Germ Warfare Comes To America

American Hospitals are in the enemy's cross-hairs

I. Destroying Americans With Depravity Bombs

Some seven years ago, in a Dredd Blog series (Your Health Is Their Number 1 Enemy?! , 2). I quoted people who were no doubt trained at the War College.

I quoted people who wrote that your health care is the biggest threat to the Pentagon.

That anti-health care diatribe was posted at National Defense Magazine, a well-known site.

After reading it, I posted:

Pentagonia, capitol of Bullshitistan, well aware of the current political climate, has declared who its greatest enemy is, believing it is health care:

The U.S. military keeps searching the horizon for a peer competitor, the challenger that must be taken seriously. Is it China? What about an oil rich and resurgent Russia?

But the threat that is most likely to hobble U.S. military capabilities is not a peer competitor, rather it is health care.

(The Enemy the Pentagon Should Fear Most: Health Care, National Defense Magazine, emphasis added). We have been pointing out this very strange ideology for a while now, using "MOMCOM" symbolism to isolate the militant energy fighting against the middle class and poor in the United States.

(Deja Vu - Guns v. Butter Election Looms, March 22, 2010). That post I quoted from was subsequently deleted by National Defense Magazine (the link in the quote above is to The Wayback Machine copy).

The sicko sycophant who wrote the National Defense Magazine article is an enemy of the welfare of the people of the United States, whom the military took an oath to protect by, among other things,  protecting the U.S. Constitution.

II. Target Number One: The Helpless

Americans are known historically for lending a helping hand to their neighbor, as is written at the Statue of Liberty:

"Give me

Is this a fake?

your tired,

your poor,

Your huddled masses

yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse

of your teeming shore.

Send these,

the homeless,

tempest-tost

to me,

I lift my lamp

beside the golden door!"

(Wikipedia). Who are the enemies of these American sentiments, who are the enemies of rural hospitals, who are these enemies of the American people who need health and other care at times during their journey to a better life?

III. "Let's Seriously Hurt and Harm

Twenty or Thirty Million American People"

That is something that enemies of the American People want to do, and would do if they could.

But they can't.

Alone.

They need people in powerful places inside America to lose their minds and turn on "tired ... poor ... huddled masses yearning to breathe free ... wretched refuse ... homeless ... tempest-tost" people in rural America, in American cities, and anywhere sickness and disease attack us.

These moles in "a despotic minority" are feverishly and fiendishly working to remove health care in order to "make America great again."

IV. What "Can't Happen Here" Is Happening Here

I recently quoted an Encyclopedia Britannica article concerning the once-most-quoted historian:

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces."

(Stockholm Syndrome: The Declaration of Intellectual Dependence). That description is way too close for comfort.

V. Conclusion

Those Americans who came and went, before we were born or became Americans, knew history well enough to use the phrase "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" (Supreme Court).

Those who want to do the harm to Americans (harm that hostile foreign enemies would want to do), and who took that oath not to harm Americans, are in fact domestic enemies.

Defend her from them!

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Trump (R-RU) has a friend named Jim:

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The Empire Strikes Back - 7

Health Care Is The Greatest Enemy

No terrorist threat has been able to endanger over twenty million Americans as they live their daily lives.

Until Oil-Qaeda came out and revealed themselves in the last election via T-Rex (The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan - 5).

Russian collusion is the least of the worries the American citizenry has to consider (Will The Military Become The Police?, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).

Mega-Oil-Qaeda within is the major threat to millions of Americans as we teeter on the edge of oblivion (Humble Oil-Qaeda; Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; The Peak of the Oil Lies, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Oil-Qaeda: The Deadliest Parasite Of Civilization, 2; MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5; The Authoritarianism of Climate Change).

It has been military doctrine for decades that the best way to defeat an enemy is to deceive them (Is War An Art or Is War A Disease?, 2, 3).

It would seem that there is a reason that military operatives and billionaires make up the current center of power in Washington, D.C.

Deceit is their credo (The Shapeshifters of Bullshitistan, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) because deceit (The Deceit Business) is in their epigenetic makeup (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy, 2, 3, 4, 8).

It is not hidden from those who want to see it, but it is so big it can't be envisioned in one setting (Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; Epigovernment: The New Model, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

As it turns out, there is little difference between futile and feudal (American Feudalism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

Ask yourself:  Why Is The Government Conditioning Us To Austerity? and dig the video below.

The previous post in this series is here.

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Etiology of Social Dementia - 15

"There must be some way out of here"
(All Along The Watchtower)

I. Background

This series has taken a look at the various and sundry dementias that historically infect then destroy civilizations.

Our civilization has not officially implemented ways to deal with group dementia, leaving the yeomen’s work on dementia to its manifestation in individuals; so, to the extent that there are similarities between dementia in an individual and dementia in a group, nation, society, or civilization, that has also been addressed in this series from time to time (Etiology of Social Dementia, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13).

