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The Global Meltdown of FEAR: Eliminated by 60+ visual aids.
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In the 21st Century we have two primary threats thrown at us. In the blue corner we have man-caused Global Warming, and in the red corner we have Islamic Terrorism. What are the risks and absurdities of each, and what is really driving these agendas?
The intention here isn't to convince people they're right or wrong about being liberal or conservative, but to point out how remarkable it is that each side of the agenda setters & policy makers have taken such staunch stances on these opposing issues, and to show the realities of the perceived threats..
These proclaimed threats are complex issues. The point here is to put them into perspective. What can we compare these issues to? How much do we know? What don't we know? What makes sense? How far should we go? What should we jeopardize? What are the ascertainable risks?
These are the questions that need to be asked no matter the issue, especially if any given issue is to cost into the range of a trillion dollars per year, as regardless we all face total economic collapse. So hang up your preconceptions and political biases for a chance at a better understanding of many things. Let's try to slow down for a minute, and try to assess what the non-Left/Right biased realities are, while discovering the unifying benefactor in pursuing both objectives as we're being told to.
Ask yourself when haven't you seen 2 people dramatize an event between them, and didn't each have different stories as to what actually happened. Now consider, Democrats are supposed to be anti-war and pro-Global Warming mitigation. Republicans are opposite on both issues. This creates a small selection of scenarios: (1) One side is right about both, making the majority of the other side wrong about what they advocate (consider the odds of over 50 million people being totally wrong on both major issues). (2) Each side is right about what they promote, which makes them each wrong about what they argue against. (3) Each side is wrong about the intensity of what they advocate for, and are overall right about the lack of doomsday threat about what they argue against.
Odds are that either scenario 2 or 3 is the right answer. Then consider how hyped everything always is, and then crunch some odds numbers. Before we explore each issue, consider what is known in academia as the "Politics of Fear".
A Primer On Fear
In the archetectualization of policy responses to perceived threats, few thinkers actually seem to address their statistical realities, nor do advocates of such policies. Should we listen wholeheartedly the strongest advocates of policy responses to any majors threats? The fact is, humans are aren't very often 'logical machines' with emotions, instead humans are 'emotional machines' that think.
The fear reaction reflex is the most overpowering of all neural mechanisms. It's a hard wired survival system, and when it goes into effect our cognitive abilities to rationally respond are almost quite literally physically incapable of rational thought. This is particularly the case if we don't understand and acknowledge this inherent feature of quite literally all human brains. Without understanding this you're almost powerless to suppress it when faced with complex fears.
The following video is for anyone who doubts the fact that the media utilizes emotioneering in their reporting:
There have been countless scholarly papers studying the media-driven Politics of Fear, but you wont hear about these on the news like you would the latest scholarly paper on global warming. Consider the intro of this paper by Frank Furedi:
Fear plays a key role in twenty-first century consciousness. Increasingly, we seem to engage with various issues through a narrative of fear. You could see this trend emerging and taking hold in the last century, which was frequently described as an ‘Age of Anxiety’. But in recent decades, it has become more and better defined, as specific fears have been cultivated.
...
Fear is often examined in relation to specific issues; it is rarely considered as a sociological problem in its own right. As Elemer Hankiss argues, the role of fear is ‘much neglected in the social sciences’. He says that fear has received ‘serious attention in philosophy, theology and psychiatry, less in anthropology and social psychology, and least of all in sociology’. This under-theorization of fear can be seen in the ever-expanding literature on risk. Though sometimes used as a synonym for risk, fear is treated as an afterthought in today’s risk literature; the focus tends to remain on risk theory rather than on an interrogation of fear itself. Indeed, in sociological debate fear seems to have become the invisible companion to debates about risk.
Agenda's tend to be pushed based on how much fear potential they carry, while the metrics of actual risk are ignored. The problem with all of this is the majority of issues trumpeted as primary items have been decreasing for decades, and not just because we've been afraid or because of insane funding for various things. In general, iti s the issues that we're most helpless against that are pushed the hardest. Issues like crime, school shootings, airplane crashes, airplane hijackings, terrorism, nuclear armageddon, and a pissed off planet frying us with CO2 that we breath out of our faces are all over-reported based on the actual ascertainable risks.
As fear expert David Altheide explains in his paper "Notes Towards A Politics Of Fear":
The politics of fear relied on terrorism as a constant threat that can never be defeated; The term “terrorism” was used to encompass an idea as well as a tactic or method. Like the Mafia, it was everywhere and nowhere, all-powerful, but invisible. Crime helped shape the direction for terrorist victimization. The politics of fear joined crime with victimization through the “drug war,” interdiction and surveillance policies, and grand narratives that reflected numerous cultural myths about moral and social “disorder”. Numerous “crises” and fears involving crime, violence, and uncertainty were important for public definitions of the situation after 9/11. So perhaps it was natural that the terrorist attacks fed off this context of fear. The drug war and ongoing concerns with crime led to the expansion of fear with terrorism. News reports and advertisements joined drug use with terrorism and helped shift “drugs” from criminal activity to unpatriotic action. A $10 million ad campaign that included a Super Bowl commercial stated that buying and using drugs supports terrorism, or as President Bush put it, “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.”
