Government Climate Change Report - 2

In the first post of this series we discussed a government report which had been mandated by a law passed in 1990 by the U.S. Congress, then signed into law by Bush I.

The current version of that report early on contains the statement "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present" (Government Climate Change Report, January 2013).

In many posts Dredd Blog has tried to sound an alarm by, among other things, estimating what the government response to that report, and others like it, would be.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog began a ten-part series on September 28, 2009, New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage, which ended with New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 10, on October 30, 2012.

The gist of that series was to argue and show that the federal government has no plan to prevent the continuation of damage to the global climate system, rather, it only has a plan to bury the bodies and take the debris to some landfill as the damage occurs.

That policy is clearly a fatalistic policy (An Old Catastrophe: Climate Policy) that is much like addicts on their last legs, looking forward only to catastrophe and further demise.

In the oil addiction case, we can add some additional data to the basic observation which indicates that the controlling oil addicts have a fervent religious element --which does add "something" extra to the basic fatalistic outlook (The Universal Smedley - 2).

Regular readers also know that another Dredd Blog theory for why the government has that attitude (an attitude reflecting that the government does not seem to think it is capable of doing anything about it) is that in fact the government level is not the level where the controlling decisions are made (Epigovernment: The New Model - 3).

The controlling decisions are made by a private empire, the 1% Plutocrats who control government through the influence of economic power and persuasion, and who have revealed on the record that they are "not an American company" (MOMCOM: The Private Parts - 5).

Their senseless policy which controls the decisions of the Obama Administration (and Bush II Administration) were pointed out a while back in several Dredd Blog posts (see e.g. Barry & Oil-Qaeda vs Arctic Wilderness and Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization).

The utter senselessness of their policy toward the damaged global climate system was recently noticed by a British journalist:

At the heart of the White House's new Arctic strategy is an elementary but devastating contradiction between what President Obama, in the document's preamble, describes as seeking "to make the most of the emerging economic opportunities in the region" due to the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and recognising "the need to protect and conserve this unique, valuable, and changing environment."

Despite repeated references to "preservation" and "conservation", the strategy fails to outline any specific steps that would be explored to mitigate or prevent the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice due to intensifying global warming. Instead, the document from the outset aims to:

"... position the United States to respond effectively to challenges and emerging opportunities arising from significant increases in Arctic activity due to the diminishment of sea ice and the emergence of a new Arctic environment."

In other words, far from being designed to prevent catastrophe, the success of the new strategy is premised precisely on the disappearance of the Arctic summer sea ice.

(Guardian: Arctic Strategy a Climate Time Bomb, emphasis added). As pointed out in the beginning of this post, this scenario is exactly what Dredd Blog has been pointing out now for several years.

The fact that burning fossil fuels is causing the Arctic Ice Sheet to melt is of no concern to the government policy --the only concern is getting more oil from the Arctic.

Using that oil will cause more damage to the global climate system, which means more catastrophe is coming our way.

The government incessantly obsesses over national security, yet it is uncanny how this senseless Arctic Policy ignores national security on several fronts:

America’s top military officer in charge of monitoring hostile actions by North Korea, escalating tensions between China and Japan, and a spike in computer attacks traced to China provides an unexpected answer when asked what is the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region: climate change.
...
[Another] Navy Admiral even believes that Singapore will no longer be the greatest ocean port, but that a port in Greenland will take that honor, because after the polar ice caps melt in the Arctic, the fabled Northwest Passage will become strategic, and the Panama Canal will become somewhat of a museum piece.

(All Weather is Local - 4). Since 97-98% of scientists agree about coming climate catastrophe, it is quite difficult to dispute the notion that sanity of government actually peaked some time ago (The Peak of Sanity - 3).

Likewise, it is difficult to dispute that the degree of insanity that replaced that sanity is somewhere high in the psychopathic range (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 4).

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

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America:

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I Hate You I Love You

The Common Bad - The Common Good

War - Peace.
Poverty - Prosperity.
Night - Day.
Bad - Good.
Sinister - Benign.
Hate - Love.
Propaganda - News.

We have all considered at some point in time that for every word that can refer to something on the "dark side" there is another word for the "light side" version of that something.

This either reflects the actual realm of existence in our family, religion, town, city, nation, civilization, Earth, and the universe, or it reflects the expansiveness of our personal and collective power of imagination.

That is, there is both a dark side and a light side or there is not.

The degenerate machinations of current U.S. politics is a struggle to cast the opposing party as an operation of the dark side.

This political construct damages any wholesome government -- which is one that considers all issues in a context of exploring and debating the merits of the issue at hand.

However, under the current structure the quality of government invariably suffers, which translates into the various degrees of suffering that this current dynamic imposes on the public, the citizenry.

The scenario can only be maintained if an imaginary world is perpetuated through the propaganda of officialdom spread by a degenerate media.

This current structure is how we got to the place we are --a war filled world teetering on the brink of the destruction of civilization through the pollutions of the only planet we have that can sustain human life.

So I guess we should add "Death - Life." to our list begun at the top of this post.

