One who spoke of the "new world order" and "a kinder, gentler, nation" passed away recently (President George H.W. Bush).
Our current replacement criticized President Bush for saying that.
Our current president who would rather have a "new world odor" and a meaner, despotic nation instead of a new world order, is climate change denier in chief, The "only I can do it" Don (The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15).
President Bush (RIP) was president when Dr. James Hansen, in 1988, revealed the dangerous waters ahead of us due to civilization's use of fossil fuels.
"Since we first understood climate change in the 1970s from studying Venus’ and Earth’s atmospheres in detail, humans in the developed world have been too slow, too stupid and too late."
A recent Dredd Blog post (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment) indicates that Oil-Qaeda soon thereafter began to spend mega-bucks to deceive the public about global warming induced climate change.
Historically, this is the path taken in some 26 earlier civilizations where a minority of the populace becomes demented, then follows a demented leader into tyranny:
But always TCS is primarily the population segment diagnosed as a despotic minority which the once most-often-quoted historian, Toynbee, fingered as one of the members of the trinity of extinction that he found in all civilizations that were about to become very successful at becoming extinct:
That something is the dementia that produces and ends up in suicide:
"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). There is no cure for the final symptom of that group dementia, there is only prevention by way of avoiding it altogether in the first place.
The components of that group dementia were pointed out in an encyclopedia piece concerning that historian quoted above:
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces" ...
(Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added). The show stopper, in terms of remedy, in this type of group dementia is that it is a contagious dementia.
At that time, among other things, I quoted a notable historian who at one time in modern history was the most quoted historian on some general interest subjects.
Nevertheless, he fell out of favor when he began to criticize current civilization.
After he had studied the rise and fall of twenty-six previous civilizations on Earth, he (the way I describe his criticism) began to indicate that our current civilization still had the "genes" of those civilizations that had gone down in flames ("committed suicide" or were "murdered").
And that is not good, because the picture he painted is looking more and more like an accurate portrayal of what we face now.
Here is a quote from his writings, along with a quote from Encyclopedia Britannica about his work:
"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." [Toynbee] ...
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces." [Encyclopedia Britannica]
There are several facets, manifestations, and definitions relating to the concept of nationalism.
I want to keep in line with the characteristics of nationalism that Toynbee (and others) saw as self destructive to civilizations down through time (“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson).
So, for now let's start with a description of American Nationalism as manifested in its current 21st Century characteristics:
"When the nation demands the supreme loyalty of its citizens, the freedom of the individual may be sacrificed to the welfare of the state. In this elevation of the state there is the concomitant denigration of the outsider and the temptation to advance the nation at the expense of other nations. As nationalism evolved in the nineteenth century, it assumed the ugly forms of imperialism, racism, and totalitarianism; it helped to stimulate world wars in the twentieth century."
(Defining "American" Nationalism, Encylopedia, emphasis added). Current acid tests which fit that description (to name a few) in US culture are: whether or not you believe that the USA is "exceptional," whether or not you want to keep others out via border walls, whether or not you favor halting immigration; whether or not you want to care for those with health needs, whether or not you would favor engaging in nuclear war, and whether or not you elevate national economics over the environment necessary for all life to survive,
III. The Militarism Gene
A Canadian professor who passed away last fall wrote:
The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.
Known and documented from information in the public domaine including Annual Reports of the US Congress, we have a fairly good understanding of the strucuture of US military expenditure, the network of US military bases and the shape of this US military-strategic configuration in different regions of the World.
The objective of this article is to build a summary profile of the World network of military bases, which are under the jurisdiction and/or control of the US. The spatial distribution of these military bases will be examined together with an analysis of the multibillion dollar annual cost of their activities.
In a second section of this article, Worldwide popular resistance movements directed against US military bases and their various projects will be outlined. In a further article we plan to analyze the military networks of other major nuclear superpowers including the United Kingdom, France and Russia.
I. The Military Bases
Military bases are conceived for training purposes, preparation and stockage of military equipment, used by national armies throughout the World. They are not very well known in view of the fact that they are not open to the public at large. Even though they take on different shapes, according to the military function for which they were established; they can broadly be classified under four main categories :
a) Air Force Bases (see photos 1 and 2);
b) Army or Land Bases;
c) Navy Bases and
d) Communication and Spy Bases. ...
