Is The McTell News Malaise-ian Frenzy Related to Guilt?

Why does the U.S. mass media go nuts over certain (by comparison) minor stories, but not cover much more serious stories?

Why do they major in the minors?

Why do they have the poor judgment that even dictators can see through ("One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic." -Joseph Stalin)?

The current media furor over the tragedy of the passenger jet evidently shot down over the Ukraine is a case in point.

The vagaries are being presented as the structural members of the story, while the knowns are tending to be presented as the twigs, therefore, it is likely that this is a brain washing exercise being attempted by a profession that operates like a panicky herd inside a laundromat (MH17: World See Tragedy, US Sees “Game Changer”).

Some professionals are quick to notice the hypocritical approach to this media frenzy:

Before you say Washington is too sophisticated to mistake one airliner for another, keep in mind that when Washington shot down an Iranian airliner over Iranian air space, the US Navy claimed that it thought the 290 civilians that it murdered were in an Iranian fighter jet, a F-14 Tomcat fighter, a US-made fighter that was a mainstay of the US Navy. If the US Navy cannot tell its own workhorse fighter aircraft from an Iranian airliner, clearly the US can confuse two airliners that the RT report shows appear very similar.

(Sanctions and Airliners — by Paul Craig Roberts). Professor Roberts was pointing out a related event that took place some 26 years ago:

"Iran Air Flight 655 was an Iran Air civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai that was shot down by the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988. The attack took place in Iranian airspace, over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, and on the flight's usual flight path. The aircraft, an Airbus A300 B2-203, was destroyed by SM-2MR surface-to-air missiles fired from the Vincennes.

All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, died. This attack ranks seventh among the deadliest disasters in aviation history, tenth if including the 9/11 attacks, which includes ground casualties; the incident retains the highest death toll of any aviation incident in the Persian Gulf and the highest death toll of any incident involving an Airbus aircraft anywhere in the world. The Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits.

According to the Iranian government, Vincennes negligently shot down the civilian aircraft: the airliner was making IFF squawks in Mode III (not Mode II used by Iranian military planes), a signal that identified it as a civilian craft, and operators of Vincennes mistook for Mode II.

According to the United States Government, the crew incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter (a plane made in the United States and operated at that time by only two forces worldwide, the United States Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force).

The event generated a great deal of controversy and criticism of the United States. Some analysts have blamed U.S. military commanders and the captain of Vincennes for reckless and aggressive behavior in a tense and dangerous environment.

The United States did not apologize to Iran."

(Wikipedia, "Iran Air Flight 655", emphasis added). The U.S., some ten years later, paid about $200k ("without admitting guilt") for each man. woman. and child that the U.S. military admittedly killed.

But now the media is trumpeting this recent incident in the Ukraine like those people are worth $100 million each because the U.S. military did not do this one (cf. Facts Needed, by Ray McGovern and also Fact Free Zone).

President Obama has admitted that he believes in U.S. Exceptionalism very strongly, but does his definition mean "when we do it it is ok but when others do it that makes it wrong," as the neoCons do?

To the neoCons, "exceptionalism" means that those who are not us ("you are for us or you are against us") are the barbarian hordes:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells or metal mines.

(As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn, 1944, page 222). The news media is a very essential member of MOMCOM, so, this exceptionalism dogma driving the Russia bashing appears to be the reality of the case.

The most pressing issues are not pressed upon by the presstitutes (The Damaged Global Climate System - 3, Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, The Deceit Business - 3).

Perhaps, then, the current media frenzy is bread and circus dynamics designed to keep our minds occupied with things that are trivial compared to the big picture, things that direct us away from guilt.

Or any number of other illegitimate propaganda goals (What Happened to the Malaysian Airliner?, Dear Fellow American) which Europeans have become aware of even if Americans have not.

For example, a leading member state of the EU (The United States of Europe - 4) is joining with Russia to develop methods in order to properly investigate the Malaysian MH17 crash (Merkel, Putin Agree on International Probe of MH17 crash).

