Saturday, January 19, 2013

On The Origin of The Bully Religion - 2

In the first post of this series Dredd Blog pointed out some of the likenesses and some of the differences between Christianity and Mithraism.

In today's post we will continue that theme, however, we will do so as we consider a new book about the Vietnam War.

The name of that new book is Kill Anything That Moves, which is a shocking revelation that departs from a lot of The Wartocracy's propaganda about that war, as well as being a departure from many other books about that war.

But it is similar to another recent book we have considered that has to do with U.S. History, albeit a book of a much more general sort concerning the beginning of the nation; similar in the sense that it offers a shocking contrast to the history most  of us have been taught and accept as the true history of our nation.

Interestingly, there are older books which offer the same shocking viewpoint; the viewpoint that tells us we have been habitually lied to for many generations, yes, older books that Dredd Blog has quoted from in prior posts:
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). The fellow writing it was well versed, as was the professor, Bernard Bailyn, who we quoted recently concerning the history of our founding:
In theory, Bernard Bailyn should need no introduction. In actuality, the intellectual landscape is so fragmented that highly literate Americans may not know of this prolific Harvard historian, the recipient of two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, a National Humanities Medal and a Bancroft (the most important professional prize for American historians).
(The Barbarous Years, NY Times). We quoted him to show that our founding was more about drug cartels than it was about Bible thumping democracy lovers (A History of Oil Addiction - 4).

Read what Professor Bailyn said about our founding in that post if you want some historical shock.

Anyway, the bully religion clearly had its impact and influence on the carnage during our founding, and the influence of the bully religion continued during our Vietnam War machinations:
The title is taken from an order given to the U.S. forces who slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in the notorious My Lai massacre of 1968. Drawing on interviews in Vietnam and a trove of previously unknown U.S. government documents — including internal military investigations of alleged war crimes in Vietnam — Turse argues that U.S. atrocities in Vietnam were not just isolated incidents, but "the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military."
(Democracy Now, emphasis added). Another unabashed, raw, to the point, and shocking review has this to say:
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by "a few bad apples." But as award‑winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to "kill anything that moves."

Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that made crimes in almost every major American combat unit all but inevitable.
(McMillian, emphasis added[the publisher 'lost' the page, so the link is now to The Wayback Machine copy]). A review asks another interesting question about the issue:
For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case.

Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.
(How Did the Gates of Hell Open in Vietnam?, emphasis added). That book, which the author took over ten years to research, certainly dovetails with the Dredd Blog post about some of our "great" warmonger leaders:
Robert McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in his [General Curtis LeMays'] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.

Interviewer: Were you aware this was going to happen?

Robert McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it. [regarding his and Colonel Curtis LeMay's involvement in the bombing of Japan during World War II] LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He ... and I'd say I ... were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
(Ayn Rand: Patron Saint of The Plutocracy - 3). The most peaceful and caring people of the Earth -- who ya gonna call -- the U.S.eh?

So, how does this tie in with the bully religion, with Mithraism faking itself as Christianity, you may be wondering.

Well, go back and read about one of the most famous military establishments in world history (until our Wartocracy made the scene), the Mithra-worshiping Roman Military:
“Polybius claimed that the Romans deliberately caused as much destruction as possible, slaughtering and dismembering animals as well as people, to deter other communities from resisting Roman demands to surrender; mercy. Male inhabitants were usually slaughtered, women raped, though only in exceptional circumstances killed in the initial orgy of destruction. After that, as tempers cooled and the desire for profit took over, prisoners would be taken for sale as slaves, though at times any considered to have a low market value, such as the very old, were still massacred.”
(On The Origin of The Bully Religion, emphasis added). Meanwhile all those people fancying themselves as good, clean, sophisticated, and exceptional citizens of the greatest nation ever, tended not to want to hear anything besides the stories about the freedom and civil rights that their "warriors" were creating for them.

Because of course they, like The Universal Smedley, had Mithras God on their side.

