An Old Catastrophe: Climate Policy

Greenland's Ice Volume

Is this the age of "Brownie you're doin' a heckupva job" or what?

Obama's new climate change adviser, Heather Zichal, made Joe Biden look like a piker when it comes to statements that start the presses rolling.

She will be quoted below, but first let's set the stage for her quote.

Look at the graphs in this post today, remembering that ice volume is not ice extent, that ice volume is given in cubic miles while ice extent is given in square miles (as was pointed out in How Fifth Graders Calculate Ice Volume), and all at once the direction we are all going becomes quite clear.

It is down hill.

The new Cryo-2 satellite, which has recently completed its first examination of ice volume, pointed out that the Arctic ice volume is one fifth (20%) of what it was in 1980 (Arctic Death Spiral Bombshell: CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed).

The ice volume of Antarctica is also decreasing at an accelerated rate.

All this was happening during the recent presidential election cycle where climate change was not even mentioned in the debates for the first time since 1988.

However, in the inaugural speech, and in his State of the Union speech, President Obama did say that if congress did not do something about it, he would do all he could using Presidential Orders.

His climate change advisor casts doubt on that, not because I am accusing Obama of being insincere, but because with advisors like her making inane statements, doubt is cast on the notion that they know what the reality is:

Environmental groups have been urging Obama to draft new rules limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Electric power plants produce about 40% of America's carbon dioxide emissions; they are the leading driver of climate change in the country.

Antarctic Ice Volume

Campaigners say Obama could cut those power plant emissions by 25% by the end of the decade without big price spikes for consumers, by directing the Environmental Protection Agency to limit those emissions under the provisions of the Clean Air Act. That would go a long way to fulfilling Obama's first term promise to cut emissions 17% from 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

The environmental groups point out Obama also has a legal obligation to act. The supreme court ruled six years ago that the Environmental Protection Agency had a duty to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. The EPA proposed new rules last year for new power plants.

But Zichal in her talk to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, damped down anticipation the EPA would move on existing coal-fired power plants any time soon. "We can't put the cart before the horse," she said.

(Guardian, emphasis added). The environment is the horse, Oil-Qaeda is the cart, and the cart has always been wrongfully placed before the horse:

See that 5 degrees Celsius we're projected to hit by 2050? That's 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That means the end of human civilization, and possibly of the human race itself. Within our lifetimes. [~37 yrs.]

(Digby's Hullabaloo, emphasis added). Thus, since we have had the cart before the horse for so long, we now have this problem of survival itself -- the survival of civilization -- and maybe even the human species itself (see also Endgame and 2 Degrees of Warming a Recipe for Disaster, NASA Scientist Says).

So, Zichal, in the speech where she made her statement "We can't put the cart before the horse", becomes utterly inane at best, insane at worst (A History of Oil Addiction - 4).

Government policy that amounts to picking up the pieces and burying the bodies over and over again is nothing short of senseless Triage.

Any rational civilization would go after Oil-Qaeda like gang-busters so as to treat the cause of the problem, thereby getting busy about ridding all of us of the catastrophe problem.

The next post in this series is here.

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Entitlement: Entitled To Endless War? - 2

Hey now, what is in the "Wayback Machine" today?

Hmmm, let's see what was happening on this date in 2010.

Curious about how long those in the political and fake news groove have been stuck on this or that  fabricated issue to the exclusion of other issues?

One way to find out is to go back to the future every once in awhile to see "what was happening tomorrow."

So, below is the text from this date in 2010:

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It is easy to tell when neoCons are going after more money from the Treasury.

It is also easy to tell which programs they think that budget money should come from and be transferred to them.

One word says it all: Entitlements.

When I hear a neoCon use that word I immediately realize that MOMCOM feels entitled to endless spending on the implements of war, together with endless incursions into the pockets of the middle class and poor to fund their largess.

We discussed how they morphed the words "liberal" and "conservative" to destroy the meaning of those words in order to deceive the public.

It is clear that they have used the same technique to destroy the meaning of the word "entitlements".

That word now means social security and other socially beneficial portions of the federal budget, but excludes their own biggest portion, which is the weapons of war budget.

