Category Archives: Germ Warfare

* Amid the joyous festivities at popular spots like the Ice-Snow World theme park, tens of thousands have also flocked to a memorial outside the city center.

* The notorious Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin as the nerve center for Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II.

* More and more young people are braving the wind and snow to come here and learn about history, demonstrating the strength and responsibility of the younger generation in China.

HARBIN, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- Since the beginning of the year, Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, has emerged as a top winter destination. But, amid the joyous festivities at popular spots like the Ice-Snow World theme park, tens of thousands have also flocked to a memorial outside the city center.

On a frigid weekday morning, with the temperature in the city dropping to minus 26 degrees Celsius, the spirits of those visiting the Exhibition Hall of Evidence of Crimes Committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army remained undeterred.

Braving the freezing weather, people queued up at the public square outside the exhibition hall. Among the visitors were many young people, some accompanied by their children. Despite the harsh weather, they patiently waited for one or two hours, with volunteers distributing hot water and warming pads to alleviate the cold.

The notorious Unit 731 was a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base established in Harbin as the nerve center for Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II. At least 3,000 people were used for human experiments by Unit 731, and more than 300,000 people in China were killed by Japan's biological weapons.

This winter the exhibition hall has been ranked third among all other tourist attractions in Harbin by the world's leading travel platform TripAdvisor.

This exhibition hall showcases documents, experimental utensils and tools used by the Japanese, along with videos that record the accounts of former Unit 731 soldiers.

Xu Xiaomeng and her two friends patiently waited for nearly 30 minutes before gaining entry to the hall. "It is worthwhile because this history should be remembered by every Chinese," said the 32-year-old Xu, who works as a middle school English teacher in central China's Hubei Province.

They planned their trip based on recommendations from social media, and the exhibition hall was on their "must-visit" list.

According to Xu, the frozen experiment performed on Chinese victims was the most unsettling aspect of the exhibition. She acknowledged that the curators might have omitted certain graphic details, but the exhibits still startled her.

Her friend Huang Guangjing, who is a Chinese literature teacher, said that she was profoundly dismayed to learn about the germ warfare conducted by Unit 731. "I will share everything with my students to ensure that they carry forward the memory."

Qian Xiaomin, a 36-year-old resident of Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, said that she and her 12-year-old son had planned to spend a week in Harbin, with the exhibition hall being their first stop.

Following their visit, her son Qian Yanchu decided to document his impressions of the exhibition in his diary. "If I could turn back in time, I would join the army to protect my fellow countrymen," the boy said, adding that for now he wants to work hard and contribute to the building of a stronger nation.

Numerous children and teenagers, just like Qian, were visiting the exhibition hall. Most of them quietly looked at the exhibits and attentively listened to the descriptions, occasionally posing questions to their parents.

Lin Yanlu, accompanied by her six-year-old son and septuagenarian parents, was among the visitors. She said that her son tried to read the descriptions himself and was petrified by the vivid accounts of vivisection. "Our country has grown stronger, but this transformation came at the cost of many martyrs," she told her son.

In addition to the exhibition hall, people also flocked to the Northeast China Revolutionary Martyrs' Memorial Hall, which has welcomed over 65,000 visitors this year, excluding those who joined virtual tours online. Of all the visitors a large percentage are young people, including more than 30,000 from 270 student groups.

Guide Gao Peng, 30, has been working at the Unit 731 exhibition hall for six years. "I always encounter visitors with various questions," he said. "Through our conversations, my aim is for them to gain a deeper understanding of the historical events from those years, fostering not hatred but rather the courage and motivation to move forward."

To cope with the surge in visitors, the exhibition hall changed the opening time from 9 a.m. to 8 a.m. starting from late December in 2023, and extended opening hours.

Since the beginning of this year, the daily average number of visitors has continued to surpass 17,000. As of the end of January, the exhibition has welcomed over 500,000 visitors, with approximately 90 percent coming from outside Heilongjiang, and 60 percent being young people.

Meanwhile, discussions about visits to the exhibition hall continued to gain widespread attention on Chinese social media. On Sina Weibo, searches related to these topics surpassed 360 million, and posts tagged with "731" were viewed around 2.6 billion times on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

"More and more young people are braving the wind and snow to come here and learn about history, demonstrating the strength and responsibility of the younger generation in China," said Jin Chengmin, head of the exhibition hall.

In the final room, an electronic screen displays the names of the victims, accompanied by bouquets placed there by the visitors. At the exhibition hall exit, visitors pass through a lengthy, dimly lit tunnel with a glimmer of light at its end. Staff members gently prompt them as they attempt to turn back, advising, "Keep moving forward, don't look back."

(Reporting by Bai Xu, Gui Tao, Li Jianping, Sun Xiaoyu, Yang Siqi; Video reporters: Xie Jianfei, Li Jianping, Sun Xiaoyu, Yang Siqi; Video editors: Hong Ling, Hui Peipei, Li Qin, Zhou Sa'ang)

Read the rest here:

Xinhua Headlines: In Harbin's icy embrace, tourists flock to offer condolences, cherish memories - Xinhua

The Foreign Ministry, its pique evident in its pithy choice of words and in the semi-hysterical tenor of its reply, responded in top form:

Facts have proven time and again that the U.S. is an empire of lies through and through. Even some in the U.S., such as Senator Rand Paul, acknowledged that the U.S. government is the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world.

State wordsmiths set the tone and content for propaganda, both in the original and in translation. Although this was a diatribe crafted inside the halls of the Foreign Ministry, it quickly got the seal of approval of the official Xinhua News Agency which reproduced it verbatim and sent it flying to key external media in its vast distribution system.

State media outlets such as the Global Times a nationalistic subsidiary of the Communist Partys Peoples Daily newspaper that is dedicated to angry coverage of world affairs in English and Chinese, and the China Daily, a state-owned English publication which has a key role to play in telling Chinas story well to diplomats and other residents of China added to the Foreign Ministry outrage with additional spittle-flecked words, but the Foreign Ministrys term empire of lies was a gem of assonance, a memorable rhetorical flourish. The term is used in English as well as in Chinese, translated literally as hungyn dgu, which echoes the description empire of hacking () that state media used to describe the U.S. after the Edward Snowden revelations of 2013.

As if to buttress the notion that China trades in facts while the U.S. shamefacedly lies, theres even a half-hearted attempt to source the empire of lies jab to Rand Paul, a U.S. senator representing Kentucky.

The Foreign Ministry made the perhaps understandable mistake of conflating libertarian father with libertarian son, for it is pre Ron Paul, a physician and former congressman from Texas, not Rand Paul, who launched the term empire of lies as a descriptor for the United States in his 2008 book, The Revolution: A Manifesto

Its also telling that the Chinese media was careful to lift only half the Rand quote in question, which in the original reads: Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

In China, where truth is sometimes literally and legally be construed as treason when it comes to criticizing X Jnpng or the Communist Party or in shedding light on certain historical events, the first half of the quote cuts uncomfortably close to home.

In The Revolution: A Manifesto, Ron Paul attributes his pungent quote to George Orwell, without a clear citation. (There is no published evidence that Orwell himself said Truth is treason in the empire of lies.)

So where did Chinas wordsmiths find this pseudo-Orwellian gem? Empire of lies is traceable to Ron Pauls 2008 book, and the greatest propagator of disinformation is attributable to his son Rand at a May 2022 Senate hearing described the U.S. government as the greatest propagator of disinformation in world history.

But theres another possible source for the empire of lies meme that is even of more immediate relevance to Chinas wolf warrior diplomats: On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin gave a speech announcing that his armies would invade Ukraine in what he called a a special military operation in which castigated the U.S. as an empire of lies. He went on to assert:

One can say with good reason and confidence that the whole so-called Western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety, the very same empire of lies.

Putin does not credit either Rand Paul or Ron Paul for the quote, but he deems it an American creation: U.S. politicians, political scientists and journalists write and say that a veritable empire of lies has been created inside the United States.

This term now has a life of its own in Russian media, and Chinese media, which sometimes takes its cues from the Kremlin, echoes this, especially on Ukraine-related matters. The U.S. has been tagged an empire of lies numerous times in the last year or so, sometimes in relation to spurious Russian propaganda about secret bio-labs, germ warfare, and COVID origins, but also in cases of documented deceit, such as in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

Last year, a cartoon entitled Empire of Lies ran in the Global Times. Penned by Russian artist Vitaly Podvitski, whose work has appeared in Sputnik News, RIA Novosti, and Channel One Russia, it portrays a sad, hook-nosed Uncle Sam pouring toxic ooze from a garbage can labeled lies on Xinjiang to discredit China.

Another Russian, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is also fond of the term. He described the entire West as an empire of lies on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV news last month, among other occasions.

There are several books with the title Empire of Lies. mostly in the realm of dystopian fiction, but there is also a political critique of U.S. foreign policy published in March this year by right-wing contrarian and economist Paul Craig Roberts who points to 9/11, COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine as examples of key U.S. deceptions.

There is another possible source of the endurable and enduring empire of lies meme, as ironic as it is unlikely. Its the title of a book about China, published in 2008 by the erudite French-American author Guy Sorman who first visited China in 1967: Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the Twenty-First Century.

Writing back when the Western honeymoon in China was not yet over, Sorman argued the West conferred greater legitimacy on China than did the Chinese themselves, which gives an insight into why the Chinese media likes to quote foreigners so much.

The uncertain origin of the phrase empire of lies adds another Orwellian twist to this already twisted matter. It certainly sounds like something Orwell would have said or could have said, and you can buy T-shirts (from libertarian-orineted stores) with the quote on it attributed to Orwell, but there is no reliable scholarship that confirms Orwell said or wrote it.

What would the human truth-seeking missile called Orwell have to say about a quote attributed to him that he never made, that has now gone around the world several times, getting reinvigorated and repurposed by authoritarian governments in Russia and China?

Original post:

Empires of lies The China Project - The China Project

A Japanese researcher has discovered official records on a section of the now-defunct Japanese Imperial Army known as Unit 731, which is said to have engaged in research on germ warfare during World War Two.

Matsuno Seiya, a researcher at Meiji Gakuin University's International Peace Research Institute, said he found the records in a report numbering more than 100 pages kept at the National Archives of Japan.

The report was created in September 1940 by the Kwantung Army stationed in what was then called Manchuria.

The records on the unit described how its official name was changed at the time, as well as a plan to expand the group by allocating more personnel.

Appended to the report was a list of the names and ranks of the unit's members. Ishii Shiro, the head of the group at that time, and medical scholars are among the 97 members on the list.

Details of the unit's activities are not known, since records on the group were ordered to be destroyed by the Imperial Army.

Matsuno said the discovery is significant, because they are the first records found regarding the unit's composition, enabling him to figure out who was in the group in its early days.

Matsuno said the member list includes previously unknown names, and that it will help researchers get to the bottom of what the unit did during the war.

Read more from the original source:

Official records on Japanese Imperial Army unit unearthed | NHK ... - NHK WORLD

December 10, 1997 Todays Nuclear Balance of Power

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editors Note: This article first appeared in EIR Vol. 24, No. 51, Dec. 19, 1997, pp. 1230.

Of information society, let it be said: Once more, this recent October, an unsinkable Titanic was fatally holed by its collision with the waiting, relevant species of iceberg. The impregnable post-1989, globalized financial system, is now settling into the watery abyss. Unfortunately, sanity being what it is, or is not, these days, even after the global events of October and November, most of the passengers, including former Citibank chief Walter Wriston, are still clinging to the sinking ship, clinging to a delusory faith in an unsinkable utopia, in an eternal, neo-Malthusian, information societys economy.

Yes, there seem to be some ups and downs on the markets, is the gist of most U.S. adults reluctant acknowledgement of the recent several weeks of global financial storms; but, they add, the economy is still basically sound. They would never let it happen here. Until I see it announced on television, I am not going to let myself believe, that that sort of crisis will ever come here. Although the modern Manichean, that citizen, leaves unclear, who, or what these mysterious potencies, they, might be; the impression is, that they are awesomely Olympian.

Such popular superstition put to one side, given the catastrophes to the global financial system since late October through early December, no economist or political figure anywhere on this planet, could still be excused for believing a U.S. daily news media which promises that the current Asia crisis will never spread into the U.S. economy. After such events, no professional could still honestly deny the exceptional accuracy of my published, February 1997 forecast: an outbreak of a global, systemic financial crisis, beginning no later than October 1997. The recent seismic shocks to the worlds financial system, have assumed the form of an eerie drum-beat; from Asia, through Europe, and into the Americas, the situation has become constantly worse. Until certain key governments end the presently ongoing attempts, to bail out a sinking financial Titanic, whose bottom has already been ripped out irreparably, the crisis will become worse, world-wide, that at an accelerating rate.

Meanwhile, as if to show us that matters were not already as bad as they might become, the policies demanded by both thuggish U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and IMF Director Michel Camdessus, for example, have already begun what threatens to become, very quickly, a hyperinflationary spiral, like that which struck Weimar Germany during 19221923. The difference is, that, if this Weimar-1923-style policy of Greenspan and Camdessus were continued throughout Asia, and into the oncoming explosions in Russia, and South America, the result must be a Weimar-style hyperinflation, which might reach total breakdown, world-wide, not over months, as in 19221923, but, because of the added impact of a global, $100 trillions-equivalent derivatives bubble, compressed into a period as short as weeks.

H.G. Wells was the first publicist of the argument of a nuclear balance of power, and also a key figure in shaping what would become the rock-drug-sex counterculture. Wells, writes LaRouche, like the Dick Morris who did so much to sink the U.S. Democratic Partys 1996 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, typifies the use of the pimp as a publicist.

In such economics matters, mere statistical studies may inform us of such relevant considerations, such as the fact that the patient is dead, but they provide little help in defining the cures which might have saved the economy, if not its financial system. If we wish to cure the disease, we must go behind the mere symptoms, to identify the agency which those symptoms express. To discover the cure, we must discover the source of the sickness. To find the continuing source of this global civilizations sickness, the presently onrushing, systemic, global financial crisis, we must focus upon the pattern of decisions which continue, even today, to shape economic practice: not the mere statistical effects of that practice. It is the substance of Genghis Khan, not his statistical shadow, which constitutes the mortal threat to our civilization. In short, to overcome the danger, the U.S. government must reverse the policy-trend of the recent thirty-odd years.

What must be introduced, would be considered by todays commonplace, elected illiterates in the subject of economics history, such as Speaker Newt Gingrich, as very radical changes in policies. If precisely those policies are not soon introduced, to deal with an already hopelessly bankrupt set of international financial and monetary institutions, this is a bottomless crisis. In the case those policies are not introduced very soon, this planetary civilization would be doomed, doomed by a lack of moral fitness to survive, doomed to plunge into the post-modernist barbarism of a prolonged new dark age, even before the 2000 U.S. election-campaigns begin. Unless, we can detect and eradicate those policies and supranational institutions, which have caused the past thirty-odd years decline in world economy, our culture is a dying culture, our nations, their populations, the casualties of a dying, global civilization.

Figure 1

Germany and Hyperinflation, 1921-23

(Index 1913 = 1)

Figure 2

Hyperinflation, Germany , 1921-23

(value of German mark in U.S. cents)

Source: Stephen V.O. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 1921-31 (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1967).

Thus, modern European civilization, now somewhat more than six hundred years old, is, presently, dying. Nothing could save the present financial and monetary system itself. By the end of this century, perhaps sooner, it, in its present form, will be gone, either by responsible actions of key governments, or, lacking that remedy, by way of either hyperinflationary, or hyperdeflationary collapse, forever. As my own and other features in EIR have repeatedly warned, this financial-monetary system is like a doomed, sinking ship; the passengers, the nations, the peoples, and the physical economy living within this civilization, could be saved, but only if they are willing to abandon that doomed ship itself. They could survive, but only if they give up, suddenly, those post-1964, radical changes in culture, which have doomed the present world economic order.

Unfortunately, the prevailing evidence warns us, that no more than a small minority of the populations and their doomed governments are yet willing, to support the policies needed to allow our nations to survive that global systemic financial crisis which has recently entered its terminal phase. For the moment, the boob-tubed majority of the pleasure-seeking populations of Europe and North Americamost notablyseem to have lost the will to grasp for anything but the next fleeting instant of momentaryor, should we better say, monetarypleasure.

We must view the majority of the people of most nations today, as like the pompous, doomed Akkadians of Biblical Belshazzars Babylonian empire; most of the leading institutions of this planet appear to have lost that essential quality, moral fitness to survive. So, as the artist portrayed a similar circumstance, Belshazzars Feast: once again, the moving finger writes; the new message is now nearly completed.

How did our world get into such a mess? When and how did we start down the road to this catastrophe? What habits must we rip out of our institutions, and ourselves, if we, and our republic are to survive the ongoing, terminal disintegration of the entire worlds present financial and monetary systems?

