Rebel Science: Gravitating Conflicts

This post has been moved to the Ecocosmology blog.

What If We Went To A Gummit Meeting?

To really succeed in government, it is sometimes helpful to know what your job is, and whether it involves any duties.

Ask around among your co-workers.

"Hi," you should say.

"I'm a new G-employee.

What is the name of my job?"

If they answer "long-range planner" or "lieutenant," you are pretty much free to lounge around and do crossword puzzles until retirement; most other jobs, however, will involve some work.

There are two major kinds of work in modern government:

1. Taking phone messages for people who are in meetings (G-meetings), and

2. Going to G-meetings.

Your ultimate career strategy will be to get to a job involving primarily No. 2, going to G-meetings, as soon as possible, because that's where the real prestige is.

It is all very well and good to be able to take phone messages, but you are never going to get to a position of power, a position where you can cost thousands of people their jobs with a single bonehead decision, unless you learn how to attend G-meetings.

The first G-meeting ever held was back in the G-mezzanine Era. In those days G-man's job was to slay his prey and bring it home to G-woman, who had to figure out how to cook it.

The problem was, G-man was slow and basically naked, whereas the prey had warm fur and could run like a dissident. (In fact, it *was* a dissident, only back then nobody knew this.)

At last someone said, "Maybe if we just sat down and did some brainstorming we could come up with a *better way* to hunt our prey!" It went extremely well, plus it was much warmer sitting in a circle, so they agreed to meet again the next day, and the next.

But the G-women pointed out that, prey-wise, the G-men had not produced anything, and the human race was pretty much starving. The G-men agreed that was serious and said they would put it right near the top of their "agenda!"

At that point the G-women, who were primitive but not stupid, started eating plants. And thus was modern agriculture born. It could never have happened without G-meetings.

The modern G-meeting, however, might be better compared with a funeral, in the sense that you have a gathering of people who are wearing uncomfortable clothing and would rather be somewhere else. The major difference is that most funerals have a definite purpose. Also, nothing is ever really buried in a G-meeting.

An idea may *look* dead, but it will always reappear at another G-meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie "Night of the Living Dead" you have a rough idea of how modern G-meetings operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed rising constantly from their graves to stagger back into G-meetings and eat the brains of the living.

There are two major kinds of G-meetings:

1. G-meetings that are held for basically the same reason that Arbor Day is observed - namely, tradition. For example, a lot of managerial people like to meet on Monday, because it is Monday. You'll get used to it. You'd better, because this kind accounts for 83 percent of all G-meetings held (based on a study in which I wrote down numbers until one of them looked about right). This type of G-meeting operates the way "Show and Tell" does in nursery school, with everybody getting to say something, the difference being that in nursery school the kids actually have something new to say. When it's your turn, you should say you're still working on whatever it is you're supposed to be working on. This may seem pretty dumb, since *obviously* you'd be working on whatever you're supposed to be working on, and even if you weren't, you'd *claim* you were, but this is the traditional thing for everyone to say. It would be a lot faster if the persons running the G-meeting would just say, "Everybody who is still working on what he or she is supposed to be working on, raise your hand!" You'd all be out of there in five minutes, even allowing time for jokes. But this is not how we do it in America. My guess is, it's how they do it over in Japan.

2. G-meetings where there is some alleged purpose. These are trickier, because what you do depends on what the purpose is. Sometimes the purpose is harmless, like somebody wants to show slides of pie charts and give everybody a copy of a big fat report. All you have to do in this kind of G-meeting is sit there and have elaborate fantasies, then take the report back to your office and throw it away, unless of course you're a vice president, in which case you write the name of a subordinate in the upper-right-hand corner, followed by a question mark, like this: "Norm?" Then you send it to Norm and forget all about it (although it will plague old Norm for the rest of his career). But sometimes you go to G-meetings where the purpose is to get your "input" on something. This is very serious, because what it means is, they want to make sure that in case whatever it is turns out to be stupid or fatal, you'll get some of the blame. So you have to somehow escape from the G-meeting before they get around to asking you anything. One way is to set fire to your tie.

Another is to have an accomplice interrupt the G-meeting and announce that you have a phone call from somebody very important, such as the president, Rush, Goofy, or the pope. It should be either one or the other. It would sound fishy if the accomplice said, "You have a call from the president. Or one of the others."