MOMCOM feels entitled to more guns, more WMD, more nukes, more ships, more planes, more drones, more soldiers, and more military bases around the world.

In her demented mindset, she is a warrior who brings us freedom, so she is special and above the rest of us who feel entitled to Social Security, Medicaid, or Medicare.

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Not much has changed.

The news media get their old scripts out so as to fabricate more of the same old same old ... and we keep an eye on them by showing that they are in a rut.

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The Germ Theory - of Government - 5

Global Warning

Watching last night's "The Last Word" (the Lawrence O' Donnell show)  guest hosted by Ezra Klein, got me to thinking.

Especially the video of Ben Bernanke testifying before the U.S. Senate about financial matters.

In so many words Bernanke indicated that the austerity obsession which the insane wing of the Republican Party is nursing (with one of Baby Huey's bottles) is wrong headed in the extreme; thus, is damaging to the economy in terms of weakening the already weak but ongoing recovery.

Bernanke said that the austerity plan being used now has already diminished the nation's GDP (during 2012, by 1.5%), and that "The Sequester" (a sequel to the bad, senseless movie "It Was Not Wrong To Ruin The Budget Surplus That President Clinton Developed", starring John "Agent Orange" Boehner) would diminish the economy even further this year.

Bernanke mentored them but they did not get it.

So what's the cause of the ongoing and glaring cognitive dysfunction?

Well, some new science may lead to an understanding of their cognitive malfunction, and may help verify "The Germ Theory of Government", or at least move in the direction of verifying it.

It is an old American belief that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", which has been the basic theme of this series of Dredd Blog posts.

We are not trying to prove whether the "power corrupts" ideology is true, because that we take for granted as having been proven during centuries of observation (the design of our Constitution was based on it).

What we are looking for is the source of the toxins that corrupt the thinking of politicians who talk their way into vortexes of power, into government.

Already, during this series, we have looked at some remarkable discoveries that those who have gone before us were unaware of, specifically that our genetic makeup contains mostly genes from germs, and that communication takes place between human cells and germs:

I remember the day we found the gene for the inter-species signaling molecule like it was yesterday. We got the gene and we plugged it into a database. And we immediately saw that this gene was in an amazing number of species of bacteria. It was a huge moment of realization. We had wondered for so long what this second molecule was for, and the database told us in an instant this must be about cross-species communication.

(The Germ Theory - of Government - 4). The use of the word "germ" is in the context of "microbe", which means small things we can't see without the aid of a microscope, but nevertheless small things that can do big things when there are enough of them around; hence, the inquiry:

We must know scientifically what "germ", if there is one, has caused the failures in our society, through the corruption of power, if we ever hope to solve that problem, or to put it another way, to "cure" that disease: "Our results suggest that during evolution, the colonization of gut microbiota has become integrated into the programming of brain development, affecting motor control and anxiety-like behavior" (Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 2, quoting The National Academy of Sciences).

Do we need a vaccine of modern epic proportions which all those who sit in the seats of power must be inoculated with (V: The Evolution of the Vaccime)?

(The Germ Theory - of Government). In that light as well, the fertile world of scientific research on stem cells has recently turned up some astonishing discoveries:

We all started out as a fertilized egg: a solitary cell about as wide as a shaft of hair. That primordial sphere produced the ten trillion cells that make up each of our bodies. We are not merely sacs of identical cells, of course. A couple hundred types of cells arise as we develop. We’re encased in skin, inside of which bone cells form a skeleton; inside the skull are neurons woven into a brain.

What made this alchemy possible? The answer, in part, is viruses.
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Pfaff and his colleagues propose that the domestication of these virus promoters was a key step in the evolution of mammals with placentas. The idea that viruses made us who we are today may sound bizarre, except that Pfaff is hardly the first person to find evidence for it. Last year, for example, I wrote about how placental mammals stole a virus protein to build the placenta.

(Stem Cell Malfunction A Quantum Toxin Source?, emphasis in original). This dynamic does not stop at birth, no, various stem cells stay with us for all our lives and are active in repairing us; taking us back to health when we are sick or injured from time to time (ibid, Stem Cell Malfunction A Quantum Toxin Source?).