In today's post I want to address the habitat of dementia within "groups, parties, nations ... epochs" and civilizations, a la Nietzsche (“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche).

II. What Is Habitat?

In both British English and American English there can be several meanings given to a word.

Seemingly innocuous, at times this innate doublespeak can render discourse anywhere from problematic to catastrophic (Good Nomenclature: A Matter of Life and Death).

So, I often make an attempt to isolate a particular word's meaning to a particular context.

That is probably especially needed in the context of a discussion about "the habitat of dementia."

Seeing as how 'dementia' has been defined in this series, let's define "habitat."

I want to use the word 'habitat' with an expansive meaning, so let's start with:

"A habitat is made up of physical factors such as soil, moisture, range of temperature, and availability of light as well as biotic factors such as the availability of food ..."

(Wikipedia). The "physical factors" (dirt, water, temperature, light) in this sense are "abiotic", and they are in contrast to the "biotic" factors:

A fair definition of Biology is:

... the science of life or living matter in all its forms and phenomena, especially with reference to origin, growth, reproduction, structure, and behavior.

(Dictionary, emphasis added). A fair definition of Abiology, then, ought to be:

... the science of non-life or non-living matter in all its forms and phenomena, especially with reference to origin, growth, reproduction, structure, and behavior.

(see e.g. abiological). One problem or question that biologists struggle with is the art of defining life (Erwin Schrodinger, PDF), but, to be sure that arises most often inside the twilight-zone between the abiotic and the biotic realms.

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 27). For those who would take umbrage at this Dredd Blog explanation, relax, there are other sources for your reading comfort:

Habitats consist of both the biotic and abiotic factors found in the environment. Biotic factors are living things, while abiotic factors are nonliving things.

(What Is Habitat? - Definition & Explanation, emphasis added). If you want an utterly long look into the abiotic habitat that existed billions of years before the additional carbon based, organic, biotic habitat evolved, check out (On the Origin of the Genes of Viruses, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) and (The Uncertain Gene, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

III. What Is Civilization?

Let's begin to answer the question with a look at some specialized literature:

"The meaning of the term civilization has changed several times during its history, and even today it is used in several ways.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries CE, it was widely believed among European scholars that all human communities were involved in a process of straightforward progression by which the conditions of a society were gradually improving. As part of these changes, it was believed, societies experienced different stages: savagery, barbarism and, finally, civilization."

[Establishment social science was of that mindset too: "Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races [Chuck was a tad-bit racist eh?] will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." - Charles Darwin (1881); cf. "Even what were once considered elite scientific journals have turned out to have been utter long-winded bullshit (The Eugenics Review Vols. 1 to 60; 1909 to 1968)" -Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 28]

"Civilization, in this context, was understood as the last stop in the long journey of human society. The different stages of this social evolution were equated to specific human communities: Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities were considered part of the savagery stage, Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers as part of the barbarism stage, and finally Bronze Age urban communities (particularly those in the Near East) were considered an early phase of the civilized world. Today, this approach is no longer valid since it is linked to an attitude of cultural superiority, by which human communities which are not yet "civilized" are seen as somehow inferior.

In everyday conversation, there is a tendency to use the word "civilization" to refer to a type of society that displays a set of moral values, such as respect for human rights or a compassionate attitude for the sick and the elderly. This can be problematic, since moral values are inevitably one-sided and ethnocentric. A behaviour considered "civilized" by a particular culture may be judged senseless or even seen with horror by another culture. History records an abundant number of examples of this issue. A famous one is reported by Herodotus, who describes the conflicting funerary practices of a group of Greeks, who cremated their dead, and the Indians known as the Kallatiai, who ate their dead:

During his reign, Darius summoned the Hellenes at his court and asked them how much money they would accept for eating the bodies of their dead fathers. They answered that they would not do that for any amount of money. Later Darius summoned some Indians called Kallatiai, who do eat their parents. [...], he [Darius] asked the Indians how much money they would accept to burn the bodies of their dead fathers. They responded with an outcry, ordering him to shut his mouth lest he offended the gods. Well, then, that is how people think, and so it seems to me that Pindar was right when he said in his poetry that custom is king of all (Herodotus 3.38.3-4)."

(Ancient History Encyclopedia, emphasis added). I think that many of these cultural dynamics of "civilized behavior" are actually cultural trances induced in many cases by the cultural amygdala (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala, Choose Your Trances Carefully).

In another sense of history, civilization is merely a group entity which comes to an end by suicide or murder, but much more frequently by the former (A Study of History, Toynbee).

In another sense we could call it "the largest form of a human group."

IV. The Habitat of Cultural Dementia Within Civilization

The early stages of social dementia resemble being lost in, of all places, space.

In other words, not knowing where we are - lost - even though we have been schooled and given a "YAH" map (You Are Here).

We hear of individuals walking around lost, but that is actually the legacy of civilizations that have come and gone too.

In the current presidential elections in various countries, right wing extremism is challenging the status quo.

In the U.S. version, one candidate does not know were we are in terms of believing that the environment, the habitat writ large, can't be harmed.

The other is like the current president, who talks like a showman but acts like the worst of the worst, killing entire nations for their oil as those who went before did (The Fleets & Terrorism Follow The Oil - 6).

The social dementia lurks behind the billboard of lies, hides in the media generated reality, incessantly covered by the cocoon of propaganda (The Deceit Business, The Authoritarianism of Climate Change).

Cultural dementia hides within the institutions of civilization, within the literature, within the educational system, within the government, within the military, and especially within the corporate media.

The study of that dynamic, that generating of ignorance, is being done within the (most likely) soon-to-be-doomed discipline of Agnotology (Agnotology: The Surge, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17).

These ignorance generators within society produce what the institutions perpetuate in an epigenetic dynamism we vaguely see and describe as "the status quo."

It plays out in a more and more obvious, more and more exposed, and more and more degenerate stupor (Comparing a Group-Mind Trance to a Cultural Amygdala).

Economically, it plays out as an economy morphing into a plutonomy within a wartocracy, i.e. neo-feudalism (American Feudalism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).

V. Conclusion

It won't get far having failed The Test (The Tenets of Ecocosmology).

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

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Black guitars matter.

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Etiology of Social Dementia - Revisited

Regular readers know that from time to time Dredd Blog posts are revisited.

This helps us to remember that some things didn't just start happening yesterday.

On September 18, 2009 Dredd Blog began a series about dementia, but since that time the subject has not died and gone away, no, it is even more relevant today, because dementia has seriously increased along with suicide.

The ideas expressed in that post in that series are just as true today as they were then.

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No doubt dementia is known in our society.

Some of that dementia has unknown causes.

In general, then, some of them come to us with no known cures.

We live in a sophisticated society that faces some diseases that have unknown causes and no known cures.

One of the more well known mental diseases of that particular group can even be deadly:

Some researchers are convinced that, whatever its cause, Alzheimer's disease is essentially an inflammatory condition, similar to rheumatoid arthritis ... there is no cure ... According to a report released in June 2001 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's disease was the 8th main cause of death in the USA in 1999, rising from 12th position in 1998.

(Dementia). A realm of medicine called Etiology looks for the root cause or origin of such diseases.

Alzheimer's is a personal disease, an individual disease that infects on a person by person basis.

But there are obviously times when entire nations "go crazy", and do strange things. Things like attacking other nations for no sound reason, or becoming inexplicably belligerent, or the like.

Take for examples, 1930's Germany that invaded various nations of Europe and started World War II, or North Korea today which threatens to do the same for the same invalid "reasons".

These are extremes that reach the border of sanity or proper social behavior, so social scientists do a sort of social etiology in an attempt to fathom how the madness originates and spreads so disastrously.

Currently in the U.S. we have symptoms of a national dementia, not unlike that of 1930's Germany, which has been around at least since General and later President Eisenhower warned against it.

The U.S. is spending more than all the rest of the world combined on weapons of mass destruction and tactical weapons, as well as having built military bases in 120 or more countries, evidently intent on maintaining them indefinitely.

Since this comes at the cost of human health and wealth, it is naturally seen by many as a sign of a national dementia.

Some observers see this dementia originating in the early 20th century when government or those behind government perceived a need to control the people, but realized that they could not do it by physical means.

Thus they took to propaganda in an effort to control the minds rather than use physical control.

Eventually this led to a mega-industry of businesses whose function was to deceive the people into believing something other than the truth of events occurring around them.

One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.

Our language itself has enough holes in it to drive a truckload of propaganda through.

Check out this simple test that gives an indication of what is being said with our tricky language and what is not.

This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:

With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."

(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.

Thus, it is possible that we are beginning to see the national manifestations of our massive practice of deceit in our nation, because deceit removes reality from the target to be deceived, and not being aware of reality is otherwise known as dementia.

In essence then, when governments, businesses, and those behind them decide to deceive the people "for their own good", they are actually injecting dementia into the populace.

With the massive technologies we have for spreading deceit "through the air waves", we can even say that the disease has become airborne, which usually strikes terror into the hearts of the Center For Disease Control, because that brings on pandemics of the untreatable kind.

The movie "Outbreak" released in 1995, before the words "WMD', "9/11", or "neoCon" hit the airwaves of the masses, starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland, Patrick Dempsey, etc., is a good study on the subject of this post. (Hat tip to Christie)

It shows that the military will take out civilians and spread propaganda when it suits their purposes, which always come first; and it shows the proper citizen response.

The next post in this series is here.

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Thanks for stopping by Dredd Blog today.

Another Look At The Dredd Blog Past

Some call it "a blast from the past."

Others call it "And that is the way it was."

