Mother Of All Enemies

The greatest enemy to the U.S. has been identified previously and some of its effects discussed.

It is especially disconcerting to remember that the Iraq war was started under false pretenses and by the dogma of religious jihad fervor of fundamentalist republicans.

The same ones still extolling the great holy value of their wondrous torture that saved the world.

Now, this mother of all corruption is spawning children that have the same DNA and footprints:

Iraq plans to arrest 1,000 officials for corruption after a scandal which has forced the resignation of the Trade Minister and is threatening the food supply of millions of Iraqis.

Corruption at the Trade Ministry is an important issue in Iraq because the ministry is in charge of the food rationing system on which 60 per cent of Iraqis depend. Officials at the ministry, which spends billions of dollars buying rice, sugar, flour and other items, are notorious among Iraqis for importing food that is unfit for human consumption, for which they charge the state the full international price.

(Independent, UK, emphasis added). This latest unconscionable debacle comes along after a million or more Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed in "the war to bring them freedom".

This comes after 4 or 5 million Iraqi men, women, and children have been made refugees by "the war on terror" and who now live in squalor in Jordan, Syria, and other countries.

The great U.S. republican occupation of Iraq is now responsible for putting people in power who are now endangering millions more.

Not only that, the Bush II policies are the mother of the most catastrophic destruction to the U.S. reputation in history.

Oh, and isn't our own economy doing fabulously as a result of war; or instead should our stupid wars file bankruptcy and be done with it?

Too many in congress and in the administration had a bit part to play in this horror movie too.

We simply no longer seem to have a reputable, intelligent government when it comes to understanding what our enemy really is.

A similar fate is being experienced in Pakistan and Afghanistan as the "war on terror" continues.

A war that has killed, maimed, destroyed, displaced, and made homeless, orders of magnitude more men women and children than the "war on terror" has.

War is a destruction of society, worshiped by the sadists and masochists as a sacrament in their delusions and cruelties.

The Areopagites & Newcycle Morphs

The title of this post does not refer to some new rock band, new angels, old angels, or feeling all right on a warm San Franciscan night.

No, the title refers to some modern day Areopagites, the talking pundit class and their function.

The particular pundit class being referenced is Morning Joe & The Fish on MSNBC, feeling all things right, and wondering what went wrong with the republican class of power.

In the last election, they (Joe & Buchanan) proclaimed a 50-50 race that was "too close to call" at a time everyone else, including the newbie who nailed it, knew it would be a landslide election rejecting their political views and stances.

In other areas of U.S. civilization they are want to discuss, their "wisdom" is composed of the obvious (Peggy Noonan declaring that one and one and one is three), or as near as they can conform it, mixed in with the occasional lite variation on that theme.

One of their professed mentors from a religious facet of their suasion, the Apostle Paul, visited an ancient incarnation of the essence of their show; which is in Athens, Greece, and is described in "the book oaths are taken on" as:

And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is? For thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know therefore what these things mean. (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.) Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

(Acts 17:19-23, emphasis added). Learning "some new thing" is the profession we call journalism; the Areopagite class.

At times and in various ways The Areopagus was also the seat of government so that "some new thing" became controlled, morphed, and massaged.

As a general rule, where there is government there will be an Areopagite class calling itself the "free press".

In what we like to think of as an advanced democracy, we have the notion of a "free press" which means that government does not control it; which illustrates the boundary of the free press as that area where "some new thing" is not controlled by or does not come from a government source.

The modern Areopagites continue to seek to use "some new thing", which we now call "news", to form a political persuasion.

The Morning Joe concept of legitimacy is to sprinkle in some news at the top or bottom of the hour as the case may be, then morph it with persuasion.

But the main focus of the program is to morph news into a persuasion to be used to revive the republican party "good conservatives", purge the "bad conservatives", and be done with this painful dearth of power as soon as possible.

Searching ...