No doubt that is not what Washington wanted.

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One Trick Pony, Paul Simon

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Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 34

This is Friday, so let's think.

Let's think about nature and how much our culture has missed, not looked for, or does not care about it.

Or has forgotten about it.

Let's limit that inquiry to plants and what they see or don't, hear or don't, taste or don't, feel or don't, and other senses they do or don't have, but most of all, let's think about what this has to do with human survival.

Leaving out the obvious (food for us and other animals), is there anything of rebel science in this equation?

First of all, the plant world has an awareness that many people do not have.

Which is that the climate system, the global climate system, is active in ways that are moving them:

Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.

(Climate Change & Major Vegetation Shifts Worldwide, emphasis added). This tells us that plants have similar senses that help them keep "an ear to the ground" for climate factors that they should be aware of, or they will cease to exist.

One Tenet of Ecocosmology indicates that we should also be aware of the many forms of intelligence around us:

4) The seeds of intelligence (genetic and memetic clues) required to successfully perform The Test are distributed into all species, races, religions, sciences, creeds, and genders. Thus, all individuals should be respected as carriers of some quanta of the seed of intelligence required to pass The Test, lest a fundamental quantum of necessary intelligence be lost.

(The Tenets of Ecocosmology). In our cultural hubris we can tend to assume that we are the the sum and apex of intelligence, but that is not the case.

The oldest of microbes, for example, did quantum physics a billion years, maybe more, before we did with photovoltaic solar panels (The Tiniest Scientists Are Very Old).

Some plants have tens of times more genes than we have in our human genome:

There was nothing extraordinary about the Japanese canopy plant — that is, until Pellicer analyzed the stained cells using flow cytometry, a high-throughput technique to detect features of cells suspended in liquid. To Pellicer’s eye, the balls of DNA inside P. japonica’s nuclei looked “really, really big,” he recalls. Soon, he confirmed that P. japonica carries the largest known eukaryotic genome on the planet, with a whopping 150 billion base pairs — 50 times the size of the human genome. “We were astonished,” says Pellicer. Plants in general are known to have sizable genomes, often as a result of whole-genome duplications, so “we were expecting to find big genomes, but nothing that big.”
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The Human Genome Project’s most startling finding was that human genes, as currently defined, make up less than 2 percent of all the DNA on the genome, and that the total number of genes is relatively small. Scientists had predicted there might be 80,000 to 140,000 human genes, but the current tally is fewer than 25,000 — as one scientific paper put it, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN that of A CHICKEN AND A GRAPE. The remaining 98 percent of our DNA, once dismissed as “junk DNA,” is now taken more seriously. Researchers have focused on introns, in the gaps between the coding segments of genes, which may play a crucial role in regulating gene expression, by switching them on and off in response to environmental stimuli.

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 26). Do plants have senses (sight, smell / taste, touch, hearing, balance, memory)?

Please watch the video below of a lecture given by a well known scientist who knows some things that plants know and that we too should know.

Have a good weekend!

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What a Plant Knows, by Daniel Chamovitz:

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The Damaged Global Climate System - 3

It isn't flat any more

If you want to be an accepted scientist do you have to flatter "the world"?

The answer in general is "yes."

By that I mean that scientists can only tell "the world" (a place which the mass media has created inside "the growing skulls") things that flatter them.

For example, telling the world "you can work out and solve any problem with science, democracy, and technology" is cool.

But, telling them "you are on a path to destroy the world" brings up the deeply embedded "end of the world" meme which is not flattering, and to say the least, is not acceptable.