To understand how all this occurred, how the most powerful civilization ever crafted, brought itself, like the fabled Ozymandias, to this present point of degradation and self-destruction, listen to a true story which begins with the Sept. 6, 1901 assassination of patriotic U.S. President William McKinley, by an imported terrorist protg of New Yorks Emma Goldmans Henry Street Settlement House, Leon Czolgosz. The mortal wounding effected by this assassins attack, an attack steered by self-anointed tyrannicide Goldman herself, brought a nasty spawn of the Confederacy, Theodore Roosevelt, into the U.S. Presidency, on Sept. 14, eight days later. About the same time, in England, a pathetic, perverse, but, subsequently, very influential British publicist, Herbert George Wells (18661946), escaped from what had been well-deserved obscurity. This Wells would later describe his personal acquaintance and ideological ally, Theodore Roosevelt, aptly, as The Big Noise of America.

That intersection of these two personalities, Wells and Theodore Roosevelt, with the accession of Prince Edward Albert as Britains King Edward VII, typify a century gone wrong from the start, the century of 1) two World Wars, 2) a terrifying nuclear balance of power, which Wells was the first to propose publicly and widely, beginning 1914, and, 3) the recent thirty-odd years of worldwide reign of a global, neo-Malthusian nightmare, the latter another Wells dogma. These three factors, including the two dogmas, the one proposed, the other adopted by Wells, became, significantly through his contributing influence, the principal proximate cause of the presently ongoing worldwide economic-breakdown crisis.

In these and other ways, among literate historians and other relevant authorities on the matter, H.G. Wells has notable importance for our understanding the strategic, political, economic, and moral crisis now enveloping this planet. An unlikely candidate for fame and influence? He was, admittedly, like fellow Fabian tribesman George Bernard Shaw, essentially a shallow poseur, in the literal sense of the Latin derivation of vanity: a miserable, invidious, misanthropic wretch, a picaresque eternal lout of immense vanity, of a personal character to be compared, and that not too favorably, with the popular image of a mafia boss. He was, in short, exactly the sort of lackey the British oligarchy would employ and cultivate to do a particularly nasty bit of thuggery.

From the time of this English Sparafuciles rocketting out of obscurity, at the beginning of this century, he is to be compared with the notorious textbook case of Typhoid Mary; like her, incontestably a figure who has, in his time, radiated a certain unpleasant influence. To appreciate Wells high-ranking, and generally rising importance in relevant world events, during the interval 19011939, think of him as, like Adolf Hitler, or his fellow-criminal Bertrand Russell, a carrier of what has proven to be an extremely virulent strain of cultural syphilis. Wells did not destroy our civilization by himself; but, he played a key, and exemplary part, as a tissue in which the relevant killer-strain of infection was cultured and disseminated.

Both Wells depraved admirers and the populists typically associative, Hobbesian view of a world government conspiracy, treat Wells, and other lackeys of his type, as either admirable, or despicable geniuses. Wells was no genius; his talent was, as he implicitly describes himself, a man with a pimps insight into the susceptibility of a depraved clienteles not-so-hidden private sexual fantasies. In each case an influential idea is attributed to Wells, whether by devotees or detractors, we discover that no such originality ever existed. His role was never that of a discoverer of principles; indeed, there is nothing of principle in Wells vocabulary. Wells was not an inventor, but, rather, a publicist, a man like Dick Morris, the recently notorious cousin of the late Roy M. Cohn, a pathetic creature who turned his pimps instinct for the sexual perversities of a general public, into a public-relations career.

This is a crucial point, so we should add a few more relevant observations on the distinction we have just made.

For example, Wells writes:

The political function for which a publicist such as Wells, is subjected to a competitive process of selection, is to transform the ideas which the prospective employers intend to promote, into the easy form in which the mere name of such ideas can acquire pleasurable associations within a large ration, if not yet the majority, of a targetted population and the institutions which that population regards as expressing its self-interest.

That is not the manner in which ideas should be given wider currency; the cognitive methods of Classical humanistic education, are the proper approach to all forms of education of a population, especially the population of a nation which wishes to escape the fall from republic to tyranny. Wells, like the Mephistopheles of Goethes Faust, is a British empiricist, who avoids cognition; he targets the populations irrational susceptibilities, the targets non-cognitive, associative modes of fantasy-life: erotic imagery.

Wells, like the Dick Morris who did so much to sink the U.S. Democratic Partys 1996 campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, typifies the use of the pimp as a publicist. Run it up the flagpole, and see who salutes it! Throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks! Read the polls, and discover which of last nights political entertainments found their way into the polluted imageries of a relative majority of the targetted strata of the population. Hence, the use of Wells policy of sexually-oriented utopian propaganda, in the case of the financially successful basing of the origins of the Promise Keepers cult on the use of Jungian homoerotic imageries.

That sort of pimp, like the mass-media generally, makes his living, and gains his political influence, through reliance upon appeal to the kind of underlying sexual perversity echoed in todays popular print and electronic mass-media of entertainment, and in the fictionalized fantasies presented in those media under the misleading rubric of news.

This is a characteristic of degenerated cultures, such as that of the Roman Empire, or British popular culture today, in which the proposed size of the testicles of the sports arenas leading gladiators, or, such matters as the size of an actresss breasts, or the reported sexual peccadilloes of entertainment celebrities, evoke far greater passion from the population, than those issues of policy upon which the lives of themselves and their posterity hang. As Wells expressed the same view, but from his vantage-point, In a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

Neo-Malthusian propaganda in the 1960s (an ad in the New York Times), and in the 1990s (a Zero Population Growth hawker in a farmers market). H.G. Wells laid the foundationIn a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

In general, whether for evil, as in the case of Wells, or for good, an idea gains currency through one or another kind of process of social ingestion. Properly, ingestion begins at the head, and is, next, transmitted from the cognitive process of one head, to replication of the same species and type of cognitive process in the head of another; but, in the lower reaches of society, types such as Wells, Dick Morris, and Richard Mellon-Scaifes circles, prefer to address the targetted populist audiences preference for fantasy, from the nether apertures of the publicists body. In the case of the oligarchy which adopted Wells, it was his uncanny ability, like his Fabian fellow-tribesman George Bernard Shaw, to target and reach the most morally debased level of his chosen audience, whose relative successes showed the oligarchy how to shape its ideas in a form of expression which would capture what Wells recognized as the baser susceptibilities of the intended mass of dupes.

In sum: Wells did not invent sex; he merely sold it. Therein lay his talent, and the quality of his influence.

In the reports included in this issues Strategic Study, our interest in Wells is focussed upon those features of his activity, which bear upon his crucial and continuing role in originating, beginning 1914, on the eve of World War I, a new variety of balance of power doctrine, premised upon chemist Frederick Soddys assurances of the feasibility of a terrible new military power, nuclear-fission weaponry.

This is the now all-too-familiar doctrine, which features the development and use of nuclear weapons as a form of terror, by means of which nations might be forced to abandon national sovereignty, and to join a new, feudalist world order, which Wells, like his crony Bertrand Russell, advocated as world government. Within the setting of that topic, our more specific interest here, is the crucial role which the nuclear balance-of-power doctrine has had, in imposing those utopian, neo-Malthusian dogmas which have, increasingly, ruled, and ruined, and continue to menace the worlds economic decision-making, during the recent thirty-odd years.

On these accounts, H.G. Wells was not only the first publicist of the argument of nuclear balance of power; he was also among the key figures in misshaping what became that mass youth-counterculture which, like the mythological Circe, took over the minds and bodies of a majority of the 19641972 generation of university students. As such a mere lackey, he played a key role in bringing about the process of self-destruction, which, in turn, sent the entirety of modern European civilization to its presently ongoing financial disintegration.

To understand Wells, his selection by his aristocratic patrons, and the impact which he has had upon this century, one must begin at the year 1901, the year in which President McKinley was murdered by a London-centered international terrorist organization of that time, the year in which Wells utopian, and frankly, as he himself insisted on the term, neo-Malthusian rant, Anticipations, was published. This book was then a leading part of the activity which brought Thomas Huxley admirer Wells into the Fabian Society, and into that eating-club, called the Coefficients, where he became a kind of early-on Josef Goebbels for Lord Alfred Milners imperial enterprises.

On these matters, Wells writing is characterized by a vivid recollection of what he views as the central fact of his world: that he exists in it, surrounded by celebrities whose acquaintance he wears as his literary plumage. Even world figures, including such non-British figures as Theodore Roosevelt, V.I. Lenin, Josef Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and so on, appear in the writing of this irascible Rumpelstiltskin as if they might be merely his predicates. Thus, in his writings, the larger world in which he is situated, is mostly out of focus, a blur. In his own mind, this British Steppenwolf was less in the world, than prancing pompously on stage, before it.

Nonetheless, outside the virtual reality which he describes his erotic fantasy-life to be, there existed a very real world, and a very real situation, a world in which he exerted some very real influence. That real world was chiefly hatred against the British monarchys traditional adversary, the continued existence of Benjamin Franklins and Abraham Lincolns United States. This was a U.S. which he and his patrons feared, and hated, bitterly, even more than they hated the U.S.s late-Nineteenth-Century allies, Japan, Germany, Russia, and, the France of Thiers, President Sadi Carnot, and historian-diplomat Gabriel Hanotaux. Without that essential situation dominating the world in which Wells lived, the Wells of the first half of the Twentieth Century could not have existed.

Follow lackey Sancho Panza (Wells) and aristocratic Don Quixote (Russell), from the starting-point of their journey, hatred against the United States, to their choice of weapons for our republics destruction. There are the three, interdependent, utopian working-notions thematically central to all of the 19011939 publicist activity of H.G. Wells, and of the Gernsback-Campbell U.S. school of radically positivist, pulp science-fiction which Wells inspired: 1.) nuclear weapons, 2.) world government, and 3.) masturbatory neo-Malthusianism. Find thus the bridge between the Wells of 19011928, and the 19641972 mass-brainwashing of university campus Baby Boomers. To grasp the thrust of their Open Conspiracy, consider that characteristic of the U.S.A. which was the focus of their fear and satanic quality of hatred.

Since 1863, what the ruling British oligarchy, otherwise traditionally named the Venetian Party, has feared, and hated, more than anything else, was the relatively awesome power which the United States economy came to represent during the course of the years 18611876. The facts of this history have been richly documented in books and leading papers published by this writer and his associates over more than a quarter-century. For our purposes here, the relevant essentials of that matter, as this bears upon the roles of Wells and Russell, are fairly summarized as follows.

Until the 18621863 interventions of Russias Czar Alexander II, the British monarchy of Lord Palmerston and Bertrand Russells grandfather, Lord Russell, was fully committed to destroying the United States. As British agent August Belmont underscored this fact in his own admissions, Londons intent in launching its puppet, the Confederate States of America, was to force the Washington, D.C. government to accept the sovereignty of the British Confederacy puppet, thus creating the situation in which London could divide the North American continent among a Balkans-like collection of perpetually squabbling local tyrannies, this according to the same balance of power illogic which the dubious Zbigniew Tweedledum Brzezinski has proposed for Central Asia.

When, despite Belmont asset McClellans complicity, Britains Confederacy assets failed to bring the matter quickly to the conclusion London intended, Palmerston, Russell, and Palmerstons French stooge, the Emperor Napoleon III, prepared to deploy the combined naval forces of Britain, France, and Spain against both Mexico and the U.S. blockade of the Confederate ports. When the Czar not only threatened to make war throughout Europe, should Britain deploy naval forces against those of the U.S., but dispatched two Russian naval fleets to aid the U.S. in the case of a British naval intervention in the Civil War, Palmerstons and Napoleon IIIs plan to destroy the U.S., had to be scrapped in favor of other, longer-term options.

During this period, the crucial feature of Lincolns strategy, was the rapid development of the basic economic infrastructure and agro-industrial potential of the region under his command. What Lincoln was fighting, from his side, was what Germanys great Alfred von Schlieffen defined as annihilation warfare, in contrast to the predominantly Eighteenth-Century model of cabinet warfare which generals such as Lee and McClellan proposed to fight instead. Victory in battles was necessary, but not decisive by itself. Decisive was the increase of the annihilation capability which one side was developing in depth, relative to the destruction of the core-capability of the opposing forces. In the end, it was the anvil Grant, the hammer Sherman, and Sheridan, who typified the expression of Lincolns strategic will on this account.

This mode of warfare, aimed to annihilate the adversarys economic-military capability for continuing to deploy effective war-fighting capabilities, had been introduced to the United States, beginning approximately 1814, from the France circles of Lazare Carnot, Frances celebrated 17921794 Organizer of Victory, and from Carnots former teacher and ally, Gaspard Monge of the cole Polytechnique. Carnot is the founder of modern warfare, a form of warfare which Carnot himself integrated with the introduction of machine-tool-design methods to the logistics and technology of war-fighting. This was adopted at the West Point of Commandant Sylvanus Thayer, whose production of a military Corps of Engineers became the germ of later U.S. military superiority, and represented an essential building-block for the Carey-Lincoln economic miracle of 18611876.

Under the guidance of economist Henry C. Carey, the 18611876 period saw the rapid development of the U.S. economy into not only the worlds most powerful, but the most technologically advanced, by far. This resulted in the successful adoption of the Carey-Lincoln model by Japans Meiji Restoration, and radical changes in the economic policies of Bismarck, making Germany the rising economy in Europe. Similar benefits of the U.S. revolution in industrial society, were extended to the Russia of U.S. ally Czar Alexander II, D.I. Mendeleyev, and Count Sergei Witte. The aid to Russias technological progress came both directly from the U.S., and by way of U.S.-Russia-Germany cooperation.

Meanwhile, with the overthrow of British agent Napoleon III, France under Adolphe Thiers, Sadi Carnot, et al., had ceased to be the number-two enemy of the U.S.A., and was engaged in cooperation in the great, railway-building and related land-bridge development projects in Eurasia. Until corrupt French creatures, agents of London, arranged a capitulation to Lord Kitcheners London, in the Fashoda incident of 1898, France was effectively a partner of the great nation-building projects which Lincolns victorious U.S.A. had inspired and was fostering in Eurasia. Until British-directed, chiefly diplomatic countermeasures of the 18941901 interval, the combination of the U.S.A.s links to Japan and to the nationalist forces of China, complemented U.S. patriots commitment to fostering Eurasia economic cooperation among France, Germany, Russia, China, and Japan.

From the success of Frances Paul Barras in ousting war-hero Lazare Carnot from all positions of political power in France, until the initial successes of President Lincolns naval blockades, during the U.S. Civil War, London was assured, that the potential strategic danger from the continued existence of the U.S.A., was a manageable threat. The developments of 18611876 nearly obliterated British strategic self-confidence on this account. These events demonstrated to the nations of that time, the absolute, and vast superiority of the Leibniz-Franklin-Hamilton-Carey-List American System of political-economy, over the British intellectual export to its intended victims, the free trade model. The spread of Henry C. Careys American model into Japan, Germany, Russia, and nationalist China, transformed the threat to the British monarchy, from a grave potential one, into an immediate challenge to the continued existence of our republics traditional and continuing chief foreign adversary, since 1714 to the present day.

At the close of the century, when Wells first emerged from obscurity, the American System had shown great resiliency against even the worst treason and external afflictions it had suffered until that time. The election of a patriot in the Lincoln-Carey tradition, President William McKinley, threatened to undo the treachery accomplished under Confederacy spawn Grover Cleveland; the U.S.A. led by McKinley, was an active challenge to the continued existence of the British Empire. A new Japan emperor, friendlier to Britain, presided over the first, 1894 Japan-China war, a direct break of Japan with its former U.S. ally; the 19411945 U.S.-Japan war was a direct outgrowth of Japans prolonged, Twentieth-Century alliance with Britain against U.S. interests. The immediate grave danger to the British Empire was eliminated, for the ensuing two decades, by the assassination of President McKinley. King Edward VIIs successful use of treasonous French officials from the ranks of Frances assortments of revanchist scoundrels, enabled London to pit France and Russia against Germany, and to deploy combined French and British freemasonic agents to orchestrate the Balkan War used to detonate World War I.

Russells expressions of hatred against the United States, like his mass-homicidal threats against darker-skinned more prolific races, are already beyond the bounds of toleration; the man was a conscienceless beast. Yet, even Russells anti-American rants do not approach the virulence and pervasiveness of Wells expressed hatred against everything American. Only a low-life lackey could muster such public displays of obsessive hatred against his masters opponent as Wells does. Sometimes, as British whodunits instruct us, the households Royal commissionaire, the butler, often a fanatical British-Israelite thug, makes a readier assassin than the typical British version of Oblomov, the butlers EstablishedChurch master.

Bertrand Russell: When I first became politically conscious, Gladstone and Disraeli still confronted each other amid Victorian solidities, the British Empire seemed eternal, a threat to British naval supremacy was unthinkable, the country was aristocratic, rich and growing richer.... For an old man, with such a background, it is difficult to feel at home in a world of ... American supremacy.

After Wells Death, Russell summarized his own and Wells common view in the following terms:

The distinction, and convergence of implied master (Russell) and house-servant (Wells), are compactly represented by Russells autobiographical outburst:

Russell was speaking in the context of Britains continuing, Churchillian hatred against that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt who, but for his untimely death, would have quickly rid this planet of all colonial empires and also of continued British export of its pernicious, theologically, implicitly satanic, free trade swindle to the foreign nations its intended victims.

