eMail From Alliance For Climate Protection - 2

Here is a recent eMail ...

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Dear Friend,

The most rewarding part of my job is meeting and learning about individuals across the globe who are leading the fight against climate change. While action in Congress stalls due to partisan politics, these people make fighting climate change a priority every day.

Miranda Ko is a 19-year-old student at UC San Diego. She started a group on campus called Smart Living whose mission is to prepare undergraduates for a career in renewable energy.

Miranda's commitment to addressing the climate crisis is more than just a hobby. Her passion inspires others to get involved and work together to curb global warming pollution.

This Earth Day, stand with leaders like Miranda. Publicly commit to making the fight against climate change a priority every day. Start today. Share your commitment with us in the comment section of this blog post.

Asif Iqbal is committed to educating his neighbors about the threat of climate change in the remote region of Pakistan where he grew up. From a classroom to a mountaintop, Asif helps educate his community about increased temperatures, dried-out water sources and changes in rain patterns.

Asif helps me realize that each one of us has our own unique place in this movement. Today, stake out your part. Make a commitment on our blog to make addressing climate change a daily priority.

Be sure to make your commitment specific, so that others who read it will be inspired to join.

Repower America Committment

How will you make addressing climate change a part of your daily life?

Happy Earth Day,

Maggie L. Fox
President and CEO
Alliance for Climate Protection

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Right on Maggie!

Is Earth Day A Celebration Or A Funeral?

You would think that most folks know where the human species lives, works, eats, and breathes.

You would think humanity would use all its power and might to preserve the planet that gives them their sustenance.

You would think that world renowned scholars would report that we are doing a wonderful job, as any sane species would be doing, in that regard.

In short, one would think everyone would want to take care of their home, their whole world.

But I am very sad to report, like last year, that is not the case on the planet Earth on this Earth Day 2011:

I have barely skimmed the surface of these critical issues, but do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative. Business leaders who are conducting propaganda campaigns to convince the population that anthropogenic global warming is a liberal hoax understand full well how grave is the threat. But they must maximize short-term profit and market share; if they don't, someone else will. This vicious cycle could well turn out to be lethal. To see how grave the danger is, simply have a look at the new Congress in the US, propelled into power by business funding and propaganda. Almost all are climate deniers. They have already begun to cut funding for measures that might mitigate environmental catastrophe. Worse, some are true believers, for example the new head of a subcommittee on the environment who explained that global warming cannot be a problem because God promised Noah that there will not be another flood.
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As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

(Professor Noam Chomsky, emphasis added). Instead of a celebration of life, a celebration that humanity is taking care of our paradise in space, we must report that MOMCOM is actively murdering the planet Earth, actively celebrating war, destruction, and death.

We believe that the society destroying disease is concentrated in the hearts and minds of those in power, and that it gets there via the toxins of power.

We call that concentration MOMCOM simply because that is where power is concentrated, so that is where the world destroying corruption emanates from.

We must, therefore, become citizen soldiers so as to begin to fight the good fight, the fight to stop the bad war against our home world:

He's five foot-two, and he's six feet-four,
He fights with missiles and with spears.
He's all of thirty-one, and he's only seventeen,
Been a soldier for a thousand years.

He'a a Catholic, a Hindu, an Atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew.
And he knows he shouldn't kill,
And he knows he always will,
Kill you for me my friend and me for you.

And he's fighting for Canada,
He's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA,
And he's fighting for the Russians,
And he's fighting for Japan,
And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.

And he's fighting for Democracy,
He's fighting for the Reds,
He says it's for the peace of all.
He's the one who must decide,
Who's to live and who's to die,
And he never sees the writing on the wall.

But without him,
How would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau?
Without him Caesar would have stood alone,
He's the one who gives his body
As a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can't go on.

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put the end to war.

(Universal Soldier, Donovan). There it is, it is incumbent on those not in power to keep those in power in check, in sanity, yes in good spirits.

MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen - 2

In the blogosphere a single picture is sometimes worth a thousand posts.

In the first post of this series Dredd Blog introduced the notion of MOMCOM.

We used the acronym MOMCOM to stand for an amalgamation of all things militant-military, all things hydrocarbon, and all things media.

Dredd Blog observes that this entity MOMCOM is in the engineer's seat on the train civilization is riding to its demise.

Currently, the minions of MOMCOM in the U.S. Congress are looking for more money for more wars, more propaganda, and more oil.

As the cartoon shows, like the bully on the school-yard, MOMCOM plans to take the "lunch money" from those who need it most, the elderly, the poor, and the infirm.

Dredd Blog saw the politics of this fiasco emerging long before it became the latest ad nauseum phase in the media portion of MOMCOM.

In posts like Deja Vu - Guns v. Butter Election Looms and Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy, we pointed out in advance the way MOMCOM would dumb down the domestic political debate with a specific purpose in mind.

In The Peak of The Oil Wars series we show how MOMCOM puts imperialism to work to keep the oil addiction at the forefront of the existence of civilization by taking control of oil through worldwide militant imperialism.

Much more recently in Triage: Still In Deep Water we remembered Deepwater Horizon, a mere side effect of the oil addiction driven oil wars, and how that is perverting government into a selfish, self-serving, and utterly dangerous meme complex.

As to the media portion of MOMCOM, in the post GE Serves The Pentagon On TV Near Yoo, following that long-ago post, we noticed recently that GE is trying to hide its propaganda engine, even removing pages from its website, running from history, but not successfully hiding from history.

