible humanity ---- but loses every clash with cold ,hard ,firm physical reality.

Until our politics, economics and High School science (above all else) aligns with the Universe's actual physical reality, this planet and this human civilization is going to continue to flatline....

Thomas "Melody" Moore : loathed by IRA, loved by Halifax FRINGE audience

Richard Hanna as Thomas Moore

Thomas "Melody" Moore - the man, not the melodies (they hated themselves but they still loved his melodies) - was much loathed by the IRA and their political and cultural kinfolk in Ireland and America.

But they're dead, gone and buried while he's back - for a two week stint only - at Halifax's Atlantic FRINGE festival.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852) last played in Halifax early in the 19th century, his  very last gig on his long tour of (the hated) America and (the loved) Canada.

But his spirit ( all 4 foot 8 of it) has been transponded into the 6 foot personage of Richard Hanna.

Richard has a harp just like Moore and a break-downable (for easy transport) oversized chair, to let today's audiences better visualize how small Moore really was, even in his day.

Like many small men, Moore adjusted successfully by always being  neatly turned out (a dandy in fact) and by being extremely charming.

Moore's small size and pixie charm might well, Hanna believes, have kept him alive in troubled times, because Moore was a fierce and at times , vocal Irish Rebel when those words could mean "head on a stake" .

His good friend , the famous Irish leader and martyr Robert Emmett , successfully kept Moore from being too physically involved in Emmett's unsuccessful rebellions.

After Emmett's execution , Moore did much to make Emmett into a legend by writing poetry and songs about Emmett and his lady love, (Emmett was captured because he'd rather die than be far from her - a devotion Victorian romantics couldn't get enough of.)

Emmett was a wealthy Protestant Irishman who rebelled on behalf of poor Irish Catholics.

Moore was equally broadminded and as a Catholic married a Protestant woman - for which the narrow minded bigots in Irish nationalist circles forever despised him for.

Moore was very political and much of his writing was political - and unread today.

But he also guised his political feelings for Irish nationhood in the form of his famous songs and their bitter sweet melodies and lyrics that made him world famous among ordinary folk , then and now.

But among those of us more literary minded, his reputation has waned from its heights when he , Lord Byron and Walter Scott were the most famous triad in the Romantic playbook.

Yes, he was not wealthy - son of a grocer (rather like Margaret Thatcher) so he wrote for money. And wrote very well - dined at the homes of heirs to the thrones, and was an all around literary lion.

But then so did Scott and even Byron write for money, not to mention Beethoven.

(Beethoven even hacked his way through a couple of vanity lyrics from canadian amateurs...)

Hanna has spent ten years reviving interest in Moore the man, not just the melodies, and he feels Moore was a proponent of tolerance and multi-culturalism for Ireland, about 175 years before its time.

With due respect, after attending Hanna's "Melody Moore Show", I feel that Hanna is selling Moore short.

Moore is regarded as Ireland's national poet which means in practise he is a footnote in general literature studies and only studied in Irish Studies, where as Hanna points out, he remains a controversial figure rather than a truly uniting force as Robbie Burns is in Scotland.

Hanna wants to make Moore a Post-Troubles unifying figure, the national poet for Irish of all - or no - faiths.

Moore is the poet of Emigration

But I think of Moore as the poet laureate of Emigration - in the 19th century for sure, but even for today.

Emigration is ageless but not until the 19th century did millions of people world wide emigrate to other continents thousands of miles away rather than to a new home a hundred miles along.

Some emigrated involuntarily as slaves or as indentured servants, many went on their own free will.

Think about that for a minute.

For all but the extremely well-to-do had to leave home and kin with little reasonable prospects of seeing or hearing from family and friends ever again.

No cheap fast reliable international mail, no cheap photographs, no telephones or fast cheap air flights or Skype internet.

The heartbreak at dockside may seem exaggerated today but the anguish was real.