On that note, here's an example of the media report mish-mashing terrorism and natural disasters:
And of course, global warming with the nuclear armageddon concept we all know all too well:
In another paper, titled "Fear in the News: A Discourse of Control", Altheide pointed out several trends in crime reporting. One example was media coverage of school shootings. Even though school homicides were down, reporting increased to portray it as epidemic, with very few articles mentioning actual school shooting statistics.
In another paper, "The Absence of Crime Data in Newspaper Reporting of School Violence", Mary H. Krouse repeated how urban schools crimes were under reported compared to more rural and suburban schools.
Three rural and three urban schools where shootings occurred were examined through the content analysis. ...the three rural school shootings received a disproportionate amount of attention compared to the three urban school shootings. The urban shootings received little attention from the six newspapers along with the number of pictures devoted to those shootings. For example, in the Courier Journal, photos pertaining to the rural school shootings totaled 101, while the total number of photos for the urban school shootings was two.
Massive fear trumpeting in the news is nothing new. For about 50 years there was always the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation to shock everyone, and motivate endless "defense" spending with. Sure, if the Soviets had nukes we needed them too, but it would really only take a couple hundreds nukes going off simultaneously to cause nuclear winter, meaning the tens of thousands built by each empire was absurd.
---CONTINUED---
Footlinks:
health.howstuffworks.com...
www.frankfuredi.com...
www.jc2m.co.uk...
www.public.asu.edu...
bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov...
forms.gradsch.psu.edu...
---CONTINUED---
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
---CONTINUED---
In many cases, after the Cold War ended "new" fears were all of the sudden front and center. Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler, organized crime and drug gang violence were taking over, Global Warming was all of the sudden the new end of the world, after not too long we had to worry about a nuclear attack by fringe terrorists, terrorists became associated with drug gang organized crime, drug gangs became titled "narco-terrorists", and global warming was going to increase global terrorism and cause nuclear war.
A good case point about fear-mongering during the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. People literally lost their minds by being faced with the Soviets having a missile base in Cuba. The thing about it was they were in effect evening the odds, as the U.S. already had multiple military bases around their borders. While it was of great tactical use for the Soviets, the reality was that was their only base in this hemisphere and hardly worthy of the total hysteria that ensued.
One government propaganda film, titled "The House in the Middle" (1954), produced by the "National Clean Up - Paint Up - Fix up Bureau", asserted that you'd literally be "doomed" if you didn't keep a fresh coat of paint on your house, neighborhoods kept clean, and even the interior of the home kept spotless. It features ridiculously presented bare dry-rotted wood shanty huts undergoing nuclear blasts, unobstructed, out in the middle of the desert, in the Nevada Testing Grounds, as "proof" justifying its gross fear-mongering.
Viewing that film today is almost hysterical in the comedy sense, but back then that was the hysteria driving issue of the day, and it's a sad story that people were socially engineered using such underhandedly manipulative means. Could it have been the government & media's long campaign of indoctrinating Americans with fear and paranoia that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis hysteria? Take a step back, and look at how much people freak out about foreign threats, despite the fact that history proves that we were more powerful than the Soviet Union, and will remain the most powerful for a long time to come.
More recently, the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was reported as being one of the biggest threats we've ever faced, many going as far as calling it an "extinction level event". From the very beginning, the majority pushed it as something that will devastate the entire Gulf for decades to come. Never mind that the dynamic Gulf alone contains about 642 trillion gallons of water, the real thing to look at is history. As it turns out, almost exactly the same type of event had occurred in 1979, in the Gulf of Mexico. In that forgotten event, the Ixtoc I, the well pipe was only half the size, but it went on twice as long (nine months). A year later, after storms, and a hurricane, the mess was almost totally history. An oil tanker had even crashed in the Gulf right in the middle of that event. Despite all of this, doomsday economic impacts on tourism and fishing never came close to the levels estimated.
Illustration is a parody, not how it looked originally.
With the new Gulf Gusher, very little attention was paid to the numerical realities of the overblown estimates. Even if the worst case scenario amount of 'stuff' ejecting from the well were the case, the sobering composition of the gushing matter was under reported. The fact is about 40% of the gushing was methane (which of course was then reported as being the end of the Gulf), which left about 60% as being actual crude.
The type of crude is critical to assessing long term damage. That crude was "light sweet crude", of which about 75% of the crude was solvents such as benzene, xylene, acetone and mineral spirits (gasoline, diesel and paint thinners). What this means is that 75% of 60% of the gusher would all evaporate into thin air. The same is true with the 40% that was methane. The methane would evaporate into thin air, or what methane didn't make it to the surface would dissolve and be eaten by bacteria, or recrystallize into the seafloor which is typical of methane molecules a mile under the surface. While the Gulf could do without that methane content, it's fully equipped to deal with it. Consider that we all fart methane everyday. In the long term the methane was more like a godsend.
Illustration showing a "natural oil seep".
Now this isn't to say that the immediate impacts, especially in the immediate region, weren't or aren't a major problem. But the issue was totally overblown, and in a way that ensured more psychological harm than necessary for those directly impacted by it. The fact that one fisherman committed suicide over the over-hyped ordeal is a deeply disturbing tragedy when you consider the sobering realities of the situation.
