The Sixth Extinction and WWII : Jews and Romas not extinct but damned close

We live - for how much longer we will live I do not know - in both a modern plenticidal age and a postmodern neo-plenitude age.

We humans are trying hard as we can to kill off all other lifeforms, killing the golden goose, so we can have this earthly golden egg all to ourselves.

So we are plenticidal : killing off Nature's plenitude, thinking that draining her gene pool is a good thing , just as we used to think draining wetlands was a good thing too.

WWII's planned mass extinctions - and the inordinate fondness for beetles

All I really know about God is that He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles - all 350,000 species of them.

As it happens, so do I.

And I like to think that scientist Henry Dawson also did too.

If so , then he was very much alone.

Dawson's Plenty : penicillin rebukes the plenticidal war

Henry Dawson's call of "wartime penicillin for all" is sort of hard sayings version of the famous Atlantic Charter , if you recall the striking title of that popular series of bible study books.

By contrast, FDR and Churchill's actual Atlantic Charter (the public war aims of the Allies) also promised human rights for all - but only set at some faraway time in an indefinite future.

So their wartime promise was really a variant of a very familiar sort of soft sayings : high flowing but empty political rhetoric that you never intent to fulfill.

Churchill and FDR defended their stance by the specious claim that universal human rights was far too costly luxury in the total war against Hitler.