That pain never really went away but Moore's bitter sweet melodies and lyrics (intended to convey only the lost of a freed Ireland) was like sad balm for millions torn from home and longing to again "see the old folks at home".

Yes : no Moore, no Stephen Foster. And throw out 90 % of all those sentimental parlor ballads that still define the Victorian age so well.

Truth be known,  most of us don't ever read Byron or Scott ( while we still hum Moore), but we know all their names while we don't know Moore's, because Scott and Byron have become symbols of larger forces than just literature.

We study them in many other areas at university - to explain this huge think called "Romanticism , the Worldview".

Scott gets blamed - fairly accurately - for inspiring the Civil War on the Southern side ; Mick Jagger's fame is explained away as warmed-over Byron.

But Victorian sentimentality is as least as important as Greek Independence, now that we are all have had our consciousness raised - right ladies ? - and you can't begin to explain it, without bringing in Thomas Moore.

Thomas "Melody" Moore the legend does need to be revived - Hanna is doing a damn find job of doing so - definitely go and see him whenever he comes to your town !

(At Halifax's North Street Church theatre all this week - see Atlantic Fringe website for showtimes.)

Former OXFORD UNIVERSITY chemist found - in National Portrait Gallery !

its all about this gold

Congratulations to Wolfgang Suschitzky , honored with a retrospective of his best known photographs at Britain's National Portait Gallery - including the un-butchered , original, version of his most enduring image.

The world famous photographer turned 100 this month !

And the missing chemist?

He is Wilson Baker, a former Oxford University chemist associated with  Big Science's highly expensive failure to synthesis penicillin during WWII.

 He went missing from one of science's iconic of all photos, after he rather 'blotted his Oxford copybook' by daring to go off to work at another university.

Iit all began back in 1944 when photographer Suschitzky took a series of still photos ,to accompany an ICL-sponsored motion film on the triumph of wartime penicillin.

The film was actually a form of a rear guard action to regain some of the "life-saving penicillin" glory for Britain, after the American soda pop supplier, Charles Pfizer and Sons, became the first firm in the world to truly mass produce penicillin.

They did it the natural way, as long advocated by their associate,  Dr Martin Henry Dawson.It is still the way we produce penicillin.

In the most famous shot in the penicillin still series (NPG P562) , a group of four of Oxford's best wartime chemists pose around a table.

They include Nobel prize winners Sir Robert Robinson and Sir Ernst Chain  and Sir Edward Abraham  (a co-developer of our most used family of antibiotics, a close relative of penicillin).

And then Wilson Baker himself, who had to settle for a FRS instead of a knighthood, perhaps because he was a committed Quaker and pacifist during WWII.

"The Chemist Vanishes...."

But ,as recounted earlier in SVE's earlier rendering, sometime after Baker 'left the family firm' , the Oxford University's copy of this famous image was butchered.

Butchered seemingly by the same high quality photo re-touchers who butchered similar photos for Stalin, after this or that former Commissar was 'liquidated', like Bain closing a factory, and had to be removed from all historical photos .

Out went Wilson and in went a cutout image of Oxford's most famous bio-tech son , Sir Howard Florey .

Florey came in via a photo scissored out crudely from another famous post-event re-staged photo : Florey and his faithful retainer needling some poor little mouse in a cage.

The resulting image never looked to be designed to avoid detection.

The fame of the mousing photo, together with the crudity of the inked backfilling to help to the final photo "jell" , ensured that anyone at all familiar with the history of penicillin would quickly detect it.

However Britain's notorious libel laws - even more favorable to the rich and powerful than those of Hitler's Germany, together with Oxford University's deep pockets for big libel law firms - ensures that no one, least of all Skygods vs earthlings , would ever call this a case of  plagiarism.

Yes plagiarism , albeit allegedly done by a university itself instead of one of its young students.

Since Oxford won't do the right thing, it is very nice that the National Portrait Gallery made the original photo - with the original Wilson Baker back in - its featured photo of the month....