After the Jews , what being did the Nazis plan to 'holocaust' next ?
My view is that the natural Atlantic Lobster couldn't have been far down their list.
Lobster meat is very tasty and the Nazis had no intention of never tasting that delicious flavour again.
But lobsters are actually nasty large marine insects, complete with claws and scales and beady eyes and with body parts that smell and look like baby poop.
The fastidious Nazis couldn't even bear looking at them, but oh that delicious lobster meat !
So eat it they would.
They just didn't see why we humans had to go to the expense of catching the ugly nasty lobsters.
Or why we let natural lobsters go on consuming valuable natural resources and valuable space that Man could make better use of.
The lobster, like the Jew and the smallpox virus and all of the natural imperfect world was just so much 'wasted space' to the modern Nazi.
So if you truly, truly believe you can replace a natural being with a better , nay perfect, synthetic equivalent ( like replacing a Slavic peasant with a German tractor) is it really murder to let those peasants starve to death ?
As Harry Lime once opined, aren't they just useless "dots" that won't be missed ?
Seen this way, the Holocaust and the Hunger Plan becomes reduced to a routine operation of organic synthetic autarky chemistry.
So we can truthfully imagine some future Nazis, as a tiny part of their program of emotional and chemical autarky, planning to create an improved chemical synthetic analogue of the lobster.
Made out of plant waste, ordinary air and tap water : all the meat without any of those bothersome shells, beady little eyes staring - or that nasty black vein.
The most unique feature of the Nazis was the intensity of their profound - Germanic faith - in that Queen of all Sciences , Chemistry.
In the era of Modernity (1870s to the 1960s) a Dalton-like sense of elements and atoms held sway in the educated and semi-educated mind.
By no long coincidence that era also was the heyday of Mecano and Erector sets and their kin.
Those toys, given by doting middle class parents to their young children , represented their faith that the ultimate underlying reality could be represented as being rather like a collection of stable ball and sticks.
These balls represented the atoms (and the sticks their attraction forces) of molecules that chemists could easily take apart and reassemble into ever new forms.
Those attraction forces are of different strength and the chemical autarky dream was to take apart the weakly-bound molecules of imperfect natural materials and reassemble them into perfect materials with strong bonds so they never could be broken down again.
Why would anyone bother to take them apart ? They were already perfect, now and forever !
The perfectly sensible dynamic notion of the survival of those best fitted for a particular niche at a particular place and time had become perverted into the frozen notion that those "fit" (those big, strong, rich, white , male) can best handle each and every niche that will come along now and in the future.
Most of us are aware that 'plastics' can either be very soft and flexible (thermoplastic) materials or very hard and rigid materials that shatter when broken hard (thermostable).
What both have in common is that once both could be poured as a soft gel into moulds and allowed to harden upon that shape. The first group can be re-melted and re-formed while the second group can't.
Think then of the moderns' concept of their current reality as being rather like flexible , re-meltable, but imperfect thermo-plastic natural products (or human genomes) that could be easily converted into perfect (hence rigid and un-meltable) thermo-stable synthetic products.
Think of the memes of Dalton-like chemistry slipping out and infecting the minds of modern physicists and biologists alike.
So physicists talked confidently of creating perfect synthetic elements (like synthetic plutonium) out of imperfect natural metals like uranium. (Eugenic physics.)
And biologists talked confidently of radiation blasts zapping out unsuitable genes and then inserting suitable genes into eggs and sperms. (Eugenic chemistry.)
So how did this wonderful Chemical Vision all work out anyway ?
(Well it did give us Global Warming - for which, thanks muchly.)
I have mentioned before Alex Wellerstein's great blog on nuclear secrecy RESTRICTED DATA and yesterday I was reading the comments on a post of his on just how big some of the buildings of the Manhattan project actually were.
How to convert the size, the acreage, of these buildings - the largest ever built - into terms we can easily relate to ?
My own observation was that ultimately the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion multi-building was as big as the sovereign state of Vatican City - albeit since the death of Oppenheimer minus its pope.
But I know that a more common observation is that these buildings are big enough to be seen from (the beginnings of) Outer Space.
So if making things ,like plutonium, synthetically was easier than natural processes , perhaps the MED (Manhattan Project in geek-speak) wasn't the best place to seek proof.
