New Government Climate Change Policy - Triage - 3

The "public relations" policy (a.k.a. propaganda) of the federal government, with regard to global climate change, is best expressed by the post The Baghdad Bobs of the United States.

A good example of this policy, which is actually the institutionalization of denial, is what is happening to two areas of the country, expressed in the Dredd Blog post Authoritarian Green Glow In The Dark, and a news article about fires threatening a national nuclear laboratory.

It is not that the government is reacting to the fears of the people, it is more like MOMCOM, the puppet meister, is instigating those fears then providing an official denial, which acts as pabulum.

This official rap "works" because the catastrophes are not happening everywhere yet, so they play to those who are eager to "be positive", i.e., those who have not yet been personally affected by direct global weirding catastrophe so as to grasp the reality of it.

The government policy is short sighted, demented, delusional, and the remainder of this post will hypothesize that it is clearly the work of the national Id / Amygdala.

The same insane policy is used to explain the wars the people do not want, have not wanted for years, yet they continue unabated.

The worst part of this national condition is that the condition is without hope of treatment, which does not bode well, because historically the amygdala run amok will result in disaster.

Let's review one famous case for some key points:

... [Whitman] killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them.

The evening before, Whitman had sat at his typewriter and composed a suicide note:

I don’t really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.

By the time the police shot him dead, Whitman had killed 13 people and wounded 32 more. The story of his rampage dominated national headlines the next day. And when police went to investigate his home for clues, the story became even stranger: in the early hours of the morning on the day of the shooting, he had murdered his mother and stabbed his wife to death in her sleep.

It was after much thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy, tonight … I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationa[l]ly pinpoint any specific reason for doing this …

Along with the shock of the murders lay another, more hidden, surprise: the juxtaposition of his aberrant actions with his unremarkable personal life. Whitman was an Eagle Scout and a former marine, studied architectural engineering at the University of Texas, and briefly worked as a bank teller and volunteered as a scoutmaster for Austin’s Boy Scout Troop 5. As a child, he’d scored 138 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test, placing in the 99th percentile. So after his shooting spree from the University of Texas Tower, everyone wanted answers.

For that matter, so did Whitman. He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain — because he suspected it had.

I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.

Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala.

(Atlantic Monthly). Whitman's statement "I don't really understand myself these days" reminded me of the myth that we normally follow the old adage "know thyself", because we really do not know ourselves anywhere near what we think we do (see this and this).

For that and other reasons, any problem with the amygdala, the nucleus of the Id, can be hazardous to our health, to say the least.

It is especially so when a nation's amygdala "has a tumor", because the nation can become belligerent, lose its sense of self, its sense of direction, and inexplicably begin to invade, occupy, and abuse the other nations around it.

The individual, Whitman, turned against his extended self then became destructive toward those most able to help him heal, which is exactly what the "powers that be" within the nation are doing.

It is like slipping into a SLIDE ZONE:

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The previous post in this series is here, the next post in this series is here.