Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization - 2

Oilah Akbar Magic / Disney World

In today's post of this series let's consider the women captives in Ohio (which has been on the news this week) as an epitome or metaphor for Oil-Qaeda's capture of civilization via its deceiving ways of propaganda (to the point of addicting billions of people ... "the first barrel is free").

One of the battles civilization is waging shows some of the results of years of doublespeak engendering propaganda that has been injected into the consciousness of Americans.

Much of it is injected by corporate commercialization of the airwaves, other is through government generated propaganda, but it all has one purpose: to distort reality.

The fundamental error that accompanies endless media airwaves pollution is the magical thinking which allures our minds to soothe ourselves with the illusion that pollution causes no harm to the nation, civilization, or planet being polluted.

You may be thinking "that sounds like a stretch Dredd, so what do you mean?"

In the U.S. Senate we see a religious debate going on about magical thinking and about Oil-Qaeda's part in captivating our minds and bodies (all of us have some degree of the results of magical twinkie thinking in and on us - see A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA - 2).

The global climate system damage is being revealed by scientists all around the world, but that scientific discussion does not sit well with those who think science wants to kill their god, gods, or God:

A study claims that successive US administrations have failed to take aggressive policy action to curb climate change partly because a large number of Americans

Blog de Christo

take a fatalistic stance on the future of the planet informed by religious doctrine.

According to David C. Barker of the University of Pittsburgh and David H. Bearce of the University of Colorado, biblical eschatology or "end-time" doctrine centered on the belief in the "Second Coming" of Jesus Christ is a major factor underlying the resistance to addressing global climate change issues in the US.

(Digital Journal, emphasis added). Never mind separation of Church and State, the U.S. Senate was recently the location of a debate where a Senator said that religion teaches that God will not allow humanity to damage the planet Earth.

In rebuttal another Senator called that magical thinking, not valid religious ideology (see video below of Senate floor speech).

I don't want to urge anyone to hear me saying that magical thinking is limited to the worlds of religion, no, it is everywhere Oil-Qaeda has been chanting "Oilah Akbar!":

Their [our] lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill's outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.

Churchill's proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world's petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy's falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become "the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require." Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil "at the source": Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions' terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.

(What If We Never Run Out of Oil, emphasis added). The subsequent oil wars are still raging, and it fact, are now taking us in the direction of the big one.

Click on the Series Posts Tab at the top of any Dredd Blog post and browse down to the "Oil" section where links to the history of oil addiction and oil wars from the U.S. perspective is available.

The previous post in this series is here.

---

Senator Whitehouse calls out the Preachers of Denial:

---