In the first post of this series we took a look at the psychological challenges that the notion of You Are Here (YAH) maps generate.
And some other stuff.
We got "here" through no fault of our own, no thought of our own, and no good or bad of our own, so, we should be aware of the cognitive ruts and highways "here" (e.g. Choose Your Trances Carefully, Raised by Animals).
You are here in an inverted warped galaxy?
Today I have posted a Hubble photo together with its inverse version, just to illustrate that the world and universe can look different to different folks ... because we are all here too (click on them to enlarge them).
Notice that when the galaxy is inverted what was light at the center becomes dark at the center.
The way civilization treats this planet one would think we are in a warped galaxy with darkness at its center.
And that we are on a planet in that darkness where we have no clue about how to properly take care of it, and thereby take care of our civilization at the same time:
" ... a new analysis released today says the drying will be even more extreme than previously predicted—the worst in nearly 1,000 years. Some time between 2050 and 2100, extended drought conditions in both regions will become more severe than the megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries." (US droughts).
...
"The first Yamal sinkhole made headlines all over the world. A crater with a diameter of up to 60 meter, the phenomenon was soon branded the Black Hole of Yamal. Scientists believe that the hole was created following the release of gas methane and subsequent collapse of permafrost.
The eight new sinkholes are smaller in size than the one discovered in July last year. The researchers believe that the bigger sinkholes are likely to be surrounded by smaller ones, and are now mapping the peninsula in order to be able to predict the sites for new holes." (Methane Sinkholes).
...
"Scientists had long thought the giant East Antarctic ice sheet was barely affected by global warming and that its glaciers were stable. It turns out those assumptions were wrong.
A team of scientists returned on January 26 from a 7-week expedition to East Antarctica with the bad news: warm ocean water is melting the huge Totten glacier from below.
Totten is East Antarctica’s largest glacier. It drains an area more than double the size of Victoria and holds enough ice to cause a 6-metre [19.685 ft.] sea-level rise." (Antarctic Eastern Ice sheet melt)
So long as our nomenclature allows for "light" to mean one thing to one person, but another thing to another person, our communication will be strained or broken, and our lives and deaths "here" may mean less.
Same with the meaning of "darkness."
As it is, we live on either an idiom planet, or in an idiom galaxy.
The following idioms may be instructive in that light:
In the first and second posts of this series an Executive Order ("EO") was discussed.
That EO had to do with the seizure of property and/or person by the U.S. government.
In the previous post I wrote: "That order gives his cabinet members the right to seize any U.S. property or the labor of any U.S. citizen to be used in government service, with or without payment, to enhance national security."
Doom is what the EO seeks to avoid, using the wealth, sweat, and anything else that the populace may have.
Some have failed to notice that the greatest doom always comes from the greatest threat (let's call that threat "it").
The exercise, then, is to identify the greatest threat, "it", before going out into the populace to grab everyone and everything to be used to fight "it" and thereby avoid doom.
III. "It" Is A Shape Shifter
This "it" thingy is slick as hell, and everywhere at once, it would seem.
During the drug war, before 9/11, "it" had one form, marijuana, dreamy weamy, and abortion pills.
Then suddenly "it" became the twin (or triplet) towers demolishers ("those who are not with us") who were mostly from Saudi Arabia.
But, "those who are not with us" were so dangerous and wiley that the United Nations
"I'll bring Clapper's littlest lie this time"
could not figure "it" out.
Even with Colin Powell's exquisite exposure of the irrefutable evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the "it."
So, being all exceptional and stuff we had to figure "it" out for the U.N., we being "it" experts and all.
So, invade Afghanistan and Iraq we must, because those wily wascals are sneaky snakes, and could be anywhere large deposits of oil and other resources are located in the many lands of "those who are not with us":
"Anything, they thought, was possible, given a nation shocked and terrified by the apocalyptic vision of those towers coming down, even if the damage had
Next comes Mission Unaccomplished
been done by just 19 hijackers armed with box cutters who belonged to a terror organization capable, at best, of mounting major operations every year or two. "[B]arely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon... [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq," CBS News reported, even though he was already certain that al-Qaeda had launched the attack, not Saddam Hussein. ("'Go massive,' the notes quote him as saying. 'Sweep it all up. Things related and not.'")"
(Tom Dispatch, Six Americans Who Prove). Some three months later we declared that the mission was 'accomplished."
However, we declared "it" to the world before we realized that "those who are not with us" were such wiley wascals, such shape shifters, that we must stay and unaccomplish that accomplished mission.
That was the only way to throw them off track lest they discover "it" and hide all of itdom from us, perhaps, to even hide "it" in the White House with the tap dancer in chief.
We meant well, but we never found "it" because for some reason, "those who are not with us" evidently moved "it" into another country with lots of oil (clue: could it be Iran?).
After throwing us off the trail, so that we never found where they hid "it", and after "those who are not with us" years later hurled Obola at us (Obola: Art Thou Dying Properly?), finally we pivoted to the greatest "it" of all time.
