How Good Can President Obama Be? - 2

President Barack Obama

On this date in 2009 Dredd Blog and its readers wondered about the chances the newly elected President Obama would have.

Since then racists everywhere, as well as the Republican Party have declared publicly that their number one goal is to make a failure of President Obama.

The following text is the 2009 post wherein we had a discussion concerning President Obama's chances to do what he wanted to do, what he campaigned on doing, and the dynamics involved:

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The military has an advertising slogan "be all you can be in the" military, without really saying how much "all" is.

Bob Dylan made this statement about Obama's potential:

"He'll be the best president he can be. Most of those guys come into office with the best of intentions and leave as beaten men."

(Telegraph). It is fiction to expect more than can be done, and it sets one up for disappointment to give in to the delusion of expecting too much.

For example, in a declining republic no person can do as much as they can in a robust booming republic; and the opposition to the goals a president has can be overwhelming.

Capacity and potential are major players in the game, so we will miscalculate if we do not take them into consideration.

This delusion of excessive expectations has led many progressives to join the neoCons in denouncing this president before he even had a chance to do the first 100 days.

With minds like that, the capacity and potential is diminished further, thus the nation is held back even further by unfair and fake progressives who talk as if they are really wannabe neoCons.

I think a telling illustration is to ask:

"Would you rather enter the presidency following the Bill Clinton years, with a big budget surplus and no unpopular wars, or enter it after Bush II with a financial disaster, two unpopular wars on your hands, and a global dislike of Americans like no time in the past?"

The potential in the two cases is vastly different, and will have a bearing on the capacity and potential a president has to work with ... and what ultimately can be accomplished.

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A Methanol Economy Way Out of Here - 5

Attention Thelma & Louise

The inability to grasp simple arithmetic is caused by various things.

Take peak oil arithmetic: o = s - u, where s is the total finite supply of oil available, u is the current amount already used by civilization, and o is the total remaining oil still available for use.

It ought to be clear to a fifth grader that as u increases, o diminishes to eventually equate to "half used up".

The term "half used up" is just another way of saying the "peak oil" point, because from then on the amount of oil available, o, is always going to be less than half of what was originally available, and is always going down even further, so long as oil is still being used.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has had a series going that describes a way we can deal with what the scientist in the video at the end of this post calls "a liquid fuel problem."

Be sure to watch the video for an insight into what will happen if we do not heed the "bridge is out ahead" signs.

You may want to review the other posts in this series beginning with  A Methanol Economy Way Out of Here.

In addition to the methanol potential, a new government study says that 80% of electrical energy could be green by 2050.

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

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Bully Worship: The Universal Religion

The Cathedral of the Bully Religion

Not everyone has heard of Eric Arthur Blair, who wrote under the pen name George Orwell, but many have heard of his book "1984."

He evidently coined the phrase "bully worship" which he called a "universal religion."

Originally it was directed at a philosophy of imperialistic militarism that was affecting the thinking of various leaders just prior to the outbreak of WW II.

Bullying is a wide-spread phenomenon in the United States, and is now considered to be a social problem.

If we accept the Wikipedia definition and description for bullying ("Bullying is a form of aggressive behavior manifested by the use of force or coercion to affect others, particularly when the behavior is habitual and involves an imbalance of power"), we can get a bit closer to what Orwell meant:

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere … Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a “good” man is squeezing the trigger … have turned into heresies.”

(George Orwell, Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in Adelphi, January 1939, emphasis added). He described the universal bully religion as disguised by various means and methods, as a use of naked force, with the wide spread support of followers of bullying leaders.

We see this phenomenon, this secular religion, still alive in the world today, but with a different central location, and a different structure.

The new structure is the international oil corporation which we discussed recently in MOMCOM: The Private Parts, which considered the book Private Empire, an exposé of the empire of oil companies.

These companies have more power than the governments of the individual countries they hold sway over, the governments they use to bully weaker nations into submission to the control of oil.

This is not an utterly recent phenomenon, however, as we pointed out in a discussion about another book:

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, emphasis added). We specifically discussed the religion of this power block in another post:

"Upon enlistment, the first act of a Roman soldier was to pledge obedience and devotion to the emperor. Absolute loyalty to authority and to fellow soldiers was the cardinal virtue, and the Mithraic religion became the ultimate vehicle for this fraternal obedience. The Mithras worshippers compared the practice of their religion to their military service."