While Manhattan Man was busy making the desired form of synthetic plutonium , He (the capitalization seems appropriate when one considers the God-sized egos of such as Robert Oppenheimer) was also inadvertently making undesired forms of plutonium.
These forms were deadly to hopes of destroying the world ten times over and because they were identical chemically , very very hard for the chemist to separate out.
All the MED's huge buildings were mostly devoted to (a) the easy job of separating out tiny amounts of useful (useful for killing people) from huge amounts of non useful stuff and (b) the incredibly tough job of separating the tiny amounts of useful stuff from equally tiny amounts of non-useful (dangerous) kissing cousin stuff.
Okay, okay enough about Yellowcake - what about the other marvel of 1945 , Yellow Magic ?
Penicillin is made in incredibly tiny factories - fungi cells barely visible under even the best of the top optical microscopes.
Yet they did so under ordinary temperatures , atmospheric pressures and PH levels - none of the chemists 'heat up, cool, heat up' energy wasting cycles - no need for expensive pressure vessels and anti-corrosive materials.
Incredibly frugal in energy, materials and space , these natural factories actually did just use plant wastes, air and water.
An Australian man named Duhig , using the same level of expertise you and I would use to make basic homebrew beer, actually obtained enough penicillin this way to save a dozen dying patients.
Like we do while making homebrew, he did strain his liquid through a cheesecloth ---- but that was it.
Jimmy Duhig injected the crude, un-purified un-separated stuff straight into his patients and none died from the impurities.
Why ?
One reason - tiny simple bacteria and fungi are actually much better chemists than hundreds of chemists with PhDs - the microbe produces only the useful form of their products - no deadly lookalike kissing cousins.
Reason two - the microbes must live in their own piss and poo (which is what crude penicillin basically is !) and they won't have lived for three billion years if their poo was deadly stuff.
It is the same reason we can eat oranges to get the natural Vitamin C that we could also get from a synthetically pure pill and yet not be killed by all the 'impurities' in the rest of the orange.
This is why I consider Yellowcake and Yellow Magic to be both the apogee and nadir of chemical and emotional autarky ...
My view is that the natural Atlantic Lobster couldn't have been far down their list.
Lobster meat is very tasty and the Nazis had no intention of never tasting that delicious flavour again.
But lobsters are actually nasty large marine insects, complete with claws and scales and beady eyes and with body parts that smell and look like baby poop.
The fastidious Nazis couldn't even bear looking at them, but oh that delicious lobster meat !
So eat it they would.
They just didn't see why we humans had to go to the expense of catching the ugly nasty lobsters.
Or why we let natural lobsters go on consuming valuable natural resources and valuable space that Man could make better use of.
The lobster, like the Jew and the smallpox virus and all of the natural imperfect world was just so much 'wasted space' to the modern Nazi.
So if you truly, truly believe you can replace a natural being with a better , nay perfect, synthetic equivalent ( like replacing a Slavic peasant with a German tractor) is it really murder to let those peasants starve to death ?
As Harry Lime once opined, aren't they just useless "dots" that won't be missed ?
Seen this way, the Holocaust and the Hunger Plan becomes reduced to a routine operation of organic synthetic autarky chemistry.
So we can truthfully imagine some future Nazis, as a tiny part of their program of emotional and chemical autarky, planning to create an improved chemical synthetic analogue of the lobster.
Made out of plant waste, ordinary air and tap water : all the meat without any of those bothersome shells, beady little eyes staring - or that nasty black vein.
The most unique feature of the Nazis was the intensity of their profound - Germanic faith - in that Queen of all Sciences , Chemistry.
In the era of Modernity (1870s to the 1960s) a Dalton-like sense of elements and atoms held sway in the educated and semi-educated mind.
By no long coincidence that era also was the heyday of Mecano and Erector sets and their kin.
Those toys, given by doting middle class parents to their young children , represented their faith that the ultimate underlying reality could be represented as being rather like a collection of stable ball and sticks.
These balls represented the atoms (and the sticks their attraction forces) of molecules that chemists could easily take apart and reassemble into ever new forms.
Those attraction forces are of different strength and the chemical autarky dream was to take apart the weakly-bound molecules of imperfect natural materials and reassemble them into perfect materials with strong bonds so they never could be broken down again.