Thus, you become a persona non grata like Sigmund Freud, Arnold Toynbee, and a host of others:

"Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind ... Freud’s ideas are rejected today because they imply that the human animal is ineradicably flawed. It is not Freud’s insistence on sexuality that is the source of scandal, but the claim that humans are afflicted by a destructive impulse." - John Gray, Prospect Magazine (emphasis added)
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"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History,  by Arnold J. Toynbee (emphasis added)
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Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any [extraterrestrial intelligence]. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation" - Dr. Noam Chomsky paraphrasing Dr. Ernst Mayr
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“One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” - Lamarck (1817) (emphasis added)

(See Genesis: The Evolution of Biology, by Jan Sapp, p. 274, fn. 14; quoting from Lamark's writings)
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“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson (emphasis added)
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"In 1973, Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist cross-trained in philosophy, sociology, and psychiatry, invoked consciousness of self and the inevitability of death as the primary sources of human anxiety and repression. He proposed that the psychological basis of cooperation, competition, and emotional and mental health is a tendency to hold tightly to anxiety-buffering cultural world views or "immortality projects" that serve as the basis for self-esteem and meaning. Although he focused mainly on social and political outcomes like war, torture, and genocide, he was increasingly aware that materialism, denial of nature, and immortality-striving efforts to control, rather than sanctify, the natural world were problems whose severity was increasing. In this paper I review Becker's ideas and suggest ways in which they illuminate human response to global climate change. Because immortality projects range from belief in technology and materialism to reverence for nature or belief in a celestial god, they act both as barriers to and facilitators of sustainable practices. I propose that Becker’s cross-disciplinary "science of man," and the predictions it generates for proximate-level determinants of social behavior, add significantly to our understanding of and potential for managing the people paradox, i.e., that the very things that bring us symbolic immortality often conflict with our prospects for survival. Analysis of immortality projects as one of the proximate barriers to addressing climate change is both cautionary and hopeful, providing insights that should be included in the cross-disciplinary quest to uncover new pathways toward rational, social change." -The People Paradox, Ecology and Society 14(1): 34 (emphasis added)

This, for the most part subconscious, reality in our matrix society has often tended toward intellectual constipation within the scientific community at large:

Science is a conservative industry that classically understates fact. One of the big reasons is that old maxim, "Publish or perish." If a scientist is wrong in his or her published findings, the scholarly journals will think twice about publishing that scientist's work again. Science therefore systematically understates evidence.

(Arctic Warming and Increased Weather Extremes). We are in a constant cultural trance to some degree because of all this.

The wiring of our brains by our culture and nature, both at most times beyond our control, tends to be put "out of sight out of mind."

Therefore, the reality outside of our trance is not generally part of our personal, conscious cognition (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala).

That is why civilization has not only damaged the global climate system, but is also in denial in some degree or another about having done it.

The heavy denial is "global warming is the greatest hoax ever fostered on humanity", medium denial is "ok, so the globe is warming but humans did not and are not doing it", and light weight denial is "ok, so anthropogenic global warming is real, but there is no extinction danger because we can handle it with our science, technology, and democracy."

All flattery aside, the bad news is that all three of these degrees of denial will end with the same result (i.e., "Failing The Test").

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

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Use the video below (from circa 2007 by Dr. Naomi Oreskes then of U.C.S.D., now at Harvard) to enjoy a free class lecture at a very well respected American university, or, read the history here.

Note: (Left Col=Key times in the video - GW = global warming; GG = greenhouse gas, CC = climate change):

