MOMCOM Engenders Zimmerman's Grand Ground-Standing

Anybody Here Seen My Old Friend Martin?

In various posts we have considered the way behavioral scientists look at the relationship between a citizen and that citizen's government.

We focused on how human parental dynamics are transferred to the nation's government.

If that is true, would we see the "child" emulating the "parent?"

The flash case that has had the media abuzz, the George Zimmerman v. Trayvon Martin case, will be offered in this post as one manifestation of this essence, and a case we can use to examine the phenomenon.

In several posts we covered the professional consensus concerning the psychological transference of the feelings, thoughts, concepts, and experiences we have, or had, with our human parents, into our notion of what government is:

... a common metaphor, shared by conservatives and liberals alike -- the Nation-as-Family metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children ...

(Security: Familyland, Fatherland, or Homeland?, emphasis added). Many fundamental emotional dynamics are involved in this configuration: fear, love, security, stability, life, and death.

Dredd Blog sees this subconscious parent mythology, after the smoke and mirrors have been stripped, as MOMCOM, an entity that is really not the angelic wife of Santa Claus (see as examples: The Virgin MOMCOM, In Loco Parentis & Parens Patriae - 2, and A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA).

The actions of George Zimmerman are like those of MOMCOM, sensing danger and suspicious people in places all around the world, then going thousands of miles away to invade weak nations that pose no real danger.

Of course MOMCOM then calls it self defense, as has been done for decade upon decade, as if mythology is in the genes:

Ground-Standing on the other side of the globe

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(Myth Addiction Is Establishment's LSD - 3, quoting 1944 book). Since children emulate parents, George Zimmerman was merely doing what comes naturally:

The article "What Orwell Didn't Know" by Professor George Lakoff is in accord with this post:

Probably 98 percent of your reasoning is unconscious - what your brain is doing behind the scenes. Reason is inherently emotional. You can't even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without a sense that it will satisfy you, not dis­gust you.

Department of Self-Defense

Fear and anxiety will affect your plans and your ac­tions. You act differently, and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and anxiety.

Thought is physical. Learning requires a physical brain change: Receptors for neurotransmitters change at the synapses, which changes neural circuitry. Since thinking is the activation of such circuitry, somewhat different thinking re­quires a somewhat different brain. Brains change as you use them-even unconsciously. It's as if your car changed as you drove it, say from a stick shift gradually to an automatic.

(What Orwell Didn't Know, see this also). The amygdala can become "propaganda central" since it gets a first look at all incoming sensory perception, that is, before the "conscious brain" gets a look at it:

So some of the key interconnections of the amygdala — and these connections actually define what it does in a sense, at least with respect to fear — the amygdala gets sensory information directly from the various sensory systems that process the external world. So the visual system, the auditory system, olfactory, touch, pain, and so forth. All of these kind of come together, or converge, in the amygdala.

(see video below). Regular readers know that this blog hypothesizes that the toxins of power hijack the process of normal pattern formation in the brain circuitry, so as to convert that pattern into a corrupt pattern.

(The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere). When Zimmerman saw Martin, all of his sensory input went first through his amygdala, and was modified according to the fears and preconceptions which formed his response, like MOMCOM getting into invasion mode when "intelligence" is gathered by The Keystone Kops.

Murdering to save "Amurka", it is not just for MOMCOM anymore, because we now have the Grand Ground-Standers In Chief (W and More W).

Vision - Nip It In The Twirl - 2

Some will remember the opinion displayed on some blogs on the Internet, by both commenters and posters, to drop a nuclear weapon on the Deepwater Horizon leak in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

 People actually thought that a thermonuclear bomb would solve all the problems of that catastrophic oil spill, seal the ocean bottom, then we could "get our lives back", and go back to driving our gas guzzlers along the coastline of Alabama and Mississippi.

You may wonder where such absolute lunacy and hogwash comes from.

I did too, so I did some research.

Here is a post on this date in 2009 showing that originally officials came up with the idea to use nuclear weapons as a way to stop hurricanes:

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The type of vision I am talking about in this instance is not eyesight.

Instead I am talking about the ability to foresee events and the consequences of behavior. For example, we know that hurricanes eventually disrupt, destroy, kill, or maim both sophisticates in cities and sophisticates in the countryside. But they begin as a tiny, twirly eddy in the mountains of Africa.

Then they grow out of their embryonic state when they reach the womb of the Atlantic Ocean:

"A lot of hurricanes start out over the Ethiopian mountains. Air is steadily flowing over those mountains and they cause waves in the air. We're going to have Mobil radars and aircraft flying through those waves," explains Owen Kelley, a NASA researcher.

One of those waves made its way to the Chesapeake Bay and turned into Hurricane Isabel.

(WJZ, emphasis added). The mountains of Ethiopia, not the east coast of Florida, is where the egg is fertilized, if you will.

Yet, when weather scientists or meteorologists long ago had the notion to control hurricanes in some way, their plans involved waiting until they were monsters. So nuclear weapons and various chemicals were their "medicine" of choice.