Why would anyone bother to take them apart ? They were already perfect, now and forever !
The perfectly sensible dynamic notion of the survival of those best fitted for a particular niche at a particular place and time had become perverted into the frozen notion that those "fit" (those big, strong, rich, white , male) can best handle each and every niche that will come along now and in the future.
Most of us are aware that 'plastics' can either be very soft and flexible (thermoplastic) materials or very hard and rigid materials that shatter when broken hard (thermostable).
What both have in common is that once both could be poured as a soft gel into moulds and allowed to harden upon that shape. The first group can be re-melted and re-formed while the second group can't.
Think then of the moderns' concept of their current reality as being rather like flexible , re-meltable, but imperfect thermo-plastic natural products (or human genomes) that could be easily converted into perfect (hence rigid and un-meltable) thermo-stable synthetic products.
Think of the memes of Dalton-like chemistry slipping out and infecting the minds of modern physicists and biologists alike.
So physicists talked confidently of creating perfect synthetic elements (like synthetic plutonium) out of imperfect natural metals like uranium. (Eugenic physics.)
And biologists talked confidently of radiation blasts zapping out unsuitable genes and then inserting suitable genes into eggs and sperms. (Eugenic chemistry.)
So how did this wonderful Chemical Vision all work out anyway ?
(Well it did give us Global Warming - for which, thanks muchly.)
I have mentioned before Alex Wellerstein's great blog on nuclear secrecy RESTRICTED DATA and yesterday I was reading the comments on a post of his on just how big some of the buildings of the Manhattan project actually were.
How to convert the size, the acreage, of these buildings - the largest ever built - into terms we can easily relate to ?
My own observation was that ultimately the Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion multi-building was as big as the sovereign state of Vatican City - albeit since the death of Oppenheimer minus its pope.
But I know that a more common observation is that these buildings are big enough to be seen from (the beginnings of) Outer Space.
So if making things ,like plutonium, synthetically was easier than natural processes , perhaps the MED (Manhattan Project in geek-speak) wasn't the best place to seek proof.
While Manhattan Man was busy making the desired form of synthetic plutonium , He (the capitalization seems appropriate when one considers the God-sized egos of such as Robert Oppenheimer) was also inadvertently making undesired forms of plutonium.
These forms were deadly to hopes of destroying the world ten times over and because they were identical chemically , very very hard for the chemist to separate out.
All the MED's huge buildings were mostly devoted to (a) the easy job of separating out tiny amounts of useful (useful for killing people) from huge amounts of non useful stuff and (b) the incredibly tough job of separating the tiny amounts of useful stuff from equally tiny amounts of non-useful (dangerous) kissing cousin stuff.
Okay, okay enough about Yellowcake - what about the other marvel of 1945 , Yellow Magic ?
Penicillin is made in incredibly tiny factories - fungi cells barely visible under even the best of the top optical microscopes.
Yet they did so under ordinary temperatures , atmospheric pressures and PH levels - none of the chemists 'heat up, cool, heat up' energy wasting cycles - no need for expensive pressure vessels and anti-corrosive materials.
Incredibly frugal in energy, materials and space , these natural factories actually did just use plant wastes, air and water.
An Australian man named Duhig , using the same level of expertise you and I would use to make basic homebrew beer, actually obtained enough penicillin this way to save a dozen dying patients.
Like we do while making homebrew, he did strain his liquid through a cheesecloth ---- but that was it.
Jimmy Duhig injected the crude, un-purified un-separated stuff straight into his patients and none died from the impurities.
Why ?
One reason - tiny simple bacteria and fungi are actually much better chemists than hundreds of chemists with PhDs - the microbe produces only the useful form of their products - no deadly lookalike kissing cousins.
Reason two - the microbes must live in their own piss and poo (which is what crude penicillin basically is !) and they won't have lived for three billion years if their poo was deadly stuff.
It is the same reason we can eat oranges to get the natural Vitamin C that we could also get from a synthetically pure pill and yet not be killed by all the 'impurities' in the rest of the orange.
This is why I consider Yellowcake and Yellow Magic to be both the apogee and nadir of chemical and emotional autarky ...
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