00:40 - Schwarzenegger: no debate, GW is happening.
06:20 - Proper amount of GG is good, keeps us warm.
07:00 - Too much GG is a bad thing.
07:09 - Tyndall in mid 1800's began research into GG.
07:45 - Arrhenius did first degree calculations re: CO₂ content.
08:25 - Callendar discovered GG increases in 1930's.
09:02 - Hulburt accord in 1930's.
09:43 - Depression / war stopped GG research.
10:00 - Gilbert N. Plass developed CO₂ atmospheric calculations.
10:49 - Suess & Revelle do paper in 1957 warning of GW dangers.
12:30 - Dr. Revelle warned of polar ice cap melt in TIME interview.
13:25 - CO₂ levels discovered to be high.
16:30 - Lyndon Johnson in 1965 says fossil fuels causing GW.
17:00 - GW, CC not political originally.
18:20 - White of NOAA, 1978, warns of GW dangers.
20:52 - Polar Areas to be impacted 4 times more than other areas. 
24:20 - IPCC formed in 1979 with consensus on GW.
26:00 - Bush I signed GW treaty.
26:45 - Denial of GW begins.
27:40 - Luntz injects GW denial propaganda into political debate.
28:25 - Oil baron Cheney propagates GW denial.
29:00 - Oil companies do massive scale denial propaganda.
29:30 - Marshall Institute
30:30 - Marshall Institute formed to support Reagan SDI (star wars)
32:50 - Marshall Institute "cigarettes not related to cancer".
36:50 - Marshall Institute does GW denial campaign.
42:54 - Marshall member Seitz worked for big tobacco.
47:20 - Singer of Marshall Institute politically attacks GW.
53:35 - Cigarette smoking is ok rhetoric applied to GW science.

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The United States of Europe - 4

Europe is busy, busy, busy

Since 2009, this Dredd Blog series has taken a look at the complicated notion of The United States of Europe (U.S.E.)

That entity currently has the flavor known as The European Union (EU).

The main focus of this series and some associated posts (e.g. On The Origin of Security - 5, Middle East Newspaper Articles Concerning Spanking Syria, Clash of the Titans of Export) has been to show that Europe has grown up since WW-II and is now leaving home to make it on its own.

This is clearly seen by very recent developments:

The United States is considering imposing unilateral sanctions on Russia over its threatening moves in Ukraine, a shift in strategy that reflects the Obama administration's frustration with Europe's reluctance to take tougher action against Moscow, according to U.S. and European officials.

Until now, the U.S. has insisted on hitting Russia with penalties in concert with Europe in order to maximize the impact and present a united Western front. The European Union has a far stronger economic relationship with Russia, making the 28-nation bloc's participation key to ensuring sanctions packages have enough teeth to deter Russia.

But those same economic ties have made Europe fearful that tougher penalties against Russia could boomerang and hurt their own economies. After weeks of inaction, the officials say the U.S. is now prepared to move forward alone if EU officials fail to enact strong sanctions during a meeting Wednesday in Brussels.

(U.S. Preparing Unilateral Sanctions On Russia, emphasis added). This is a pattern that is developing behind the scenes as the default pattern.

That is, The United States of Europe is standing up to The United States of America on more and more issues:

Annex Statement of Heads of State or Government

The Heads of State or Government discussed recent developments concerning possible intelligence issues and the deep concerns that these events have raised among European citizens.

They underlined the close relationship between Europe and the USA and the value of that partnership. They expressed their conviction that the partnership must be based on respect and trust, including as concerns the work and cooperation of secret services.

They stressed that intelligence gathering is a vital element in the fight against terrorism. This applies to relations between European countries as well as to relations with the USA. A lack of trust could prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence gathering.

The Heads of State or Government took note of the intention of France and Germany to seek bilateral talks with the USA with the aim of finding before the end of the year an understanding on mutual relations in that field. They noted that other EU countries are welcome to join this initiative.

They also pointed to the existing Working Group between the EU and the USA on the related issue of data protection and called for rapid and constructive progress in that respect.

(ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller - 6). The pattern is that other nations no longer trust the U.S. to have their interests at heart.

The nations of Europe are more and more seeing the U.S. as "a user" because of our self-serving foreign policy based on imperialism (American Feudalism - 6).

The previous post in this series is here.

Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch

Truth is never the fault of the Messenger

Yesterday, I presented the "optimistic" view in the debate about "Near Term Human Extinction" (NTHE) compared and contrasted with "Long Term Human Extinction" (LTHE).

