During the Algerian war, the terrorists promulgated an order which with variations would provide the backbone doctrine for information warfare into the 21st century. Dr. Cori Dauber, the author of the SSI monograph “The YouTube War: Fighting in a World of Cameras in Every Cell Phone and Photoshop on Every Computer” describes the ground zero of the modern information Jihad.
The Algerians’ “Directive Number Nine” argued that it was better to kill one man where the American press would hear of it than nine where no one would find out. What Khattab realized was that technology had finally put into the terrorists’ reach the ability to cut out the middleman—the Western reporter.
Information warfare, of which terrorism is a subset, consists of the operational art of subordinating actual physical effects to their propaganda impact. The actual physical damage counts for less than the memetic effect. The picture of the murder of an unimportant election worker on Haifa Street, Baghdad in 2004, for which an Associated Press photographer received a Pulitzer Prize was a textbook case. A low ranking bureaucrat was murdered but a high level narrative was established. It was for the insurgents, more than a fair trade. The murder on Haifa street also cemented its corrollary: the identity of the victim doesn’t really matter. Anyone will do. What counts is the picture. And in that brace of propositions lies 95% of terrorism. The image on Haifa street was altered in the old-fashioned way. There are two ways to “Photoshop” an image: digitally and the secondly by controlling its composition like a Hollywood director. See Directive Number 9.
Information warfare is so important that Dauber suggests that on the battlefield the priority of the combat soldier and combat cameraman have been reversed. No longer is it the job of the cameraman to support the military effort, it is the role of the military arm to set up the picture for the cameraman.
Today even the smallest terrorist or insurgent group active in the Islamist movement, certainly those in the combat theaters of Afghanistan and Iraq, will have a specific position within the organization for the person whose responsibility is “media affairs”—in this they mirror al-Qaeda itself — but this is invariably one of the highest ranking posts, obviously seen as a job of great importance and authority.
An insurgent infantryman is expendable. An auteur — ah! that is something else. And the cost of production has been declining inversely with Moore’s Law. Jim Gray of Microsoft (still missing at sea) noted that ordinary individuals now have access to vast computational power and database access over the network. It’s capability now allows them, for example, to use Google Earth to plan operations. Dauber describes what raiders found one one computer in Iraq.
The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks, and where lightly armored land rovers are parked. Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp’s precise longitude and latitude.
This planning information would have cost literally millions only a decade before. Today it is nearly free. But even without the network, modern computing has enabled the information warrior in ways that are as revolutionary as the Gutenberg Press. Gray might have been describing video collection and editing when he wrote: “the ideal mobile task is stateless (no database or database access), has a tiny network input and output, and has huge computational demand.”
Between June and roughly November 2007 (in other words, roughly the period corresponding to the surge of additional forces to Baghdad), American forces captured and destroyed eight media labs belonging to al-Qaeda in Iraq. Two were in Baghdad, two were in Mosul, one in Diyala near Baquba, one in Samarra, and one in Garma. In the eight labs, they found a total of 23 terabytes of material that had not yet been uploaded to the web.
One of the underappreciated aspects of the information revolution is how the MSM has slowly been denegirated from a fact-finder to a mere distribution channel. The 23 terabytes of data was gold looking for a market. As Dauber notes, “American media outlets now depend on the terrorists and insurgents for content” and in one case ABC News almost used a script written by the Islamic Army of Iraq as the basis for one of its stories.
Of course, not only Islamic insurgents but every political movement has tried to use information warfare — whatever they may have chosen to call it — for their own ends. Adolpf Hitler claimed it was possible to sell a complete falsehood, provided it was repeated often enough. In fact, the bigger the lie, the more easily sold because no one would believe anyone would have the effrontery to prevaricate on so collossal a scale.Wikipedia quotes Mein Kampf.
in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation … it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
Hitler suggests that the brotherhood of “expert liars” know certain tricks in common. It is perhaps suggestive that the global warmists should suspect the Russians of hacking the computer files at the CRU. The closed CRU building at the University of East Anglia and the blank face of a nondescript building in the formerly closed city of Tomsky may look at each with understanding. One set of information warriors would naturally suspect another. The Independent reports:
The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.
The leaked emails, which claimed to provide evidence that the unit’s head, Professor Phil Jones, colluded with colleagues to manipulate data and hide “unhelpful” research from critics of climate change science, were originally posted on a server in the Siberian city of Tomsk, at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business.
The truth is often a set of sparks adrift on a sea of darkness. Who knew that al-Qaida killed eight times more Muslims than non-Muslims? You wouldn’t know if al-Qaeda could help it. Perhaps one of the reasons for the growing skepticism surrounding the assertion of anthropogenic global warming is that the key elements of the theme have emerged from a single closely linked group of climatologists. Climategate, as the revelation of emails from the CRU has come to be called derives its force the topology of the information source. Information warriors have realized Khattab’s dream. They have interposed themselves into the public process of knowing. Journalism has to manage information — using metrics like lineage, collateral and validation — in ways that it is presently unaccustomed to. Maybe the best schools of future journalism will be at Caltech and MIT.
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the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it
That trace for those who “think that there may be some other explanation” is called “The Audacity of Hope.”
Journalism began to die when the rewards for technical expertise in managing delivery became greater than those for providing accurate meaningful content. This holds across all media. The high cost and high skill model of traditional media is reinforced by their craft union traditions. In movies we now have craftsmen who can perform miracles with CGI but they don’t have a story to tell that anyone cares to pay for. The ideal for the big footprint media is a Spielberg or better yet the Producer/Director in “Wag the Dog“, who could manage the wizadry while remembering how to tug the heartstrings.
Experts who can do both are increasingly rare. In fact even as the level of technical craftsmanship at the professional level has increased the access of low cost competition by amateurs has expanded. This has placed the professionals in a trap. Their market share is shrinking and they no longer have the less mechanical skills that would allow them to connect to the audience. No wonder they identify with the image of the polar bear on the melting iceberg.
Excellent observations. I’d only add that, actually, the Russian secret service angle is easily accommodated to the whistleblower line: I read in one article – the Telegraph’s? – that University of East Anglia aggressively sought Russian students, perhaps as some sort of post-Cold War exchange. I believe the article referred to some 30+ Russian national students at the University. And everyone knows the story of the Cambridge 5, to say nothing of Oleg Kalugin’s experience at Columbia University…
Wretchard: you nail things exactly here, and also link them powerfully. The CRU cabal forms a node in a network to generate and propagate “authoritative narratives” in their war. And it is a war, in the sense that it seeks to subjugate others by force (laws to strip wealth and limit action). One of the more powerful analyses of the ClimateGate emails was a network diagram showing who was linking with whom.
Regarding the “big lie” it makes psychological sense that we would assign more “truth” value to larger-scale statements. They are, after all, “meta,” not really statements about precise aspects of reality that can be tested yes/no, and more like narratives where some shreds of evidence can be attached opportunistically or where the narrative (which is inherently dynamic) can evolve to “heal” the contradictions.
The “big lie” also scales differently for different areas of reality. If the lie concerns what the average person knows, then it has to be a real whopper to generate that credulous pause. But if it concerns the esoteric, the near-magical realms of high technology and “science,” then it can be launched at smaller scale and grow from there. For a long time these people have traded on their status as “scientists.” Which they were, in the same way that Bernie Madoff was an investment manager.
Not sure what we do about it, but this is a very rich topic. Thanks for this, and for all your works.
If you haven’t already, take a look at an excellent forensic analysis of FOIA2009.zip at Watts Up With That:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/07/comprhensive-network-analysis-shows-climategate-likely-to-be-a-leak/#more-13821
stephen,
What poetic justice. The suggestion is that the CRU collected all the dirty linen in one place, the better to hide it. They forgot the corollary to the rule: the better to steal it. LOL.
December 7 is a good time to remember that it was because they feared saboteurs at Pearl Harbor that they parked all the aircraft in the middle of the runaway. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
This has nothing to do with the Algerian war or with Directive #9. It has to do with an earlier war, one that started for us 68 years ago today at Pearl Harbor. Too many Americans today have no conception of what went on that day, and those who do are a vanishing breed. Most of us here at Belmont Club remember, but for far too many of our countrymen today is just another day. The following was posted today on my blog under the title Battleship Row.
Guts and valor are words not usually associated with inanimate objects, but ships are not inanimate objects. Ships are live, living things. Ships, as well as men, can be tough and resilient. Such were the ships of Battleship Row.
0755 SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941
A quiet, peacetime Sunday morning. Seven battleships swung gently at their moorings; Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and California. Pacific Fleet flagship Pennsylvania was in drydock. When the attack came, half their crews were ashore, and most of the officers. None had steam up, for it was Sunday, and all was at peace. Except Nevada. Nevada had steam. Nevada could move. At the height of the attack, with burning and exploding ships all around her, already severely hurt by a torpedo to her port side, Nevada, under Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, senior officer aboard, broke out her big battle ensign and stood down the channel, heading for the open sea. Sailors on the burning ships cheered and threw their caps in the air, but Nevada’s gallant sortie was short lived. Five Japanese dive bombers laid her low, beaching her.
The battleships were ultimately raised and rebuilt, those that were salvageable. They rejoined the fleet, but the war had passed them by. It was a carrier war now, and the World War 1 era battleships were too slow, could not keep up with the fast carriers. They were relegated to fire support, and accompanied the Marines in their march across the Pacific, bombarding the beaches, their 14 and 16 inch guns trained on palm trees instead of dreadnoughts, declared unfit to do the job for which they were built. Until Surigao.
SURIGAO STRAIT, 0351 TO 0409 hours, 25 OCTOBER 1944
Vice Admiral Nishimura, with a force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, was heading for the Leyte beaches and the soft-skinned, vulnerable transports, still loaded with troops. Standing across his path was Admiral Oldendorf, and six old fire support battleships, all but Maryland and Mississippi on Battleship Row that Sunday morning in December. The other four were California, Tennessee, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Oldendorf put his weary old battleships in line ahead, a Battle Line, as battleships had fought since the 17th century, and waited for Nishimura. At 0351 the big guns lit the sky. Oldendorf brought his big ships across the Japanese front, crossing the T, the dream of every admiral down the centuries, doing to the Japanese what Togo had done to the Russians at Tsushima nearly forty years earlier. The Japanese fought back, but when Nishimura turned away his battleships were gone, along with most of his heavy cruisers.
Surigao was the last battleship to battleship action of WWII, and very likely the last big gun surface action battleship fight the world is likely to see, and it was fought by ships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor and returned to life. Ships, like men, can be judged by their deeds, and some, like the ships of Battleship Row, by their sheer stubbornness, their refusal easily to die. Ships, like men, are alive, and though it took the ships of Battleship Row almost three years, they gained their revenge in the only way they knew how, with their guns.
Torn by bombs, wracked by fire
They settled slowly to the harbor floor
Breathing their last, or so some thought
But not they
Rising, they joined their kind
Who scorned them now
As the young scorn the old
The slow
They did their job
Plodding the vastness of the central sea
Island to island
A supporting cast
Gaining no praise
No, that was for the young
The swift
The carriers
Until
Until
That blessed night
When called upon to be themselves
They were
Themselves and more
One of the underappreciated aspects of the information revolution is how the MSM has slowly been denigrated from a fact-finder to a mere distribution channel.
Oh, I don’t think that’s how they see it – they have indeed gotten out of the business of “facts”, but only because they realize facts are cheap – or in any case, impossible to own! It’s their analysis and summary and advocacy that are unique. Brand over content. Sizzle over steak. And for weird anthropological reasons, their analysis all tends to Marxism … for which it turns out there is small market. No wonder it seems that nothing remains but the channel!
Is propaganda more important than military strength? I dunno. Not really. Apples and oranges. Anyway, if it is, I don’t see it as new, and maybe if anything less important now than fifty or two thousand years ago. Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come, and all that. We may be more cynical now about any information offensive – at least, we ought to be. In fact, I think we are, to our own detriment in some cases, when we have trouble believing even the truth – as in the CRU frauds. But then, Hitler told us that seventy years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.