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Seek the "I love you" side of The List:

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Blind Willie McTell News - 2

The Exceptional Press

Yesterday, the following was written at the end of that post: "This whining by the Establishment Media is unavailing since they are silent when those things happen regularly to the 99% of us whom their 1% puppeteers are constantly abusing." (The IRS As A Political Weapon - 2).

That quote of course was in reference to the media's feigned outrage, over the past few days, at several IRS employees.

As it turns out, there were some IRS employees who were stressing out several right wing neoCon swift-boat type sites.

Those sites tend to masquerade as "social welfare" organizations which those IRS employees --by asking too many questions could expose --especially questions about what those applicant's "social practices" really are (for which they want to pay no taxes).

On another front, the same thing can be said about main stream media attitudes concerning the DOJ seizure of lots of Associated Press (AP) telephone records.

In fact, a journalist has come out and said as much:

There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are.

(Guardian). Indeed, when it is McTell News that is being assailed then the infraction is the most grave of civil rights violations.

However, when it is "only a common citizen" such as you or I, who is being assailed -- well that is no civil rights biggie:

For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his

McTell It Like It Is

treatment as "cruel and inhuman".

But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration's true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as "regular Americans". Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman - once the most vocal defender of Bush's vast warrantless eavesdropping programs - suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.

(ibid, Guardian). The elitist mentality corrupts institutions of government when the common citizen is not the focus of their professionalism, but instead they are self-serving.

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

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Like a Rolling Stone?

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The IRS As A Political Weapon - 2

John Boy

In this series we have taken a look at several aspects of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

When the news media get bothered by IRS practices, or when they get bothered by secret government seizure of their phone records, often there is a bigger story that is not being reported (see e.g. Warriors Press For Propaganda - 4).

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has many posts over a span of time of several years which have had to do with the IRS when it was a toy of the king, when it was a toy of presidents, and when it was a toy of The Department of Just Us (DOJ).

Here are some examples:

The IRS As A Political Weapon

Wee The People - 2

Toxic Minds Produce A Toxic World

Why is It The Busiest Tax Court?

Why is It The Busiest Tax Court? - 2

It Is Not Wrong To Avoid Taxes

2 4 U 1 4 me - Isn't That Tax Special?

Politicization Of Internal Revenue

So, as you may surmise, this conservative media story that "IRS is requiring neoCon political hit groups to toe-the-line for a change" is not the big story the media pumps it up to be.

I say that because the IRS is always doing something all rogue and mavericky somewhere to some citizen as the above posts show (but John Boy doesn't cry then as he is now).

That is why Dredd Blog, after running across a story of the recent use of tactical nuclear artillery shells in Syria, wondered if that is the story the mass media is covering up for The Wartocracy.

This whining by the Establishment Media is unavailing since they are silent when those things happen regularly to the 99% of us whom their 1% puppeteers are constantly abusing.

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John Boy (in "kosher drag") petitions IRS for relief:

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Everybody's Got A Holder Heart - 2

"Everybody's Got a Hungry Heart" - Springsteen

In the first post of this series we discussed how Attorney General Eric Holder showed favoritism to a Republican Senator.

That senator had been convicted by a jury of his peers of a felony crime (Everybody's Got A Holder Heart).

The problem that Dredd Blog post pointed out was that those in the 99% who suffer from DOJ mischief during a criminal trial, mischief called "prosecutorial misconduct", have to appeal their case to an appellate court should the trial judge not afford that defendant relief from the prosecutor's misconduct (see e.g. Politicization Of Internal Revenue - 2).

Yet, since the defendant in the case of Holder's Big Heart was an elite, General Holder changed all that by dismissing the case against the elite so that no such appeal had to be "suffered."

Well, Eric Holder's Big Heart eventually got hungry, and has now caused him battle with his peers.

Which supports the lyrics of the poem:

...

Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers
...

(Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, emphasis added). Yes, Eric the Well Read is now in a battle with his peers because he got hungry for emails to read -- from the press corps.

He read as many of those hunger filling morsels as he thought he could get away with:

Associated Press on Monday revealed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) "secretly obtained two months of telephone records of [its] reporters and editors", denouncing it as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into the news gathering process. In a letter sent yesterday to Attorney General Eric Holder, AP's President, Gary Pruitt, detailed that the phone records cover more than 20 telephone lines used by AP journalists, including their homes, offices and cell phones. He said the phones for which the DOJ obtained records also include ones at the AP bureaus in New York City, Washington DC, Hartford, and at the House of Representatives.

Pruitt wrote that "we regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news."
...
The ACLU last night condemned the DOJ's acts as "press intimidation" and said it constitutes "an unacceptable abuse of power". The Electronic Frontier Foundation denounced it as "a terrible blow against the freedom of the press and the ability of reporters to investigate and report the news". The New York Times' Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal called the DOJ's actions "outrageous" while Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said they were "shocking" and "disturbing". Even Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: "I am very troubled by these allegations and want to hear the government's explanation."

