Pages

Friday, March 8, 2013

Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 16

Some of the most stupid science wars are not battles between Creationists vs. Evolutionists.

All too often they are between scientists and other scientists.

Generally those professional altercations involve new breakaway hypotheses that challenge current and established scientific dogma ("Establishment Science vs. Rebel Science").

Scientists can very religiously protect what they believe is an attack on the dignity of science, and in so doing can look more wacky than religionists do from time to time.

Note the example of a doctor who had revolutionized gynecology:
If you could ask Ignaz Semmelweis he just might say pseudoscience is "the kind of science that rejects the obvious, then has a violent reaction towards those who don't reject the obvious":
Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and Semmelweis could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory. In 1865, Semmelweis was committed to an asylum, where he died of septicemia, at age 47.
(Ignaz Semmelweis, emphasis added). Galileo or Copernicus would have similar notions, as would modern scientists who also experienced blinding bias during their scientific careers.
(What Is Pseudo Science?). You might think "that was a long time ago Dredd, things are different now."

It was a long time ago, and maybe things are better now, but that beat goes on:
Notably, before Stanley Prusiner, a neurologist, stood his ground in the 1980s insisting that dementias could be caused by nucleic acid-deficient infecting agents, virologists were adamant in their belief that these strange diseases were caused by “slow viruses.” Emphasis was on the “slow.” Furthermore, dogma at the time held that “conveyers of transmissible diseases required genetic material composed of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) in order to establish infection in a host,” Prusiner writes.

Prusiner lost both his promotion to tenure at the University of California San Francisco and his Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant by stubbornly defending his then heretical belief that “proteinaceous infectious particles“—or “prions”—could underlie inherited, as well as communicable, diseases. Such dual behavior was unknown and thus unthinkable at the time. “Virologists were generally incredulous, and some investigators working on scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease were irate.” Prusiner got even at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1997 and cautions in his autobiography: “While it is quite reasonable for scientists to be skeptical of new ideas that do not fit within the accepted realm of scientific knowledge, the best science often emerges from situations where results carefully obtained do not fit within the accepted paradigms.”
(Oddly Microbial: Prions, emphasis added). Prusiner and crew have gone on to show that some mental impairment is transmittable (ibid), which is a great help to our nation, because we have a problem with mental diseases:
One of the more well known mental diseases of that particular group can even be deadly:
Some researchers are convinced that, whatever its cause, Alzheimer's disease is essentially an inflammatory condition, similar to rheumatoid arthritis ... there is no cure ... According to a report released in June 2001 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's disease was the 8th main cause of death in the USA in 1999, rising from 12th position in 1998.
(Dementia). A realm of medicine called Etiology looks for the root cause or origin of such diseases.
(Etiology of Social Dementia). In that series, so far ending here, Dredd Blog explores the notion that propaganda could be a source for initiation of some dementia.

Prions are "oddly microbial", so we wondered if there could be a link to another wide-spread mental problem:
Recently, scientists discovered that even humans and microbes are symbionts, and in fact humans can not reproduce without them.

One can surmise that the K-T boundary extinction event was globally traumatic, since ~90% of land species, including dinosaurs, bit the extinction dust, as did perhaps ~50% of ocean species.

How did the remaining microbes react?

Since the utter destruction and catastrophe caused by the K-T boundary extinction was globally extreme, the microbes that survived would have been extremist types for the most part, otherwise they would have been unable to exist in those new extreme conditions.

The subsequent extreme events of taking over control of mammalian female placenta, establishing a virgin species, or perhaps engendering the adaptability of newts, may have been microbial reactions to the extreme trauma of the K-T boundary extinction event.

The spurious activity caused by any such trauma may explain why not all mammals, for example the rabbit, need those microbes to reproduce.

Evidence, in the form of the oldest rabbit fossil yet found, shows that it originated after the time of the K-T extinction event.