Walt at#6: as an old Coastie whose ship has long been decommissioned, I found a tear for your recognition of a warship as a living being. I would never wish another a “Happy Pearl Harbor Day”, but I hope yours was a life-affirming interlude…
A previous post indicated that Russia had a veritable mountain of “carbon credits” that could inundate the world markets in this bogus currency, but the CRU “hack” is a product of the Russian government? What’s wrong with this picture? Fonman
“All your techniques are belong to us.”
Is that person at the demonstration talking into a cell phone or are they broadcasting live video/audio onto the net.
So the security is too good for us to take the third floor directly, can we access the roof from a neighboring building and burn down to it?
Information warfare, of which terrorism is a subset, consists of the operational art of subordinating actual physical effects to their propaganda impact.
That’s a definition I had never before seen.
Defining Information Warfare proved to be so difficult that the Americans gave up and quit using the term altogether as of Joint Publication 3-13, Information Operations, 13 February 2006.
Terrorism is not a subset of Information Warfare, but rather Propaganda of the Deed, and Propaganda is a Psychological Operation.
“The murder of an unimportant election worker on Haifa Street, Baghdad in 2004, for which an Associated Press photographer received a Pulitzer Prize was a textbook case.”
Surely you didn’t mean to say that he received a Pulitzer Prize for the murder. That wouldn’t be a very nice thing to say at all.
LTEC,
Oops. Fixed. Thanks for spotting it.
Wretchard wrote: Information warfare is so important that Dauber suggests that on the battlefield the priority of the combat soldier and combat cameraman have been reversed. No longer is it the job of the cameraman to support the military effort, it is the role of the military arm to set up the picture for the cameraman.
This sounds a lot like Baudrillard’s description of the Iraq War. If it is true, then it can only mean that media technology will soon be abandoned as irrelevant; for in the world of objective facts, at the place where the rubber meets the road, the soldier remains much more important on the battlefield than the camera guy. Soldiers destroy people, places, and things; soldiers build bridges and clear neighborhoods; soldiers do stuff. Camera guys only get in the way and, at worst, distract men from their mission. Ultimately war is an action, not a stage performance. Those who forget that will no doubt adorn their enemy’s gallows with great pathos.
Human beings aren’t infinitely gullible, and you can only tug on heartstring so many times before they snap. You can propagandize and photoshop your way to success only so many times before people will begin to ignore the entire medium of communication. I suspect that after a decade or so, the electronic media will have the same supreme and irrelevant grandeur as the Temple of Saturn – a ruined altar to a dead god. This essentially epistemic revolution will result in people using their own eyes, ears, knowledge, and reason to establish thier fact base. The curtain is drawing on the world of “public” facts, and consequently of public power (the kind that, mediated by shared perceptions, is capable of organizing the manpower of entire nations into a tool to be disposed of as some ruling personality somewhere or other sees fit). In its place will be a world of private facts, private ambitions, private Caesars, who are powerful precisely because they have rediscovered how to do stuff. This indeed is the liar’s comeuppance. Anthing not rooted in reality ultimately cannot stand, and reality is about to reassert itself with a vengeance.
And no, the revolution will not be televised.
Terrorism is really an information war disguised as a military conflict
The Counterrevolution Will Be Twittered
Actually, I think you had it right the first time. I hoped it wasn’t a mistake.
What Is Propaganda?
The curtain is drawing on the world of “public” facts, and consequently of public power (the kind that, mediated by shared perceptions, is capable of organizing the manpower of entire nations into a tool to be disposed of as some ruling personality somewhere or other sees fit). In its place will be a world of private facts, private ambitions, private Caesars, who are powerful precisely because they have rediscovered how to do stuff. This indeed is the liar’s comeuppance. Anthing not rooted in reality ultimately cannot stand, and reality is about to reassert itself with a vengeance.
A developer said that ideally a system should know the answer to a question before you ask it. You prebuild things, keep them in cache. When people ask for it, you already have it in your hand. What happens when we clear the cache or the pre-built table? What happens when everbody, or most everybody has to run fresh queries over trusted processes because the public facts are no longer good enough; what happens when we clear the common cache? The definition of what constitutes a trusted process will be really interesting. Maybe the growth industry of the next ten years.
I think public facts (the general answer) will continue to be important where there’s little or no controversy. We don’t need to rethink the number of planets in the solar system. It’s in the matter of critical things that public facts no longer answer to the need. Or at least are in need of improvement.
With the equipment coming online the soldier will be a recorder and broadcaster of events.
Sooner or later or maybe even now, the military intelligence groups will know not only what a “hostile” reporter is doing but will have him predicted by Operation Analysis computation like any other terrorist enemy.
This article and comments are some of the smartest and most critical we have seen recently.
Information warfare is with us whether we like or not. It is worse because our media is so perverted that it knowingly accepts and protects frauds.
The KGB types in Russia are master manipulators and can thrive in this environment. The release of the CRU emails and data may have been an op of theirs. The truth can be a very sharp weapon.
toad,
the soldier will be a recorder and broadcaster of events
Law Enforcement Officers now ride around with video cameras to record what they say. In the worst case it can be used as evidence for when an officer was killed during a traffic stop. Officers get trained, and need more formal training, in how to articulate their reasoning for what they did. Saying “I am an experienced professional and it didn’t feel right” is no longer good enough. Under the Obama-Holder upside down world of Miranda warnings for what should be called Unlawful Combatants members of the armed forces may have to travel with video cameras. Getting your version out is important, as the Israelis have learned.
probably that the german general, who was “fired” out for his incapacity of managing a clear response for the events that happened recently in Afghanistan, wasn’t trained in reasoning, he gave the bad responses. I wonder what kind of recuperation of this events, and of this general eviction, did the Talibans
But it did work out in Germany, people want to get out this nightmare
Also a recent poll in France says that 82% of the french population want to get out too
I just watched the ABC Evening News coverage of the Copenhagen Madoff Memorial Climate Conference, and the EPA sneaking in unilateral control over CO2 by lumping it with actual polluting gasses.
December 7, 2009 – a day that will live in infamy.*
I nominate today as the official start of The New Dark Ages, in which hysteria and scientistic fraud have taken the reins of public life. Thanks, 0bambus.
*I think Rush already said as much this morning, hat tip.
(no this is not “giving science a bad name”, I refuse to concede that, what this is is a bunch of false claims to be scientific by ignorant, preening jackasses – they got the character “dickless” completely down in Ghostbusters twenty years ago.)
So, is this post OT, or at least related to the previous/alternate subject of global warming? Not really. It is about what is information and what is propaganda, what is fact and what is narrative, and the MSM giving us crap and caring nothing for matters of fact. Well OK, that, and a reversion to the other topic, too.
The truth will set you free. Dead is a subset of free.
The massive amounts of information twittered, youtubed and uplinked during the Iranian elections/protests was the raw material for a dedicated group of “cooks”. If the chef is good and well connected he can control/create the meme on the fly. I hope our side is actively training such chefs. This reminded me of the Mr. Universe character in Serenity the movie.
If I may, same day, different time zone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hong_Kong
Heyyoukids
MIT researchers locate all 10 DARPA balloons in barely 9 hours
Mon Dec 7, 2009 12:06PM EST
The 10 red weather balloons were scattered across the country this past Saturday, and the first team to send in the correct locations for all 10 balloons was in line for a $40,000 prize. So, how did the MIT team take the day so quickly?
Richard, thanks for this dazzling, breathtaking combination of ideas.
Re: #6
Walt, that was a beautiful poem, a true work of art for those of us who revere those ships. God bless our soldiers, sailors, and Marines.
What the MIT team did in principle was create a market for original facts. It doesn’t have to be built on a social networking system; that’s the just transport layer. But the choice was a shrewd one. The social networking systems had a modicum of trust between the nodes. That meant that the requests, passed down and passed up had a trust value along the edges. And maybe it didn’t even matter in the end that the trust along the edges were individually weak because you could collaterally confirm a suspicion by interating up and down. Resample, Bayesian update. Once you suspected the presence of a red balloon, then you could mobilize the nodes downard to prosecute the search, tighter and tighter till you found it. The P-3 sonobuoys and their interaction with the big acoustic arrays worked the same way, or so I read in the old copies of Proceedings. Localize and prosecute.
In a way the MIT team solved the next generation news model from the ground up. Simple wasn’t it? The real problem has always been to find a structure of micro-rewards that will pay the freight at lower levels. Not everyone has big reward monies to play with. In reality we don’t have nine red balloons to find when writing a story, we have ninety harder and difficult to distinguish facts to find. But the principle is the same.
So why can’t government or the media do it? Someone explained to me that most institutions are built by people who understood the way things worked. The architects, the old ones knew what they were doing. But over time, those who followed after them were never forced to think things through from first principles. What they in place of understanding was procedure. Over time every institution has the tendency to decay into a state called management by ceremony. You ticked the boxes. The hierophants eventually confuse procedure with actually doing something. This is why a lot emphasis is placed on process. Process is what we do when we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. And then you have the situation where things constantly get better until the moment everything collapses. See Fannie Mae. Sarbanes Oxley makes you answer every question except one: does it make business sense? Maybe the MSM is now nearly completely populated by people performing the ceremony of the news business. They do things thus because they’ve always been done thus. It’s pointless, but who cares?
The MIT experiment shows the result of thinking the problem through from first principles. But don’t expect the NYT to do it. They’re irretrievably stuck in the quagmire of ceremony.
Adolph Hitler: “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The best way to deal with lies is to, with courage, tell the truth. For the fool or the coward there remain two ways for political lies to be accepted; through the sanity of stupidity or the insanity of intellegence:
“The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird… Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity.” George Orwell, 1984
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… His (Winston Smith’s) mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of Doublethink; to know and not to know; to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies; to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic; to repudiate morality while laying claim to it; to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane.” George Orwell, 1984
Baghdad -2,Mosul -2, Diala -1, Samarra -1, Garma -1. The sum of all these is 7, not 8. Is this an example of the Big Lie ?
Wasn’t the photographer that took the Pulizer pic of the election worker in Baghdad in 2004 getting murdered tipped off about what was to come, and that he was in position? Sounds like an accomplice to murder to me. W, you did have it right the first time.
Over time every institution has the tendency to decay into a state called management by ceremony. The hierophants eventually confuse procedure with actually doing something.
I heard years ago, that the difference between the boomers like me, and the gen-x’rs that followed, is that boomers believed in results, management by objective, while the x’r believed in “roles not goals”.
Sound like any POTUS you know?
W: “One of the underappreciated aspects of the information revolution is how the MSM has slowly been denegirated from a fact-finder to a mere distribution channel.”
The Russian press became a mere distribution channel for the Communist Party. It follows that:
Pravda & Izvestia / Soviet Communist Party = MSM / American Democrat Party
“The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses… When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward – or go back. He who now talks about the “freedom of the press” goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.” Vladimir Lenin
W: “Someone explained to me that most institutions are built by people who understood the way things worked. The architects, the old ones knew what they were doing. But over time, those who followed after them were never forced to think things through from first principles. What they (had) in place of understanding was procedure.”
I read a book on education during Graduate School which discussed the tendency of some to focus on answers to problems rather than the problem its self; these people were described by the author as “answer grabbers.” I’ve never forgotten that little book, and on occasion in the past I reminded my kids that the correct answer to a problem is important, but that there is always one thing more important: understanding the problem; if necessary through intellectual struggle.
“Process is what we do when we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. ” -W
For some reason, that really made me laugh. I am in the middle of re-writing our company’s quality manuals to conform with ISO 9001/2008. My brane hurtz.
Speaking of information; there’s too much noise to signal, too much crap thrown up against the wall that doesn’t stick, and way too much shit and not enough shinola.
In short, despite the wonders of the “Information Age”, it feels like people are a lot stupider and more ignorant than ever (including me). Our minds and awareness are being drowned in a sea of useless and contradictory information. Not knowledge (signal), but noise (information).
So in times of strife and insecurity like this, people tend to bitterly cling to beliefs, no wonder how trite and fictional.
Like AGW. CO2 is dangerous stuff; watch out!!
The North Vietnamese and other communists have already proven that the US is vulnerable to asymmetrical information distribution. They had pretty tight control, largely because there were no electronic information networks. It worked pretty well for them; well, their elites, at least.
It is amusing to me that the Chinese also have pretty tight control over information distribution within China, and although they did not put up a good show against the Vietnamese in their little war back in ’89 (or whenever) I suspect that things have changed greatly now …
We live in interesting times.
As a technical nit to pick: don’t jump to the conclusion that soldiers will be the cameramen and the reporters. We may have reached the point where finding the information is at commodity pricing, but Grey was right: the best mobile apps require no state and no network.
Right now, the network is the problem. It is just not that easy to get gigs and teras of data out of the hands of soldies and up to anyone else. It’s still sneakernet(or flippernet) out of the Straits of Hormuz. Why? because the networks can’t support the amount of data, and putting up an antenna at your current location to send it is a big flashing “shoot me now” sign.
We still need the photoshop equivalent. In a market society, tracking all of the transactions is painful. that’s why it’s nice to have a price: only takes a byte or two to summarize. The boots on the ground are going to have to make value judgments on the data. They are going to have to assign prices, video unseen. And that price, combined with Their trust value is what is going to seal the deal. If you trust their prices, you’ll know what’s valuable.
But there will be much arbitrage as the same video is valued differently by the various parties, who would play different PSYOPs with it.
wretchard (#29), you read Proceedings? Awesome!
It is just not that easy to get gigs and teras of data out of the hands of soldies and up to anyone else. It’s still sneakernet(or flippernet) out of the Straits of Hormuz. Why? because the networks can’t support the amount of data, and putting up an antenna at your current location to send it is a big flashing “shoot me now” sign.
Back in the day when information moved at the speed of sailing ship there was so much latency in the system that the men on the spot had to act on the basis of their own data stores which paradoxically may have been greater than that available to people higher up in our networked age. Nelson could put his blind eye to the telescope and win the battle. Even today the cost of communication means we cannot always “be there” in place of someone else and it’s often easier to empower that person to think and act rather than act in his stead. Gray, whose numbers are getting old now observed that the following economics applied:
= 1 $
≈ 1 GB sent over the WAN
≈ 10 Tops (tera cpu operations)
≈ 8 hours of cpu time
≈ 1 GB disk space
≈ 10 M database accesses
≈ 10 TB of disk bandwidth
≈ 10 TB of LAN bandwidth
which implies that when you have to make a good call quickly you are better off in many cases doing it with the data and thinking power that you have on the spot and that is easier to increase that relative to the other constraints. But this runs directly contrary to our insatiable desire for layers of process and to the requirements of ceremony. It requires real delegation of authority and by implication it means giving it up at the center. It also means the willingness to make mistakes and the availability of people who can think — really think — on the spot. But in an environment where central authority is guarded like the Crown Jewels and error is literally criminal or at least politically fatal then you impose so much of a process load on the whole shebang that no one is ever to blame. Maybe nothing ever gets done either but that’s a feature and not a bug in the game of CYA.
Fonman@8 makes a great point. With carbon redits comming out the wazoo what movtive would the Russian goverment have to out the folks at CRU? On the contrary they shold want to promote this man made global warming hooey.
The BBC reportedly had this info for weeks and sat on it. I think it was leaked from th inside not stolen. There is someone at CRU who had a conscience. This was only hacked in the sense that someone left the key on the table and then excused themslves from the room.
I’m with Matt Beck on this one. Thought experiement: The combat soldier and the combat cameraman shoot each other. Which one walks away to shoot another day?
Or just go back to Adolph Hitler and his propaganda machine. It worked, for a while. Then he found himself in a bunker with Russian combat soldiers closing in. Saddam had Badgad Bob, and ended up being hanged badly, though I doubt that last was Bob’s fault.
At some point, the lies so debase the currency of information that (didn’t Wretchard have a post along these lines a few weeks back?) that people simply stop paying attention and assume it’s all lies. At that point, oddly enough, common sense takes over again. Deprive the totalitarian of his lies and how exactly does he convince the average Joe to follow him?
Information warfare is self-defeating. Eventually you convince your enemy to kill you, then you’re dead. Unless you’ve got better soldiers.
To continue the thought in #38,
I don’t think it’s exactly that what’s non controversial that are acceptable public facts. I think the public rejected the “public fact” of Pluto being downgraded, in fact even though the value of Pluto as planet or not matter not one whit to all but the smallest number of astronomers and astrophysicists, for whom these definitions may in fact have big consequences.
I think it has to do with the trust value put on the agent, and their price for the fact.
The “public” accepts facts that are nearly free–but that’s not the price on the fact, it’s the trust value of the agent.
I think our diversity and multiculturalism has fragmented our “public” into a very numerous set of autonomous cliques, with high degrees of connectivity between members, and few connections across cliques. Within a clique, the trust value is all high, and so facts coming from those agents are low-cost i.e. low risk. Across cliques, you will have to pay a lot to find a source you trust. How much are you willing to pay?
The “public”, i.e. the majority of the nation rejects climate change catastrophisizing because the source they trust is their friend or Drudge or their own eyes before it is ABC News. On subjects that you feel actually matter but don’t trust your own clique to know well enough, you may still trust ABC news, if it’s cheap enough.
This seems at least a bit different than the Soviet model, where the public distrusted anything the Soviet govt or media said because they were saying it.
#3, #6 and #30,
Outstanding comments! Thank you for your thought provoking and inspiring thoughts and words.
#13,
“This essentially epistemic revolution will result in people using their own eyes, ears, knowledge, and reason to establish thier fact base.”
Your faith in the rational evaluation of fact by the majority of human beings is admirably idealistic but premature.
Perception is everything in selling.
Maintaining support for a war effort is critical in a democracy and public support is ALL about perception. And when it comes to perception, the cameraman (symbolic for who controls the narrative) trumps the soldier.
Yet, when push comes to shove and historical perspective is properly ‘weighed’, I cannot fundamentally disagree with the intuition that is the source of your idealism.
Regardless of it’s ‘clicheness’ the accuracy of the truism, “the truth shall set them free” is still inviolate.
No lie can, ultimately, prevail against truth. For a time, even generations, a lie can appear unchallenged and even inviolate, yet eventually truth prevails, for truth is reality and reality is truth, for the operative existential principles within which we exist, trumps everything.
Accordingly, communist and socialist premises and dogma must fail because they are antithetical to both human nature and the outer reality within which they seek to operate.
America is founded upon universal truth; “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are not mere words but a concise description of what ultimately motivates every man, woman and child and thus an inviolate principle across the march of history.
That allegiance to reality ultimately must prevail because reality will allow no other outcome.
i remember the Haifa Street Murder case being deconstructed and sleuthed out –Sherlock Holmes style –right here on BC, fed and led by the host, whom i believe to have begun, pretty much alone, the world reconstruction of the thitherto ordinary photo-accompanied “violence in the streets of Baghdad” story, with the plangent question, ‘what do you think, is there something ‘off’ here?’
i’m sure it’s all in the archives someplace. A pretty impressive performance.
GB/44; –re your closing four paragraphs, i can’t help but think of something old Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk told his biographer, something along the lines of Sioux medicine being strong but white man’s medicine –meaning rifles, railroads, telegraphs, etcetera –was stronger. i can’t help but think, a really good secret police makes its own reality, and (as we have seen, Gestapo for instance) that unless broken into by an outside force, can be stronger medicine than the strong natural order that you identify. If so, the next good secret police may last as long as the solar system.
Speaking of info warfare…
Life of the Mind,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6946586.ece
Park the paranoia, please.
The soldier won’t be thinking about reporting but he will be a “grain of sand” in the system. If he has a camera on his rifle that he uses to check and shoot around corners or ID the blue, that video data can be stored.
As stated the police have video cameras in their cars these day and one force has a set up that starts audio recording to go with the video to the car over a wireless setup every time the officer steps out of his car to do a stop. What is said as well as what is seen can be gone over. One officer told me it took a little getting used to but the upside is well worth having to watch your language a little. Your behind is covered and the number of people taking pleas has gone up.
delete me please
delete me too please
“Someone explained to me that most institutions are built by people who understood the way things worked.”
From Russian disinformation to MIT to Walmart, (the distribution arm of the Chinese communist party).
I would note the value of false propaganda is found in the propagation of information true or false, and the effect of the narrative on the public at large. Our inability to role back the tide of disinformation is witnessed by the France 2 TV station’s complicity in the Paliwood (Al dura affair) farce, as ruled in French Court. but it took years to run down the results buried in tedium and so the story of the boy and his dad, shot on film by the Palestinians still is believed by many to have been shot by the Israeli army.
I favor the “Hand of Allah” narrative approach much better, but such swift justice is not to be found whenever the ACLU is near.
Tribulations of a republic.
–Wadeusaf
Arg…I’ve lost the edit mode, what I used to place links, so I think I may be dbl posting again.
what da ya mean, its too hot?
I see that many persons disinform lke many institutions, in case of France2 it was rather because of lazyness and arrogance, this old info dame used to be reverred as being part of the first original TV channels, and journalists aren’t out firable,and not contested as usely in administrations, they are hold like infaillibles popes, but it’s changing with new numerical private TV channels, that earn more customers each year.
But here is a flagrant tentative of disinformation too :
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/putins-pal-on-the-french-right-wing/#comments
Adolph Hitler: “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.”
The best way to deal with lies is to, with courage, tell the truth. For the fool or the coward there remain two ways for political lies to be accepted; through the sanity of stupidity or the insanity of intellegence:
too bad, I’m not buying these BS
wadeusaf,
the story of the boy and his dad, shot on film by the Palestinians still is believed by many to have been shot by the Israeli army
I’l bet you a nickel that most still believe the Paliwood narrative, including most members of the media and most members of educated society. Most still believe that the Israelis deliberately sought out and killed a saintly little girl named Rachel Corrie.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
- Mark Twain
To be blogged under the title “Framing the Narrative.”
Lose the F-22, White House staff told Elmendorf
Link:
Foreign Policy Before President Obama arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base on his way to Asia in mid-November, White House aides ordered base officials to swap an F-22 fighter jet on display in the hangar where Obama was to speak for a good old F-15 fighter.
No reasons were given, but the Obama administration fought to cut off production of the pricey F-22 at about half its original order, and aides didn’t want him photographed with one of the jets. Elmendorf airmen are said by anonymous sources to have been miffed at what they considered an insult from the White House.
Matt @ 13,
“This essentially epistemic revolution will result in people using their own eyes, ears, knowledge, and reason to establish thier fact base.”
I’ve argued something akin to this at Richard’s site before, and that many more positive economic and social developments are likely to follow on, too. But there haven’t been many takers.
Just two positives:
(1) I think academe is where ClimateGate will now be fought, (it won’t be fought in any meaningful way in paid, popular media) and, after the dust clears “-ology” departments nationwide will be better for it. Now, after the CRU hack, 15-years worth of expensive “-ology” credentials from Columbia to Duke to UCLA are of dubious value. And an angry mob of card-carrying alumni and ‘hard’ sciences faculty and duped parents is sure to demand a stiff reckoning. The bad PR, brand-slander and parents’ diligence, all coinciding with renewed political pressure to cut DC’s and statehouses’ spending, could do a lot to nip the Universities’ post-modern sciences’ growth spree in the bud.
(2) The ‘epistemic revolution’ will make an obvious case for reforming the public grant-awards process, too. A hard look at the ways that tax-payer funded Federal grants and extravagant private donations can corrupt local research markets will hint that the nation should at least manipulate the one lever we can control in the equation, government grants. In the end this will confirm the private/public divide: Let the private research market spin all the junk-science that it can print, but keep the taxpayers’ dollars out of it.
Once an eagle-eyed committee starts peering into the grants market with an eye to accounting for the taxpayers’ donations, there’s no telling what it’ll find. Cozy, rent-seeking, politicized science is everywhere, from Climate ‘sciences’ to various gender ‘studies,’ and in coursework for everything from Environmental Science to Political Science to ‘Peace’ Studies. Running its magnifying glass down every item on the tax-payers’ bill, the committee’d be forced to take note of the rank, unsustainable growth in the ‘non-profit’ sector, study its political patronage ties, and undertake to reduce its subsidy, too.
Not exactly the outcome that the Prog’s were hoping for, huh? Heck, applied thickly and rubbed briskly with tax-payer’s anger, ClimateGate could deoderize several of America’s key institutions.
I’m sure glad I’m not the only one who sees it this way.
D/54; It’s funny in a way, the asymmetry of it, that the all-weather F-22 has been defeated by not the weather but what people are making up about the weather.
#53 LOTM, the affair isn’t finished, it’s going to “Cassassion court”
Well, isn’t it a bit ironical that the journalist Enderlin who made the video is also a Jew and an Israeli citizen !
uh, it wasn’t a little girl but a little boy
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Mohammed_al-Durah
Rupert Murdoch speaks on the future of Journalism
http://tinyurl.com/yfgd36c
Anybody know how to get in touch with the guy?
MC,
I talked of two events, Corrie was the female. Enderlin was the perfect useful idiot. He’s a Left wing Israeli who trusted the footage the Pals gave him, he wasn’t there, and then was trapped into defending the process.
Wretchard in #40 said:
–But in an environment where central authority is guarded like the Crown Jewels and error is literally criminal or at least politically fatal then you impose so much of a process load on the whole shebang that no one is ever to blame.
I think this goes back to the value of the data, too. In the end, the data we value is the data we can act on. The “public” doesn’t need to believe in climate change being catastrophic because if it really were, we’d just deal with it and act on it. Until then, it’s irrelevant.
But the people who want centralized control are the people who CAN act on it now. They can change the world their way because of it. So they value the data of climate change highly because it gives them the opportunity they always wanted. On the battlefield, the soldier will always value his gun more highly than the camera if his life is in danger. The point of counterinsurgency work is to change how the forces interact by changing what information they value, what information they can act on. The psyop worker won’t be able to dissuade a soldier under fire, but can persuade a soldier not under fire that having tea he may learn a great deal more valuable to his future.
There are other examples.
The American civil rights movement was not nonviolent because we–I participated in a limited fashion–thought that the local equivalen of Bull Connor would feel bad beating us up and change his evil ways.
We were nonviolent because us getting beaten shown on the six-thirty news had a huge impact on other forces. I should also say that it never happened to me, but it was the principal by which we trained.
Now, if a couple of rednecks had followed me into an alley where nobody could see what was happening, we’d have had some fun.
Difference is not violence but propaganda.
Suppose I had a lot of money and an agenda to acquire more. I could send up a big red news balloon, but how would I ensure that at least 56 media outlets or newspapers found it in time to publish the contents all on the same day at the very start of a conference where policy suggestions will undoubtedly affect my investments?
Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer last night on CNN made the claim that there were 2500 scientists involved in the IPCC’s study. “Expert Lie”?
CNN on ClimateGate with Steve McIntyre
How many times does Campbell Brown quote CRU’s Bozo ref. to McIntyre?
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 12/08/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.
Steveaz,
” The ‘epistemic revolution’ will make an obvious case for reforming the public grant-awards process, too. A hard look at the ways that tax-payer funded Federal grants and extravagant private donations can corrupt local research markets will hint that the nation should at least manipulate the one lever we can control in the equation, government grants.”
I hope you are right. Most academic institutions, both private and public, are largely funded by government grants, loan etc. This academic grant system long ago was hijacked, ( or perhaps it was always intended) to become the principal funding mechanism in the leftist indoctrination system now ruling academe. It is high time to apply a little equal protection condition on these grants, to rid the leftist bias from the system.
U.S. sees homegrown Muslim extremism as rising threat
The Cold War is essentially over and the USA lost, badly!
By guns, buy ammo.
You’ll need it!
AWM/65; –with a decent leader we can still save a pretty decent rump state. and think what a refreshing, zesty place it’ll be, too, governed by the Constitution and without this leftist dreck stuck in our nostrils.
The nice thing about living in a nation ruled by the actual American Constitution is that the supreme law of the land is amendable by “We the People” under the moral constraints of our Declaration, rather than the Marxist “Living Constitution” which is amendable by an un-Declarational oligarchy of “We the Judges.” The actual American Constitution is a real living Constitution, and draws its breath of life from the amendment process controlled by “We the People;” the Marxist “Living Constitution” is Orwellian Newspeak for “Dead Constitution;” killed by the Supreme Judicial Oligarchy – often in collusion with one or the other branches of our Federal Government.
I’m amazed by the complacency, ignorance and stupidity of so many Americans who haven’t figured this out yet. At least teach your children, your neighbors and those with whom you work; maybe then the American Revolution can be rekindled – God help us if it isn’t.
https://secure.heritage.org/PocketConstitutions/?src=first
Alluded to above, this raises in my mind the specter of not being able to trust any source that you are not intimately familiar with. East Anglia Univ. may have severely damaged climate science but its fallout may be the rest of science.
We now have several generations that are almost totally innumerate. (The mathematical equivalent of illiterate) They can add subtract and multiply but dont know which to do when, and forget trying to do even the basest analysis, clearly illustrated by the widespread refusal to vaccinate children because of some trace amounts of mercury in vaccine (at one time) and the flap over the adjustment in the Federal standard for arsenic in drinking water and the power of anecdotal evidence.
Members of BC can think clearly enough to work their way through controversies like these and the clear idiocy of AGW but the vast number of Americans cannot. So they depend on scientific authority. That authority has been undermined. The EAU/CRU mimics the alleged corruption of medical research funded by pharmaceutical firms and chemical research funded by chemical firms. All science can be made suspect.
Science is going the way of the academy, the government, finance, most church hierarchy, most of the press, Tiger Woods, all authority melting away in front of us.
Somehow some voices of reasonably trustworthy authority must be preserved or the cacophony of dispute will stop everything.
herb 68:
I remember trying to explain to a guy that buying 250 lottery tickets would not increase his chances of winning by any appreciable amount over buying just one. Whish, right over his head. As has been noted before, if we didn’t have computerized cash registers the fast food business couldn’t exist. Ratio and proportion, which should have learnt in the 8th grade, has become a strange concept even to college graduates. I watch people buy three pounds of hot dogs on sale because they thought it was cheaper than a three pound roast. Price per pound or ounce on the roast was cheaper. The butcher explained to me that they put the price per package, per pound, and per oz. on the meat but trying to get the majority of consumers to use them was a futile effort.
If times get hard then the innumerate will go to the back of the line.
“Science is going the way of the academy, the government, finance, most church hierarchy, most of the press, Tiger Woods, all authority melting away in front of us.”
The absence of law deriving from “We the People” translates into the arbitrary law of an oligarchy; i.e.: no law; i.e.: law of the jungle; i.e.: the law of all nations outside the American Revolution.
“Nothing was illegal (in Oceania) since there were no longer any laws.” George Orwell, 1984
“Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding and should, therefore, be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties which may make anything mean everything or nothing at pleasure (Oceania and the Marxist “Living Constitution”).” Thomas Jefferson
herb
Interesting connection between the two thoughts. I’m not an advocate of flu vaccines. Not that I can’t do the math and figure out the statistical wise choice (which based on reported statistics is clearly to get the vaccine), but I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the CDC to give me straight numbers – I assume (and have since the Clinton administration at least) that they’re perfectly happly to lie to me in order to get me to do what THEY think is right. If vaccines were found to be significantly more toxic than thought, would the Surgeon General go on TV to let us know? Or would the whole public health apparatus work overtime to hide the data and discredit anyone trying to get it out, telling themselves it’s okay because the good still outweighs the bad, and who wants to admit to being wrong anyway?
So I fall back on personal experience, and that’s not very good. I’ve never had a flu shot, but several members of my extended family have over the years, and I can’t think of a single case where one of them got the shot and didn’t get the flu. Nobody had horrible reactions, though several times someone came down with a nastier than average case two or three days after getting the shot (typical incubation period) and most of them have felt crumy for a couple of days.
Are my annectodal experiences more valid than the published data? In a better world, no. Ideally I would ignore those annecdotes as a small sample size anomoly and go with the larger data set that says flu shots are good. But I’ve seen enough shenanigans from public advocacy groups (and Public Health types fall into that category) to not trust their data, so I fall back on the data set I can trust. It’s sad because, by treating people as ignorant, they’ve blown their credibility so that even if they are right, nobody will listen any more.
Climatologists have blown a whole bunch of credibility on environmental issues. That’s sad too because it certainly is possible for human activity to screw up the local environment and a little attention to conservation and treading lightly can go a long way towards a more pleasant world. But that’s a secondary concern for these folks at best. Primary is their own power and sense of importance.
God save us from career do-gooders.
The best way to defeat a big lie is to treat it like a balloon; that is, blow it up until it pops. Playfully join in with the believers and supporters and keep expanding the lie, adding more and more ridiculous parts to it. Soon it becomes a race to outrageousness that gets completely out of control of the supporters. Then, it collapses with most people walking away laughing. Except the original supporters, who look like fools.
JMH: Part of the issue (at least for stuff like polio and measles mumps and rubella) is that the failure to vaccinate lets the disease continue. Universal vaccination eliminated smallpox and will get polio (if we can get rid of the witchdoctors running some African countries) So the effects are greater than an individual’s choice.
Public health’s AGW was the Tuskeegee experiments where they observed the advance of untreated syphilis thru a group of poor blacks from the 30′s into the 1950′s IIRC. Gave the whole industry a bad smell. I believe that because of that history that somebody cooking the books at CDC would be summarily outed, but you can never tell.
But see, that’s the sort of thing that drives the corruption. The greater good outweights the individuals choice, so it’s okay to mislead/nudge/force the individual into making the “right” choice. Especially if there are “witch doctors” on the other side spreading their own lies. If we can just cut down carbon emissions, we can save the planet, and that’s a lot more important than individual choices on what car to drive, where to live, etc. If we can just get rid of the Deniers and their profiteering corporate masters…
After watching the exaggerated anti-drug campaigns, the exaggerated anti-drunk driving campaigns, the various Brady-bill attempts to get handguns regulated (or at least discouraged) under the mantra of “Public Health”, I’m not at all certain someone cooking the books would be outed. At least not as long as they were cooking ‘em in the politically correct direction.
(edit PS: not meaning to call you out or anything, must observing that the desire to get the masses to “do the right thing” is a powerful incentive to lie, whether the “right thing” is right nor not, and sometimes the lie takes on such a life of its own that none of the insiders can even tell what’s right or wrong any longer).
BTW Herb, not meaning to cast apsersions on you or anything like that. Just pointing out how the desire to get the masses to “do the right thing” can become an excuse for lying. And once decent men accept lying for the greater good then not-so-decent men have much more leeway to lie for the lesser good (e.g. their pocketbooks, status, etc.).
The notion that individuals can’t be trusted with their own choices inevitably leads to evil, no matter how good the original intentions.
I don’t think anyone on this thread has yet noticed the retaliatory salvo–in keeping with battleship language on this thread–loosed by the Environmental Protection Agency today when it said in effect, “we don’t care whether the science is crap, we have the power to close down this nation, and we’re going to do it.”
With a passing bow to the explosion of the scientific reputations of the people who brought you global warming, the EPA announced that it would be declaring CO2 the great poison of the planet, and its emitters and beneficiaries–which includes many industries in the USA–to be put on a diet of thin gruel. The purpose? To strike a major blow at the economy (filthy capitalist enterprise that it is) of the United States.
The timing couldn’t have been righter, nor could the sense of incipient panic have been wholly removed from the announcement: “If we’re going to use the environmental bomb we’re going to have to use it NOW!”
How the next seven days’ of anti-environmentalist rhetoric spins this battlefield confrontation will tell us something significant as to how far the anti-Obama forces can and are willing to go in confronting eye-to-eye the United States federal government, which has now announced itself as the country’s most dangerous enemy.
Anent my comment #76 above qv:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/08d11a451131bca585257685005bf252!OpenDocument
#76, good point on EPA’s shiny new arrogation of authority to regulate our every breath. Apparently they had received 380,000 comments over the comment period. Somebody (at Watts Up With That: great blog, almost as good as BC) said that worked out to 2500 comments/day for EPA to have “considered.”
Anyway, alea jacta est or in modern terms, they’ve now teed up the issue for litigation. Because without adequate scientific basis any regulation they issue will be open to challenge. Since the “science” here is pretty much (IMHO) hopelessly polluted by the self-executing admissions of the emails disclosed from the CRU cabal, by the CRU’s admitted loss of raw data (thus destroying the evidentiary basis for everything that rests on the missing data: which is a lot), and by emerging evidence that the temperature record itself has been systematically corrupted by “value-added homogenization” at the Fort Knox of temperature data (Global Historical Climate Network or GHCN), for these reasons and others yet to come I am confident that the EPA is going to have its head handed to it.
But that’s cold comfort because the litigation will be slow, expensive and piecemeal. They now hold the high ground and to drive them from it will take both relentless shelling and waves of fixed bayonet work. Very discouraging development.
One possible way to outflank them is to continue the public disclosures. Andrew Breitbart’s de-pantsing of ACORN with a well-orchestrated series of Youtube-friendly exposures, drip drip drip, is one example of how to use theatrical strategies to catch and maintain public attention. If enough ClimateGates come out, the public will “get it,” and the EPA –a highly political creature– will realize it has nowhere to go. And if it persists, Congress –an even more highly political creature– will realize it has to trump whatever EPA has decided to do.
Given the brutal impact on employment and GDP of any new regulation, or even the spectre of it, Congress may wake up sooner than later. Given the uncertainty associated with this entirely novel scheme of regulation –what is being measured, how, by whom, what credits and debits will be given or taken, how one should alter one’s plans for building or operating to allow for GHG police action– this may well break the system. Hard enough to sort out for your new plant the bank loan and building permit and labor force plan; adding in this wild card of carbon sin taxation or outright injunction, may just drive business back into its bunker or offshore.
Our international rivals have got to be doing cartwheels down the hallways these days. Does a great nation shoot itself in the foot? Of course. Does it keep on doing it over and over? Not if it’s a great nation; the two items are not compatible.
“we don’t care whether the science is crap, we have the power to close down this nation, and we’re going to do it.”
Offhand, I can’t think of a previous US government action that is aimed at saving the planet. Though they often involve “externalized” costs, most pollution laws have (only) immediate and local benefits.
I can’t recall any phraseology in the US constitution that addresses the ceremonies and procedures for saving the planet.
So, isn’t this were the green/red libtards trot out the conservative cliche, “the constitution is not a suicide pact”?
So, I guess we need a constitutional amendment: “If he says it’s really important the president can do whatever he wants, especially if his name is Barack Hussein Obambus The Great and Powerful”.
I’m a retired engineer.
I sure enjoyed reading all the comments from thinkers above.
How did we let things like our current government & the Coopenhagen fiasco happen ?
Because we are a very tiny minority. Not even up to “voices crying in the wilderness”.
I knew life as we know it was over when the EPA declared CO2 was a pollutant.
The insane have won.
We as SO Fxxked.
Suggested Republican Party Congressional Platform for 2010:
If elected to the Majority, we pledge to:
1) End the bailouts immediately, and order the divestiture of all federal government ownership or insterest in any companies aquired during the financial panic.
2) Repeal any health care reform initiatives passed by Congressional Democrats this year over the objections of the American people. Then we will start working on a real solution.
3) Defund (zero dollars) the EPA if it does not immediately cease relying upon junk science for its decision.
78. oMan:
“EPA’s shiny new arrogation of authority to regulate our every breath.”
Every time a believer in CO2 opens his/her mouth to say that CO2 is a poison, that person is . . . emitting that poison.
I’m sure something political can be made of the fact that a significant contribution to the poisoning of this planet with CO2 are the very people who are decrying it.
The answer is obvious: we simply must get these people to stop emitting CO2. How exactly they choose to do that is their business.
But I’m only joking north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I think there’s a significant anti-EPA rhetorical point to be made: “if you are a true believer, then consistently requires that you stop breathing.”
My microdistillery dreams are being dashed by the fools at EPA. Can’t have them yeasts fermenting (CO2!) or use any process heat from fuels anymore.
Sorry I haven’t joined the conversation lately. I got a day job.
#82: JMH for President! And Congress!
Must we wait until November 2010?
Hey, what about simply opening a can or bottle of beer, doesn’t that make you an enemy of the people?
And methane is like 10x worse than CO2, so do we need an offset to buy a can of beans? Do I have to keep a pilot light going in my pants to convert any methane to the less harmful CO2 as quickly as possible? Or will the EPA require we start adding Beano to the drinking water?
Alfred E. Newman performs, It’s a gas!
(don’t worry, the “gas” referred to is the more harmless upper-digestive variety)
Either this nation has a rational reaction to all of this and rejects it, or it is over for us.
It is a simple as that.
This is a new test for the nation. It is more radical than ww2 or the Civil War, and yet no real war has been fought.
Is it possible it is over? The next year will tell us.
I really never thought I would see this in my lifetime.
How low we have fallen. It would not have been possible even 10 years ago.
I have never felt the shame I do for this country as I do now.
Off topic in a way, but something of a punch thrown in the info war. Claremont Review has a very long list of Christmas book recommendations online now. Good information from a trusted source. I’m sure many here will find it useful (even if only for sneaking that special gift into your own stocking).
http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.775/pub_detail.asp
BTW, how about a Holiday Gift thread at Belmont?
I have never felt the shame I do for this country as I do now.
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Hold on and let’s see which this is.
I’ll have to tell ya, the first time I felt this low about things was during the Clinton follies, when I saw how many people defended the big lummox or made any kind of an issue out of it, when clearly the proper reaction to Filegate and Travelgate alone would have been to impeach and convict him with a big laugh about the whole thing, promoting Al Gore to the Oval Office. Can you imagine? As soon as the main issue because Monica Lewinsky, Clinton had already won. Ken Starr has to be among the biggest idiots of the twentieth century, couldn’t find a crime with both hands, couldn’t even figure out what his job was and wasn’t, or what the likely results of this or that would be. Gosh, when events leave you nostalgic for Richard Nixon, how far we have fallen, indeed.
Better cheer up, mongoose –we gwan be needin’ ya in fightin’ trim –
#71 JMW writes:So I fall back on personal experience, and that’s not very good. I’ve never had a flu shot, but several members of my extended family have over the years, and I can’t think of a single case where one of them got the shot and didn’t get the flu. Nobody had horrible reactions, though several times someone came down with a nastier than average case two or three days after getting the shot (typical incubation period) and most of them have felt crumy for a couple of days.
You describe the insanity of zealotry. The true believers in flu vaccine would argue that your relatives never got the flu–they just got the SYMPTOMS of the flu from the vaccine. As for myself, the reason I don’t want to get the flu is precisely because of the SYMPTOMS I experience when I get it. If the cure is as bad as the disease, why do you want the cure? The disease may pass you by. If you take the cure the misery is certain. If its all about stopping the flu, the cheapest way to deal with it is to shoot everybody who is alive through the head. Dead people never get the flu. But that’s the problem–the people in charge of solving the problem have lost sight of why the problem was considered to be a problem to begin with.
And so it is with the “greens,” some just useful fools but many of them are just unreconstructed Marxists. The idea was originally that capitalism would lead to the immiseration of the masses, who would then overthrow it all and embrace communism. Unfortunately for the Marxists, capitalism failed to produce the needed poverty. It actually produced the opposite effect.
The Green Solution? Produce poverty by other means, preferably by government policy. Any industrial economy depends upon energy to function. Kill the energy and the economy dies. The United States has more than enough fossil fuels to be energy independent. If nothing else we have about two-thirds of the worlds coal supplies, and the technology to turn that into gasoline is old. We have the technological know how to build as many nuclear power plants as we could conceivably need, but we aren’t allowed to build them.
If Capitalism won’t cooperate by producing poverty then we must produce poverty by other means. That will lead to THE GOAL. That, IMHO, is the history of the Left for the last forty years.
“The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.”
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/acorn_report_finds_no_illegal_conduct.php?ref=fpblg
“While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.”
JMH @ 64:
No callout detected. I operate from the idea that mankind is fallen but not irrational. If people can see the marginal benefits (continuance in this life) of vaccination, they will operate for it. Look up the change in the rate of Typhoid in Philadelphia before and after the forced (as in not optional) introduction of chlorine (a widely recognizes deadly poison) into the drinking water in that city. Phenomenal. Likewise the rate of tooth cavities in the current generations due to the (forced) fluoridation of the water supplies.
Yours goes to my point previous. If we can trust (open question) the data from the PH people the choice of vaccination is eminently rational and the rational leads to the public good, i.e. the elimination of polio, et al..
The wholesale elimination of any and all forms of reasonable authority prohibits progress. Loss of an authority source is a huge tragedy for mankind. The public health example is just simple and easy.
Its not dissimilar to the loss of a common morality. What follows is license and a collapse of society. (see Rome n BC to 200AD)
Now for something OT and different. The Volokh Conspiracy has a post on Hobbits in Flores that became a Tolkien geek fest. I dropped 500+ words on it and feel much better.
the information warre is actually the war i think we are winning. i am most heartened by the protests of the iranian people and their use of info warfare–the internet. there is not turning back for the 8th century Islamists. the gig is up. satellite, cell phone, and internet are an enemy they just cannot defeat. the tide is turning in the islamic middle east. our military efforts may prove to be negligable, but the advance of freedom through the rapid information revolution takes no prisoners. folks, we are winning. freedom and openness is winning. it just takes time.
TC/91; i doin’t think it’s so much a case of requiring poverty as it is a case of capitalism’s deadly threat via the adding of value to private property. Property makes for freedom from need, AKA independence from total control, and the mounting domestic political and lawfare attacks on it post Wall Fall have ramped up alongside the total value of it.
Indeed the two basic forms of it, real and financial, are precisely what was smashed into between the leftist elections of 06 and 08. The real estate and the financial markets, and then the political control of them, were knocked over one, two, three, in a swarming attack the main lines of which had been well prepared over the previous decade. Much of the preparation so arcane and intricate as to be effectively secret to us great masses, especially so behind a cover of a vicious bloodless pop cult war over the mideast shooting war, and the MSM attack that we came to call “BDS”.
The Mighty Red Wurlitzer vs the Great Wealth Machine –the prize is you. Kinda flattering, until you think about the why the MRW wants you so badly. I think it eats meat. That’s why it doesn’t want us to. It prefers us graze-fed. A matter of taste, no doubt.
of course, despite the fact that success has made it ten feet tall, not a bit of the Wurlitzer’s win was ordained. Just a few percent swing in the results of them two election cycles, and we would be in a whole ‘nuther world. A so much better one, populated by people whose political leaders are of a like psychological nationality. Juuuust a couple of percent here and there slipped wrong, and we stuck ourselves in one of Saddam’s plastic shredders, feet first so we get to watch ourselves spray against the walls.
Acorn vindicated? What a laugh. One of the most corrupt organization we have ever seen in this nation hires a ultra-liberal shyster to undertake an “internal review” and ACORN comes up smelling like a rose.
What sickening immorality. There is not a Democrat on the planet possessing so much as one strand of moral fiber. If there were, Acorn would be out of business.
Unequivocal evidence and we get these baleful lies. They lie right to our faces when the truth is right there for all to see.
All should read the comment thread on that link. It is rather revealing of the sickness of the soul that possesses the Left.
Why do we even bother to use language anymore, why do we just not grunt at each other. We truly as a nation have departed from reality. We have left the shores of civilized life and are adrift on a poisoned sea of vanity, egoism and brutish appetites. Reality is merely what we say it is.
If we cannot turn from this and reject it, complete barbarity will surely come. I do not think that the West has seen such since the fall of Rome.
How does it happen that at the height of our civilization a third of us turn into cretinous, evil barbarians.
That’s good question, mongoose. maybe it was Roe vs Wade?
Buddy just the fact that we are always only a few votes away from the USSA means that it was preordained, at least in the sense that it was bound to happen sooner or later. What is amazing is that they are getting away with it. Think about the mood of the country immediately after Bush’s re-election. It is hard to imagine that it is the same country.
It is most vile. Are the American people really so stupid? That is the question. Time will tell, but the answer does not look to be a pretty one from where I sit.
We have never seen anything remotely like what is going on in this country. Even the craziest days of the New Deal would not have seen AIR called as a pollutant.
If we cannot reject this all then there is really no hope for us.
We are not far from the Bolivar circles of Chavez or the gulags of Stalin.
How quickly this country has fallen.
The Clinton would have not dared to try all of this even 15 years ago.
It is really beyond belief.
The whole thing, including Wall Fall must be brought to the mainstream and exposed. It all goes to show just how cowardly the GOP truly is. Do they stand for what they purport to stand for? Are they capable of patriotism.
96. buddy larsen:
I don’t think it’s so much a case of requiring poverty as it is a case of capitalism’s deadly threat via the adding of value to private property. Property makes for freedom from need, AKA independence from total control, and the mounting domestic political and lawfare attacks on it post Wall Fall have ramped up alongside the total value of it.
Maybe we are talking at cross purposes here. I don’t have any disagreement whatsoever with you from what I have quoted above. My only tiny little point (other than the one on my head) is that the “green” policies are geared towards artificially creating economic conditions that traditionally Marxist theory predicted but that never ever happened.
And the little water melons are trying very, very hard to push their agenda.
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2009/12/andrew-breitbart-strong-arms-media-matters-over-fistgate-scandal/
read “wanumba” –comment #6. It’ll cheer you up! As to the topic it’s pointed to on right-side of Drudge, and top (at the moment) of instapundit. can’t say more. too repulsive.
***
(edit PS)
mongoose/100; i agree with you all the way. might add that that “GOP” is actually a group of interchangeable individuals, and that the GOP structure IS at the moment our only tool. Or, better said, weapon. also, if we get demoralized, we’ll be right where they want us to be. We’ll be “complying” with the lousy sonzabitches.
TC/101; naw, i wasn’t trying to disagree with you –i was trying to hitch on to your thought and add to it. yep, poverty and wealthlessness are the same thing –we were just coming at it athwart each other’s approach vectors, so to speak –
“How the next seven days’ of anti-environmentalist rhetoric spins this battlefield confrontation will tell us something significant as to how far the anti-Obama forces can and are willing to go in confronting eye-to-eye the United States federal government, which has now announced itself as the country’s most dangerous enemy.”
What it will be is what you eluded to. A long drawn out expensive fight in the courts. Lets just hope they don’t fight it in the 9th. But even then, just the specter of possible upcoming new regulations will be enough to stunt or stop any more expansion or manufacturing here in the U.S.
Along with other [un]intended side effects, all bad.
Government Motors won’t even get a break and Ford will be screwed as they didn’t suck on Obama’s offered tit. The eco-terrorists will be ecstatic and get our tax money for grants on everything green.
What are us Americans to drive. Well, we know what they want us to drive. Those unsafe at any speed little electrics that even if everyone was given one the power distribution system would black or brown out even if used at night only. So it’s to the trains and buses we will be herded into.
And we will be told that unsafe sex is any sex with anyone without a condom and you will be prosecuted. We don’t need any more little mouths exhaling a deadly gas.
Cap and trade would be the number one item on the Congressional to do list. Well right after giving amnesty to all the illegals.
Oh hell, I’m going to bed. Right after I say a prayer for this Republic and put another coat of oil on my favorites.
Papa Ray
well, that’s gonna be papa ray’s night table favorite, so my bet is, Colt 1911.
Buddy, What was it that Clinton said about Roe vs. Wade? “I do not care how the Haitians get home”?
But seriously, maybe it was universal sufferage. Maybe it was too much wealth. Maybe it was a faliure to disipline the boomer generation. Maybe it was TV.
When did the worm get in the wood, and when did it chew so much that the timbers rotted out? When could it have been squashed and the house saved?
I think the answer is somehow buried in several places: The huge size of the Boomer cohort, the prosperity of the post war years, the experience, hopes and expectations of the returning ww2 vets (and their bewilderment at this new hurtling and affluent world where they were to raise their children in) and, most importantly, the Soviet propaganda organizations of the Cold War.
For the enemies of the Light, some was fortuitous and accidental, some serendipitous and some just plain, brute, animal luck. The enemies of civilization managed to blunder into the perfect cocktail for the destruction of this nation. Yes they are evil, and plot and execute the most monstrous designs, but we have nonetheless allowed them to do it. How did this come to be?
Had the first protesters in the sixty been hauled of to court and sent to bloody fates in Vietnam would things had been different? If the occupiers of Sproul Plaza had been kick out of school and sent to jail in 67 would none of this have happened? Perhaps, but one wonders if the sickness was not closer to the bone, if it was not something beyond mere happenstance.
If the baby boomers were not so indulged, would they have passed through their narcissism in their twenty like any other generation? If they had fought their father and lost, like all youth is supposed to do, rather than win, would it have been different? Here I think we get closer to the truth. In some sense all of this nonsense is a crying out to the guidance of a father’s strong, stubborn and knowing hand.
Yet were the boomer’s fathers really that weak, that befuddled?
It may well be that, given the times and the size of that generation, the outcome was inevitable.
The world has never seen such a broad swath of society so pampered, so indulged, so catered too. History had never seen such a large age cohort as the boomers, and never seen this coincide with such prosperity and technological growth.
Perhaps we have found a new natural law, a new wall against which civilizations much be smashed. It only took these circumstances to discover this law.
And if it is to be set right, I think the boomer must set it right. I do not see the depth of character, the force of mind or even the knowledge of how things should be in the following generation. Yes there are individuals, some are even here on BC, but I do not see this collectively. It is hard to raise the cane up when it is in the field.
They have had this stolen from them. Has there ever been a generation that so betrayed the past and the future generation such as we boomers have?
JMH @ 71:
The really sad part is not that is even what they think is RIGHT but the truth is they want us to do what will further their agenda or feed them more power or enhance their control ….. ad nauseum….
If I could trust that these creatures at least had a sense of right vs wrong then there could be some comfort in the madness but there isn’t, it is all dedicated to ‘Power & Control’. The Left has traded it’s humanity to the ‘Prince of the Air’, the great Deceiver.
Voltimand @ 76:
I had wondered what form the last insult would take. Now we know. The problem is that Cthulhu will begin by eating at our toes ….. sloooooowly. Creeping gov’t regulation will take some time to have it’s full effect. Jobs will now NEVER come back. Buy staples, ammo and guns.
luddy barsen @ 79:
But that there are now two Americas is obvious. There is the one where a nothing named 0bama is the CiC and lives in the WH and the other one that admires the likes of Palin for being genuine (no matter what you think of other issues with her). The one that trusts the elitist Statists that are the products of the Ivy League and the other one that distrusts these smarmy bastards just because they are smarmy bastards.
Acorn Vindicated? @ 92:
He-he! Har-de-har! I personally investigated myself and I most assuredly did not sleep with that girl. No sleeping was done at all and now I am declared completely innocent. Saintly even.
buddy @ 97:
The call of Cthulhu is strong but depends on our acquiescence to our own end. Like I said he will eat from the toes up. And, what a visual! Priceless!
Mongoose:
Take heart. Like I said, there are two America’s. America the Beautiful and Amerikkka. If you doubt, lift your head and look about you. What do you see? Other Loyal Citizens (LC’s) of The Belmont Club! Keep your powder dry.
Wow Mongoose (105), that was really good.
The generation of the Great Depression learned not to waste time or money. The boomers generally didn’t waste time but they sure wasted money. The following generations have wasted both time and money.
Generations of deconstruction have done their damage. Pphilosophically that started a long time ago, accelerated with Nietzsche, but really didn’t take hold in the main culture until the 1930′s leftists. They taught the next generation that fought WW II and went to college on the GI Bill. They, in turn, indulged the Boomers who became the teachers, at all levels, of education.)
I sent that quote from Hitler (cited in the prior post) to everyone on my mailing list asking them to identify who wrote it. Everyone under age 55 guessed wrong. Everyone over age 55 got it right (or identified it as Goebbels, which I counted as close enough).
I have long held that the first half of the Boomers were different from the second half. I say this for a lot of reasons — radio and black and white TV versus color TV, being pioneers of the group rather than followers, less prosperity in their families of origin, lagging memories of WW II, idealistic visions that had not yet been proved to be empty, together with some just causes.
Bill Clinton — born August 19, 1946; George W. Bush — born July 6, 1946 — both from the earliest wave of Boomers.
Barack Hussein Obama — born August 4, 1961 — second wave of Boomers.
Very different feelings about American and the World. Very different campus environment during college and graduate school.
And as far as Generations X, Y, Millennials, or whatever they are called, there is no such thing as history. When I ask students what their favorite OLD or CLASSIC movies are, they never mention anything before 1970, and generally regard films from the 1980′s as old and classic. They rarely memorized poetry or famous speeches in high school. Cultural and historical references prior to 1960 are virtually non-existent for them.
They are truly children of the digital age, whose watches reveal the time RIGHT NOW, in contrast to those who still have a link to analog times, and whose watch dials note a past and a future as well as a now.
Perhaps it has always been a trait of human nature to overvalue the immediate over the long term, always to prefer a short term fix to a more strategic long term plan. But the attention span seems to be shrinking, especially among those of more recent generations. Is it a coincidence that ADD is the condition of the current age? Or that the MTV perspective of not lingering on a frame of film or video for more than a second, is the trend.
The beautiful vistas of John Ford Westerns are too slow for them. Whether it is their digital watches, the remote control, or “The Power of Now” nonsense, they are different. Perhaps not different in the cosmic sense, for no doubt there were generations like them that popped up in earlier times. But different from the early Boomers and the generations before them. (Yes, I can hear someone bringing up the Roaring Twenties or the Gay Nineties.)
Time to build arks. Time to identify those who will be remnants. Time to know who your friends are. Tuum est.
#83 Voltimand – Everything in your post is pure, unadulterated BS. Why?
Because when you, or anyone else, or any animal, emits CO2 then the carbon has been fixed in solid or liquid form for maybe ten years, maximum, if you most recently ate rather old canned food. CO2 emitted from a power station or from the exhaust of your car has been fixed in solid or liquid form for tens of millions of years, minimum. One is completely irrelevant to the other. The likely difference is even greater – carbon fixed in the Carboniferous Era versus carbon fixed last month.
Christian, once again you reflexively spit out left wing agitprop. I think that you do this almost innocently, but you really need to face this in you.
There is no “carbon crisis”. There is no “carbon problem”. There is no “climate chane problem”.
It is all a lie. It is all a hustle. It is all a con-game.
That is it. Stop repeating these lies as if they were truths.
And stop thinking tht you are scientist.
exhaust of your car has been fixed in solid or liquid form for tens of millions of years, minimum
Really? What is your proof? It makes no sense. Just purely epistimologically, how can you know this to be absolutely true?
There is no such thing as “climate science”, and I can assure you that that these “climate scientists” have but the slightest grasp of real physics nor do they have any real depth in chemistry. Show me one that could make a living as a straight physicist or chemical engineering in the industrial world.
Their knowledge of mathematics thus far seems to go little beyond junior statistics. I imagine that thet stumbled through basic entry level calculus and inorganic chem courses in the first two years of college, and that was it. Seriously. Empirical method? The intellectual processes of “hard science”? they have never in fact engaged in any such thing in their lives. These people are careerists and fakers. They are not scientists in any real sense of the word. Their opinions need to be gauged as the opinions of such.
It is just politics masked in a veneer of science.
You have a really bad habit here, and it comes up often. You seem to mean well, but you consistently do this. Listen, whatever media programed you repeat is really nothing more than that. Stop repeating it.
Got in as a repost. You have hit gold, I you should keep digging. The MSM is just a feed for a terrorist groups that it likes.
All the Afghan dead civilians? They all just wrote what the Tallies told them was true. The word is getting around.
Mongoose – If oil and coal were not formed many millions of years ago, where the heck do they come from? Coal, in particular, usually comes from mines; which means that there has been enough time for hundreds of feet of sediment to be deposited on top of it and turn into rock. We know that coal was formed from plants because often the remains of plant structures can be observed in it.
If oil has an abiogenic origin then the problem is even worse, because the only other possible source of that carbon is hydrocarbons deposited on Earth, perhaps by comets, even longer ago – probably billions of years – and we would then be releasing carbon fixed before the beginning of land life.
Of course, none of this applies if you are one of those who believe that the entire Universe, complete with all the evidence that it is 12-13 billion years old and Earth and the Sun are a mere 4.5 billion, was created all at once by the Great White Beard In The Sky at 9 AM on October 23rd, 4004 BC. In which case I am wasting my time, because you are impervious to rational argument.
Bottom line; I know, as much as anyone can, that oil and coal are many millions of years old and formed from life-forms that died before that – because there is good evidence for it.