As previously stressed, in sundry relevant locations, since the 14391440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, and since the subsequent establishment of Louis XIs France as the first modern form of nationstate republic, the central issue underlying all the important wars and related political, social, and philosophical conflicts within extended modern European civilization, has been the conflict between the notion of the equality of all persons, as made in the cognitive image of God, against the contrary policy of those oligarchical classes then centered in Venices imperial role as the then-dominant maritime and financier power of the Mediterranean region and northern Europe. The case of Russell, Wells, et al., is no exception to this rule. The Civil War between the United States of President Abraham Lincoln and the British puppet-state known as the Confederacy, is a perfect expression of precisely this issue.

As stressed in earlier locations, the exceptional quality of superiority of the design presented in our 1776 Declaration of Independence and 17871789 Federal Constitution, is a reflection of the historic circumstance, that post-League of Cambrai Europe continues, to this day, to be characteristically a corrupted form of nation-state, in which one of the two ruling classes of feudal society, a financier-oligarchy of what has been known variously, since the Seventeenth Century, as the Venetian Party, AngloDutch oligarchy, or, more recently, Club of the Isles, World Wildlife Fund, etc., has usually occupied the positions of top-most authority over government and economy. Although we were polluted with spores of such an oligarchical slime-mold, with our New England opium-traffickers, our New York bankers, and our southern slave-owners, our constitutional principle was of such excellent moral superiority over that of any other nation-state established in modern times, that we have managed, thus far, to emerge, sooner or later, afresh from every protracted period of corruption by the influence of our own domestic oligarchical classes.

On this account, we were not an exception to the best currents within Italy, France, Germany, and so forth; the highest levels were reached by such German-speaking admirers of our republican struggles as Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig van Beethoven. Indeed, those best currents from precisely those countries, provided the majority of the founding kernel of our citizenry. The difference is, that we used our distance from Europe to constitutional advantage, thus becoming the only modern European form of nation-state which gained the freedom to be founded upon a consistent moral principle. That, and only that, is our exceptional superiority as a form of nation-state. This is the only reason for the stubborn persistence of the British monarchys continuing role, since 1714, of being the principal, mortal adversary of our republic. The fact, as many foolish Americans demonstrate the point, that the British oligarchy regards us with an even greater, more consistent enmity than our U.S. patriots, such as the present writer, view the British monarchy.

This is not to suggest, that Clement Prince Metternichs Habsburg monarchy was any less fervent an enemy of the United States than Benthams, Castlereaghs, Cannings, and Palmerstons Britain. Probably, putting aside a significant number of happier exceptions, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, the Emperor Joseph II, and Beethovens student, the Archduke Rudolf, the continental European land-owning aristocracy, taken as a class, was more aptly represented by the secret police under such Austrian Chancellors as Wenzel von Kaunitz and, the official pimp, of the 1814 (sexual) Congress of Venice, Metternich. That class, generally, was more brutish than the British. The difference is, that the landed aristocracy of the southern regions of Europe and the Americas, was a dying species, a great nuisance for the security of the United States during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, but with little potency for the longer term, even then.

As this reporter has stressed early and often, the difference between U.S. patriots in the tradition of Franklin and Lincoln, and the British ruling classes and their lackeys, is not other than, nothing less than, an uncompromisable difference respecting the concepts of God, man, and nature. Russells, Hitler-like, sordid racialism, expressed in proposals for genocide, to be accomplished by aid of means which he himself acknowledged to be disgusting Malthusian methods, including bacteriological warfare, expresses this unbridgeable moral gulf between our respective forms of government.

In Jonathan Swifts satire, Lemuel Gulliver visits the kingdom of the Houyhnhnms, in which lordly horses posteriors reign over rutting humanoids called Yahoos, which were devoid of morals or speech, an apt picture of the British Isles aristocrats and lower classes at the time. Gulliver: He did me the honor to raise his hoof gently to my mouth.

To make the needed summary of our argument on this point, as short as possible, the reader is referred to the charming stories of Jonathan Swifts 1726 Gullivers Travels. One must get past the misapprehension, that these are merely childrens stories. They are, chiefly, political satires on the condition of the British Isles under King George I. The most relevant among these, is the tale of the fictional Lemuel Gullivers visit to the kingdom of the Houyhnhnms, in which lordly horses posteriors reigned over rutting humanoid creatures, called Yahoos, which latter were devoid of morals or speech: an apt picture of the British Isles aristocrats and lower classes at that time. It is relevant to emphasize here, that that is also a fair satire on the Eighteenth-Century depravity to which the British population has been returned, since the onset of those pestilences known as the Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher governments.

The chief practical expression of the issue which underlies the incurable hostility between all U.S. patriots and the present British oligarchy, is the interrelated issues of popular education, popular employment, and popular physical standard of household incomes. Summarily: If each man and woman is made, equally, in the image of God, by virtue of those sovereign cognitive potentials of the individual mind, by means of which man increases our species power over nature through such means as new, validated discoveries of physical principle, then the education, employment, and conditions of family and community life of each and all persons must be ordered accordingly.

In such a society, which our Leibnizian 1776 Declaration of Independence, and the Preamble of our 1789 Federal Constitution, define this republic of ours to be, there can be no superior social classes, nor any institution by means of which any form of usuryfinancier usury or slaveryis allowed as means by which one group of persons can subjugate, or otherwise loot another. Each newborn personality must be cultivated to the utmost degree possible, in the development of those powers of cognition which define each as made in the image of God. Each must be afforded, to the degree possible, the opportunities of useful employment which are consistent with such developed cognitive powers. Each household, and community within society must be afforded the opportunities which are consistent with these other requirements.

Not only must we desire this naturally lawful state of affairs for our nation itself. We can not be happy unless we are working to ensure the same rights for all humanity, for all nations.

Here, on these two points, we part company with our foremost traditional enemy, the British Venetian-style financier oligarchy and its representative instrument, the imperial monarchy.

The question is then often posed, Can we not persuade such wretches as poor lackey H.G. Wells, that our desire is in their best interest as human individuals? Can the British not be brought to understand, that we wish nothing so much for them, as that they might enjoy the same preconditions of happiness we defend for our own nation? Why not? Perhaps a miserable wretch like Bertrand Russell, belongs to the criminal class his title and outlook define his loyalties to be? But, what of the ordinary, poor Brit, or simply one of unpretentious circumstances: Why should he or she not see the wisdom of abandoning his nations long-established policy of destroying the liberties of ones own people?

With such questions, one touches upon the existence of a principle of evil, like that which gripped the poor Confederate soldier, almost in a condition of slavery, and illiteracy, like the African-American slave, himself. Why should he fight for the cause of his actual oppressor? How can a miserable wretch such as lackey H.G. Wells exist? Wells would recognize the answer to that question: Eros! Will Shakespeares friend, Christopher Marlowe, wrote elegantly of this in his Dr. Faustus. John Miltons Satan, like Bertrand Russell, would rather reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. Wells, like Adolf Hitler, another of the same pedigree, would rather be Satans lackey in Hell, than a citizen in Heaven; on both counts, both Russell and Wells succeeded. You will not bring them back, nor, likely, any of their kind. They have been destroyed by the culture of which they are a part.

Thus, if we do not willingly purge ourselves of a bad culture, one which, like that 19641972 youth- counterculture, has brought this civilization to the presently ongoing systemic collapse, this generation now in topmost positions of power, and its children and grandchildren, will pay the horrid price suffered by any culture, whose virtual extermination is a prerequisite to further human progress.

That should be warning to those who are reluctant to give up the acquired traits of the 19641972 youth-counterculture. History is so composed, that bad cultures tend to eliminate, or, at least, greatly weaken themselves. Although several thousand years were required to crush the degraded Semitic culture which grew up in Mesopotamia, when the crucial blow was finally struck, by Alexander the Great, the way was cleared for the role which Christianity began to play just over three centuries later. Archeology and related studies warn us, that it is by the weakening of a bad culture, which would otherwise be an impediment to human improvement, that mankind has progressed. Thus, if we do not willingly purge ourselves of a bad culture, one which, like that 19641972 youth-counterculture, has brought this civilization to the presently ongoing systemic collapse, this generation now in topmost positions of power, and its children and grandchildren, will pay the horrid price suffered by any culture, whose virtual extermination is a prerequisite to further human progress. Similarly, if we allow the British cause, as represented by Wells, Russell, and their like, to continue to dominate the course of current history, we and our posterity shall be in large degree, soon obliterated, as the levels of global population are reduced, through the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to the range of not more than the several hundred millions world population which Europes Fifteenth Century encountered.

The central issue of all known human existence to date, and the essential issue which prompts all U.S. patriots to recognize the British oligarchical system as our republics first, continuing, and principal mortal adversary, is this issue of establishing a form of society consistent with the inborn, cognitive potential of each and all human individuals. The issue is to eliminate all expressions of multi-tier society, in which those beneath serve as virtual human cattle to landlord or financier above.

What moves a Russell, is not the desire to exploit, as much as it is to have the status of an exploiter. What moves a Wells, or a Henry A. Kissinger, is, similarly, the passion to be a lackey, rather than live in a world where lackeys do not enjoy the privileges accompanying patronage by an oligarchy. There is, as the cases of the public sexual advocacies of both Russell and Wells attest, something Freudian, or similarly debased, in the proximate motivations of these despicable types of Englishmanand others like them. Indeed, the entirety of empiricisms history, is a history of degraded eroticism. Not merely strange sexual appetites, although those abounded; but, erotic in the more inclusive sense of placing the sense-perceptual experience of intense pleasure-pain at the highest rank of motivating passion. Exemplary, is the smell of homosexual rape in the slaves subjection by the master. It is not by our objective interests, but, by our motives, our passions, that we are ruled.

Russells referenced expostulation, It is difficult to feel at home in a world of ... American supremacy, sums up the point adequately. The kind of republican society represented by the U.S. in its best moments, is a kind of society in which a Russell loses his desire to live. Thus, he must destroy that kind of society. It is that simple a motive. Wells wishes to be a butler to a Russell; a world without Russells, Milners, and so on, is a world which gives a Wells no pleasure, a world in which he would not care to live. He, too, must destroy that kind of society.

The British oligarchys horrid fascination with the persistence of the American Revolution, impelled that oligarchy to look at this phenomenon more deeply. Rather than simply attempting to crush the existing United States, it reckoned that it must uproot the seedling, destroy the seed, and salt the fields, such that this planet might be secured against new growth of such an undesirable plant, at last, and forever. To accomplish that, Britain must eliminate the existence of the institutions upon which the existence of modern European civilization depends. It must turn back the clock of history, accordingly. It must eliminate the nation-state, to return to a kind of global Pax Romana, or a world government approximating that. It must eradicate forms of economy which depend upon the development of the cognitive processes of the general population. It must create a world ruled by the horses posteriors depicted by Swifts satire, a world in which the illiterate masses are kept amused, as Wells proposed, and as Newt Gingrich admirer Lord William Rees-Mogg has implicitly proposed, by rutting with one another in bushes and ditches, when they are not fully occupied with menial chores of a sort which a virtual beast might accomplish.

So, the one-time partners of Lincolns legacy, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and so on, were put against one anothers throats, in World War I. Not sufficient. Some nations, among the victors, survived! Worst of all, the hated U.S.! Try again, put Hitler into power in Germany, and soon, we shall have another wonderful war on the continent! Not good enough; the victor nations still exist. Try nuclear-fission weapons; and pit the biggest victors, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., against one another, With we Brits managing both sides in the middle. Stalin is a bother; as Russell said, during that period, that is a medical problem, which can be solved accordingly, that we might deal on better terms with those successors whom we think we have waiting in the wings. Russells discussion-partner Khrushchev will cooperate. We shall bring the powers to their knees, in sheer terror of going to the brink of total nuclear warfare! Then, they will beg for world government. Then, we shall win.

So, beginning 1964, young university students of increasingly doubtful literacy, began to imitate the rutting Yahoos of Swifts fable, in the corridors, basements, and bushes of the campuses. Some challenged then, What about reality? The voices from bushes retorted, We dont go there! One might have imagined that he heard Wells giggling from his grave: In a world where pressure on the means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians.

To understood how the images associated with the 19011928 writings of the lackey publicist H.G. Wells, could have become, as they did, the prevalent characteristics of belief among the university student population of the 19641972 interval, we must understand how modern European civilization works. In other words, we must identify the mechanisms by means of which a chiefly unsuspecting population is so subtly encumbered, even suddenly, with a new mind-set, that it is, afterward, scarcely aware of the fact, and might even deny vehemently that its mind-set has undergone an induced change to such effect. To understand that, we must discover how to discover how modern European civilization works. In other words, we are obliged to examine history in the same way we ought to study any branch of physical science.

Decades ago, the present writer, then engaged in consulting to various branches of industry, was struck by the implications of something which most relevant business managers and their consultants appeared, to him, at that time, simply to take for granted as a cruel fact of business life. In a time when the rudiments of successful industrial society were rather widely known, one of the most interesting, and important facts respecting production, was the fact that it was possible to foresee, even years in advance, a general change in popular taste for products and product-designs. We, whose treatment of the productive processes themselves must take into account the fact of changing consumer tastes, must ask ourselves, how was it possible, that the business executives who planned the new designs of products to emerge even a specific number of years later, could effectively foresee what public tastes would be. During the writers early adulthood, this was the characteristic problem of manufacturing garments; the distinctive feature of the rise of power of Wall Streets General Motors over the industrial philosophies of Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler, was General Motors emulation of the New York garment center. How, for example, did we foresee, what typical women, in identified social strata, would prefer, as a style change, not only months, but even years ahead. What does this phenomenon say about the human mind, the opinion-making of those customers? What does this tell us about the manipulability of public opinion generally?

This same question bears upon the ability of the British to foresee the induced changes in cultural-paradigm which they, and their confederates brought about with the hegemonic trends among the university student populations of 19641972. It was not quite as simple a matter as shortening skirt-lengths almost to the hips; but, as H.G. Wells would have been greatly pleased to observe, there was a connection.

As one might recognize, from study of my writings on the function of time-reversal in physical-economic processes, this question, which I have just summarized, touches upon the most profound and important philosophical questions respecting mankinds efficient relationship to nature. The question thus posed by industrial experience, is simply a reflection of a much larger domain: What is history? Not history as chronology, or chronology enhanced by mere academic commentary upon commentary, but living, real history, as history makes itself. To render comprehensible a valid representation of the connection between Wells of 19011928 and the university Baby-Boomer population of 19641972, the following summarized considerations are indispensable.

When some among us were children and adolescents, the raw idea of history made its impact on our awareness in chiefly two ways: the living genealogy in which our own existence is situated, and the antiquity of the process of emergence and development of the language we use. In the present writers time, and for earlier generations, these two impressions converged upon one another to relatively strongest effect about the time we approached adolescence, and were exposed, in that time to not only foreign languages, but to the importance then attached to the study of both Latin and Classical Greek. The timing of the appearance of that effect upon our young selves, had to do with our developing sense of the evolution of modern mathematics and physical science out of origins more than two thousand years earlier. The attempt to put together, in some coherent way, these three considerations: genealogy, language, and the transmission of a developing body of scientific ideas, is the rudimentary basis for a modern study of human history.

The point of this, is the urgency of freeing mankind from our species, unfortunately, commonly displayed habit, of blindly following current changes in public opinion, a habit of viewing opinions impressed upon us, in our role as victims, as unchallengeable, sacred gifts of pagan gods, of some Hegelian or Savigny Weltgeist, Zeitgeist, or, for the case of the most pitiable class of dupe, the populist, the Volksgeist. Is there some comprehensible principle of Reason, which we might observe as the underlying metric of a science of history? Is there a comprehensible ordering-principle underlying what a Socratically self-critical, well-informed mind might wish to identify as history?

Of course there is; that is the subject-matter to which the present writer has devoted the principal amount of his adolescent and adult life: the nature of human progress as measurable in the human species often successful efforts at increasing power over the universe. In other words: measurable in the sense of those subjective processes of valid discovery of new principle, by means of which mankind increases our species per-capita power over the universe. This led this writer, relatively early in adult life, to focus his lifes efforts on enhancement of an admired Leibnizs discoveries in the science of physical economy. However, economy is only a facet and reflection of the more general process of practice of ideas, a practice of mankinds total relationship to the universe, a total relationship which the realities of physical economy best typify. From this vantage-point, one may identify what ought to appear to be rather obvious clues to those mechanisms, by means of which the influence of a 19011928 publicist might have become the prevailing ideology among a university student population of 19641972.

As most of the present writers published work on physical economy and related matters, emphasizes this, mankinds relationship to the universe, and to our species itself, bears no similarity to that of any other living species. The distinctiveecological, if you willrelationship of man to the universe, is mans increasing power, as a species, over that universe. This power is located in the manner in which the properly developed, sovereign, innate cognitive potentials of the individual human mind, discover new, valid principles of the universe, both physical principles, and the principles which govern this remarkable subjective potential of the individual human cognitive processes themselves. In short, history is a history of orderable sequences of discovery and practice of ideas, in Platos specific, anti-empiricist sense of idea.