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

Friday, January 18, 2013

Government Climate Change Report

A 60-person Federal Advisory Committee (The "National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee" or NCADAC) has produced a report.

The report concerns civilization's green house gas pollution which causes global warming induced climate change (you can download the large PDF report here).

Thirteen federal agencies took part in producing various aspects of the current report.

The report is open for public comment until April, prior to a final draft being officially published sometime after that.

The report's focus was mandated by legislation of the U.S. Congress, and was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

The law specified that major reports were to be produced periodically (Global Climate Change Research Act).

A recent Dredd Blog post (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment) indicates that Oil-Qaeda soon thereafter began to spend mega-bucks to deceive the public about global warming induced climate change.

Oil-Qaeda started the global warming denier movement to deny that global warming is caused by the use of fossil fuels which are now known to be "addictive." [see also Smoke & Fumes]

The current draft begins with the following opening statement:
Climate Change and the American People

Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. This report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee concludes that the evidence for a changing climate has strengthened considerably since the last National Climate Assessment report, written in 2009. Many more impacts of human-caused climate change have now been observed. Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont have observed changes in their local climate that are outside of their experience. So, too, have coastal planners from Florida to Maine, water managers in the arid Southwest and parts of the Southeast, and Native Americans on tribal lands across the nation.

Americans are noticing changes all around them. Summers are longer and hotter, and periods of extreme heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced. Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours, though in many regions there are longer dry spells in between.

Other changes are even more dramatic. Residents of some coastal cities see their streets flood more regularly during storms and high tides. Inland cities near large rivers also experience more flooding, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Hotter and drier weather and earlier snow melt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the year, last later into the fall, threaten more homes, cause more evacuations, and burn more acreage. In Alaska, the summer sea ice that once protected the coasts has receded, and fall storms now cause more erosion and damage that is severe enough that some communities are already facing relocation.

Scientists studying climate change confirm that these observations are consistent with Earth’s climatic trends. Long-term, independent records from weather stations, satellites, ocean buoys, tide gauges, and many other data sources all confirm the fact that our nation, like the rest of the world, is warming, precipitation patterns are changing, sea level is rising, and some types of extreme weather events are increasing. These and other observed climatic changes are having wide-ranging impacts in every region of our country and most sectors of our economy.
(NCADAC Report, Jan. 2013, page 1, lines 1-27, emphasis added). It is official that the economic impacts the report mentions clearly indicate that we can't afford not to change our practices of damaging the Global Climate System any longer.

Other previous Dredd Blog posts have reiterated that not only money is involved, but the lives of more than a hundred million men, women, and children are also in grave danger:
More than 100 million people will die ... by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.

It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

More than 90 percent of those deaths will occur in developing countries, said the report that calculated the human and economic impact of climate change on 184 countries in 2010 and 2030. It was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a partnership of 20 developing countries threatened by climate change.

"A combined climate-carbon crisis is estimated to claim 100 million lives between now and the end of the next decade," the report said.
(New Climate Catastrophe Criminality Policy, quoting Reuters). The millions of deaths already caused by Oil-Qaeda should also be addressed and dealt with.

The next post in this series is here.


Thursday, January 17, 2013

In Mother-Country MOMCOM: "Text Acts You!"

Globe Theatre - Shakespeare's Theatre
In previous posts, as regular readers know, I have linked or equated some of the machinations of U.S.eh? politics to the ways of characters in a play.

The linkage heretofore has not necessarily involved Shakespearean plays.

If you haven't yet, you might want to take a look at one or more of these Dredd Blog posts that deal with the issue: The Elections of Pontius Pilots - 3 , The State of The Onion Script, or Epigovernment: The New Model for three examples out of many.

In today's post let's take another serious look into the reality of that hypothesis.

I use the word "serious" in the sense that in general we are being played by government officials instead of being represented by government officials.

But let's look at it from a bit of a different angle, let's look at it in the sense of a specific aspect of Shakespearean Theatre.