From time to time we look at the past to see what was written down on Dredd Blog and passed along to readers here.

On this date in 2009, the following two stories is what was happening on Dredd Blog on August 18, 2009:

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Health Care Includes Mental Health?

The sound and the fury of the health care debates raging in the land of pundits, journalists, and concerned citizens is sometimes less than clear.

I am not sure people are talking about the same thing sometimes, because they seem discordant and unsure of their facts about what physical illness is relevant.

I have heard no discussion about what mental health issues, if any, are covered in this raging health care debate.

Mental health care should be included in the discussion if the issue of mounting health care costs is to be a factor:

U.S. spending on mental illness is soaring at a faster pace than spending on any other health care category, new government data released Wednesday shows. The cost of treating mental disorders rose sharply between 1996 and 2006, from $35 billion (in 2006 dollars) to almost $58 billion, according to the report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, the report showed, the number of Americans who sought treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and other mental health woes almost doubled, from 19 million to 36 million. The new statistics come on the heels of a study, released Monday, that found antidepressant use among U.S. residents almost doubled between a similar time frame, 1996 and 2005"

(Medical News Today, emphasis added). There is some potentially disconcerting language on some government sites in this regard:

The emotional impact of traumatic events can have devastating effects on the mental well-being of individuals of all ages. For many, it is easy to focus all energies on helping other people or on maintaining daily schedules and routines. Although these efforts deserve attention, it is important to remember to take care of yourself and to monitor your own emotions during difficult times.

(U.S. HHS, emphasis added). It is a bit strange but at the same time socially acceptable that we would be left to monitor our own mental condition, but would not even think of doing our own doctoring on physical maladies.

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She Don't Mind She Don't Mind Cocaine

Once again we have a reminder of injustice and disparity in the U.S.A. when it comes to sentencing practices over the past decade or so.

Cocaine has been said to be the drug of the affluent, for which users get a comparatively light sentence in jail.

At least it is light compared to crack cocaine, said to be the drug of the poor, for which a much greater sentence has been given for the same amount.

A recent study shows us that cocaine is found on 90% of our small paper bills, our cash:

The scientists collected U.S. banknotes from 17 U.S. cities and found that larger cities like Baltimore, Boston, and Detroit had among the highest average cocaine levels. Washington, D.C., ranked above the average, with 95 percent of the banknotes sampled contaminated with the drug. The lowest average cocaine levels in U.S. currency appeared in bills collected from Salt Lake City.

(Science Daily). If it were crack cocaine on the cash there could be enough to send almost anyone to jail who handles enough currency so that the residue stays on them until a test on a person's hands is conducted:

For sentencing purposes, the rules equate one gram of crack cocaine to 100 grams of powdered cocaine. Essentially, the judge who sentenced Kimbrough ignored this punitive standard.

"The judge said, this crack/powder thing is just nuts," said Harvard Law School Professor Carol Steiker.

Other judges agree. So does the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which has repeatedly recommended revising the 21-year-old cocaine sentencing rules. So do members of Congress such as Reps. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., and Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, who've again introduced a bill to even out cocaine sentences.

(McClatchy). The 100 - 1 ratio has resulted in an unfair prosecution of blacks who make up the bulk of prisoners.

The Supreme Court held that federal district court judges could ignore the unfair 100-1 ratio and do sentences based on a more fair application of law.

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The Peak of Antibiotic Validity

Regular readers know that yesterday's post pointed out some shocking facts about the health care system in the U.S.

That post dealt with how many people die or are maimed each day as a result of defects within that system.

That third largest killer within the U.S. scenario even applies to rich people with the very best health care insurance available.

That is, that post was not in any way a comment on the lack of access to the health care system, rather, it was a comment on what happens in a shocking number of cases following access to the system.

Today we will visit upon another defect in that system, which is the increasing disease exposure which that system is producing.

Specifically, the fetish-like overuse of antibiotics as a be all cure all for just about anything and everything, which said overuse is going to reach a peak, to then fit into the realm talked about in the book "The Peak of Everything":

The arms race between humanity and disease-causing bacteria is drawing to a close—and the bacteria are winning. The latest evidence: gonorrhea is becoming resistant to all standard antibiotic treatment ... If it seems to you that the drumbeat of bad news with respect to antibiotic resistance has become louder and more insistent in the past few years, you would be right ... Researchers reported in January that they had for the first time collected samples of E. coli bacteria from the Antarctic with particularly dangerous drug-resistance genes.

(Scientific American). This is the result of the medical system in America willfully ignoring years of warnings, much like the congress, presidents, and big business having ignored of years of warnings about global warming dangers.

It is quite possible that we destroy the good bacteria, a.k.a., microbes, when "we", i.e., Dr. Strangelove,  strafe and cluster bomb our bodies to rid ourselves of one pathogen.

Like the millions of innocent men, women, and children MOMCOM kills in the oil wars, then calls those human beings "collateral damage", MOMCOM may just be making collateral damage of all of us.

The next post in this series is here.

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Super Bugs and the Advent of the Bullsheviks

The blogosphere has been feverishly covering the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) public demonstrations for as long as they have been happening.

The OWS phenomenon has generated some debate, which is leading to a perplexing news storm, where even the main stream media (MSM) is beginning to realize that bull is the currency of the new political revolution, the Bullshevik revolution.

That U.S. Bullshevik Revolution (not Bolshevik) is the one which has created the 1% wealthy elite of the U.S. plutonomy.

In reaction to that Bullshevic Revolution, OWS has begun to express the views and the voice of the 99% counterrevolution.

Those taking part in OWS have spoken up everywhere around the nation, so they are finally being talked about often now in the MSM.

Meanwhile, a presidential election looms on the horizon.

The New York Times (NYT) published an article yesterday concerning foreign policy and national security, in the context of the views of Republican Party candidates running for president.

In that article the NYT, in some degree, seems to have recanted to distance itself from its previous opinion:

"For a while, we were concerned that the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination were not saying much about national security and foreign affairs. Now that a few have started, maybe they were better off before."

(Republicans and Foreign Policy, NYT). The republicans have tended to denounce OWS because the republicans are the party of the 1% elite ("This is an impressive crowd — the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base." - Bush II).

That NYT article wasn't the end of the matter, in fact, the NYT has some formidable competition from a Politico writer, someone not known to hold back his words:

“When they ask me, ‘Who is President of UBEKI-beki-beki-becki-stan, stan, I am going to say ‘Do you know?’”

The fact that Citizen Cain takes great pride in his ignorance of global affairs is understandably unnerving to American voters in this unstable age. But on the small stage on which Mr. Cain now finds himself, the Godfather’s Pizza CEO fits with these vapid times as much as James Dean did with his in the 1950s classic, “Rebel Without a Cause.” Sadly, Cain and his fellow cast members are little more than rebels without a clue. That reality is a dismal curtain call for the Republican party and the country it hopes to run.

Compared with the GOP’s field of reality stars, George W. Bush looks like Brando, Paul Ryan is as attractive as Robert Redford, and Chris Christie is Brad Pitt. So much for an audition process that leaves the audience, once again, aching for more.

(The Reality Show Facing GOP Voters, Scarborough). As you regular readers know, Dredd Blog does not have a favorite political party or a favorite political candidate, so we spread the criticism among those who IMO deserve it.

We suggested the best republican candidate for the 2012 presidential election way back in 2010 with the post "Obama: The Republican Candidate in 2012?".

Today more and more folks are agreeing with that notion, urging that a democrat should also run in the 2012 presidential election, while clamoring for a democratic primary where someone challenges Obama and the "other republicans".

This is especially so after Obama, while talking cooperation with republicans for the first two years of his presidency while the Democratic Party controlled the House and Senate, never mentioned jobs as he polarized the political landscape with the health care debate over legislation that drove republicans up the wall when it eventually became law.

Recently he inexplicably dropped a major chunk of that health care legislation, CLASS, without the populace even knowing about it beforehand, and after having fought tooth and nail for it instead of fighting for jobs.

What kind of domestic policy is that: fight for health care reform, not for jobs, then after passing that health care law, drop it from existence then start debating a jobs bill?

In a similar vein, a lot of other serious bugs, such as the staff monster, are going around, which seems like a microcosm or allegory for some other kind of germ infecting these "crazy" war induced politics of the past decade.

So, Dredd Blog must now bring up not only the science fiction theory of the U.S. government of this time, but Dredd Blog must also bring up the hard science theory of U.S. government as well.

Pathogens (germs) follow a certain behavioral path, and that path for The United States has been the path we call The W Direction, an alien direction IMO.

It is food for thought anyway.

The Peak of Health And The Peak of Oil

The American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) has published a series of articles that link The Peak of Oil with the issue of health care.

The Dredd Blog has pointed out the dependency of civilization on hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal) to the point that it really is an addiction (some examples: A Closer Look At MOMCOM's DNA, A Peek At The Peak Oil Catastrophe, The Peak of The Oil Wars).

The AJPH articles indicate the serious threat to health that the peak of oil production, and subsequent decline, is bringing to civilization:

Petroleum is used widely in health care — primarily as a transport fuel and feedstock for pharmaceuticals, plastics, and medical supplies — and few substitutes for it are available. This dependence theoretically makes health care vulnerable to petroleum supply shifts, but this vulnerability has not been empirically assessed. We quantify key aspects of petroleum use in health care and explore historical associations between petroleum supply shocks and health care prices. These analyses confirm that petroleum products are intrinsic to modern health care and that petroleum supply shifts can affect health care prices. In anticipation of future supply contractions lasting longer than previous shifts and potentially disrupting health care delivery, we propose an adaptive management approach and outline its application to the example of emergency medical services.