Be sure to remember that most germs (microbes, viruses, etc.) in the world way beneath our eyes are helpful to us, so, it is the rogue ones that we consider when we search for the toxins in power (that which makes officials in the seats of government become corrupt and dangerous).

Before signing off today, please let me point out that there may also be toxins of power factors even down at the quantum physics level; toxins that impact us when we get into vortexes of power, into government:

"In this paper we have pointed out that, since the protons are not classical particles but "wave packets" obeying the laws of modern quantum theory, the genetic code cannot --in spite of all precautions-- be 100% stable. Due to the quantum-mechanical "tunnel effect," there is always a small but finite probability that the protons will change place, alter the genetic code, and give rise to mutations. This implies also that this transfer of protons over a distance of about 10^-8 cm may be one of the driving forces in the evolution of living organisms on the earth."

(ibid, Stem Cell Malfunction A Quantum Toxin Source?). Perhaps we should encourage our kids to become microbiologists instead of lawyers, because at the macro level of cognition within our plutocracy, we are "doin' a heckuva job Brownie."

Example (graph not included):

See that 5 degrees Celsius we're projected to hit by 2050? That's 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That means the end of human civilization, and possibly of the human race itself. Within our lifetimes.

The International Energy Agency agrees with the assessment.

The Science Pope blog makes clear exactly what this all means:

Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like:

- You are among the last people that will ever walk the Earth
- Your children won’t survive to middle age
- All of the beauty, culture, and scientific discoveries we’ve unlocked will return to the ether from whence they came.

Forgive my French, but that is some heavy shit. Yet our ability to understand and feel threatened by this information is hindered by the fact that things don’t seem that bad right now. Sure things feel a little “off”, but how can we be so close to oblivion when life is (generally speaking) so good, modern and happy?

The answer is exponentials. Climate change does not follow a linear path (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc…), it follow an exponential path (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc…). Global temperature is increasing exponentially, fueled by humanity’s exponential rise in energy use, population, and economic growth ...

Next to this problem, the deficit isn't just child's play. It doesn't even exist by comparison. Drones? Let's get serious.

There is one problem on this planet that dwarfs all the others right now, and it barely gets mentioned by the national press except as a niche environmental issue.

(Digby's Hullabaloo, emphasis added). One of the definitions of "hype" is: "7. a swindle, deception, or trick" (Dictionary).

So, if the public is not informed of reality they have been swindled out of their right to know so they can demand that the problem be fixed.

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

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Dr. James Hansen, of NASA, explains (at about 8:00 in the video below), that the Earth is heating up due to CO2 increases in the atmosphere from civilization's use of fossil fuels.

It is heating up in the amount equal to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs EACH DAY, 365 days a year:

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Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity?

Sequester

The talk in McTell News circles, generated from the scripts they have been given to read (as good "journalists") is all about what they have stupidly named "the sequester."

They would have done better to name it "the sequel" because it seems like an ongoing bad TV Show.

I have been wondering "why are they doing it?", because I have been reminded of the statement made by the military, following years of preparation, about how they would be used to battle with the public once the economy got so bad people took to the streets:

A new report by the U.S. Army War College talks about the possibility of Pentagon resources and troops being used should the economic crisis lead to civil unrest, such as protests against businesses and government or runs on beleaguered banks.

“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” said the War College report.

The study says economic collapse, terrorism and loss of legal order are among possible domestic shocks that might require military action within the U.S.

(Will The Military Become The Police - 3, emphasis added). The MSM Sequester seems to be what the military was talking about:

-600,000 food stamp recipients will be cut from the program

-Massive education cuts. According to President Obama:

"Once these cuts take effect thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off and tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids."

-12 billion in Medicare cuts (more to come after 2013)

-Millions receiving unemployment will see their checks cut by 11% (an average of 132 a month)

-Federal funds to state governments will be cut, creating even more deficits for states and municipalities, and thus more localized cuts (the states have already made austerity cuts of $337 billion!)

Also, 700,000 jobs are expected to be lost, while 70,000 kids are also expected to be kicked off of Head Start

And this is just for 2013. The current plan for the austerity "sequester" cuts is $100 billion of federal cuts every year for ten years, equaling massive cuts to jobs, Medicare, education, and completely destroying federally funded social programs.