As far as the rest of the crude, about 20% of its composition was wax, and only 3% actual tar and asphalt (which is eaten by natural bacteria). By the time it was capped it was already being reported that 75% of the "oil" had "disappeared". Even critics of BP have to admit that they assisted most of the out of work fisherman financially, and in a years time most should be back to normal including being able to eat seafood without major concerns.
Back on point, terrorism hasn't killed anyone in the U.S. for years, yet every scale of incident of "terrorism" that happens across the globe is reported as if it's all happening in in your local metropolis. Ultimately, we're conditioned to feel like victims, and then we associate with reports framed around victimization. From viewing more victim framed reporting, it reinforces our sense of being victims, which solidifies our yearning for an ever more powerful government to step in and conduct warrant-less searches and to embed pervasive surveillance into all levels of the social stratosphere.
Then comes along 'Global Warming' and 'Islamic terrorism'. By their very semantics each is a threat to our very survival. When you believe your survival is at threat, what do you think your mind is going to do? The truth is, your mind literally shuts down and your brain takes over following its ingrained fight or flight survival mechanisms.
We humans like to believe we're in control of our own minds, but for the most part it isn't true. Without understanding how our human-inherent brain/mind works, we're almost powerless to overcome it with reason. Reason & logic are the opposite of emotions. Emotions are the brain at work, logic is our minds trying to overcome these survival based 'reflexes'. Our minds, that is our egos, literally rationalize our emotional behaviors, as a mechanism to maintain the illusion of control of our own brains. The less we know about all of this, the more we are all slaves to these circumstances.
Then comes along the latest trends in doomsday how-will-we-survive-it fear...
The War on Terror
Yes 9/11 happened, and yes it was very tragic. Between planes crashing, people jumping out of the burning buildings, and the towers crashing, it was very scary and very emotional stuff. Now in the wake of such an event, do we want leadership that uses it to scare us indefinitely, or leadership that projects reason. Shouldn't the bewildered and confused masses expect leadership that conveys logic about the event and what caused it, instead of 'catapulting the propaganda' by endlessly scaring the bejesus out of everyone? Sure, we want payback. Get the people who did it, right?
Now there's a lot of controversial explanations of the 'truth' about 9/11, but here the issues are what was the motivation for Islamic terrorists to want to do such a thing, and what would cause them to go to such an extent? The explanation has been (A) "they hate our freedoms", but is that all there is to it? Okay, so they're also pissed about (B) the way Israel treats the Palestinians. So they don't like our culture, and we support their local enemy. What else?
---CONTINUED---
Footlinks:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.oil-spill-info.com...
www.nationalparklover.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.gomr.mms.gov...
www.earthfiles.com...
www.mms.gov...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.newsweek.com...
www.telegraph.co.uk...
www.google.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
---CONTINUED---
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
In many cases, after the Cold War ended "new" fears were all of the sudden front and center. Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler, organized crime and drug gang violence were taking over, Global Warming was all of the sudden the new end of the world, after not too long we had to worry about a nuclear attack by fringe terrorists, terrorists became associated with drug gang organized crime, drug gangs became titled "narco-terrorists", and global warming was going to increase global terrorism and cause nuclear war.
A good case point about fear-mongering during the Cold War was the Cuban Missile Crisis. People literally lost their minds by being faced with the Soviets having a missile base in Cuba. The thing about it was they were in effect evening the odds, as the U.S. already had multiple military bases around their borders. While it was of great tactical use for the Soviets, the reality was that was their only base in this hemisphere and hardly worthy of the total hysteria that ensued.
One government propaganda film, titled "The House in the Middle" (1954), produced by the "National Clean Up - Paint Up - Fix up Bureau", asserted that you'd literally be "doomed" if you didn't keep a fresh coat of paint on your house, neighborhoods kept clean, and even the interior of the home kept spotless. It features ridiculously presented bare dry-rotted wood shanty huts undergoing nuclear blasts, unobstructed, out in the middle of the desert, in the Nevada Testing Grounds, as "proof" justifying its gross fear-mongering.
Viewing that film today is almost hysterical in the comedy sense, but back then that was the hysteria driving issue of the day, and it's a sad story that people were socially engineered using such underhandedly manipulative means. Could it have been the government & media's long campaign of indoctrinating Americans with fear and paranoia that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis hysteria? Take a step back, and look at how much people freak out about foreign threats, despite the fact that history proves that we were more powerful than the Soviet Union, and will remain the most powerful for a long time to come.
More recently, the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico was reported as being one of the biggest threats we've ever faced, many going as far as calling it an "extinction level event". From the very beginning, the majority pushed it as something that will devastate the entire Gulf for decades to come. Never mind that the dynamic Gulf alone contains about 642 trillion gallons of water, the real thing to look at is history. As it turns out, almost exactly the same type of event had occurred in 1979, in the Gulf of Mexico. In that forgotten event, the Ixtoc I, the well pipe was only half the size, but it went on twice as long (nine months). A year later, after storms, and a hurricane, the mess was almost totally history. An oil tanker had even crashed in the Gulf right in the middle of that event. Despite all of this, doomsday economic impacts on tourism and fishing never came close to the levels estimated.