The rabbit, and species close to it, are not like other mammals such as the gorilla, monkey, orangutan, or human, which must have microbe (viral) help in order to reproduce via a functional placenta.
(Are Microbes The Origin of PTSD?). It is not unthinkable if we consider it along with one current scientific hypothesis about cancer possibly being caused by ancient microbes:
“Cancer cells are ancient alternative organisms, living protozoan-like fossils, foreign to their hosts because of deep origins elsewhere,” says oncologist Mark D. Vincent from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. They are, he asserts “In the body but no longer of the body,” and therefore deserve a radically different taxonomy. This isn’t a new idea but one taking on increasing relevance with the dismal failures of one onco-therapy after the other.
(Oddly Microbial: Cancer Cells). Microbial entities go way back billions of years:
Moreover, because every cell in all domains living on the planet today has ribosomes, it is likely that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) had them as well. “Thus,” Yarus adds, “it’s reasonable to conclude that the RNA world came before the invention of proteins and lies behind the root of the tree; before the time of LUCA.”
(Oddly Microbial: Ribocytes). Thus, they have been through five or so Mass Extinction Events, and have therefore been through different catastrophes and have experienced very different lives and environments:
Life in a high-pressured environment with practically nothing to eat might be ok for high-fashion models, but it’s an unlikely lifestyle choice for a single cell whose usual overriding goal is to become two cells. Yet the largest living ecosystem on Earth—the deep biosphere—is comprised of microbes so energy starved that the average cell divides only once every thousand or even several thousand years.

Even what these cells are is unclear because they are so different, so distantly related to any of our usual microbial strains, they can’t be typed. Moreover, there isn’t an expert consensus about whether cells in the deep seabed are really “alive” and metabolically active, dormant, or, perhaps, even dead, according to Bo Barker Jørgensen, Director of the Center for Geomicrobiology at Denmark’s Aarhus University.

However, research by Morono et al. in 2011 provides convincing evidence that most of the deeply buried cells are indeed alive, says Jørgensen. When a banquet of isotope-labeled glucose or amino acids was put before them, 76% assimilated the rare delicacies and did so up to 1,000 times faster than is typical for deep seabed microbes. Thus, Jørgensen also reasons that, because they wake up so quickly when dinner is served, dormancy is probably not a good explanation for how most of these organisms survive the harsh conditions under the ocean floor.

Most of the oldest deep-sea cells so far studied are still dining on the remains of fish, algae, and the like that sank out of the paleo-ocean in the distant geological era of the dinosaurs, got buried deep down in the seabed, and have been slowly degrading ever since.
(Oddly Microbial: 86 Million Year-Old Deep Seabed Mystery Cells). When evolution is considered from too recent a framework, much of the mystery of mass extinctions and their impact on life forms living through them can be missed.

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


Thursday, March 7, 2013

Epigovernment: The New Model - 3

America Meets Its Match?
The Attorney General of The United States, the most powerful nation ever known (militarily, and at one time economically) has said that the United States is too feeble to take on some banks.

Yes, Eric Holder, said in a congressional hearing that the banksters have defeated civilization, in the sense that they can do the crimes, plunder, and pillaging that they want to around the world.

But there is nothing anyone can do about it (they are "too big to fail" and "too big to jail").

First of all let me say that it is time for the wimp to go, and to be replaced with someone who is competent, because "you are doin' a heckuva job Brownie" was rejected a long time ago.

Imagine where African Americans would be if Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had said "the racists are too big to jail."

Imagine where Europe would be if "Hitler was too big to fail."

Imagine where America would be if "the king is too big to resist."

The loser mentality AG Holder is expressing is more evidence of control of America's treasury by an Epigovernment, an international entity which Dredd Blog has been talking about in this series:
A University of Zurich study 'proves' that a small group of companies - mainly banks - wields huge power over the global economy.

The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them - and created a 'map' of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy.

