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Friday, February 28, 2014

Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 28

Rebel science, even on the weekend, is not the same as false or pseudo-science.

Pseudo-science has often been the mainstream science time and again.

That is, official "scientific" dogma has been batshit crazy from time to time (What Is Pseudo Science?).

I am not talking about some of the religious influence over science at times (flat Earth, Sun and stars orbit the Earth, etc.), no, I am talking about mainstream, establishment, official scientists feverishly advocating utterly false and bogus dogma (The Criminally Insane Epoch Arises - 2).

Another example surfaced this week, which shows that most often this perversion of science takes place due to external corrupting forces:
Egypt's military leaders have come under ridicule after the chief army engineer unveiled what he described as a "miraculous" set of devices that detect and cure Aids, hepatitis and other viruses.

The claim, dismissed by experts and called "shocking to scientists" by the president's science adviser, strikes a blow to the army's carefully managed image as the saviour of the nation. It also comes as General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, who toppled Mohammed Morsi in July after the Islamist leader ignored mass protests calling for him to step down, is expected to announce he will run for president.
...
Abdullah said two of the devices named C-Fast and I-Fast used electromagnetism to detect Aids, hepatitis and other viruses without taking blood samples while the third, named Complete Cure Device, acted as a dialysis unit to purify the blood. He also said the C-Fast, which looks like an antenna affixed to the handle of a blender, detected patients infected with viruses that cause hepatitis and Aids with a high success rate.
...
(Egypt's Military Leaders Unveil Devices to Cure AIDS). I am reminded of suggestions in the U.S. that advocated dropping nuclear bombs on hurricanes and on the BP Gulf Oil Spill as solutions to those problems.

That is deliberate fraud, however, other fraudulent "scientific" material is engendered by negligence or laziness:
Like all the best hoaxes, there was a serious point to be made. Three MIT graduate students wanted to expose how dodgy scientific conferences pestered researchers for papers, and accepted any old rubbish sent in, knowing that academics would stump up the hefty, till-ringing registration fees.

It took only a handful of days. The students wrote a simple computer program that churned out gobbledegook and presented it as an academic paper. They put their names on one of the papers, sent it to a conference, and promptly had it accepted. The sting, in 2005, revealed a farce that lay at the heart of science.

But this is the hoax that keeps on giving. The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves. This week, Nature reported, French researcher Cyril Labbé revealed that 16 gobbledegook papers created by SCIgen had been used by German academic publisher Springer. More than 100 more fake SCIgen papers were published by the US Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Both organisations have now taken steps to remove the papers.
(How Computer-generated Fake Papers Are Flooding Academia). Possibly the most famous hoax papers recently are those which some scientists and politicians pass around and quote which deny the science that tells us that we have damaged our Global Climate System.

Not so easy to remember, but equally unscientific, is a NIST paper which said office fires for the first time in history brought down three skyscrapers, but those official papers were not persuasive enough to change building codes (Are Millions of Business People At Risk of ... Collapsing Buildings?).

As a follow up to that one, some architects and engineers are trying to get the paper corrected, or the building codes changed (William Pepper, Attorney at Law, Pursuing NIST via OIG Re: Fraudulent WTC 7 Report).

Even what were once considered elite scientific journals have turned out to have been utter long-winded bullshit (The Eugenics Review Vols. 1 to 60; 1909 to 1968).

Nevertheless, various states passed laws based on the pseudo-science, Eugenics, and such laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, causing thousands to be castrated and such, and eventually the American attitude towards that pseudo-science eventually convinced Adolf Hitler:
And yet in Bruinius’ telling American eugenicists don’t look nearly so inconsequential. Importantly, Bruinius points out, we were the first to pick up the eugenics bug. Galton, a Brit, provided the intellectual basis for eugenics, but Americans, who fancied themselves a chosen people and whose blood has always run hot on matters of utopia, actually implemented the plans. In 1907, Indiana passed “the first sterilization law in human history,” Bruinius writes, and “in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the ‘unfit.’” At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.