One wonders why they did not think of coal mining the tops off the African mountains, or nuking those mountains? Just call it a pre-emptive strike based on national security? Was it not done because "doin' a heckuva job" was the rage then? Who knows.

Anyway, dealing with the cause or source of a problem rather than dealing with its eventual effects once they have become monstrous somehow escaped them.

There was a lack of vision or foresight, which in the "old days" was called "nipping it in the bud". Deal with a problem when it is a tiny bud instead of waiting until it threatens your very life is the basis of that saying.

In general we tend to not deal with life threatening or liberty threatening problems that way because there is a severe lack of vision in our society at the political level. The next election is usually as far as the thinking goes.

One exception to this rule is that diplomacy, a form of vision, is returning this year with the election of the Obama Administration.

It is a refreshing development after almost a decade of diplomatic demise, and the resultant surge of militarism.

But the return to diplomacy is not because all of a sudden the politicians waxed diplomatic on their own.

It is because the militarism wreaked havoc on the economy and on our world reputation, so the people voted the hawks out.

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Did Religion Evolve In Microbes?

If we were looking for ancient ancestors of humans, would we look for something that looks exactly like humans do now, perhaps a fossil with a suit and tie on?

If we looked for the first evolutionary beginnings of war, would we look for fossilized nuclear weapon carrying fighter jets?

No, we would look for something not yet developed to the same extent as current species, something much more primitive, because the dynamic involved is supposed to be change via evolution, that is, being one thing then, but being another thing now.

So why, then, if we were looking for the most rudimentary essences of the evolution of religion, would we look for a pope, bishop, minister, or a church in the "fossil" record, or in any other records (why look for a fully developed human religion)?

It would seem more sensible to look for behaviors that could become full blown religious behavior (following billions or millions of years of evolutionary change, prior to full blown human religion ever developing):

"Secular religion" is, therefore, a natural way of describing ordinary human life: either as that way of life that is expressed in religion, or as that way of life in which religion is expressed. The conceptual need to reestablish the secular ramifications of what appertains to a religious order, or to a hierarchical church, or to a transcendent sacred, only proves the symbiotic relationship of the religious and the secular. Thus even a "secular" form of religion will still need its "extramural" forms of expression — if it is to be called a religion at all.

(Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. emphasis added). We could say, then, that we must look for forms of expression that are, in principle, the earliest inklings of the forms of religion.

One scientist fully grasps this concept, articulating it quite clearly:

I would never have imagined that things as simple as slime molds could do a primitive version of farming.

(The Scientist). That scientist used the proper term, "a primitive version" of a practice that is not the same now as it was then (billions of years ago "they" did not have John Deere tractors to "farm" with).

Likewise, the teachings of evolution would instruct us that any religion of ancestors, who lived billions of years ago, would not resemble today's human religion, or be a human religion, so why look for "fossils" of a human religion as defined in the dictionary today?

Further, the book Religion For Atheists makes the point that not all religion is theology, i.e., behavior and/or beliefs based on existence of a God or gods.

So, in that light, we can look for behaviors that are not based on theology, rather, we can look for behaviors that might constitute the beginnings of "civil religion" or secular religion.

Our search would have a focus on the behaviors of various life forms we know are ancient, yet that are available for study.

The oldest forms of organic life are microbes (see The Human Microbiome Congress), which have been on Earth for billions of years.

Let's take a look there:

In the excellent book, “The Social Amoebae,” John Tyler Bonner, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, describes many social abilities of amoebas including communication, group activity, and individual and group decision making. Do these raise the question of cognition in amoeba?

Some of their behavior is quite extraordinary. When food is scarce, individual cells join together and form a structure that functions as if it was a multicellular animal.  This slug-like creature, made of individual cells working together as one, crawls to a place with more food. There, the cells break apart, and form a new structure composed of a stalk and a fruiting body, with the appearance of a plant. The cells in the fruiting body live on by separating from the stalk and flying in the air, like a seed or spore, or attaching itself to a moving animal, to transport itself to a new place to start the colony over in a new location with the possibility of more food. The cells forming the stalk altruistically sacrificed themselves, by becoming a dying part of the structure. These amoebas, which had been living individually, came together to function as a multicellular creature to increase their access to food, then reverted back to behaving as individual organisms. The communication necessary for such actions is extraordinary.

(Social Microbes, emphasis in original). We are only looking for the "seeds" of religion, not the full grown, ripe, and developed fruits of theology.

So, since microbes exhibit altruism and community behavior for the good of all, are those "indicators, memes, or the inkling of religious behavior?":

Altruism /ˈæltruːɪzəm/ is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of 'others' toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). Another consideration is the sophisticated communication that takes place among or between microbes:

Many microbes demonstrate an elaborate language of signals which elicit a wide range of other behaviors.

Messages between microbes often take the form of secreted chemicals. One chemical message tells others that there is not much food in a particular location; those who “hear” it go in other directions.