The main sources of information on these military installations (e.g. C. Johnson, the NATO Watch Committee, the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases) reveal that the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military bases Worldwide.
In this regard, Hugh d’Andrade and Bob Wing’s 2002 Map 1 entitled “U.S. Military Troops and Bases around the World, The Cost of ‘Permanent War'”, confirms the presence of US military personnel in 156 countries.
The US Military has bases in 63 countries. Brand new military bases have been built since September 11, 2001 in seven countries.
In total, there are 255,065 US military personnel deployed Worldwide.
These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide (Gelman, J., 2007).
This suicidal state of affairs is not what the founders envisioned:
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.
"A recent study of World Health Organization data published in the American Journal of Medicine that found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by bullets lived in the United States. And the trends are only growing more dire. On average, two dozen children are shot every day in the United States, and in 2016 more youths were killed by gunfire — 1,637 — than during any previous year this millennium."
(Washington Post, emphasis added). The despotic minority won the last national election with the help of our preznit's favorite leader's operatives.
The simple argument supporting that declaration is that he is only one person.
He is an individual who is a member of a group of about 62,984,825 people who, in varying degrees (0-100), have the same group dementia.
One thing that has happened to most civilizations is something that has been fatal to each and every one of them.
That something is the dementia that produces and ends up in 'suicide':
"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). There is no cure for the final symptom of that group dementia (there is only prevention by way of avoiding it altogether in the first place).
The components of that group dementia were pointed out in an encyclopedia article concerning the historian quoted above:
"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces" ...
(Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added). The show stopper (in terms of remedy, in this type of group dementia) is that it is a contagious dementia.
Group dynamics, in this context, are contagions to those who become ideological members of a demented group within a society.
Applying that to current society, we can easily recognize the rampant nationalism and militarism in our culture.
Focusing on the third factor ("tyranny of a despotic minority") tends to be much more difficult.
So here are the numbers concerning the minority we are talking about:
Clinton
65,853,516
48.18%
Trump
62,984,825
46.09%
(Federal Election Commission). A minority consisting of some 62,984,825 people voted for President Trump (but it was a smaller subgroup within that group who cast the 304 electoral votes that actually won the election for him).
The 62,984,825 voters are a minority, and the 65,853,516 are a majority by definition (a slim 2.09% majority).
Moving on to 'despotic,' we find that in that violent insurrection oriented group sense, it is associated with despotism:
... societies which limit respect and power to specific groups have also been called despotic.
(Wikipedia). There need not be a dictator or other autocratic individual in order to meet Toynbee's description set forth in his study, especially in the sense of the description "the tyranny of a despotic minority."
In this sense, a minority means a group composed of a population less than the majority of a society (but wielding substantial directional influence).
Note that this would not be possible in the United States if it was a democracy rather than a constitutional republic with an Electoral College that can elect presidents without a majority popular vote (as in the 2016 election of Donald Trump).
To fit into the Toynbee description, all that is needed is that the group be despotic in nature, which is to be 'authoritarian' (a synonym).
This type of authoritarian despotism requires two fundamental characteristics:
Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want -- which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal. In my day, authoritarian fascist and authoritarian communist dictatorships posed the biggest threats to democracies, and eventually lost to them in wars both hot and cold. But authoritarianism itself has not disappeared, and I'm going to present the case in this book that the greatest threat to American democracy today arises from a militant authoritarianism that has become a cancer upon the nation.
(The Authoritarians, book by Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, PDF). Put those two together (leaders and followers) in a group with despotic ideology and we have a structure matching and composing a despotic group of the type that historian Toynbee wrote about.
But, in this case the despotism is "soft despotism" to wit:
"Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people. Soft despotism gives people the illusion that they are in control, when in fact they have very little influence over their government. Soft despotism breeds fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the general populace. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that this trend was avoided in America only by the "habits of the heart" of its 19th-century populace."
(Soft Despotism, Wikipedia). The way the despotism is maintained by a minority has been explained by "the father of spin" (The Ways of Bernays).