That "optimistic" view favors the long term LTHE, as if that is "optimistic" in and of itself, rather than just being the better of two terrible potentials.

LTHE is something like "humanity won't go extinct in your lifetime" but will go extinct circa 2100.

The NTHE is the "pessimistic" view that "humanity will go extinct in your lifetime" by about 2050, soooo, there is only about a 50 year, or five decades, difference in the two models (which both seem "pessimistic" to me).

However, neither "pessimistic" nor "optimistic" are relevant, rather, what is relevant is that both NTHE and LTHE are pointing out human extinction in a relatively short time frame.

If either one of them happens to be reality,  then your kids and mine will go extinct along with the rest of humanity in their lifetimes, which is anywhere from circa 2050 to circa 2100 !!!

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has repeatedly posted about civilization going down, but that was not intended to say that the human species would go down too:

There is a tendency to think that the catastrophe of global warming is an extinction threat to the human species.

The threat however, in the sequence of events, is the extinction of human civilization, not the human species.

Civilization can go down with a billion or so human survivors still remaining, yet only being taken back into the dark ages by a "time machine" built by the civilization that erased itself from the face of the earth.
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World civilization means the nations of the world interconnected by trade, travel, treaties, and international commerce.

So, when climate change scientists talk about dangers to the existence of civilization they do not mean that the population of human beings as a species is going to become extinct.

In other words, the human species would live on even if civilization ended.

(Confusing "Civilization" With "Species"). So, all you readers who thought I have been "pessimistic" now must blush at how "optimistic" I may have been.

In either NTHE or LTHE speak, we are driven by "hopium" when we are optimistic without reason (or driven by "doomium" if we are pessimistic without reason).

But as I said, neither pessimism nor optimism are relevant or useful terms, rather, what is relevant and useful is the scientific reality.

That is what we want to determine, whether it makes us cry because humanity has no chance, or on the other hand makes us shout for joy because there is still a chance for our species.

We have to face it, because it is not going away until we face up and get it right.

Today's post is about civilization being on "suicide" watch, but, of course the proper word to describe when a civilization kills itself is omnicide ("human extinction caused by human action").

Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive:

If the evolution of civilization has such a far reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization——or epochs of it——possibly even the whole of humanity——have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim a great practical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities. [p. 39]
...
Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature
to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this——hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. [p. 40]

(MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 5, "Civilization and Its Discontents"). As to individuals, those who have a habit of trying to kill themselves are at greater risk than those who tried it once, failed, and never tried again.

That is because the data show that 54% of individuals who try suicide more than once have "comorbid mental disorders" (Suicide Attempt Self-Injury Interview, SASII, PDF).

Since civilizations, empires, nations, and societies that were studied by Toynbee had a much higher "suicide success" rate than individuals tend to have, there is a proclivity toward omnicide that merits pessimism for civilization today.

Since we looked at LTHE yesterday, let's be aware of other concepts by taking a look at some of the work of the NTHE folk to ascertain what propels them toward an expectation of near term omnicide:

There are such massive reserves of methane in the subsea Arctic methane hydrates, that if only a few percent of them are released, they will lead to a jump in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere of 10 degrees C and produce a "Permian" style major extinction event which will kill us all.

The whole northern hemisphere is now covered by a thickening atmospheric methane veil that is spreading southwards at about 1 km a day and it already totally envelopes the United States.

A giant hole in the equatorial ozone layer has also been discovered in the west Pacific, which acts like an elevator transferring methane from lower altitudes to the stratosphere, where it already forms a dense equatorial global warming stratospheric band that is spreading into the Polar regions.

The spreading atmospheric methane global warming veil is raising the temperature of the lower atmosphere many times faster than carbon dioxide does, causing the extreme summer temperatures in Australia and the US.

During the last winter, the high Arctic winter temperatures and pressures displaced the normal freezing Arctic air south into Canada and the United States, producing never before seen, freezing winter storms and massive power failures.

