World War II - assessment

A sufficient time has passed, and enough players with egos at stake have died, so that we can clear the slate and confirm what REALLY happened in the paroxysm of WWII. Here are a few notes:

1. FACTS. Hitler's personal secretary for a decade was an educated eye-witness to his rise to power and conduct of the War. She was never interviewed by anyone -- the military, the academy, the journalists. This single anecdotal fact reveals an enormous disinterest in facts generally, and a huge bias against women, that colors all accounts of the War.

2. ECONOMICS. A British economist spent the post-war decade appraising the value of the real estate and stock of Germany before the war, and comparing the value to the cost of fighting Germany. It cost much much more to wage war than to buy the materials which appear to be at stake.

3. GOLD. We know that the Nazis were pillagers. Like all thugs with guns, as they conquered Europe, they walked into every bank in every city, town and village and removed the gold. The Imperial Japanese Army systematicaly removed the gold from every bank, temple, and estate they could find from Manchuria to Indonesia. Together, the Axis consolidated at least 80% of the world's gold. This bullion has never been fully accounted for. It did not actually disappear -- it was not destroyed. Still, its "story" has never been told or ventilated by the press or by historians. We know the numbers of men at arms in numerous engagements across the globe, and we know the gold is important to thugs. But "military historians" seem to lose interest when "following the money".

4. VICTORY. Not surprising for such a complex event, but surprising considering what was at stake, there are many examples where but for a small and largely overlooked fluke, the AXIS would have won the war.

5. ACTUAL COST. We resist the attempts to assess the actual losses and damage because of the enormity. The losses of Nanking, Nagasaki, Dresden, and the Jews and Gypsies of eastern Europe, are simply not calculable, for even a start.

The difficulty of Belief Changing

If we never change our Beliefs, we imply our own un-educability. And even to state a Belief, to declare that we have over-reached the facts and hang by an unsupported limb, is to pronounce the fact that we are inclined to be un-educable. Now, is there any difficulty among men and women greater than the prospect of changing their Beliefs? I have seen people face starvation, death and pestilence, heroically, and with ingenuity. Yet, when face-to-face with the FACT that a central long-held Belief is not true, a Believer will die before changing that Belief.

After a Holiday feast, I was thinking about tryptophan -- the "drowsy Turkey" amino acid humans use as an essential building block in protein biosynthesis, and as a precursor for compounding Serotonin, Niacin, and apoptotically, Auxin (a phytohormone which we share with plants, and which plants use to convert stems into flowers(!).) It is true that the Tryptophan uptake across the blood-brain barrier may increase, and once inside the central nervous system, tryptophan is converted into serotonin which is further metabolized into melatonin, the circadian mother of sleep, in the pineal gland under normal enzymatic pathways. Still, is there a tryptophan trigger? The pineal is not the only source of melatonin. For example, peripheral cells such as bone marrow, and skin produce it, and it can even be ingested directly.

I convinced myself that the marginal tryptophan in the turkey was not likely to be a significant Cause of drowiness, in spite of my Belief that it might be. And after eating the Turkey, there I was nodding off. Was my pineal gland, the size of a grain of rice, triggered into melatonin manufacturing mode? Or was I getting drowzy because I had the naked, unsupported Belief, that turkey would induce drowziness? Sleep slipped into my quandary.