Let's get a sense of my drift by reading a blog that specializes in this kind of thing, a dynamic that the title brings out:
Have you ever heard anyone say that when acting Shakespeare, the text acts you, the text does the work for you, or something along those lines? I’m willing to bet you have. But what does it mean that the text acts you? How does it do that? Doesn’t one normally act the text? If the text does the work for you, does that mean Shakespeare is easy?
Batteries Included

By the text acts you, most people mean that Shakespeare’s text is so rich in meaning and tells the story so clearly that it’s unnecessary to work to hard at showing the audience how you feel or telling the story. In other words, don’t color the picture that’s already colored-in.

If the text acts you, how come some actors sound great speaking the text and others give abysmal performances? It’s good advice to talented actors who tend to try too hard and over-act; it’s clearly an over-simplification that’s not meant for everyone. So when you hear it: Caveat Actor.
(In Mother Country Text Acts You!). The false sense of U.S.eh? history that exceptionalists promote is specifically designed to do just that.
Cow Farts Cause Climate Change
The Nobel-Peace Prize-Fighter

The presupposition is that the actors we call politicians or government officials are those from the greatest nation that has ever, ever existed.

The richest nation that has ever, ever existed.

The most exceptional nation that has ever, ever existed, because we have the genes of the best human beings to ever walk the planet.

Voting for them, then, is a choice of the best of two variations on the best possible themes in the best possible cultural environment in the best possible universe.

Thus, "the text acts you" Shakespearean thingy applies because it presents a subconscious play something like "who would want not to be part of the best of all worlds" by not accepting such a great script?

That propaganda covers up reality with a false history that we have been, and are still constantly being taught.

That historical play pretend constantly glorifies an image, an ideology, a story, yes, a fairy tale called "our history" that is very false:
Now comes “The Barbarous Years,” the next installment. It circles back to a period that most Americans don’t hear much about in school: the chaotic decades from the establishment of Jamestown (England’s first permanent colony in the Americas) in 1607 up to King Philip’s War (the vicious conflict that effectively expelled Indians from New England) in 1675-76. Bailyn’s goal is to show how a jumble of migrants, “low and high born,” sought “to recreate, if not to improve, in this remote and, to them, barbarous environment, the life they had known before.” As the title indicates, the story is as grim as it is fascinating: a group portrait in tones of greed, desperation and brutality. In recent years conservative writers dismayed by historical revisionism have flooded stores with books extolling the character and sagacity of America’s founders. “The Barbarous Years” is not one of them.

Death was everywhere,” Bailyn writes of Jamestown. The colony was a commercial enterprise, started by the Virginia Company with the sort of careful financial evaluation that in the more recent past was the hallmark of the dot-com boom.

English people kept coming anyway, lured by a discovery that the Crown and company hated: tobacco. Hip, fun, disdained by stuffy authorities and wildly addictive, the smoking weed was an ideal consumer product. Thousands of migrants were willing to risk death for the chance to cash in on England’s squadrons of new nicotine junkies. The Chesapeake Bay became a barely governed swarm of semi-independent tobacco fiefs, owned by families, operated by squads of indentured servants, all squabbling with one another, Protestants against Catholics, English against other Europeans, everyone against Indians.
(A History of Oil Addiction - 4). The Washington Play "Alien Obama vs Agent Orange Boehner" seems to be getting sillier and sillier even as it waxes more and more dangerous:
Mr. Boehner ... Throughout our hourlong conversation, as is his custom ... takes long drags on one cigarette after another ...
...
... the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."
...
With the two sides so far from agreeing even on the nature of the country's fiscal challenge, making progress on how to address it was difficult. Mr. Boehner became so agitated with the lack of progress that he cursed at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Those days after Christmas," he explains, "I was in Ohio, and Harry's on the Senate floor calling me a dictator and all kinds of nasty things. You know, I don't lose my temper. I never do. But I was shocked at what Harry was saying about me. I came back to town. Saw Harry at the White House. And that was when that was said," he says, referring to a pointed "go fuck yourself" addressed to Mr. Reid.
(Education of John Boehner?). It narrows the American world view down into a scripted "us vs them" mentality that conceives the world in terms of Republicans and Democrats, glued together by a phony plot that offers glory through both capitulating compromise as well as going over the edge of the flat Earth.