We have followed MOMCOM down to the DNA in the series A Closer Look At MOMCOM DNA, and we conclude that MOMCOM was "born" just after The Peak of Sanity.

A bleak future of continual demise into the oblivion of the middle class, and eventually the oblivion of civilization itself, contemporaneously with the ascension, then full-on takeover of all-things-government by MOMCOM minions.

The previous post in this series is here.

Open Thread

Open
Thread

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Some analysts think that the US economy is in more danger than it was before the Bush II collapse.

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3,200 abandoned oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico are uncapped and could become a catastrophe at any time (which is a catastrophe in and of itself)

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It used to smell, but things have changed ...

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Triage: Still In Deep Water

Long before the Deepwater Horizon disaster Dredd Blog predicted the future of governmental response to disastrous catastrophes.

For example, in the post New Government Climate Change Policy: Triage we pointed out that governments would morph into hyper-selfish entities.

Dredd Blog opined that those entities would develop programs to ensure the survival of government bureaucrats, programs not designed to ensure the survival of their people, and would increasingly keep those policies hidden from their people by the power of the state secrets doctrine.

This new body of policies is developed surreptitiously by the warlords of civilization, led by an indispensable nation.

We pointed out in the post The Indispensable Nation For Global Nihilism that the essence of that policy, the heart and core of it, is actually nihilism, an insurrection against the natural laws of the cosmos.

Listening to the people who live along the Gulf Coast today, one gets the firm impression that Dredd Blog was "spot on" in the assessment of the future of response to disasters and catastrophes brought on by the hydrocarbon wars.

The hydrocarbon wars are being fought on three fronts: 1) the war front where MOMCOM fights for possession and control of civilization's main drug hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal), which involves the oil wars; 2) the phony nuclear power front that speaks only the language Chernobylese; and 3) the war front against the environment which is causing another series of increasingly deadly catastrophes through the inducement of climate change.

On the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, that assessment still holds water, the oily toxic water of MOMCOM.

A year later following Dredd Blog criticism of MOMCOM in the Gulf, the propaganda machine of MOMCOM is still lying through its propaganda stained teeth 24/7.

The people along the Gulf of Mexico and the gulf itself still suffer from the mother of great catastrophes, MOMCOM, who likes to sh*t where we eat.

The Obvious As Wisdom - 2

In the first post of this series we pointed out how major political figures at times are oblivious even to the obvious.

Dredd Blog has also mentioned in various posts from time to time how this dumbs down our national debate to the point where the obvious is becoming our "wisdom".

How is it that our leaders are "wise" if they see the obvious and proclaim the obvious, but are only "in a bubble" if they fail to see the obvious?

That is tragic indeed, because the truly wise people see not only in the bright light of day, but they can also see in the dark, having a form of vision known as wisdom.

It is obvious that the USA is morphing away from a kinder and gentler nation into a meaner, more brutal, and heartless nation.

Our wars are becoming endless, and now our debates are becoming about how much money we are going to take away from the elderly, after they have paid their whole life into Social Security, upon the promise of having it for their retirement.

What about that "full faith and credit" of the government thingy?

Not only that, the American Dream is being taken from them and other feeble folk to give to the military so the endless wars can become even more endless.

Yes, the American Nightmare looms on the horizon.

The obvious is that we are slipping into a slide zone, stumbling in the darkness, and becoming what we always decried as being "unAmerican" (cold, heartless, warmongers).

Our friend Pogo said "We have met the enemy and it is us."

Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 4

The only stock market recommendations Dredd Blog has made is that investments in text books is a good play, but that of course is tongue-in-cheek.

We point out in several posts along the way that there is controversy in scientific circles (see also: Mystery Bubble Galaxy, or Mystery Hexagon The Great), that is, not every scientific notion is well settled, even though there is an authoritarian push to make it that way from time to time, even to the point of establishing the science police.

In other words, we must admit that we do not know everything, so Dredd Blog points to mysteries in science from time to time.

Why not?

With that in mind, there is a current and ongoing academic war about the origin of good, in the context of evolutionary eusociality theory:

His new argument, in a nutshell, amounts to a frontal attack on long-accepted ideas about one of the great mysteries of evolution: why one creature would ever help another at its own expense ...

“Kin selection is wrong,” Wilson said. “That’s it. It’s wrong.”

He most recently argued this point of view in a rhetorically unsparing paper that ran on the cover of Nature last August, saying that kin selection theory simply doesn’t explain altruism. It is that paper, co-written with the Harvard mathematicians Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita, that is now being broadly and dramatically challenged in the form of letters, blog posts, and rebuttals published in other journals.

(Where Does Good Come From?, The Evolution of Eusociality, PDF). That maelstrom inexplicably includes prominent scientists hurling logical fallacies back and forth at each other.

Such decadent episodes do not keep Dredd Blog from wondering about the origin of the opposite side of the coin, the toxins of power, at the Toxins of Power Blog.

Nor will they stop us from wondering about the virgin lizard species, as well as other interesting mysteries, all in the fun of wonder.

Three-fourths of species are not even named yet. Recently an entire order was "discovered" ... it had been assumed to be something else, so remember tenet four.

So where do "good and bad" originate, and where do they end up eventually?

MYSTERY! ... it's not just for science anymore.

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