IV. "It" Is Now Global
In a surge of declassification, the President has now declared what the greatest threat to our national security, "the threat", yes, "the Mother of all it", really is.
It is not "those who are not with us", or Iran, or anything of the nature of inflated, imagined terrorism.
"It" is climate change:
I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what – I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.
(PBS, emphasis added). "It" could even impact our TV viewing pleasure "more than expected."
V. Release Agent Pogo From Gitmo!
Since Comedy Central has also declared that Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show, we need someone else like Pogo to replace him.
So, why not release Agent "we have met the enemy and 'it' is us" Pogo from Gitmo?
The new religious war over "it" is now looking to be a better episode than "Colin Powell Does The UN", which was a doozy.
Senator Nope takes out Colin "It R Us" Powell to attain first place in "we are our enemy" status.
VI. Pope Francis v. Nope Jimmy
The Pope is in accord with the president, the consensus of scientists, and the Pentagon, while denialist Senator Jimmy "Nope" Inhofe (R-Bullshitistan) is in religious rebellion to all that.
Senator Nope, fresh from taking a snort of Ayn Rand's Nopium, says:
More specifically, I want to focus on those beliefs that "God is doing the climate change if there is any, because human civilization is not capable of doing anything that could change the climate" (Ergo AnthropogenicDeigenic climate change).
Let's use the religious beliefs of two human public figures, Pope Francis and Senator Inhofe, to get the criticism in gear.
Pope Francis is of the faith that anthropogenic climate change is the reality, and that endangering and harming humanity by damaging the Earth is sin (Message of Science & Religion - Western - 2).
I did not coin the phrase "Barbarian Civilization", no, I got it from the very competent Catholic Encyclopedia, as will be shown with a quote later in this post.
"Barbarian Civilization" seems like a contradiction of terms, so that encyclopedia probably used it intentionally to describe the western division of themselves during the feudal ages.
The graphic to the left comes from a Wikipedia page "Barbarian", depicting The Huns at the Battle of Chalon.
I modified the middle section, so as to show what the religious barbarians then thought of themselves: holy lily white Crusaders (see this & this).
I modified the top and bottom so as to show the women and children being slaughtered (bottom), and the flocks of vultures and eagles (top) following the "civilized barbarians" to feast on "the carrion of the wicked."
Today, let's look at an historical example of how the individual amygdala and the cultural amygdala reacted to stress, in terms of generating a dangerous religion:
Religious service even became part of feudalism:
The Church, too, had her place in the feudal system. She too was granted territorial fiefs, became a vassal, possessed immunities. It was the result of her calm, wide sympathy, turning to the new nations, away from the Roman Empire, to which many Christians thought she was irrevocably bound. By the baptism of Clovis she showed the baptism of Constantine had not tied her to the political system. So she created a new world out of chaos, created the paradox of barbarian civilization. In gratitude kings and emperors endowed her with property; and ecclesiastical property has not infrequently brought evils in its train. The result was disputed elections; younger sons of nobles were intruded into bishoprics, at times even into the papacy. Secular princes claimed lay investiture of spiritual offices. The cause of this was feudalism, for a system that had its basis on land tenure was bound at last to enslave a Church that possessed great landed possessions.
About 100 or so of the current congress members have the religious faith that God is causing weather catastrophe upon the Earth.
God the Chef, ostensibly does this to generate "the carrion of the wicked" for the flocks of vultures and eagles to feast upon.
Meanwhile, their God (Oil-Qaeda) has sold enough holy "Oilah Akbar" oil to destroy another critical cycle in the Earth's ecosystem:
At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.
The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.
“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.
From the first post of this series the quote from historian Arnold J. Toynbee has been resonating.
The quote we focus on is one reason Toynbee eventually fell from practically universal approval.
The same thing happened to Sigmund Freud.
They both had the propensity to call it as they saw it rather than having the propensity to flatter society.
Toynbee said: "...a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former...", while Freud said: "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." (Dredd Blog quotes page).
II. Mortal vs. Immortal
What Toynbee meant, when he said that society does not die of natural causes, is that unlike people, civilizations have an open door to exist in perpetuity (so long as their components are all properly maintained).
For example, Egypt, Greece, and the United States (to name a few) have existed far longer than all of the individuals who began those societies, and will continue on as long as they perpetuate themselves.
Individuals do not fit into the same realm (our minds and bodies are mortal, we can't perpetuate them).
There is, then, this concept and reality of individual mortals living within a potentially immortal culture (Choose Your Trances Carefully, 2).
The book "Being Mortal", pictured at the top of the post, points out that our culture's medical philosophy and practice treats citizens as if they should be immortals, feverishly trying to keep them alive.
In fact, statistically (according to the author of the book) the most likely time we will have an operation (serious surgery), is in the last week of our lives.
However, the leaders of our civilization ("civilization's doctors"), now that the Doomsday Clock has been set to 3 minutes until lights out, are not doing what medical doctors of individuals do, which is to pull out all stops to keep alive those people who are dying.
