Trump Moscow's "Manchurian Candidate" ?

When I was a little kid, more than fifty years now, I had a good laugh about the absurd plotline of both the book and original movie of The Manchurian Candidate.

As it there would ever be a fervently right wing White House bound Republican candidate actually having all his strings pulled by Moscow !

But now Donald Trump and his campaign manager's fondness for the current Russian strongman, together with rumours of the real estate tycoon's past possible associations with the local Russian Mob, has made me regret my youthful certitude.

Nothing, it seems, is ever impossible in America -- and the fiction writers and Hollywood simply have to try much harder to keep ahead of reality....

reductionist Eugenics, born and throttled at Cold Spring Harbour ...

Nobody in the American scientific-corporate-medical-government cartel controlling the fate of the Allies' wartime penicillin wanted to hear from him.

However, Dr Miroslav Demerec, the new director of New York's Cold Spring Harbour eugenics labs, those ever vigilant guardians of the racial purity of America, still thought he might have a solution to the desperate shortfall in natural penicillin production available to heal all of the sick and dying, the 'unfit' as well as the fit (!)

What would Henry do ?

We all have our own very good reasons for not helping suffering humanity:

• We are so overworked on the job that we simply lack the time and energy.
• Our bosses are really tightening down on us - or our all-powerful government is.
• There are restrictions on where we can travel, what we can write, what we can do.
• We have a lot of little kids to raise - or a handicapped spouse.
• Or maybe we're dying of a painfully debilitating disease

Or maybe 'all of the above' : like WWII's Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Still believe that just one person --- one overworked, over-burdened, over-censored, over-restricted and over-dying person --- can't possibly change our whole world, for the better, forever ?

wartime Penicillin : controlled by the few, granted to the few -- or controlled by no one and a right of all ?

Simply substitute "Life" for "Penicillin" and very few would have any problem with the above title.

For we all know that WWII was all about the Allied 'good guys' liberating the world from the threat of Axis death camps.

Auschwitz was fully their mistake, not ours.

But unfortunately for our moral comfort, the Axis had nothing to do with wartime penicillin, that was entirely an Allied show.

And almost our really big mistake, not theirs....

Pure Modernity, circa 1870s -1960s : winnowing Life's answers, keeping the correct and discarding the wrong

Lets face it, if you already know the correct answers to all of the Future's questions, why keep the wrong answers hanging about ?

So don't go calling it genocide, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, forced euthanasia or eugenics --- just call it 'good housekeeping'.

Pure Modernity becomes Diverse Modernity : Dawson's legacy ?

The original Modernity (Pure Modernity) had very high hopes indeed for 'purifying' all of Life's gene pools, though to judge by their 'success' with the English Bulldog, that would only have resulted in pure-breeding Humanity and Nature into rapid extinction.

By contrast, scientist Martin Henry Dawson's study of bacterial diversity had convinced him that the most successful lifeforms throughout history, the microbes, had survived four billion years because they evolved to support the widest possible amount of diversity.

In particular, the microbes survived dire change because they deliberately sustaining even those strains judged by scientists to be useless degenerate defective failures.

Japanese Muscularity, 1890s-1940s : Japanese culture becomes extraordinarily hands-on brutal

In an age surely dominated by the machine (and the machine gun) what stands out instead about the era of Muscular Modernity was the rise of the subtly implied threat of old fashioned physical violence, used as a casual instrument of control by parents, teachers, bosses and competitors all through the Westernized world.

But only in one highly westernized part of the Orient, Japan, did this turn into the frequent and casual use of actual hands-on physical violence as a form of social control.

Totalitarianism : the one 'all around fit' surviving in the one only global niche

Totalitarianism is, deep down, Muscular Darwinism's 'survival of the one fit in a single globe-wide niche' against Charles Darwin's original 'survival of the many fittest in many niches'.

One might also almost call it Ballistic Modernity.

Recall that attempting to launch a ballistic object correctly on target requires an extreme act of faith that you have correctly calculated and adjusted for all the future variables that might pull the object off its normal trajectory.

Ballistics, the 'queen' science of all Muscular Modernity, required that you believe you already have all the correct answers to whatever questions the future might ask.

Because you believe that reality is only apparently complex and dynamic, a mere surface artifact , while deep down reality can really be easily reduced to a handful of simple, knowable, universal and eternal laws.

So why tolerate a useless, wasteful diversity of wrong niches, wrong opinions, wrong expertise, wrong peoples and species ?

Best just one big correct (eternally & universally correct) niche.

"Everything within the global niche, nothing outside the global niche, nothing against the global niche" to paraphrase Mussolini...

Muscular Deferments : Trump (and Florey)

Viewing news photos & videos, I am always amazed at just how many prominent military-service dodging 'chicken-hawks' are big, tall, muscular and verbally aggressive.

Or, not surprisingly, how often they garnered outstanding athletic records as young men.

Only to discover that these outstanding athletic achievements were won at the very same time as their military service deferments were 'won' : on account of newly discovered 'medical' conditions.

Diverse Modernity replacing Muscular Modernity

Muscular Modernity is hardly dead, not judging by the recent insurgent success of strongman politics all over the world, from Putin to Trump to Duterte.

But it no longer holds an intellectual hegemony over us --- in fact its appeal is almost entirely to the non-intellectual today, making a striking contrast to its widespread appeal among intellectuals of all sorts in the period between 1885 and 1945.

We are told - all too often - that a placeholder term, Postmodernity, is what has replaced Modernity, since about the early 1970s.

But I think we can do better, much better : to be more accurate, Muscular modernity is being replaced by Diverse modernity....

One can really only be a PD broadcaster, never a PD publisher

Once something is released into the Public Domain, becomes 'PD', one can no longer speak of it being controlled and published.

It is now as free and easy as the breeze itself - it has been broadcast, sown, into the wind : falling willy-nilly where it may.

"Nature's House has many Niches" --- and many different creatures to fill them

John 14:2 probably says all that needs to be said in proof of the 'survival of the MANY fittest' over the claim of the 'survival of the one most all-around fit'.

Survival of the MANY fittest

Short of successfully terraforming Earth into one big uniform niche (and don't think muscular modernity hasn't tried many times !) our world continues to be made of an incredibly wide selection of very different niches - and hence - an equally incredibly diverse selection of beings, each able to be the fittest key for each of those niche locks....

What if 1759 or 1959 first saw theory that a vast diversity of species needed to best fill every little niche in Nature ?

Muscular Modernity was going to happen, was already well underway, whether or not Darwin and Wallace ever publicly presented their new theory that Natural Selection, aka Survival of the Fittest, was why Evolution did exist and how it worked itself out.

PD sunshine & penicillin hated by Big Oil and Big Pharma

The same sort of - despicable - people who pushed patented synthetic penicillin 'sometime in the future' over currently available PD natural penicillin, during WWII's desperate times for the ill & wounded, are at it again.