Mongoose at 98. You are totally correct on the ACORN so-called “vindication.” I actually read much of the report. It’s a laugh a minute produced by a Democratic hack. Utterly unconvincing. The funniest part is they justify themselves with this bit of cant:
there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers
Oh really? Gee, maybe that’s because they weren’t actually a pimp and a prostitute and they didn’t come back to get the housing loan. Still, the mere fact that such a “report” exists will now become the new narrative. “ACORN was vindicated. The report said so. Let’s give them a few billion dollars.”
You are also, sadly, correct on the thread. Such threads make me feel hopeless. It’s like reading a comment thread on the NY Times site. The level of stupidity there (hip, “sophisticated,” affluent, urban stupidity though it may be) is simply breath taking. These folk really do live in a different universe than you or I. And for God’s sake, they are the same people that watched the World Trade Center collapse into their laps, and it still didn’t shake them out of it.
What on earth is reading a blog going to do for them?
Perhaps we have found a new natural law, a new wall against which civilizations much be smashed. It only took these circumstances to discover this law.
Oh, no. When the founding fathers defined our government, they expected it to fall. When Franklin said, “If you can keep it, m’am,”, that was more than a wisecrack. They knew that Plato had said government goes in a circle, as it had in ancient Greece, tyrant to democracy to oligarchy and back to tyranny, in each case first as an improvement to the previous, and then in malignant form that needed to be replaced (wait, I think I’ve omitted a step). Anyway, Rome fell after you can debate how many years, how many Republics has France had, the Soviets fell, the Chinese commies have mutated beyond recognition, and Gore Vidal said when the US gets its tyrant, we will call him, “Coach”. We’ve done remarkably better than expected already, not counting tomorrow.
Just why must we go in circles? Stop asking, or Daddy will nail your other foot to the floor, too.
–
Fletcher, what are you babbling about, “fixed” carbon?
Most of the carbon atoms on Earth were formed in supernova explosions between five and fifteen billion years ago, except for tiny bits formed from cosmic rays hitting nitrogen forming carbon-14 and enabling carbon dating to work, about 1 part per trillion according to Wikipedia. Carbon atoms may have been “fixed” in various organic forms for a billion years or more without ever becoming CO2.
Batman @ 107: And as far as Generations X, Y, Millennials, or whatever they are called, there is no such thing as history. When I ask students what their favorite OLD or CLASSIC movies are, they never mention anything before 1970, and generally regard films from the 1980’s as old and classic. They rarely memorized poetry or famous speeches in high school. Cultural and historical references prior to 1960 are virtually non-existent for them.
Oh, but were we any better? When I was a kid in the 50′s, did I know any movies more than about 20 years old? Nope. CUZ THERE WEREN’T ANY! But that’s no excuse!
Frankly, I didn’t learn much history until twenty years after I graduated with psych and cs degrees, went through college when western civ had been suspended for being racist, though I won some sort of history prize from the DAR when I was in high school, or was it junior high?
Still, I suppose you’re right, there is an increased ahistoricity in the younger clades, there is too much current events, TMI of all kinds, and human capacity is oh so limited.
Fletcher: that is just a mess of pseudo-scientific babble. !) it makes no scientific sense, 2) it makes no rhetorical sense. even if what you state is true, your conclusions do not logically follow.
Really, I know you mean well, but you have to get a handle on filtering out the BS in the media. It is a real problem with you. You are blind to it. It comes up oiver and over again.
Josh – “Fixed” means what it usually means; as in not mobile. But just to make it clear this term is often used as meaning “not active as a greenhouse gas” or “not in the atmosphere or dissolved in the sea” and hence not a problem to anyone. As an aside, natural seeps of hydrocarbons don’t cause a problem, even though methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, because the residence time of methane is rather short – and also because methane seeps are by now part of the background.
Mongoose, I haven’t got a clue what you are talking about. There is fossil carbon buried in the earth; that is a given. Where it comes from, ultimately, is actually rather irrelevant; what matters is that whatever the burying process is, it is either over or much slower than the rate at which we are releasing it from its solid or liquid form.
As an example of why this matters, burning wood (or straw, or anything else formed recently) really isn’t much of a problem as long as you grow more trees or plant more grass. When it does become a problem is when one burns down forests and doesn’t replace them; this not only releases large amounts of CO2 as a gas that has been in the form of cellulose for a long time, but also removes a carbon sink. Which is why cutting down Amazonian forests to raise beef cattle for McDonalds is a poor idea, even if you don’t care about biodiversity or the people currently living there.
Fletcher. Please. There is even a bunch of the evil substance tied up in rocks that dont burn, like limestone.
Look up the specific heats of CO2 and Dihydrogen Monoxide. Compare, discuss. Look up the causes of variance in humidity both absolute and relative.
While you’re at it try to find the sample size of the pre-1850 temperature database the climate “scientists” used. Try to find the annual distributions of that database. When you succeeded in those tasks, let us know.
Ill not wait.
Fletcher man, read.
http://volokh.com/2009/12/08/the-homogenized-data-is-false/
Then repeat after me. It. Is. A. Fraud.
Fixed Carbon? Well, let’s talk about fixed water instead. After all, even by the Warmingmongers own crackpot theories, Carbon is a very weak greenhouse gas. What the hoaxsters claim is that by adding a little bit of CO2, we raise the temperature a little and that release more water vapor, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. That raises the temp even farther, releasing more vapor, repeat until the Eco-pocalypse. There’s no magic about how carbon does this in the Warmingmongers theories, it just raises the temperature a bit and off we go, runaway warming. So it doesn’t matter if the carbon was “fixed” last year or “fixed” during the Cambrian era (or the Carboniferous Era, when we were promised abundance for all, by robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul…). It doesn’t even really matter (from the theory standpoint) if it’s carbon at all. Some other impetus would work just as well. All that matters is raising the temperature enough to pump more water vapor into the air.
But, but, but the Earth has been significantly warmer in the past, and we’ve never had this runaway water vapor effect. Conversely, the Earth has also been much cooler in the past as well and we’ve never had the reverse runaway cooling effect, which you would expect if the theory was valid.
But it’s not. It’s a sham. A hoax. A fraud. A dirtly rotten lie. But it’s tarted up with pseudo-science techno-babble like “fixed carbon” and validated with fabricated data so people get suckered. “Fixed” comming from the Warmingmongers caries about as much scientific weight as “potentiated” does from the homeopathic crowd.
Fletcher, I doubt if the carbon in all the CO2 in the world is 0.001% of the carbon on the planet, your concerns are nonsense.
Let’s see, carbon as percent of Earth’s crust 0.03, there’s 50x more C in the ocean as CO2 and other species than in the atmosphere, in hydrocarbon ores alone we have 300 years’ worth still in the ground, and some other large amount in hydrates at the bottom of the sea (I don’t think those are already counted above), let’s see, this site says there’s 10x more in the crust than in the ocean, so it looks like about 1/500 of the Earth’s carbon is CO2 at any given time. Does that assuage your concerns?
Well, my original guess was off, fwiw, all the CO2 in the atmosphere is a big 0.2% of the carbon on the planet, rather a lot, as such things go. But this stuff about “fixed” carbon is still prime gibberish.
What no one seems to realize is what Fletcher is hinting at. The Gov’t has just seized controls of the means of production. By extending the farcical claim that some carbon emissions are good and some are bad they can selectively punish some emitters and reward others.
Who do you punish for a naturally occurring forest fire that releases “bad carbon”? I’m sure they’ll find someone.
The relationship between atmospheric CO2 and atmospheric temperature is apparently not a simple matter.
“The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today– 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.”
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
Stop picking on Fletcher, he’s right as far as he goes—carbon in coal or petroleum was in the atmosphere maybe 300mya, at which time it was absorbed into plants and subsequently buried, irrelevant to the atmosphere until oxidized by us.
HOWEVER, that re-release of carbon as CO2, among other things, hardly justifies the idea that there is a scientifically proven chain of causation leading to catastrophe at some distant future date, nor that even if such were proven, any of the proposals now on the table would affect that outcome.
All we can say for sure is that atmospheric CO2 has been rising and that humans are burning a lot of carbon-based material that adds to atmospheric CO2 in the short term. And that CO2 is a weak GHG.
We are almost certain that the Earth’s surface temperature has been rising intermittently for a century or so. “Almost” because there is no good definition of what we are measuring and there are all sorts of questions about the data. Still, on the whole we have probably seen some warming over the last century or so, tho with ups (1930s, 1990s) and downs (1950s-70s).
We also know that climate varies naturally, probably driven by a number of factors including oscillations in ocean currents and systems, solar activity, the Earth’s axis inclination, the rock weathering cycle, possibly other things. We know there has always been natural variation, we have some vague sense of its limits, and only the vaguest ideas of what drives it.
Beyond that, we actually know very little. We don’t have a good sense of how current temps and trends compare to the more distant past (which is what Mann’s discredited hockey stick tried to do), how the human addition of CO2 and other GHG’s compares to natural processes, how other human activities may act to cool (i.e., aerosols).
We certainly cannot predict; the current models can’t even replicate the 20th century (see the HARRY_READ_ME file), why on earth should we think they can accurately forecast centuries or even decades into the future?
Even if we could predict global averages, estimating the effects would require very fine geographic detail regarding temps, precipitation, clouds, wind and such. this is so far beyond us as to be laughable.
The climate system is itself hugely complicated; its effect on us is complication squared, and our understanding let alone power to predict is extremely primitive.
Yet some people want to throw trillions of dollars around and create vast economic waste on the basis of something that doesn’t even compare favorably to alchemy.
Yesterday’s kerfuffle about the “Danish Text” gives us a peek behind the mask. It’s all about money. The supposedly “most-vulnerable” equatorial third world will walk out if they don’t get the dollars they demand on the terms they demand. I guess they really don’t see the alternative as catastrophe, huh?
The developed countries won’t confront the reality of a carbon tax, which would be the only sane way to address this problem (ask James Hansen, a real true believer) because (a) too politically obvious to the people who will be paying, (b) we have no sound basis to set the level of the tax, and (c) not enough scope for graft, corruption and rent-seeking—carbon trading works much better for everything EXCEPT restraining emissions.
So, it’s clear that even the people who are pushing this don’t really believe there is a crisis, it’s just an opportunity to help themselves to someone else’s money.
Written in 2004:
Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media
by Patrick J. Michaels
h/t to Scott at Powerline for Danger heartbreak dead ahead which touches on the EPA’s endangerment finding.
Regarding Mongoose’s question of when and how it all went wrong. There are any number of poisons that have been poured into the nation. But I think the deadliest brew fed to the Boomers was that there was something shameful about being white. White culture was a thing to be ashamed of. In short, guilt and self-hate as a kind of racial balancing of the scales. (By “white” I mean Western culture, but that’s too hard a concept to grasp for many, while the toxic shorthand of “white” was simple to understand and an inescapable fact. Hence, white=bad and non-white=good.)
Once this takes hold in a person’s mind, everything else spins out of control, and things obviously detrimental to the national culture are magically turned into moral necessities. The notion was further splintered by women’s lib, when women as a group became, in essence, non-white, as “whiteness” was further distilled down into meaning “white maleness.” But this splitting only made it easier for white women to hate their whiteness while also hating their white-male counterparts. Hence, they are often the shrillest and most true-believing of Lefists (something we also refer to as “Whiskeyism” around these parts.) They are also the most self-destructive, but they are blind to what they are going to bring down on themselves if they get their way.
And this is why the Left is repulsed by Sarah Palin and the great white unwashed middle (e.g. Joe the Plumber). Palin is clearly proud of her culture and her whiteness, though even she would never dare put it into such blunt terms. The hoity-toity white sophisticates crowding our cities and voting for Democrats reflexively are all essentially ashamed of themselves, and they recoil from any white person who isn’t.
