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Friday, December 13, 2013

Mocking America - 2

McTell News
In this series Dredd Blog has been pointing out government infiltration of the news media in order to "catapult the propaganda" (Bush II).

This has been going on for decades and is going on daily now too.

The military NSA does not limit its blackmail campaign to government officials, no, it uses some of the data to "influence" the media too.

The following couple of stories will give you a feel for information that is not coming to you if you digest only main stream media data flows (congrats if you are already aware of them).

Nuclear pollution is blanketing the West Coast with surges from time to time:
In fact, a previous alert, from Nov. 26, specifically cited the Fukishima, Japan, nuclear disaster, where a power plant was struck first by an earthquake, then by a tidal wave created by the undersea quake.

The organization reports that several of the individual reactors at Fukushima melted down and exploded, releasing massive doses of radiation into the air and water.

Yother said the records show that Seattle, which once was one of the lowest radiation reporting sites in the nation, has been rising ever since the disaster.

“We can tell it has been increasing,” he said.
(Radiation alerts hit U.S. cities). The mysterious die off of certain sea creatures along the West Coast, including those in aquariums, could be related to Fukushima radiation in a direct and/or indirect way:
The mysterious illness has the potential to wipe out all the sea stars along the west coast of North America, said Paula Romagosa, a marine biologist and curator at the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre in Sidney. “Events like this have happened before but on a much smaller scale. We’ve never seen one of this magnitude.” The die-off of sea stars was first detected in August in small pockets in Howe Sound, off West Vancouver and in Indian Arm. Since then, the extensive die-off has been reported along the shoreline from Alaska to California. [...] The virus affects the animals in different ways. A sea star at the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre showed it was unwell by developing a bald spot. [...] Others look completely healthy except for their guts coming out in strings. [...] There is speculation that the die-off could be due to water-borne radiation originating from the Fukushima nuclear plant.
(West Coast Die Off). It is no secret that the Global Warming induced Climate Change problems require global solutions.

The media impair such solutions when they tend to foster war ideologies which militate against global cooperation ... remember this:
"Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles." Iraq is progressing towards "dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile." An Iraqi defector "tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites." It is an "undisputed fact" that September 11 attacker Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague.

Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. The nonexistence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in Iraq immediately prior to the invasion and the absence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida eventually became the official U.S. position with the Duelfer Report and the report of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war's six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.

A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.

This has not kept some newspapers from reporting that Arctic ice is "recovering", a rather adventurous claim in light of the fact that the Arctic has lost 40% of its ice cover since 1980 and that ice extent is now lower than during several millennia preceding 1980. A recent quantitative analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media confirmed that misreporting of the science is widespread.

There are some interesting similarities and differences between the media failures involving Iraqi WMDs and climate change.
(Guardian, "Media failure..."). I do not think that such media failures are inadvertent, rather, I think that they are substantially deliberate, as they have been for a century:
One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control
" ...
(The Deceit Business). A professor of law at Harvard, Cass Sunstein, wrote a paper during his career, before he came to work for the federal government, that openly advocated infiltration and the like as valid functions of government on any issues the government chooses to label as conspiracy theories:
What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).
(The Empire Strikes Back). The very idea of addressing problems imposed on society by Oil-Qaeda, so as to develop solutions, does not seem to occur to them.

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


Thursday, December 12, 2013

Warless Commander In Chief, President - 2

Seeds of the killing fields
Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has pointed out some strange facts about American Presidents.

For example, in the previous post of this series, it was pointed out that 61% of presidents have been involved in a war during their presidency, while 39% have not  (Warless Commander In Chief, President).

In fact, 100% of American Presidents have been involved in a war since President Carter left office on January 20, 1981.

Additionally, twenty-seven percent (27%) of all America Presidents have owned slaves (The Germ Theory - of Government - 7).

In yesterday's post (The One Party System of Gummit) we indicated that dissidents complain that there is only one political party, the business party, but perhaps the reality is that the one political party is actually The War Party.

I think this is a reflection on our culture (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala, Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 2, and Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 3),

Anyway, here is the text from the post on this date in 2009:

It may be hard to believe, but some of the Presidents of the United States did not partake in wars during their time in office.

Here is a list of non-wartime Commanders In Chief whose military was at-ease, yes, U.S. Presidents who could focus on helping their own people, their own nation, at home:
* John Adams (2nd)
* John Quincy Adams (6th)
* Zachary Taylor (12th)
* Millard Fillmore (13th)
* Franklin Pierce (14th)
* Andrew Johnson (17th)
* Ulysses Grant (18th)
* James Garfield (20th)
* Chester Arthur (21st)
* Grover Cleveland (22nd)
* Benjamin Harrison (23rd)
* Grover Cleveland (24th)
* Theodore Roosevelt (26th)
* William Taft (27th)
* Calvin Coolidge (30th)
* Herbert Hoover (31st)
* Jimmy Carter (39th)
(Wikipedia). This is roughly 39% of those holding that office.

Which means that roughly 61% of the time U.S. Presidents are influenced by war, which James Madison (2 yr War of 1812, 4th President) called our greatest enemy.

Equally of note is that since Jimmy Carter left office, on January 20, 1981, we have been involved in wars.

That is about 28 years in a row with presidents involved in war and the war ideology, our worst enemy.

As we proclaim to the world that we are the exceptional nation of peace, our war budgets involve more war money than all of the rest of the nations of the earth combined.

Is it any wonder that we have a serious credibility problem?


The previous post in this series is here.

Carl Sagan's last interview:


Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The One Party System of Gummit

The One True Political Party
Some activists are eager to repeatedly point out that we are a one party system.

That one party is "the business party" which is an epigovernment overseeing a duopoly.

According to this viewpoint, the basic purpose for the charade or masquerade of two opposing political forces is to deceive  the people into thinking they have a voice.