You should know how to take notes at a G-meeting. Use a yellow legal pad. At the top, write the date and underline it twice.

Now wait until an important person such as your boss starts talking. When s/he does, look at him/her with an expression of enraptured interest, as though s/he is revealing the secrets of life itself.

Then write interlocking rectangles. If it is an especially lengthy G-meeting, you can try something like this:

If somebody falls asleep in a G-meeting, have everybody else leave the room. Then collect a group of total strangers from the past Administration, right off the street, and have them sit around the sleeping person until s/he wakes up. Then have one of them say to him/her, in a very somber voice, "Robert[a], your plan is very, very risky. However, you've given us no choice but to try it. I only hope, for your sake, that you know what you're getting yourself into."

Then they should file quietly from the room.

Apologies to Dave Barry.

Etiology of Social Dementia

No doubt dementia is known in our society.

Some of that dementia has unknown causes.

In general, then, some of them come to us with no known cures.

We live in a sophisticated society that faces some diseases that have unknown causes and no known cures.

One of the more well known mental diseases of that particular group can even be deadly:

Some researchers are convinced that, whatever its cause, Alzheimer's disease is essentially an inflammatory condition, similar to rheumatoid arthritis ... there is no cure ... According to a report released in June 2001 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's disease was the 8th main cause of death in the USA in 1999, rising from 12th position in 1998.

(Dementia Updated). One endeavor in medicine called Etiology looks for the root cause or origin of such diseases.

Alzheimer's is a personal disease, an individual disease that infects on a person by person basis.

But there are obviously times when entire nations "go crazy", and do strange things (like attacking other nations for no sound reason, or becoming inexplicably belligerent, or the like).

Take for examples, 1930's Germany that invaded various nations of Europe and started World War II, or North Korea today which threatens to do the same for the same invalid "reasons".

Demented Civilizations Die

These are extremes that reach the border of sanity or proper social behavior, so social scientists do a sort of social etiology in an attempt to fathom how the madness originates and spreads so disastrously.

Currently in the U.S. we have symptoms of a national dementia, not unlike that of 1930's Germany, which has been around at least since General and later President Eisenhower warned against it.

The U.S. is spending more than all the rest of the world combined on weapons of mass destruction and tactical weapons, as well as having built military bases in 120 or more countries, evidently intent on maintaining them indefinitely.

Since this comes at the cost of human health and wealth, it is naturally seen by many as a sign of a national dementia.

Warmonger educational systems destroy worlds

Some observers see this dementia originating in the early 20th century when government or those behind government perceived a need to control the people, but realized that they could not do it by physical means.

Thus they took to propaganda in an effort to control the minds rather than use physical control.

Eventually this led to a mega-industry of businesses whose function was to deceive the people into believing something other than the truth of events occurring around them.

No way out?

One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.

Our language itself has enough holes in it to drive a truckload of propaganda through.

Check out this simple test that gives an indication of what is being said with our tricky language and what is not.

This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:

With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."

(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.

Thus, it is possible that we are beginning to see the national manifestations of our massive practice of deceit in our nation, because deceit removes reality from the target to be deceived, and not being aware of reality is otherwise known as dementia.

In essence then, when governments, businesses, and those behind them decide to deceive the people "for their own good", they are actually injecting dementia into the populace.

With the massive technologies we have for spreading deceit "through the air waves", we can even say that the disease has become airborne, which usually strikes terror into the hearts of the Center For Disease Control, because that brings on pandemics of the untreatable kind.

The movie "Outbreak" released in 1995, before the words "WMD', "9/11", or "neoCon" hit the airwaves of the masses, starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland, Patrick Dempsey, etc., is a good study on the subject of this post. (Hat tip to Christie)

It shows that the military will take out civilians and spread propaganda when it suits their purposes, which always come first; and it shows the proper citizen response.

The next post in this series is here.

Play Pretend Missile Offense Rejected

The Bush II regime had a "you are with us or against us, bring it on" foreign policy that seemed to implement an "offend everybody except oil sheiks" type of result. One of the pieces of that puzzling dogma was to put up a missile base near the Russian border but within Poland and the Czech Republic.