For us, as members of European culture, we must first master the history of our own culture, as from the inside. Only after we have applied the Socratic method to smoke out the hidden, usually perverse assumptions underlying our own, naive beliefs, have we established the intellectual foundations for examining the process of history in a more general way, the competence to pass judgment upon cultures not our own, that competence which is typical of a true science, capable of judging everything. The beginning of that initial subject-matter, European civilization, is the emergence of Classical Greek culture, as typified by the passage from Homeric epics through Solon, through the great Classical tragedians, and through the foundations for modern civilization supplied by Plato and the following century or two of his Academy after him. The essence of this process of initial internal development of European civilization, is the Greek image of Prometheus, as that image is typified by the work of Aeschylus.

Classical Greek culture, thus viewed, is a process of freeing the Greeks from submission to the assumed power of pagan gods, a process of freeing mankind, as an idea of mankind, from any notion that the human species is anything but the noblest, most beautiful existence within all known Creation. There is a connection, of this sort, between the Ulysses of the Odyssey and the Prometheus of Aeschylus Prometheus Bound. Aeschylus Prometheus is prepared to endure immortal torment, for the sake of keeping secret the forecastable, self-induced doom of Zeus and his fellow-gods of Olympus, a secret which Prometheus keeps, so that the noble human species might at last be freed from the rule over their minds by those evil pagan gods.

So, as it is written in Acts 17:2223, the Apostle Paul comes to the place in Athens dedicated to the Unknown God. Paul speaks:

Thus, Jesus Christs mission was expressed, as the establishment, in practice, for the first time in all known human existence, of a universal equality and oneness of all mankind, an equality rooted in no lesser consideration, than the fact each man and woman is made the noblest creature in the universe, because made in the cognitive image of God, a creature, by nature, beloved of God, to exert dominion in this universe. The Christian Apostles takeover of the richest contributions of Classical Greek culture, as Christianitys most suitable garment for its continuing mission in this world, and the fight of Christianity against that Rome which the Apostles knew as variously Babylon and Whore of Babylon, is the central feature of European civilizations unfolding history since the day the Apostle Paul stood upon the Athens hill.

However, until the Fifteenth-Century aftermath of the 14391440 sessions of the great ecumenical Council of Florence, there existed no form of society consistent with such a Christian principle. Over ninety percent of the population of each nation lived in the estate of human cattle, or in the debased, oligarchical status of brutish human-cattle-herders. Man in the image of God had no recognized rights under Diocletian or his followers of Byzantium or feudal western Europe. The principle which, to date, the Leibnizian Preamble of the U.S. Constitution represents with an exceptionally good approximation, exemplifies what the founders of the Council of Florence intended by their sponsorship of the first approximation of a Christian form of society, the France reconstructed under Louis XI.

That is to say, a form of society in which the accountability of the state for the promotion of the natural rights of all persons, as persons, was, for the first time in feudal history, placed above, and in opposition to the feudal rights of the land-owning and financier oligarchs and their lackeys. Since Louis XI lacked the power to eliminate the oligarchs, he placed himself as representative of the sovereign-state, above them, and thus, by virtue of the sovereign states accountability for principle, made the sovereign state under his reign an efficient agency for that Christian principle, in opposition to the pagan principle intrinsic to feudal forms of society.

That is to imply the corollary point, a point which we may be certain Frances Louis XI would have acknowledged as a measure of his reigns uncompleted work. The essential problem of modern European civilization, is that it has yet to free itself from the institutional heritage of what the Christian Apostles rightly named Whore of Babylon, the Latin imperial, bureaucratic Rome of Augustus Caesar: from the pagan form of state bureaucracy. Here lies the key to the transmission of Wells fantasies of 19011928 into the behavioral code of university students of the 19641972 period of cultural paradigm-shift.

This, as codified by Diocletian, persisted as the evil inherent in Byzantium. This Roman imperial bureaucratization is expressed, by intent, as the permanent civil-service bureaucracy of the British Crown. It is a tradition of imperial corruption by bureaucracy, which an Anglophile spawn of the Confederacy, President Grover Cleveland, fostered, in the abused name of reform, for the United States. It is the rot within our republican institutions, an imitation of the British permanent, civil-service bureaucracy, which has degenerated into the ruling U.S. Federal bureaucracy and judiciary of today.

This continuing role of bureaucracies, and bureaucratized judiciaries, in imitation of the principle of Augustus Caesars Roman imperial bureaucracy, is a crucial, pervasive flaw in the existing institutions of modern European civilization, world-wide. The kernel of the problem of administrative practice so ordered, is the existence of systems of rules which acknowledge no principle, but have, rather, the nature of the terms of a commercial contract, or what some terribly misguided theologians and others identify as a covenant.

This, of course, is directly opposed to all Christian principle, as Pauls celebrated I Corinthians 13 exemplifies the working point. The quality which identifies the person as in the image of God, is identified by Plato, and by the Apostle Paul as agap. Agap is expressed, in Plato, as the passion for truth and justice, as the governing cognitive principle, the informed quality of passion which guides ones cognitive processes and will for action. So it is with the Apostle Paul and the Gospel of John.

When a body of law is informed by this passion, we may speak of natural law. By natural law we should signify the impact of an efficiently served agapic passion for man, as a sacred life of a being made in the cognitive image of God, a view of mans nature which must inform the cognitive processes of administration of society, especially those functions associated with justice. It is that conception of man, which is to be served in all legislative and other conflicts respecting positive law: Does this decision coincide with those requirements which an agapic notion of the individual person implicitly imposes upon the society as a whole.

The crucial feature of Lincolns strategy, was the rapid development of the basic economic infrastructure and agro-industrial potential of the region under his command, while annihilating the adversarys economic-military capability for continuing to deploy effective war-fighting capabilities.

This was Abraham Lincolns conception of the law, as expressed in his Presidency, in all leading matters. No such conception is to be found in representatives of the philosophy of government among his oligarchical adversaries of that time: none among the followers of John Locke, such as the southern slave-owners; none among those New York bankers in the spirit of the Bank of Manhattans treasonous Aaron Burr, Martin van Buren, or treasonous August Belmont; none, among the New England families of the British East India Companys opium-trafficking tradition. Lincolns central point of concern was to ensure the existence and durability of those qualities of institution, especially of sovereign nationhood, without which human freedom, and natural human rights can not exist. This notion of essential institutions was governed by the Christian notion of natural law, of agap. Among his oligarchical opponents and rivals, there was no principle, only cognitively sterile commercial contracts, mere covenants.

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Today's Nuclear Balance of Power: The Wells of Doom - Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)

May 1968: early morning in the sprawling, 18-room log cabin on the corner of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Lookout Mountain Drive where the famous freak-out artist Frank Zappa lives. Outside, finches and sparrows are chirping and the sun is burning off the first-light smog; inside, though, the atmosphere is still blinded and dark, the air choking with cigarette smoke.

As usual, Zappa has been up all night working at the piano and desk that dominate the enormous main living area, swivelling in his chair from desk to piano and back again as he composes his masterpieces, one after the other, while guzzling strong black coffee and chain-smoking the cigarettes that have been his only drugs since he was 11 years old.

Now Frank is sleeping. As are most of the other people who share the house with him: his English secretary Pauline Butcher, his former girlfriend Pamela Zarubica, his recording engineer Dick Kunc, designer Cal Schenkel, tour manager Dick Snork Barber, and Mothers Of Invention band members Ian Underwood and Jim Motorhead Sherwood. Then there are those non-residents, famous and not-so, sleeping in various nooks and crannies, or just stretched out in front of the huge stone fireplace, beneath the 14-candle chandelier.

The only person up at this hour is Zappas 23-year-old wife, Gail, who tiptoes around the bodies with their eight-month-old baby daughter, Moon Unit, under her arm.

Life was complete chaos, Gail told Classic Rock in 2012. One time I said to Frank: That guys been here for three days and I dont even know who he is! He said: Dont worry about it. Then youd run into [teenage groupie] Miss Mercy with a stick of butter peeled like a banana that shed just be eating. Oh, and a rocknroll band would arrive in the middle of the night and just walk in; there were no locks on the door. It was just insane.

Going into the kitchen, where there is no floor (I dont know what happened, it just disappeared!), Gail hunts for whatever food might be left to make breakfast. The stove is on a platform so high that she has to reach up to put on the frying pan. The hardest part, though, is that Gail cant just drive to the store to buy food. We didnt have a car. If we had to get groceries, I hitchhiked, she says. I went right out the back door with my thumb out and went down to the market. I did the laundry that way too! Id have Moon on one hip and laundry on the other I mean, it sounds insane, but those things had to be done.

Nothing must keep Gails husband from his work. For he is not just any rock musician, but a composer. And, as he explains in his semiautobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book: A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Pauline Butcher, Franks former secretary, speaking from her home in Singapore, recalls her boss as a formidable man. He made it very clear he shouldnt be interrupted if he was working. And from the minute he got up to the minute he went to bed, he would be working. We would not dare to go near him. He would raise his head from his desk or the piano and think about what you had said to him, and give you a very short, swift answer to make it clear that you were not welcome.

As Zappa told an early interviewer: The lifestyle that I have is probably neither desirable nor useful to most people.

Nor, a cynic might add, was the music he composed. But then Frank Zappa neither lived his life nor made his music to please most people. He did so to please himself. And anybody who expected to remain in his orbit would have to come second to that.

Ask anyone now, 30 years after his death from prostate cancer in 1993, who Frank Zappa was and they might describe any number of people. Not just a rock star, but an avant-garde jazz musician, a classical composer, a filmmaker, a writer, satirist and university lecturer. Zappa was the guy John Lennon said hed always wanted to meet; he was the record label entrepreneur who signed Captain Beefheart and produced his greatest work, Trout Mask Replica; the mentor who Alice Cooper now calls the original shock rocker.

And that was just in his late-60s Log Cabin period. By the time he died, at the age of 52, Zappa had also become a pioneer of computerised electronic music, a campaigner for voter registration, and the personal hero Vaclav Havel wished to designate as Czechoslovakias cultural liaison officer with the USA. Others will simply recall him as the guy who gave his kids funny names like Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen; a man who, when asked once whether he feared giving his children unusual names might cause problems for them in later life, replied: Itll be their last name that gets them into trouble.

For me, Frank Zappa was the most intimidating person I ever interviewed. But that was in 1984, long after his empire had been built, his rule established. I was there to talk to him laughably, I now realise about rock music, and Frank had never been interested in that. Pauline Butcher recalls: He listened to the blues and classical. He did not play any rocknroll whatsoever none. He loved Stravinsky, Varse, Bartok They were the main ones.

I think he was unusual probably from the time he was born, said Gail in 2012, speaking on the phone from the kitchen of the house she and Frank lived in for nearly 25 years. I think that he came pretty much full-blown the way that he was. I dont think you can change yourself so radically. I think he just was a person who was very interested in freedom. He was a patriot and he was a composer. Just a strange combination.

Certainly as a child he was different. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, four days before Christmas in 1940, Frank Vincent Zappa was the eldest of four kids to a French- Italian mother, Rose Marie, and a father, Francis Vincent Senior, a Sicilian immigrant of Italian, Greek and Arab ancestry. At home, Frank spoke mainly Italian, learned from his grandparents; at school he spoke Yankee-doodle-dandy.

His father was a mathematician and scientist working for the US defence industry, so the family moved around. This included a spell in Florida during Franks infant years, before settling back in Baltimore, where his fathers new job at the Edgewood Arsenal Chemical Warfare facility meant there were always gas masks around the place, waiting to be pulled on quickly in the event of accidents. Mention of germs and germ warfare would later infiltrate Franks music.

He was a sickly child, stricken by bouts of asthma and endless ear, nose and throat complaints. When the family doctor inserted pellets of radium into his nostrils to combat sinusitis, it so traumatised him that nostril references and nasal images would also surface regularly in his adult work.

When he was 12 the family left Baltimore for good, moving down to Southern California, where Frank seniors work took him to posts in Monterey, Claremont and El Cajon, before finally settling in San Diego, where Frank junior attended Mission Bay High School and where he joined his first band, The Black-Outs, as a drummer.

Pauline Butcher, who met Zappa in London in September 1967 before going to work for him, says she thinks his thing was affected by going to so many schools when he was young. He ended up being with all the drop-outs and the people that werent popular at school. I think that stayed with him the rest of his life. He related to the underdog and the people who were outside the mainstream.

A walking contradiction, he was a serious-minded teenager who composed his first orchestral work when he was 14, wrote precocious letters requesting meetings with his heroes Igor Stravinsky, who lived in California, and Edgard Varse, who lived in New York. (Varse agreed to a meeting, then cancelled.) Yet he spent most of his free time listening to doo-wop records and watching monster movies, cruising all night in a car with his only friend, another high-school outsider named Don Van Vliet, later renamed and mentored by Zappa as Captain Beefheart (something the Captain, himself a mass of weird contradictions, never quite forgave him for).

But if the teenage Zappa was nerdish and unpopular, what hardened and turned him into the unforgiving, controlling personality that characterised everything about his adult life was an incident that took place when he was 21. By then Zappa was the proud owner of a little five-track facility in Cucamonga, which hed bought with the fee hed received for scoring a B-movie cowboy flick called Run Home Slow. Thus, in a typically oddball way, began Zappas career as a composer and producer. Early success included a doo-wop number for The Penguins, titled Memories Of El Monte (for which hed received 75 cents), and Grunion Run, the B-side of a novelty single called Tijuana Surf which went to No.1 in Mexico.

He was awaiting royalties for that when, in 1962, a middle-aged man offered to pay him $100 to make a party tape for the guys early-60s code for a porn tape. Hardly high art, but 100 bucks would go some way to financing his next dreamed-of project, a movie hed written called Captain Beefheart Vs. The Grunt People. So the following evening, Frank and a girlfriend recorded themselves bouncing around on a squeaky mattress, making Ooh and Aah sounds and trying not to laugh. There was nothing funny, though, when the middle-aged John turned out to be one Detective Willis, and Zappa was sentenced to six months in jail for peddling pornography.

He eventually served only 11 days in jail, with the remainder reduced to probation, but it gave him enough of a criminal record to not be eligible to be drafted to Vietnam. The rest was all downhill, according to those that knew him. He was left with a permanent sense of injustice. Worse, he was left with a morbid fear of the police, a condition that led both to his outlawing of drug use in his presence, and his bitter mistrust of authority figures and institutions.

He was so terrified of being arrested, says Butcher. If the police had come and found drugs in the house, then he would have been thrown into jail as well and he couldnt have gone through another experience like that. Its never been totally explained what happened to him there, but there are some implications that he was sexually abused because he had long hair.

By the mid-60s, at a time when the clean-cut Beatles were still regarded as a threat to the nations youth, Zappa was every straight-thinking Middle- Americans nightmare writ large: long hair, Zapata moustache, thrift-store clothes and an apparent dislike of hot baths of cold showers. But he knew his days of being the lone freak, as he later put it, of the small town he lived in were numbered. He just needed a vehicle to transport him to the next level.

No man is an island not even Frank Zappa. And he would need the help of other like-minded solitaries to help free him up to do what he wanted to do. Enter the most talented, misunderstood, repulsively attired yet aptly named group in the rocknroll pantheon: the Mothers Of Invention. Betraying some of the bitterness that would understandably come to characterise many of the former Mothers memories of their association with Zappa, their original bassist, Roy Estrada, once put it: Frank joined us, we didnt join him.

That is true but only to a point. They were known as the Soul Giants when Zappa joined as guitarist in 1965, along with vocalist Ray Collins Zappa had released a couple of his songs under monikers like The Heartbreakers and Baby Ray & The Ferns. They were a talented but unadventurous weekend bar band playing covers at a club called The Broadside in the downtrodden Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. Zappa, the Sagittarian fire sign with a brain like a planet, was about the change all that.

I suggested we develop our own stuff and try to get a record contract, Zappa later recalled. The leader at that time, a guy called Davey Coronado, said: No way. Because if you learn original stuff, the bars wont hire you. So he quit. And he was right. We stayed together, changed our name to the Mothers, and we did get fired.

No band was ever gonna be big enough for Frank Zappa to share leadership in. Fortunately, the mid-60s was a fast-paced musical melting pot where the music business was already midway through its transformation from single-oriented pop to album-oriented rock. When Tom Wilson producer of Bob Dylans earliest albums and original musical mentor to the Velvet Underground caught an early Mothers Of Invention gig on Sunset Strip, he thought he saw a progressive rock and blues outfit not unlike The Doors and Love, then also making baby steps into the scene. Signing the Mothers to the MGM-Verve label, he had no idea what he was in for once Zappa got the band inside a proper recording studio.

Despite being briefly considered as a producer for The Doors, Zappa viewed fellow Angelino acts like The Doors and Love as glorified hippies, which he considered a very conformist group, with an established uniform, vocabulary and lifestyle. The Mothers were something else: they were freaks. Hence the title of their first album: Freak Out!