(Petroleum and Health Care, AJPH, emphasis added). Since food is essential for good health, the publication also explores the impact of peak oil on food dynamics:

We examined food system vulnerability to rising oil prices and the public health consequences. In the short term, high food prices harm food security and equity. Over time, high prices will force the entire food system to adapt. Strong preparation and advance investment may mitigate the extent of dislocation and hunger.

(Peak Oil, Food Systems, AJPH). That journal goes on to explore the coming impact on other aspects of health care as the finite supply of oil runs out.

The Dredd Blog System has also explored ways to compensate for the decline of petroleum products with natural methods and products that do not harm the environment (some examples: A Methanol Economy Way Out of Here, Dandelion Farmers of the World Unite, A Green Way Out of Here, Someone Figured It Out, Some Way Out of Here, Another Way Out of Here, The Wind Is Not Just For The Birds).

Another positive is that as petroleum use declines, to be replaced with renewable energy, damage to the environment will also hopefully decline.

The response we take today, tomorrow, and thereafter will determine whether or not our civilization avoids the import of the words too little, too late.

Health Care Reform Helps Everybody - 2

In the first post of this series, Health Care Reform Helps Everybody, a guest post, we focused on the non-legal aspects of health care reform.

This post focuses on the legal aspects of the health care reform law.

Three cases are pending in which health care reform legislation (“Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”), which the president signed into law on March 23, 2010, is being challenged as being unconstitutional.

One is in Michigan, another in Virginia, the third one is pending in Florida.

Federal District Court Judge Steeh of the U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division, in Case No. 10-CV-11156, Thomas More Law Center, et al. v Obama, has issued a decision upholding the law as constitutional.

The specific section that was at issue, and which is at issue in all three cases, is the requirement that everyone (a few exceptions apply) purchase a health care policy by 2014 or face a tax penalty which must be reported on the individual's tax form in 2015.

Three days after the bill was signed into law Dredd Blog covered the specific issue, stating:

The weakness in the neoCon case lies in a well worn path, already travelled by the states, that is in contrast, in basic principles, to their "you can't make me do it" argument.

Clearly states mandate auto insurance, which has been held constitutional, and not only that, it is actually universally mandated insurance coverage ("socialists did it!").

Those who advocated not having auto insurance raised the same "you can't make me do it" arguments, but lost because it is obvious that a requirement on everyone is not biased against anyone, and it benefits all of us.

(The Rise of The Machine Hypocrisy). This will not be the end of the matter, because the other federal district courts that are considering the issue are more conservative, sit in different federal circuits, and are likely to differ in whole or in part with Judge Steeh's decision.

Thus, in the final analysis, it will be The Supreme Five (Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy) who ultimately decide the issue, some years from now.

Bush v Gore may not be the end of The Conservative Coup in the federal judiciary.

UPDATE (10/15/10): A federal district court judge in Pensacola, Florida has issued a ruling in one of the other cases now pending, leaving an impression that he will hold the law unconstitutional. If so this would lead to appeals to two federal circuit courts of appeal, which could lead to a split in circuit decisions on the issue. That would open the door to a case in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Rise Of The Machine Hypocrisy

It is as if Dredd Blog saw it coming, conservative activist judges, as did many other folks.

Moderate democrats, asleep at the wheel, along with right wing republicans who think every thing goes better with a right wing ideology controlling things, generally scorned the Dredd Blog alarm bells.

But the ears of the democrats perked right up when the Supreme Court case Citizens United v FEC came down.

Now, activist conservative judges in the federal system are going to have to decide what to do with the Health Care Reform (HCR) legislation.

That is unavoidable because mostly conservative, or even neoCon, lawyers who hold positions as Attorney General in their respective states, have filed a lawsuit in Florida claiming that HCR is unconstitutional or otherwise illegal.

After reading the complaint, and the comments of legal scholars on both sides, I am of the opinion that the legal challenge is certainly neoCon in origin.

The ideology in the complaint does not simply arise from traditional conservative thinking, no, it is more neoCon in origin than conservative.

There are three activist neoCons on the Supreme Court, Roberts, Alito, and Thomas, with Scalia on the border line, crossing back and forth at times.

Kennedy is more of an "old fashioned" conservative who is now often the "swing vote" after Sandra Day O'Connor left the bench.

There are four Justices, who are called liberal, but who are not activist anywhere near the degree Roberts, Alito, and Thomas are.

Even with that backdrop, the complaint has no chance in its Tenth Amendment constitutional challenges, or in its states rights challenges.

The only area for a "valid challenge" is where the complaint sets forth a debate on the commerce clause, in the context of requiring people to purchase insurance or receive some sort of tax assessment as a consequence.

The weakness in the neoCon case lies in a well worn path, already travelled by the states, that is in contrast, in basic principles, to their "you can't make me do it" argument.