That ill fated move was propagandised as a safety shield from Iranian missiles, a nation so mighty that it fought Iraq for 8 years, resulting in the two nations taking on a million or so casualties, but gaining not an inch of either nation's territory.

Some threat. Gotta build them star wars gadgets to "purtek Amurka" was the ruse that fooled only the fools.

They created a mega-department that liked searching Americans who were only trying to get on aircraft to go to a business meeting or vacation, like they had for decades before.

In the Bush II movie they were to be accosted by Mr. I.M Purtekting-Yoo who had a runaway paranoid imagination and a low paying job. Mr. Purtekting-Yoo once netted Senator Ted Kennedy trying to get on a plane home to rest up. Big Fish!

Bush II was strongly "guided" by military oil media complex participants, and was acting out their screenplay scripts constantly.

This see-through plot was one of those puffing moments they do to scare up some new, unnecessary, and money wasting boy toys.

They religiously hoped to scare them up some citizens who would eventually be whipped up into a frenzy of rhetorically glorifying them.

But instead, the war gained in being more and more unpopular, and the used car salesman media did too for spouting bad propaganda.

In what sane people everywhere hope signals a return to reality based fiscal policies, before we are bankrupt beyond recovery by military spending, this ill advised plan has been stopped:

The Obama administration is shelving an Eastern European missile defense plan that has been a major irritant in relations with Russia, a U.S. ally said Thursday. The Pentagon confirmed a "major adjustment" of the system designed to guard against Iranian missiles.

Jan Fischer, the prime minister of the Czech Republic, told reporters that President Barack Obama phoned him overnight to say the U.S. "is pulling out of plans to build a missile defense radar on Czech territory."

The missile defense system, planned under the Bush administration, was being built in the Czech Republic and Poland.

(AP Yahoo, The Daily Progress). This ranks up there with shutting the abominable GITMO, pulling out of Iraq, and stopping torture; all gestures to the world showing that the United States is recovering from its decade long bout of dementia.

Even Israel acknowledges that Iran is not an existential threat to them, so Poland, the Czechs, and even podunk Arkansas can give up the bull.

Putting A Face on Machine Mutation - 2

This post has been moved to the Ecocosmology Blog.

The Joester's Race On & Off The Table

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC still mourns the fact that the public is wise to his form of "journalism":

The public's assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans' views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate.

(Pew Research). In fact the public is so wise that they threw his brand of politician out of office, even though he evangelized for neoCons with fervor.

The public is still angry with the Joester's blindness to racism, such as dissing Jimmy Carter [The Joester can run but he can't hide] for pointing it out. The Joester can not seem to figure out why there are no blacks in the House or Senate that have the brand "R" behind their name.

There are no black republicans in congress because the Joester's people are racist to that degree, and the minorities are wise to it. From time to time the Joester's peep throw the public a bone and appoint a black to something, like Steele, but that is about it. Lip service.

So today they attacked ACORN for spending too much of the treasury, near a million a year, while overlooking Joester's momma GE's curious accounting methods, which are much like convict Madoff's methods.

Add to that the fact that the Pentagon homies of GE can only track 75% of the treasury dollars they finagle from congress. Which is a million times more each year than ACORN gets. Hypocrisy Inc. of "GE news" runs the Joester's scripts these daze.

One of the glaring tactical mistakes the Joester's Crew back at the War College makes is to fail to recognize that the public is not hoodwinked by every deceitful notion that passes from their twisted minds out to the air waves.

The McClatchy Newspaper reports that race is a factor and gives some interesting factual background to support the story.

Gravitate Towards Light Speed?

This post has been moved to the Ecocosmology Blog.

The Intellectual War Monger

The word monger is not in and of itself indicative of something bad:

mon·ger (mŭng'gər, mŏng'-)
n.

1. A dealer in a specific commodity. Often used in combination: an ironmonger.

2. A person promoting something undesirable or discreditable. Often used in combination: a scandalmonger; a warmonger.

tr.v. mon·gered, mon·ger·ing, mon·gers
To peddle.

(Dictionary). Thus, a drugmonger is someone who traffics in drugs (e.g. pharmacist), and a warmonger is a person who traffics in war.

The intellectual warmonger is one who has been educated in one of the many War Colleges around the globe to deal in war with an intellectual aura.

For example, notice one of the movements within that war college educational system:

Who is SSI?