A double album released at a time (June 1966) when single albums were still mainly comprised of hits and filler, Freak Out! was an anomaly on every level, even in a year that saw the release of game-changers like the Beach Boys Pet Sounds and The Beatles Revolver. From its inner gatefold sleeve comprising various boxes of thank-yous and credits including names like Carl Franzoni (aka Captain Fuck, self-styled leader of the LA freak scene), Suzy Creamcheese (a fictional catch-all groupie that would crop up on several subsequent Mothers albums), Kim Fowley (on hypophone), even ex-wife Kay (credited for inspiring Anyway The Wind Blows) Freak Out! seemed built to confuse all but the already metaphorically, at least freaked out.

Tom Wilson was credited with production, but soon handed over control as everyone finally did to Zappa. Wilson got a good inkling of what he was in for after Eric Burdon, who Wilson had hired Zappa to produce a couple of tracks for, described the experience as like working with Hitler. When Zappa hit the producer up for $500 to bring in as many freaks as he could find from the Strip to record the free-form musical malaise that comprised side four, The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet (described by Zappa on the sleeve as Unfinished Ballet In Two Tableaux, the first titled Ritual Dance Of The Child Killer), Wilson simply paid up. Life was too short for this kind of shit.

Not unexpectedly, Freak Out! was not a hit. Yet its message outstripped sales to such a degree that the names Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention became synonymous throughout the album-buying world with a musical mien that belonged not to the narrow enthusiasms of the chartbuying public, but to the new rock cognoscenti; the ones who listened not just to Jimi Hendrix and The Doors but also to John Coltrane and John Cage, maybe Bartok and Stockhausen too.

As Melody Maker noted in its belated review of Freak Out!, published in March 1967: Throwing off their social chains, freeing themselves from their national social slavery and realising whatever potential they possess for free expression the Mothers Of Invention toss the moral code aside like spare sugar lumps. That is, theyre sending up American society, advocating free love, nay, advocating freedom already.

Sales of the album may not have jumped significantly as a result, but word of mouth spread like wildfire, and six months later the Mothers were headlining Londons Royal Albert Hall.

The true musical identity of the Mothers, though, was not really established until their second album, Absolutely Free the first to feature keyboard player Don Preston and sax player Bunk Gardner. Frank and I both had the same record collection, Preston remembers now, from his Hollywood home. But Id already been playing outside music for a few years. We didnt play jazz or classical, we improvised to unusual things.

The most unusual being the bicycle which Preston (who also claims to have invented the Moog synthesiser) taught Frank to play. Joining Zappa, whom hed known since the early 60s, Preston was a natural fit. I was just overjoyed to be able to do that kind of material and have an audience listen to it, instead of just doing it in my garage, he says. At that point, Preston recalls, there was little separation between band and band leader. He was a lot of fun to be around and hang out with, he says now.

Recorded in just four days in November 1966 and released four months later in March 1967, and billed as the first and second in A Series Of Underground Oratorios (side one and side two to you and me), Absolutely Free set the template for everything Zappa would record during what is now regarded as the classic Mothers period, from 1966 to 1970. Seemingly free-form jazz-influenced rock although actually minutely annotated neoclassical music using mainly electric instruments was interwoven with extracts of off-the-wall taped conversations, lewd commentary, and a sense of the absurd that bordered on sinister.

The Mothers musical ethos was best embodied on Zappas first real masterpiece, on side two, Brown Shoes Dont Make It. Ostensibly a blues-acid-rock-pantomime-groove-laden satire on suburban America, with Captain Beefheart growling in the background, it switches suddenly into a third-person narrative about a sleazy government official fantasising about screwing a 13-year-old girl, rocking and rolling and acting obscene. None of which really conveys the dizzy sense of watching a theatrical production crumble before your eyes, revealing only the actors, naked, learning their lines. And failing.

For the first six months after Preston and Gardner joined, the band rehearsed for eight hours a day, seven days a week. There were strict rules: if you were sick, you could be asked for a doctors note or lose a days pay. Preston describes the band as democratic, although it was always clear who was in charge.

Zappa had already begun staying at a different hotel from the rest of the band. Drummer-cum trumpeter Jimmy Carl Black later recalled: The Mothers were into sex, drugs not heavy drugs and rocknroll.

Zappa, by contrast, was only into one of those things. He had been curious enough to watch while Ray Collins dropped acid, and not impressed enough to try it himself. Zappas only known drug foray, smoking 10 joints in one sitting, just left him with a sore throat, he said. And he certainly didnt like rocknroll.

But when it came to sex, and taking advantage of the newly announced permissive society, Frank was right there at the cutting edge. Hed already been married (to his teenage sweetheart Kay Sherman) and divorced before the Mothers. Now he revelled in those aspects of the freak scene that included groupies, fuck buddies and one-night stands. Even when he was shacked up with Pamela Zarubica, it wasnt unusual for her to come home and find Frank in bed with different girls. Because of their open relationship, outbreaks of crabs were common, as was getting the clap. Indeed crabs would later inspire several Zappa classics, such as Toads Of The Short Forest.

His second wife, Gail who had spent her formative years in London, as part of the same social scene as The Beatles and the Stones had also for a short time been a groupie. And an excellent groupie too, Frank boasted in interviews. It didnt matter to me that she had slept around with other beat men.

Yet Pauline Butcher says he had a more traditional outlook on marriage. He didnt think the marriage would last if Gail had outside sexual partners. He had outside women, but not to the extent that he would leave Gail or break up his family.

Gail, a blonde-haired beauty, had met Frank in early 1966. He had the clap and crabs, the latter venturing as far north as his hair. She married him a year later, on the heels of his first European tour. Speaking to Classic Rock in 2012, she described Frank as incredibly stable at home. But of course, all that changes when hes on the road and, from a wifes point of view or from a girlfriends point of view, you have all the occupational hazards that rocknroll can present to you. All I can say is that the secret to not killing yourself over stuff like that is you stay focused on what it is that you want for yourself in your life.

Zappa sang about sex endlessly, in every permutation and situation he could conceive of. Sometimes it was puerile (Penis Dimension), sometimes it was profound (America Drinks And Goes Home), but it was always there somewhere. Proto-feminism at play, perhaps? Or just a more clever form of male chauvinist pigdom? When Zappa told Rolling Stone he found the work of knob-modelling groupies Cynthia and Dianne Plaster Caster artistically and sociologically really heavy, no one knew if he was joking. Later he hired Cynthia to become a full-time babysitter for Gail, a role she proved very good at.

Meanwhile, back at the coal face, the divide between the Mothers and their leader grew even wider when Verve failed to pick up the option for the bands next album, and Zappas street-smart manager, Herb Cohen, used the loophole to negotiate a much better deal for Zappa that included the formation of his own production company, through which he would control the release not just of all future Mothers Of Invention albums but also his own solo projects and those of any other artists he chose to sponsor. Those who were there say that this marked a key staging point in Zappas transformation from band leader to group dictator.

Zappa was always the leader, but we all had equal responsibilities, says Don Preston. By the time we reached the Log Cabin, Zappa was the main guy; he was the man. It felt more isolated.

The shift became complete with the release of Zappas first solo album, Lumpy Gravy, released in August 1967, just five months after Absolutely Free. At this point things got really complicated. And they stayed that way for the rest of his life.

Put as simply as possibly, Lumpy Gravy went from being an orchestral work performed by a group of session players he named the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, to a drastically re-edited strand in a larger production called No Commercial Potential, which itself comprised a further two albums, both credited to Frank and the Mothers: Were Only In It For The Money (released in March 1968) and Cruising With Ruben And The Jets (December 1968).

While none of the albums sounded remotely like the others, according to Zappa it was all one album. He claimed that he could cut the master tapes into different running orders and it would still make sense. It was, he explained, part of his project/object concept: each album was a different project but all the albums combining to make a bigger object.

While one of the related albums Cruising With Ruben And The Jets, a set of doo-wop songs corralled into a concept album about a fictitious group called Ruben & The Jets baffled critics to the point of irritation, the other two remain among the finest works to bear either the Zappa or Mothers imprimaturs. Indeed Lumpy Gravy remained one of Zappas personal favourites. Working around the clock in the studio with a full orchestra at his disposal and state-of-the-art 12-track recording facilities, Zappa was in his control-freak element. He drove everyone crazy, says Preston, making us do 28 takes of the simplest little bridge.

But it was the next Mothers album, Were Only In It For The Money, that really sealed the deal here in the UK. An alternative-universe take on The Beatles Sgt Pepper, complete with hilariously mocking sleeve and a cameo from a stuttering Eric Clapton, it was one of the most incisive and unforgiving satires on the whole so-called 60s movement.

Everybody else thought they were God! Zappa said of The Beatles. I think that was not correct. They were just a good commercial group. Perverse to the last, he let it be known he preferred The Monkees.

By now Zappa was living in a small, third-floor apartment in New York with his new wife, Gail, then pregnant with their first child. It was at this point that drummer Arthur Dyer Tripp III joined the Mothers. Tripp had performed solo concerts of the works of John Cage and Stockhausen heavyweight stuff, considering the height of drummer-related sophistication had entailed Ringo Starr singing _Yellow _Submarine. Tripp had just finished a two-year stint playing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and he was ready for anything.

Frank was continuously on the prowl for new ideas and inspirations, Tripp says, speaking from his home in Mississippi, so just about anything we discussed was used. To be associated with a guy who basically favoured anything goes, but at a high level, was heaven for me. I shared Franks counter-culture, anti-mainstream philosophy, and in those days we made fun of everything.

Tripp recalls Zappa being ill at ease in social situations. He tended to feel comfortable only when he was in control of the subject matter, and its direction, says the drummer.

It was a world away from how Zappa was seen by his fans. When Jimi Hendrix dropped by the New York apartment to say hi, instead of the crazy scene he had envisaged, he found Gail and Frank making supper. That didnt stop him getting up and jamming with the Mothers on stage that night, though Zappa left him to it, sitting in the stalls to watch Jimi play. It was also in New York that he appeared in an episode of The Monkees, playing Mike Nesmith, while Nesmith, dressed as Zappa, played him. (He was also in The Monkees movie Head, playing Davy Joness mentor, while leading a talking bull.)

He was a precociously intelligent man in a business which is not necessarily filled with a lot of intelligent people, and he stood out, observes Pauline Butcher. He worked out he wasnt a pretty boy like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, he didnt play their kind of music, he didnt even like it, and if he was going to get himself heard he was going to have to do something radically different. He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in womens clothes. All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.

By the time the extended Zappa family had moved back to Los Angeles in 1968, being radically different was hardly a stretch. He and Gail rented a log cabin in Laurel Canyon once owned by 20s cowboy movie star Tom Mix for $700 a month. Frank dubbed it Freak Central. The Canyon had been transformed from a rundown, overgrown semi-wilderness by musicians looking for cheap places to hang out and get high, to play their music beneath the bird-of-paradise plants, thickets of pepper trees and pines.

It was here that the Zappa mythology that had begun to build in New York now rose to a whole new, stupendously far-out level. Visitations by rock royalty were daily occurrences. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull turned up, followed later the same night by members of The Who, followed even later by Captain Beefheart, aka Zappas old school friend Don Van Vliet. They finished the evening jamming in the basement on Be Bop A Lula. (Beefheart complained that Jagger gave him a dud mic to prevent him being overpowered vocally.) Eric Clapton stopped by the next night, but Frank was unimpressed, complaining that he wasnt the jamming type.

Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick was another visitor. In her autobiography, she describes the Log Cabin as like a trolls kingdom. Fuzzy-haired women lounged in long antique dresses, and naked children ran to and fro while Frank sat behind piles of electronic equipment discussing his latest ideas for orchestrating satirical hippy rock music openly [making] fun of the very counter-culture he was helping to sustain.

Then there were the wannabes and hopefuls. When Larry Fischer, a 24-year-old escaped mental patient, jailed at 16 for trying to knife his mother, turned up to sing Frank a song, Zappa signed him to his new Bizarre label and recorded a double album with him, An Evening With Wild Man Fischer. Zappa continued to mentor Fischer (described as something not entirely musical) until he threw a glass jar at Moon, at which point Gail put her foot down and Fischer was permanently ejected. A more successful newcomer Zappa signed to Bizarre was the Alice Cooper Band, a group of reprobates who dressed in womens clothing and sang songs called Earwigs To Eternity and B.B. On Mars.

Id seen Zappa play at Thee Experience club in LA, Alice recalls now. One night it was Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, all jamming. Then Frank gets up and does an imitation of each one of them! Then he takes off and starts playing his own riffs, and those other guys just stood there, like, What?! Cos this guy was doing stuff that they had never seen before. Even Jimi Hendrix. Frank gave Hendrix his first wah-wah pedal and showed him what it was.

When one of the Log Cabin regulars told Frank of this band that every record label in LA had turned down, he asked to see them. The following morning, at seven oclock, they were on his front lawn, bashing out their strangely unlovely set.

We got our times wrong. Wed heard he wanted us there at seven, we figured he meant seven in the morning, says Alice. But we played five songs that were two minutes long and had, like, 25 changes in them, and he sat there and he listened. Then he looked at me and said: I dont get it. I dont get what you just did. And then we played another one for him that did the same thing. And then another, and another. They were like if you took an ELP prog piece and condensed it to two minutes. And he just kept going: I dont get this! I said: Is that bad? He said: No. The fact I dont get it is why Im signing you.

Arguably the most infamous of all were The GTOs, the group of teenage groupies that Zappa took under his wing. They originally called themselves the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, until the night they turned up at the Cabin naked except for bibs and giant nappies, their hair up in pigtails and all sucking lollipops. A delighted Frank insisted they dance on stage with the Mothers that night. And that they change their name to The GTOs.

GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and any number of similar acronyms. The GTOs would get dressed up every night to go dancing, cos there was safety in numbers, said Gail Zappa in 2012. They wore these wild outfits [and], they would also get in the Whisky free so they could dance. Cos for a while they were the entertainment.

In the GTOs there was Miss Cinderella, Miss Christine, Miss Pamela, Miss Mercy and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing on stage at several Mothers Of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of $35 each. People just got off on them, recalls Alice Cooper. They were a trip.

When Zappa produced their sole album, Permanent Damage, in 1969, he got Rod Stewart to sing on the track The Ghost Chained To The Past, Present, And Future (Shock Treatment). Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins also appeared on the record, conducted by Frank.

And did Zappa enjoy any extra perks from the job? Pauline Butcher is emphatic that he did not. He wasnt interested in The GTOs on a groupie level, she says. He wasnt a sexual predator at all. He didnt lunge after anyone. He didnt come across as a dirty old man-type of thing. He was not like that. He was far too laid-back.

Why should he, when he and the Mothers were thronged by groupies at every gig they played? Again, Butcher is defensive on the subject. He only had these women on the road because he was highly sexually charged, I suppose, and he just needed an outlet for his sex. But the fact is, Zappa wrote more songs about groupies and sex in general including taped conversations with groupies discussing their various conquests than any other artist before or since.

One time when Zappa went back to play in London, Pauline, who had stayed behind in LA, got tickets for the show for a friend of hers. She went to the club afterwards where he was, she recalls. And Frank said to her: Im looking for a fuck. Are you available? She said: No, Im married. He said: Well, does that make any difference? He would get very grumpy if he didnt get any groupies. And then Gail would have to fly out and sort him out.

Nevertheless, both Gail Zappa and Pauline Butcher insist he was a different man at home. When it came to personal and professional relationships with women, Zappa could be nurturing, inspiring even.

The main thing was, he listened to what I had to say, says Butcher. This, in 1967, 68, was revolutionary to me. It was just so unusual for me, [for him] to listen and take seriously what a woman had to say. He treated me like an equal. Which was extraordinary.

If so, she was the exception. From here on in, Zappa rarely, if ever, treated anyone like an equal. By the time he came to record what was officially his second solo album, Hot Rats, in the summer of 1969, the transformation was complete. Frank Zappa was the Mothers, and the Mothers were whatever Frank Zappa wanted them to be. In this case, that meant a collection of jazz-leaning orchestral rock with an extra twist of post-psychedelic savagery.

Opening track Peaches En Regalia, despite its compositionally complex parameters, would become the most instantly recognisable Zappa track of his career the All Right Now of the freak generation. Willie The Pimp featured typical Zappa outsiders such as Captain Beefheart on vocals and Don Sugarcane Harris recently bailed by Zappa from jail after his latest drug bust on violin. Willie would also become an unlikely term in this context, but nonetheless true a real crowd pleaser. Violinist Jean Luc Ponty plays on It Must Be A Camel, and a young, uncredited Lowell George also features.

Although the album didnt even break the US Top 100, it became Zappas only Top 10 hit in the UK and would go on to become one of his biggest-selling album worldwide. Not that Frank gave a shit. Or at least he said he didnt. Within weeks of its release, he had officially broken the Mothers up.