More astonishing than the number of people sterilized is the long list of famous Americans who supported and sanctioned such programs. Bruinius takes his book’s title from the 1927 Supreme Court majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which ruled that the Constitution did not prohibit Virginia — and, consequently, other states — from sterilizing its citizens. The opinion, by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., is Bruinius’ trump card, and he repeats bits of it often; if you have trouble believing that anyone with half a brain might have bought the arguments of eugenicists, the [Supreme Court Opinion] settles the matter.
...
The American enthusiasm for purifying the populace did not go unnoticed beyond our borders. After the Supreme Court approved the process, “the American technique of social engineering became the model for ... Hitler’s Germany, where the sterilization laws were consciously modeled on and supported by the American efforts.
(Progressive Genocide, emphasis added). I could go on and on, but the weekend approaches, so I will leave the remainder for another time:
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

"That depends on the quality of both the science and the religion." - Dredd
(Dredd Blog Quotes, cf. Science and Religion, by Albert Einstein).

Have a good scientific weekend.

Thursday, February 27, 2014

African-American History Month

Carter G. Woodson
On this date a while back Dredd Blog post "Hidden History In Plain Sight" mentioned Black History Month.

The photo of Carter G. Woodson ("the father of Black History") is related to this month's remembrances and reflections, in the sense that he was a historian, and initiated Negro History Week which influenced the observances this month.

This year in honor of the occasion, I wanted to share a public domain poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1802-1906).

This poem is a work of art in the language and dialect of that time, shared from a site that has many, many of his works as well as many other artists (link to site at end of poem).

Protest

Who say my hea't ain't true to you?
Dey bettah heish dey mouf.
I knows I loves you thoo an' thoo
In watah time er drouf.
I wush dese people 'd stop dey talkin',
Don't mean no mo' dan chicken's squawkin':
I guess I knows which way I's walkin',
I knows de norf f'om souf.

I does not love Elizy Brown,
I guess I knows my min'.
You allus try to tek me down
Wid evaht'ing you fin'.
Ef dese hyeah folks will keep on fillin'
Yo' haid wid nonsense, an' you's willin'
I bet some day dey 'll be a killin'
Somewhaih along de line.

O' cose I buys de gal ice-cream,
Whut else I gwine to do?
I knows jes' how de t'ing 'u'd seem
Ef I 'd be sho't wid you.
On Sunday, you's at chu'ch a-shoutin',
Den all de week you go 'roun' poutin'--
I's mighty tiahed o' all dis doubtin',
I tell you cause I's true.

Thanks to Its Written

I might add that the reason this poem is written in a code of sorts, in addition to being written in the dialect, was explained in the Dredd Blog Post Blind Willie McTell News.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

In the Fog of The Presstitutes - 2

The descendants of Bernays
What is the fundamental essence of the American Public's relation with the mainstream media press?

It is a matter of trust.

Which is not so good considering how badly the mainstream media abuses that trust.

It is well known that they abused the citizens of the U.S. by going along with the Bush II Administration's lies.

Lies which led inexorably to catastrophic wars.

Lies that have helped perpetuate atrocities in the Obama Administration too.

One of the more striking examples of press prostitution is the coverage or lack of coverage of the Fukushima calamity, the explosive leaking of radioactive material into the air, ground, and ocean.

Consider a post at a Japanese blog on site in Japan:
Following up this article.. Tepco holds 40,000 past contaminated water samples / Too radioactive to dump [URL]

Tepco had measured approx. 7 Trillion (1012) Bq/m3 of All β nuclides from contaminated water last summer, but they underestimated it to be 1/10 due to the “wrong analysis” according to Tepco.

On 2/24/2014, Tepco released the detailed list of 167 wrongly analyzed samples (and they stated 3 of them were correctly analyzed). (cf, Tepco mis-analyzed 167 samples since 311/ Correct readings can be over 10 times much as wrong ones [URL 2] )

From their report, 6 of them exceeded 100 Billion Bq/m3 in All β nuclides even based on the wrong analysis. These are the contaminated water samples taken from underground trenches of reactor2 and reactor3.

Tepco comments the wrong analysis underestimated the readings by 1/10. It means the highest reading would be 6.7 Trillion Bq/m3, which is the water taken from reactor3 trench pit.

The sampling date was about 2 months before IOC selected Tokyo as the host city of Olympic games in 2020.
(Fukushima Diary). An American publication covered the story too:
The measurement errors were halted in October 2013 after testing manuals were clarified and other steps taken to ensure accuracy, Tepco said.

Shinji Kinjo, leader of a disaster task force at Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, said his office hadn’t been aware of the measurement errors. The regulator’s oversight of the utility is based on Tepco’s measurements, he added.
(Bloomberg, emphasis added). The regulatory technique used to monitor Fukushima events is: the fox counts how many chickens in the hen house have been adversely affected by activities of the fox.