Illustration is a parody, not how it looked originally.
With the new Gulf Gusher, very little attention was paid to the numerical realities of the overblown estimates. Even if the worst case scenario amount of 'stuff' ejecting from the well were the case, the sobering composition of the gushing matter was under reported. The fact is about 40% of the gushing was methane (which of course was then reported as being the end of the Gulf), which left about 60% as being actual crude.
The type of crude is critical to assessing long term damage. That crude was "light sweet crude", of which about 75% of the crude was solvents such as benzene, xylene, acetone and mineral spirits (gasoline, diesel and paint thinners). What this means is that 75% of 60% of the gusher would all evaporate into thin air. The same is true with the 40% that was methane. The methane would evaporate into thin air, or what methane didn't make it to the surface would dissolve and be eaten by bacteria, or recrystallize into the seafloor which is typical of methane molecules a mile under the surface. While the Gulf could do without that methane content, it's fully equipped to deal with it. Consider that we all fart methane everyday. In the long term the methane was more like a godsend.
Illustration showing a "natural oil seep".
Now this isn't to say that the immediate impacts, especially in the immediate region, weren't or aren't a major problem. But the issue was totally overblown, and in a way that ensured more psychological harm than necessary for those directly impacted by it. The fact that one fisherman committed suicide over the over-hyped ordeal is a deeply disturbing tragedy when you consider the sobering realities of the situation.
As far as the rest of the crude, about 20% of its composition was wax, and only 3% actual tar and asphalt (which is eaten by natural bacteria). By the time it was capped it was already being reported that 75% of the "oil" had "disappeared". Even critics of BP have to admit that they assisted most of the out of work fisherman financially, and in a years time most should be back to normal including being able to eat seafood without major concerns.
Back on point, terrorism hasn't killed anyone in the U.S. for years, yet every scale of incident of "terrorism" that happens across the globe is reported as if it's all happening in in your local metropolis. Ultimately, we're conditioned to feel like victims, and then we associate with reports framed around victimization. From viewing more victim framed reporting, it reinforces our sense of being victims, which solidifies our yearning for an ever more powerful government to step in and conduct warrant-less searches and to embed pervasive surveillance into all levels of the social stratosphere.
Then comes along 'Global Warming' and 'Islamic terrorism'. By their very semantics each is a threat to our very survival. When you believe your survival is at threat, what do you think your mind is going to do? The truth is, your mind literally shuts down and your brain takes over following its ingrained fight or flight survival mechanisms.
We humans like to believe we're in control of our own minds, but for the most part it isn't true. Without understanding how our human-inherent brain/mind works, we're almost powerless to overcome it with reason. Reason & logic are the opposite of emotions. Emotions are the brain at work, logic is our minds trying to overcome these survival based 'reflexes'. Our minds, that is our egos, literally rationalize our emotional behaviors, as a mechanism to maintain the illusion of control of our own brains. The less we know about all of this, the more we are all slaves to these circumstances.
Then comes along the latest trends in doomsday how-will-we-survive-it fear...
The War on Terror
Yes 9/11 happened, and yes it was very tragic. Between planes crashing, people jumping out of the burning buildings, and the towers crashing, it was very scary and very emotional stuff. Now in the wake of such an event, do we want leadership that uses it to scare us indefinitely, or leadership that projects reason. Shouldn't the bewildered and confused masses expect leadership that conveys logic about the event and what caused it, instead of 'catapulting the propaganda' by endlessly scaring the bejesus out of everyone? Sure, we want payback. Get the people who did it, right?
Now there's a lot of controversial explanations of the 'truth' about 9/11, but here the issues are what was the motivation for Islamic terrorists to want to do such a thing, and what would cause them to go to such an extent? The explanation has been (A) "they hate our freedoms", but is that all there is to it? Okay, so they're also pissed about (B) the way Israel treats the Palestinians. So they don't like our culture, and we support their local enemy. What else?
---CONTINUED---
Footlinks:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.oil-spill-info.com...
www.nationalparklover.com...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.gomr.mms.gov...
www.earthfiles.com...
www.mms.gov...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
www.newsweek.com...
www.telegraph.co.uk...
www.google.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
---CONTINUED---
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
---CONTINUED---
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the number one reason the group of predominantly Saudi hijackers was (C) because we have military bases in Saudi Arabia, which the Islamic World considers to be their Holy Land. The bases there help keep the Saudi royal family in power. What has the greatest odds of pissing them off to the extreme measure of suicide terrorism: A, B or C? Bin Laden's base was in Afghanistan, which happened to not be occupied by the U.S. at the time, yet not one of the hijackers were from there.
It's important to realize that how you might perceive the existence of U.S. military bases in those monarchies and dictatorships is irrelevant. It's how the people in those nations feel, and to the majority of them the U.S. is an occupying force. Since overall they're opposed to our culture, to them it's the equivalent of if the Soviet Union had military bases on U.S. soil during the Cold War. Therefore, the opinion of many U.S. citizens, that the U.S. bases somehow don't equate to military occupation, doesn't take away from their more personal perceptions of the U.S. being occupiers. In effect, we can't expect the anti-American hatred that fueled to the 9/11 hijackers to ever cease as long as we're an occupying force.
