Will Elections Cure The Disease? - 2

Fig. 1 Enhanced USGS table

ONE. About six years ago, in the first post of this series, I asked the question presented in the title.

The question tends to conjure up the notion that for every cure there is a disease (or is it the other way around?).

Historically, as concerns civilization cures, that has not been the case.

Civilizations have all gone down due to murder or suicide, the latter holding the lead at this time ("In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee).

We sometimes wonder if our nuclear civilization is above all that:

As time goes on in the USA, fewer and fewer people think that election time is a time to bring some cure to the governing process.

It is more often than not a time to express anger.

A time to throw some bums out in anger, not really contemplating the consequences of simply venting anger so much that worse candidates replace the current losers.

Is this a symptom of something?

If I were to say that ... more U.S. citizens will begin to lose their minds than will lose homes, jobs, or health care, would you believe it?

(Will Elections Cure The Disease?). Remember that one of the technical characteristics of cultural dementia, like individual dementia, is being unaware of one's location (You Are Here).

The current election aftermath season supercharges the notion that entire cultures and even civilizations can become demented to the point of being lost in space (in the sense of not even knowing which planet one inhabits):

Donald Trump Still Thinks Climate Change Is ‘A Bunch Of Bunk’

Priebus confirms that climate denial will be the official policy of Trump’s administration

The greatest threat to national security (in the thinking of the military and the scientific community) is global warming induced climate change:

Every branch of the United States Military is worried about climate change. They have been since well before it became controversial.
...
At a time when Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush 41, and even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, called for binding international protocols to control greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. Military was seriously studying global warming in order to determine what actions they could take to prepare for the change in threats that our military will face in the future.

The Center for Naval Analysis has had its Military Advisory Board examining the national security implications of climate change for many years. Lead by Army General Paul Kern, the Military Advisory Board is a group of 16 retired flag-level officers from all branches of the Service.

This is not a group normally considered to be liberal activists and fear-mongers.
...
[the article quotes Eugene Skolnikoff:] "The central problem is that outside the security sector, policy processes confronting issues with substantial uncertainty do not normally yield policy that has high economic or political costs. This is especially true when the uncertainty extends not only to the issues themselves, but also to the measures to avert them or deal with their consequences.

The climate change issue illustrates – in fact exaggerates – all the elements of this central problem. Indeed, no major action is likely to be taken until those uncertainties are substantially reduced, and probably not before evidence of warming and its effects are actually visible. Unfortunately, any increase in temperature will be irreversible by the time the danger becomes obvious enough to permit political action."

(Does Our Military Know Something We Don't?, emphasis added). Consider this in the context of the shocking statement by Professor Wilkerson:

"The Military is the lead federal agency on climate change ... and that is ... extremely dangerous ... we may lose the republic ..."

(The Authoritarianism of Climate Change - 2, video at bottom). According to Professor Wilkerson, the military will coalesce into the Sun Tzu kind of coup they teach at the War College (Is War An Art or Is War A Disease?).

Fig. 2 What Will Be Censored?

TWO.  So, if you haven't guessed what I am getting at yet, I am getting at "when will the military purge the denier sections of government or instead purge the climate science ?"

The state of the union (SOTU) is that the country has been invaded in a manner that I have characterized as an invasion by Greenland & Antarctica (Greenland & Antarctica Invade The United States, 2, 3, 4; Why The Military Can't Defend Against The Invasion).

So, today let's talk about the ~three feet or ~1 meter aspect of the situation, which is the point at which the Sun Tzu kind of coup may have to take place.

Fig. 3 220.7 mm (1.07 mm yr) & counting

THREE. Feet ... yes, ~three feet (~a meter) is the degree of sea level rise that will cause the beginning serious malfunctions of international and national infrastructure organs of international trade / intercourse (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization - 3).

That 3 foot quantity of sea level rise is only about 1% to 1.14% of the total ice of the ice sheets of the Cryosphere (Fig. 1); the percentage depending on whether or not one includes ghost-water in the calculation  (The Ghost-Water Constant, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Fig. 4 ice loss: ~88,813.5 km³

The Cryosphere is composed of the ice on Greenland, Antarctica, and land glaciers.

That is the same one and only Cryosphere that is and has been melting for a long time (Humble Oil-Qaeda).