When the Arctic ice cap finally melts towards the end of next year, the Arctic sea will be aggressively heated by the sun and the Gulf Stream. The cold Arctic air will then be confined to the Greenland Ice cap and the hot Arctic air with its methane will flow south to the United States to further heat up the Gulf Stream, setting up an anticlockwise circulation around Greenland.

Under these circumstances Great Britain and Europe must expect even more catastrophic storm systems, hurricane force winds and massive flooding after the end of next year, due to a further acceleration in the energy transport of the Gulf Stream. If this process continues unchecked the mean temperature of the atmosphere will rise a further 8 degrees centigrade and we will be facing global deglaciation, a more than 200 feet rise in sea level rise and a major terminal extinction event by the 2050s.

(Focus on Methane, emphasis added). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has also focused on the methane tipping point in times past (e.g The Bubbling Up To Rude Awakening, New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5).

And, in the interest of comprehensive coverage, we have also taken a look at the dynamics of denial in the past (Convergence - Fear of Death Syndrome), and have posted two videos of Dr. Guy McPherson who expounds upon NTHE (A Cure For Congress & The Supreme Five: Fickle Fecal Transplants).

In future posts in this series we will take an even closer look at the dynamics of denial dementia.

The next post in this series is here.

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This large crater/hole (unknown depth, ~80m / ~263 ft diameter) in the Siberian permafrost may be related to methane gas release (Confirmed here) caused by thawing over a high pressure area:

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The Deceit Business - 3

"What's troubling you is the nature of my game."

I. Introduction

The very first post on Dredd Blog was entitled "It's The Peace Stupid," which addressed the Israeli vs. Palestinian "problem."

That problem is another one of those "Groundhog Day" problems (Groundhog Day & The Climate of Fear) that never change at the core.

What does change is the news media's use of magic tricks which are designed to make us think those problems change.

Some of today's news media stories, as well as the very first Dredd Blog post ever (a post about Gaza / Israel) could be written with the same words then published today (7/14/14) with only the date changed.

But, today's post belongs to a series that focuses on "business deceit" (The Deceit Business) which, strange as it may seem, is subject matter related to them.

Yes, today's post is in a series which began on the same day (January 9, 2009) as the "It's The Peace Stupid" post mentioned above.

Eventually, this series was somewhat supplanted by the various additional series on the subject of propaganda, with a focus on Edward L. Bernays, the Father of American Propaganda (e.g. The Ways of Bernays, Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels).

So, today, I am going to tie those flavors of American propaganda together, in an attempt to show that, like several vines that have grown together, American mass propaganda has fused together into a chimera.

II. The Emperor's New Camouflage Uniform

One of the major structural accomplishments of that chimera, the modern American media, is that it includes the military mass media (Warriors Press For Propaganda) as well as what passes for the civilian mass media (Blind Willie McTell News).

The major functional accomplishment of that structure is the deceit of the masses, a deceit subject to an imperialist agenda driven by the money religion ("All money is a matter of belief." - Adam Smith) together with the most sophisticated fear-mongering of all history

"What's troubling you is the nature of my game."

(The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere, Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 4).

This subterfuge was done via camouflage on steroids, which was primitively explained later, to a degree, by the description that President Eisenhower used to try to convey a message: "military-industrial complex."

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog calls that entity's current form, using today's language and facts, the military-oil-media complex (MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen).

Some of our best intellectuals, teachers, historians, propagandists, and activists have precisely described these dynamics:

"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" [quoting Noam Chomsky].
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THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are

Feel better now?

governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty [now 320] million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
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It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice. [-quoted from "Propaganda", by Edward L. Bernays]

(The Ways of Bernays, cf. A Social History of Spin). We won't tend to see this uniform and universal camouflage unless we are closely watching.

The camouflage uniform exercise is to hide the evolving fusion of the military and civilian realms (Will The Military Become The Police?) to cover up the old, slow, ongoing coup-by-morph.