The study found that 147 companies formed a 'super entity' within this, controlling 40 per cent of its wealth. All own part or all of one another. Most are banks - the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. [Bank of America is in the top 25]
(Epigovernment: The New Model). The reference to Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America gives a clue as to who The Attorney General thinks is too big to handle.

Others in that list furnish the money to the banksters, by selling the number one drug of civilization, fossil fuels, then depositing the money in these big banks, and are known as Oil-Qaeda.

Eric Holder expects us to believe that The United States which has the world divided up into sections, with over a thousand military bases in 192 nations, and secret ones added on to that (The Virgin MOMCOM - 8) can't handle geeks in banks.

Other Dredd Blog series such as (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 8) and (MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 4) detail other aspects of the international entity that tells the United States to go sit in the corner and be quiet.

The other explanation is that he is saying that he does not want to mess with his bosses.

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

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Best Formula For "Gun Control"

The spin folks (propagandists) always get caught up in their own BS, so without fail from time to time they run into reality that exists outside their bubble.

Their recent media generated storm called "gun control" evoked a response, to a large extent, that caught them by surprise.

They are not too often caught off guard like that.

That is because the government, agenda driven groups, and the News Media (to the extent those are separate entities) in America have developed the greatest propaganda engines the world has ever seen, and they work quite well, thank you.

Even the NAZI propaganda maestros, whom you have been taught were the originators of propaganda, actually learned their ways from Bernays, the American master of official propaganda.

So, they have been taken aback by the response to the media storm surge of propaganda that was designed to remove various armaments from the possession of the public:
The furious reaction to the Obama administration’s gun control proposals is reminiscent of the anger that greeted the passage of the 1993 Brady Bill and the 1994 ban on assault weapons supported by another relatively liberal Democrat — Bill Clinton. The passage of those bills, along with what was seen by the right as the federal government’s violent suppression of political dissidents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the early 1990s, led to the first wave of the Patriot movement that burst into public consciousness with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. The number of Patriot groups in that era peaked in 1996 at 858, more than 500 groups fewer than the number active in 2012.
(The Year in Hate and Extremism). It is not racism alone that fans these passions, because it happens as a reaction to any color of a president.

The public is afraid of the government and they do not trust the government, especially those parts of government that are not in accord with their politics (conservatives don't like liberal government officials, and liberals don't like conservative government officials).

Thus, the distrust and dislike of government is not coming only from the right, it is also coming from everywhere:
American neighborhoods are increasingly being policed by cops armed with the weapons and tactics of war. Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created for overseas combat theaters – and yet very little is known about exactly how many police departments have military weapons and training, how militarized the police have become, and how extensively federal money is incentivizing this trend. It’s time to understand the true scope of the militarization of policing in America and the impact it is having in our neighborhoods. On March 6th, ACLU affiliates in 23 states filed over 255 public records requests with law enforcement agencies and National Guard offices to determine the extent to which federal funding and support has fueled the militarization of state and local police departments. Stay tuned as this project develops.

Consider these ten chilling stories. If the anecdotal evidence is any indication, use of military machinery such as tanks and grenades, as well as counter-terrorism tactics, encourage overly aggressive policing – too often with devastating consequences:
1) Confused after throwing a deafening and blinding “flashbang” into a home, police mistakenly shot and killed a sleeping nine-year-old.

2) A county sheriff’s department in South Carolina has an armored  personnel carrier dubbed "The Peacemaker," which can shoot weapons that  the U.S. military specifically refrains from using on people.

3) New Hampshire police received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, asking “what red-blooded American cop isn’t going to be excited about getting a toy like this?”

4) Two SWAT Teams shut down a neighborhood in Colorado for four hours to search for a man suspected of stealing a bicycle and merchandise from Wal-Mart.

5) A company in Arizona submitted a patent for shock cuffs, which can be used by cops to remotely administer a Taser-like shock to detainees.

6) Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.

7) Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles.

8) Drone manufacturers may offer police remote controlled drones with weapons like rubber bullets, Tasers, and tear gas.

9) An Arizona SWAT team defended shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, but had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.

10) The New York City Police Department disclosed that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy Movement protesters.
(ACLU Launches Nationwide, emphasis added). And the minions of the Epigovernment have openly declared that if the people do not like the bad economy the 1% have made by their warmongering ways, too bad.

If the people decide to exercise their constitutional right to march in the streets to petition the government for a redress of grievances, then:
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.
(Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity?). And they are wondering why the people want to keep and bear arms?

If so, they are Luddites, because it is clear they are the best promoters of gun sales and the gun peddlers must be thankful:
Sales of Guns Soar in U.S. as Nation Weighs Tougher Limits
Smith & Wesson sales surge as gun restrictions loom
Out of stock: Firearms, ammo sales surge as gun control talk swirls
Gun stores running low on weapons as sales surge
Ammunition Sales Surge
Google "gun sales surge" and you will see that this incarnation of "The Surge" is an indication that domestic policy is bringing crazoids, fearful people, and your everyday zealot together.

Ok, the name of today's post is "The Best Formula For Gun Control", so what do I suggest?

Stop scaring the people, de-militarize the police, stop the funky foreign policy "We Own The World", stop plundering the people on behalf of the plutocrats, put as many of the 1% criminals in jail as possible, and get back to being America once again.

It is quite simple conceptually ... so long as one knows a few things outside the prick bubble surrounding most of the clown corps running this nation at this time.


Tuesday, March 5, 2013

We Killed More Of US Than They Did - 2

Our real or imagined enemies used to kill more of us than we killed of ourselves.

That is what one would expect with "The War on Terror", assuming that such a concept is a part of reality.

 At least that is how they did it in the old days of "good wars" like WW II when suicides totaled numbers that said fewer Americans were killing themselves than the enemy was killing.

Today we take a look back to a Dredd Blog post on this date in 2009 when that began to change for some reason:

In a recent article here we asked who is the enemy, took ourselves back to a very popular president who warned us to beware of militarism, and mused that we would be better off economically if we just invaded ourselves.

The military is very stingy with data which they think puts them in a bad light. For instance, they have not been allowing the public to even view coffins of the dead coming back from Iraq.

But they, for some reason, have had to disclose that suicides killed more soldiers last month than the wars did:
The Army is investigating a stunning number of suicides in January — a count that could surpass all combat deaths on America's two warfronts last month.
(Fox News ... they "lost" it so use The Wayback Machine). I think we must congratulate them for not covering up this news item.

The old saying that "many hands lighten the load" reminds me that they would do well to let many psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, in and out of the military, take a meaningful look at this trend.

Then do some treatment.

So what of today's world after ten years of "getting rid of terrorists?"

Both the civilian American population, as well as the military American population, kill more of ourselves by suicide than "the enemy" does (see Suicide Number One and Surge of Snap Sergeants).

I can hear some nutters saying "see, the 'War on Terror' worked because the 'turrists' are not killing as many of us as we are now, so if we had not invaded nations around the world they would be killing more of us than we are."

Notice that the suicide rates began to go up when we went after the phantom terrorists, and still continues to do so as our phantom wars continue.

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

 

 

 

 

Monday, March 4, 2013

The Virgin MOMCOM - 8

The World According To MOMCOM
This series of posts on Dredd Blog has been one of the most interesting to me.

The graphic shows a view of the world not held by most people on the planet Earth.

It is the MOMCOM worldview, it is the world MOMCOM feels divinely selected to govern, but not only that, this imperial world view includes how MOMCOM divides up the world into military commands ("COM"):
That is, USNORTHCOM, USSOUTHCOM, USCENTCOM, USEUCOM, USAFRICOM, and USPACOM (which are all part of the size of government).