Consider the 4th of July, the day we celebrate our independence from the English monarchy. Monarchies are dictatorships, by definition. Yet we have the nerve to support numerous dictatorships across the Middle East, and act surprised when they hate us? Given our national heritage, every person that calls themselves an "American" should be 100% against the support of any and all absolute monarchies, or any other forms of dictatorship, period.
Yet the Saudi royals aren't even the only monarchies we keep in power in the Middle East. We have military bases in the majority of the nations there, especially after 9/11. In fact the ones where there weren't bases were the ones all added to the "Axis of Evil". What are the odds of that? If you don't let us put military bases in, to support your dictatorships, then you must be a terrorist! Now obviously a great deal of people have supported the overall idea of US foreign policy in the region for a long time, but take a step back for a moment and ask yourself how this doesn't sound like totally hypocritical and childish at the same time. How can we legitimately celebrate the 4th of July, that is independence from a foreign monarchy dictatorship, when we support foreign monarchies and other forms of dictatorships?
A sociology professor, from the University of California no less, named Robert Pape, conducted a qualitative study on the causes of suicide terrorism. His results found that the vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks don't even originate in the Middle East, or by Islamics. The overwhelming majority, quite literally every single case worldwide, of these attacks are caused by occupation. It's an act of desperate freedom fighting. Now of course things like religion and other cultural differences are fuel on the fire, and suicidal terrorists aren't rational, but to propose things like freedom to choose religion, or none, as the sole cause for people to spend enormous time training and preparing to then actually fly planes into buildings is beyond absurd.
The following video features Robert Pape, Michael Scheuer (former head of the Osama Bin Laden Unit), and Richard A. Clarke (former US Counterterrorism Czar) all agree that U.S. occupation in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 attacks and the widespread hatred of the U.S.:
For corroborative evidence, consider how terrorism has exploded across Iraq and the Middle East following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. If we were invaded, wouldn't you be creeping around trying to attack the occupiers (thus being labeled a "terrorist")?
So what are the risks? Here's some perspective... The annual odds of dying by various means:
The odds of death by terrorism doesn't seem to be mentioned on that chart, but this one shows the odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an airplane:
The odds of dying in an ordinary aircraft accident are 1 in 5,051, while you're 11,000 times more likely to die in an ordinary accident than you are a terrorist plot involving an airplane. If one commercial flight per week was hijacked and crashed in the U.S., a person who flies once a month would have 135,000 to 1 odds of being on one of those flights, while only one attack per month would reduce those odds to 540,000 to 1. Also consider that if one of the 40,000 shopping malls in the U.S. were attacked and completely leveled per week, a person shopping for 2 hours per week would have 1.5 million to 1 odds of dying.
It isn't to marginalize the individuals who were murdered during the 9/11 attacks to put the statistic into perspective. A total of 2,976 people died that day. Now that's a lot of people, all in one wave. In contrast, 2,417,798 died in the U.S. in 2001. In 2001, terrorism accounted for about 0.12% of deaths in the United States.
It's worth noting that 42,443 people died in automotive accidents in 2001. It's estimated that more Americans die from medical mistakes each month than died on 9/11. Over 2.5 times as many people died from aspirin alone in 2001. Comparing these numbers against year 2001 is important, because on any other year few few die from terrorism in the U.S.
The number of terrorist attacks in the U.S. each year is also of issue:
Note that those attacks include events such as arson at abortion clinics, where nobody necessarily died (note preceding chart).
About 900 more people die from drowning every year than from the totality of the 9/11 attacks. Should we spend over a trillion per year sending out a massive army of privacy invading life guards into neighborhoods across the planet to prevent people from drowning? Of course there was collateral damage in the form of destruction of several massive buildings on 9/11, but can you say those buildings were worth more than the additional 900 people who die in any given year in the U.S. via drowning? That chart also shows that roughly 6 times as many people die each year from drunk driving accidents.
That chart shows the number of deaths between 1995-2005. What's amazing is there are still roads that lack guardrails.
Following the War on Terror logic, should we be spending over 4 trillion dollars per year trying to stop drunk driving? Then we have 'falls in the home', guess we ought to be spending 1.8 trillion dollars installing elevators in every multi-story home.
---CONTINUED---
Footlinks:
www.danieldrezner.com...
www.americanthinker.com...
eyewashstation.blogspot.com...
online.wsj.com...
web.archive.org...://www.aei-brookings.org/policy/page.php?id=19
www.wrongdiagnosis.com...
www.greenchange.org...
wonko.com...
www.wired.com...
---CONTINUED---
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the number one reason the group of predominantly Saudi hijackers was (C) because we have military bases in Saudi Arabia, which the Islamic World considers to be their Holy Land. The bases there help keep the Saudi royal family in power. What has the greatest odds of pissing them off to the extreme measure of suicide terrorism: A, B or C? Bin Laden's base was in Afghanistan, which happened to not be occupied by the U.S. at the time, yet not one of the hijackers were from there.