Pauline Butcher says that the first night she arrived at the Log Cabin, in May 1968, he told me that he wanted to break up the Mothers. All the way through the band, he said this. There was another crisis about a month later, and he was gonna break up the band then. And then Ian Underwood said he would rehearse the band, and that started the lifelong habit of Frank always having someone else in the band rehearse the band, and learn the parts before he joined them, because he hadnt got the patience.

Zappa himself put it more bluntly: How long can you be enthusiastic about music as an art form, never mind music as a business, when it involves other people that you have to rely on, and they piss on your shoe? he said. Why do you have to put up with that? The more I can rely on myself, the better I like it.

Whatever ones views on Frank Zappa his music, his personal politics, his attitude to women and fellow band members by the end of the 1960s he had become as significant a figure in rock culture as almost anyone else one might wish to make similar claims for. He would re-form the Mothers Of Invention in the summer of 1970, when the expediency of filling venues on a lengthy tour demanded. He would even record more music with them. But as Don Preston says: By then we were just hired musicians. And he made a film featuring some of them: 200 Motels; as dreary, incoherent and interminably tedious as any of the other truly awful wacky movies of the period only more so.

Mostly, though, Frank Zappa would go on to become Frank Zappa. Which meant many, many more great albums though none, it has to be said, ever quite so daring, seemingly impromptu and alive with the gung-ho spirit of the times as the ones he made with The Mothers Of Invention.

In 1969, the Zappas finally moved out of the Log Cabin and into a more conventional home, still in Laurel Canyon but this time with doors that had locks. They would live there together for the rest of Franks life. On the door leading to the basement where he worked was a sign: Dr Zircons Secret Lab In Happy Valley. What came out of that lab over the next near quarter of a century will likely be argued over for centuries to come. There were 62 albums live, studio, rock, jazz, orchestral, singles, doubles, trebles released during his lifetime, a further 35 original works released posthumously, plus 13 compilations and box sets at last count, and god knows how many bootlegs.

He was driven by the stimuli around him, said Gail Zappa in 2012. Everybody else, if you were in a rocknroll band you were typically sitting around getting stoned and bumping into each other while you write their songs. Frank was clearly a band leader and didnt tolerate that kind of behaviour in a working environment. So I dont think he was suffering in any major way, other than not being able to get any exposure on the radio or television or anything like that.

She added Frank once complained of a boring life, because all he did was work. He just wrote dots on paper, but he used to talk about connecting the dots which really speaks to what he did in terms of music and what he did in terms of social commentary. You know what she means, even if you dont. Just like her husbands music.

The term musical genius is so overused as to be obsolete. Yet its difficult not to draw on it when it comes to the story of Frank Zappa.

I would say yes, he was as long as you put the word musical there, says Don Preston. If he was a genius hed still have the first band together and wed all have been making millions of dollars, like the Grateful Dead. But a musical genius? Yes, absolutely.

This article originally appeared in Classic Rock #178.

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People thought the Beatles were God. That's not correct: the ... - Louder

The word pathogenesis means the ways in which a disease develops and progresses, and Jonathon Kennedys hopefully contagious thesis examines all manner of dreadful illnesses and their gruesome effects; not just on individuals, but on entire societies.

Most readers will be familiar with the calamitous results of the introduction of bacteria and viruses into populations with no prior immunity. British annexation of Australia, while a disaster for the Indigenous population, was made far worse by the introduction of smallpox and other diseases to which the colonists had, over centuries, developed immunity, or at least far lower fatality rates.

British annexation of Australia, while a disaster for the Indigenous population, was made far worse by the introduction of smallpox and other diseases. Detail from Taking of Colbee & Benalon, November 25, 1789 by William Bradley. State Library of NSW

The Aztecs and Incas of central and southern America, as well as the northern tribes of what was to become the USA and Canada, were all decimated by European pathogens far more deadly than swords and muskets. Indeed, it was much worse than that. The Latin word decimate means to kill one in 10. These cultures were not decimated they suffered casualty rates that a twisted Roman general could have only dreamed of.

Kennedy writes that the population of the whole of the Americas, estimated at more than 60 million in 1500, was at most 6 million a century later. The vastly outnumbered soldiers of Cortes and Pizarro did not defeat the massive armies of the Central American empires. No, they were beaten by an unintentional yet devastating form of germ warfare, invisible invaders that spread faster than the armies that followed them. Spanish soldiers would walk into deserted Andean villages, with only corpses to be found.

There was an exchange of diseases, with syphilis being brought back to Europe by conquistadors and rapacious slave traders, but it was essentially a one-sided affair. Kennedy concedes that venereal afflictions certainly caused a good deal of pain, irritation and embarrassment to the people of Europe, but points out that their impact cannot be compared to that of Old World pathogens in the Americas.

Europe had had its own catastrophic encounter with an imported pathogen two centuries earlier, the Black Death having made its way from eastern Asia aboard rats and fleas via the trade routes of the Silk Road. Although plague had been a regular and dreaded occurrence in Europe in the 6th and 7th centuries, the Black Death, which swept across Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353, was probably the deadliest outbreak of contagious disease in history, killing between 75 million and 200 million people. Europe would never be the same.

So while Kennedys book is subtitled How Germs Made History, he has certainly not written a history of disease. The book is about disease as an essential driver of primate evolution, then the human story, from before we homo sapiens outlasted all the other hominids to become, for the time being at least, the dominant creatures on the planet.

He kicks off with microbiologys most perplexing debate is a virus alive? Well, yes and no. The lonely virus is both a dead collection of complex chemicals, and an incipient, bottled genie waiting patiently for the correct chemical caress to pop its cork.

A virus is both a dead collection of complex chemicals, and an incipient, bottled genie.

But COVID-19, AIDS and all the other blueprints for despair that wed rather had never evolved notwithstanding, Kennedy enlightens us on one viral infection so astonishing, so fundamental, that it explains how we came to be the creatures we are.

For billions of years, all creatures hatched from eggs. And we still do, in a way. A human ovum is an egg. Not much to look at, next to an ostrichs, but thats because it doesnt have to be. Until a fortunate retrovirus infected a shrew-like creature many millions of years ago, all eggs hatched outside their mothers body. Most eggs on earth still do.

Then mammals found themselves with an escape hatch, an airlock between umbilical babe and a hostile outside world.

Yes, the placenta, a temporary organ that allows all mammalian mums to hatch their eggs inside their own bodies. But the astonishing thing is that the evolution of our maternal engineering was less likely than an asteroid impact.

It was the result of an opportunistic viral infection, one thats been protecting us in the womb from being ousted by our own mothers immune systems. Then, when fully baked, we get shoved out, along with the placenta and any other odds and ends that mum doesnt need any more.

Not a bad effort for a humble virus, eh? But dont feel too grateful to this mindless sack of viral spare parts. Its done pretty well out of it, too.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. .

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The startling role that disease played in human evolution - Sydney Morning Herald

Mothers Day is upon us. For most of us, that requires some very specific plans to honor our own moms. You make a trip to Hallmark (not the grocery store) for a nice card. You make a reservation at a brunch spot back in February, to make sure mom wouldnt have to wait. And perhaps you make a promise to yourself that youll call or at the very least text your mother more, and if youre a very good child, you might even keep up that resolution past the Fourth of July.

But if you dont want to have the kind of Mothers Day that commercials typically dictate, you can spend Sunday with some mothers from TV specifically, famous ones who were brought in to play a series regulars mom (and maybe notch an Emmy nomination while theyre at it).

The thing about calling your show Mom is that every female parent you subsequently cast has to nail the part. In the early going of CBS sitcom, Bonnie (Allison Janney) tells us a fair bit about the troubled childhood that contributed to her disordered substance use in particular, that her own mother abandoned her, leaving Bonnie to be raised in foster care. But in Terrorists and Gingerbread, the Season Three premiere, Bonnie and her mother are reunited. Mom always mixed real pathos with its comedy plots, and that was especially true here, as Bonnies mother Shirley (Ellen Burstyn) reaches out hoping to make peace, and Bonnie ponders the kind of relationship she wants them to have or if they should have one at all. You dont have to get an Oscar winner to play a role like Shirley, but it doesnt hurt.

A Different World immediately establishes Whitley (Jasmine Guy) as a Southern belle with extremely specific ideas about how to live life, and extremely ready judgments for anyone who doesnt conform. Where could such a woman come from? Well, from a mother like Marion (Diahann Carroll). Through Carrolls nine appearances on the series, we see that Marion was instrumental in Whitleys having developed a gift for insults so sugary-sweet that their targets may not even notice theyve been attacked. Bonus: Many of Carrolls best spats find her facing off against Adele, mother to Whitleys eventual husband Dwayne (Kadeem Hardison). And Adele is played by none other than Patti LaBelle.

Abe Grampa Simpson (voice of Dan Castellaneta) was part of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was a stand-alone show, appearing in the short Grampa and the Kids in a 1988 episode of The Tracey Ullman Show, before The Simpsons spun off from it. But little was known about Homers other parent, Mona, until the seventh-season Simpsons episode Mother Simpson. Prior to that point, flashbacks to Mona (in which she was voiced by Maggie Roswell) showed her as a typical mid-century American homemaker. Homer (also Castellaneta) had believed Mona was long dead, but when multiple Oscar nominee Glenn Close took over the role, we learned that Mona had left the family after getting involved in leftist activism who can say how many 1960s housewives were similarly radicalized by Joe Namaths sideburns?! and was still wanted by the FBI for sabotaging a lab full of germ warfare experiments. Mona recurs in later-era episodes, but none is as poignant as the first.

After starting out as a stand-up comic, Susie Essman made an indelible impression as the virtuosically profane Susie Greene on Curb Your Enthusiasm, establishing herself as an actor. After that, Essmans profile was high enough for her to be cast on Broad City as Sandi, mother to Ilana (Ilana Glazer). A Long Island doyenne, Sandis trips to New York City to see her children are always memorable, whether shes tearing it up at the nail shop or hunting for the most convincing knockoff purses.

Essman may not have the widest range as an actor, but she seems to have staked out her terrain playing TVs Jewish mothers. Here she is playing Donna, mother to Lake Bells Rio in the tragically short-lived and underrated Bless This Mess, about a couple of New Yorkers who inherit a farm in Nebraska

and as Sharon Quinzell, mother to the artist currently known as Harley Quinns eponymous anti-heroine.

Character actor and later director Chip Fields is a lot less famous than the other mom-portrayers here, but I could not possibly sign off on a list of mom stuntcasting on sitcoms without including her. Fields recurred on The Facts of Life as Diane Ramsey, mother to Tootie; Tootie was played by Kim Fields, Chips real-life daughter. As a working actress in the entertainment industry, which doesnt exactly brim with opportunities for Black women, Chip may not have had to dig too deep to perform this argument about, among other things, Tooties desire to become an actor:

In the next decade, Chip and Kim would play mother and daughter again when Kim was cast in another sitcom revolving around a female foursome: Living Single.

On Friends, Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) had the spottiest family history: Her mother, Lily, died by suicide; her father Frank (Bob Balaban) left her family and then one more that we know of; her twin sister Ursula (also Kudrow) is basically a sociopath; and while were supposed to be happy for her brother, Frank Jr. (Giovanni Ribisi), when he finds love with his home-economics teacher Mrs. Knight (Debra Jo Rupp), that requires us to forget that when their relationship started, it was technically felonious. So when Phoebe tracks down Lilys best friend Phoebe (Teri Garr) on a trip to Montauk and finds out that Phoebe Sr. is actually Phoebe and Ursulas biological mother, its a relief and excellent casting of a character whose flingy attributes are apparently genetic.

Years later, it would be Kudrows turn to be stuntcast as a mom whos not quite up for the job: roller-coaster enthusiast Lori-Anne, mother to Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; and on Space Force as Maggie (mother to Erin, played by Diana Silvers), incarcerated for very serious crimes that are never actually revealed.

Honorable mention to the many other stuntcast moms of Friends: Marlo Thomas (That Girl) as Sandra Green, mother to Rachel (Jennifer Aniston); Christina Pickles (St. Elsewhere) as Judy Geller, mother to Monica and Ross (Courteney Cox and David Schwimmer); Brenda Vaccaro (Midnight Cowboy) as Gloria Tribbiani, mother to Joey (Matt LeBlanc); and Morgan Fairchild as Nora Tyler Bing, mother to Chandler (Matthew Perry).

Though shes best known to viewers of a certain age for playing Deacons daughter Thelma on NBCs church-centered sitcom Amen, Anna Maria Horsford has been a steadily working actor since the 1970s, with roles across all on-screen genres. Case in point: She already co-starred in History of the World, Part II earlier this year. By far my favorite of her mom roles is New Girls Charmaine. When she was originally introduced in Season Two, she didnt get much to do but disapprove of Schmidt (Max Greenfield), roommate to Charmaines treasured son Winston (Lamorne Morris). When she returns in Season Six, its for a much meatier storyline: Winston has joined the LAPD, but because he knows how much his single mother Charmaine dotes on him, hes kept his career change from her via elaborately faked episodes of his sports radio show. Charmaines immediate bond with Winstons new fiance Aly (Nasim Pedrad) forces him to rethink how hes been deceiving Charmaine. A scene in a discount retailer that is definitely NOT TJ Maxx proves pivotal.

Like Friends, New Girl also went big on stuntcasting: Lets hear it for Jamie Lee Curtis (Everything Everywhere All At Once) as Joan Day, mother to Jess (Zooey Deschanel); Nora Dunn (Saturday Night Live) as Louise, mother to Schmidt; and Margo Martindale (Justified) as Bonnie Miller, mother to Nick (Jake Johnson).

Since her breakout role as Gabi in the soapy dramedy Desperate Housewives, Eva Longoria has been leaning further into comedy. In front of the camera, shes starred in the sitcom Telenovela and recurred on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Shes also worked in comedy behind the camera, as a director and/or producer on Jane The Virgin, The Mick and Black-ish. And shes done comedy on productions where she might never be near a camera, voicing roles in The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, The Boss Baby 2: Family Business and BoJack Horseman.

Longorias role in the last of these is even less appropriate for children than the average BoJack: She plays Mrs. Buenaventura, mother to Yolanda (Natalie Morales). Yolanda has been dating Todd (Aaron Paul), and the time has come for her to introduce him to her family. She has yet to disclose to them that shes asexual, and asks Todd to join her in pretending theyre sexually active. What possible reason might their sex life come up at a family dinner? Well, her father has written sex books, her sister is a sex columnist and her mother is an accomplished adult film star. So it does.

Since getting cast as Georges wife Angie on The George Lopez Show, Constance Marie has rarely been off our TVs or streaming services. Her (initially) ABC Family show Switched at Birth premiered just a few years after the end of The George Lopez Show; then she had a recurring role on Elena of Avalor; then a series regular role in an adult animated show, Undone; and is about to return for the second season of With Love, a Prime Video romcom series from One Day At A Time creator Gloria Caldern Kellett. This year, Marie also made time to stop by How I Met Your Father and originate the role of Raquel, Long Island real estate mogul and mother to Val (Francia Rasa). Opposite Mark Consuelos as Vals father Juan, Marie must convince the audience that shes in such a hot couple that even late twentysomethings (like Hilary Duffs Sophie) are ready to make out with either or both of them. Spoiler: They nail it.

Longtime colleagues and roommates Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) had very different origin stories. Leonard was raised by Beverly (Christine Baranski), a neuroscientist with multiple PhDs. Sheldon was raised by Mary (Galeckis former Roseanne co-star Laurie Metcalf), an East Texas woman whos so born-again that she formerly worked as a church secretary. Mary may not entirely understand science in general, or Sheldon in particular, but as this compilation of her best moments shows, her ability to to love her son and his friends is as infinite as her supply of folksy expressions:

When CBS greenlit the single-cam prequel series Young Sheldon, the show found the perfect performer to play young Mary: Zoe Perry, aka Metcalfs daughter.

Netflixs 2017 beloved cult hit remake of Norman Lears 1970s and 1980s sitcom One Day At A Time introduced Rita Moreno already an Oscar winner for West Side Story to a whole new audience as Lydia, mother/overbearing roommate to Justina Machados new divorce Penelope. Its an iconic role, but two years before, Moreno made her dbut on another beloved TV comedy. On A Different World, Marion showed the audience how a character like Whitley might come by her extreme self-absorption honestly thanks to the influence of a narcissistic parent, and on Jane The Virgin, Janes father Rogelio (Jaime Camil) makes a lot more sense once we meet his mother Liliana (Moreno), who is pretty much obsessed with him.

Moreno extended her run of stuntcast sitcom matriarchs this year as Dolores, Georges (George Lopez) grandmother, in a January episode of Lopez vs. Lopez though since shes technically playing Doloress ghost, haunting Georges house, its unclear whether one should expect further appearances.