But what is missing from this grandiose picture of a worldwide military command and control structure?

For one thing, the above list does not include USSPYCOM, which spies on everyone everywhere, including American citizens.

What is also missing from that picture is the story of the participation of MOMCOM in 120 or so nations where daily acts of war are conducted:
Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done ... for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now ... One of its key components is the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command whose primary mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. Reporting to the president and acting under his authority, JSOC maintains a global hit list that includes American citizens. It has been operating an extra-legal “kill/capture” campaign that John Nagl, a past counterinsurgency adviser to four-star general and soon-to-be CIA Director David Petraeus, calls "an almost industrial-scale counterterrorism killing machine."
(Nick Turse, Huffington Post, emphasis added; see also USSOCOM). If you watched the news about The Libyan War you would have seen the fruits of USSOCOM labor, since their primary operation now is the oil wars.
(The Virgin MOMCOM - 4). But the most outstanding characteristic of MOMCOM is the two-pronged ability to destroy civilization: 1) through nuclear holocaust, and 2) through environmental hyper-poisoning on a global scale ("destroying the world to save it"; see video "Who Owns The World" here).

In today's post let's notice one of the more startling results of the evolution of MOMCOM, which is USCENTCOM, the "United States Central Command", which has exemplified what McTell News means when it says "lean forward."

This COM has "leaned forward" all the way to the forward bases in the middle east:
Events of the late 1970's threatened the stability of the Central Region and placed vital US interests [control of oil] at risk. Following the revolution and subsequent fall of the Shah of Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF) was formed at MacDill AFB, Florida on 1 March 1980. During 1981 and 1982 it evolved from a worldwide deployable force to a de facto regional unified command representing US interests in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. As a result of this evolution, the RDJTF was deactivated on 31 December 1982, to be replaced with the US Central Command on 1 January 1983.

Within Saudi Arabia, the US Military Training Mission and Office of the Program Manager, Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) were two separate "noncombatant" organizations. The Office of the Program Manager, Saudi Arabian National Guard, a "stovepipe" organization reported to the US Army Materiel Command, Alexandria, Virginia ...

United States Central Command's Area of Responsibility (AOR) includes 22 nations, ranging from Egypt in the West to Pakistan in the East, and Kazakhstan in the North. The 27 countries within the AOR were: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. Lebanon and Syria were not originally part of USCENTCOM's AOR.

On 1 October 1999, USCENTCOM assumed responsibility for all US military engagement activities, planning, and operations for the five Central Asian states. USCENTCOM was responsible for peacetime engagement planning and program execution for the five countries in the Central Asian Region: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

The Area of Responsibility includes the waters of the Red Sea, Arabian Gulf, and the Western portions of the Indian Ocean. The region comprises an area larger than the continental United States ...
(USCENTCOM, emphasis added). Just this one "COM", located in the middle east, has a vast area of "responsibility", larger than the United States itself (the same goes for USAFRICOM, USSOUTHCOM, USPACCOM, etc.).

Since Americans provide the money via taxes for the budget of MOMCOM and all its little baby _____COM realms, each larger than the U.S., a "puzzling austerity" is being forced on U.S. citizens.

Dredd Blog recently asked Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity?, noting that austerity does not seem so so puzzling anymore since the warmonger budget has doubled since about the year 2000.

"Lean forward" also gives new meaning to "size of government" and what "government" means to the warmongers.

So, today's post gets into the interesting aspects of Epigovernment, which is the highest level within MOMCOM.

To get a feel for this reality, note that the Epigovernment compares with the federal government in the U.S.A., while the separate military COM entities compare with the 50 states in the U.S.A.

The night and day difference being that the Epigovernment is an international entity, not an American entity (MOMCOM: The Private Parts).

Finally, the "spiritual / religious" aspects of MOMCOM were discussed in the Dredd Blog post The Virgin MOMCOM - 6.

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

The military is the number one user of fossil fuels.