It's important to realize that how you might perceive the existence of U.S. military bases in those monarchies and dictatorships is irrelevant. It's how the people in those nations feel, and to the majority of them the U.S. is an occupying force. Since overall they're opposed to our culture, to them it's the equivalent of if the Soviet Union had military bases on U.S. soil during the Cold War. Therefore, the opinion of many U.S. citizens, that the U.S. bases somehow don't equate to military occupation, doesn't take away from their more personal perceptions of the U.S. being occupiers. In effect, we can't expect the anti-American hatred that fueled to the 9/11 hijackers to ever cease as long as we're an occupying force.
Consider the 4th of July, the day we celebrate our independence from the English monarchy. Monarchies are dictatorships, by definition. Yet we have the nerve to support numerous dictatorships across the Middle East, and act surprised when they hate us? Given our national heritage, every person that calls themselves an "American" should be 100% against the support of any and all absolute monarchies, or any other forms of dictatorship, period.
Yet the Saudi royals aren't even the only monarchies we keep in power in the Middle East. We have military bases in the majority of the nations there, especially after 9/11. In fact the ones where there weren't bases were the ones all added to the "Axis of Evil". What are the odds of that? If you don't let us put military bases in, to support your dictatorships, then you must be a terrorist! Now obviously a great deal of people have supported the overall idea of US foreign policy in the region for a long time, but take a step back for a moment and ask yourself how this doesn't sound like totally hypocritical and childish at the same time. How can we legitimately celebrate the 4th of July, that is independence from a foreign monarchy dictatorship, when we support foreign monarchies and other forms of dictatorships?
A sociology professor, from the University of California no less, named Robert Pape, conducted a qualitative study on the causes of suicide terrorism. His results found that the vast majority of suicide terrorist attacks don't even originate in the Middle East, or by Islamics. The overwhelming majority, quite literally every single case worldwide, of these attacks are caused by occupation. It's an act of desperate freedom fighting. Now of course things like religion and other cultural differences are fuel on the fire, and suicidal terrorists aren't rational, but to propose things like freedom to choose religion, or none, as the sole cause for people to spend enormous time training and preparing to then actually fly planes into buildings is beyond absurd.
The following video features Robert Pape, Michael Scheuer (former head of the Osama Bin Laden Unit), and Richard A. Clarke (former US Counterterrorism Czar) all agree that U.S. occupation in the Middle East was the cause of the 9/11 attacks and the widespread hatred of the U.S.:
For corroborative evidence, consider how terrorism has exploded across Iraq and the Middle East following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. If we were invaded, wouldn't you be creeping around trying to attack the occupiers (thus being labeled a "terrorist")?
So what are the risks? Here's some perspective... The annual odds of dying by various means:
The odds of death by terrorism doesn't seem to be mentioned on that chart, but this one shows the odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an airplane:
The odds of dying in an ordinary aircraft accident are 1 in 5,051, while you're 11,000 times more likely to die in an ordinary accident than you are a terrorist plot involving an airplane. If one commercial flight per week was hijacked and crashed in the U.S., a person who flies once a month would have 135,000 to 1 odds of being on one of those flights, while only one attack per month would reduce those odds to 540,000 to 1. Also consider that if one of the 40,000 shopping malls in the U.S. were attacked and completely leveled per week, a person shopping for 2 hours per week would have 1.5 million to 1 odds of dying.
It isn't to marginalize the individuals who were murdered during the 9/11 attacks to put the statistic into perspective. A total of 2,976 people died that day. Now that's a lot of people, all in one wave. In contrast, 2,417,798 died in the U.S. in 2001. In 2001, terrorism accounted for about 0.12% of deaths in the United States.
It's worth noting that 42,443 people died in automotive accidents in 2001. It's estimated that more Americans die from medical mistakes each month than died on 9/11. Over 2.5 times as many people died from aspirin alone in 2001. Comparing these numbers against year 2001 is important, because on any other year few few die from terrorism in the U.S.
The number of terrorist attacks in the U.S. each year is also of issue:
Note that those attacks include events such as arson at abortion clinics, where nobody necessarily died (note preceding chart).
About 900 more people die from drowning every year than from the totality of the 9/11 attacks. Should we spend over a trillion per year sending out a massive army of privacy invading life guards into neighborhoods across the planet to prevent people from drowning? Of course there was collateral damage in the form of destruction of several massive buildings on 9/11, but can you say those buildings were worth more than the additional 900 people who die in any given year in the U.S. via drowning? That chart also shows that roughly 6 times as many people die each year from drunk driving accidents.
That chart shows the number of deaths between 1995-2005. What's amazing is there are still roads that lack guardrails.
Following the War on Terror logic, should we be spending over 4 trillion dollars per year trying to stop drunk driving? Then we have 'falls in the home', guess we ought to be spending 1.8 trillion dollars installing elevators in every multi-story home.
---CONTINUED---
Footlinks:
www.danieldrezner.com...
www.americanthinker.com...
eyewashstation.blogspot.com...
online.wsj.com...
web.archive.org...://www.aei-brookings.org/policy/page.php?id=19
www.wrongdiagnosis.com...
www.greenchange.org...
wonko.com...
www.wired.com...
