Since Manhattan Project caused first global environmental crisis, it can hardly solve the new one ...

If your baby isn't dying from an overdose of Strontium 90 from mother's breast milk , it isn't for want of trying on the part of the permanently teenage males who brought us the first Manhattan Project.

They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.

Noir films reveal the disconnect between Breen Office moral uplift and the darker reality of America

Contrary to general opinion, Noir films do not just show the grimmer parts of American life.

Their particular effectiveness is to give you both the official version and then show you the unofficial reality.

It was a bit like public school and high school in my day : we got plenty of sunny uplift from our unaltered textbooks, '40s and '50s NFB films and present day CBC radio school broadcasts.

But just outside the classroom, TV's noir and sci fi horror movies , combined with tv newscasts, told us all was not really that rosy in the human animal kingdom.

Of course, learning in school and on television about good old Uncle Joe Stalin's Katyn Forest mass graves, Auschwitz, DDT, Thalidomide and Nuclear Fallout had already prepared us to trust film noir far more than any government official ....

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall

"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......