(Guardian, Justice Department's pursuit of AP's phone records is both extreme and dangerous, emphasis added). That Guardian article went on to say:

Numerous media reports convincingly speculated that the DOJ's actions arise out of a 2012 AP article that contained leaked information about CIA activity in Yemen, and the DOJ is motivated, in part, by a desire to uncover the identity of AP's sources.

(ibid, Guardian, emphasis added). So, no one except Eric the Well Read knows why he did it, but it has to do with those who can do no wrong, the CIA, who he has been protecting from prosecution for Bush II era war crimes.

So, to join the speculation, could it have had something to do with the alleged nuclear weapon usage by Israel against Syria recently?

Those allegations do not yet come from any main stream media sources:

After analysis, it had become clear, Syria had come under attack by Israel using, not just nuclear weapons, but an American nuclear bunker buster bomb, one of several supplied to Israel to use against Iran, one of the last acts of the Bush/Cheney administration.

(Veterans Today). These allegations seem to be pure speculation, but something made AG Holder incredibly nervous, causing him to "step over the Rubicon" and commit what banana republic tyrannical regimes are infamous for.

Had the planned alleged use of nukes been leaked requiring serious censorship of the upcoming Syrian strike?

The use of tactical nuclear weapons is something whistle blowers would likely leak if they got wind of it.

Anyway, it is all speculation to some degree at this point.

That Holder did a Pontius Pilate public hand washing by "recusing himself" is further implication of wrong doing, not less so.

It would be like Obama saying to the Vice President, "you do this, it is too hot for me to handle."

But Holder cleared it all up when he said "I can't remember how many times I have done this myself, I just remember that this time I asked 'Big Jimmy' Cole to take some heat for me."

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

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"Sultans of Swing" - Dire Straits:

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The Fog of Lore

The new address of the Earth's atmosphere is 400 PPM Street, and it is a wonderful place -- according to the Wall Street Journal.

The only gripe they have with the place is that it is not the place down at 450 PPM Street; the place that scientists call The Hotel California (the place you can never leave).

The Wall Street gang's gripe is that we need more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the Earth so the crops will do better.

What, the Wall Street paper owned by Australian neoCon Rupert Murdoch, now wants to tell us how to garden?

The climate scientists of the world, on the other hand say we have to move the other way, down to 350 PPM Street.

So, who are we to listen to besides Wall Street (they are doing so well on the economy thingy after all)?

On the one hand, this is yet another issue where we must do what scientists do, which is to rely on someone else in order to develop our opinion:

I find myself believing all sorts of things for which I do not possess evidence: that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, that my car keeps stalling because the carburetor needs to be rebuild, that mass media threaten democracy, that slums cause emotional disorders, that my irregular heart beat is premature ventricular contraction, that students' grades are not correlated with success in the nonacademic world, that nuclear power plants are not safe (enough) ...

The list of things I believe, though I have no evidence for the truth of them, is, if not infinite, virtually endless. And I am finite. Though I can readily imagine what I would have to do to obtain the evidence that would support any one of my beliefs, I cannot imagine being able to do this for all of my beliefs. I believe too much; there is too much relevant evidence (much of it available only after extensive, specialized training); intellect is too small and life too short.

What are we as epistemologists to say about all these beliefs? If I, without the available evidence, nevertheless believe a proposition, are my belief and I in that belief necessarily irrational or non-rational? Is my belief then mere belief (Plato's right opinion)? If not, why not? Are there other good reasons for believing propositions, reasons which do not reduce to having evidence for the truth of those propositions? What would these reasons look like?

In this paper I want to consider the idea of intellectual authority, particularly that of experts. I want to explore the "logic" or epistemic structure of an appeal to intellectual authority and the way in which such an appeal constitutes justification for believing and knowing.

(The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?). That realistic appraisal comes from an "epistemologist" -- one who studies the nature of knowledge.

On the other hand, this is what we citizens do when we are on jury duty.

That is, we sit and listen to two experts who come to an opposite opinion from one another, on the same set of facts:

In the courts during trials experts are used. In the typical case experts will give their opinions to the jury. Typically this means an opposite opinion for each side. The experts are sworn in, list their degrees, and the court makes a ruling that they are experts.

Afterwards those experts explain that they looked at the evidence, and then they tell the jury what their opinion is. The expert for the defense has one opinion, but the expert for the prosecutor typically has another and different opinion. On the exact same evidence I should add.

Finally, the everyday folk on the jury make the decision as to which expert was right and who was telling the truth! Yes, the person who left the farm after a 5:00 AM breakfast, and then drove the truck into town for that day's jury duty, decides which rocket scientist had it right.

(Why Trial By Jury?). This is our modern world where it is dangerous for us not to be responsible citizens, because some of these things citizens must accomplish do not come with a second chance or a refund policy.

If our civilization listens to Wall Street and they are wrong, our civilization is without doubt going down.

So, we must make the correct choice on the issue of the global climate system by choosing which expert group is sane and honest, and which group is composed of psychopaths who are risking billions of lives.

About 98.4% of scientific papers conclude that global warming is caused because of the misuse of fossil fuels by human civilization (Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature).

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"Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature":

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