In the U.S. this manifested as the Democratic and Republican wings of the one business party.

I would tend to say that their hypothesis is sound, because it is not difficult to gather facts which reveal a direction that is incompatible with the views of the people, and it is also clear that the people can't change that direction with their votes (The Elections of Pontius Pilots).

One poll after another shows that the people feel that the nation is and has been going in a wrong direction (Mystery of Compromise vs. Capitulation - 2).

That wrong direction is not in the interests of the common good (see e.g. The W Direction = The Perilous Path, The Circle W Cowboys, Titanic Mistakes Using The W Compass, Obama: The Republican Candidate in 2012? - 2).

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog sees this direction as a plundering of the people via a modern feudal strategy (see the multi-post series American Feudalism).

Regular readers also will remember that Dredd Blog, on today's date in 2009, posted the following:

When you go to accept a prize for peace then glorify war in your newspeak, you are bound to please the intellectual warmongers.

Warsters tell us that war is peace when we do it, war is just and holy when we do it, because there is evil in the world (evil defined as whatever we are opposing) because we are real.

(Our forefather was not real when he fathered the U.S. Constitution?)

Warsters say we are also exceptional, inerrant, and resistance is futile.

Whoopee doo hey la di la my BORG friend's back and there's gonna be trouble.

The Orwellian doublethink continues, only it is in a different colored package with "NEW" stamped on it:
And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that [propaganda] process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US—roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.

And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.
(Chomsky, emphasis added). Congratulations when you are spreading insanity in the world as if there was such a thing as a just, holy disease? No, no congratulations.

The question is not whether or not there are just, holy wars in the abstract, the question is whether the war one is fighting at a given time is a just, holy war or not.

As any war continues it becomes increasingly unjust, even if it began as a just war, so it is unlikely that any war, which had no exit strategy when it began, can be called a just war.

Somebody X kills 3,000 men, women, and children in Somebody Y cities, so in what Somebody Y calls a just, holy war Somebody Y kills 10,000 men, women, and children of Somebody X and Somebody Z for each 1 person killed of Somebody Y? Because Somebody Y is more just and holy than Somebody X and Somebody Z?

Face up to it, your endless wars are not endlessly just, are a mad cow disease that engenders doublespeak, newspeak, and all the other germs dangerous to a free people as James Madison said.

Of course it does not matter in a military oil complex governed nation, because freedom is simply nothing left to lose.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

ObamaCare: Good Foreign Policy - 3

R.I.P. Mr. Nelson Mandela
World War II was not a good war, no war is, but it was one of the worst in terms of human failure.

It damaged the humanity of Americans even more than the imbecilic Civil War which was fought over slavery.

During or shortly after WWII the U.S. lost some of its humanity, that is, its caring about its own.

Shortly after that war there was The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 which mature nations embraced.

But, as Dredd Blog noted in the first post of this series, "The US did not ratify the social and economic rights sections, including Article 25's right to health", even though the general government dogma promulgated was to the effect that the war was fought for "the freedom and good" of humanity (ObamaCare: Good Foreign Policy).

General Eisenhower saw the holes in those propaganda spiels, so he publicly commented on the growing warmonger ideology that was in the process of drowning our humanity:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
(Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity? - 2). President Eisenhower's sentiments had not been destroyed by war, neither had the general humanity of the human family of nations:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
(Preamble, UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS). Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for almost 30 years in Apartheid oriented South Africa for advocating for equality, but like President Eisenhower, it did not extinguish his humanity:
At a time when the United States is engaged in an archaic debate over whether to even try and provide universal access to health care, most other countries well understand the absurdity of conditioning access to basic human needs—including access to healthcare, housing and education—on the ability to pay.

That understanding was championed by Nelson Mandela, whose life and legacy is being honored this week by President Obama, members of Congress and leaders from around the world. Fittingly, the memorials for Mandela will coincide with this week’s sixty-fifth anniversary of the adoption (on December 10, 1948) by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a document that the former South African president revered as a touchstone for nation building and governing.

Mandela, a lawyer by training and a student of constitutions, steered South Africa toward a broad understanding of human rights. When his country adopted its Constitution in 1996, he announced that “the new constitution obliges us to strive to improve the quality of life of the people. In this sense, our national consensus recognizes that there is nothing else that can justify the existence of government but to redress the centuries of unspeakable privations, by striving to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, homelessness and disease. It obliges us, too, to promote the development of independent civil society structures.”
(Nelson Mandela’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The United States is now on the road to regaining more of its humanity, following civil rights improvement for minorities, and other humane actions.

This is trillions of dollars worth of State Department Ambassadorial work (where our interface with other nations takes place), that is to say, when other nations see us doing humane things which they have already accomplished, they know without us saying anything, that we are changing to a better direction and to a better place.

Our actions in a humane direction speak louder than words.

Let's keep up the good work.

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

Monday, December 9, 2013

The Queens of Stalingrad - 4

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall"
In this series Dredd Blog has been pointing the utter absurdity of what Daniel Ellesburg calls The United Stasi of America.

The internet business community is nervous that world Internet traffic will somehow move from U.S. locations to somewhere else in rebellion to the military NSA operating in the United States as the East German Stasi once did (Guardian).

The Russian Communists stopped it under Gorbachev, so why can't the wannabe American Communists stop lying to congress and everyone else and do it too?

How true these warnings were and are:
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison
...
Experience has shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” – Thomas Jefferson
...
"Leave no authority existing not responsible to the people." - Thomas Jefferson
The following is an open letter to those who now support or tend to fascist/communist forms of government in the U.S.:

An open letter to Washington


Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress,

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.

We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight. To see the full set of principles we support, visit ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com

Sincerely,

AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo


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

A talk from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas: