“Technology Addiction” in the Electronic Age: Worldwide Progress or Servitude?

Global Research
Joel S. Hirschhorn

Everywhere I look outside my home I see people busy on their high tech devices, while driving, while walking, while shopping, while in groups of friends, while in restaurants, while waiting in doctor offices and hospitals, while sitting in toilets – everywhere.  While connected electronically, they are inattentive to and disconnected from physical reality.

People have been steadily manipulated to become technology addicted.  Technology is the opiate of the masses.

This results is technology servitude.  I am referring to a loss of personal freedom and independence because of uncontrolled consumption of many kinds of devices that eat up time and money.  Most people do not use independent, critical thinking to question whether their quality of life is actually improved by the incessant use of technology products that are marketed more aggressively than just about anything else.

I for one have worked successfully to greatly limit my use of technological innovations, to keep myself as unconnected as possible and to maximize my privacy and independence.  I do not have a smart phone; I do not participate in social networking; I do not have any Apple product, nothing like an IPod, IPad and similar devices.  I have never used Twitter or anything similar, or sent a text message.  I do use the Internet judiciously on an old laptop. Email is good and more than enough for me.  I very rarely use an old cell phone.

So what have I gained?  Time, privacy and no obsession to constantly be in touch, connected, available, informed about others.  Call me old fashioned, but I feel a lot more in control of my life than most people that I see conspicuously using their many modern devices.  They have lost freedom and do not seem to care about that.  When I take my daily long walks I have no device turned on, no desire to communicate, nor to listen to music; I want to be in the moment, only sensing the world around me, unfiltered and uninterrupted by any technology.

I am not hooked by advancing technology, not tethered to constantly improved devices, not curious about the next generation of highly priced but really unnecessary products, not logged on and online all the time.  I have no apps or games.

Those who think interactions with people through technology devices are the real thing have lost their sanity.  Technology limits and distorts human, social interactions.  Worse yet, people have lost ability and talent for actually conversing to people face to face, responding to nonverbal nuances, or through intimate writing with more than just a few words.

Consider these findings: “Researchers from the University of Glasgow found that half of the study participants reported checking their email once an hour, while some individuals check up to 30 to 40 times an hour. An AOL study revealed that 59 percent of PDA users check every single time an email arrives and 83 percent check email every day on vacation.”

A 2010 survey found that 61 percent of Americans (even higher among young people) say they are addicted to the Internet. Another survey reported that “addicted” was the word most commonly used by people to describe their relationship to technology.  One study found that people had a harder time resisting the allure of social media than they did for sex, sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center ’s Internet and American Life Project found that 44 percent of cellphone owners had slept with their phone next to their bed.  Worse, 67 percent had experienced “phantom rings,” checking their phone even when it was not ringing or vibrating. A little good news: the proportion of cellphone owners who said they “could live without it” increased to 37 percent from 29 percent in 2006.

The main goal of technology companies is to get you to spend more money and time on their products, not to actually improve your quality of life.  They have successfully created a cultural disease that has gone viral.  Consumers willingly surrender their freedom, money and time in pursuit of what exactly?  To keep pace with their peers?  To appear modern and sophisticated?  To not miss out on the latest information?  To stay plugged in?  I do not get it.

I see people as trapped in a pathological relationship with time-sucking technology, where they serve technology more than technology serves them.  I call this technology servitude.  Richard Fernandez, an executive coach at Google acknowledged that “we can be swept away by our technologies.”  Welcome to virtual living.  To break the grand digital delusion people must consider how lives long ago could be terrific without all the technology regalia pushed today.

What is a healthy use of technology devices?  That is the crucial question.  Who is really in charge of my life?  That is what people need to ask themselves if they are to have any chance of breaking up delusions about their use of technology.  When they can live happily without using so much technology for a day or a week, then they can regain control and personal freedom and become the master of technology.  Discover what there is to enjoy in life that is free of technology.  Mae West is famous for proclaiming the wisdom that “too much of a good thing is wonderful.”  Time to discover that it does not work for technology.

As to globalization of technology servitude: Is this worldwide progress what is best for humanity?  Is downloaded global dehumanization being sucked up?  Time for global digital dieting.
 Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.

Moulding Young Minds: American Schools Preaching the Virtues of a War On Iran

Global Research
Patrick Henningsen

I remember my history lessons in school. Among many things, I can recall Patton’s march through France and the Battle of the Bulge, and how we learned about the millions of deaths on, as well as off, the fields of battle throughout history.

All in all, it was a tale of battles won and lost, and as was rightly put by my junior high school teacher - a tale of caution for future generations. But as young students, we were never taught to idiosyncrasies of ‘war-gaming’ a conflict in the future.

Nor can I recall getting lessons in school about using various aspects of asymmetrical warfare to encircle an enemy, or how admirable and clever it is to deploy terrorist units to bomb a country in order to ‘soften it up’ from within.

Unbeknownst to many people, there are school teachers who are delivering pro-war propaganda, indoctrinating young children with violent globalist military stratagem selling the concept of an inevitable war on the people of Iran as well as anyone else deemed as ‘Axis’ powers in relation to western central planning.

Interestingly, and quite horrific in fact, when challenged by his young (and extremely bright) female student over the idea of western pre-emptive intervention against Iran, the teacher addressing these students laid down a nonnegotiable maxim stating:
“… one of the rules (in this discussion) – you can’t do nothing”.

The female student followed his NLP intellectual diversion by rightly pointing out to him:
“But we (the US) are the only country in the world that’s ever used nuclear weapons”.
To which the teacher replies sharply:

“That’s irrelevant.”

It appears also towards the end of the video, that the class was being monitored by the principal’s office, who then summoned the student in question to the office. Orwellian – in the extreme.

This is the generation of children who may be asked – or drafted in to fight a coming war with Iran and others – so is this part of the indoctrination of future soldiers? Maybe.
Certainly here, it’s safe to say that teachers are grooming the next generation of compliant consumer spectators.

Watch the classroom exchange recorded by the student:

The Palin-Bachman-George W. Syndrome of Celebrity Stupid Re-Emerges in Rep. Nan Hayworth

Imperialism In The X-Factor Age

Global Research
Colin Todhunter

In Vietnam, Agent Orange was dropped by the US to poison a foreign population. In Iraq and the former Yugoslavia, depleted uranium was used. In Western countries, things are a bit more complicated because various states have tended to avoid using direct forms of physical violence to quell their own populations (unless you belong to some marginalized group or hit a raw nerve, as did the Occupy Movement last year). The pretence of democracy and individual rights has to be maintained.

One option has been to use South American crack cocaine or Afghan heroin to dope up potential troublesome sections of the population. It’s worked wonders: highly lucrative for the drug running intelligence agencies and banks awash with drug money (1), while at the same time serving to dampen political dissent in the most economically and socially deprived areas. Another tactic has of course been the massive ever-increasing growth of the surveillance industry to monitor ordinary citizens.

But drugs, surveillance and direct violence are kind of a last resort to keep a population in check. Notwithstanding baton charges, tear gas and the use of rubber bullets on the European mainland and that the US Government is not ruling out the use of violence on its own people (2), ideology via the media has and continues to be the choice of method for population control in Western countries.

Whether it’s through the paranoia induced by the fear of terrorism or more general propaganda spewed out by the mainstream ‘news’ channels, political agendas and modes of thought are encouraged which seek to guarantee subservience and ‘integration’, rather than forms of critical thought or action that may lead to a direct questioning of or a challenge to prevailing forms of institutionalised power.

From trade unions to political parties, oppositional groups are infiltrated, deradicalised and incorporated into the system (3) and critical stances are stifled, ridiculed or marginalized. Consensus is manufactured both in cultural and political terms. The result is that presidential candidate TV debates, political discourse and much of the popular mass media is void of proper analytical discussion: public theatre scripted by speech writers and PR people, presented in manipulative, emotive, ‘human-interest’ terms.

From the TV news and commercials to the game-shows and latest instant fame programme, misinformation, narcissism and distraction pervade all aspects of life. Why be aware of the world’s ills and challenge anything when you can live in the dark, watch X-Factor, wear Reebok and shop till you drop? It is an infotainment paradise where lies are truth and unfettered desire a virtue.

It’s a world of crass consumerism and gleaming shopping malls bathed in designer lifestyle propaganda where people drown in their Friday night alcohol vomit, shop till they drop for things they don’t really need or indeed want and bask in their emptiness by watching TV with eyes wide shut.

But this is ‘free market’ democracy. And the concept behind it is that the mass of the population are a problem, and any genuine debate or the electorate’s ability to see what is actually happening must be prevented. People must be distracted – they should be watching millionaire footballers kick a ball around, mind numbing soap operas or some mindless sitcom. Every once in a while, at voting time, they are called on to parrot or back some meaningless slogans.

Politics is no longer about great ideas. The acquisition of power has become the core value in itself, not socialism or any other radical philosophy. What is required from mainstream political leaders is technocrat not, radical; middle manager, not firebrand. In an era of advanced capitalism, the role of mainstream glove puppet political leaders is to demonstrate competence when it comes to managing the machinery of state in order to fine tune the status quo, not overhaul it.

Robert Gibbs Blames the Victim?

The Daily Bell

"A 16-year-old American boy killed in an Obama administration drone strike 'should have [had] a far more responsible father,' Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs says in a new video released by the group We Are Change. – Young Turks

Dominant Social Theme: If you don't hit them over there, they will come here.

Free-Market News: In this video, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks comments on why the US killed a male US minor in Yemen – a young US citizen whose father, US officials claim, was a terrorist.

Robert Gibbs is a former spokesperson for the Obama administration and the initial YouTube posting was created by the alternative media group, We Are Change. While the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki (who was said by some to have actually been a CIA asset) was widely reported, the death of his young son, Abdulrahman, also a US citizen who lived in the United States, is not nearly so well known.

Al-Awlaki's death is justified by those who carried it out as a strike against someone who meant to harm US citizens. He was labeled a terrorist and put on an Obama death list. But his son wasn't on any such list and was killed anyway, two weeks after his father, in another drone strike. Neither individual received judicial due process.

In defending the killing, Gibbs says at one point: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don't think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."

Uygur calls this answer "a terrible one."

Apparently, Gibbs's response has been noted by the larger, "mainstream" US press. "The Atlantic suggests that if Gibbs is giving the genuine rationale for the killing, it's grounds for impeachment." And Esquire magazine wrote about the death of the son as follows:

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

(Video from TYTNETWORK's YouTube user channel.)

Pakistan’s anti-drone campaigner Imran Khan removed from US airline for interrogation

Russia Today



US immigration authorities have taken Pakistan’s former cricket superstar-turned-politician Imran Khan off a flight to New York and interrogated. Khan is known for his anti-drone campaigning.

Khan, who is now a popular political figure in Pakistan and ahead of the Pakistan Movement for Justice party (PTI), was removed from an American Airlines flight heading from Canada to New York and interrogated. Immigration officials asked him whether he was planning to protest in the US, as well as demanding to know his views on drone strikes and jihad.

Earlier this month, the former cricket star led thousands of Pakistani protesters, together with some US anti-war advocates, on a march from Islamabad to the tribal region of South Waziristan in opposition to US drone strikes. About 15,000 of his supporters joined him in the high-profile march, which focused attention on the strikes that have killed large numbers of civilians. Islamabad recently said that 80 percent of drone-related deaths were civilians.

“I was taken off the plane and interrogated by US Immigration in Canada on my views on drones. My stance is known. Drone attacks must stop,” Khan wrote in a tweet after being questioned on Friday. Khan had been on his way to the US to give a speech and attend a fundraiser organized by his political party, which the delay caused him to miss.

“Missed flight and sad to miss the fundraising lunch in NY but nothing will change my stance,” he tweeted.

Furthermore, Khan said the official who was questioning him did not seem to understand drone warfare himself. He also expressed confusion over why he was granted a visa to visit the US given if his stance on drones was a problem.

Khan heads a political party that was founded in 1996 and ignored for years. The PTI was called “Pakistan’s one-man party” by the US Department of State. Today, it is rapidly growing, with electable officials joining. The Pakistani leader believes the War on Terror “has been devastating for Pakistan,” he said in an interview with Julian Assange in June.

“Basically, our army was killing our own people,” he said.

He is an avid opponent to US presence on Pakistani soil – even when it came down to the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011. The US mission to kill the former terrorist leader in Pakistan shows that “our ally did not trust us,” the politician said. Rather than employ Pakistan as “a hired gun, being paid to kill America’s enemies,” Khan believes the US should trust that there will not be terrorism coming out of Pakistan.

Several Canadian commentators have suggested that groups protesting Khan’s entrance to the US may have influenced Immigration to pull him off the flight. The American Islamic Leadership Coalition last week requested that Hilary Clinton attempt to revoke his visa due to what they believe are sympathetic views towards the Taliban.

“The US Embassy made a significant error in granting this Islamist leader a visa,” the group said in a statement reported by the Sun. “Granting individuals like Khan access to the US to fundraise is against the interest of the people of Pakistan and the national security interests of the US.”

Ali Zaidi, a senior PTI party leader, demanded an apology from the US government for removing Khan from the plane. So far, no apologies have been made, and Immigration officials have only restated their policies.

“Our dual mission is to facilitate travel in the United States while we secure our borders, our people, and our visitors from those that would do us harm like terrorists and terrorist weapons, criminals, and contraband,” Customs and Border Protection spokesperson Joanne Ferreira told the Toronto Sun.