At first, Penny (Casey Wilson) seems to be a bit on the flighty end of the spectrum although, compared to Jane (Eliza Coupe), nearly everyone is. Then we meet Pennys mother Dana (Megan Mullally), a thrice-divorced itinerant lounge singer who formerly enlisted a young Penny in a mother-daughter cabaret act. Penny and Danas intermittently functional relationship is strained when Dana starts dating Big Dave (Michael McKean), father to Dave (Zach Knighton), one of Pennys best friends right around the time it seemed like Dave and Penny might be drawn to one another themselves. The womens capacity to work through their emotions is also limited by a practice, started by Dana during Pennys childhood, for them only to argue with each other through improvisational song. But maybe Dana was on to something if their conflict can bring us musical numbers like this:

One of the most enduring jokes of Will & Grace is that the titular Grace (Debra Messing) is obsessed with gay men. So who better to play her mother than someone gay men had been obsessed with for almost 50 years? As Bobbie Adler, a flamboyant firecracker whos the toast of the theater scene in Schenectady, New York, Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds got to show off all her talents: singing, dancing, impersonating Mae West and the impeccable timing required to put down her daughter with devastating effect. Its a tour de force.

Once again, Will & Grace used parent casting to bring in A-list talent. Lets give it up for Blythe Danner (Meet the Parents) as Marilyn Truman, mother to Will (Eric McCormack); Veronica Cartwright (The Witches of Eastwick) as Judith McFarland, mother to Jack (Sean Hayes); Suzanne Pleshette (The Bob Newhart Show) as Lois Whitley, mother to Karen (Megan Mullally); Judith Ivey (Women Talking) as Eleanor Markus, mother to Graces husband Leo (Harry Connick Jr.); and Ellen Albertini Dow (The Wedding Singer) as Syl, Karens mother-in-law.

Speaking of showbiz legends, the only one on this list whos really in Reynoldss league is Elaine Stritch. Her legacy was secured as soon as she appeared in the seminal documentary Original Cast Album: Company (watch it, then watch Documentary Now!s parody, Original Cast Album: Co-op). Mostly a Broadway actor, Stritch had considered sitcoms: As she told it, in a one-woman show in the early aughts, she had the opportunity to read for Dorothy in The Golden Girls, but the thought of working with Betty White every day would be like taking cyanide. (The eventual stars have a different recollection, but its still a good story.)

Anyway: Dorothy might not have panned out, but another caustic senior citizen came along later, and Stritch was cast as Colleen Donaghy, bitter mother to Alec Baldwins Jack. A success in all aspects of his life, Jack can still be psychologically assaulted by a visit from Colleen, a merciless fault-finding machine the shows producers deployed with admirable judiciousness.

More famous moms dotted this long-running production, too: Catherine OHara (Schitts Creek) as Pearline, mother to Kenneth (Jack McBrayer); Patti LuPone (Broadways Evita) as Sylvia Rossitano, mother to Frank (Judah Friedlander); Mary Steenburgen (The Last Man on Earth) as Diana, mother to Jacks wife Avery (Elizabeth Banks); and Jan Hooks (Saturday Night Live) as Verna Maroney, mother to Jenna (Jane Krakowski).

Famously, Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) lives with his father Martin (John Mahoney). A retired detective, Martins mobility is compromised from a gunshot to the hip, and he moves in with Frasier for, initially, at least, safety reasons. Though Frasiers psychotherapist mother Hester appeared in one episode of Cheers, the show that introduced him played by future Sopranos star Nancy Marchand by the time Frasier is launched, she has been dead for some time. Come the seventh-season premiere, Frasier has a meet-cute at Cafe Nervosa with childrens book author Mia (Rita Wilson) and invites her on a family trip. So far so normal, until Martin and Frasiers brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) meet her and blanch: It hasnt occurred to noted Freudian Frasier that his latest love interest looks exactly like his late mother; footage from an old home movie reinforces the casting retcon.

Years later, Wilson would recur as Evie Michaels, mother to Allison Williamss Mia, in the HBO dramedy Girls; thanks to Frasier, she already had experience performing in a comedy full of characters who were only somewhat capable of addressing their own mental health.

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Celebrate Mothers Day With These 15 Stuntcasted Sitcom Moms - Cracked.com

A woman with smallpox in Prince Edward Island, c. 1909.

Smallpox is an infectious disease most commonly caused by the variola major virus. Its symptoms include fever, headache, vomiting, mouth sores and an extensive skin rash. The rash blistersand scabs, leaving pitted scars or pocks. Smallpox can cause pneumonia, blindness, and infection in joints and bones. There is also a less virulent form of smallpox called alastrim, caused by the variola minor virus.

Smallpox spreads in saliva droplets and through contact with the infectious rash. It can be passed between people and from contaminated objects to people. The rate of death from variola major is 30 per cent but from variola minor it is 1 per cent or less.

Smallpox crossed the Atlantic Ocean when European empires began to expand in the 16th century. The disease had long decimated populations and caused terror. It was first reported in New France in 1616 near Tadoussac, the colonys first fur-trading post. The budding fur trade repeatedlyexposed nearbyInnu and Algonquin communities to the disease. Many fell ill and died due to their lackof immunity. The disease spread into the Maritime,James Bay and Great Lakes regions.

Between 1634 and 1640, Jesuit priests introduced smallpox into Wendake (Huronia),west of Lake Simcoe and south of Georgian Bay. Priests insisted on baptizing sick and dyingHuron-Wendat.However,the priests presence contributed to the spread of the disease. Due to smallpox and other infectious diseases, the Huron-Wendat population declined by roughly 60 per cent by 1640.

Smallpox played a large role in the struggles between the French, British and Americans to control the St. Lawrence region. In 173233, a smallpox epidemic swept through Louisbourg, a French settlement in what is now Nova Scotia. It killed at least 150 people, including people the French had enslaved and brought to the colony. Another epidemic hit Louisbourg in 1755. This was the worst epidemic in New France. It was part of a larger epidemic that swept acrossNorth America between 1755 and 1782. During the Seven Years War, an outbreak forced de Vaudreuil,the French commander, to delay his invasion of Fort Oswego in what is now New York State. In 1763, the British under Jeffrey Amherst used blankets exposedto smallpox as germ warfare in an attempt to subdue the First Nations resistance led byObwandiyag (Pontiac). In 1775, during theAmerican Revolution,American troops besiegingQuebec City were stricken with smallpox.

As European fur-trading posts moved west, so did the virus. From 1779 to 1783, smallpox spread to areas that now form parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Some communities of Plains Indigenous peoples lost 75 per centor more of their members. It is estimated that more than half of First Nations people living along the Saskatchewan River(territory of the Nehiyawak, Saulteaux, Assiniboine and Niitsitapi) died of smallpox orepidemic-related starvation.

In 1838, a second smallpox epidemic struck the Prairies. The epidemic began with an infected person aboard an American Fur Company steamship on the Missouri River. The captain refusedto halt or quarantine the ship. The virus eventually reached Forts Union and McKenzie, in what is now North Dakota and Montana. Traders representing various nations, including the Assiniboine and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), frequented the affected American trading posts.

Hudsons Bay Company employees started giving inoculations and teaching the technique to others after the two Prairie epidemics. Smallpox changed power structures andalliances, as well as land use and occupancy. Some distinct cultural groups disappeared as almost all of their members died. Survivors sometimes joined other ethnic groups.

Mtis communities in what is now central Alberta experienced a smallpox outbreak in 1870. St. Alberts Mtis populationdeclined by roughly 37 per cent that year.

Smallpox first reached the Pacific Northwest in the late 18th century. In the late 1770s, the disease killed many members of Tlingit, Haida,Kwakwakawakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Salish and Ktunaxacommunities. In 1782, roughly two-thirds of the St:l population died after contracting smallpox.

In 1862, a person infected with smallpox arrived in Victoria aboard a steamship travelling from San Francisco. The disease spread to an encampment north of the city, where tradersfrom many First Nations stayed. The few efforts colonists made to control the disease were disorganized. Some demanded the eviction of Indigenous people from colonial communities to protect themselves from the disease. When the residents of the north encampment left for their homelands, the disease spread across the colonies of Vancouver Islandand British Columbia. The disease had devastating impacts on many peoples, including the nations of Kwakwakawakw, Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Haida, Tsimshianand Tilhqotin, as well as some Coast Salish and Interior Salish nations. On the coast alone, some 14,000 Indigenous people died, representing a loss of roughly half of the regions population.

The1862 epidemic left mass gravesites, empty settlements and grieving survivors. It also impacted governance in some nations. Stories, knowledge and skills were lost with those who carried them. The massive population decline paved the way for coloniststo move further into Indigenous lands without establishing treaty relations. Fear ofsmallpox was one cause of the Chilcotin War of 1864 (see Tilhqotin).

Beginning in 1768, arm-to-arm variolation, an inoculation using the live smallpox virus, became more widely practised in North America and helped limit the spread of the disease. Reverend John Clinch introduced a safer vaccine in North America in 1798.After Confederation, the provinces made it mandatory to vaccinate schoolchildren. They also passed laws allowing municipalities and townships to carry out general vaccinationwhen an epidemic threatened. However, many people opposed mandatory vaccination. Anti-vaccinationists were critical of the unclean administration of vaccines and viewed vaccines asa way for public health units to avoid more costly sanitary measures. Some believed that vaccines would cause illness and suffering. Anti-vaccinationists also viewed mandatoryvaccination as a breach of individual rights. Many French Canadians in Montreal opposed vaccination during a major smallpox outbreak in 1885.Riots broke out in the city, in part as a response to officials attempts to enforce control measures.

Modern smallpox vaccine production began in Canada in 1916. Nevertheless, a notable outbreak occurred in Windsor, Ontarioin 1924. Sixty-seven unvaccinated people contracted the disease and thirty-two died. Smallpox persisted in Canada until 1946, when vaccination campaigns eliminated it. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it globally eradicated in 1979 aftera 10-year campaign in South America, Africa and Asia. Smallpox is the first major disease to have been wiped out by public health measures.

Canadian scientists played a key role in the eradication. Connaught Laboratories, based in Palmerston, Ontario, consulted on vaccine production across the Americas.Between 1980 and 2001, Connaught and its successors kept smallpox samples in a deep-freeze in case the vaccine was needed in the future. After 9/11, in the context of new fearsof bioterrorism, pharmaceutical company Aventis Pasteur retrieved the stocks to create a new stockpile of the vaccine.

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Smallpox in Canada | The Canadian Encyclopedia

Microscopic living organism

A microorganism, or microbe,[a] is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells.

The possible existence of unseen microbial life was suspected from ancient times, such as in Jain scriptures from sixth century BC India. The scientific study of microorganisms began with their observation under the microscope in the 1670s by Anton van Leeuwenhoek. In the 1850s, Louis Pasteur found that microorganisms caused food spoilage, debunking the theory of spontaneous generation. In the 1880s, Robert Koch discovered that microorganisms caused the diseases tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, and anthrax.

Because microorganisms include most unicellular organisms from all three domains of life they can be extremely diverse. Two of the three domains, Archaea and Bacteria, only contain microorganisms. The third domain Eukaryota includes all multicellular organisms as well as many unicellular protists and protozoans that are microbes. Some protists are related to animals and some to green plants. There are also many multicellular organisms that are microscopic, namely micro-animals, some fungi, and some algae, but these are generally not considered microorganisms.[further explanation needed]

Microorganisms can have very different habitats, and live everywhere from the poles to the equator, deserts, geysers, rocks, and the deep sea. Some are adapted to extremes such as very hot or very cold conditions, others to high pressure, and a few, such as Deinococcus radiodurans, to high radiation environments. Microorganisms also make up the microbiota found in and on all multicellular organisms. There is evidence that 3.45-billion-year-old Australian rocks once contained microorganisms, the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.[1][2]

Microbes are important in human culture and health in many ways, serving to ferment foods and treat sewage, and to produce fuel, enzymes, and other bioactive compounds. Microbes are essential tools in biology as model organisms and have been put to use in biological warfare and bioterrorism. Microbes are a vital component of fertile soil. In the human body, microorganisms make up the human microbiota, including the essential gut flora. The pathogens responsible for many infectious diseases are microbes and, as such, are the target of hygiene measures.

The possible existence of microscopic organisms was discussed for many centuries before their discovery in the seventeenth century. By the sixth century BC, the Jains of present-day India postulated the existence of tiny organisms called nigodas.[3] These nigodas are said to be born in clusters; they live everywhere, including the bodies of plants, animals, and people; and their life lasts only for a fraction of a second.[4] According to the Jain leader Mahavira, the humans destroy these nigodas on a massive scale, when they eat, breathe, sit, and move.[3] Many modern Jains assert that Mahavira's teachings presage the existence of microorganisms as discovered by modern science.[5]

The earliest mention of micro organisms is found in hindu scriptures like the Atharvaveda, compiled 1200 BCE-1000 BCE, where Rishi Kanva refers to the microbes as Kirmis. He, along with his descendants Yamadagnni and Agasti, composed mantra suktas which highlight microbial infections and possible ways to cure them.[6]

Rishi Agastya composed a mantra in Rig Veda which refers to two types of harmful creatures for ones body. The first being visible and second being so minuscule that they are invisible to the naked eyes.[7]

The Shanti Parva of Ved Vyas Mahabharata mentions organisms that are so minuscule that they can't be seen with naked eyes but only inferred.

There are many creatures that are so minute that their existence can only be inferred. With the failing of the eyelids alone, they are destroyed.

[8]

The earliest known idea to indicate the possibility of diseases spreading by yet unseen organisms was that of the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in a first-century BC book entitled On Agriculture in which he called the unseen creatures animalcules, and warns against locating a homestead near a swamp:[9]

and because there are bred certain minute creatures that cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and they cause serious diseases.[9]

In The Canon of Medicine (1020), Avicenna suggested that tuberculosis and other diseases might be contagious.[10][11]

Akshamsaddin (Turkish scientist) mentioned the microbe in his work Maddat ul-Hayat (The Material of Life) about two centuries prior to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's discovery through experimentation:

It is incorrect to assume that diseases appear one by one in humans. Disease infects by spreading from one person to another. This infection occurs through seeds that are so small they cannot be seen but are alive.[12][13]

In 1546, Girolamo Fracastoro proposed that epidemic diseases were caused by transferable seedlike entities that could transmit infection by direct or indirect contact, or even without contact over long distances.[14]

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is considered to be one of the fathers of microbiology. He was the first in 1673 to discover and conduct scientific experiments with microorganisms, using simple single-lensed microscopes of his own design.[15][16][17][18] Robert Hooke, a contemporary of Leeuwenhoek, also used microscopy to observe microbial life in the form of the fruiting bodies of moulds. In his 1665 book Micrographia, he made drawings of studies, and he coined the term cell.[19]

Louis Pasteur (18221895) exposed boiled broths to the air, in vessels that contained a filter to prevent particles from passing through to the growth medium, and also in vessels without a filter, but with air allowed in via a curved tube so dust particles would settle and not come in contact with the broth. By boiling the broth beforehand, Pasteur ensured that no microorganisms survived within the broths at the beginning of his experiment. Nothing grew in the broths in the course of Pasteur's experiment. This meant that the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than spontaneously generated within the broth. Thus, Pasteur refuted the theory of spontaneous generation and supported the germ theory of disease.[20]

In 1876, Robert Koch (18431910) established that microorganisms can cause disease. He found that the blood of cattle that were infected with anthrax always had large numbers of Bacillus anthracis. Koch found that he could transmit anthrax from one animal to another by taking a small sample of blood from the infected animal and injecting it into a healthy one, and this caused the healthy animal to become sick. He also found that he could grow the bacteria in a nutrient broth, then inject it into a healthy animal, and cause illness. Based on these experiments, he devised criteria for establishing a causal link between a microorganism and a disease and these are now known as Koch's postulates.[21] Although these postulates cannot be applied in all cases, they do retain historical importance to the development of scientific thought and are still being used today.[22]

The discovery of microorganisms such as Euglena that did not fit into either the animal or plant kingdoms, since they were photosynthetic like plants, but motile like animals, led to the naming of a third kingdom in the 1860s. In 1860 John Hogg called this the Protoctista, and in 1866 Ernst Haeckel named it the Protista.[23][24][25]

The work of Pasteur and Koch did not accurately reflect the true diversity of the microbial world because of their exclusive focus on microorganisms having direct medical relevance. It was not until the work of Martinus Beijerinck and Sergei Winogradsky late in the nineteenth century that the true breadth of microbiology was revealed.[26] Beijerinck made two major contributions to microbiology: the discovery of viruses and the development of enrichment culture techniques.[27] While his work on the tobacco mosaic virus established the basic principles of virology, it was his development of enrichment culturing that had the most immediate impact on microbiology by allowing for the cultivation of a wide range of microbes with wildly different physiologies. Winogradsky was the first to develop the concept of chemolithotrophy and to thereby reveal the essential role played by microorganisms in geochemical processes.[28] He was responsible for the first isolation and description of both nitrifying and nitrogen-fixing bacteria.[26] French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d'Herelle co-discovered bacteriophages and was one of the earliest applied microbiologists.[29]

Microorganisms can be found almost anywhere on Earth. Bacteria and archaea are almost always microscopic, while a number of eukaryotes are also microscopic, including most protists, some fungi, as well as some micro-animals and plants. Viruses are generally regarded as not living and therefore not considered to be microorganisms, although a subfield of microbiology is virology, the study of viruses.[30][31][32]

Single-celled microorganisms were the first forms of life to develop on Earth, approximately 3.5 billion years ago.[33][34][35] Further evolution was slow,[36] and for about 3billion years in the Precambrian eon, (much of the history of life on Earth), all organisms were microorganisms.[37][38] Bacteria, algae and fungi have been identified in amber that is 220million years old, which shows that the morphology of microorganisms has changed little since at least the Triassic period.[39] The newly discovered biological role played by nickel, however especially that brought about by volcanic eruptions from the Siberian Traps may have accelerated the evolution of methanogens towards the end of the PermianTriassic extinction event.[40]

Microorganisms tend to have a relatively fast rate of evolution. Most microorganisms can reproduce rapidly, and bacteria are also able to freely exchange genes through conjugation, transformation and transduction, even between widely divergent species.[41] This horizontal gene transfer, coupled with a high mutation rate and other means of transformation, allows microorganisms to swiftly evolve (via natural selection) to survive in new environments and respond to environmental stresses. This rapid evolution is important in medicine, as it has led to the development of multidrug resistant pathogenic bacteria, superbugs, that are resistant to antibiotics.[42]

A possible transitional form of microorganism between a prokaryote and a eukaryote was discovered in 2012 by Japanese scientists. Parakaryon myojinensis is a unique microorganism larger than a typical prokaryote, but with nuclear material enclosed in a membrane as in a eukaryote, and the presence of endosymbionts. This is seen to be the first plausible evolutionary form of microorganism, showing a stage of development from the prokaryote to the eukaryote.[43][44]

Archaea are prokaryotic unicellular organisms, and form the first domain of life in Carl Woese's three-domain system. A prokaryote is defined as having no cell nucleus or other membrane bound-organelle. Archaea share this defining feature with the bacteria with which they were once grouped. In 1990 the microbiologist Woese proposed the three-domain system that divided living things into bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes,[45] and thereby split the prokaryote domain.