The Dredd Blog software module, which uses PSMSL tide gauge station records, calculates the 1807 - 2014 ice loss amount of the Cryosphere to be ~88,813.5 km³ (Fig. 4) using the "Golden 23 Zones" (Calling All Cars: The Case of the "Missing Six" - 5).

Those are the WOD zones in which the "Golden 23" tide gauge stations are located.

Fig. 5 ~0.28% approaching 1% to 1.14%

In the sea level realm of science those tide gauge station records provide a global indication and useful view of sea level change.

Those tide gauge stations obviously do not directly measure the highest sea levels.

That is because those highest sea levels take place out in the deep ocean far away from coasts of the large land masses where those tide gauges must be placed (The Bathtub Model Doesn't Hold Water - 3).

Nevertheless, they provide a platform of data from which to calculate the highest sea levels (think formulas for arcs, hemispheres, and spheres).

The results of those calculations are also helpful for calculating the amount of ice lost from the Cryosphere from 1807-2014 (Fig. 5).

Notice that in Fig. 4 when the sea level graphed amount falls to its lowest point circa 1866, the ice loss amount increases to its highest graphed amount, which is counter intuitive but normal (Proof of Concept - 3, The Evolution and Migration of Sea Level Hinge Points - 2).

The graph of ice loss percentages per year is shown on Fig. 5, which totals to about 0.28%, which means that we not quite a third of the way to the 1% to 1.14% threshold yet.

But, even with that seemingly small amount, right now military installations in some locations are beginning to flood, and to be abandoned at other locations, according to Professor Wilkerson (second video below).

FOUR. Elections will not solve this problem, so, we must ponder whether or not the military will "step into the vacuum" caused by what they consider to be a clueless civil government.

A clueless civil government that has deceived sixty some million folks who, in effect, voted this year to deny the existence of global warming induced climate change (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; The Agnotology of Sea Level Rise Via Ice Melt).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Changing of the Guards
by Bob Dylan
(lyrics here)

...

"Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards

Peace will come
With tranquillity and splendor on the wheels of fire
But will bring us no reward when her false idols fall
And cruel death surrenders with its pale ghost retreating
Between the King and the Queen of Swords"

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Mega Infrastructure Bill To Make Jobs? - 2

Fig. 1 Serious Arctic Climate Change

I. Background

There has been talk for many years about degenerating U.S. infrastructure.

It came up in the presidential election and in comments from a bi-partisan list of Senate and House members.

Infrastructure upgrade is a good thing they say, but once again Dredd Blog wonders about and asks "what is infrastructure?" that they keep talking about like they do with other dog whistles.

II. What Is Infrastructure?

Is it just the great anti-immigrant wall that middle class workers are going to build and Mexico is allegedly going to pay for?

Fig. 2 Trend?

Does it include repairing the global warming induced climate change damage, caused by past catastrophe after catastrophe which insurance companies worriedly talk about (The Evolution and Extinction of Affordable Insurance) ?

Does it include damage by ongoing and future sea level rise and fall (Why Sea Level Rise May Be The Greatest Threat To Civilization, 2, 3, 4, 5) ?

The graphs at Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 show that the Arctic sea ice is still losing extent even in the middle of November, which means that Greenland will also lose more of its ice sheet, and thereby cause even more sea level change (The Evolution and Migration of Sea Level Hinge Points - 2).

III. Military Infrastructure

The military sees climate change as the major threat to its infrastructure, as Dredd Blog has pointed out for years (Global Climate & Homeland Insecurity, 2009; Global Climate & Homeland Insecurity - 2, 2016).

Professor, and Colonel, Wilkerson points out in the video below that the top Naval installation in Norfolk, VA and the Air Force headquarters airport runway near there, both flood due to sea level rise.

The word Dredd Blog has been spreading all these years is getting around:

Based on these calculations, the report says a three-foot sea level rise would threaten 128 U.S. military bases, valued at roughly $100 billion.

Nine of those bases are major hubs for the Navy: In addition to Norfolk, flooding threatens Naval Station Mayport, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia and the Naval Academy in Maryland, where 2003's Hurricane Isabel flooded classrooms, dormitories and athletic facilities.