UK claims possible court hearing into CIA drone strikes in Pakistan would risk denting US ties

Washington Post

Ties between Britain, the U.S. and Pakistan could be jeopardized if a judge grants a request for a court inquiry into the possible role of U.K. spy agencies in aiding covert CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s northwest tribal region, a government lawyer told Britain’s High Court on Thursday.

James Eadie, lawyer for Britain’s Foreign Office, insisted that intelligence sharing between Britain and the U.S. — already under strain by previous disclosures made in London courtrooms — and links between Washington and Pakistan would all potentially be cast into doubt.

Noor Khan, a 27-year-old whose father was killed by a drone strike in northwest Pakistan in March 2011, has asked Britain’s High Court to examine whether U.K. intelligence officials assisted the action and may be liable for prosecution.

His legal advisers want a judge to determine whether Britain’s secret eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has passed location data to guide CIA drones, and whether the U.K. has agreed to a secret policy of assistance to the program of targeting militants.

“Adjudicating on the claim plainly would have significant impact on the conduct of the United Kingdom’s relations with both the United States and Pakistan,” Eadie told a three-day hearing at the High Court. “It would also be likely to have such an impact on relations between the United States and Pakistan. That impact would be felt in an acutely controversial, sensitive and important context.”

Since 2004, CIA drones have targeted suspected militants with missile strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions, killing hundreds of people. The program is controversial because of questions about its legality, the number of civilians it has killed and its impact on Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Khan’s father, Malik Daud Khan, was attending a meeting of local elders in Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, when it was hit by a missile fired from an unmanned drone, killing around 40 people.

British officials have not commented publicly on their policy toward CIA drone strikes. U.S. officials do not publicly acknowledge the covert program.

Pakistani officials have urged the U.S. to halt its program and to instead relay intelligence gathered by the pilotless aircraft to Pakistani jets and ground forces so that they can target militants themselves.

Kat Craig, legal director of the Reprieve charity, which is representing Khan, said that her client “merely wishes to know what role the British intelligence services play in this game of one-sided Russian roulette.”

“He is calling for the veil of secrecy around Britain’s drones policy to be lifted so that he can keep his community safe. We share his concerns about the lack of accountability, and the morality of the U.K. being dragged into an illegal attack on a country with whom we are not at war,” she said.

Last year, British spy agencies were accused of sharing sensitive information with Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya, leading to the torture or rendition of two Libyan men and their families. The case is now the subject of an inquiry by British police.

Previously, intelligence sharing between Britain and the U.S. was put under strain after a London court made public details of abuse that ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed alleges he suffered at the hands of U.S. intelligence officials. Mohamed had accused the British government of complicity in his alleged torture.

Britain’s Foreign Office said that a decision on whether to grant Khan a hearing is expected to be handed down by the High Court before the year’s end.

The Cost of Stupidity

United Nations should be kicked off US soil: US congressman

Press TV

Scrutinize us, will you?

Republican congressman Connie Mack has called on the US administration to stop funding the United Nations, saying the world body should be “kicked off US soil.”

Connie, who is the representative for Florida’s 14th congressional district, condemned the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for its plan to send monitors to polling places across the United States on Election Day to monitor the event.

OSCE, which is registered as an NGO with the UN, will send 44 observers across America to monitor the voting centers. The organization was asked by American civil rights groups to monitor the election, after being warned of “a coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans - particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”

The 45-year-old congressman stressed that the news should have outraged every American, because “the only ones who should ever oversee American elections are Americans.”

The Republican politician said that the idea that the UN “would be allowed, if not encouraged” to monitor the US election, “is nothing short of disgusting.”

“For years the United Nations has aggressively worked against the best interests of our country and many of our allies. The UN’s actions and intentions toward the United States have been nothing short of reprehensible," Connie added.

Connie is the Republican Senate nominee, running for 2012 US Senate election in Florida, which is scheduled be held alongside the 57th US presidential election on November 6.

Debbie Wasserman Doesn’t Know About Obama’s Secret Kill List

Fraudulent Educational Reform in America

Global Research
John Kozy

“Curiosity is the wick in the candle of learning.”—William Arthur Ward

What goes on in America’s schools is essentially identical to what goes on in the Madrassas of the Muslim world. In both, orthodox beliefs are taught as truth and critical examination is discouraged. Two worlds clash in loggerheads.

In the 1960s, I came across a little book entitled Master Teachers and the Art of Teaching. This unpretentious little book, written by John E. Colman of St. John’s University, not only enlightened me as a young university professor but proved to be invaluable. In it, about a dozen different teaching methods are described along with some information about the master teachers who designed them. Each of these methods was used successfully to teach some subjects to some students. None was used successfully to teach all subjects to all students. Throughout my teaching career, I found opportunities to utilize many of these methods when the right situations arose. The lesson I learned from this little book is that there is no one teaching method that works for teaching all subjects to all students. Finding the right method for the students at hand is at best an art, never a science, and is never easy.

Few people understand this. In fact, teacher training suppresses it. Teaching methods are taught to prospective teachers as fixed, reliable procedures that never fail when in reality, they rarely succeed. And although carried out in numerous variations, the predominant way of teaching in America’s schools at all levels has been the teacher’s lecture and the student’s need to memorize it. Today the lecture is often presented in various ways. The student listens to a teacher speak, or reads a teacher’s words in a textbook, or watches a televised presentation or a computerized video. And students are asked to memorize some portion of the presented material. Furthermore, the memorization of presented material is the most boring way of teaching anyone anything. No one likes having to memorize stuff. Some teachers, like orators, are better at lecturing than others which leads many to conclude that the quality of the presentation is what really matters and that that quality depends on the teacher’s talent. But it doesn’t. Teaching is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for learning. Human beings had been teaching themselves and others for millennia before what we know as a “teacher” ever existed.

The history of education in America makes this transparently clear. Even the Puritans had ways of teaching their children, but the first normal school, a school to train students to be teachers, didn’t come into being until 1839, less than two centuries ago. It resulted in building a school system modeled on an industrial, manufacturing model that still controls thinking about education today. Unfortunately is was faulty then and still is today.

Using this model, our schools are thought of as factories, the teachers are thought of as factory workers, and students are thought of as raw material. Each student enters the school system as a tabula rasa and exits as a book engraved with “knowledge.” The engraver, of course, is the teacher who is responsible for what is written on the tabulae. The system is devoted to mass producing educated people, and even anecdotal observations of people clearly demonstrate that it has never worked. Had it worked, everyone who attended school would have been equally educated, just like the buttons produced in a button factory are all alike. Two and a half centuries of graduate counterexamples absolutely refute the theory.

But so does the experience of most students. It is the rare graduate of any school on any level who can’t name a teacher s/he considers exceptionally good. Yet even those teachers never taught every student in their classes equally well. Some learned a lot, some learned less, and perhaps some learned nothing. No teacher can be responsible for such disparate results. Something other than the teacher’s ability must be accountable for them, because each student in each class was subjected to the same presentations. Mill’s method of difference must be used to identify the other, but no reformer is attempting to use it. Blaming the teacher is so much easier, and putting the blame there proves that the improvement of education is not the aim of reformers.

Even though we routinely ask children what they would like to be when they grow up, except in trivial ways, our schools rarely make attaining their goals possible, because the system is designed to make products not educated human beings. Prospective college students are always being told, even by the President, to study subjects that the commercial community needs to carry out its enterprises. Lindsay Oldenski, Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, writes that the need is to match graduates to the areas where labour demand is growing. Students are not told to study the subjects needed to become what they want to be because unless the commercial community wants people who want to be what they want to be, this society has no place for them in it, which proves that this society does not exist for people, but that people exist to fulfill the purposes of the commercial community.

From Persuasion to Coercion: PsychoPharma’s “Priesthood of the Mind”

Global Research
James F. Tracy

The “psychopharmaceutical complex”[1]— modern psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, and an accommodative regulatory apparatus–sustains itself through a public belief in its medical scientific expertise and legitimacy realized through marketing and public relations. Now a combination of more direct government involvement in medicine via the Affordable Care Act, the 2013 release of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) new and expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Volume V (DSM), alongside more comprehensive systems of federal health surveillance and biometric identification technologies suggest how psychiatry’s behavioral norms and protocols will be more and more integrated into everyday life. Overall, the psychopharmaceutical complex appears poised to abandon a paradigm based on persuasion and belief and move toward a model encompassing coercion and decree to enforce its normalcy ideal.

“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”—Erich Fromm[2]

Since the 1950s psychotropic drugs comprise the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex’s lucrative masterstroke of public relations and marketing. Heretofore the prevalence and use of such substances have been constructed in the public mind through a conditioned cultural obeisance toward professional expertise and its amplification in advertising and related promotional discourse. Twenty percent of Americans now take at least one drug to treat one or more psychiatric disorders. Usage among women and children under ten doubled between 2001 and 2010.[3] According to the Centers for Disease Control the “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors” (SSRIs) class of antidepressants marketed under the now common brand names Zoloft, Celexa, Effexor, and Paxil, are among the most heavily prescribed drug types, with 11% of Americans over the age of 12 now on such treatment.

Pharmaceuticals are widely prescribed by psychiatrists and general practitioners alike as treatment of conditions delineated in the DSM, through which the psychiatric profession exerts worldwide authority in defining what mental illness is in a sweeping array of behavioral designations applicable to thousands of subjectively interpreted behavioral abnormalities. The APA recommends antidepressant medication for a large proportion of alleged maladies, such as what it terms “moderate to severe depressive symptomatology.”[4] Yet as historian David Healy notes, the current DSM IV has “conveniently made it impossible to define dependence on SSRI’s antipsychotics, or benzodiazepines as a disorder.”[5]

Between 1988-1994 and 2005-2008 antidepressant use in the US increased by close to 400%.[6] If usage were to expand further along this trajectory by the early 2020s two in five people will be taking antidepressants alone. Antidepressant sales peaked at $15 billion in 2003, yet expiration of drug patents, the pharmaceutical industry’s inability to produce new “blockbusters” to take their place, and increasing reports that such drugs are useless and often dangerous may reduce sales to as little as $6 billion by 2016.[7]

The four-fold expansion of antidepressant consumption demonstrates how “depression” and the introduction of SSRIs have no doubt been a tremendous boon for pharmaceutical companies. Yet how depression and antidepressants have become such a taken-for-granted element of the public mind is a far less interrogated social phenomenon. Pharmaceutical companies wield tremendous power over discourse and belief through a carefully crafted advertising and public relations agenda that exceeds the often useless and dangerous products they sell.[8] Such effects have capitalized on the cultural inclination toward deference to expert opinion—in this case toward psychiatry.

Constructing the Profession and Its Object

In 2006 investigative journalist Jon Rappoport conducted a series of interviews with Ellis Medavoy, an alias provided to a high-level public relations expert who played a major role in orchestrating and manipulating public perceptions of major health crises, including HIV/AIDS. Among the PR man’s revealing observations is how psychiatric expertise is largely the result of propaganda technique. “Problem equals mental disorder equals diagnosis equals drugs,” Medavoy explains.

The PR job is to dress that up and give it scientific sounding context and you throw in all sorts of stuff about “the research”—and you have an industry. But in the larger frame, you have a priesthood of the mind. An official priesthood. Licensed. And you sell that, too, using other words. You REALLY sell that. “No one else knows anything about the mind. Only the psychiatrists have the knowledge.” You sell “needs professional help” and “is going in for treatment” and “new breakthroughs” and all that crap. You sell it six ways from Sunday.[9]

The intricacies of building a public creed around the twofold deity of pharmaceuticals and psychiatry involves several processes specific to advertising and public relations. For example, linguistic specialists fashion brand names to “tap different synapses in their customers’ brains: those linking the raw sounds of vowels and consonants known as phonemes to specific meanings and even emotions.”[10] In this way the name for the archetypal SSRI Prozac was designed to have a specific resonance in consumers’ minds. “Prozac: Pro is a rather pedestrian beginning, but the sounds p, z, and k all score high for the qualities active/daring.” The name of Prozac’s close relation Zoloft involves the same method of linguistic engineering. “Zoloft: Zo means life in Greek and loft elevates the concept.” Like Prozac, the SSRI Paxil includes the sounds z and k, along with “crackling, buzzing sounds [that] may subliminally suggest activity to back up the sequence ac, which suggests the word action.”[11]

Japan is the world’s third largest market for pharmaceuticals and provides an illustrative example of the pharmaceutical industry’s capacity to manipulate and seduce a society into the wide-scale use of specific psychoactive substances. Beginning in 1998 the country loosened its regulatory requirements for drug sales and advertising. By 2001 US-style direct-to-consumer drug advertising proliferated and US-based companies controlled close to 50% of Japan’s $364.2 billion of pharmaceutical sales. The increased popularity and availability of branded drug products within a non-Western cultural milieu set the stage for marketing strategies involving the brisk construction of public perception to overcome cultural barriers and generate demand.

In the 1980s when Japanese pharmaceutical corporation Meiji Seika was in the process of having a drug to treat “obsessive-compulsive disorder” approved by Japanese regulators, company officials realized that Japan had no standard diagnostic test for OSD. The company therefore proceeded to write its own definition, using US descriptors as a template. In the late 1990s Meiji Seika took this practice to an entirely new level when it obtained the go-ahead from regulators to market its own SSRI, Luvox.[12] After receiving approval the company faced an uphill battle of having the drug accepted in a country where, according to a survey conducted by the World Health Organization in the early 1990s, the most common prescription for a “mood disorder” was a mild tranquilizer.[13] In light of this, Meiji and several other interested corporate partners proceeded in “effecting nothing less than a sweeping cultural change,” as one observer explained.

One crucial step: altering the language people use to discuss depression. The Japanese word for clinical depression, utsu-byo, had unpleasant associations with severe psychiatric illness. So Meiji and its partners began using the phrase kokoro no kaze, which loosely translated means “the soul catching a cold.” The message was clear: If you take pills to alleviate a stuffy nose in the wintertime, why not do the same for depression? The marketing director for Meiji and its affiliates says he would regularly make use of the kokoro no kaze line when explaining to Japanese reporters why the taboo surrounding the disease should be lifted.[14]

America was far ahead of Japan in its recognition of pharmaceuticals to address mental illness. The notion that depression was a potential epidemic requiring “treatment” was placed in the public mind several years before the immensely popular SSRI Prozac was introduced in 1988. The idea nevertheless requires continual reinforcement. So too does the questionable concept of “screenings” to assess potentially injurious “moods” or behaviors, a practice currently underway at some US healthcare facilities using DSM V classifications.

The Architecture of Psychiatric and Police State Surveillance

“Science does not possess the technology to measure biochemical imbalances in the living brain” physician and author Peter R. Breggin observes. “The biochemical imbalances speculation is actually a drug company marketing campaign to sell drugs.”[15] In this way, mental health “screenings” lack the objective scientific gauging and assessment of physical indications to determine the existence of a disorder. Rather, the opinion is based on the subject’s response to a series of questions.

Over the past several years marketing methods have been implemented in earnest on American college campuses to condition a generation toward accepting the routine nature of mental health screenings. In the early 2000s Wyeth, maker of the antidepressant Effexor, sponsored “mental-health educational campaigns” on 10 college campuses. The 90-minute program, titled “Depression in College, Real World, Real Life, Real Issues,” took place in campus theaters and was hosted by MTV star and Effexor user Cara Kahn. The program’s associated depression “screenings,” now a commonplace feature of the public health regimen, were given upbeat sounding pitches, such as, “Stressed? Come find out how much,” and “Come test your mood.” Industry representatives observed how such solicitations meet with higher interest among potential participants than would a more prosaic-sounding, “depression screening.”[16]

If the allure of psychotropic nostrums is wearing thin, as some industry and market trends suggest creating a need, by whatever means, for psychopharma’s corresponding therapies and products is essential. The anticipated dearth in antidepressant sales alongside Western governments’ broad acceptance of psychiatry’s superficial articulation of aberrant human behavior and its remediation may go a long way in explaining recent widely publicized studies alleging a growing epidemic of mental illness and government programs decreeing obligatory mental health screenings of youth and attendant pharmaceutical treatment.

What exactly constitutes a mental disorder requiring treatment? Again, the DSM V’s forthcoming expanded assortment of peculiarities provides some indication of what future screenings may look for. An individual divulging her enjoyment of an occasional cigarette will be classified as suffering from “tobacco use disorder.” A social drinker may be designated with “alcohol use disorder.” Someone regularly imbibing too many cups of coffee or iced teas may undergo “caffeine intoxication,” or, worse, “caffeine-induced anxiety disorder.”  Spending too much time browsing the web, visiting online gambling sites, porn sites, or shopping too frequently may be respectively judged as “internet addiction,” “gambling disorder,” “hypersexual disorder,” and “compulsive shopping disorder,” and accordingly prescribed treatment regimens.[17]

Further, the expansion of psychiatry under federal auspices increases the potential for its Soviet-style abuse to silence political dissidents, as the recent case of former US Marine Brandon Raub illustrates.[18] Taking an insistent stance that weather modification exists or discussing World Trade Center Building 7’s inexplicable September 11 collapse may be grounds for a diagnosis of “paranoid delusional disorder.” Activist overtures calling attention to the precarious rationales of the “war on terror,” the Federal Reserve, or an overreaching police state could be easily classified as having unresolved “oppositional defiant disorder.”

With such a broad array of maladies which are themselves subject to the psychiatric practitioner’s interpretation, nearly everyone is susceptible to the psychopharmaceutical combine’s scrutiny, especially as it expands its purview to younger age groups. “The [ACA] is designed to help increase incentives to physicians and other health and mental health professionals to look after people across the entire continuum of care,” psychologist John M. Grohol points out, editor of the popular website PsychCentral. “Research suggests that this sort of integrated, coordinated care is ultimately beneficial to the patient. It can help catch health issues before they become more serious concerns.”[19]

The growing mental illness epidemic—or the psychiatric profession’s contention of such—has severe consequences not only in terms of personal anguish, but also for entire economic regions. Mental health experts assert that close to forty percent of Europeans are mentally ill, a problem estimated to cost the European economy alone several hundred billion euros annually. A 2011 study concludes 165 million EU residents are afflicted with some form of mental illness. “The immense treatment gap ... for mental disorders has to be closed,” the paper’s lead author asserts. “Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life ... Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill ... patients in the future.”[20]

In the US, where the ACA stresses “the importance of integrating and coordinating the delivery of physical and mental health services and provides incentives to providers to integrate care”[21] an individual who may even have private insurance and visits the hospital for a physical sickness or injury will be increasingly subject to surveillance and evaluation in accordance with standards established by the DSM.

The Centers for Disease Control’s 2011 Mental Illness Surveillance Report stresses that 25% of Americans are mentally ill and one in two will develop a mental illness sometime in their lifetimes. Thus a program of “public health surveillance” comprised of “public health officials, academicians, health-care providers, and advocacy groups” will constitute “multiple surveillance systems” to “reduc[e] the incidence, prevalence, severity, and economic impact of mental illnesses ... assess associations between mental illness and other chronic medical conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and alcohol and substance abuse); identify populations at high risk for mental illness and target interventions, treatment, and prevention measures; and provide outcome measures for evaluating mental illness interventions.”[22] The project uses the DSM to identify and diagnose such illnesses.

“The public health importance of increasing treatment rates for depression is reflected in Healthy People 2020,” the CDC notes elsewhere, a ten year plan of the Department of Health and Human Services “which includes national objectives to increase treatment for depression in adults and treatment for mental health problems in children.” To aid the program the US government has established a Preventative Services Task Force that now recommends “mental health screenings” for children ages 12 thru 18. Like the Mental Illness Surveillance program, the Task Force uses the DSM as a template for its diagnoses.[23]

Conclusion

Given that the US federal government and insurance industry now have a combined investment in mitigating risk attached to the DSM’s classificatory scheme over myriad personal behaviors, individuals and the broader society must collectively ask, “Where does such surveillance end?” At present the individual may still exert some degree of control over what medical information s/he wishes to disclose to the medical surveillance apparatus. However, the increasing deployment of biometric technology and the rapid move toward an electronic “cashless” base of financial transactions all but ensures the end of this modest sphere of privacy and the complete realization of a far-reaching panoptic grid by which to locate and identify private idiosyncracies and thereby produce candidates for “interventions” and treatment.

An imperative for calling out and resisting the psychopharmaceutical complex’s ever-expanding grip on society is to understand and recognize its intertwined history with advertising and public relations of largely constructing public perceptions and what now constitutes a widely accepted set of beliefs toward mental wellness and disease. The fact that this enterprise will now be more closely allied with a national healthcare armature and a central component of the government-controlled medical stratagem suggests the coming fulfillment of a full-fledged pharmacological technocracy where through continued mass persuasion and government edict phony medicine and drugs will fill the vacuum of misspent and unfulfilled existence.

Inhofe Seeks Hearings Addressing the EPA’s Monstrous “Illegal Human Experiments”

IntelHub
Andrew W. Griffin

Just days after Red Dirt Report featured a story out of St. Louis, Mo. addressing the shocking revelation that the U.S. Army was conducting secret experiments on citizens of that city without their knowledge in the 1950’s -by spraying toxic substances on them – we learn that potentially deadly human experimentation is taking place this very day – and sanctioned by the U.S. government, no less! While those Cold War-era tests – some believed to include radiological substances, primarily on lower-income, inner-city folks – took place more than 50 years ago in St. Louis, Corpus Christi, Texas and elsewhere, we learn that the Environmental Protection Agency is currently being sued in federal court for “conducting illegal life-and-health-threatening scientific experiments on human subjects,” according to a JunkScience.com report from September 24th.

And Oklahoma’s senior senator, Tulsa’s Jim Inhofe, is demanding further answers from the EPA, in the meantime. Hearings are likely in coming weeks.

Suing the EPA and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is The American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center.

This is in response to illegal human experiments involving the 2009 KINGCON study and the 2010 OMEGACON study and exposure to lethal levels of particulate matter. The court document and lawsuit, The American Tradition Institute Environmental Law Center v. United States Environmental Protection Agency and Lisa P. Jackson, Administrator can be read here.

In the court documents, it notes, for instance, that one plaintiff, asthma-sufferer Landon Huffman, participated in human experiments several years ago that he was led to believe would “help people with asthma.”

Huffman, the documents note, “was not informed that the pollution EPA was forcing into his lungs could actually cause him to have an asthma attack. Nor was he ever given anything from EPA that would possibly relieve his asthma.”

One “obese woman with hypertension and pre-experiment evidence of cardiac irritability” was placed in a gas chamber and exposed to small particles “at levels far above what the EPA had published as safe.” She was later hospitalized. Clearly these poor people were seen as expendable by this out-of-control government agency.

A medical ethicist named Dr. John Dale Dunn looked at the post-experiment results and was stunned by what he learned.

Said Dunn: “I am outraged and saddened to know that highly trained and expert physicians would be involved in scandalously unethical and immoral professional research, subjecting humans to toxic or lethal levels of small particles.”

Two other plaintiffs, Steven J. Milloy and Dr. David Schnare, had relatives in Nazi concentration camps. Milloy’s uncle, Zoran Galkanovic, who was incarcerated at the Mauthausen concentration camp, “was forced to … identify those individuals at the concentration camp too ill to work, knowing they would subsequently be executed.” Located in Austria, the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp was known for unspeakable horrors that included all sorts of gruesome and deadly medical experiments.

Camp physician Hermann Richter “surgically removed significant organs – e.g., stomach, liver, or kidneys – from living prisoners solely in order to determine how long a prisoner could survive without the organ in question.”

It is because of what happened to his family member that Milloy has “(a)ccepted as a family responsibility the fight against any government who subjects its citizens to inhumane treatment.”

Dr. Schnare, meanwhile, worked for the EPA for 33 years and was shocked to learn of the illegal human experimentation by the EPA. He told the American Tradition Institute, based in Burke, Va., that he is a plaintiff because he “abhors current governmental experimentation on humans for the purposes of determining the effect of poisons.”

One new study, called CAPTAIN, is currently ongoing at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, believe it or not. CAPTAIN, according to court documents, “imposes a risk of immediate death from an acute exposure” to dangerous particulates.

The plaintiffs are seeking an end to CAPTAIN and other sinister experiments taking place in the Tarheel State and elsewhere, via the federal courts.

Meanwhile, the EPA scientists, it was revealed, conducted some potentially lethal experiments in Durham, North Carolina. “order(ing) human subjects be placed into a gas chamber and exposed to a lethal gas.” In this case, diesel exhaust.

Three days ago, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), a ranking member on the Committee on Environment and Public Works, wrote a letter to that committee’s chairwoman, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), addressing this shocking lawsuit.

Writes Inhofe, in his letter dated September 28th: “As I understand from the complaint, the EPA exposed dozens of human subjects, many of whom were health-impaired (e.g. asthma, metabolic syndrome, elderly) to concentrated high levels of substances like fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and diesel exhaust, which EPA has previously and officially determined can kill people and cause cancer.”

Inhofe continues: “It also appears that the EPA researchers failed to inform the institutional review board and the study subjects of its official views concerning the lethality and toxicity of PM2.5 and diesel exhaust.”

Inhofe also tells Boxer that he would like the committee, which is responsible for EPA oversight, to “conduct hearings on this matter in the upcoming ‘lame-duck’ session.”

Inhofe also says that the EPA “may be held criminally liable for its conduct.” We hope to have more on this story in the coming weeks.

SAT reading scores hit a four-decade low

Washington Post
Lyndsey Layton
Emma Brown

Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam.

Many experts attribute the continued decline to record numbers of students taking the test, including about one-quarter from low-income backgrounds. There are many factors that can affect how well a student scores on the SAT, but few are as strongly correlated as family income.

Scores among every racial group except for those of Asian descent declined from 2006 levels. A majority of test takers — 57 percent — did not score high enough to indicate likely success in college, according to the College Board, the organization that administers the test.

In the Washington region, average statewide reading scores in Maryland, Virginia and the District all slipped slightly from 2011. But in Montgomery, Fairfax and Arlington counties, students outperformed their peers across their states and the country. And Montgomery County set a record for total average scores.

But the national trend lines are alarming and should serve as “a call to action,” College Board President Gaston Caperton said. “When less than half of kids who want to go to college are prepared to do so, that system is failing.”

The nearly four-hour SAT covers critical reading, writing and math. Each subject is worth a maximum of 800 points, for a potential total of 2400 points. For generations, SAT scores have been used, in conjunction with grade-point averages, by college admission officers to judge whether an applicant is likely to succeed at their school.

But questions about whether the SAT is biased in favor of middle-class and wealthy students have led many colleges and universities to use other gauges or to accept an alternative exam, the ACT, which edged out the SAT in 2012 for the first time as the nation’s most popular college entrance exam.

There is a significant correlation between family income and test scores on the SAT, with average scores increasing with every $20,000 in additional family income.

Educational experts are divided over the causes. Some assert that privileged students do better on the SAT because they are exposed to activities, from summer camp to private violin lessons, that give them an advantage in that particular test. Others point to the fact that affluent parents can provide private tutoring and privileged students can afford to take the test multiple times.

Still, many school districts — and parents — traditionally have seen SAT scores as an important measure of the quality of a K-12 education.

Across the country, 1.66 million seniors who graduated last June took the SAT, the highest number since the exam was first administered in 1926 to a few thousand overwhelmingly white and privileged students headed for Ivy League schools. In many places around the country, school administrators have been nudging more students to take the exam, saying that all students should consider college. In Prince George’s County, officials plan to offer the exam during the regular school day this year, making it more convenient for students.

Is the Internet Really Making Us Dumber?

Der Spiegel
Hilmur Schmundt

Many scholars and critics warn that TV and the Internet are dumbing us down. But, if that's true, why are children around the world performing better on IQ tests? Are we actually getting smarter, or are we merely thinking in different ways?


Vincent is sitting on the couch and watching a vacation video when he suddenly poses two questions to his parents: "Why is space endless? And what was there before the Big Bang?"

Without waiting for an answer, Vincent jumps up to turn his attention to a different topic: his new red rubber boots with pictures from the animated film series "Cars." "I want a puddle!" Vincent shrieks, dancing around the room in excitement. "Then I can jump in it and splash you!"

Vincent T. is 4 years old. Two years ago, he was having problems at his day care center, where he was throwing sand and hitting other children. Was he disturbed? Did he suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or perhaps even Asperger's syndrome? Concerned, his parents had two-and-a-half-year-old Vincent examined by a psychologist. The finding: Vincent had an IQ of 133.

That means Vincent is gifted. At just two years old, he taught himself the alphabet. Being bored in his toddler playgroup led him to break out in tears every morning. Since he started at a preschool with a reading corner, though, things have been fine. His parents have registered Vincent to start school next year, a year earlier than the usual starting age in Germany.

Children like Vincent -- little superbrains who devour stories of Winnie-the-Pooh and reports on the Mars rover Curiosity with equal enthusiasm -- are increasingly common. Just this April, the British branch of high-IQ society Mensa admitted 4-year-old Heidi Hankins to its ranks. By definition, the average IQ is 100; above 130 is considered gifted. Heidi's is 159.

And Heidi is not even Mensa's youngest member. In 2009, the society inducted little Elise Tan Roberts of London with an IQ of 156. Elise could spell her name, list 35 world capitals and discuss various types of triangles. At the time, she was 2 years old.

This obsession with numbers is not without its controversies. "IQ tests are not yet reliable at such a young age," says Tanja Baudson, a psychologist at the University of Trier, in southwestern Germany, who specializes in research on the intellectually gifted. Up until puberty, she says, those IQ levels may develop very differently for Vincent, Heidi and Elise.

A Mind-Boggling Trend

Still, the three children provide an example of a global trend widely acknowledged by specialists in this field: From one generation to the next, children are performing better on IQ tests. In Germany, scores increase by about 3 IQ points each decade. In fact, the tests have to be adjusted every few years to keep up. The test currently used for children is called the WISC-IV. A person claiming to have an IQ of 130 needs to specify which test generated that result: WISC-III? WISC-IV?

The astonishing upward trend in IQ levels is known as the "Flynn effect," named after American political scientist James Flynn, who is now in his late seventies and lives in New Zealand. The emeritus professor with a full white beard published a new book this month, "Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century," in which he seeks to elucidate this phenomenon.

In the book, Flynn offers a level-headed analysis of the limits and possibilities of intelligence tests. Germany falls in the middle of the Flynn effect phenomenon, with an annual increase of 0.35 IQ points, while countries such as Brazil and Turkey are catching up nearly twice as fast. China has long been playing in the top league, with an average IQ of 105.

Developing countries such as Kenya are also making gains. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is making less progress -- Flynn surmises this is because being subsidized by petrodollars provides little motivation for learning.

Such findings refute the claims of those who warn that humanity is getting dumber. We're "amusing ourselves to death," American media theorist and critic Neil Postman argued in a 1985 book of the same name. Postman blamed television for a decline in cognitive skills. Since then, however, the average IQ in the US has risen by nearly 10 points.

Aspartame: Safety Approved In 90 Nations, But Damages Brain

GreenMediaInfo
Sayer Ji

A new study on aspartame has the potential to reignite the decades-old controversy behind this artificial sweetener's safety, or lack thereof.  As far back as 1996, folks were writing about the potential link between aspartame and increasing brain tumor rates.[i] Indeed, its intrinsic neurotoxicity and carcinogenicity has been confirmed in the biomedical literature. And yet, aspartame has been approved for use in thousands of consumer products in over 90 countries, [ii] and is still being consumed by millions worldwide on a daily basis – despite the fact that over 40 adverse health effects of aspartame have been documented.

The new study, published in the September edition of the Journal of Bioscience and titled, "Effect of chronic exposure to aspartame on oxidative stress in the brain of albino rats," aimed to test the hypothesis that chronic consumption of aspartame may be causing neurological damage in exposed populations.
They found that chronic (90 day) administration of aspartame to rats, at ranges only 50% above what the FDA considers safe for human consumption, resulted in blood and brain tissue changes consistent with brain damage.

Aspartame is metabolized into three distinct components: aspartic acid, methanol and phenylalanine. While aspartic acid is a well-known excitotoxin, phenylalanine only presents a serious health concern to those with a genetic disorder known as phenyletonuria. Methanol, on the other hand, is far more problematic, as it is not naturally found in significant quantities in the human diet.

According to a recent review

Until 200 years ago, methanol was an extremely rare component of the human diet and is still rarely consumed in contemporary hunter and gatherer cultures. With the invention of canning in the 1800s, canned and bottled fruits and vegetables, whose methanol content greatly exceeds that of their fresh counterparts, became far more prevalent. The recent dietary introduction of aspartame, an artificial sweetener 11% methanol by weight, has also greatly increased methanol consumption.[iii]

Moreover, the aspartame metabolite methanol (also known as wood alcohol) is highly toxic and is metabolized into the known human carcinogen formaldehyde and formic acid,[iv] which is known to be highly toxic to the central nervous system. Considering the fact that the normal human body temperature is approximately 98.6 degrees Farenheit, and that aspartame will convert to its toxic metabolites at temperatures as low as 86 degrees Farenheit, the finding that aspartame is neurotoxic to animals is not a surprise. The authors of the new study surmised that the observed adverse brain changes were due to the generation of oxidative stress in brain regions.