Archaea differ from bacteria in both their genetics and biochemistry. For example, while bacterial cell membranes are made from phosphoglycerides with ester bonds, archaean membranes are made of ether lipids.[46] Archaea were originally described as extremophiles living in extreme environments, such as hot springs, but have since been found in all types of habitats.[47] Only now are scientists beginning to realize how common archaea are in the environment, with Thermoproteota (formerly Crenarchaeota) being the most common form of life in the ocean, dominating ecosystems below 150 m in depth.[48][49] These organisms are also common in soil and play a vital role in ammonia oxidation.[50]

The combined domains of archaea and bacteria make up the most diverse and abundant group of organisms on Earth and inhabit practically all environments where the temperature is below +140C. They are found in water, soil, air, as the microbiome of an organism, hot springs and even deep beneath the Earth's crust in rocks.[51] The number of prokaryotes is estimated to be around five nonillion, or 5 1030, accounting for at least half the biomass on Earth.[52]

The biodiversity of the prokaryotes is unknown, but may be very large. A May 2016 estimate, based on laws of scaling from known numbers of species against the size of organism, gives an estimate of perhaps 1trillion species on the planet, of which most would be microorganisms. Currently, only one-thousandth of one percent of that total have been described.[53] Archael cells of some species aggregate and transfer DNA from one cell to another through direct contact, particularly under stressful environmental conditions that cause DNA damage.[54][55]

Bacteria like archaea are prokaryotic unicellular, and having no cell nucleus or other membrane-bound organelle. Bacteria are microscopic, with a few extremely rare exceptions, such as Thiomargarita namibiensis.[56] Bacteria function and reproduce as individual cells, but they can often aggregate in multicellular colonies.[57] Some species such as myxobacteria can aggregate into complex swarming structures, operating as multicellular groups as part of their life cycle,[58] or form clusters in bacterial colonies such as E.coli.

Their genome is usually a circular bacterial chromosome a single loop of DNA, although they can also harbor small pieces of DNA called plasmids. These plasmids can be transferred between cells through bacterial conjugation. Bacteria have an enclosing cell wall, which provides strength and rigidity to their cells. They reproduce by binary fission or sometimes by budding, but do not undergo meiotic sexual reproduction. However, many bacterial species can transfer DNA between individual cells by a horizontal gene transfer process referred to as natural transformation.[59] Some species form extraordinarily resilient spores, but for bacteria this is a mechanism for survival, not reproduction. Under optimal conditions bacteria can grow extremely rapidly and their numbers can double as quickly as every 20 minutes.[60]

Most living things that are visible to the naked eye in their adult form are eukaryotes, including humans. However, many eukaryotes are also microorganisms. Unlike bacteria and archaea, eukaryotes contain organelles such as the cell nucleus, the Golgi apparatus and mitochondria in their cells. The nucleus is an organelle that houses the DNA that makes up a cell's genome. DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) itself is arranged in complex chromosomes.[61]Mitochondria are organelles vital in metabolism as they are the site of the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation. They evolved from symbiotic bacteria and retain a remnant genome.[62] Like bacteria, plant cells have cell walls, and contain organelles such as chloroplasts in addition to the organelles in other eukaryotes. Chloroplasts produce energy from light by photosynthesis, and were also originally symbiotic bacteria.[62]

Unicellular eukaryotes consist of a single cell throughout their life cycle. This qualification is significant since most multicellular eukaryotes consist of a single cell called a zygote only at the beginning of their life cycles. Microbial eukaryotes can be either haploid or diploid, and some organisms have multiple cell nuclei.[63]

Unicellular eukaryotes usually reproduce asexually by mitosis under favorable conditions. However, under stressful conditions such as nutrient limitations and other conditions associated with DNA damage, they tend to reproduce sexually by meiosis and syngamy.[64]

Of eukaryotic groups, the protists are most commonly unicellular and microscopic. This is a highly diverse group of organisms that are not easy to classify.[65][66] Several algae species are multicellular protists, and slime molds have unique life cycles that involve switching between unicellular, colonial, and multicellular forms.[67] The number of species of protists is unknown since only a small proportion has been identified. Protist diversity is high in oceans, deep sea-vents, river sediment and an acidic river, suggesting that many eukaryotic microbial communities may yet be discovered.[68][69]

The fungi have several unicellular species, such as baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe). Some fungi, such as the pathogenic yeast Candida albicans, can undergo phenotypic switching and grow as single cells in some environments, and filamentous hyphae in others.[70]

The green algae are a large group of photosynthetic eukaryotes that include many microscopic organisms. Although some green algae are classified as protists, others such as charophyta are classified with embryophyte plants, which are the most familiar group of land plants. Algae can grow as single cells, or in long chains of cells. The green algae include unicellular and colonial flagellates, usually but not always with two flagella per cell, as well as various colonial, coccoid, and filamentous forms. In the Charales, which are the algae most closely related to higher plants, cells differentiate into several distinct tissues within the organism. There are about 6000 species of green algae.[71]

Microorganisms are found in almost every habitat present in nature, including hostile environments such as the North and South poles, deserts, geysers, and rocks. They also include all the marine microorganisms of the oceans and deep sea. Some types of microorganisms have adapted to extreme environments and sustained colonies; these organisms are known as extremophiles. Extremophiles have been isolated from rocks as much as 7 kilometres below the Earth's surface,[72] and it has been suggested that the amount of organisms living below the Earth's surface is comparable with the amount of life on or above the surface.[51] Extremophiles have been known to survive for a prolonged time in a vacuum, and can be highly resistant to radiation, which may even allow them to survive in space.[73] Many types of microorganisms have intimate symbiotic relationships with other larger organisms; some of which are mutually beneficial (mutualism), while others can be damaging to the host organism (parasitism). If microorganisms can cause disease in a host they are known as pathogens and then they are sometimes referred to as microbes.Microorganisms play critical roles in Earth's biogeochemical cycles as they are responsible for decomposition and nitrogen fixation.[74]

Bacteria use regulatory networks that allow them to adapt to almost every environmental niche on earth.[75][76] A network of interactions among diverse types of molecules including DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, is utilised by the bacteria to achieve regulation of gene expression. In bacteria, the principal function of regulatory networks is to control the response to environmental changes, for example nutritional status and environmental stress.[77] A complex organization of networks permits the microorganism to coordinate and integrate multiple environmental signals.[75]

Extremophiles are microorganisms that have adapted so that they can survive and even thrive in extreme environments that are normally fatal to most life-forms. Thermophiles and hyperthermophiles thrive in high temperatures. Psychrophiles thrive in extremely low temperatures. Temperatures as high as 130C (266F),[78] as low as 17C (1F)[79] Halophiles such as Halobacterium salinarum (an archaean) thrive in high salt conditions, up to saturation.[80] Alkaliphiles thrive in an alkaline pH of about 8.511.[81] Acidophiles can thrive in a pH of 2.0 or less.[82] Piezophiles thrive at very high pressures: up to 1,0002,000 atm, down to 0 atm as in a vacuum of space.[83] A few extremophiles such as Deinococcus radiodurans are radioresistant,[84] resisting radiation exposure of up to 5k Gy. Extremophiles are significant in different ways. They extend terrestrial life into much of the Earth's hydrosphere, crust and atmosphere, their specific evolutionary adaptation mechanisms to their extreme environment can be exploited in biotechnology, and their very existence under such extreme conditions increases the potential for extraterrestrial life.[85]

The nitrogen cycle in soils depends on the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. This is achieved by a number of diazotrophs. One way this can occur is in the root nodules of legumes that contain symbiotic bacteria of the genera Rhizobium, Mesorhizobium, Sinorhizobium, Bradyrhizobium, and Azorhizobium.[86]

The roots of plants create a narrow region known as the rhizosphere that supports many microorganisms known as the root microbiome.[87]

These microorganisms in the root microbiome are able to interact with each other and surrounding plants through signals and cues. For example, mycorrhizal fungi are able to communicate with the root systems of many plants through chemical signals between both the plant and fungi. This results in a mutualistic symbiosis between the two. However, these signals can be eavesdropped by other microorganisms, such as the soil bacteria, Myxococcus xanthus, which preys on other bacteria. Eavesdropping, or the interception of signals from unintended receivers, such as plants and microorganisms, can lead to large-scale, evolutionary consequences. For example, signaler-receiver pairs, like plant-microorganism pairs, may lose the ability to communicate with neighboring populations because of variability in eavesdroppers. In adapting to avoid local eavesdroppers, signal divergence could occur and thus, lead to the isolation of plants and microorganisms from the inability to communicate with other populations.[88]

A lichen is a symbiosis of a macroscopic fungus with photosynthetic microbial algae or cyanobacteria.[89][90]

Microorganisms are useful in producing foods, treating waste water, creating biofuels and a wide range of chemicals and enzymes. They are invaluable in research as model organisms. They have been weaponised and sometimes used in warfare and bioterrorism. They are vital to agriculture through their roles in maintaining soil fertility and in decomposing organic matter.

Microorganisms are used in a fermentation process to make yoghurt, cheese, curd, kefir, ayran, xynogala, and other types of food. Fermentation cultures provide flavour and aroma, and inhibit undesirable organisms.[91] They are used to leaven bread, and to convert sugars to alcohol in wine and beer. Microorganisms are used in brewing, wine making, baking, pickling and other food-making processes.[92]

Some industrial uses of Microorganisms:

These depend for their ability to clean up water contaminated with organic material on microorganisms that can respire dissolved substances. Respiration may be aerobic, with a well-oxygenated filter bed such as a slow sand filter.[93] Anaerobic digestion by methanogens generate useful methane gas as a by-product.[94]

Microorganisms are used in fermentation to produce ethanol,[95] and in biogas reactors to produce methane.[96] Scientists are researching the use of algae to produce liquid fuels,[97] and bacteria to convert various forms of agricultural and urban waste into usable fuels.[98]

Microorganisms are used to produce many commercial and industrial chemicals, enzymes and other bioactive molecules. Organic acids produced on a large industrial scale by microbial fermentation include acetic acid produced by acetic acid bacteria such as Acetobacter aceti, butyric acid made by the bacterium Clostridium butyricum, lactic acid made by Lactobacillus and other lactic acid bacteria,[99] and citric acid produced by the mould fungus Aspergillus niger.[99]

Microorganisms are used to prepare bioactive molecules such as Streptokinase from the bacterium Streptococcus,[100] Cyclosporin A from the ascomycete fungus Tolypocladium inflatum,[101] and statins produced by the yeast Monascus purpureus.[102]

Microorganisms are essential tools in biotechnology, biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. The yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Schizosaccharomyces pombe are important model organisms in science, since they are simple eukaryotes that can be grown rapidly in large numbers and are easily manipulated.[103] They are particularly valuable in genetics, genomics and proteomics.[104][105] Microorganisms can be harnessed for uses such as creating steroids and treating skin diseases. Scientists are also considering using microorganisms for living fuel cells,[106] and as a solution for pollution.[107]

In the Middle Ages, as an early example of biological warfare, diseased corpses were thrown into castles during sieges using catapults or other siege engines. Individuals near the corpses were exposed to the pathogen and were likely to spread that pathogen to others.[108]

In modern times, bioterrorism has included the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack[109] and the 1993 release of anthrax by Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo.[110]

Microbes can make nutrients and minerals in the soil available to plants, produce hormones that spur growth, stimulate the plant immune system and trigger or dampen stress responses. In general a more diverse set of soil microbes results in fewer plant diseases and higher yield.[111]

Microorganisms can form an endosymbiotic relationship with other, larger organisms. For example, microbial symbiosis plays a crucial role in the immune system. The microorganisms that make up the gut flora in the gastrointestinal tract contribute to gut immunity, synthesize vitamins such as folic acid and biotin, and ferment complex indigestible carbohydrates.[112] Some microorganisms that are seen to be beneficial to health are termed probiotics and are available as dietary supplements, or food additives.[113]

Microorganisms are the causative agents (pathogens) in many infectious diseases. The organisms involved include pathogenic bacteria, causing diseases such as plague, tuberculosis and anthrax; protozoan parasites, causing diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, dysentery and toxoplasmosis; and also fungi causing diseases such as ringworm, candidiasis or histoplasmosis. However, other diseases such as influenza, yellow fever or AIDS are caused by pathogenic viruses, which are not usually classified as living organisms and are not, therefore, microorganisms by the strict definition. No clear examples of archaean pathogens are known,[114] although a relationship has been proposed between the presence of some archaean methanogens and human periodontal disease.[115] Numerous microbial pathogens are capable of sexual processes that appear to facilitate their survival in their infected host.[116]

Hygiene is a set of practices to avoid infection or food spoilage by eliminating microorganisms from the surroundings. As microorganisms, in particular bacteria, are found virtually everywhere, harmful microorganisms may be reduced to acceptable levels rather than actually eliminated. In food preparation, microorganisms are reduced by preservation methods such as cooking, cleanliness of utensils, short storage periods, or by low temperatures. If complete sterility is needed, as with surgical equipment, an autoclave is used to kill microorganisms with heat and pressure.[117][118]

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Microorganism - Wikipedia

The Covid-era is a lesson on why it matters to test what we think we know about viruses and germs, argues Andrew Kaufman. Germ Theory is like climate science in that it is established dogma that may not be questioned; it is unscientific and illogical; and it is heavily funded by big industries.

Challenging paradigms is what critical thinking is about.

Germ Theory is one such paradigm that must be critiqued and falsified because, well, thats what science is about. If something cant be falsified, then were off to a good start. But if something can be falsified, then were off to an even better start.

To understand Germ Theory, a good rule of thumb is to get a bit of historical context.

Whereas most Americans probably have heard of Louis Pasteur (18221895), it is doubtful that many are familiar with the name and work of Antoine Bchamp (18161908). The two nineteenth-century researchers were scientific contemporaries, compatriots and fellow members of the French Academy of Science, but key differences in their views on biology and disease pathology led to a prolonged rivalry both within and outside of the Academy.

Bchamp was the more brilliant thinker, but Pasteur had political connections, including Emperor Napoleon III. Reportedly not above plagiarising and distorting Bchamps research, Pasteur achieved fame and fortune largely because his views were in tune with the science and the politics of his day. Meanwhile, mainstream medical historians relegated Bchamps ideasnot as attractive to conventional thinkersto the intellectual dustbin.

Pasteurs promotion of germ theory (a flawed notion that he did not so much discover as repackage) has remained dear to pharmaceutical company executives hearts up to the present day, having laid the groundwork for synthetic drugs, chemotherapy, radiation, surgical removal of body parts and vaccines to become the medicine[s] of choice. The unshakeable belief that there is one microbe for every illness is so ingrained as the controlling medical idea for the Western world that competing ideas about disease causation still have difficulty gaining traction.

I recommend reading the book Bechamp or Pasteur?: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, which is a wonderful biographical account of the two aforementioned scientists.

A number of my guests including Andy have spoken about all of this. Mark Baileys insights are concise and easy to follow, as are those of Mike Stone. Denis Rancourts analyses are a bit more detailed and analytical. David Rasnicks critiques are also a bit more detailed and analytical, such as his breakdown of the (lack of) existence of HIV.

Andy chatted to me about

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Andrew Kaufman on the false germ paradigm - Jerm Warfare