It's not just the Navy. Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island is at risk of being completely underwater. All told, three Marine Corps installations, two joint bases, an Air Force base and a Coast Guard Station are also at risk of daily flooding, the report said.

(The Extinction of Robust Sea Ports - 9, quoting Navy Times). The dangers that Professor Wilkerson talks about in today's video are, in his words, "extremely dangerous".

He sees the brain-lock in congress and in the approaching presidency, concerning the global climate change national security threat, as a "complete vacuum" where the military has always stepped in to take over.

IV. Ghost Infrastructure?

Or is "infrastructure" the ghost-infrastructure Dredd Blog has been asking about for years now:

We are talking about "the most expensive public works legislation in US history" having creative billions reserved as special earmarking to the tune of "$24 billion for a staggering 6,376 pet projects, spread among virtually every congressional district in the land".

"The enormous bill -- 1,752 pages long" costing "$286.4 BILLION" known as "the highway bill" was the republican congress and republican president's bill passed in late 2005.

But it did not stop the Minnesota bridge from collapsing and killing American citizens, nor did it stop the great recession that is still ongoing.

So how is the next most expensive public works legislation in US history going to be any different?

The answer is that nothing is going to work until we stop destroying wealth with the stupid wars, the stupid military spending gone pork barrel wild, and the stupid military propaganda deciding our fate.

Read this following quote slowly, remembering that it was done while the exorbitant costs of war were not being included in the budget a few years back, while everyone was smitten with bubbleosis, that economic disease which says this economic universe is expanding forever baby, and while we were in the love of war daze:

AT $286.4 BILLION, the highway bill just passed by Congress is the most expensive public works legislation in US history. In addition to funding the interstate highway system and other federal transportation programs, it sets a new record for pork-barrel spending, earmarking $24 billion for a staggering 6,376 pet projects, spread among virtually every congressional district in the land. The enormous bill -- 1,752 pages long -- wasn't made public until just before it was brought to a vote, and so, as The New York Times noted, ''it is safe to bet that none of the lawmakers, not even the main authors, had read the entire package."

That didn't stop them from voting for it. It passed 412 to 8 in the House, 91 to 4 in the Senate.

(Boston Globe, August 2005, emphasis added, see also PBS Transcript). Once again, why didn't the greatest infrastructure spending in fiscal history not help the economy?

(Mega Infrastructure Bill To Make Jobs?, Dredd Blog, 2009). That money went somewhere but it did not fix the still-crumbling infrastructure (Inferior Structure, 2, Famous Last Words,The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 4).

That is likely to continue in the current corrupt state of things (Getting Caught Is The Only No-No).

V. Trump Infrastructure Vision

How hard engineering concepts can become "political" is only understood completely by a trip down along Highway 61 (War is the Highway 61 of the 1%).

Here is the current rap on trumpfrastructure:

It was supposed to be a big, beautiful infrastructure bill. But President-elect Donald Trump’s pitch for a $1 trillion upgrade of the nation’s roads, bridges, tunnels and airports is already running into potholes as it meets reality in Washington.

The overwhelming sticking point, as always, is how to pay for it.

(Infrastructure according to Trump, "plan hits D.C. speed bumps"). The situation seems to be that everything everywhere is now "politically controversial," which is not the essence of a stable country.

VI. Conclusion

Pay attention to the video below, because it probably offers the answer to the question: Will The Military Become The Police?, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

The previous post in this series is here.

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R.I.P. Leonard Cohen

The New Yorker

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Everybody knows ...

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Awe Topsy

Yes, it really happened

One of the premiere Topsy-turvey autopsy institutions ("Hindsight & Hindsight, Inc.") is busy these days daze.

Down through time, there have been many autopsies of historical events.

They are conducted because of the concept of "who knew?" or "should have known" how to stay the course.

The should-have-known is a legal term emanating from one of the legal concepts about the knowledge we are, as adults, required to have and to use.

Under our system of jurisprudence we are held to factors such as "what did we know" and "when did we know it", but, that is not the end of the matter, because we are also held to the standard of "what we should have known" and "when we should have known it" (You Should Have Known Better, PDF).