Yet another group effort is taking place in the search for a habitable planet. We cover this subject in the post Make Love, War, Wine, or Spacecraft?, which links to other posts and threads that cover the subject in more depth. This particular search we cover in this post does not involve spacecraft. Instead it involves the analysis of light coming to a telescope near you:

Although Captain Kirk and crew could zip over to a planet at warp speed and teleport down to the surface to check if it was inhabited, current-day scientists will generally have to search for life from a distance. New research gives some hope that we could detect a "handedness" beacon from a planet full of microbes. This handedness, or homochirality, is characteristic of life on Earth. The molecules that make proteins and DNA all have either a left-handed or right-handed orientation. Both orientations are made in equal quantities by non-biological processes, but life prefers to have just one type of hand over the other. "Homochirality is a fundamental aspect of self-replication," says William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "It is a reasonable proposition that life on other planets will exhibit a particular handedness."

(Space, emphasis added). Other articles linked to above point out that eventually human kind will have to move to another planet because the Sun is going to destroy the planet earth in the distant future. So we keep searching in many ways until we find some good leads. UPDATE: A water detecting technique is being developed in the Kepler mission. Planets with water will be easier to find as it is perfected.

100 Yrs Of Psycho Therapy - Take Cover

Our vast billion dollar feel good news media does not like to tell you about High Priest Bush II or the Book of Bowser.

I was wondering about some of this while reading the book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse, by Hillman and Ventura.

In that book I came across this back and forth between them:

HILLMAN: There is a decline in political sense. No sensitivity to real issues. Why are the intelligent people - at least among the white middle class - so passive now? Why? Because the sensitive, intelligent people are in therapy! They've been in therapy in the United States for thirty, forty years, and during that time there's been a tremendous political decline in this country.

VENTURA: How do you think that works?

(ibid, page 5). Yes, how does that work? I think Noam Chomsky, a great scholar, gave us a hint when he said:

Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is — it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.

(Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Chomsky indicates that our educational system is perceived to be controlled by the private sector. But there are other considerations:

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WW I, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.

And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.

(Chomsky, above, emphasis added). We see that impact clearly when education via public information is controlled by the military; and it is to a great degree in our nation at times.

So the High Priest Warrior is to be expected. Take cover!

A statement we hear so much is that we need to "grow". Grow inside, grow the economy, grow outside, grow baby grow. Why? The book had an interesting comment on that notion:

HILLMAN: You think people undertake therapy to grow?

VENTURA: Isn't growth a huge part of the project of therapy? Everybody uses the word, therapists and clients alike.

HILLMAN: But the very word grow is a word appropriate to children. After a certain age you do not grow: You don't grow teeth, you don't grow muscles. If you start growing after that age, its cancer.

(ibid, page 7, emphasis added). Our economy and our political structure has seemed to have had cancer which was called "growth" in recent years.

What is left of those years of "growth" is dying economies everywhere, the gangrene of torture, and endless wars.

Growth for growth's sake, it turns out, really is like cancer as the book suggests.

The next post in this series is here.

The Dogma of The High Priest In Chief

The President of France, Chirac, received a mixed missive from the President of the United States, Bush II.

It was so mixed that it confused Chirac.

Bush II told Chirac, in an official government communiqué, that the war against Iraq was god-ordained and prophesied in the Bible.

To support his dogmatic statement, Bush II pointed out these verses:

7. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,

8. And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

9. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

(ICH, Revelation 20). A hand me down quotation by the Leader of the Free World, from a book controversially said to have been written circa A.D. 90 by the Apostle John, even though the first verse of the book says "The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him".

I call the Bush II communique to Chirac presidential dogma because we know his mind was made up well before the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It was also written at a time when he was making public statements that he had not made up his mind about Iraq. But notice:

The Plutocracy of The Empire Prevaileth

It was early July 2002, and I went to meet Condoleezza Rice, President George W. Bush's national security advisor, in her West Wing office. I was seeing Condi in my capacity as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff ... I began my meeting with Condi by noting that the administration seemed to be building momentum toward going to war with Iraq and that I harbored serious doubts about the wisdom of doing so ... Condi cut me off. "You can save your breath, Richard. The president has already made up his mind on Iraq." The way she said it made clear that he had decided to go to war.