Aspartame, of course, is a proprietary synthetic chemical not found in nature, and exists primarily because plants like stevia, which have significant, clinically-substantiated healing properties, can be grown in your back yard for free and are therefore not profitable commodities that can be produced and controlled only by a few.
But, aspartame is not the only toxic sweetener on the market. A growing body of research now shows that sucralose, known by the brand-name Splenda, is also capable of suppressing the immune system, causing inflammatory bowel conditions such as Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, migraine headaches, and DNA damage.[v]

The trick is to stick with naturally occurring compounds, whose sweetness is not associated with adverse health effects. Below is a list of natural alternatives, along with the number of potential health benefits associated with each, as indexed on our website.

Excellent Example of "Bait and Switch" Style Propaganda Giving CO2-Driven Climate Science a Free Pass

Editor's Note:  Maybe you could help me out here because this is what I’ve seen so far.

Another hot summer (in some areas, record colds in others), no money for infrastructure and the refusal to perform controlled burns gives us lots of tasty forest fires.

Massive solar flares this summer get no press.

CO2 levels are down this year.  Another study offers substantive finding related to the lack of a link between CO2 and global temps.

Last July, we’ve learned that Arctic ice has hit substantial cycles worse than this one from a supreme Russian sample source.

We get this theme from Obama making some vague statement about a “hoax”.  What precisely is he talking about?

Here's a typical article aimed at confusing the issue.

The goal seems two-fold:

Confuse people about the phenomenon of "Climate Change" by referring to dissent about actual warming trend.

Re-Enforce the connection between the warming trend and rising CO2 levels, whether it exists or not.

"According to a recent report, climate change skepticism is funded by a few big industries, primarily the Koch brothers."

They somehow think we are stupid enough to buy into such a paradigm.  The assumption is that we somehow lack the intellectual capacity to negotiate the attempts by industry funded nonprofits to bullshit us.

There does indeed seem to be a lack of intellectual capacity.

This gross misconception of CO2 driven warming has found its base in the premise that people can't negotiate scientific data or examine the information themselves and instead need to be told what to think about what they are looking at.

Never before has so many parties weighed in on CO2 driven climate change with absolutely no look at the IPCC reports, CERN/CLOUD studies, or both sets of climate-gate emails and the figures they are wrestling with.

Set up Google alerts for "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" to get an idea of the massive propaganda campaign being foisted with this bait and switch technique.

For example, you'll only see feeble-minded Koch shills like Mueller paraded out with such fanfare.  Forget the recent defectors that went the other direction: Lindzen, Lovelock and Vahrenholdt.  No spot for them on "Democracy Now!"

Now they are beginning the sales pitch for geo-engineering.

This will be pushed along with carbon derivatives/taxes in a rush to implement policy regardless of where the science truly leads us. Years from now, it will turn out that they have been spraying us with similar chemicals for years and the excuse presented is how our benevolent, heroic, eugenicist, overseers had the good insight to spray us despite ourselves.

"The debate is over!"  Remember?

We have a slap on the wrist to BP for destroying the Gulf of Mexico's food supply and radioactive water continually being added to the Pacific.

What's on the agenda at the DNC?  Exactly.

Brings a whole new dimension to the term "ineffectual".

The recurring theme in the following article can be discovered everywhere:

"Can't you feel the heat?  Don't soil your pretty head with with information that could lead to some rudimentary level of critical analysis.  Trust us.  It's man-made.  Trust our experts..."





The Elephant We’re All Inside Of

ABC News
Bill Blakemore

Junk Journalism on Climate, or Too Big to Cover?
———–
Nature’s Edge Notebook #35

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

A number of the world’s professional climate scientists are perplexed by — and in some cases furious with — American news directors.

“Malpractice!” is typical of the charges this reporter has heard highly respected climate experts level — privately, off the record — at my professional colleagues over the past few years.

Complaints include what seems to the scientists a willful omission of overwhelming evidence the new droughts and floods are worsened by man made global warming, and unquestioning repetition, gullible at best, of transparent anti-science propaganda credibly reported to be funded by fossil fuel interests and anti-regulation allies.

As scientific reports about the speedy advance and devastating impacts of man made global warming have grown steadily more alarming, surveys have shown most mainstream American news organizations covering it less and less over the past two years.

Even during this hot summer, when inescapable bad news about the warming climate from around the United States and the world has forced its way into main stream media coverage, it has usually been reported only in a reactive and literal event-coverage sort of way.

There’s been little of the persistent probing analysis and regular coverage scientists say is urgently needed for a grave planet-wide crisis — reporting of the kind surveys show there was much more of in mainstream coverage up until two years ago.

Why this decline in persistent coverage?

It seems unlikely to last; all responsibly sourced reports from around the world — “as solid as science ever gets,” say eminent climate scientists — suggest the increasing impacts will soon force news directors to offer more coverage and explanatory reporting to a public that will appreciate getting it.
It may be that many of our mainstream news directors are, in effect, in the final stages of getting their act together as they get ready to cover this unprecedented story.

Elements that have stalled American coverage appear to include a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Ross Gelbspan (as we’ve reported before on Nature’s Edge) paid for, so the reporting says, by multinational fossil fuel companies, often based in the United States, that are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent inevitable regulation on carbon emissions as long as possible.

‘A Crime Against Humanity’

A number of climate scientists have told this reporter they agree with those, including NASA scientist James Hansen, who charge fossil fuel CEOs are thus guilty of a “crime against humanity,” given the calamity that unregulated greenhouse emissions are quickly bringing on.

But there’s another aspect of the global warming story that is challenging and upsetting everyone — fossil fuel CEOs, environmental activists, presidents, high school teachers, their students, bus drivers, economists, cartoonists, chefs, Kansas wheat farmers and Chinese rice farmers, MIT philosophers, amateur chess players… and political strategists in every party.

That aspect is its scale.

At this point in reporting this story, this reporter feels it may be helpful to simply stop for a moment and focus briefly on this one, most obvious and unprecedented aspect of this story.
It may be psychologically helpful simply to name it — to recognize the full size and complexity of this problem.

One reason — though not an excuse — for journalistic hesitation on this story may well have been that, in its unprecedented immensity, it is simply so psychologically daunting.
This reporter would respectfully suggest that any reporter who hasn’t felt this hasn’t been paying attention.

And there is still hardly a day, after eight years covering it, that I don’t find myself being pulled once again back out of natural, even healthy, denial about it.

Psychologists Charles B. Strozier and Robert J. Lifton report finding what they call a sort of pragmatic “professional numbing” in several professions that deal with traumatic or frightening events or information.

The Elephant We’re All Inside Of… and a New 4th Category of News