Clearly states mandate auto insurance, which has been held constitutional, and not only that, it is actually universally mandated insurance coverage ("socialists did it!").

Those who advocated not having auto insurance raised the same "you can't make me do it" arguments, but lost because it is obvious that a requirement on everyone is not biased against anyone, and it benefits all of us.

Texas has proven, since it has the highest number of people who refuse to purchase auto insurance, that not having it increases the number of trailer parks in those neoCon states.

When the financial security of the nation is threatened by rising health care costs, why can't the federal government mandate insurance coverage like the states do with automobile insurance?

Everyone benefits if everyone has automobile insurance, so it would seem bizarre indeed if states did not mandate automobile insurance coverage would it not?

The only hope these politically motivated lawyers have in the lawsuit against HCR, is the hope that the rogue and mavericky fellas on the Supreme Court get all "jiggy wid it", to radicalize the Supreme Court with judicial activism.

Like Citizens United v FEC, it will show supreme hypocrisy for those in the republican political machine, who have constantly and loudly voiced opposition to judicial activism, to become the most activist judges in many generations by outlawing HCR.

Bipartisan Critics See Through The Fog

When these fellows who are in trouble in their districts and who are running to be elected once again announced a deal in the Senate Friday, what happened is best explained by Joe Scarborough, Howard Dean, and Daily Kos:

On Sunday's Meet The Press, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was asked a simple question about health care: What has President Obama achieved? His answer: "He has made a lot of people with insurance stock a lot richer."

"This [bill] is great for insurance companies," he explained. "They were going to reform the system [but] neither side wanted to take on the insurance companies. Neither side wanted to get rid of anti-trust exemptions. Neither side really pushed hard to allow you or me or anybody here to buy across state lines. And as Howard Dean said -- and this is a devastating fact -- insurance companies' stocks reached a 52-year [actually 52-week] high on Friday after this so called reform bill got its 60th vote.

(Huffington Post, emphasis added). The Senate version of the bill is what they were talking about, not the House bill.

Investors are not buying stock in the insurance companies because they want to lose money, they know something don't they.

Daily Kos has charts to support the notion that the insurance companies are happy with what they think will be the result of the fusion of the House and Senate Bills later, and so are investors.

Little wonder those who care for the middle class and poor, who are losing homes, jobs, savings, and health care, are not so happy; while the military oil complex gets everything it wants.

There is reason to believe it is an under the table bailout of the insurance companies who they bailed out in the open (e.g. AIG), causing widespread outrage.

Etiology of Social Dementia

No doubt dementia is known in our society.

Some of that dementia has unknown causes.

In general, then, some of them come to us with no known cures.

We live in a sophisticated society that faces some diseases that have unknown causes and no known cures.

One of the more well known mental diseases of that particular group can even be deadly:

Some researchers are convinced that, whatever its cause, Alzheimer's disease is essentially an inflammatory condition, similar to rheumatoid arthritis ... there is no cure ... According to a report released in June 2001 by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Alzheimer's disease was the 8th main cause of death in the USA in 1999, rising from 12th position in 1998.

(Dementia Updated). One endeavor in medicine called Etiology looks for the root cause or origin of such diseases.

Alzheimer's is a personal disease, an individual disease that infects on a person by person basis.

But there are obviously times when entire nations "go crazy", and do strange things. Things like attacking other nations for no sound reason, or becoming inexplicably belligerent, or the like.

Take for examples, 1930's Germany that invaded various nations of Europe and started World War II, or North Korea today which threatens to do the same for the same invalid "reasons".

Demented Civilizations Die

These are extremes that reach the border of sanity or proper social behavior, so social scientists do a sort of social etiology in an attempt to fathom how the madness originates and spreads so disastrously.

Currently in the U.S. we have symptoms of a national dementia, not unlike that of 1930's Germany, which has been around at least since General and later President Eisenhower warned against it.

The U.S. is spending more than all the rest of the world combined on weapons of mass destruction and tactical weapons, as well as having built military bases in 120 or more countries, evidently intent on maintaining them indefinitely.

Since this comes at the cost of human health and wealth, it is naturally seen by many as a sign of a national dementia.

Warmonger educational systems destroy worlds

Some observers see this dementia originating in the early 20th century when government or those behind government perceived a need to control the people, but realized that they could not do it by physical means.

Thus they took to propaganda in an effort to control the minds rather than use physical control.

Eventually this led to a mega-industry of businesses whose function was to deceive the people into believing something other than the truth of events occurring around them.

No way out?

One tell tale sign of dementia is an inability to articulate or speak clearly.

Our language itself has enough holes in it to drive a truckload of propaganda through.

Check out this simple test that gives an indication of what is being said with our tricky language and what is not.

