Obama Administration Rides Into The W Sunset - 2

Mr. Transparent Green

While campaigning, someone we know was claiming to be in favor of a transparent government.

While also claiming to be one who understands the catastrophic domestic policy of addiction to oil.

Following the election, however, President Obama has morphed into the ringleader of our ongoing state of repeated failures, and on those two issues he is indistinguishable from the presidents we have rejected in the past for their succumbing to Orwellian and unscientific ways of thinking and doing.

He wants to be like those before him who were rejected?

Why else would he become a mouthpiece for Oil-Qaeda and Wall Street?

Like those before him.

On the "transparency" front (the place where secret back-room, shady dealings take place out of the sight of the public) Obama seems to be practicing for his next assignment - a traveling lobbyist for all the things that are bringing both the nation, as well as civilization, down.

This is all hidden in plain sight:

Prior to Barack Obama's inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ) ... But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect "noble" and "patriotic" whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible?
...
James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper that "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.

(Guardian, emphasis added). The office of the president has often been the seat of these mental storms of the Pontius Pilate type:

Some journalists are now understandably afraid to go near the Stratfor files. The broader implications of this go beyond Brown; one might think that what we are looking at is Cointelpro 2.0—an outsourced surveillance state—but in fact it’s worse. One can’t help but infer that the US Department of Justice has become just another security contractor, working alongside the HBGarys and Stratfors on behalf of corporate bidders, with no sense at all for the justness of their actions; they are working to protect corporations and private security contractors and give them license to engage in disinformation campaigns against ordinary citizens and their advocacy groups.

(The Nation, The Strange Case of Barrett Brown, emphasis added). The video below features an author and professor who explains that the history of cultural and national "progress" is not like "progress" in science.

That is because "social progress" takes one step forward, but then is likely to take two steps backward.

Professor Gray even states in his speech that we could even see slavery reemerge in the distant future, because governments of nations forget what has been learned in the past.

On the damage done and still being done to the environment we depend on for our very existence, Obama is as clueless as those who went before him:

Today's post has to do with one specific meme that is on the edge of the climate change denier meme complex.

A meme which the President perpetuated in his news conference yesterday:

"The lifeblood of the economy." - Dept. of Energy

"[oft heard meme] ... no single weather event can be linked directly to ... global warming."

("President OBAMA: You know ... we can’t attribute any particular weather event to climate change.")

(see Katrina & Global Warming). Notice that according to this meme every single big weather event that makes the fossil fuel industry and government look bad (such as Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy or Hurricane Katrina) "can't be linked directly to global warming."

Now who would want us to believe that?

"Why is that meme a false meme as the title of today's post indicates?" you may ask.

Since we deserve an answer, let's contemplate this problem with an exercise in deductive logic, premised on the false meme under our consideration today:

1) No single weather event can be linked directly to global warming;
2) all weather events are single weather events;
3) therefore, weather events can't be directly linked to global warming.

(see Doctors of Philosophy Make Phd. Mistakes). To see what the propagandists and/or apologists (who originally fabricated this false meme) are advancing, let's analyze this a bit further by considering a realistic meme:

1) Weather is a function of the global climate system;
2) all single weather events are parts of the global climate system;
3) the global climate system has been damaged by global warming;
4) therefore, all single weather events are part of the global climate system that has been damaged by global warming;

(see How Fifth Graders Analyze Hurricane Sandy). See the subtlety that the false meme forces, and see the bigger picture the accurate meme "global climate system" connotes?

(False Climate Change Meme Infects The President). That was made all the more clear in the series On The Origin of Tornadoes, pointing out that scientists own some of the blame for not stopping false memes in their tracks.

The previous post in this series is here.

---

Dr. Gray - The Myth of Progress

Index: Time (min:sec) - subject
=====================
01:00 - civilization and barbarism
01:30 - our situation today is akin to the situation in 1913
02:05 - international struggles for resources (see The Universal Smedley)
02:15 - religious conflict and war then as now
03:50 - civilization often becomes a vehicle for barbarism
04:45 - two traders go to the Congo with ideals then lose those ideals
05:00 - the neoCon myth of bringing progress to them or eradicating them
05:30 - possessed by a myth of "progress" that is actually imperialism
06:25 - eras in science tend not to be repeated once left behind
06:40 - this is not the case in civilization / ethics and politics
06:50 - things are learned in ethics / politics but they don't stay learned
07:20 - an example is the return to torture by civilization's preeminent democracy
08:25 - the progress myth is belief that knowledge makes us more civilized
08:30 - most of us believe in this myth
08:45 - but knowledge increase produces more civilization and barbarism
11:45 - "social evolution" is reemerging to what it was 100 years ago
13:00 - Herbert "survival of the fittest" Spencer at first believed but recanted
14:00 - one think you find about that myth is that it is fashionable to a status quo
15:33 - the social evolution myth attaches to any current notion of "what is good"
15:45 - fifty years from now, slavery may be seen as the direction of "social evolution"
16:00 - eras in ethical / political ideology tend to return, but in science not so
17:00 - questions

---