(The Virgin MOMCOM, emphasis in original). The bully religion, involving bully worship that Orwell spoke of, is a reincarnation of ancient Mithraism, fused with modern militant religious imperialism:

Bush II told Chirac, in an official government communique, 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.

(The Dogma of the High Priest in Chief). Today great military powers still invade weak victim nations for their oil because the bully religion is still being practiced.

The next post in this series is here.

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The Epoch of The Straw That Broke - 3

A couple of years ago in a post on this date in June, Dredd Blog touched upon one reality we live in, "the straw that broke the camel's back" syndrome.

In the space of time between that post and now, one hears equivalent words all the time.

"Living on the edge" looms big on this planet at this time.

One application of this syndrome is often expressed as: "We may have already passed the tipping points on global warming, say scientists at the Planet Under Pressure conference. At the London conference, scientists are giving a bleak view of the future of the planet due to catastrophic damage and growth by humans, saying we are close to the irreversible point of global warming."

Here is the text of that post in 2010 which considered the phenomenon:

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People are struggling to find an appropriate name for the times we live in.

One candidate is "The Criminally Insane Epoch", another is The Anthropocene Epoch (ibid).

I offer the name The Epoch of the Straw That Broke The Camel's Back.

Environmental scientists use a term "the tipping point", another form of the ancient folk concept "the straw that broke the camel's back".

There is a place at the edge, the boundary, the twilight zone, where the tiniest, infinitesimal, possibly even unmeasurable force will become the trigger that starts a catastrophic cascade that is incomparable in size and effect to the tiny trigger that "caused" it to happen.

The trigger of course does not "cause" that catastrophic cascade to happen, it only triggers it.

This leads some folks to mock the notion that a single, small, but out in the open disaster can trigger mega-catastrophes.

Military folk know that we have come to the verge of catastrophic nuclear war by accident and on purpose over the course of The Nuclear Weapons Daze.

A small rogue and mavericky nation could trigger that nightmare under certain circumstances.

We all have our own tipping point where just one more word, the straw, the trigger, can "cause" us to "fly off the handle" and say or do things we would not otherwise do, if the stage had not been set.

That is the point, to avoid the straw that breaks the camel's back, we must not allow the stage to be set.

The focus of this post is not the nuclear war problem, but the environmental disaster problem that could wipe out the current civilization.

The stage is well set for that, but it is not as easy to discern that stage as it is to discern the tipping point for nuclear war, or one individual's angry outburst.

The flora and fauna of the earth are well aware that the stage is set, scientists are well aware that the stage is set too.

To add to the drama, we will not know when the final straw is added, because then it will in fact be too late to take that straw back to avoid the catastrophe.

Our only play, our only card, our best shot is to take down the stage quickly by radical, effective, and comprehensive moves to renewable energy sources.

Otherwise, even a straw thrown onto the load by a foreign nation far away can hold us accountable.

As long as the stage is set we are hostage to the whims of the collective madness.

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Etiology of Social Dementia - 6

Fruit of The Big Lies

 This series began with an argument contained in the first post, an argument that propaganda is a trigger or toxin for social dementia.

Subsequent posts in the series have mentioned posts in another Dredd Blog series which point out the annual polls of U.S. citizens which consistently indicate that the citizenry believes that the U.S. military is the most competent institution in our society.

Never mind that 18 of the military / veterans per day commit suicide, totalling 6,570 per year, which amounts to more in one year than all enemies have killed in all the wars over the past decade of war fever.

Never mind that the DoD admits that 19,000 rapes of women soldiers take place each year, a figure disputed by watch-dog organizations that say the number is far greater.

Never mind that only about 200 per year of those 19,000 rapists are prosecuted.

Never mind that when prosecuted those rapists are given misdemeanor, not felony punishments, which are little more than a slap on the wrist.

Never mind that the military does not produce anything useful to society, because their business is destruction not production, as has been seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and Vietnam.

Never mind that the military has a hair trigger nuclear system that is prone to error and accidental launch scenarios that would make the human species extinct.

Never mind that this pathological behavior is all learned behavior, now being taught as an art in The War College.

I dare say that the U.S. population would not have that opinion of a corporation which had the same statistics of torture, war crimes, suicide, and rape.

So then, don't these factors beg the question, "why don't the people know about this?", which leads to the answer: epic propaganda programs designed to deceive the people.

The damage in the form of dementia has been done, and still is being done to the U.S. citizenry.

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

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