A morph from a civilian dominated governing entity into a military dominated governing entity (A Tale of Coup Cities - 2).

III. The Emperor's New Feudalism

The MOMCOM of today suffers multi-personality disorder which has led to the rhetoric of peace while at the same time colonies are and have been built around the world to closely watch over MOMCOM's world (e.g. think military NSA).

Modern feudal lords and vassals have replaced the castle and plantation with the military fortress around the world (American Feudalism - 6) as they wear the camouflage to cover up and hide their spirit of modern feudalism (American Feudalism, cf. 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10).

Here are some direct quotes from Adam Smith, who Noam Chomsky read and paraphrased in Section II above.

Quotes which show the flavor of feudalism:

"No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money." - Adam Smith

“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.”- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” ― Adam Smith

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith

In closing this section, I will add:

"It is not from the benevolence of Oil-Qaeda, Coal-Qaeda, Gas-Qaeda, or Nuke-Qaeda that we expect our energy, but from their regard to their own interest."

(Dredd, with an apology to Adam Smith). Why are those XXX-Qaeda members of society (who kill the most people through pollution) not terrorists according to the presstitutes?

IV. Agnotology: The Study of the Effects of Mass Propaganda

There is a specific discipline that studies the affects which this mass propaganda has had on everyone it touches:

Agnotology "is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data" ...

(Agnotology: The Surge, cf. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). There are "reasons" for the mass generation and publication of "inaccurate or misleading" scientific data.

Adam Smith mentioned one of those reasons:

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”

(Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations). The heart breaking side of the current practice of mass propaganda is the mental diseases it can engender (Etiology of Social Dementia, cf. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

V. Suicide By Any Other Name

One historian, who was once the most quoted historian, has an interesting observation of massive groups we call society, culture, nations, or empires:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee

(The Queens of Stalingrad - 8). The Dredd Blog series about Agnotology, quoted from in Section IV above, explains a lot about how a modern, scientific culture could foster ignorance which eventually leads to self-destruction.

Especially a culture with all of the educational institutions we see abounding within it.

And more than that, how such societies continue to commit suicide, as Toynbee described it, following his historical study of many of them.

One way it is done is to divide the minds up into small pieces in the name of specialization, leaving other disciplines to the imagination:

“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

"The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”  ― Adam Smith

Was the U.S. President just fooling around when he recently directed ~14 federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency, to immediately form a task force because of a dire threat to our food supply (Will We Destroy Food - The Bees? - 2)?

VI. Conclusion

That is it for today (if you want more, peruse The Matriarch of the Matrix - 3 as the EPA, one member of the president's task force, did earlier today).

In closing, let me emphasize that mass ignorance (intentionally generated in the public sphere by the handiwork of the mass propaganda engines of society) has dire consequences (ibid @ "Etiology of Social Dementia").

With that in mind, I will close with the finality of the subject of human extinction (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5).

There are two main positions on human extinction in current global warming science, as well as in those studies now contemplating current nuclear war potential.

One position is "near term human extinction," and the other position is "long term human extinction."

In other words, the issue is not "if" human extinction will take place (under business as usual status quo), rather, the issue is "when" it will take place:

"The First Law of 'When': the more critical an issue is to the future of our civilization, the difficulty of determining when that critical issue will take effect tends to increase exponentially.

The Second Law of 'When': the greater the amount of time it takes for that critical issue to play out completely tends to exponentially diminish Civilization's grasp of that critical issue.

The Third Law of 'When': the more destructive the impact which that critical issue would have on civilization tends to exponentially increase the time when that critical event will be understood to have begun to take place." - Dredd

(see e.g. Clive Hamilton to Revkin). There will be more in this series in the future, assuming I can remain a citizen journalist and share my research with you readers.

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

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Bill Moyers interviews Dr. Suzuki:
(Some insight into ignorance generators, but too much ancient "hopium?"):

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