---CONTINUED---
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
--CONTINUED--
Apply this methodology to annual deaths via cigarettes: should we spend into the ballpark of 93 trillion dollars per year keeping people from smoking? Consider that the 'rage' the past few years is to pass legislation forcing "Fire Safe Cigarettes", which is already in effect in 43 states. The way they make the cigarettes "fire safe" is by lacing them with ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), an oil derivative polymer. This make even high grade cigarettes taste like garbage, and they all go out constantly. Each time they're re-lit they taste worse and are harder on your lungs. Side-effects include itchy rash, allergic reactions, severe headache, vomiting, diarrhea, mouth sores, and nose bleeds. The big story is that there hasn't even been extensive human testing done to assess the harmful effects of smoking EVA polymer on a regular basis, but testing with rats has shown the triggering the cellular proliferation necessary for tumor development. If the motivation of the massive government & military budgets for the war on terror were all about saving lives, then why wouldn't this methodology apply here as well?
Deaths from prescription pain killers is on a steady rise. Where's the annual budget of over two trillion dollars to stop this? With fMRI machines doctors can see chronic pain regions, in the brain, which means they can verify if it even exists in a person claiming to have chronic pain. In one fMRI study, it was demonstrated that by seeing pain centers in the brain, in real time, patients were able to overcome and manage the pain with mere thought alone. Why aren't all physicians and nurses being trained for this type of therapy, and these machines being built into every scale of clinic across the globe?
What a trillion dollars looks like in $100 bills:
If we scale the War on Terror logic all the way up, trying to save lives should cost about 1,400,000,000,000,000, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars per year (1,400 times larger than the graphic above)!
By now many would say we aren't just 'threatened' by Islamic radicals, we have the rest of the "Axis of Evil" to worry about. That still doesn't explain the "defense" budget:
Apparently Iran is the greatest threat, even though they have no hope of ever mustering a budget to back up their bark:
Then there's the reality that the U.S. budget isn't even all it has going for it, as with it's allies it easily accounts for well over 70% of global military spending:
Consider that the U.S. has over 700 military bases in over 60 foreign nations (not counting Iraq & Afghanistan). Factoring the budgets of those host nations means a daunting global military infrastructure, which these days is supposedly about stopping the completely marginalized "Islamofacsists" (or so it shifted from just being the criminals who attacked us on 9/11), and the "Axis of Evil" (half of which is already occupied via brute force invasion).
Now if that isn't enough to convince you that this is all overkill, consider things from Iran's perspective:
Now if Iran had the power and resources the U.S. has, and declared the U.S. to be part of a 4 nation "Axis of Evil", and then proceeded to invade the first 2 on the list, Canada & Mexico, surrounding the U.S. with it as next in line, how do you think we'd all be responding? If we didn't have nukes, wouldn't we be clamoring desperately to get them?
Even if they did get some, Israel alone already has hundreds of nuclear weapons. People assert that Iran is willing to commit suicide by launching on Israel, but as we've already seen with suicide terrorism, people aren't just going to go to such extreme lengths without being in total desperation. Even if they thought they could nuke Israel and face no retaliation, they'd kill all of the Palestinians with them, as well as covering countless other Muslims in radioactive fallout. Just thinking you're messiah is coming still doesn't make sense in destroying the Middle East with nuclear armageddon, as they're well aware of the counter-attack they all face.
The thing about 9/11 was that same day Bush said the terrorists attacked our freedoms, which was then parroted by media pundits and politicians for years. Yet the federal government has been the one attacking our freedoms increasingly and persistently, doing things to us that won't stop Islamic terrorism, while doing things that is creating more terrorists globally, while not even doing things like securing our borders where terrorists could infiltrate our nation with supposed suitcase nukes. The U.S. citizenry are the ones being targeted across the board as terrorists, as enemies of the state. Guilty until proven innocent, and then still suspect needing to be monitored and tracked.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bill of Rights is history, Bin Laden hasn't been killed or captured (that we're told of), we're bogged down in 2 wars, we're on the verge of total economic collapse and there are more terrorists in response to the "Shock & Awe" response. On top of it all, it's all being used to justify the 'need' to build strong AI (AGI), like you see in scifi horror movies, via the AGI Manhattan Project, which we'll get back to shortly.
Should terrorism be down near global warming, or should global warming be up where terrorism is?
Global Warming:
Once global Warring was in full swing here comes Global Warming into the big time. Aside from some pathological corporate executives, we all care about the environment, right? So let's have a look at this issue, which is also being used to usher in AGI.
Okay, now CO2 has definitely gone up, and odds are humans have surely contributed to it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That's "A greenhouse gas", not "THE greenhouse gas". Now does this mean that humans have CAUSED all of the perceived warming? Surely we have contributed to it, but to say without exception we have caused all of it is irrational. How much have we contributed to it? Nobody knows. Nobody can even say for sure how much a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperatures, or what the historical temperature record even equates to. Another important fact is that all of the warnings and projections you've ever seen have been made by computers. The problem with that is no human anywhere is smart enough to be able to properly program a computer to do this, and no array of supercomputers anywhere is powerful enough to even handle the job. The scientists all know this, and even NASA admits doubt in the computer models.
Humans certainly are contributing CO2 to the natural cycles, CO2 has been on the rise, and it is a greenhouse gas. Naturally, we should strive to not increase such any more than we can avoid...