To a fault we try to keep individuals alive, while to the contrary, we are quite risky with our society when it comes to official behavior concerning our two greatest threats (e.g. Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 2).
Ed Shultz of MSNBC has good hearing, and he hears the cries of our dying civilization (see video below).
Next week Mr. Shultz is doing coverage, in a 5 part series, of the Climate Change Catastrophe.
A predicament that has covered the eyes of some in government with a fog, with religious dogma, or with a trance of denial of some sort.
For example, the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the shorelines surrounding it (where people victimized by BP of Oil-Qaeda's Deepwater Horizon catastrophe are still being made sick and are still dying both literally and figuratively), do not receive coherent attention.
What main stream presstitutes report, instead, since Oil-Qaeda buys them off (by spending huge sums of advertising dollars to benefit them), is "no problem, nothing to see here folks, move along."
If the gulf was a person, an individual in their last week of life, there would be operations, surgeries, frantic attention, and all out efforts.
But, since the environment is not an individual, it is "only the environment", they want to pull the wool over our eyes, let the environment die, and bury the story.
Which is clearly suicidal.
IV. Conclusion
People from climate scientists, Pentagon Generals, the Pope, and all the way to the President of the U.S., are saying that terrorists are not the greatest danger to civilization, climate change is.
If only the environment was an individual in the last week of their life ... oh wait ... that could be the case.
A common myth is that progress is fundamentally composed of time, because time only goes in one direction.
Therefore, time is God's or Evolution's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
The post-mortem conducted on what was once the American economy has determined that inequality metastasised within our economy.
The post-mortem conducted by dreaming politicians came up with a different conclusion ("the American economy is not dead") compared to those done by others whose eyes are open to what the phrase "the American economy" means.
It does help to know what species of economy is being autopsied, I suppose, because different forms of government have different types of economy (Who Are The Job Creators?).
"The American economy" was the one that functioned to maximize or enhance "the common good" (The Common Good, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).
The way to measure the common good was to measure the degree of equality within the system.
Yes, the lifeblood of that extinct American economy was the equality that produced the common good.
Anyway, not realizing what species they were doing an autopsy on, some advocated for techniques of resurrection that do not apply to the current species of economy on the coroner's table:
In a new paper for the Institute For New Economic Thinking’s Working Group on the Political Economy of Distribution, economist Lance Taylor and his colleagues examine income inequality using new tools and models that give us a more nuanced — and frightening —picture than we’ve had before. Their simulation models show how so-called “reasonable” modifications like modest tax increases on the wealthy and boosting low wages are not going to be enough to stem the disproportionate tide of income rushing toward the rich. Taylor’s research challenges the approaches of American policy makers, the assumptions of traditional economists, and some of the
Where the money gets lost (the waste portal)
conclusions drawn by Thomas Piketty and Larry Summers. Bottom line: We’re not yet talking about the kinds of major changes needed to keep us from becoming a Downton Abbey society. [nor have we been since endless war became our foreign policy] ...
I think we need some detail to really understand what’s going on. So I look at inequality across low, middle and top groups. How does the share of income of the richest group compare to the others? Where do these groups get their income and what do they do with it? Is the middle getting squeezed? What’s driving income towards the rich?
In the U.S., if you are in the bottom 50-60 percent group of households, your main sources of income are wages and, especially for the very bottom, government transfers like Medicaid and Social Security. In the reported data, this group has a negative savings rate, meaning that people spend more than they receive. Their average wealth is close to zero.
If you’re in the “middle class” — households between the 61st and 99th percentiles — wages are your main income source, though you may get some capital income from interest and dividends. In recent decades, people in this group have been getting squeezed as income flows shift toward profits for business owners rather than wages for employees. The variation in wages has been increasing among this group as well. The middle class has positive saving rates and visible net worth, largely concentrated in housing. [Whoopie we're all gonna die]
If you’re in the top one percent group, you get income from wages, with a lot of variability among individuals. But bigger chunks come from interest and dividends along with proprietors' incomes, like lawyers’ fees and big farmers’ subsidies and sales. These people have high saving rates and substantial wealth, including equity. The top group holds one-third of total equity in the U.S. and receives large capital gains. Their share of total disposable income (not including capital gains) has jumped by around ten percentage points since the mid-1980s. This is an enormous change in shares, very unusual in historical terms. The top group’s income now exceeds three trillion dollars, one-fifth of the total.
The picture we get from making these comparisons can be captured in a ratio named for Gabriel Palma of the University of Cambridge, the “Palma ratio” which draws a contrast between the rich and poor. It tells us that in the U.S., the income per household of the top one percent compared to the bottom 40 percent has more than doubled since the 1980s, while incomes at the bottom were virtually flat. Compared to other rich countries, the ratio here is very high.
(What Piketty & Summers Don’t Tell You - INET, emphasis added). The "American economy" is dead and stinking, so, what is this remaining thing we still call an economy (More Evidence That 'Centrist' Solutions Can't Save Us - Economic Inequality)?