(Richard N. Haass, emphasis added). The president of a supposedly democratic country was carrying out a religious dogma "to bring peace and democracy" to the heathen by way of an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation without a democratic debate or United Nations approval.

Furthermore, by this time torture had been practiced for months by the same Bush II regime and policy decisions were being made based upon what detainees said during torture sessions where water boarding was administered scores of times each month on some detainees.

It really was an apocalyptic mentality that brought disaster upon us, which we are still suffering from, as you well know.

The next post in this series is here.

Andy Rooney's Awesome Memorial Day

Andy Rooney has the heart to say something that needs to be said, especially in our morphing, shape shifting, and inexplicable empire in its latter daze:

... it seems wrong that we have so often saved this virtue [courage] to use for our least noble activity - war. The goal of war is to cause death to other people ...

I wish we could dedicate Memorial Day, not to the memory of those who have died at war, but to the idea of saving the lives of the young people who are going to die in the future if we don’t find some new way - some new religion maybe - that takes war out of our lives.

That would be a Memorial Day worth celebrating.

(Andy Rooney a War Vet, 60 Minutes, emphasis added). The 4th President and the 34th President both had similar sentiments to Rooney's at times.

The simple fact of the matter is that a much more in-depth and comprehensive understanding is required for life on this planet to continue into the ages.

Otherwise as explained above, there will come a Memorial Day for the earth, but it is unclear who would observe it.

Next posts in the series are here and here.

Make Love, War, Wine, or Spacecraft?

The eye in the sky (Hubble Telescope) has been given more time to take a look "out there".

Look for what?

Since our science declares that our star, The Sun, will destroy us some time in the future, we must look for another home planet.

By "our" of course I mean the human race (the human species) if you will.

Our science, specifically our physics, does not tell us how to move matter at the speed of light ('c' in the equation e=mc²) in any realistic way.

When we talk about the speed of light we are talking about photons. But we must travel at that velocity, at a minimum, to effectively find a new home.

At that speed it would take four years to reach the nearest star, then 4 more years to return after staying a while.

But there is no habitable planet there.

We have the Kepler mission looking for potentially habitable planets, which are hundreds and thousands of years away, at the speed of light.

It will take perhaps thousands of years to learn the physics of that kind of space travel, after we develop that new physics which does not yet exist.

The bottom line is that we must stop being a hostile species, hostile to each other, hostile to our own home world, and hostile to the notion of what we must do to avoid a catastrophic death.

A very recent discovery indicates that we may not have an unimaginable amount of time before our Sun becomes the death of our planet by removing it from existence.

Another discovery shows a very large and well known red giant, Betelgeuse, is shrinking for an unknown reason.

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

I wrote about his latest album a while back.

I watched a "movie about him" ("I'm Not There") last night.

I read his Chronicles I and two biographies about him a few years ago.

It comes down to the fact that in historical writings the outcome of the story is dependent on who is doing the writing.

After having personally done the watching, the listening, and the research I am as qualified as anyone else to say that he is a great song writer, poet, singer, musician, and Seer.

He will take exception to the "Seer" part but it is too late for him to express a rejection of that notion now.

His early rejection of that notion was based upon a belief that Seer equates to saint and hence saintly behavior.

Actually it has nothing to do with morality of that sort, it is simply a gift of vision like mathematicians, criminals, and scientists sometimes have.

It is no more than seeing what is going to happen when a certain set of events are put into action.

Bob Dylan you were no doubt a gifted seer at times in your life.

You wrote some of the things down which you correctly envisioned, and you can't hide from it now, well after the fact.

Happy Birthday.