You might call it "the law of when," which can be made to seem out of the reach of comprehension where the dynamics involved in some way challenge our trance package or our world view:

"The First Law of 'When': the more critical an issue is to the future of our civilization, the difficulty of determining when that critical issue will take effect tends to increase exponentially.

The Second Law of 'When': the greater the amount of time it takes for that critical issue to play out completely tends to exponentially diminish Civilization's grasp of that critical issue.

The Third Law of 'When': the more destructive the impact which that critical issue would have on civilization tends to exponentially increase the time when that critical event will be understood to have begun to take place."

(Quotes Page). The recent election is a case in point because it does beg some of the questions about "should have known."

In terms of prescience, there are none more blind to the future than those who refuse to be prescient, and none more prescient than those who simplify it:

Professor Allan Lichtman ... has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every presidential election since 1984.

When we sat down in May, he explained how he comes to a decision.

Lichtman's prediction isn't based on horse-race polls, shifting demographics or his own political opinions. Rather, he uses a system of true/false statements he calls the "Keys to the White House" to determine his predicted winner.

And this year, he says, Donald Trump is the favorite to win.
...
So very, very narrowly, the keys point to a Trump victory. But I would say, more to the point, they point to a generic Republican victory ...

(Trump is headed for a win, says professor who has predicted 30 years of presidential outcomes correctly). Others that were better equipped to discern the matter utterly failed to do it (Why HuffPost’s Presidential Forecast Didn’t See A Donald Trump Win Coming).

Similarly, but long ago, a German uh-oh (shown by the book cover at the top of this post) is a culture-wide case where many should have known, but didn't.

The book details the blindness of many in Germany and the world at that time, and is an indictment of those people who should have known it was tending to happen, but utterly failed to take note.

Anyway, for developing vision the basic drill is to be well read and aware:

The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

(Noam Chomsky, April 2010, emphasis added). That was spot on, some six years ago, concerning the wrong direction the people polled in the U.S.eh? say the country is going, and has been going (for decades).

So let's consider the source of the prescience, the foresight:

Noam #Chomsky isn't a figure that a lot of American voters are going to be overly familiar with. He's certainly not ignored as he is one of the most-cited people in the history of writing. In fact according to an ancient article from MIT News "his 3,874 citations in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index between 1980 and 1992 make him the most cited living person in that period and the eighth most cited source overrall--just behind famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud and just ahead of philosopher Georg Hegel"

(ibid). Yep, there are two types of being "well read," one is reading and writing a lot, the other is when lots of people are reading your writings.

Nevertheless, as Professor Lichtman has shown by 30 years of exact prediction of who would win each presidential election, one does not have to be a Noam Chomsky to be prescient.

On to another case.

The two political parties competing for power in this election had different reactions to the two (in establishment eyes) radical candidates (Trump & Sanders) who were surging and giving the establishment sleepless nights (The Donald University vs. The Lord GOP University, Doomer Tuesday).

Eventually the party that won had backed off from their decision to crush their "unworthy radical candidate" (Trump), however, the other party (that lost) took the opposite approach and surreptitiously worked to thwart the will of the primary election voters.

They officially (albeit surreptitiously) resisted their "unworthy radical candidate" (Sanders).

They had no vision, thus, were doomed to experience the pain of unawareness.

The result of the autopsy, then, is demise by way of a type of ignorance, which is ignoring the plight of the people (cf. Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here).

In short, they suffered from a lack of vision.

They should have known better.

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"The country I come from is called 'The Midwest' " ...

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Flight 44

Oh what a relief it is.

Now we have a chance.

That seems to have been the feeling of the hundreds of thousands or millions in Washington today. It was great to find we still have a chance.

Bush did not completely destroy us. But is is not over yet.

One thing is absolutely sure ... it was too close for comfort.

Inauguration Day 2009 - The 'Rebellion' Strikes Back

Why are we so glad and why is there palpable joy in the crowds in Washington today?

After all, we have massive deficits in the federal and state budgets, the economy is dangerously sick, torture, unending wars, and a reputation so low in the world that even Libya's Qadafi never had to suffer it.

There is so much joy because the people sense that some very bad players are leaving power and some very good players are taking over that power.

It is a reason to rejoice. We still have a chance to turn this baby around and find America once again.

But we all know, and our new President Obama has said, we are in this together and it will take all of us to get ourselves back home.