Really, could you think of anything a person could do in contemporary America that would more quickly destroy their life and career than proclaiming they are proud to be white? Murder, rape, terrorism, even abusing animals. None of it would do you in as fast and certainly as saying you’re white and proud. It the only sin for which there is no excuse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q47bpOCTcaY
I posted Directive 9 over at freerepublic and got this reply
I’d like to see more articles like this on Free Republic. It contains the core criticism of conservative failure in the latter 20th and 21st century. Yes, conflict in Marshal McLuhan’s information age is MEDIA CONFLICT, perioid. You want to know why the MSM is 80% liberal, why universities are 90% liberal, why entertainment is 90% liberal, why liberals are able to put 20k people on the streets over an issue, why the 3rd world hates us…
Liberals communicate better. Simple. Why? Because they are empaths. Simple. Conservatives piss and moan about liberal touchy feely “caring” and wonder why people can’t just get down to the “life’s a bitch and then you die” struggle for survival. A clot of hippie potheads in touch with their “feelings”, basically took over modern culture because they empathize with the suffering of others. It’s that freaking simple. Until conservatives learn to do something similar in an authentic manner, they continue to wonder what the hell hit them.
Racial inequality before the law is Fascist, whereas most of what we are now experiencing is Marxist:
Racial Fascism:
Non-white females – best
Non-white males – good
White females – fair
White males – bad
Economic/Political Marxism:
Proletariat (non-disabled, tax-eating poor) – good
Middle (proto-Proletariat) Class (laboring, tax-paying, owner or property) – bad
Marxist ruling class (tax-eating intellectuals) – good
Entrepreneurs (creative, tax-paying, owner of business) – bad
Cultural Marxism:
Homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality outside of marriage – good
Heterosexuality within marriage – bad
Cultural Marxism (Title IX):
Equal numbers of male and female collegiate sports teams regardless of demand – good
Equal opportunity (unequal numbers of men’s and women’s teams) for college men and women to form sports teams based on demand – bad
Cultural Marxism:
Equalization of admission to graduate schools based on race – good
Equal opportunity (unequal admission) to graduate schools based on academic achievement – bad
Marxism in general:
Irrational/unnatural unequal rules (unequal law) leading to irrational/unnatural equal results
Americanism in general:
Rational/natural equal rules (equal law) leading to rational/natural unequal results
Marxism in general:
Irrational/unnatural unequal rules (unequal law) leading to irrational/unnatural equal results *
* Equal results for the now homoginized proletarian masses of serfs (origional proletariat class + former middle class); exceptions are made for the Marxist ruling class because they are more equal.
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property”… meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell, 1984
#120 Josh – Precisely. Earth’s carbon is mostly out of the atmosphere and thus irrelevant to the discussion – unless and until it gets into the atmosphere. It is also true that it’s unlikely in the short term that the carbon in carbonate rocks is going to get into the air, either. Methane clathrates at the bottom of various seas and oceans are rather less stable to a small rise in temperature, however. In short, most of Earth’s carbon is not in the atmosphere. I’d rather keep it that way – for an example of a planet with a largish amount of carbon, all in the atmosphere, see the next one in.
Carbon dioxide dissolved in the planet’s water – mostly the oceans – stays irrelevant as long as it stays there. However, there is a continuous flow both in and out of the water supply, and if the oceans stop mopping up the CO2 then atmospheric levels will go up faster – a LOT faster. This could happen due to saturation or due to higher ocean temperatures which in turn cause lower solubility of CO2 in water – which is one positive feedback loop. Another is that the more acid the oceans get the less able various aquatic organisms will become to turn dissolved CO2 into various forms of calcium carbonate. Another positive feedback loop.
#122 Storm Rider – You are quite right. Which makes significant the (probable, but scientists are about as certain as scientists get) fact that the Sun was about 3% dimmer at the time you mentioned. The continental configuration was different, too. Which makes discussions mentioning the Earth’s climate three hundred million years ago rather beside the point.
#123 Marty – Strangely enough I agree with you. Carbon credits are a crappy way to solve this potential problem – carbon taxes, particularly on forms of carbon whose use can easily be controlled by market forces, are a much better idea. For example, I completely fail to see why rapidly (10% per year?) increasing taxes on automotive fuels in the USA would hurt America’s economy. There would simply be a decreasing market for the classic (oversized and inefficient) American car and an increasing one for smaller, more efficient ones. And if the American car industry can’t fill that demand, then perhaps the current industry should be allowed to go bankrupt and be replaced by new companies that can. One more, not insignificant, benefit to the American economy of this sort of policy would be a decrease in the balance of payments deficit, particularly with respect to mediaeval barbarians who want to kill and/or enslave us. The ideal (for everyone else) oil income of the entire Arab Middle East is zero.
StormRider:
There is no essential difference between marxism and fascism. They both elevate the state over the individual. One justifies it with economics the other for racial or religious or climate reasons or any reason at all.
Dosent matter whether you are butchered by Hitler or Stalin or Khomeni.
Fletcher Christian/130
There is evidence that Sun intensity is the main factor affecting atmospheric temperature:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/123866
So how is it that man-derived CO2 emissions are so important? During the Late Ordovician Period (450 million years ago) CO2 levels were extremely high yet atmospheric temperatures were low – presumably due to less intense sun intensity. It appears to me that human CO2 production (due to burning of fossil fuels) is not a significant factor in relation to atmospheric temperature. Discussion of Earth’s climate 300 million (or 450 million) years ago is not beside the point because the climate (atmospheric temperature), then as now, appears to be primarily related to sun intensity.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
herb/131
Yep – Marxist = Fascist
Government Ownership = Government Control
Red = Brown
Gulag = Concentration Camp
Serf = Serf
Grave = Grave
Uh, Charles, I read that someone posted that the Russians are behind the polemic of the hackered” emails, but then again why a Vaclav Klaus would be so against “global warming” hoax if the Russians have interest to contradict it
I’ve been wondering about the motivation of whoever it is within the AGW crowd that released the Climategate information and was behind leaking the “Danish Text”. This person or group of people understand the importance of timing the release of this information for maximum political impact and appreciates that the MSM will not enable this process. I was wondering why this mystery person doesn’t openly oppose the AGW political agenda rather than sneaking around and releasing confidential information onto the Internet. Then I remembered that Bjørn Lomborg chose the open/honest approach and got hammered for it. Lomborg was targeted in a major smear campaign that almost finished his career (read the Wikipedia article about him). Lomborg’s history makes it clear that if you’re within the AGW community and don’t like what you see then the last thing you should do is come out in the open.
I wonder what this mystery person did to gain trust within the AGW community. Is he a member of Greenpeace as was the case with Bjørn Lomborg? Perhaps this person is a high level academic who has previously published papers concerning AGW? Maybe this person felt pressured by funding necessity to prostitute himself as a scientist and now he’s seeking redemption? Eventually the MSM will “out” this guy and maybe that’s the motivation, i.e. he’ll sneak around leaking stuff until outted and then go public like Bjørn Lomborg.
Do the “first wave boomers” really hate “being white”, or do they just hate where they come from? Or perhaps do they just hate their fathers? Did they internalize the old establishment, East Coast WASP contempt for the working and middle classes that came from the interior, or at least internalize the caricature of same that was a core element of the Democrat’s Class War propaganda of the immediately preceding period? This is in fact the profile of most first wave boomers– Midwestern (or Western), working and (lower) middle class.
It is hard to say, because the whole hate whitey thing did not really get into full swing until after the 1960′s. Never forget that there are three waves of boomers: First Wave (born during ww2 to 1952 or so); Second Wave (’52 to ’60 or thereabouts), and the Last Wave (roughly ’60 to roughly 64 ot 65′). Each wave maps to different phases of the ww2 vets’ family building, and each has a different dynamic.
The last wave,for instance, is the first bunch to go completely through the thoroughly corrupted, debased and dumbed-down educational system. Many of their teachers were in fact first-wavers. The last wave got most of the “hate your race” nonsense. The first wave boomers are the supreme narcissists of the cohort, and they cause most of the trouble that comes out from whole the boomer bunch. Kerry and Clinton are exemplars of this wave. These were there real 1960′s radicals. The set the tone and mentors the other waves
It is telling that Obama is basically a last wave boomer (or perhaps on a cusp) mentored by first wavers
Anyway, about liberals and “hate whitey”…
Only leftist upper scale boomers in urban centers are afraid to be proud of being “white”, if that is indeed what their issue is, and generally these people do little that is productive or of lasting value. They have been the chief enabling destructive force behind the left’s outrages against the nation, but rarely the instigators or masterminds. They have been used by much more cynical force who also happen to be white as wonderbread, and, let me tell you, this latter group is about as far from self-hatred as one can get. Both groups, of course, do not have to give up much to behave this way. They do not have mixed communities and most would not be caught dead working for a minority. It is one thing to wallow in vainglorious leftist pieties enabled by having a few tokens about; it is quite another thing to actually be on a equal footing with those on the other side of the “diversity curtain” or subject one’s offspring to such.
Go to a googleplex, investment bank or hedgie, or head out to Marin or Westchester Counties, and then do a little diversity head count there, particularly at the upper levels management level or at the private clubs. Go look at the HR org profiles when they assign talent to work under one of these “Diversity hires”. Gets pretty gruesome retention-wise, I can tell you.
Diversity is for the rest of us, not really for them, no matter how much lip service they give.
Yes, few whites are more self-loathing, but few whites are a racist as this bunch.
Never forget that that self-loathing only drives them deeper into egoism and narcissism. It is all of a piece.
The rest of the nation is appalled by this diversity culture, and find this bizarre liberal culture that spouts it (and has given us Obama) alien, and more so by each day that passes. It is becoming clear that this was just as cynical a hustle as global warming, and just as much a fraud. If you ask me, America has had quite enough of it all. Matters might not, however, resolve themselves politically. I predict a white conscious movement soon, and as some 70% of the country is white, this is no trivial matter. A similar thing will happen in the EU, and indeed they are farther down this path than we are. Look to the EU to see the future on that one. It is obscured by a treacherous media, but things move apace there. The Left will reap the whirlwind.
IF we can turn this around, and it is a big IF, this will get turned around rather briskly and rudely.
I would suggest that the AA/hate your race poison, however, was just an agitprop angle used by the left, and that one just happened to stick. The real culprits are again, the direct action Soviet operatives, dating back to the interwar period, the size of the boomer cohort, and the general prosperity (along with a lot of self-loathing as boomers did not identify with their parents).
But the whole diversity thing yet another fraud masked as a moral cause.
As I have said before, these sort of topics have to become mainstream, and the true history of the left’s war on the Light has to become common discussion before this is turned around.
It is all a series of lies of course. The question is do we have as a nation the collective moral character to face what has gone on these last 50 years and act upon it.
Soon we will know.
But we cannot “reset the clock’”of politics somehow to “Pre-obama”. We will have to face the truth or we will quickly be back here again no matter what happens in 2010 oir 2012.
Fletcher. Darn right that you have not a clue of what I am talking about. This is just pseudo-science you a spouting, and you are getting it straight out of the UK MSM. That is the point.
But Fletcher, you’re still not explaining how extra carbon, regardless of whether it was fixed or not, creates runaway warming. CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas. Doubling the carbon currently in the atmosphere (which is near the high end projections of AGW alarmists) would only raise temperatures a degree or two by itself. That’s not catastrophic, so for there to be a problem, that increase in atmospheric CO2 needs to trigger some other runaway event. The CO2 increase all by itself is not a problem, it’s not a runaway event.
So what is the runaway warming event then that you worry increased CO2 levels will trigger?
It’s a ClimateGate Christmas! Might as well have fun with it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpQXY4tWaoI
RE: 134-135
Looking into “The Russians did it” but be aware there is a language alert on this post.
But sure signs of intelligence.
Papa Ray
# 139
Thanks so much for that link…it will be in my email list for sure.
Outstanding!
Papa Ray
136 Mongoose
Mongoose, most of that is over my head. Kinda like how a bacteria or virus gets started or born.
But I can tell you how this liberal progressive affliction spread here.
It spread through our American Educational System, which was also influenced heavily by academics from outside of the U.S.
I’ve been preaching for years that our system has been corrupted and that in order to stop the spread we must quarantine and disinfect it.
It will be a huge job, long and hard and seemingly impossible but it could be done without killing individual rights in order to save our children and our future children from this disastrous affliction.
I’ve had to counter all of this and re-educate my kids and grand kids in the manner I want and that is right. Which is to teach them the truth- hair, balls and all. But how many fathers and grandfathers do this? How many are even aware of what is going on or think it’s OK that the crap and misinformation their kids minds are polluted with?
How many pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to pay to have their children infected?
Well they did not infect my kids and grand kids.
By the grace of God and my persistent instruction and advice.
Papa Ray