III. The Current Soft Despotism
Is Hardening Into Tribalism
The concept of tribalism is probably easier for us to understand, because it has been engineered to fruition in our time:
"But then we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures). I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other."
(America Wasn’t Built for Humans). The group psychology at work forming our minds and thoughts when tribalism prevails is enmity towards "the other."
Recent scientific papers have pointed out that our culture, and in some cases our subculture, is "remodeling" our brains all the time:
"Beyond such internal mechanisms of variation, environment-driven plasticity lends yet another layer of complexity to the brain. The brain is capable of remarkable remodeling in response to experience. Signals originating from the environment can cause both widespread and localized adaptations. At the level of individual cells, structure and function are continually changing with the environment in a dance of lifelong brain plasticity, and some experiences, such as stress or physical exercise, affect the growth, survival, and fate of newborn neurons in neurogenic regions of the brain. ... Traditionally, cells are defined by the tissue to which they belong as well as their particular functional role or morphology. This classification represents a developmental trajectory that begins early in embryogenesis and is hardwired into each cell. But other differences among cells are more subtle. Multi-dimensional analyses of gene expression and other metrics have revealed remarkable heterogeneity among cells of the same traditional “type.” Cells exist in different degrees of maturation, activation,plasticity, and morphology. Once we begin to consider all of the subtle cell-to-cell variations, it becomes clear that the number of cell types is much greater than ever imagined. In fact, it may be more appropriate to place some cells along a continuum rather than into categories at all. ... Brain cells in particular may be as unique as the people to which they belong. This genetic, molecular, and morphological diversity of the brain leads to functional variation that is likely necessary for the higher-order cognitive processes that are unique to humans. Such mosaicism may have a dark side, however. Although neuronal diversification is normal, it is possible that there is an optimal extent of diversity for brain function and that anything outside those bounds—too low or too high—may be pathological. For example, if neurons fail to function optimally in their particular role or environment, deficits could arise. Similarly, if neurons diversify and become too specialized to a given role, they may lose the plasticity required to change and function normally within a larger circuit. As researchers continue to probe the enormous complexity of the brain at the single-cell level, they will likely begin to uncover the answers to these questions—as well as those we haven’t even thought to ask yet."
(Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 5). We know more about some of those dynamics than those previous civilizations did, civilizations that went down by "suicide" (self-destruction).
Will that superior scientific knowledge we have be sufficient to make us aware of ways to avoid the suicidal fate that engulfed previous groups (which we call "civilizations") recorded in our written history?
I thought I would continue the phrase I coined during the Bush II Administration ("Bulshitistan"), however, I though it should be placed in a series rather than in random places in comments and the like.
The language spoken in Bullshitistan is designated as BS-01.5572, but in scientific circles it is called "double-speak," a language which has been studied incessantly (Propaganda Is A "Toxic Asset", quoting Professor Lutz).
II. Swamped
It is in honor of the quickest draw in the swamp:
It took former President George W. Bush 1,205 days to reach a majority disapproval rating. Former President Barack Obama crossed that threshold in 936 days.
Gallup poll of 1,500 Americans finds. As of Saturday, 51 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump.
Trump’s majority disapproval rating comes after a tumultuous first week in office that was capped off with his widely protested executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. After the president’s first day in office, millions of women and men protested his agenda in the Women’s March on Washington and sister marches around the world.
"nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled."
Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."
Currently, The ConWay is casting aspersion spells on those who are making fun of her for running off the rails to temporarily make things up in violation of the fundamental rule (BS-01.5572.Rule.001): "only things that the base will believe can be made up out of whole cloth" (Bowling Green massacre? Kellyanne Conway has taken alt facts up a notch).
One thing to note is that the Federal Court of Appeals is not paranoid about lies (It Takes A Culture To Raise A Compulsive Liar), so SOB will take that into consideration (according to the SOB rule-book, generally, the next step is to threaten SCR with an invasion).
Mass Grave, unclaimed bodies,Chicago, circa July 1995
What we may be in for in the denial administration has already been demonstrated far and wide.
Remember the heat wave of 1995 that killed ~700 elderly, infirm, weak, and homeless?
You don't?
I didn't either.
