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"I don't know how to save the world. I don't have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all Earth's inhabitants, none of us will survive - nor will we deserve to." Leonard Peltier
Saturday, October 31, 2015
People are Herd Animals Reason vs. Instinct
People are Herd Animals
Reason vs. Instinct
Has the World gone Insane?
We humans like to think of ourselves as beings of reason and logic. We like to believe that we have "common sense" and that a reasonably intelligent and sane person wouldn't likely do something or believe something that he or she knows or should know is stupid. Nonetheless we see examples everywhere where people do things and believe things that are far below their capacity for logic and reason. We look around and say to ourselves, "People can't really be that dumb!" yet every day they continue to be that dumb? I believe that I have found the answer as to why people perform below their intellectual capacity. The answer is that people are herd animals, and that when behavior is viewed in relationship to the herd mind, a lot of things can be explained and understood.
For example, ever have a Jehovah's Witness, Hare Krishna, or other member of cult religion come to your door to try to convert you to their way of believing? Have you ever had a discussion with them and come to the conclusion that no matter what you said, no matter how good your reasoning and logic, that there was no way that you were every going to have a meeting of the minds with this person. You can be right and the subject of your discussion so obvious that a dog with a note in his mouth could win the argument, yet this person can't comprehend it. And it's not that the cult member is to stupid to understand obvious reality. They may have a college degree, a good high tech job, and be a member of Mensa. You might even be able to discuss the mathematics of why time slows down as you approach the speed of light, yet they remain unconvinced that world is round. How is that possible? It's obvious, yet they can't see it. Why? Why? Why?
We have already established that they are smart enough. They have the brain power to comprehend what you are saying. There's not a shred of doubt that you are right and they are wrong, so wrong that you can't believe that they actually believe what they believe. What's even more confusing is that this cult member is as adamant about his beliefs as you are about yours. The absolutely can't understand why you don't want to give up your worldly possessions and commit suicide to join the space aliens hiding behind the Hale-Bop comet. Who would not want to join the space aliens?
The problem is everywhere. It's not just the Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas, Branch Davidians, Mormons, New Agers, and Republicans. The insanity is everywhere. Government agencies make bizarre decisions. Politicians pass bizarre laws. Judges make bizarre rulings. Corporations enact bizarre rules. You hear stories about girls who are straight A students being expelled because they brought Midol to class to control menstrual cramps. Jack Kevorkian, a saint in the Church of Reality, is in jail. The Kansas Board of Education wants to equate Evolution and Creationism. Teenagers, who know better, are still getting hooked on cigarettes. Men wear neck ties, and women wear high heels. What is going on here? Did someone poison the drinking water? How is it possible for reasonable people to behave this way?
The Inner Workings of the Mind
If we assume that people are behaving far below their capacity to reason, then we have to conclude that reason is not the dominate aspect of the mind. We have to conclude that there are other factors in the brain that are dominate over our reason and these other factors cause us to behave and believe what we do. We have to give up the assumption that because we are human and intelligent, that intelligence rules. Clearly it doesn't. But if it doesn't, what does?
What does control behavior and belief indeed? You may find the answer to that question shocking. The answer may be so shocking that you find it hard to accept. At this point I want to invite you to do a little mental experiment with me. As you read the rest of this article, I want you to try an old hippie LSD trick without having to actually take LSD. I want you to separate you mind into several independent threads of conscious. Most people are only away of or are used to paying attention to a single voice or thread of consciousness and haven't learned how to use multiple voices to comprehend new ideas. In this article I will attempt to instruct you in a new way of learning and apply that new way of learning in real time to understanding your own mental processes. This is actually fun. It's like solving a new kind of puzzle. And it's not very hard to learn.
In order to multitask your brain I will create a series of different voices in you mind and give them names. As I create these voices, you will hear them talking. Each voice will have a different tonal quality so as to distinguish them from the other voices. As you read these words, a voice is speaking them to you in your mind. We will call that thread, "The Reader". As you read these words the Reader creates a voice in your mind which you imagine is my voice talking to you. I have a low deep voice like Barry White. Do you hear it? No, I have a high squeaky voice like Pee Wee Herman. You hear that? If you really want to here my voice you can go to my Sprint Sucks page and hear what I really sound like. Pick a voice. That will be the voice of the Reader and represent my voice.
The second voice will be the voice of "The Critic" which will be your voice. As you read my words here and hear my voice in your head, you will hear your voice in your head talking back to me. "Who the hell is this guy? Is he trying to fuck with my brain? What is he really up to? And what's the LSD stuff about? What makes him so smart? Was he sent by God or the Devil? Republicans are not a cult! You Liberals are the ones that are brainwashed! Hey, this is fun!" The Critic character is you talking back to me as if we are having a conversation. In your mind you hear your voice and my voice arguing about what you're reading here. You can't believe everything you read. You have to have someone standing guard to evaluate and filter the information that comes into your mind and to relate it to what you know and believe. The critic is the gateway that guards the mind.
The third thread of consciousness will be "The Feeler". The Feeler won't have a voice because it doesn't actually say anything. It is the emotions you are experiencing as you read this. As I tell you things you will feel good about the things that you agree with or find interesting or amusing. You will feel angry or resentful towards things you don't agree with that offend your system of beliefs or the values you hold sacred. As you read these words you will experience emotions about the ideas presented here. It's the same as what happens when you read anything. The only difference here is that you are aware that what you are reading is creating an emotional thread of conscious, the Feeler, in real time that is coexisting with at least two other threads, the Reader, and the Critic. And these threads all exist at the same time, and you are aware of all three simultaneously. How do you feel about that?
At this point you should observe an order of causal events that is taking place. As the Reader reads these words, your mind creates a voice, my voice, which is speaking to you. As you hear me talking, the Feeler reacts to my words and created emotions about what I am saying to you. The emotions drive the Critic to respond to the Reader that the Feeler also reacts to. If the Feeler experiences strong emotions, it compels the Critic to respond in a manner so as to cause the Feeler to feel comfortable with itself. What the Critic says is for the benefit of the Feeler. I would now ask you a question. In your mind, is the Critic a slave of the Feeler? Can the Feeler be compared to a nagging spouse that makes the Critic do it's bidding? Ponder the notion.
You are now observing the Reader, the Feeler, and the Critic and how they interact. You are observing the chain of events where the Reader says something, the Feeler reacts to it, the Critic responds, and the Feeler feels something else. Now that you are aware of these three threads of conscious and how they are processing this stream of information in real time, what is it that is aware? What it is that's watching all this? If you are now, at this moment, observing three threads of consciousness simultaneously, then who is the observer?
The fourth thread of consciousness will be called "The Watcher". The Watcher may or may not have a voice depending on how your mind works. In my mind that Watcher sees pictures. The way I experience it is that the Watcher sees the Reader as a person with a generic face that is speaking to me. The Critic is me listening to the Reader speak. The Feeler is like someone else's kid who is some screaming 6 year old brat that won't shut up and want's it's way all the time. The Watcher is like a TV camera that's taking it all down. And it's all happening in a place that is usually some place where I do deep thinking and feel good about. Your experience may vary.
The Watcher is like the "higher self". This fourth thread of conscious is that part of you who is observing the other three threads process this information in real time. The Watcher is also self aware and can watch itself watching itself. It's kind of like defining the word "Recursion" in the dictionary by saying, "See Recursion". In addition to being the Watcher and watching the other threads, the Watcher is that part that makes decisions and controls the updating of the "Master Database" which is the accumulation of who you are. It might be compared to the Board of Directors in a corporation or the Congress of the United States. Oh my God! A Congress in my brain? The Feeler just vomited!
The Watcher is also the one who determines "The Prime Directive" which are the guiding principles that matter in your life. It determines your "morals" or "what you believe in" and important principles and lessons that guide your life. It integrates your experiences and evaluates them and gives them meaning so as to create the pattern for future decisions. The patterns for your future decisions is what makes up your Master Database. The Master Database stores information about decisions so as to create a pattern of behavior.
The advantage of storing patterns of behavior in your Master Database is to relieve your mind of having to figure out what to do every time you face a situation. Instead of going to the effort of thinking, you access the pattern. That frees up the Watcher so that it can move on to new problems. Remember the first time you ever drove a car? It was terribly complex. You had to deal with the gas and the brakes and the steering and other traffic and traffic lights and other cars and what if you hit someone or a cop sees you. It's amazing you made it down the road at all. Now you drive somewhere and it's so automatic that you may not even remember the experience of just having driven somewhere. That's because it's stored in the Master Database.
When things go along as usual, you are on cruise control. But if something unusual occurs, something that is inconsistent with the Master Database, the Feeler sounds the alarm. The Feeler is the thread of consciousness that compares the data input streams with the master database and creates the appropriate emotions to summon the mental resources to deal with the input that fails the pattern tests in the master database. You're driving down the road and suddenly some idiot runs a red light. The Feeler wakes up the Watcher indicating that an executive decision is needed immediately.
Usually the Feeler doesn't need to wake up the Watcher. It just gets annoyed and nags the Critic to spout the dogma stored in the Master Database by the Watcher. For example, if I say to you, "Ronald Reagan was the greatest president who ever lived." Or if I said, "Bill Clinton was the greatest president who ever lived." One of those two statements will alert the Feeler, who is driven by the Master Database, to cause the Critic to state, "He's got to be out of his fucking mind!" This happens because the information about Clinton and Reagan are already stored and the reaction causes a predictable response.
Thus, how you feel about Reagan and Clinton is based on the information stored in your Master Database rather than what you think about them. The only time you think about them is if a situation comes up that exceeds the limits of the information stored in the Master Database. That requires the Watcher to make a decision and update the information there. Remember when Reagan admitted he really did trade arms for hostages? Remember when Clinton admitted he really did have inappropriate sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky? Some of what you felt was the stress of the Feeler trying to store and integrate information that doesn't agree with the contents of the Master Database and requiring the Watcher to sort out conflicting information about who's good and who's evil.
You may wonder at this point how many threads of conscious are there. Probably thousands. But for the purposes of discussion and experience here we'll limit it to talking about 4 threads and a database. That's enough to give anyone a headache. You might want to take a break at this point and get a couple aspirin. This is deep and it's going to get deeper. I'll try to keep this as simple as possible, but it's a very complex subject. It's out of the box and beyond the rim. There's nothing in the "Master Database of Global Human consciousness" to attach it to. (That's a hint as to where this conversation is going.)
Why is the Inner Workings of the mind Relevant?
I'm glad you asked that question. This is relevant for a number of reasons and it is necessary to lay the groundwork for the ideas I'm presenting here. It is important for you to understand the relationship. It's not only important to understand how brains work in general, but how your brain works in particular. The reason this is necessary is because all of our brains are imperfect tools. These imperfections are significant defects that cause us to form the wrong conclusions about the nature of reality. There are aspects of our brain that we all share that make it very difficult to accurately assess certain specific information and that in order to understand it, we must first address our own mental flaws and program around the bugs.
Additionally, all knowledge is relative. We understand what a tree is in respect to it being a plant, that it is made of wood, and wood is hard, and trees are big, and they grow, and they have leaves, and they die, but they live a long time. All these aspects of understanding a tree comes from relating it to other things we know. When a new born baby sees a tree, it doesn't comprehend it as a tree. The image is focused on the back of the eye, and it is transmitted to the brain where it is compared to an empty database. Nothing in the baby's mind says "tree". In order to understand "tree" the baby has to accumulate a lot of information to understand what "tree" means. Without the information in the database, tree means nothing. Likewise, to understand the forces that override reason, one has to first understand and experience the inner workings of the brain in real time.
I'm going to say things here that are true, but are in direct conflict with your Master Database. These are ideas that your mind will actively defend itself against unless your Watcher updates this information. We humans collectively have a lot of bad data in our databases which was placed there both as a result of cultural and tribal forces and survival instincts. If I just presented this information directly to you, your automatic processes would prevent you from understanding it without you ever being aware that this mental process was taking place. I have a theory that if you can be aware of your mental processes and observe them trying to kill an uncomfortable idea, that you will learn a new trick that will allow your brain to function beyond it's design limits.
I am not asking you to accept anything I say here on faith. In fact, I discourage the belief in anything that can't be tested. That's why I am trying to set this up as an experiment that you can conduct yourself of your own brain and to learn for yourself from your own direct observation so that you know first hand the resources and limitations of your own mind and can develop techniques that allow you to use your brain as a more effective tool. There are situations I face every day where I have to use my brain in areas that are flawed. But I have been able to understand my mental deficiencies and to work around them.
What we are talking about here is why other people believe in and do things that look to us to be incredibly stupid. How many times do we see someone with a personal problem that is so obvious to everyone except for the person involved, who absolutely can not understand it. Sometimes they get past the problem and they themselves can't understand what took them so long to figure it out. It seems that everyone has the ability to see everyone else's problems but their own. What does it take to isolate oneself for oneself so that a person can observe themselves the way everyone else sees you? If you can do that, you can see yourself the way you really are without your brain playing tricks on itself to protect you from a reality that you find unpleasant and are not prepared to accept. The only difference between seeing yourself the way you really are and the way others see you is that they don't have your personal mental barriers. Likewise, you can see them the way they are because you don't have their personal mental barriers.
Mental barriers are not limited to individuals and personal behavior. There exist mental barriers that are tribal mental barriers that are shared by all members of a tribe. For example, it is perfectly natural for Moonies to believe that Sun Myung Moon is God. That is part of their tribal database. If you are a member of that tribe, you believe Moon is God. If you don't believe Moon is God, the tribe throws you out. If being a member of the tribe is more important than reality, you mind will trick you into believing that Moon is God and your mind will prohibit you from realizing that Moon is not God until you are ready to leave the tribe. No amount of reasoning will penetrate that barrier because logic and reason are not the dominate factors. Your Master Database is controlled by the Master Database of the Moonies. If your mind doesn't control that section of information then your Watcher can't update the information and you will be unable to assimilate information that is real.
Lets pretend that the Martians invaded the earth. They landed here in 1979 in Iran and took over the minds of Iranian students who brought the Ayatollah into power, eventually leading to Reagan being elected and everything that happened as a result of that. These Martians are invisible and invade the thoughts of everyone they contact. At this point every person on the planet has been touched by the Martians. If this were true, which it isn't (I hope), how would you know if what you were thinking was your own thoughts or the thoughts of the Martians? If you worked at it hard enough you could create a set of objective tests that would allow you to function normally in spite of the foreign consciousness. Dealing with the human brain isn't that different. Your brain has a hell of a lot more potential that your using, and you can learn how to tap into it. (No, in not with a Church of Scientology.)
Your Critic may be saying to your Watcher, "We'll that doesn't apply to me. I'm not a member of a cult." To that I say, yes you are. All of society is organized into tribes and we are all members of various tribes and have surrendered part of our Master Database to the control of those tribes. The human race itself is a global tribe and it controls much of what we believe, some of which is wrong. Because we are human and we are part of various tribes, we all have the invisible Martian inside us, messing with our minds. However, if we can reclaim our minds from tribal control, then we can use our reason to discover reality the way it really is and to feed real information back into the tribal mind so as to improve the entire tribe and all it's members. Which is what the Church of Reality is all about. To pursue reality the way it really is, in spite of the tribal mind.
Human Tribal Instincts are Usually Stronger than Logic and Reason
Millions of years ago humanoids were just beginning to stand upright. They organized into small groups allowing them to survive better as the males provided protection and hunted and the females raised their young. Over the centuries language skills developed which allowed individuals to talk to each other. Because ideas could be communicated, one individual could learn something new and pass that knowledge on to the next person without that person having to learn it on his own. Knowledge could be passed on by word of mouth allowing a person's knowledge to survive past his death. With this new knowledge others could build upon the work of others and create levels of technology far greater and any individual could create themselves. No longer did everyone have to reinvent the wheel. (I wonder how long that expression has been around?) Because of language, people could communicate and work together and there was shared knowledge or tribal knowledge. These communication skills allowed those who could talk to survive better than those who could not talk and our brains evolved for the purpose of language.
Because of language, people became dependent on each other. No longer were we truly individuals. We need each other to survive. In a sense we are part of a greater organism in the same way that bees are part of a hive. Although an individual bee is technically an organism, a single bee has no more chance of surviving than a single bee cell. I think it's more accurate to say that in the world of bees, that the hive represents the individual organism, and bees are merely cells of the hive.
Although humans are much more individualistic than bees are, we are more like bees than we're like spiders. We rely on each other for our survival. For example, I didn't make my computer, build my house, build my car, grow the food I eat, or make the clothes I wear. Very little of my reality was made by me. I wrote software that runs on millions of computers that allows my mental functions to work for other people. I am dependent on society and society is dependent on me. We share knowledge and we work together. In order to work together we have rules and we have governments that enforce the rules. We have trade and have developed currency so as to enhance our ability to trade. We have the ability to write and send email and data and our ability to share information has greatly enhanced our ability to survive.
But this shared knowledge has come at a price. In order for our species to survive, we have had to surrender part of our individuality for the tribal good. Many of our ancestors fought and dies in wars for the survival of our tribal culture. Our ability to survive as a tribal member has become a significant instinctive skill that is part of who we are and the knowledge we are born with. We all need the approval of the herd in order to have a sense of well being and to feel OK about ourselves. And for most people, it creates great mental anguish to be rejected or disconnected from the herd. The instinct to be tribal is so strong that many people will kill themselves as a result of separation from or rejection by the herd.
Because we live in an advanced society much of our knowledge comes from other people. Some of that knowledge is just plain wrong, but because the herd thinks it's true, we are expected to believe it. After all, it's not our nature to assume that we, as individuals, are smarter than the combination of thousands or millions of people who have believed things for centuries. But often an individual does discover a new truth or discovers that something the herd though was true is not true at all. When this happens knowledge is often lost because the individual submits to the will of the herd.
What is a herd?
A herd or tribe is any organization of two or more people who come together for any purpose. A herd can be as small as two people sharing an apartment to all of humanity. Most people belong to hundreds of herds and will move in and out of different herds throughout their lifetimes. A herd is any organization of people who share some common function. Herds include all religions, governments at all levels including neighborhood associations, sports fans, clubs, political parties, chat rooms, talk radio fans, Mackintosh owners, fellow employees, Mensans, hippies, bars, nerds, and schools. Each of the organizations have a set of rules and common beliefs. The members of the organizations all surrender part of their Master Database to the herd. The herd itself becomes a living organism much the same way a hive is a living organism of bees. And in many cases these tribal organizations are as real or more real than the individuals that make them up.
For example, if you are a Christian, you are expected to believe in Jesus. If you don't believe in Jesus, what's the point in being a Christian? As a Christian, you might join a specific denomination of Christianity and become a member of a specific church. As a church member, you are expected to attend church on Sunday morning. You are expected to dress up and give them 10% of your money. The preacher is in charge and you are expected to listen to the sermon. When he says to stand and pray, you stand and pray. If he leads the congregation in prayer, then you all pray together. When you sing, you all sing together. When he says stand, everyone stands. When he says sit, everyone sits. When he says to speak in tongues, someone will get up and speak in tongues. And when he says vote Republican, everyone votes Republican.
In order to be a member of the herd, the member has to surrender control of part of their thinking and decision making process to the group consciousness. In the case of clubs, the punishment for individuality is denial of membership. In the case of government they might take away your money or freedom. In the case of religion, you risk losing your eternal soul and roasting in Hell forever. Membership in the herd gives an individual a sense of community and family. An individual develops standing and social position within the tribe and that sense of group acceptance is necessary of the psychological well being of that person. An individual who would challenge the powers that be within the herd risks losing the benefits of and encoring the wrath of the herd. There is a price to pay, and if the individual isn't willing to pay that price then they have to accept the herd's domination of that part of their Master Database.
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
Reason vs. Instinct
Has the World gone Insane?
We humans like to think of ourselves as beings of reason and logic. We like to believe that we have "common sense" and that a reasonably intelligent and sane person wouldn't likely do something or believe something that he or she knows or should know is stupid. Nonetheless we see examples everywhere where people do things and believe things that are far below their capacity for logic and reason. We look around and say to ourselves, "People can't really be that dumb!" yet every day they continue to be that dumb? I believe that I have found the answer as to why people perform below their intellectual capacity. The answer is that people are herd animals, and that when behavior is viewed in relationship to the herd mind, a lot of things can be explained and understood.
For example, ever have a Jehovah's Witness, Hare Krishna, or other member of cult religion come to your door to try to convert you to their way of believing? Have you ever had a discussion with them and come to the conclusion that no matter what you said, no matter how good your reasoning and logic, that there was no way that you were every going to have a meeting of the minds with this person. You can be right and the subject of your discussion so obvious that a dog with a note in his mouth could win the argument, yet this person can't comprehend it. And it's not that the cult member is to stupid to understand obvious reality. They may have a college degree, a good high tech job, and be a member of Mensa. You might even be able to discuss the mathematics of why time slows down as you approach the speed of light, yet they remain unconvinced that world is round. How is that possible? It's obvious, yet they can't see it. Why? Why? Why?
We have already established that they are smart enough. They have the brain power to comprehend what you are saying. There's not a shred of doubt that you are right and they are wrong, so wrong that you can't believe that they actually believe what they believe. What's even more confusing is that this cult member is as adamant about his beliefs as you are about yours. The absolutely can't understand why you don't want to give up your worldly possessions and commit suicide to join the space aliens hiding behind the Hale-Bop comet. Who would not want to join the space aliens?
The problem is everywhere. It's not just the Jehovah's Witnesses, Hare Krishnas, Branch Davidians, Mormons, New Agers, and Republicans. The insanity is everywhere. Government agencies make bizarre decisions. Politicians pass bizarre laws. Judges make bizarre rulings. Corporations enact bizarre rules. You hear stories about girls who are straight A students being expelled because they brought Midol to class to control menstrual cramps. Jack Kevorkian, a saint in the Church of Reality, is in jail. The Kansas Board of Education wants to equate Evolution and Creationism. Teenagers, who know better, are still getting hooked on cigarettes. Men wear neck ties, and women wear high heels. What is going on here? Did someone poison the drinking water? How is it possible for reasonable people to behave this way?
The Inner Workings of the Mind
If we assume that people are behaving far below their capacity to reason, then we have to conclude that reason is not the dominate aspect of the mind. We have to conclude that there are other factors in the brain that are dominate over our reason and these other factors cause us to behave and believe what we do. We have to give up the assumption that because we are human and intelligent, that intelligence rules. Clearly it doesn't. But if it doesn't, what does?
What does control behavior and belief indeed? You may find the answer to that question shocking. The answer may be so shocking that you find it hard to accept. At this point I want to invite you to do a little mental experiment with me. As you read the rest of this article, I want you to try an old hippie LSD trick without having to actually take LSD. I want you to separate you mind into several independent threads of conscious. Most people are only away of or are used to paying attention to a single voice or thread of consciousness and haven't learned how to use multiple voices to comprehend new ideas. In this article I will attempt to instruct you in a new way of learning and apply that new way of learning in real time to understanding your own mental processes. This is actually fun. It's like solving a new kind of puzzle. And it's not very hard to learn.
In order to multitask your brain I will create a series of different voices in you mind and give them names. As I create these voices, you will hear them talking. Each voice will have a different tonal quality so as to distinguish them from the other voices. As you read these words, a voice is speaking them to you in your mind. We will call that thread, "The Reader". As you read these words the Reader creates a voice in your mind which you imagine is my voice talking to you. I have a low deep voice like Barry White. Do you hear it? No, I have a high squeaky voice like Pee Wee Herman. You hear that? If you really want to here my voice you can go to my Sprint Sucks page and hear what I really sound like. Pick a voice. That will be the voice of the Reader and represent my voice.
The second voice will be the voice of "The Critic" which will be your voice. As you read my words here and hear my voice in your head, you will hear your voice in your head talking back to me. "Who the hell is this guy? Is he trying to fuck with my brain? What is he really up to? And what's the LSD stuff about? What makes him so smart? Was he sent by God or the Devil? Republicans are not a cult! You Liberals are the ones that are brainwashed! Hey, this is fun!" The Critic character is you talking back to me as if we are having a conversation. In your mind you hear your voice and my voice arguing about what you're reading here. You can't believe everything you read. You have to have someone standing guard to evaluate and filter the information that comes into your mind and to relate it to what you know and believe. The critic is the gateway that guards the mind.
The third thread of consciousness will be "The Feeler". The Feeler won't have a voice because it doesn't actually say anything. It is the emotions you are experiencing as you read this. As I tell you things you will feel good about the things that you agree with or find interesting or amusing. You will feel angry or resentful towards things you don't agree with that offend your system of beliefs or the values you hold sacred. As you read these words you will experience emotions about the ideas presented here. It's the same as what happens when you read anything. The only difference here is that you are aware that what you are reading is creating an emotional thread of conscious, the Feeler, in real time that is coexisting with at least two other threads, the Reader, and the Critic. And these threads all exist at the same time, and you are aware of all three simultaneously. How do you feel about that?
At this point you should observe an order of causal events that is taking place. As the Reader reads these words, your mind creates a voice, my voice, which is speaking to you. As you hear me talking, the Feeler reacts to my words and created emotions about what I am saying to you. The emotions drive the Critic to respond to the Reader that the Feeler also reacts to. If the Feeler experiences strong emotions, it compels the Critic to respond in a manner so as to cause the Feeler to feel comfortable with itself. What the Critic says is for the benefit of the Feeler. I would now ask you a question. In your mind, is the Critic a slave of the Feeler? Can the Feeler be compared to a nagging spouse that makes the Critic do it's bidding? Ponder the notion.
You are now observing the Reader, the Feeler, and the Critic and how they interact. You are observing the chain of events where the Reader says something, the Feeler reacts to it, the Critic responds, and the Feeler feels something else. Now that you are aware of these three threads of conscious and how they are processing this stream of information in real time, what is it that is aware? What it is that's watching all this? If you are now, at this moment, observing three threads of consciousness simultaneously, then who is the observer?
The fourth thread of consciousness will be called "The Watcher". The Watcher may or may not have a voice depending on how your mind works. In my mind that Watcher sees pictures. The way I experience it is that the Watcher sees the Reader as a person with a generic face that is speaking to me. The Critic is me listening to the Reader speak. The Feeler is like someone else's kid who is some screaming 6 year old brat that won't shut up and want's it's way all the time. The Watcher is like a TV camera that's taking it all down. And it's all happening in a place that is usually some place where I do deep thinking and feel good about. Your experience may vary.
The Watcher is like the "higher self". This fourth thread of conscious is that part of you who is observing the other three threads process this information in real time. The Watcher is also self aware and can watch itself watching itself. It's kind of like defining the word "Recursion" in the dictionary by saying, "See Recursion". In addition to being the Watcher and watching the other threads, the Watcher is that part that makes decisions and controls the updating of the "Master Database" which is the accumulation of who you are. It might be compared to the Board of Directors in a corporation or the Congress of the United States. Oh my God! A Congress in my brain? The Feeler just vomited!
The Watcher is also the one who determines "The Prime Directive" which are the guiding principles that matter in your life. It determines your "morals" or "what you believe in" and important principles and lessons that guide your life. It integrates your experiences and evaluates them and gives them meaning so as to create the pattern for future decisions. The patterns for your future decisions is what makes up your Master Database. The Master Database stores information about decisions so as to create a pattern of behavior.
The advantage of storing patterns of behavior in your Master Database is to relieve your mind of having to figure out what to do every time you face a situation. Instead of going to the effort of thinking, you access the pattern. That frees up the Watcher so that it can move on to new problems. Remember the first time you ever drove a car? It was terribly complex. You had to deal with the gas and the brakes and the steering and other traffic and traffic lights and other cars and what if you hit someone or a cop sees you. It's amazing you made it down the road at all. Now you drive somewhere and it's so automatic that you may not even remember the experience of just having driven somewhere. That's because it's stored in the Master Database.
When things go along as usual, you are on cruise control. But if something unusual occurs, something that is inconsistent with the Master Database, the Feeler sounds the alarm. The Feeler is the thread of consciousness that compares the data input streams with the master database and creates the appropriate emotions to summon the mental resources to deal with the input that fails the pattern tests in the master database. You're driving down the road and suddenly some idiot runs a red light. The Feeler wakes up the Watcher indicating that an executive decision is needed immediately.
Usually the Feeler doesn't need to wake up the Watcher. It just gets annoyed and nags the Critic to spout the dogma stored in the Master Database by the Watcher. For example, if I say to you, "Ronald Reagan was the greatest president who ever lived." Or if I said, "Bill Clinton was the greatest president who ever lived." One of those two statements will alert the Feeler, who is driven by the Master Database, to cause the Critic to state, "He's got to be out of his fucking mind!" This happens because the information about Clinton and Reagan are already stored and the reaction causes a predictable response.
Thus, how you feel about Reagan and Clinton is based on the information stored in your Master Database rather than what you think about them. The only time you think about them is if a situation comes up that exceeds the limits of the information stored in the Master Database. That requires the Watcher to make a decision and update the information there. Remember when Reagan admitted he really did trade arms for hostages? Remember when Clinton admitted he really did have inappropriate sexual contact with Monica Lewinsky? Some of what you felt was the stress of the Feeler trying to store and integrate information that doesn't agree with the contents of the Master Database and requiring the Watcher to sort out conflicting information about who's good and who's evil.
You may wonder at this point how many threads of conscious are there. Probably thousands. But for the purposes of discussion and experience here we'll limit it to talking about 4 threads and a database. That's enough to give anyone a headache. You might want to take a break at this point and get a couple aspirin. This is deep and it's going to get deeper. I'll try to keep this as simple as possible, but it's a very complex subject. It's out of the box and beyond the rim. There's nothing in the "Master Database of Global Human consciousness" to attach it to. (That's a hint as to where this conversation is going.)
Why is the Inner Workings of the mind Relevant?
I'm glad you asked that question. This is relevant for a number of reasons and it is necessary to lay the groundwork for the ideas I'm presenting here. It is important for you to understand the relationship. It's not only important to understand how brains work in general, but how your brain works in particular. The reason this is necessary is because all of our brains are imperfect tools. These imperfections are significant defects that cause us to form the wrong conclusions about the nature of reality. There are aspects of our brain that we all share that make it very difficult to accurately assess certain specific information and that in order to understand it, we must first address our own mental flaws and program around the bugs.
Additionally, all knowledge is relative. We understand what a tree is in respect to it being a plant, that it is made of wood, and wood is hard, and trees are big, and they grow, and they have leaves, and they die, but they live a long time. All these aspects of understanding a tree comes from relating it to other things we know. When a new born baby sees a tree, it doesn't comprehend it as a tree. The image is focused on the back of the eye, and it is transmitted to the brain where it is compared to an empty database. Nothing in the baby's mind says "tree". In order to understand "tree" the baby has to accumulate a lot of information to understand what "tree" means. Without the information in the database, tree means nothing. Likewise, to understand the forces that override reason, one has to first understand and experience the inner workings of the brain in real time.
I'm going to say things here that are true, but are in direct conflict with your Master Database. These are ideas that your mind will actively defend itself against unless your Watcher updates this information. We humans collectively have a lot of bad data in our databases which was placed there both as a result of cultural and tribal forces and survival instincts. If I just presented this information directly to you, your automatic processes would prevent you from understanding it without you ever being aware that this mental process was taking place. I have a theory that if you can be aware of your mental processes and observe them trying to kill an uncomfortable idea, that you will learn a new trick that will allow your brain to function beyond it's design limits.
I am not asking you to accept anything I say here on faith. In fact, I discourage the belief in anything that can't be tested. That's why I am trying to set this up as an experiment that you can conduct yourself of your own brain and to learn for yourself from your own direct observation so that you know first hand the resources and limitations of your own mind and can develop techniques that allow you to use your brain as a more effective tool. There are situations I face every day where I have to use my brain in areas that are flawed. But I have been able to understand my mental deficiencies and to work around them.
What we are talking about here is why other people believe in and do things that look to us to be incredibly stupid. How many times do we see someone with a personal problem that is so obvious to everyone except for the person involved, who absolutely can not understand it. Sometimes they get past the problem and they themselves can't understand what took them so long to figure it out. It seems that everyone has the ability to see everyone else's problems but their own. What does it take to isolate oneself for oneself so that a person can observe themselves the way everyone else sees you? If you can do that, you can see yourself the way you really are without your brain playing tricks on itself to protect you from a reality that you find unpleasant and are not prepared to accept. The only difference between seeing yourself the way you really are and the way others see you is that they don't have your personal mental barriers. Likewise, you can see them the way they are because you don't have their personal mental barriers.
Mental barriers are not limited to individuals and personal behavior. There exist mental barriers that are tribal mental barriers that are shared by all members of a tribe. For example, it is perfectly natural for Moonies to believe that Sun Myung Moon is God. That is part of their tribal database. If you are a member of that tribe, you believe Moon is God. If you don't believe Moon is God, the tribe throws you out. If being a member of the tribe is more important than reality, you mind will trick you into believing that Moon is God and your mind will prohibit you from realizing that Moon is not God until you are ready to leave the tribe. No amount of reasoning will penetrate that barrier because logic and reason are not the dominate factors. Your Master Database is controlled by the Master Database of the Moonies. If your mind doesn't control that section of information then your Watcher can't update the information and you will be unable to assimilate information that is real.
Lets pretend that the Martians invaded the earth. They landed here in 1979 in Iran and took over the minds of Iranian students who brought the Ayatollah into power, eventually leading to Reagan being elected and everything that happened as a result of that. These Martians are invisible and invade the thoughts of everyone they contact. At this point every person on the planet has been touched by the Martians. If this were true, which it isn't (I hope), how would you know if what you were thinking was your own thoughts or the thoughts of the Martians? If you worked at it hard enough you could create a set of objective tests that would allow you to function normally in spite of the foreign consciousness. Dealing with the human brain isn't that different. Your brain has a hell of a lot more potential that your using, and you can learn how to tap into it. (No, in not with a Church of Scientology.)
Your Critic may be saying to your Watcher, "We'll that doesn't apply to me. I'm not a member of a cult." To that I say, yes you are. All of society is organized into tribes and we are all members of various tribes and have surrendered part of our Master Database to the control of those tribes. The human race itself is a global tribe and it controls much of what we believe, some of which is wrong. Because we are human and we are part of various tribes, we all have the invisible Martian inside us, messing with our minds. However, if we can reclaim our minds from tribal control, then we can use our reason to discover reality the way it really is and to feed real information back into the tribal mind so as to improve the entire tribe and all it's members. Which is what the Church of Reality is all about. To pursue reality the way it really is, in spite of the tribal mind.
Human Tribal Instincts are Usually Stronger than Logic and Reason
Millions of years ago humanoids were just beginning to stand upright. They organized into small groups allowing them to survive better as the males provided protection and hunted and the females raised their young. Over the centuries language skills developed which allowed individuals to talk to each other. Because ideas could be communicated, one individual could learn something new and pass that knowledge on to the next person without that person having to learn it on his own. Knowledge could be passed on by word of mouth allowing a person's knowledge to survive past his death. With this new knowledge others could build upon the work of others and create levels of technology far greater and any individual could create themselves. No longer did everyone have to reinvent the wheel. (I wonder how long that expression has been around?) Because of language, people could communicate and work together and there was shared knowledge or tribal knowledge. These communication skills allowed those who could talk to survive better than those who could not talk and our brains evolved for the purpose of language.
Because of language, people became dependent on each other. No longer were we truly individuals. We need each other to survive. In a sense we are part of a greater organism in the same way that bees are part of a hive. Although an individual bee is technically an organism, a single bee has no more chance of surviving than a single bee cell. I think it's more accurate to say that in the world of bees, that the hive represents the individual organism, and bees are merely cells of the hive.
Although humans are much more individualistic than bees are, we are more like bees than we're like spiders. We rely on each other for our survival. For example, I didn't make my computer, build my house, build my car, grow the food I eat, or make the clothes I wear. Very little of my reality was made by me. I wrote software that runs on millions of computers that allows my mental functions to work for other people. I am dependent on society and society is dependent on me. We share knowledge and we work together. In order to work together we have rules and we have governments that enforce the rules. We have trade and have developed currency so as to enhance our ability to trade. We have the ability to write and send email and data and our ability to share information has greatly enhanced our ability to survive.
But this shared knowledge has come at a price. In order for our species to survive, we have had to surrender part of our individuality for the tribal good. Many of our ancestors fought and dies in wars for the survival of our tribal culture. Our ability to survive as a tribal member has become a significant instinctive skill that is part of who we are and the knowledge we are born with. We all need the approval of the herd in order to have a sense of well being and to feel OK about ourselves. And for most people, it creates great mental anguish to be rejected or disconnected from the herd. The instinct to be tribal is so strong that many people will kill themselves as a result of separation from or rejection by the herd.
Because we live in an advanced society much of our knowledge comes from other people. Some of that knowledge is just plain wrong, but because the herd thinks it's true, we are expected to believe it. After all, it's not our nature to assume that we, as individuals, are smarter than the combination of thousands or millions of people who have believed things for centuries. But often an individual does discover a new truth or discovers that something the herd though was true is not true at all. When this happens knowledge is often lost because the individual submits to the will of the herd.
What is a herd?
A herd or tribe is any organization of two or more people who come together for any purpose. A herd can be as small as two people sharing an apartment to all of humanity. Most people belong to hundreds of herds and will move in and out of different herds throughout their lifetimes. A herd is any organization of people who share some common function. Herds include all religions, governments at all levels including neighborhood associations, sports fans, clubs, political parties, chat rooms, talk radio fans, Mackintosh owners, fellow employees, Mensans, hippies, bars, nerds, and schools. Each of the organizations have a set of rules and common beliefs. The members of the organizations all surrender part of their Master Database to the herd. The herd itself becomes a living organism much the same way a hive is a living organism of bees. And in many cases these tribal organizations are as real or more real than the individuals that make them up.
For example, if you are a Christian, you are expected to believe in Jesus. If you don't believe in Jesus, what's the point in being a Christian? As a Christian, you might join a specific denomination of Christianity and become a member of a specific church. As a church member, you are expected to attend church on Sunday morning. You are expected to dress up and give them 10% of your money. The preacher is in charge and you are expected to listen to the sermon. When he says to stand and pray, you stand and pray. If he leads the congregation in prayer, then you all pray together. When you sing, you all sing together. When he says stand, everyone stands. When he says sit, everyone sits. When he says to speak in tongues, someone will get up and speak in tongues. And when he says vote Republican, everyone votes Republican.
In order to be a member of the herd, the member has to surrender control of part of their thinking and decision making process to the group consciousness. In the case of clubs, the punishment for individuality is denial of membership. In the case of government they might take away your money or freedom. In the case of religion, you risk losing your eternal soul and roasting in Hell forever. Membership in the herd gives an individual a sense of community and family. An individual develops standing and social position within the tribe and that sense of group acceptance is necessary of the psychological well being of that person. An individual who would challenge the powers that be within the herd risks losing the benefits of and encoring the wrath of the herd. There is a price to pay, and if the individual isn't willing to pay that price then they have to accept the herd's domination of that part of their Master Database.
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
Freedom vs. Safety
Freedom vs. Safety
Is safety worth giving
up your personal liberty?
Nerf society of mindless government slaves ...
Every day the federal government as well as state and local governments pass laws to make us a safer society. As they make society safer they are slowly chewing away at our rights, liberties, and our personal freedoms. Where is the balance? Is a safe nerf ball society worth giving up our freedoms for. At what point do we tell the government that we would rather die than to become mindless government slaves? Where is the line between where our right to choose is more important than the government's right to impose their standards on us. Even if it's for our own good?
We now have law regulating everything. We are forced to wear seat belts. We have to wear motorcycle helmets. Kids have to ride in the back seat. Smokers can't even smoke outside. We can't smoke a joint in the privacy of our own homes. Kids are expelled from schools for possession of nonprescription drugs. The government wants to regulate abortion, religion, sex, child discipline, marriage, and free speech. They want to control what you can post on the web, what your kids wear to school, where you can walk across the street, what you can watch in titty bars, what you can say at the office, where you can pray, where you can get high, who you have sex with, what kind of sex you have, what jokes you can tell, and when you can spank your children.
The Government is moving to regulate every aspect of our lives in order to protect us from ourselves. But is it worth our freedom and liberty?
The police can arrest you in your home without a warrant. The Division of Family Services can take your kids away. Teachers can no longer enforce discipline in the classroom. The courts tell you who you can have over as a lover and will take your kids away if you don't comply with their standards. If you spank your kids you can lose them for child abuse. If your spouse files for divorce, the courts take control of your property and divide it among the lawyers. They want to tell you where you can smoke outside. They can take your property away without ever charging you, let alone convicting you, of a crime. If the government want's your house, all they have to do is establish probable cause that your house was involved in a crime to institute a civil forfeiture proceeding. And all of this is "for the children" and to "enforce drug laws" to protect you from criminals.
Eliminating Civil Liberties Reduces Crime
Reducing crime is easy. All we have to do is to eliminate the Constitution and get rid of all these rights. If a person commits a crime then just shoot 'em. Why bother with a trial or a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Why bother spending tax money to put these people in jail? So we fry a few innocent people. We're eliminating crime and saving the taxpayer money. A bullet only costs a few cents. Wouldn't we all be safer if we just killed off all the lawbreakers and other undesirables? Wouldn't that cut down on crime?
You bet it would. It worked very well for Stalin and Hitler. In Russia, if you even thought about committing a crime you were killed. Russia under Stalin was a society of people who obeyed the law. But is that what we want here? I don't think so.
America isn't like World War II Russia. Not even close. But we are heading in that direction. Who would have thought that the police could come into your home without a warrant and haul you off to jail? Who would have thought that the government could take your house without convicting you of a crime? Who would have thought they could take your kids away without a conviction or a judge's order? If the police attack you, they charge you with a crime. You can go to jail for what other people do or fail to do. If you spank your kids, you go to jail. If your kids commit crimes or fail to attend school, you go to jail.
And this is supposed to be America, the home of the brave and the land of the free. But what does it mean to be free. To me, being free is the freedom to make my own decisions. I decide what I want to believe in. I decide if I want to risk my life by not wearing a seatbelt. I decide if I want to ruin my health by smoking cigarettes. (By the way, I'm an avid non-smoker.) I decide who I want to have sex with and how I will pay for it. I decide if I want my kids to sit in the front seat of my car or in the back end of my pickup truck. I decide if I want to get drunk or stoned. I decide if my kids need their butt swatted. I decide if I want to go to church and what church I want to go to. I decide if I want my kids on drugs and be free of courts or schools who try to force my kids to take drugs because the teachers are boring.
I want to be free to own a gun to protect myself and my family if I want to. I want to be free to Burn the Flag if the government gets too far out of line. I want to be free to say FUCK YOU on the Internet to those who want to tell me I can't say FUCK YOU. If I choose to live a lifestyle that will result in my burning in Hell forever, then that's my choice. Freedom is not a government who subjects me to their moral standards. I am a motherfucking asshole and I am comfortable with who I am. If the government doesn't like it they can shove it up their ass. I'm free. Get used to it.
Personal Protections we don't want
Is it a good idea to wear a seatbelt? Yes it is. Should the government do the research and determine how much safer it is? Yes they should. Should they require car manufacturers to install seatbelts in new cars? Yes. Should they be allowed to run ads and put up billboards suggesting I wear my seatbelt? Sure. Should they be allowed to force me to wear a seatbelt? No. That's my choice. If I choose to be stupid, that's my right.
One could argue that if I was injured because I didn't wear my seatbelt that society might incur some kind of expense. Yes, it might happen. But freedom has a price. Our soldiers have gone to war and fought and died so that we can remain free. Freedom always has a cost. But it's worth the price.
There's no doubt that when people are free that bad things are going to happen to some people. If people are allowed to make choices then some people will make bad choices. When you have freedom and liberty, you have the freedom and liberty to screw up. You have the freedom to destroy your life. But would you rather be a mind slave to the government and have them control your life, or perhaps destroy your life for you? After all, there's no IQ test to be elected to public office. There are a lot of laws that are just plain stupid. Laws that it's the duty of the people to break in defiance of the government.
I hate cigarette smokers. I think you have to be a total idiot to smoke. And I support laws that restrict smoking inside a building where non-smokers have to breathe it. But when you're outside where the ratio of air to fumes is low, you have to be reasonable and let the idiots smoke. Does it make them less of an idiot because they are allowed to smoke? No. But this is America where you have the freedom to be an idiot if that's what you choose to do.
Should a Jehovah's Witness be allowed to die for lack of a blood transfusion? Definitely. Should a person be able to choose when and how they will die? Absolutely. Yet Jack Kevorkian rots in jail for helping people die who chose to die and needed a doctor to make it happen. Jack Kevorkian is a Saint and should be honored as a hero. But re rots in jail because society hasn't faced the reality that we all die. It's my life. It's my choice. The government has no right to decide that for me.
Government of the People
America is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It exist only to serve us, not to rule use. They don't give us our rights. Our rights are ours. Anyone who would take away our freedoms and liberties is committing treason to the Constitution and is an enemy of the people and an enemy of our nation. The people are the fourth branch of government and superior to all other branches.
It is our duty as freedom loving people to rise up and slap down the government when it gets out of line. If the people don't stand up and assert their liberties, they don't deserve them.
We as a people can not sit back and assume that Uncle Sam is going to take care of us and that the machinery of government is just going to work without the supervision of the people. We as a people have a duty to watch the government and slap it down when it gets out of line. We as a people have to be worthy of deserving freedom. This is not something that was bestowed on us by the founding fathers. We have to maintain it and defend it. If we let freedom and liberty slip away a little at a time, then we are a people who doesn't deserve to be free. Just as the government has a duty to serve us, we as a people have a duty to defend our freedom and to understand and appreciate the rewards of being a free and open society. If we as a people fail in our duty to protect our freedom, then we no longer deserve to be a free people.
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
Is safety worth giving
up your personal liberty?
Nerf society of mindless government slaves ...
Every day the federal government as well as state and local governments pass laws to make us a safer society. As they make society safer they are slowly chewing away at our rights, liberties, and our personal freedoms. Where is the balance? Is a safe nerf ball society worth giving up our freedoms for. At what point do we tell the government that we would rather die than to become mindless government slaves? Where is the line between where our right to choose is more important than the government's right to impose their standards on us. Even if it's for our own good?
We now have law regulating everything. We are forced to wear seat belts. We have to wear motorcycle helmets. Kids have to ride in the back seat. Smokers can't even smoke outside. We can't smoke a joint in the privacy of our own homes. Kids are expelled from schools for possession of nonprescription drugs. The government wants to regulate abortion, religion, sex, child discipline, marriage, and free speech. They want to control what you can post on the web, what your kids wear to school, where you can walk across the street, what you can watch in titty bars, what you can say at the office, where you can pray, where you can get high, who you have sex with, what kind of sex you have, what jokes you can tell, and when you can spank your children.
The Government is moving to regulate every aspect of our lives in order to protect us from ourselves. But is it worth our freedom and liberty?
The police can arrest you in your home without a warrant. The Division of Family Services can take your kids away. Teachers can no longer enforce discipline in the classroom. The courts tell you who you can have over as a lover and will take your kids away if you don't comply with their standards. If you spank your kids you can lose them for child abuse. If your spouse files for divorce, the courts take control of your property and divide it among the lawyers. They want to tell you where you can smoke outside. They can take your property away without ever charging you, let alone convicting you, of a crime. If the government want's your house, all they have to do is establish probable cause that your house was involved in a crime to institute a civil forfeiture proceeding. And all of this is "for the children" and to "enforce drug laws" to protect you from criminals.
Eliminating Civil Liberties Reduces Crime
Reducing crime is easy. All we have to do is to eliminate the Constitution and get rid of all these rights. If a person commits a crime then just shoot 'em. Why bother with a trial or a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Why bother spending tax money to put these people in jail? So we fry a few innocent people. We're eliminating crime and saving the taxpayer money. A bullet only costs a few cents. Wouldn't we all be safer if we just killed off all the lawbreakers and other undesirables? Wouldn't that cut down on crime?
You bet it would. It worked very well for Stalin and Hitler. In Russia, if you even thought about committing a crime you were killed. Russia under Stalin was a society of people who obeyed the law. But is that what we want here? I don't think so.
America isn't like World War II Russia. Not even close. But we are heading in that direction. Who would have thought that the police could come into your home without a warrant and haul you off to jail? Who would have thought that the government could take your house without convicting you of a crime? Who would have thought they could take your kids away without a conviction or a judge's order? If the police attack you, they charge you with a crime. You can go to jail for what other people do or fail to do. If you spank your kids, you go to jail. If your kids commit crimes or fail to attend school, you go to jail.
And this is supposed to be America, the home of the brave and the land of the free. But what does it mean to be free. To me, being free is the freedom to make my own decisions. I decide what I want to believe in. I decide if I want to risk my life by not wearing a seatbelt. I decide if I want to ruin my health by smoking cigarettes. (By the way, I'm an avid non-smoker.) I decide who I want to have sex with and how I will pay for it. I decide if I want my kids to sit in the front seat of my car or in the back end of my pickup truck. I decide if I want to get drunk or stoned. I decide if my kids need their butt swatted. I decide if I want to go to church and what church I want to go to. I decide if I want my kids on drugs and be free of courts or schools who try to force my kids to take drugs because the teachers are boring.
I want to be free to own a gun to protect myself and my family if I want to. I want to be free to Burn the Flag if the government gets too far out of line. I want to be free to say FUCK YOU on the Internet to those who want to tell me I can't say FUCK YOU. If I choose to live a lifestyle that will result in my burning in Hell forever, then that's my choice. Freedom is not a government who subjects me to their moral standards. I am a motherfucking asshole and I am comfortable with who I am. If the government doesn't like it they can shove it up their ass. I'm free. Get used to it.
Personal Protections we don't want
Is it a good idea to wear a seatbelt? Yes it is. Should the government do the research and determine how much safer it is? Yes they should. Should they require car manufacturers to install seatbelts in new cars? Yes. Should they be allowed to run ads and put up billboards suggesting I wear my seatbelt? Sure. Should they be allowed to force me to wear a seatbelt? No. That's my choice. If I choose to be stupid, that's my right.
One could argue that if I was injured because I didn't wear my seatbelt that society might incur some kind of expense. Yes, it might happen. But freedom has a price. Our soldiers have gone to war and fought and died so that we can remain free. Freedom always has a cost. But it's worth the price.
There's no doubt that when people are free that bad things are going to happen to some people. If people are allowed to make choices then some people will make bad choices. When you have freedom and liberty, you have the freedom and liberty to screw up. You have the freedom to destroy your life. But would you rather be a mind slave to the government and have them control your life, or perhaps destroy your life for you? After all, there's no IQ test to be elected to public office. There are a lot of laws that are just plain stupid. Laws that it's the duty of the people to break in defiance of the government.
I hate cigarette smokers. I think you have to be a total idiot to smoke. And I support laws that restrict smoking inside a building where non-smokers have to breathe it. But when you're outside where the ratio of air to fumes is low, you have to be reasonable and let the idiots smoke. Does it make them less of an idiot because they are allowed to smoke? No. But this is America where you have the freedom to be an idiot if that's what you choose to do.
Should a Jehovah's Witness be allowed to die for lack of a blood transfusion? Definitely. Should a person be able to choose when and how they will die? Absolutely. Yet Jack Kevorkian rots in jail for helping people die who chose to die and needed a doctor to make it happen. Jack Kevorkian is a Saint and should be honored as a hero. But re rots in jail because society hasn't faced the reality that we all die. It's my life. It's my choice. The government has no right to decide that for me.
Government of the People
America is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It exist only to serve us, not to rule use. They don't give us our rights. Our rights are ours. Anyone who would take away our freedoms and liberties is committing treason to the Constitution and is an enemy of the people and an enemy of our nation. The people are the fourth branch of government and superior to all other branches.
It is our duty as freedom loving people to rise up and slap down the government when it gets out of line. If the people don't stand up and assert their liberties, they don't deserve them.
We as a people can not sit back and assume that Uncle Sam is going to take care of us and that the machinery of government is just going to work without the supervision of the people. We as a people have a duty to watch the government and slap it down when it gets out of line. We as a people have to be worthy of deserving freedom. This is not something that was bestowed on us by the founding fathers. We have to maintain it and defend it. If we let freedom and liberty slip away a little at a time, then we are a people who doesn't deserve to be free. Just as the government has a duty to serve us, we as a people have a duty to defend our freedom and to understand and appreciate the rewards of being a free and open society. If we as a people fail in our duty to protect our freedom, then we no longer deserve to be a free people.
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
Solving America's Problems
Solving America's Problems
Because I make it a practice to point out what everybody else is doing badly, I thought for a change I would offer solutions or at least suggestions.
The problem with guns, as even Barack Obama would admit if you could water board him into telling the truth, has nothing to do with law-abiding citizens, everything to do with loons and thugs having access to weapons when, in a sane society, the only things those two groups would have access to are insane asylums and jails, respectively.
I venture that far less than one percent of all crimes committed with guns are committed by members of the NRA. Somehow, I just don’t see the inner city residents of Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and L.A., signing up to take gun safety classes or undergoing background checks.
As for all the violence taking place in gun-free zones, nobody should be too surprised. After all, even crazy people aren’t necessarily stupid. The only stupidity on display is that of those who think that posting a sign is enough to safeguard the public. Do these stoopnagels also believe that if you post fang-and- claw-free zones at the zoos and then throw open the cages, the lions and tigers will refrain from devouring the visitors?
The solution to the mass killings on school campuses and elsewhere is to have good guys standing guard. Most communities are full of retired cops, soldiers, sheriffs and deputies, who’d be only too happy to volunteer to protect their grandkids and yours.
Democrats don’t believe that if you own a gun, even if it’s been legally purchased and licensed, you can possibly be a law-abiding citizen. On the other hand, they resent it if you refer to the folks who sneak into America as illegal aliens.
As an email that had gone viral summed it up, “If we don’t need guns because we have cops, then we shouldn’t need fire extinguishers because we have firemen.”
A cartoon someone sent me showed Obama addressing the Ayatollah Khamenei, assuring him that “If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program.”
An alternative would have Obama telling Vladimir Putin: “If you like Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, you can keep Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.”
Putin sends planes, missiles and ground troops, into the Middle East, and this administration claims he’s acting unprofessionally. I would humbly disagree. I would say the former head of the notorious KGB and the current heir to Stalin’s bloody boots is acting exactly like a professional despot, whereas Obama is flaunting his amateur status on the world stage.
Obama might yearn to go 10 rounds with Putin in a San Francisco bathhouse, but is terrified of confronting Russia’s newest czar anywhere else. In seven years, he has succeeded in making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world, a world in which our enemies taunt us and our former allies distrust us. It’s a topsy-turvy world when not only Iran seeks advice and counsel from Russia, but Israel and Saudi Arabia do the same. Can anyone even imagine such a surrealistic scenario if Reagan were in the White House; or Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson or even, for that matter, little Lindsey Graham?
If your hometown newspaper is anything like mine, which happens to be the L.A. Times, it is very possible that they have also instituted a policy of refusing to publish letters to the editor that question man-made climate change. In the case of the Times, I know from personal experience that they are equally reluctant to print letters that question the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s foreign policy, Barbara Boxer’s intelligence and Jerry Brown’s sanity.
My own solution was to stop subscribing, and I suggest that you follow suit with your own local rag. The fact is that these trashy papers need you far more than you need them. So why on earth are you supporting a publication that not only holds conservatives in contempt, but that even parakeets whine about when they find it being used to carpet their apartments?
At the University of Pennsylvania, when a professor called Dr. Ben Carson a coon, Carson’s campaign manager complained to the college president. Not too surprisingly, he was told that the professor was merely practicing her academic freedom. I’m not sure if Carson’s aide was shocked, but I wasn’t. For years now, the so-called tolerant, colorblind, Left has granted itself dispensation to label black conservatives Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas, so why not coons?
Because Rep. Kevin McCarthy was stupid enough to sabotage Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee by suggesting it existed for no other reason than to scuttle Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, the Democrats are quoting him even more often than Donald Trump quotes himself. But the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden would make a far stronger candidate. He’s a dummy, but he doesn’t have scandals trailing from his shoe bottoms the way she has. Besides, the Gowdy committee has been around for months, but it’s only been since we’ve been hearing about all the national security lapses connected to her private server that her poll numbers have tanked. So, good try, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, but no cigar.
In case you missed the news, Robert Redford, who traded in his leading man status years ago in order to be a megaphone for the Left, has another stink bomb on his resume. In a film written and directed by an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, Redford re-establishes his liberal creds by appearing as Dan Rather in a movie titled “Truth,” a highly fictionalized homage to the disgraced former anchor of the CBS news.
If you recall, in 2004, hoping to get George W. Bush un-elected, Rather and his producer Mary Mapes fell hook, line and sinker, for a clumsily forged document purporting to prove that young Bush had gone AWOL from his National Guard unit.
Although Rather eventually went on television to apologize for his role in promoting the hoax, he then turned around and sued the network for about $70 million for removing his royal rump from the anchor chair. A judge tossed his claim out of court claiming it lacked merit and that it was, legally speaking, a carload of poop.
I’m not expecting the movie to generate much business at the box office, but my fear is that the majority of those in the audience will be gullible millennials, who just might be the most ignorant generation in American history. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch them embarrass themselves on Bill O'Reilly’s Watter’s World segment or those man-on-the street bits we see on late night TV, where one college student after another is unable to name the vice-president, tell the interviewer how many U.S. senators there are or even identify the country we fought in the American Revolution.
Just for the heck of it, I looked up “millennials” in the dictionary. I naturally assumed it meant brainless. It turned out to mean people born around the turn of the century, but I’ll go with my definition.
Finally, in response to an email from a reader who fears for America’s future, I wrote: “I would gladly concede control of Congress to the Democrats if I could control the media and public education. In a single generation, I could clean up the mess the Left has created.”
It’s not an empty boast. After all, the formula worked like a charm for the liberals, who in 25 short years took us from Ronald Wilson Reagan’s shining city on the hill to the urban nightmare of Barack Hussein Obama’s Baltimore.
Burt Prelutsky
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
Because I make it a practice to point out what everybody else is doing badly, I thought for a change I would offer solutions or at least suggestions.
The problem with guns, as even Barack Obama would admit if you could water board him into telling the truth, has nothing to do with law-abiding citizens, everything to do with loons and thugs having access to weapons when, in a sane society, the only things those two groups would have access to are insane asylums and jails, respectively.
I venture that far less than one percent of all crimes committed with guns are committed by members of the NRA. Somehow, I just don’t see the inner city residents of Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia and L.A., signing up to take gun safety classes or undergoing background checks.
As for all the violence taking place in gun-free zones, nobody should be too surprised. After all, even crazy people aren’t necessarily stupid. The only stupidity on display is that of those who think that posting a sign is enough to safeguard the public. Do these stoopnagels also believe that if you post fang-and- claw-free zones at the zoos and then throw open the cages, the lions and tigers will refrain from devouring the visitors?
The solution to the mass killings on school campuses and elsewhere is to have good guys standing guard. Most communities are full of retired cops, soldiers, sheriffs and deputies, who’d be only too happy to volunteer to protect their grandkids and yours.
Democrats don’t believe that if you own a gun, even if it’s been legally purchased and licensed, you can possibly be a law-abiding citizen. On the other hand, they resent it if you refer to the folks who sneak into America as illegal aliens.
As an email that had gone viral summed it up, “If we don’t need guns because we have cops, then we shouldn’t need fire extinguishers because we have firemen.”
A cartoon someone sent me showed Obama addressing the Ayatollah Khamenei, assuring him that “If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program.”
An alternative would have Obama telling Vladimir Putin: “If you like Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, you can keep Crimea, Ukraine and Syria.”
Putin sends planes, missiles and ground troops, into the Middle East, and this administration claims he’s acting unprofessionally. I would humbly disagree. I would say the former head of the notorious KGB and the current heir to Stalin’s bloody boots is acting exactly like a professional despot, whereas Obama is flaunting his amateur status on the world stage.
Obama might yearn to go 10 rounds with Putin in a San Francisco bathhouse, but is terrified of confronting Russia’s newest czar anywhere else. In seven years, he has succeeded in making the U.S. the laughingstock of the world, a world in which our enemies taunt us and our former allies distrust us. It’s a topsy-turvy world when not only Iran seeks advice and counsel from Russia, but Israel and Saudi Arabia do the same. Can anyone even imagine such a surrealistic scenario if Reagan were in the White House; or Mitt Romney or Ted Cruz or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson or even, for that matter, little Lindsey Graham?
If your hometown newspaper is anything like mine, which happens to be the L.A. Times, it is very possible that they have also instituted a policy of refusing to publish letters to the editor that question man-made climate change. In the case of the Times, I know from personal experience that they are equally reluctant to print letters that question the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s foreign policy, Barbara Boxer’s intelligence and Jerry Brown’s sanity.
My own solution was to stop subscribing, and I suggest that you follow suit with your own local rag. The fact is that these trashy papers need you far more than you need them. So why on earth are you supporting a publication that not only holds conservatives in contempt, but that even parakeets whine about when they find it being used to carpet their apartments?
At the University of Pennsylvania, when a professor called Dr. Ben Carson a coon, Carson’s campaign manager complained to the college president. Not too surprisingly, he was told that the professor was merely practicing her academic freedom. I’m not sure if Carson’s aide was shocked, but I wasn’t. For years now, the so-called tolerant, colorblind, Left has granted itself dispensation to label black conservatives Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas, so why not coons?
Because Rep. Kevin McCarthy was stupid enough to sabotage Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee by suggesting it existed for no other reason than to scuttle Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, the Democrats are quoting him even more often than Donald Trump quotes himself. But the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden would make a far stronger candidate. He’s a dummy, but he doesn’t have scandals trailing from his shoe bottoms the way she has. Besides, the Gowdy committee has been around for months, but it’s only been since we’ve been hearing about all the national security lapses connected to her private server that her poll numbers have tanked. So, good try, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, but no cigar.
In case you missed the news, Robert Redford, who traded in his leading man status years ago in order to be a megaphone for the Left, has another stink bomb on his resume. In a film written and directed by an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune, Redford re-establishes his liberal creds by appearing as Dan Rather in a movie titled “Truth,” a highly fictionalized homage to the disgraced former anchor of the CBS news.
If you recall, in 2004, hoping to get George W. Bush un-elected, Rather and his producer Mary Mapes fell hook, line and sinker, for a clumsily forged document purporting to prove that young Bush had gone AWOL from his National Guard unit.
Although Rather eventually went on television to apologize for his role in promoting the hoax, he then turned around and sued the network for about $70 million for removing his royal rump from the anchor chair. A judge tossed his claim out of court claiming it lacked merit and that it was, legally speaking, a carload of poop.
I’m not expecting the movie to generate much business at the box office, but my fear is that the majority of those in the audience will be gullible millennials, who just might be the most ignorant generation in American history. Don’t take my word for it. Just watch them embarrass themselves on Bill O'Reilly’s Watter’s World segment or those man-on-the street bits we see on late night TV, where one college student after another is unable to name the vice-president, tell the interviewer how many U.S. senators there are or even identify the country we fought in the American Revolution.
Just for the heck of it, I looked up “millennials” in the dictionary. I naturally assumed it meant brainless. It turned out to mean people born around the turn of the century, but I’ll go with my definition.
Finally, in response to an email from a reader who fears for America’s future, I wrote: “I would gladly concede control of Congress to the Democrats if I could control the media and public education. In a single generation, I could clean up the mess the Left has created.”
It’s not an empty boast. After all, the formula worked like a charm for the liberals, who in 25 short years took us from Ronald Wilson Reagan’s shining city on the hill to the urban nightmare of Barack Hussein Obama’s Baltimore.
Burt Prelutsky
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
Eco-apocalypse Indonesia Is Burning. So Why Is The World Looking Away?
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. - It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far. -
Eco-apocalypse
Indonesia Is Burning. So Why Is The World Looking Away?
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.
What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/indonesia-readies-shelter-ships-as-haze-last-resort-after-evacuateus-hits-twitter/
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/09/children-are-dying-from-respiratory-ailments-as-haze-blankets-sumatra/
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/15/how-indonesias-staggering-fires-are-making-global-warming-worse/
http://blog.globalforestwatch.org/2015/10/indonesias-fire-outbreaks-producing-more-daily-emissions-than-entire-u-s-economy/
But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.
One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.
http://www.monbiot.com/books/poisoned-arrows/
Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14011
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/kalimantan-politicians-wear-facemasks-inside-parliament-as-palangkaraya-suffers-in-silence/
It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/singapore-takes-legal-action-against-5-indonesian-companies-over-haze/
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/malaysia-pm-turns-up-heat-on-indonesia-as-australian-firm-faces-fires-probe/
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.http://theactofkilling.co.uk/
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/03/indonesias-act-denial
Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/09/indonesian-officials-resist-movement-to-end-deforestation-for-palm-oil/
http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/opinion/erik-meijaard-indonesias-fire-crisis-biggest-environmental-crime-21st-century/
Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/rainforestactionnetwork/pages/5884/attachments/original/1435772500/RAN_TESTING_COMMITMENTS_2015_FINAL.pdf?1435772500
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/25/starbucks-palm-oil-campaign-2015-sumofus-consumers-deforestation-commitments
http://www.ran.org/sf20scorecard
On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/26/joint-statement-united-states-america-and-republic-indonesia
Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.
At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
George Monbiot
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
Eco-apocalypse
Indonesia Is Burning. So Why Is The World Looking Away?
I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.
A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/indonesia-readies-shelter-ships-as-haze-last-resort-after-evacuateus-hits-twitter/
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/09/children-are-dying-from-respiratory-ailments-as-haze-blankets-sumatra/
And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?
What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/15/how-indonesias-staggering-fires-are-making-global-warming-worse/
http://blog.globalforestwatch.org/2015/10/indonesias-fire-outbreaks-producing-more-daily-emissions-than-entire-u-s-economy/
But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.
One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.
http://www.monbiot.com/books/poisoned-arrows/
Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14011
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/kalimantan-politicians-wear-facemasks-inside-parliament-as-palangkaraya-suffers-in-silence/
It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/singapore-takes-legal-action-against-5-indonesian-companies-over-haze/
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/malaysia-pm-turns-up-heat-on-indonesia-as-australian-firm-faces-fires-probe/
Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.http://theactofkilling.co.uk/
They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/03/indonesias-act-denial
Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/09/indonesian-officials-resist-movement-to-end-deforestation-for-palm-oil/
http://jakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/opinion/erik-meijaard-indonesias-fire-crisis-biggest-environmental-crime-21st-century/
Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/rainforestactionnetwork/pages/5884/attachments/original/1435772500/RAN_TESTING_COMMITMENTS_2015_FINAL.pdf?1435772500
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/25/starbucks-palm-oil-campaign-2015-sumofus-consumers-deforestation-commitments
http://www.ran.org/sf20scorecard
On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/10/26/joint-statement-united-states-america-and-republic-indonesia
Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.
At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?
George Monbiot
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
The Untold History of The US - Bush & Obama Age of Terror
How the Bush administration manipulated terror warnings on Americans to fulfill their political motives.
The Untold History of The US - Bush & Obama Age of Terror
By Oliver Stone
How the Bush administration tried to manipulate terror warnings on Americans to fulfill their political motives.
Posted October 30, 2015
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
The Untold History of The US - Bush & Obama Age of Terror
By Oliver Stone
How the Bush administration tried to manipulate terror warnings on Americans to fulfill their political motives.
Posted October 30, 2015
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016
The desire to take the American public out of the “of the people, by the people, for the people” business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War -
The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016
You may not know it, but you’re living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that’s a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we’ve lived through and give it the attention it’s always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you’ll end up back exactly where we are -- in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let’s return to late September 2001. I’m sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”http://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9-11/
I couldn’t resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that’s happened since, including the establishment of a terror “caliphate” by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps -- all of which you wouldn’t believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apeslook like outright realism.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/9301/%20jim_lobe_on_timing_the_cheney_nuclear_drumbeat
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” or “a new Day of Infamy,” and the attackers “the kamikazes of the twenty-first century.” Remember the moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the rubble at "Ground Zero" in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and swore payback in the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu crowd shouted out things like “Go get ‘em, George!”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno_
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7OCgMPX2mE
“I can hear you! I can hear you!” he responded. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
“USA! USA! USA!” chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, “Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.” By then, he was already talking about "our war on terror."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno
_
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As CNN put it at the time, “President Bush... urged Americans to travel, spend, and enjoy life.” His actual words were:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/06/smn.26.html
“And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying. Though that got little attention at the time, tell me it isn’t a detail out of some sci-fi novel. Or put another way, as far as the Bush administration was then concerned, Rosie the Riveter was moldering in her grave and the model American for mobilizing a democratic nation in time of war was Rosie the Frequent Flyer. It turned out not to be winter in Valley Forge, but eternal summer in Orlando. From then on, as the Bush administration planned its version of revenge-cum-global-domination, the message it sent to the citizenry was: go about your business and leave the dirty work to us.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/We_Can_Do_It!.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
Disney World opened in 1971, but for a moment imagine that it had been in existence in 1863 and that, more than seven score years ago, facing a country in the midst of a terrible civil war, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg had said this:http://www.d.umn.edu/~rmaclin/gettysburg-address.html
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom at Disney World -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish for lack of vacations in Florida.”
Or imagine that, in response to that “day of infamy,” the Pearl Harbor of the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt had gone before Congress and, in an address to the nation, had said:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/franklindroosevelt/a/Day-Of-Infamy-Speech.htm
“Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our airlines, with the unbounding determination of our people to visit Disney World, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God.”
If those are absurdities, then so is twenty-first-century America. By late September 2001, though no one would have put it that way, the demobilization of the American people had become a crucial aspect of Washington’s way of life. The thought that Americans might be called upon to sacrifice in any way in a time of peril had gone with the wind. Any newly minted version of the classic “don’t tread on me” flag of the revolutionary war era would have had to read: “don’t bother them.”
The desire to take the American public out of the “of the people, by the people, for the people” business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen’s army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army. https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html
Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result, on January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, and so the citizen’s army. With it went the sense that Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and peace).
http://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/us-military-draft-ends-jan-27-1973-072085
From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be considered demobilizing trends.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175570/tomgram:_engelhardt,_the_national_security_complex_and_you/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram:_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/
This twin process y has a long history in the U.S., as any biography of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would indicate. Still, the expansion of secrecy and surveillance in this century has been a stunning development, as ever-larger parts of the national security state and the military (especially its 70,000-strong Special Operations forces) fell into the shadows. In these years, American “safety” and “security” were redefined in terms of a citizen’s need not to know. Only bathed in ignorance, were we safest from the danger that mattered most (Islamic terrorism -- a threat of microscopic proportions in the continental United States).
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175945/tomgram:_nick_turse,_a_shadow_war_in_150_countries/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram:_engelhardt,_inside_the_american_terrordome
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram:_engelhardt,_entering_the_intelligence_labyrinth/
As the American people were demobilized from war and left, in the post-9/11 era, with the single duty of eternally thanking and praising our "warriors” (or our "wounded warriors”), war itself was being transformed into a new kind of American entertainment spectacle. In the 1980s, in response to the Vietnam experience, the Pentagon began to take responsibility not just for making war but for producing it. Initially, in the invasions of Grenada and Panama, this largely meant sidelining the media, which many U.S. commanders still blamed for defeat in Vietnam.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175912/tomgram:_rory_fanning,_why_do_we_keep_thanking_the_troops/
By the First Gulf War of 1991, however, the Pentagon was prepared to produce a weeks-long televised extravaganza, which would enter the living rooms of increasingly demobilized Americans as a riveting show. It would have its own snazzy graphics, logos, background music, and special effects (including nose-cone shots of targets obliterated). In addition, retired military men were brought in to do Monday Night Football-style play-by-play and color commentary on the fighting in progress. In this new version of war, there were to be no rebellious troops, no body bags, no body counts, no rogue reporters, and above all no antiwar movement. In other words, the Gulf War was to be the anti-Vietnam. And it seemed to work... briefly.
Unfortunately for the first Bush administration, Saddam Hussein remained in power in Baghdad, the carefully staged post-war “victory” parades faded fast, the major networks lost ad money on the Pentagon’s show, and the ratings for war as entertainment sank. More than a decade later, the second Bush administration, again eager not to repeat Vietnam and intent on sidelining the American public while it invaded and occupied Iraq, did it all over again.
movThis time, the Pentagon sent reporters to “boot camp,” “embedded” them with advancing units, built a quarter-million-dollar ie-style set for planned briefings in Doha, Qatar, and launched its invasion with “decapitation strikes” over Baghdad that lit the televised skies of the Iraqi capital an eerie green on TVs across America. This spectacle of war, American-style, turned out to have a distinctly Disney-esque aura to it. (Typically, however, those strikes produced scores of dead Iraqis, but managed to “decapitate” not a single targeted Iraqi leader from Saddam Hussein on down.) That spectacle, replete with the usual music, logos, special effects, and those retired generals-cum-commentators -- this time even more tightly organized by the Pentagon -- turned out again to have a remarkably brief half-life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/international/middleeast/18MEDI.html?pagewanted=print
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/embedistan-reporting-with-or-without-the-military/
http://www.hrw.org/news/2003/12/12/us-hundreds-civilian-deaths-iraq-were-preventable
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/world/struggle-for-iraq-intelligence-errors-are-seen-early-attacks-iraqi-leaders.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
War as the first demobilizing spectacle of our era is now largely forgotten because, as entertainment, it was reliant on ratings, and in the end, it lost the battle for viewers. As a result, America's wars became ever more an activity to be conducted in the shadows beyond the view of most Americans.
If war was the first experimental subject for the demobilizing spectacle, democracy and elections turned out to be remarkably ripe for the plucking as well. As a result, we now have the never-ending presidential campaign season. In the past, elections did not necessarily lack either drama or spectacle. In the nineteenth century, for instance, there were campaign torchlight parades, but those were always spectacles of mobilization. No longer. Our new 1% elections call for something different.http://www.wrex.com/story/8895106/lincoln-douglas-debates-in-freeport
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175478/tomgram:_engelhardt,_the_1%25_election/
It’s no secret that our presidential campaigns have morphed into a “billionaire’s playground,” even as the right to vote has become more constrained. These days, it could be said that the only group of citizens that automatically mobilizes for such events is “the billionaire class” (as Bernie Sanders calls it). Increasingly, many of the rest of us catch the now year-round spectacle demobilized in our living rooms, watching journalists play... gasp!... journalists on TV and give American democracy that good old Gotcha!
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176051/tomgram:_nomi_prins,_how_trump_became_trump_and_what_that_means_for_the_rest_of_us/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fight-for-american-voting-rights-inside-ari-bermans-new-book-20150729?page=2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/sanders-calls-on-women-to-stand-up-to-billionaire-class/2015/10/23/b3c5d2ae-79a4-11e5-a5e2-40d6b2ad18dd_video.html
In 2001, George W. Bush wanted to send us all to Disney World (on our own dollar, of course). In 2015, Disney World is increasingly coming directly to us.
After all, at the center of election 2016 is Donald Trump. For a historical equivalent, you would have to imagine P.T. Barnum, who could sell any “curiosity” to the American public, running for president. (In fact, he did serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature and was, improbably enough, the mayor of Bridgeport.) Meanwhile, the TV “debates” that Trump and the rest of the candidates are now taking part in months before the first primary have left the League of Women Voters and the Commission on Presidential Debates in the dust. These are the ratings-driven equivalent of food fights encased in ads, with the “questions” clearly based on what will glue eyeballs.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
http://lwv.org/content/league-women-voters-and-candidate-debates-changing-relationship
http://www.debates.org/
Here, for instance, was CNN host Jake Tapper’s first question of the second Republican debate: “Mrs. Fiorina, I want to start with you. Fellow Republican candidate, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, has suggested that your party’s frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as president. He said he wouldn’t want, quote, ‘such a hot head with his finger on the nuclear codes.’ You, as well, have raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament. You’ve dismissed him as an entertainer. Would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?”
http://time.com/4037239/second-republican-debate-transcript-cnn/
And the event only went downhill from there as responses ranged from non-answers to (no kidding!) a discussion of the looks of the candidates and yet the event proved such a ratings smash that its 23 million viewers were compared favorably to viewership of National Football League games.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/17/media/cnn-republican-debate-ratings/
In sum, a citizen’s duty, whether in time of war or elections, is now, at best, to watch the show, or at worst, to see nothing at all.
This reality has been highlighted by the whistleblowers of this generation, including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou. Whenever they have revealed something of what our government is doing beyond our sight, they have been prosecuted with a fierceness unique in our history and for a simple enough reason. Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from being watched by us. That’s their definition of “democracy.” When “spies” appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are “spies” for us, they are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_joining_the_whistleblowers'_club/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175843/tomgram:_glenn_greenwald,_how_i_met_edward_snowden/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_in_washington,_fear_the_silence,_not_the_noise/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175733/engelhardt_spying_for_us
http://www.propublica.org/special/sealing-loose-lips-charting-obamas-crackdown-on-national-security-leaks
A Largely Demobilized Land
A report on a demobilized America shouldn’t end without some mention of at least one counter-impulse. All systems assumedly have their opposites lurking somewhere inside them, which brings us to Bernie Sanders. He’s the figure who doesn’t seem to compute in this story so far.
All you had to do was watch the first Democratic debate to sense what an anomaly he is, or you could have noted that, until almost the moment he went on stage that night, few involved in the election 2016 media spectacle had the time of day for him. And stranger yet, that lack of attention in the mainstream proved no impediment to the expansion of his campaign and his supporters, who, via social media and in person in the form of gigantic crowds, seem to exist in some parallel universe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/13/the-oct-13-democratic-debate-who-said-what-and-what-it-means/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/06/not-quite-all-things-considered-why-mainstream-media-discounts-bernie-sanders
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-sanders-california-20150811-story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-does-bernie-sanders-draw-huge-crowds-to-see-him/2015/08/11/4ae018f8-3fde-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html
unpluggIn this election cycle, Sanders alone uses the words “mobilize” and “mobilization” regularly, while calling for a “political revolution.” (“We need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money.”) And there is no question that he has indeed mobilized significant numbers of young people, many of whom are undoubtedly ed from the TV set, even if glued to other screens, and so may hardly be noticing the mainstream spectacle at all.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/257747-sanders-wont-take-up-the-obama-mantle
Whether the Sanders phenomenon represents our past or our future, his age or the age of his followers, is impossible to know. We do, of course, have one recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008 election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory, only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Sanders himself puts little emphasis on personality or a cult of the same and undoubtedly represents something different, though what exactly remains open to question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMchxVF8w8
In the meantime, the national security state’s power is largely uncontested; the airlines still fly; Disney World continues to be a destination of choice; and the United States remains a largely demobilized land.
Tom Engelhardt
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
The Demobilization of the American People and the Spectacle of Election 2016
You may not know it, but you’re living in a futuristic science fiction novel. And that’s a fact. If you were to read about our American world in such a novel, you would be amazed by its strangeness. Since you exist right smack in the middle of it, it seems like normal life (Donald Trump and Ben Carson aside). But make no bones about it, so far this has been a bizarre American century.
Let me start with one of the odder moments we’ve lived through and give it the attention it’s always deserved. If you follow my train of thought and the history it leads us into, I guarantee you that you’ll end up back exactly where we are -- in the midst of the strangest presidential campaign in our history.
To get a full frontal sense of what that means, however, let’s return to late September 2001. I’m sure you remember that moment, just over two weeks after those World Trade Center towers came down and part of the Pentagon was destroyed, leaving a jangled secretary of defense instructing his aides, “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”http://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-9-11/
I couldn’t resist sticking in that classic Donald Rumsfeld line, but I leave it to others to deal with Saddam Hussein, those fictional weapons of mass destruction, the invasion of Iraq, and everything that’s happened since, including the establishment of a terror “caliphate” by a crew of Islamic extremists brought together in American military prison camps -- all of which you wouldn’t believe if it were part of a sci-fi novel. The damn thing would make Planet of the Apeslook like outright realism.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/9301/%20jim_lobe_on_timing_the_cheney_nuclear_drumbeat
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story
Instead, try to recall the screaming headlines that labeled the 9/11 attacks “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century” or “a new Day of Infamy,” and the attackers “the kamikazes of the twenty-first century.” Remember the moment when President George W. Bush, bullhorn in hand, stepped onto the rubble at "Ground Zero" in New York, draped his arm around a fireman, and swore payback in the name of the American people, as members of an impromptu crowd shouted out things like “Go get ‘em, George!”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno_
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7OCgMPX2mE
“I can hear you! I can hear you!” he responded. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people -- and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
“USA! USA! USA!” chanted the crowd.
Then, on September 20th, addressing Congress, Bush added, “Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.” By then, he was already talking about "our war on terror."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_092001.html
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/118775/9_11_an_explosion_out_of_the_towering_inferno
_
Now, hop ahead to that long-forgotten moment when he would finally reveal just how a twenty-first-century American president should rally and mobilize the American people in the name of the ultimate in collective danger. As CNN put it at the time, “President Bush... urged Americans to travel, spend, and enjoy life.” His actual words were:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/06/smn.26.html
“And one of the great goals of this nation's war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry and to tell the traveling public, get on board, do your business around the country, fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Go down to Disney World in Florida, take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
So we went to war in Afghanistan and later Iraq to rebuild faith in flying. Though that got little attention at the time, tell me it isn’t a detail out of some sci-fi novel. Or put another way, as far as the Bush administration was then concerned, Rosie the Riveter was moldering in her grave and the model American for mobilizing a democratic nation in time of war was Rosie the Frequent Flyer. It turned out not to be winter in Valley Forge, but eternal summer in Orlando. From then on, as the Bush administration planned its version of revenge-cum-global-domination, the message it sent to the citizenry was: go about your business and leave the dirty work to us.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/We_Can_Do_It!.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter
Disney World opened in 1971, but for a moment imagine that it had been in existence in 1863 and that, more than seven score years ago, facing a country in the midst of a terrible civil war, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg had said this:http://www.d.umn.edu/~rmaclin/gettysburg-address.html
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom at Disney World -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish for lack of vacations in Florida.”
Or imagine that, in response to that “day of infamy,” the Pearl Harbor of the twentieth century, Franklin Roosevelt had gone before Congress and, in an address to the nation, had said:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/franklindroosevelt/a/Day-Of-Infamy-Speech.htm
“Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our airlines, with the unbounding determination of our people to visit Disney World, we will gain the inevitable triumph -- so help us God.”
If those are absurdities, then so is twenty-first-century America. By late September 2001, though no one would have put it that way, the demobilization of the American people had become a crucial aspect of Washington’s way of life. The thought that Americans might be called upon to sacrifice in any way in a time of peril had gone with the wind. Any newly minted version of the classic “don’t tread on me” flag of the revolutionary war era would have had to read: “don’t bother them.”
The Spectacle of War
The desire to take the American public out of the “of the people, by the people, for the people” business can minimally be traced back to the Vietnam War, to the moment when a citizen’s army began voting with its feet and antiwar sentiment grew to startling proportions not just on the home front, but inside a military in the field. It was then that the high command began to fear the actual disintegration of the U.S. Army. https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/Vietnam/heinl.html
Not surprisingly, there was a deep desire never to repeat such an experience. (No more Vietnams! No more antiwar movements!) As a result, on January 27, 1973, with a stroke of the pen, President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, and so the citizen’s army. With it went the sense that Americans had an obligation to serve their country in time of war (and peace).
http://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/us-military-draft-ends-jan-27-1973-072085
From that moment on, the urge to demobilize the American people and send them to Disney World would only grow. First, they were to be removed from all imaginable aspects of war making. Later, the same principle would be applied to the processes of government and to democracy itself. In this context, for instance, you could write a history of the monstrous growth of secrecy and surveillance as twin deities of the American state: the urge to keep ever more information from the citizenry and to see ever more of what those citizens were doing in their own private time. Both should be considered demobilizing trends.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175570/tomgram:_engelhardt,_the_national_security_complex_and_you/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175713/tomgram:_engelhardt,_you_are_our_secret/
This twin process y has a long history in the U.S., as any biography of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would indicate. Still, the expansion of secrecy and surveillance in this century has been a stunning development, as ever-larger parts of the national security state and the military (especially its 70,000-strong Special Operations forces) fell into the shadows. In these years, American “safety” and “security” were redefined in terms of a citizen’s need not to know. Only bathed in ignorance, were we safest from the danger that mattered most (Islamic terrorism -- a threat of microscopic proportions in the continental United States).
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175945/tomgram:_nick_turse,_a_shadow_war_in_150_countries/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175904/tomgram:_engelhardt,_inside_the_american_terrordome
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175901/tomgram:_engelhardt,_entering_the_intelligence_labyrinth/
As the American people were demobilized from war and left, in the post-9/11 era, with the single duty of eternally thanking and praising our "warriors” (or our "wounded warriors”), war itself was being transformed into a new kind of American entertainment spectacle. In the 1980s, in response to the Vietnam experience, the Pentagon began to take responsibility not just for making war but for producing it. Initially, in the invasions of Grenada and Panama, this largely meant sidelining the media, which many U.S. commanders still blamed for defeat in Vietnam.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175912/tomgram:_rory_fanning,_why_do_we_keep_thanking_the_troops/
By the First Gulf War of 1991, however, the Pentagon was prepared to produce a weeks-long televised extravaganza, which would enter the living rooms of increasingly demobilized Americans as a riveting show. It would have its own snazzy graphics, logos, background music, and special effects (including nose-cone shots of targets obliterated). In addition, retired military men were brought in to do Monday Night Football-style play-by-play and color commentary on the fighting in progress. In this new version of war, there were to be no rebellious troops, no body bags, no body counts, no rogue reporters, and above all no antiwar movement. In other words, the Gulf War was to be the anti-Vietnam. And it seemed to work... briefly.
Unfortunately for the first Bush administration, Saddam Hussein remained in power in Baghdad, the carefully staged post-war “victory” parades faded fast, the major networks lost ad money on the Pentagon’s show, and the ratings for war as entertainment sank. More than a decade later, the second Bush administration, again eager not to repeat Vietnam and intent on sidelining the American public while it invaded and occupied Iraq, did it all over again.
movThis time, the Pentagon sent reporters to “boot camp,” “embedded” them with advancing units, built a quarter-million-dollar ie-style set for planned briefings in Doha, Qatar, and launched its invasion with “decapitation strikes” over Baghdad that lit the televised skies of the Iraqi capital an eerie green on TVs across America. This spectacle of war, American-style, turned out to have a distinctly Disney-esque aura to it. (Typically, however, those strikes produced scores of dead Iraqis, but managed to “decapitate” not a single targeted Iraqi leader from Saddam Hussein on down.) That spectacle, replete with the usual music, logos, special effects, and those retired generals-cum-commentators -- this time even more tightly organized by the Pentagon -- turned out again to have a remarkably brief half-life.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/international/middleeast/18MEDI.html?pagewanted=print
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/embedistan-reporting-with-or-without-the-military/
http://www.hrw.org/news/2003/12/12/us-hundreds-civilian-deaths-iraq-were-preventable
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/world/struggle-for-iraq-intelligence-errors-are-seen-early-attacks-iraqi-leaders.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html
The Spectacle of Democracy
War as the first demobilizing spectacle of our era is now largely forgotten because, as entertainment, it was reliant on ratings, and in the end, it lost the battle for viewers. As a result, America's wars became ever more an activity to be conducted in the shadows beyond the view of most Americans.
If war was the first experimental subject for the demobilizing spectacle, democracy and elections turned out to be remarkably ripe for the plucking as well. As a result, we now have the never-ending presidential campaign season. In the past, elections did not necessarily lack either drama or spectacle. In the nineteenth century, for instance, there were campaign torchlight parades, but those were always spectacles of mobilization. No longer. Our new 1% elections call for something different.http://www.wrex.com/story/8895106/lincoln-douglas-debates-in-freeport
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175478/tomgram:_engelhardt,_the_1%25_election/
It’s no secret that our presidential campaigns have morphed into a “billionaire’s playground,” even as the right to vote has become more constrained. These days, it could be said that the only group of citizens that automatically mobilizes for such events is “the billionaire class” (as Bernie Sanders calls it). Increasingly, many of the rest of us catch the now year-round spectacle demobilized in our living rooms, watching journalists play... gasp!... journalists on TV and give American democracy that good old Gotcha!
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176051/tomgram:_nomi_prins,_how_trump_became_trump_and_what_that_means_for_the_rest_of_us/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-fight-for-american-voting-rights-inside-ari-bermans-new-book-20150729?page=2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/sanders-calls-on-women-to-stand-up-to-billionaire-class/2015/10/23/b3c5d2ae-79a4-11e5-a5e2-40d6b2ad18dd_video.html
In 2001, George W. Bush wanted to send us all to Disney World (on our own dollar, of course). In 2015, Disney World is increasingly coming directly to us.
After all, at the center of election 2016 is Donald Trump. For a historical equivalent, you would have to imagine P.T. Barnum, who could sell any “curiosity” to the American public, running for president. (In fact, he did serve two terms in the Connecticut legislature and was, improbably enough, the mayor of Bridgeport.) Meanwhile, the TV “debates” that Trump and the rest of the candidates are now taking part in months before the first primary have left the League of Women Voters and the Commission on Presidential Debates in the dust. These are the ratings-driven equivalent of food fights encased in ads, with the “questions” clearly based on what will glue eyeballs.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
http://lwv.org/content/league-women-voters-and-candidate-debates-changing-relationship
http://www.debates.org/
Here, for instance, was CNN host Jake Tapper’s first question of the second Republican debate: “Mrs. Fiorina, I want to start with you. Fellow Republican candidate, and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, has suggested that your party’s frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as president. He said he wouldn’t want, quote, ‘such a hot head with his finger on the nuclear codes.’ You, as well, have raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament. You’ve dismissed him as an entertainer. Would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?”
http://time.com/4037239/second-republican-debate-transcript-cnn/
And the event only went downhill from there as responses ranged from non-answers to (no kidding!) a discussion of the looks of the candidates and yet the event proved such a ratings smash that its 23 million viewers were compared favorably to viewership of National Football League games.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/17/media/cnn-republican-debate-ratings/
In sum, a citizen’s duty, whether in time of war or elections, is now, at best, to watch the show, or at worst, to see nothing at all.
This reality has been highlighted by the whistleblowers of this generation, including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and John Kiriakou. Whenever they have revealed something of what our government is doing beyond our sight, they have been prosecuted with a fierceness unique in our history and for a simple enough reason. Those who watch us believe themselves exempt from being watched by us. That’s their definition of “democracy.” When “spies” appear in their midst, even if those whistleblowers are “spies” for us, they are horrified at a visceral level and promptly haul out the World War I-era Espionage Act. They now expect a demobilized response to whatever they do and when anything else is forthcoming, they strike back in outrage.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175526/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_joining_the_whistleblowers'_club/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175843/tomgram:_glenn_greenwald,_how_i_met_edward_snowden/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175500/tomgram:_peter_van_buren,_in_washington,_fear_the_silence,_not_the_noise/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175733/engelhardt_spying_for_us
http://www.propublica.org/special/sealing-loose-lips-charting-obamas-crackdown-on-national-security-leaks
A Largely Demobilized Land
A report on a demobilized America shouldn’t end without some mention of at least one counter-impulse. All systems assumedly have their opposites lurking somewhere inside them, which brings us to Bernie Sanders. He’s the figure who doesn’t seem to compute in this story so far.
All you had to do was watch the first Democratic debate to sense what an anomaly he is, or you could have noted that, until almost the moment he went on stage that night, few involved in the election 2016 media spectacle had the time of day for him. And stranger yet, that lack of attention in the mainstream proved no impediment to the expansion of his campaign and his supporters, who, via social media and in person in the form of gigantic crowds, seem to exist in some parallel universe.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/13/the-oct-13-democratic-debate-who-said-what-and-what-it-means/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/06/not-quite-all-things-considered-why-mainstream-media-discounts-bernie-sanders
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-sanders-california-20150811-story.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-does-bernie-sanders-draw-huge-crowds-to-see-him/2015/08/11/4ae018f8-3fde-11e5-8d45-d815146f81fa_story.html
unpluggIn this election cycle, Sanders alone uses the words “mobilize” and “mobilization” regularly, while calling for a “political revolution.” (“We need to mobilize tens of millions of people to begin to stand up and fight back and to reclaim the government, which is now owned by big money.”) And there is no question that he has indeed mobilized significant numbers of young people, many of whom are undoubtedly ed from the TV set, even if glued to other screens, and so may hardly be noticing the mainstream spectacle at all.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/257747-sanders-wont-take-up-the-obama-mantle
Whether the Sanders phenomenon represents our past or our future, his age or the age of his followers, is impossible to know. We do, of course, have one recent example of a mobilization in an election season. In the 2008 election, the charismatic Barack Obama created a youthful, grassroots movement, a kind of cult of personality that helped sweep him to victory, only to demobilize it as soon as he entered the Oval Office. Sanders himself puts little emphasis on personality or a cult of the same and undoubtedly represents something different, though what exactly remains open to question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrMchxVF8w8
In the meantime, the national security state’s power is largely uncontested; the airlines still fly; Disney World continues to be a destination of choice; and the United States remains a largely demobilized land.
Tom Engelhardt
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
U.S. Special Operations Forces To Invade Syria: Official
The special operations forces will be stationed in northern Syria and work alongside groups with a "proven track record" of fighting ISIS.
U.S. Special Operations Forces To Invade Syria: Official
The U.S. will send a small number of U.S. special operations forces into Syria as part of a shift in its strategy against ISIS, officials said Friday.
A senior administration official confirmed that President Barack Obama has authorized a contingent of less than 50 special operations forces to deploy into northern Syria.
"We have been focused on intensifying elements of our strategy that have been working, while also moving away from elements of our approach that have proven less effective," the official explained.
The White House was expected to announce the decision later Friday.
The move will be described as a "shift" but not a "change" in U.S. strategy against ISIS, another senior U.S. official told NBC News. The official said the special operations forces will be stationed in northern Syria and work alongside groups with a "proven track record" of fighting ISIS.
That could include working with Kurdish and allied actors who have come together under the umbrella of the "Syrian Democratic Forces," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet public.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said the expected announcement made clear the White House was feeling the pressure of a "failed policy" against ISIS.
"I'm concerned that the administration is trying to put in place limited measures — too late — that are not going to make a difference," he told NBC News. "I don't see a strategy towards accomplishing a goal, I see an effort to run out the clock without disaster."
Obama and his administration have come under mounting pressure amid signs the anti-ISIS coalition has stalled or at least failed to turn the tide against the militants — including the recent Pentagon decision to abandon a failed program to train and equip Syrian rebels.
Small signs of a sea change in strategy have been filtering out in recent weeks and gained steam in wake of a U.S.-backed raid to free ISIS hostages that cost the life of a Delta Force commando.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/master-sergeant-joshua-wheeler-idd-commando-killed-isis-hostage-rescue-n449876
Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned earlier this week that to expect more such raids when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon would be stepping up attacks against ISIS — including through "direct action on the ground" in Iraq and Syria.
Carter's remarks — in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee — immediately raised eyebrows given repeated assurances from President Barack Obama that U.S. troops in the region would not engage in combat.
The defense secretary himself referred to the aforementioned raid as "combat," where "things are complicated" in his comments to the committee.
The U.S. currently has around 3,300 troops in Iraq to train and advise Iraqi forces and protect U.S. facilities.
In addition to the announcement about sending Special Operations Forces into Syria, the White House will announce it will send more fighter jets to Turkey for intensified bombing runs on ISIS from a NATO airbase there.
Obama in 2013: ‘I Will Not Put American Boots on the Ground in Syria’
By Alex Griswold
During a September 10, 2013 speech announcing the beginning of U.S. military action in Syria, President Barack Obama promised that he would not put American boots on the ground in Syria.
Many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? One man wrote to me that we are “still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.” A veteran put it more bluntly: “This nation is sick and tired of war.”
My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo. This would be a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective: deterring the use of chemical weapons, and degrading Assad’s capabilities.
Friday, the White House appeared to renege on that promise, announcing that U.S. special forces troops would be deployed to Syria to “advise and assist” rebels.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/breaking-white-house-to-announce-its-sending-u-s-special-forces-to-syria/
Watch above, via CNN.
By Richard Engel, Kristen Welker and Cassandra Vinograd
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
U.S. Special Operations Forces To Invade Syria: Official
The U.S. will send a small number of U.S. special operations forces into Syria as part of a shift in its strategy against ISIS, officials said Friday.
A senior administration official confirmed that President Barack Obama has authorized a contingent of less than 50 special operations forces to deploy into northern Syria.
"We have been focused on intensifying elements of our strategy that have been working, while also moving away from elements of our approach that have proven less effective," the official explained.
The White House was expected to announce the decision later Friday.
The move will be described as a "shift" but not a "change" in U.S. strategy against ISIS, another senior U.S. official told NBC News. The official said the special operations forces will be stationed in northern Syria and work alongside groups with a "proven track record" of fighting ISIS.
That could include working with Kurdish and allied actors who have come together under the umbrella of the "Syrian Democratic Forces," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the announcement was not yet public.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said the expected announcement made clear the White House was feeling the pressure of a "failed policy" against ISIS.
"I'm concerned that the administration is trying to put in place limited measures — too late — that are not going to make a difference," he told NBC News. "I don't see a strategy towards accomplishing a goal, I see an effort to run out the clock without disaster."
Obama and his administration have come under mounting pressure amid signs the anti-ISIS coalition has stalled or at least failed to turn the tide against the militants — including the recent Pentagon decision to abandon a failed program to train and equip Syrian rebels.
Small signs of a sea change in strategy have been filtering out in recent weeks and gained steam in wake of a U.S.-backed raid to free ISIS hostages that cost the life of a Delta Force commando.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/master-sergeant-joshua-wheeler-idd-commando-killed-isis-hostage-rescue-n449876
Defense Secretary Ash Carter warned earlier this week that to expect more such raids when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon would be stepping up attacks against ISIS — including through "direct action on the ground" in Iraq and Syria.
Carter's remarks — in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee — immediately raised eyebrows given repeated assurances from President Barack Obama that U.S. troops in the region would not engage in combat.
The defense secretary himself referred to the aforementioned raid as "combat," where "things are complicated" in his comments to the committee.
The U.S. currently has around 3,300 troops in Iraq to train and advise Iraqi forces and protect U.S. facilities.
In addition to the announcement about sending Special Operations Forces into Syria, the White House will announce it will send more fighter jets to Turkey for intensified bombing runs on ISIS from a NATO airbase there.
Obama in 2013: ‘I Will Not Put American Boots on the Ground in Syria’
By Alex Griswold
During a September 10, 2013 speech announcing the beginning of U.S. military action in Syria, President Barack Obama promised that he would not put American boots on the ground in Syria.
Many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? One man wrote to me that we are “still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.” A veteran put it more bluntly: “This nation is sick and tired of war.”
My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo. This would be a targeted strike to achieve a clear objective: deterring the use of chemical weapons, and degrading Assad’s capabilities.
Friday, the White House appeared to renege on that promise, announcing that U.S. special forces troops would be deployed to Syria to “advise and assist” rebels.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/breaking-white-house-to-announce-its-sending-u-s-special-forces-to-syria/
Watch above, via CNN.
By Richard Engel, Kristen Welker and Cassandra Vinograd
Pro Deo et Constitutione – Libertas aut Mors
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Joseph F Barber-
http://josephfreedomoranarchy.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FREEDOMORANARCHYCampaignofConscience/notes
https://plus.google.com/+JOSEPHBARBERforfreedom/posts
“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.”
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