The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College publishes national security and strategic research and analysis which serves to influence policy debate and bridge the gap between Military and Academia.

(SS Institute, emphasis added). The military teaches how to influence policy debates and sometimes they get jiggy wid it:

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

(NY Times, emphasis added). The AP finally had to just come out and admit that the intellectual warmongers had had their way with the press:

The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."

(AP). The intellectual warmongers had, of course, learned their trade in the war colleges:

Capture their minds and their hearts will follow ...
Psychological Operations (PSYOP) or Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR) is simply learning everything about your target enemy, their beliefs, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Once you know what motivates your target, you are ready to begin psychological operations.

(Psyops Psyche!, emphasis added). The bottom line is that the media were swallowed up by those who monger the country's greatest enemy.

The next post in this series is here.

Does Currency War Lead To Trade War?

During the Wall Street speech President Obama mentioned the tariffs he had placed upon some Chinese products sold in the United States, but he did not mention that China is retaliating, which is an escalation, in the current context.

The current context is that China has been lobbying and advocating that the U.S. Dollar be removed as the world business currency, and that a new dollar replace it.

We have been monitoring the progression of this background aggression against the U.S. Dollar led by China, and now agreed to by half the world.

Nor did he mention that Wall Street is fighting very hard against reform, instead, he spoke different words than what had been written and provided before the speech to the press, saying Wall Street was only "resisting".

Arianna Huffington did not miss the change in the speech, nor that his softening will not bring the results his administration seeks.

In either the Wall Street case or the China case, I will add.

Myth Addiction Is Establishment's LSD

New oil discoveries are like finding a new drug peddler to supply the drug a little longer.

That way, those riding on their own personal Titanic Ship of Fate can ignore the long term needs of the human species (keeping the earth habitable).

Likewise, a fabled savior, the Canadian Oil Tar Sands, is just another myth pushed by those looking for brains that feed on myths and false hope.

The oil industry has been a peddler willing to "take care of" its customer addicts, but the scientists have been resisting the peddlers.

Scientists are pointing out that clean tar mythology is like clean coal mythology, and is really as deadly a poison as the product it casts a fog upon:

Alberta's oilsands produce more greenhouse gas emissions than some European countries right now and will produce more than all of the world's volcanoes in just 11 years if the pace of development continues, a new report says.

(CBC News). The propaganda is getting weak ("jobs or coffins", "guns or butter", and "war or terrorism") but will continue to deceive the weak who can only terrorize themselves with a vision of gloom if they do not get their fix.

The press is part of the establishment, however the public is not hoodwinked by the press as much as the press would hope:

The public's assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans' views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate.

(Pew Research). Good, stay thirsty for the truth and stay sceptical until the press stops being the lackey for the mythology fixated far right.

There is a better scenario: we evolve to become the fittest cosmic adults and the cosmos will be seen as a place where we can survive as a species, having left our addiction to our own death behind us.

The next post in this series is here.

In Defense of Noam Chomsky

Professor Chomsky

For those of you who read here from time to time, you know that Noam Chomsky is quoted and referred to regularly here.

There is also a link to his website on page one of this blog, for those who don't want to simply sip Chomsky, but who want that fine wine by glass instead.

One of the first blog posts here was The Deceit Business, which quoted a discussion between Chomsky and another intellectual about the massive deceit business in the United States and Britain.

That massive deceit business was more tame and had better manners, akin to "honour among thieves", at one time; but now it seems that they are coming unglued and are becoming moral barbarians from head to toe:

In the annals of damage control strategies, this one from Bonner & Associates may go down as one of the least effective ever: We may have forged 13 letters to lawmakers about climate change, on behalf of our coal industry client. But definitely not 14!

Yesterday we reported that congressional investigators had found a fourteenth forged letter to a lawmaker criticizing the recent climate change bill, purporting to come from a Virginia American Legion post, but actually sent by Bonner, the Washington-based astroturf lobbying firm, on behalf of a coal-industry client.

(TPM). I hypothesize that this degeneration is a result of the military oil media complex monstrosity having morphed from the old military industrial complex that was the focus of the Eisenhower warnings.

Professor Chomsky has seen this and has talked about it for years and years. It is time he was given air time about this in the media, after they break free from their chains of endearment.