Since heat waves are typically not classified as emergencies, and for other reasons, officialdom and other elite left Chicago to go to cooler places as the heat wave approached.
Then, and until recently, the corporate press tended to covered it up.
A young graduate student then, a professor now (see video below) did his PhD thesis on the matter, and later did a book:
"In 2002, sociologist and writer Eric Klinenberg contextualized those events in a book, 'Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago,' recounting the various ways in which the city of Chicago failed its citizens during that scorching period. As Klinenberg analyzed that one July week, there were many factors in play. These included a wholesale lack of awareness of the danger of heat and the magnitude of the crisis that was unfolding, not to mention an absence of cooling centers, absurdly long emergency-response times, the blame games of city politics, poor public information ..."
(Chicago Tribune). The future is like what Oil-Qaeda (now in control of the U.S. government) was doing then:
Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.
Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain.
This is all likely to be a microcosm of the larger disaster which our Titanic civilization is headed for in the next few years (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here. 17:15 Chicago heat wave, July, 1995 (temp. index 126 deg F) 20:25 The elite, officials, business leaders left town 20:39 more than 700 people died of heat (thousands more hospitalized) 20:50 african americans, elderly, weak, sick, and poor took the hit 21:00 morgue filled up with the dead, refrigerator trucks used 24:15 mass graves, dozens of people who died never claimed 24:51 a cover up took place (no public hearings, no federal hearings) 25:10 in the report "heat wave" not mentioned, snowflake on cover 25:30 heat wave, Europe 8 yrs later, 2003, was reported as "first time ever"
This series has taken a look at the various and sundry dementias that historically infect then destroy civilizations.
Our civilization has not officially implemented ways to deal with group dementia, leaving the yeomen’s work on dementia to its manifestation in individuals; so, to the extent that there are similarities between dementia in an individual and dementia in a group, nation, society, or civilization, that has also been addressed in this series from time to time (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).
In today's post I want to address the habitat of dementia within "groups, parties, nations ... epochs" and civilizations, a la Nietzsche (“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche).
II. What Is Habitat?
In both British English and American English there can be several meanings given to a word.
So, I often make an attempt to isolate a particular word's meaning to a particular context.
That is probably especially needed in the context of a discussion about "the habitat of dementia."
Seeing as how 'dementia' has been defined in this series, let's define "habitat."
I want to use the word 'habitat' with an expansive meaning, so let's start with:
"A habitat is made up of physical factors such as soil, moisture, range of temperature, and availability of light as well as biotic factors such as the availability of food ..."
(Wikipedia). The "physical factors" (dirt, water, temperature, light) in this sense are "abiotic", and they are in contrast to the "biotic" factors:
A fair definition of Biology is:
... the science of life or living matter in all its forms and phenomena, especially with reference to origin, growth, reproduction, structure, and behavior.
(Dictionary, emphasis added). A fair definition of Abiology, then, ought to be:
... the science of non-life or non-living matter in all its forms and phenomena, especially with reference to origin, growth, reproduction, structure, and behavior.
(see e.g. abiological). One problem or question that biologists struggle with is the art of defining life (Erwin Schrodinger, PDF), but, to be sure that arises most often inside the twilight-zone between the abiotic and the biotic realms.
(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 27). For those who would take umbrage at this Dredd Blog explanation, relax, there are other sources for your reading comfort:
Habitats consist of both the biotic and abiotic factors found in the environment. Biotic factors are living things, while abiotic factors are nonliving things.
Let's begin to answer the question with a look at some specialized literature:
"The meaning of the term civilization has changed several times during its history, and even today it is used in several ways.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries CE, it was widely believed among European scholars that all human communities were involved in a process of straightforward progression by which the conditions of a society were gradually improving. As part of these changes, it was believed, societies experienced different stages: savagery, barbarism and, finally, civilization."
[Establishment social science was of that mindset too: "Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races [Chuck was a tad-bit racist eh?] will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." - Charles Darwin (1881); cf. "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)" -Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 28]
"Civilization, in this context, was understood as the last stop in the long journey of human society. The different stages of this social evolution were equated to specific human communities: Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities were considered part of the savagery stage, Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers as part of the barbarism stage, and finally Bronze Age urban communities (particularly those in the Near East) were considered an early phase of the civilized world. Today, this approach is no longer valid since it is linked to an attitude of cultural superiority, by which human communities which are not yet "civilized" are seen as somehow inferior.
