Summary: Our news media overflows each day with a new crop of fear-mongering It should disturb us that both Left and Right seek to persuade us through fear. To manipulate us. These are skilled political engineers. They know us better than we know ourselves, and they obviously see us as fearful sheep. It’s our choice: When we wish to become men and women, like our ancestors, we will do so. Until then, they’ll spin stories of imminent doom from which only unquestioning obedience can save us.
“If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”
— Calvera, bandit leader in the movie “The Magnificent Seven” (1960)
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(1) Jon Stewart looks at the Nightmare on Graham Street
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(2) “New Fox News paranoia: ISIS at the border!“, Salon, 16 September 2014 — “Fox has a new way to scare its old white audience: Not just drug mules but terrorists are coming up from Mexico”
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(3) “Warmest August on Record, Global Warming Continues“, Greg Laden, Science Blogs, 15 September 2014 — Gotta love his mad graphic!
“According to data just updated by NASA, last August was the warmest August for the entire instrumental data record, which begins in 1881. This has been something of a mixed year but overall warm.”
Excellent fear-mongering. Note the absence of numbers in his post.For good reason, as the numbers debunk the burning world image.
- He cites the NASA’s GISS dataset, but doesn’t mention August was only 0.07°C over 2013, and only 0.01°C over previous record set in 2011.
- By the RSS satellite data, the lower troposphere temperature anomaly in August was only +0.19 deg C above the 30 year average.
- By the UAH satellite data, the lower troposphere temperature anomaly in August was only +0.20 deg C above the 30 year average.
- The data for the HADCRUT4 and NCDC datasets are not yet out.
Citing the warming since 1881 is misleading. The core climate consensus as expressed by the IPCC — validated by many surveys of scientists — is that it is “extremely likely” that we have caused more than half of the warming since 1950. The warming of the previous 100+ years was largely from natural causes (CO2 levels skyrocketed after WW2). The total warming since 1950 is roughly 1°C — not setting the world on fire.
The headline “global warming continues” is the activists’ war cry, their long effort to conceal the pause in surface atmosphere warming since roughly 2000. Meanwhile climate science moves on, with a flood of papers discussing the causes of the pause and estimating when it will end.
Conclusion
Fear is a natural emotion. Letting it rule us is a choice. Acting ike sheep is a choice. We can do better. Then those who seek to influence us will adapt, using logic and data. And America will become stronger.
The Litany Against Fear
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone pst
……I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain
From Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965).
For More Information
(a) Are we cowards?
- Are Americans easily panicked cowards? I think not, but many experts disagree., 24 April 2009
- Today’s fear-mongering (they think we’re cowards, but I’m sure they’re wrong), 4 May 2010
- Why are we so fearful? Have we become cowards?, 16 September 2014
(b) See all posts about us, Americans as sheep. Here are some examples:
- The American spirit speaks: “Baa, Baa, Baa”, 5 August 2008
- We’re Americans, hear us yell: “baa, baa, baa”, 6 August 2008
- This crisis will prove that Americans are not sheep (unless we are), 8 January 2008
- About security theater, a daily demonstration that Americans are sheep, 25 January 2009
- Attention fellow sheep: let’s open our eyes and see the walls of our pen, 16 October 2009
- Hear the cattle bellowing in the chutes. Will they revolt?, 8 September 2011 — Different metaphor; same message
- Our leaders explain that we’re sheep. Our role: to obey. Rebel sheep will be imprisoned or destroyed., 7 March 2012
- Captain America: the Winter Soldier – high-quality indoctrination for sheep, 14 April 2014
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Excellent point. We need to hear that, especially as so many people continue to watch tv “news”.
Good use of Dune, btw.
They are buying ISIS’ oil! This is all for people who don’t know about dirty game..
http://www.mintpressnews.com/west-created-isis/196488/
How The West Created ISIS
… with a little help from our friends.
FSA leader says ISIS is a good buddy!
Fabius — This is great news! Because the trillion dollars we’re spending on national security every year is not buying security, can we cut it by, say, two-thirds and reinvest the savings in infrastructure or use it to reduce the national debt?
Chet,
As usual, that’s right on target. As I have insisted so often for so long, America is immensely strong. We are the weak link. Should we re-take a place at the controls, the nation should have a great future.
That is, America will be governed. If we refuse the burden, others will govern America — and do so I their interest. Not ours. That’s only fair.
When Paul Nitz drafted NSC-68 in 1958, setting forth the doctrine of Military Keynesianism, America got locked onto an irreversible path toward becoming a garrison state mired in perepetual war under a state of undeclared martial law. Today the military/police/prison/surveillance/torture complex has now become so vast and so economically and politically powerful that it constitutes one of the most powerful lobbies affecting government policy.
Chet’s suggestions proves amusing for the same reason that jovial quips about eliminating the home mortgage deduction or shutting down the huge tax breaks for big oil companies tickle our funny bones: the constituencies for these pork barrel expenditures are huge and too powerful to permit any change.
As William S. Lind has remarked, nothing in the U.S. military/police/prison/surveillance/torture complex will change until the money runs out…and there’s no sign that the money will run out anytime soon. So it looks like we’re all just along for the run until the United Snakes of Amnesia runs so completely off the rails that we get a massive systems breakdown that forces change. Until then, expect more of the same. More privatized for-profit prisons, more militarized police, more Boston-marathon-bombing and Ferguson Missouri style quasi-military curfews and lockdowns, more endless unwinnable foreign wars, more Buck Rogers doomsday weapons that cost trillions and don’t work, more mutilated veterans kicked to the curb and left to fend for themselves, more military contractors making fortunes supplying worthless tripe like the $30,000 bulletproof canine SEAL vest or the non-working anti-terrorist lightning guns recently sold for scrap on eBay.
When you live under undeclared martial law, as America does in 2014, talking about democracy and change is just hot air. The new definition of “freedom” in 2014 America is “earlier curfew.”
As an outsider I sit and look at the USA and wonder…
Its like watching a drunk wander from one ditch only to fall into another.
Out of the Second World War into Korea. Out of the Korean war to Vietnam. From Vietnam to Guatemala and Panama to Iraq and from the ditch of Iraq to Afghanistan.
I watched the interviews with the Secretary of Defence Hagel and the skull faced admiral/general and thought… this is Donald Rumsfeld all over again.
I wanted to scream, ‘don’t do it, you are just getting out of one war and you are putting your face into a wasp’s nest again.’
Nobody asked what all the money spent on building the Iraqi army had been spent on. Oh yes, on supplying the ISAL militants with arms and ammo to shoot the next us recruits.
You would swear that it was the blind leading the blind in Washington.
When will they understand that the Muslims don’t want democracy. They like the Chinese Russians and Africa operate best under a dictator. Remove the strong man and you have chaos.
Ist going to be fun to watch how long it takes for the cycle to go round again before the paper tiger is folded up again.
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