(Austerity USA Begins March 1). Does it seem like they are deliberately trying to goad the public into a scenario where they can deploy the military into the streets?

Or are they just so stupid that it renders them sincerely incompetent to do what has been done economically in the United States for a century or so?

The meaning of the word sequester:

se·ques·ter [si-kwes-ter]

verb (used with object)

1. to remove or withdraw into solitude or retirement; seclude.

2. to remove or separate.

3. Law. to remove (property) temporarily from the possession of the owner; seize and hold, as the property and income of a debtor, until legal claims are satisfied.

4. International Law. to requisition, hold, and control (enemy property).
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Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English sequestren < Latin sequestrāre to put in hands of a trustee, derivative of sequester trustee, depositary ...

(Dictionary). The odd fellows of McTell News use the word as a noun "The Sequester", rather than a verb, which does nothing to lend sense to it.

This is the kind of behavior one might expect when the only government program in the past decade that has doubled has been the military, the military is equipped with warmonger international corporations who profit from it (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 7),  and non-American plutocrats own those international corporations (MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 4).

The next post in this series is here.

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George Carlin on the Plutocracy:

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Good Job Academy: Thumbs Down For ZDT

"Your Interrogator is here"

ZDT sounds like some 1950's birth defect inducing pesticide made from the blood of Oil-Qaeda.

That is because the movie Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT, hereinafter ZERO) is made from the blood of Oil-Qaeda, which the Department of Energy has called the lifeblood of American economy.

Thank you Academy for not giving ZERO the jingoistic inglorious propaganda review trash that a lot of reviewers gave it.

Oh how the propagandists lobbied the movie reviewer clan of McTell News.

As a result of those warmonger perks, those reviewers said ZERO was to be the movie of the year, blah blah blah, but instead ZERO got a dose of what it deserves for piously worshiping The Bully Religion on steroids, mixed with a lot of crack:

Just a few months ago, the consensus of the establishment press and the nation's (shockingly large) community of film critics was that Zero Dark Thirty was the best film of the year and the clear (and well-deserved) front-runner to win the most significant Academy Awards. "OK, folks, you can plan something else for Oscar Night 2013 . . . . Zero Dark Thirty will win Best Picture and Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow)," pronounced Time Magazine's Richard Corliss. "'Zero Dark Thirty' and Kathryn Bigelow won major critics' prizes on Sunday, confirming the Osama bin Laden manhunt thriller as an Oscar frontrunner," said Entertainment Weekly. The film "looks like the movie to beat right now" as the critics' awards "landscape is dominated by Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty,'" reported the Washington Post's Jen Chaney.

But then political writers had begun to notice what film critics either failed to detect or just wilfully ignored. The film falsely depicted torture as instrumental in the finding of Osama bin Laden ("what is so unsettling about 'Zero Dark Thirty' is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it", said the New Yorker's Jane Mayer). Beyond the torture falsehoods, it was a blatant vehicle for CIA propaganda, bolstering a worldview exclusively out of Langley ("This is not a coincidence. The CIA played a key role in shaping the film's narrative," reported BuzzFeed's Michael Hastings; the CIA "couldn't have asked for better product placement", said the New York Times' Timothy Egan; as a result, said The Atlantic's Peter Maass: "Zero Dark Thirty represents a new genre of embedded filmmaking that is the problematic offspring of the worrisome endeavor known as embedded journalism"). In sum, said MSNBC's Chris Hayes, the film "colludes with evil" (a long but very partial list of writers, filmmakers, FBI agents and even government officials who similarly denounced the film is here).
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(I'm actually glad that it won essentially half of an award, for sound editing, as that's somehow more cruel than if it just won nothing).

This is a rare case of some justice being done. There's little question that the objections to its pro-torture depictions and CIA propaganda were what sunk the film.

(Guardian). I like what Chris Hayes said about it, the film colludes with evil; and it is some of the most sicko psychopathic jingoistic babble ever to have wasted money, time, as well as what we have remaining of our national reputation.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has pointed out the scourge of government propaganda over and over again for years (Propaganda Is A "Toxic Asset", 3/21/09; Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels, 1/25/12; and The Virgin MOMCOM - 6, 1/31/13; to name a few).

I will boycott ZERO in the future as I have in the past.

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Clean bravery:

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