In everyday conversation, there is a tendency to use the word "civilization" to refer to a type of society that displays a set of moral values, such as respect for human rights or a compassionate attitude for the sick and the elderly. This can be problematic, since moral values are inevitably one-sided and ethnocentric. A behaviour considered "civilized" by a particular culture may be judged senseless or even seen with horror by another culture. History records an abundant number of examples of this issue. A famous one is reported by Herodotus, who describes the conflicting funerary practices of a group of Greeks, who cremated their dead, and the Indians known as the Kallatiai, who ate their dead:
During his reign, Darius summoned the Hellenes at his court and asked them how much money they would accept for eating the bodies of their dead fathers. They answered that they would not do that for any amount of money. Later Darius summoned some Indians called Kallatiai, who do eat their parents. [...], he [Darius] asked the Indians how much money they would accept to burn the bodies of their dead fathers. They responded with an outcry, ordering him to shut his mouth lest he offended the gods. Well, then, that is how people think, and so it seems to me that Pindar was right when he said in his poetry that custom is king of all (Herodotus 3.38.3-4)."
In another sense of history, civilization is merely a group entity which comes to an end by suicide or murder, but much more frequently by the former (A Study of History, Toynbee).
In another sense we could call it "the largest form of a human group."
IV. The Habitat of Cultural Dementia Within Civilization
The early stages of social dementia resemble being lost in, of all places, space.
In other words, not knowing where we are - lost - even though we have been schooled and given a "YAH" map (You Are Here).
We hear of individuals walking around lost, but that is actually the legacy of civilizations that have come and gone too.
In the current presidential elections in various countries, right wing extremism is challenging the status quo.
In the U.S. version, one candidate does not know were we are in terms of believing that the environment, the habitat writ large, can't be harmed.
The other is like the current president, who talks like a showman but acts like the worst of the worst, killing entire nations for their oil as those who went before did (The Fleets & Terrorism Follow The Oil - 6).
Cultural dementia hides within the institutions of civilization, within the literature, within the educational system, within the government, within the military, and especially within the corporate media.
The study of that dynamic, that generating of ignorance, is being done within the (most likely) soon-to-be-doomed discipline of Agnotology (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17).
These ignorance generators within society produce what the institutions perpetuate in an epigenetic dynamism we vaguely see and describe as "the status quo."
Economically, it plays out as an economy morphing into a plutonomy within a wartocracy, i.e. neo-feudalism (American Feudalism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).
Have you wondered why the police in the cities of America are now, and have in the past been supplied with military equipment (Will The Military Become The Police?, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) ?
One hypothesis is that totalitarianism is a lot cheaper than a bazillion spies who are difficult to keep track of:
* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
The dictionaries don't vary much when they define 'commentariat':
"All the pundits and commentators of the news media collectively" - Wictionary; "a group of powerful and influential commentators" - Miriam-Webster; "Members of the news media considered as a class" - Oxford; "the journalists and broadcasters who analyse and comment on current affairs" - Free Dictionary; "the group of people who regularly write about subjects in the news or discuss them on television" - Macmillan; "the journalists and broadcasters who analyse and comment on current affairs" - Collins; "the journalists and broadcasters who analyse and comment on current affairs" - Dictionary.Com.
Which is now a worldwide system of damage, yes, a system of automated damage which they choose to either ignore or cover up on behalf of their cohorts in the epigovernment (Epigovernment: The New Model - 11).
It is a damaging system which they have greatly helped to bring about by way of, among other things, deliberate geoengineering of the flow of information through "the innertubes" (MOMCOM 2.0).