Individual microbes send out signals that communicate their presence, and when a certain number have signaled they launch various group activities. This is called “quorum sensing.” For example, some colonies of bacteria light up when enough bacteria are present. Similarly, they defend each other from antibiotics, grow food together, and eat each other’s waste.

(Microbe Communication, emphasis added). This shows that sometimes microbes need the whole community to pull together, and they take steps to make that happen, which is potentially symbolic of religion, at least in this context.

A closer look at the dynamics of microbial communication is given in the post Microbial Hermeneutics, a post which shows that microbes can discern signals, interpret signals, and make choices between/among signals, even when there are conflicting signals being sent and received.

The following video shows individual microbes sending and receiving signals to come together for a social purpose, then their coming together to form a temporary multi-cellular entity in order to further that group purpose, and finally, their carrying out of that mission to find food elsewhere so as to save the majority.

Then, after many gave their lives in the effort for the survival of the group, the survivors disband to once again become individuals following their individual single-cell pursuits.

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The Germ Theory - of Government - 3

In the first post of this series we began to point out that the founders of the United States were acting as if they were doctors treating a social disease, human government.

That post pointed out that their experiences under the Kings of England led them to a point of view that power tends to corrupt, so they fashioned the beams and pillars of a social construct called government by the people, in the hopes that, over time, they could tame the beast, or at least keep it under wraps.

The post then went on to discuss some new research and theories, from the science of microbiology, which the second post in the series took a bit further.

Today, in a post over at the Toxins of Power blog, that blog narrowed its focus on microbes by looking at molecular machines within cells that pump toxins out into places that should not have those toxins (Do Molecular Machines Deliver Toxins of Power?).

One hope expressed in this series was a hope for a future vaccine for politicians.

A vaccine that would help them to not become psychopaths as a result of too much exposure to power.

That vaccine could now be getting closer to reality. Cross your fingers.

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

U.S. Mythology Trance - Military Justice - 2

The Obama Administration wanted to try an alleged 911 hijacker in a federal district court in New York.

Right-wing operatives made a big stink out of it saying it would threaten national security, cause traffic jams, and yada, yada, yada.

A trial in a federal court would have allowed, among other things, evidence, defense, and argument of selective prosecution that is being argued in another case.

The essence of that civil case is that the Bush II administration knew that Saudi Arabia financed 15 of the 19 hijackers on 911:

A Saudi Arabian accused of associating with several of the September 11 hijackers and who disappeared from his home in the United States a few weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, is in London working for his country’s state oil company.

Abdulaziz al-Hijji and his wife Anoud left three cars at their luxurious home in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida — one of them new — and flew to Saudi Arabia in August 2001. The refrigerator was full of food; furniture and clothing were left behind; and the swimming pool water was still circulating.

Security records of cars passing through a checkpoint at the Prestancia gated community indicated that Mr al-Hijji’s home, 4224 Escondito Circle, had been visited a number of times by Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 19-strong hijack team, who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in 2001.

The logs also indicated that Marwan Al-Shehhi, who crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower, and Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, had visited the house.

All three men had trained to fly at Venice Airport, which is 19 miles from Sarasota.

(Fighting Terrorism For 200 Years). As usual the Obama Administration cowered compromised, to instead have the trial at GITMO, the base they promised to close forthwith once they took office.

On this date in 2010 the first post of this series discussed this subject, so it is reposted below:

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MOMCOM's little helper, the Bush II regime knew that innocent people were imprisoned at GITMO.

They were afraid it would be bad for catapulting the propaganda if they failed to cover up the fact they were torturing innocent people.

Dredd Blog posts going back a while have wondered at the barbarianism of the Bush II regime, and of the seeming inability of the Obama administration to do anything differently, even though Obama has expressed a willingness to do so.

Accusations are being revealed in Britain, by former Bush II regime members, that the barbarian injustices were widely known during the Bush II regime:

The allegations were made in a document by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Bush's first secretary of state, Colin Powell, in a lawsuit filed by a former Guantanamo inmate and published by The Times in London.

Colonel Wilkerson alleged Bush's vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew most detainees held at the US detention camp in 2002 were innocent but believed it was "politically impossible to release them".

They were also keen to avoid revealing the "incredibly confused" detention operation, Colonel Wilkerson said, claiming prisoners were often rounded up by Afghan and Pakistani forces in return for cash, with little or no evidence as to why.

He alleged then-vice-president Cheney "had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it."

(Herald Sun, emphasis added). Now we know why they do not want to try them in federal court where this will all be revealed, or at least much more difficult for MOMCOM to cover up any longer.

The MOMCOM "courts" will do a better job of covering up the torture of innocent victims tortured by the Bush II evil masters, but at what cost to the reputation of the American people?

This is another one of the costs of war that should pop the mythology that wars are free.

One's reputation is one's most valuable asset in has been said, but the U.S. reputation has been ruined by "the pew, the loud, the latrines".

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