What could go wrong?

The U.S. media seems to think that the fox has the better story:
Radiation detected off the U.S. West Coast from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan has declined since the 2011 tsunami disaster and never approached levels that could pose a risk to human health, seafood or wildlife, scientists say.

Experts have been trying to dispel worries stemming from a burst of online videos and blog posts in recent months that contend radiation from Fukushima is contaminating beaches and seafood and harming sea creatures across the Pacific.
(LA Times). Others do not think that the fox has the "ability" to oversee the protection of the chickens.

Something about a conflict of interest:
Russian Study: Fukushima released 100 quadrillion becquerels of cesium into atmosphere… In just ONE day — About equal to Chernobyl’s total release
(eNews). Fukushima atmospheric releases in one day equal all of Chernobyl releases.

But there is more, because that does not include soil, ground water, and ocean releases:
Nuclear Engineer: Estimated 276 quadrillion Bq of Cs-137 entered Fukushima basements — Triple Chernobyl total release — A portion “has already made its way to aquifer, whence it can easily flow into sea”
(eNews). And finally, scientific "suspicions" abound concerning how wildlife is adversely impacted:
On March 11, 2011 off Japan’s west coast, an earthquake-generated tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant resulting in a major nuclear accident that included a large release of airborne radionuclides into the environment. Within five days of the accident atmospheric air masses carrying Fukushima radiation were transiting into the northern Bering and Chukchi seas. During summer 2011 it became evident to coastal communities and wildlife management agencies that there was a novel disease outbreak occurring in several species of Arctic ice-associated seals. Gross symptoms associated with the disease included lethargy, no new hair growth, and skin lesions, with the majority of the outbreak reports occurring between the Nome and Barrow region. NOAA and USFWS declared an Alaska Northern Pinnipeds Usual Mortality Event (UME) in late winter of 2011. The ongoing Alaska 2011 Northern Pinnipeds UME investigation continues to explore a mix of potential etiologies (infectious, endocrine, toxins, nutritious etc.), including radioactivity. Currently, the underlying etiology remains undetermined. We present results on gamma analysis (cesium 134 and 137) of muscle tissue from control and diseased seals, and discuss wildlife health implications from different possible routes of exposure to Fukushima fallout to ice seals. Since the Fukushima fallout period occurred during the annual sea ice cover period from Nome to Barrow, a sea ice based fallout scenario in addition to a marine food web based one is of particular relevance for the Fukushima accident. Under a proposed sea ice fallout deposition scenario, radionuclides would have been settled onto sea ice. Sea ice and snow would have acted as a temporary refuge for deposited radionuclides; thus radionuclides would have only become available for migration during the melting season and would not have entered the regional food web in any appreciable manner until breakup (pulsed release). The cumulative on-ice exposure for ice seals would have occurred through external, inhalation, and non-equilibrium dietary pathwaysduring the ice-based seasonal spring haulout period for molting/pupping/breeding activities. Additionally, ice seals would have been under dietary/metabolic constraints and experiencing hormonal changes associated with reproduction and molting.
(Scientists Present Links, emphasis in original). There are also stories of mass die-offs among West Coast starfish, strange polio-like disease in children, and the like (as usual for six decades, the official story is: "can't be radiation because it is harmless at these levels").

Some activists are said to have gone overboard into propaganda and untruth, but you decide (36 Signs The Media Is Lying vs All The Best Information).

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

Cenk Uygur: "MSNBC is establishment media" ...




Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Mocking America - 3

The NSA is good ... the NSA is good ...
In this series I have been discussing well documented and known techniques that the military spies have used on Americans.

The technique focused on primarily has been infiltrating mainstream media sources (McTell News) with spies who write articles that favor epigovernment policy (Mocking America).

Some of those spies are human operators, and some are "software robots."

By "software robots" I mean the same thing that is meant by "sock puppets" in Internet parlance:
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command [USCENTCOM], which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
(Guardian, March 2011, emphasis added). That deception has been known about for some time, however, now new information involving the military NSA operation is available.

This new robotic software is used to destroy the personalities of various targets who criticize Epigovernment's crimes and other excesses:
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction ... these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
...
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
...
The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats. As Anonymous expert Gabriella Coleman of McGill University told me, “targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent.” Pointing to this study she published, Professor Coleman vehemently contested the assertion that “there is anything terrorist/violent in their actions.”
(Covert Agents Infiltrate Internet, emphasis added). These real threats are being uncovered in many places.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has fingered several of them during citizen journalist activities, which show a deliberate policy to put down legitimate American dissent:
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). There is a serious war going on to subdue the traditions and constitutional rights of Americans.