This national speech impairment has not gone unnoticed by the scientific community. One professor calls this doublespeak, and has written a book "Why No One Knows What Anyone Is Saying Anymore". He points out:

With doublespeak, banks don't have "bad loans" or "bad debts"; they have "nonperforming assets" or "nonperforming credits" which are "rolled over" or "rescheduled." Corporations never lose money; they just experience "negative cash flow," "deficit enhancement," "net profit revenue deficiencies," or "negative contributions to profits."

(William Lutz, Rutgers University). What is forgotten is that this propaganda is not harmless but is toxic, and those who use it are doomed to eventually become deceived by it.

Thus, it is possible that we are beginning to see the national manifestations of our massive practice of deceit in our nation, because deceit removes reality from the target to be deceived, and not being aware of reality is otherwise known as dementia.

In essence then, when governments, businesses, and those behind them decide to deceive the people "for their own good", they are actually injecting dementia into the populace.

With the massive technologies we have for spreading deceit "through the air waves", we can even say that the disease has become airborne, which usually strikes terror into the hearts of the Center For Disease Control, because that brings on pandemics of the untreatable kind.

The movie "Outbreak" released in 1995, before the words "WMD', "9/11", or "neoCon" hit the airwaves of the masses, starring: Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Cuba Gooding Jr., Donald Sutherland, Patrick Dempsey, etc., is a good study on the subject of this post. (Hat tip to Christie)

It shows that the military will take out civilians and spread propaganda when it suits their purposes, which always come first; and it shows the proper citizen response.

The next post in this series is here.

Health Care Includes Mental Health?

The sound and the fury of the health care debates raging in the land of pundits, journalists, and concerned citizens is sometimes less than clear.

I am not sure people are talking about the same thing sometimes, because they seem discordant and unsure of their facts about what physical illness is relevant.

I have heard no discussion about what mental health issues, if any, are covered in this raging health care debate.

Mental health care should be included in the discussion if the issue of mounting health care costs is to be a factor:

U.S. spending on mental illness is soaring at a faster pace than spending on any other health care category, new government data released Wednesday shows. The cost of treating mental disorders rose sharply between 1996 and 2006, from $35 billion (in 2006 dollars) to almost $58 billion, according to the report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. At the same time, the report showed, the number of Americans who sought treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and other mental health woes almost doubled, from 19 million to 36 million. The new statistics come on the heels of a study, released Monday, that found antidepressant use among U.S. residents almost doubled between a similar time frame, 1996 and 2005"

(Medical News Today, emphasis added). There is some potentially disconcerting language on some government sites in this regard:

The emotional impact of traumatic events can have devastating effects on the mental well-being of individuals of all ages. For many, it is easy to focus all energies on helping other people or on maintaining daily schedules and routines. Although these efforts deserve attention, it is important to remember to take care of yourself and to monitor your own emotions during difficult times.

(U.S. HHS, emphasis added). It is a bit strange but at the same time socially acceptable that we would be left to monitor our own mental condition, but would not even think of doing our own doctoring on physical maladies.

Is There a National Dementia?

Some of the more popular blogs in the U.S., which are main stream in thinking, if there is any such thing any more, are wondering about mental aberrations which they think they have detected, and which are showing up massively in the common public discourse or debate we hear or read all around us.

Daily Kos, for example, has a post Sunday Talk - It's Not the Heat, It's the Stupidity, followed by Idiot Nation, Idiot Press, then It's "f-king stupid"?, and finally So you wanna talk about Hitler, from which the photo comes.

The last one mentioned is a good place to focus, I think, because it shows a domestic scene with growing children, a new baby, a stroll in the country, but also the clothing of madness depicted in the NAZI S.S. uniform one of the participants is wearing.

To me it captures a national schizophrenia or similar dementia, where the normal peaceful way of life is slowly being infected, probably undetected at that time, with a social disease.

During the process at first social disease seems normal, then denial sets in, then anger, then catastrophe, then depression, and finally either revolutionary remedy or final demise.

The conundrum is that there is no treatment for national dementia, and as our national health debate shows, there is a number in the many millions and growing daily, of people who could not get treatment because they do not have health insurance anyway.

There are also indications that the treatment may not be effective to the degree that it is not associated with a physical malady of some sort.

The type of treatment with psychotropic drugs that shows dramatic results is usually associated with some brain chemistry that is out of balance, but which can be offset with prescription drugs.

But who is the nation's shrink who does the diagnosis and then dispenses the cure?

And that is the dilemma, not only in the current word storm damaged landscape, but in American social beliefs in general: one man's sanity is another man's dementia.

The diagnosis "you are a sick S.O.B. for thinking that way" is rewarded with "no, you are the sick one".

I suppose if we treat each other well all will heal, it is just that there is no agreement on what the sickness is or what is the cure is.

On Dredd Blog we have postulated a scenario where a person freezing to death and the associated dementia that goes along with it could be compared to an empire going down by suffering cognitive impairment.

Finally, we think that the healthy approach to life is Ecocosmology, where everyone pulls together to save the human species, and all forms of life are respected as carriers of the cure in some way.