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The Peak of The Oil Lies - 4

Oil-Qaeda Spokesperson
In this series we are discussing how Oil-Qaeda has begun to spend tons of money at McTell News to convince us that dirty fossil fuels will last forever.

This latest mythology from Bullshitistan (Oil-Qaeda Propaganda HQ) is a cornucopian fairy tale about a never-ending supply of a finite substance.

The reason Oil-Qaeda continues to deceive the public is their need to protect what they think are their best interests, by dumbing down and hiding the reality from the public.

An expert who is aware of Oil-Qaeda's propaganda campaign on the subject should be heard:
Oil-Qaeda Syringe
... there are more than enough fossil fuels in the ground to drive an accelerated rush to the most extreme scenarios of climate catastrophe.

... oil prices would be much higher if not for the fact that governments are heavily subsidising fossil fuels. The WEO revealed that fossil fuel subsidies increased 30 percent to $523 billion in 2011, masking the threat of high prices.

Therefore, world conventional oil production is already on a fluctuating plateau and we are increasingly dependent on more expensive unconventional sources. The age of cheap oil abundance is over.
(Great Oil Swindle, emphasis added; cf. this, this, & this). The price you pay at the pump has hidden costs that are a form of tax taken from you and given to Oil-Qaeda.

That is because the peak oil -- that is the peak of old timey cheap oil ("conventional oil")  -- has already been reached.

We are now on the stair steps going downward in a spiral of increasing oil prices, because the low hanging fruit has already been picked, thus, the increasingly-inferior-quality stuff in the ground is more and more difficult to get.
Another Oil-Qaeda Syringe

Like all terrorists who commit suicide as they kill as many others as they can, Oil-Qaeda seems to have forgotten that by killing civilization's future with an addiction to a finite drug that is getting lower in inventory each day, they are going to fade away along with civilization (even if some Oil-Qaeda religious zealots may think they are going to heaven or nirvana forevermore).

The whoopie doo is that even if there is enough oil left to cause the global temperature average to rise two or more degrees, civilization is going tits up anyway, and Oil-Qaeda will have no country to sell dirty oil to anyway.

So, the truth to focus on is that there is a narrow window of time left within which civilization must convert to renewable resources.

That narrow amount of time will come whether we use up all remaining fossil fuels ("oil is the lifeblood" of current civilization), or whether we only use enough of what remains to destroy civilization through pollution.

That is one of the penalties Oil-Qaeda is paying for using propaganda -- the one deceiving everyone else likewise becomes deceived themselves before too long.

Even decades ago scientists were aware of the finite nature of fossil fuel:
“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. ... I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out ...”
(Thomas Edison, 1931, emphasis added). When the powers of government and Oil-Qaeda joined forces to addict civilization to deadly, finite fossil fuel usage, that was The Peak of Sanity.

The mental health of civilization has not improved since then.

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


Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Interlude

Dredd Blog is going through equipment upgrades.

Next post in a few days.

Check out the Series Page

Who Do You Love?

i walked forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
i got a Cobra Snake for a necktie,
i got a brand new House by the Road side,
Maid out of rattlesnake hyde!

i got a little-Bitty chimney made on top,
made from the Human skull,
come on, take (a little walk with Me?),
Ayn tell me who do you Love?

Come on Arlene, take me by the hand,
let me know you'll Understand,
whodoo ... you Love? ...

I died nine times on The midnight train,
been Through the fire and cold dark rain,
who do you Love? ...

I've got a graveyard hand in a tombstone mine,
just twenty-one and I don't Mind Dying,
who do you love?
tell me who do you Love? ...