And the military NSA is leading the charge against Americans (The Queens of Stalingrad, On The Origin of Security - 2).

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

"If I was a terrorist ..."


Monday, February 24, 2014

Is War An Art or Is War A Disease? - 2

Nuclear War: the ultimate nothing
Like the sales pitch "try it you'll like it" indicates, some things we seem to have to try in order that we may grasp the subject matter.

But other things, like the nuclear war to end all wars, trying it will be the last thing civilization does.

Literally.

A general jesus fan of some sort, a U.S. General, has a better solution which he preached about at length to the choir and the congregation in a church:
The Lord is a warrior and in Revelation 19 it says when he comes back, he's coming back as what? A warrior. A mighty warrior leading a mighty army, riding a white horse with a blood-stained white robe ... I believe that blood on that robe is the blood of his enemies 'cause he's coming back as a warrior carrying a sword.
"Jesus is coming with an AR-15"

And I believe now - I've checked this out - I believe that sword he'll be
carrying when he comes back is an AR-15.

Now I want you to think about this: where did the Second Amendment come from? ... From the Founding Fathers, it's in the Constitution. Well, yeah, I know that. But where did the whole concept come from? It came from Jesus when he said to his disciples 'now, if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.'

I know, everybody says that was a metaphor. IT WAS NOT A METAPHOR! He was saying in building my kingdom, you're going to have to fight at times. You won't build my kingdom with a sword, but you're going to have to defend yourself. And that was the beginning of the Second Amendment, that's where the whole thing came from. I can't prove that historically and David [Barton] will counsel me when this is over, but I know that's where it came from.

And the sword today is an AR-15, so if you don't have one, go get one. You're supposed to have one. It's biblical.
(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 4). Now that will save a lot of lives, only killing the enemies of Mithra with AR-15 rifles from the well-stocked armory:
Today’s religious Right equates secularism with totalitarianism, and it opposes these twinned forces internationally and within the culture of the United States. Jonathan P. Herzog’s well-researched study demonstrates that the Right’s theological partisans are marshaling a system of beliefs initially forged by a coalition of conservatives, liberals, and moderates in the early Cold War. With assistance from clergy and interfaith groups, leaders in a variety of secular institutions promoted the idea that America was a covenant nation engaged in a holy war with a communist enemy whose belief system was a rival faith to Judeo-Christian democracy.
(The Virgin MOMCOM - 6). In the first post of this series we pointed out that the War Colleges teach war, religion, and when the chips are down they surge:
"The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives ...

The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness ...

By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure."
(Is War An Art or Is War A Disease?). So, what are we to believe is going to happen now that a shocking development, perhaps borne of reductionism, is said to be taking place:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will propose on Monday a reduction in the size of the U.S. Army to its smallest size since before World War Two and scrapping a class of Air Force attack jets, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The plans, which the paper said were outlined by several Pentagon officials on condition of anonymity, would be aimed at reducing defense spending in the face of government austerity after a pledge by President Barack Obama to end U.S. involvement in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It would leave the military capable of defeating any enemy but too small for long foreign occupations, and would involve greater risk if U.S. forces were asked to carry out two large-scale military actions at the same time.

"You have to always keep your institution prepared, but you can't carry a large land-war Defense Department when there is no large land war," the Times quoted a senior Pentagon official as saying.

It added that some of the plans may face political opposition in Congress, but quoted the officials as saying that they had the endorsement of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
(War Budget To Be Diminished, [by ~13.5% Guardian]; cf. Salon). Remember the last time that military austerity was on the table:
Until more money arrives, the defense apparatus is literally feeding on its own parts, pinching this and that, scrimping here and there, in order to keep the same Cold War force structure in place and the same lineup of new weapons moving through the pipeline of development. During the Cold War era, the military institution acquired a reflexive appetite for growth that it's now unwilling to give up. Instead, it lumbers toward a self-induced crisis of malnourishment, as when an addict's starving body eats its own liver.
(Is There A Shadow Government? - 2). There was a surge that doubled the budget for wars soon after that.

So, we shall see. But for now we can hope (American Feudalism - 6).

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