And boy howdy, they are by now consummate deceivers:
"Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news
"Hurricane Patricia Big Nuthin"
packages. This paper demonstrates that consistent adherence to interacting journalistic norms has contributed to impediments in the coverage of anthropogenic climate change science. Through analysis of US newspaper and television coverage of human contributions to climate change from 1988 through 2004, this paper finds that adherence to first-order journalistic norms – personalization, dramatization, and novelty – significantly influence the employment of second-order norms – authority-order and balance – and that this has led to informationally deficient mass media coverage of this crucial issue. By critically scrutinizing US print and television media as a ‘public arena,’ we improve understanding of how journalistic activities have shaped interactions at the interface with climate science, policy and the public."
III. This Dredd Blog Series Will Expose Their Mythical Memes
I intend to go through the memes which they promulgate, the myths they perpetuate, and the distortions which they originate.
I intend to do that one, two, or three myths at a time per post.
For example:
In this series I have been pointing out mythological memes that are promoted by main stream media (McTell News) as science and as news, even though they are neither.
The news media is not giving much true information about the President's climate change trip to Alaska.
After all, there are the real news makers, the Kardasians, Trump, and shootings, so how can they talk about the President's first-time-in-history-trip for any president to the Arctic (National Geographic) ? ...
Like most of us, the President is unaware of the nature of climate change, that is, the part of the story in the sea level change (SLC) category.
Why?
For one thing, deliberate suppression of the information.
For another, reality is scary as hell, "so don't tell me what I don't want to hear."
Sea level fall (SLF) is unheard of.
Since I found out about it, a short while ago, I have been posting about it.
Some bloggers have been asking me to "stop with the obsession already."
Yeah, right, my reality obsession bothers them.
Too bad, on Dredd Blog reality gets first place, junk science and similar rubbish gets last place.
(False Climate Change Meme Infects The President - 2, emphasis added). Would you please show me McTell News articles that talk about SLF caused by the burning of fossil fuels which in turn causes global warming?
I mean articles in McTell News since 1888 when scientist Woodward first published a scientific paper in a journal:
To our knowledge, Woodward (1888) was the first to demonstrate that the rapid melting of an ice sheet would lead to a geographically variable sea level change. Woodward (1888) assumed a rigid, non-rotating Earth, and therefore self-gravitation of the surface load was the only contributor to the predicted departure from a geographically uniform (i.e. eustatic) sea level rise. This departure was large and counter-intuitive. Specifically, sea level was predicted to fall within ∼2000 km of a melting ice sheet, and to rise with progressively higher amplitude at greater distances. The physics governing this redistribution is straightforward.
(Mitrovica Team, quoted @ On the West Side of Zero, emphasis added). Again, show me one McTell News article that talks accurately about global warming induced SLF would you?
IV. Myth Number One
Let's get down to business, then, and start with "thermal expansion."
It is touted as the original cause of sea level change up until a few years ago.
That is because the commentariat did not want to know about, and was therefore unaware of, among other things the existence of "ghost-water" (The Ghost-Water Constant, 2, 3).
Thermal expansion in the ocean can not and does not cause SLF.
I mean SLF as recorded in many tide gauge station records, some going as far back as more than two centuries (ibid).
Nor does thermal expansion, or any other form of SLC for that matter, happen uniformly.
Thermal expansion happens more like a "warm water iceberg" in the sense of staying together in a warm water area within a larger cold water area:
In one sense, it's [El Niño is] like an iceberg; most of it is submerged, but part of it sticks out above the sea's surface, as the wedge floats in the surrounding ocean. Partly because warm water is less dense than cool water, and also partly because El Niño waters are less salty than normal seawater. (It's always raining over an El Niño, and the rainwater dilutes the sea.) Both of these conditions contribute to buoyancy. A sharp temperature and density change—called the thermocline—floats about 100 meters below the surface, and marks the bottom of this warm "iceberg." The top layer of water may protrude 150 or more centimeters above sea level. This isn't so hard to picture if you think about tides, which also pile water up above sea level.
(On The Origin of the Sea-level Seesaw - 2, quoting NOVA @ PBS). Thermal expansion in the vast ocean is not at all like thermal expansion in a small beaker warmed by a Bunsen Burner.
V. Conclusion For Today
I will continue to name individual members of the commentariat, and their myths as this series proceeds.
In the mean time, as regular readers know, you can go to the Series Posts tab at the top of this page to read more of this type of information in posts listed under the SEA LEVEL CHANGE headings on that page.