The point with all of this isn't to try and convince that the threat of global warming isn't real. I don't know for sure that it is or isn't, and neither does anybody else. If they try and tell you they know for sure in one direction or another then their motives and rationale should be in question. It could be the worst case scenario, irrelevant, or we could go into a mini ice age for all anybody knows. Now you might be able to build a case that leans more to one direction, but to speak anything with absolute certainty is still akin to declaring you know for a fact whether or not a "god" is real. You're certainly free to believe that any given "god" is or isn't real, but that is still faith in your belief. We probably shouldn't care what people believe in this regard, unless they said we need a trillion dollars per year to fund something based on their given faith.
--CONTINUED--
Footlinks:
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.vinylacetate.org...
www.wallstats.com...
www.nytimes.com...
www.zee.me...
www.acq.osd.mil...
www.vspa.com...
www.wired.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
agimanhattanproject.com...
www.sciencedaily.com...
wattsupwiththat.com...
--CONTINUED--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Apply this methodology to annual deaths via cigarettes: should we spend into the ballpark of 93 trillion dollars per year keeping people from smoking? Consider that the 'rage' the past few years is to pass legislation forcing "Fire Safe Cigarettes", which is already in effect in 43 states. The way they make the cigarettes "fire safe" is by lacing them with ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), an oil derivative polymer. This make even high grade cigarettes taste like garbage, and they all go out constantly. Each time they're re-lit they taste worse and are harder on your lungs. Side-effects include itchy rash, allergic reactions, severe headache, vomiting, diarrhea, mouth sores, and nose bleeds. The big story is that there hasn't even been extensive human testing done to assess the harmful effects of smoking EVA polymer on a regular basis, but testing with rats has shown the triggering the cellular proliferation necessary for tumor development. If the motivation of the massive government & military budgets for the war on terror were all about saving lives, then why wouldn't this methodology apply here as well?
Deaths from prescription pain killers is on a steady rise. Where's the annual budget of over two trillion dollars to stop this? With fMRI machines doctors can see chronic pain regions, in the brain, which means they can verify if it even exists in a person claiming to have chronic pain. In one fMRI study, it was demonstrated that by seeing pain centers in the brain, in real time, patients were able to overcome and manage the pain with mere thought alone. Why aren't all physicians and nurses being trained for this type of therapy, and these machines being built into every scale of clinic across the globe?
What a trillion dollars looks like in $100 bills:
If we scale the War on Terror logic all the way up, trying to save lives should cost about 1,400,000,000,000,000, or 1.4 quadrillion dollars per year (1,400 times larger than the graphic above)!
By now many would say we aren't just 'threatened' by Islamic radicals, we have the rest of the "Axis of Evil" to worry about. That still doesn't explain the "defense" budget:
Apparently Iran is the greatest threat, even though they have no hope of ever mustering a budget to back up their bark:
Then there's the reality that the U.S. budget isn't even all it has going for it, as with it's allies it easily accounts for well over 70% of global military spending:
Consider that the U.S. has over 700 military bases in over 60 foreign nations (not counting Iraq & Afghanistan). Factoring the budgets of those host nations means a daunting global military infrastructure, which these days is supposedly about stopping the completely marginalized "Islamofacsists" (or so it shifted from just being the criminals who attacked us on 9/11), and the "Axis of Evil" (half of which is already occupied via brute force invasion).
Now if that isn't enough to convince you that this is all overkill, consider things from Iran's perspective:
Now if Iran had the power and resources the U.S. has, and declared the U.S. to be part of a 4 nation "Axis of Evil", and then proceeded to invade the first 2 on the list, Canada & Mexico, surrounding the U.S. with it as next in line, how do you think we'd all be responding? If we didn't have nukes, wouldn't we be clamoring desperately to get them?
Even if they did get some, Israel alone already has hundreds of nuclear weapons. People assert that Iran is willing to commit suicide by launching on Israel, but as we've already seen with suicide terrorism, people aren't just going to go to such extreme lengths without being in total desperation. Even if they thought they could nuke Israel and face no retaliation, they'd kill all of the Palestinians with them, as well as covering countless other Muslims in radioactive fallout. Just thinking you're messiah is coming still doesn't make sense in destroying the Middle East with nuclear armageddon, as they're well aware of the counter-attack they all face.
The thing about 9/11 was that same day Bush said the terrorists attacked our freedoms, which was then parroted by media pundits and politicians for years. Yet the federal government has been the one attacking our freedoms increasingly and persistently, doing things to us that won't stop Islamic terrorism, while doing things that is creating more terrorists globally, while not even doing things like securing our borders where terrorists could infiltrate our nation with supposed suitcase nukes. The U.S. citizenry are the ones being targeted across the board as terrorists, as enemies of the state. Guilty until proven innocent, and then still suspect needing to be monitored and tracked.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bill of Rights is history, Bin Laden hasn't been killed or captured (that we're told of), we're bogged down in 2 wars, we're on the verge of total economic collapse and there are more terrorists in response to the "Shock & Awe" response. On top of it all, it's all being used to justify the 'need' to build strong AI (AGI), like you see in scifi horror movies, via the AGI Manhattan Project, which we'll get back to shortly.
Should terrorism be down near global warming, or should global warming be up where terrorism is?
Global Warming:
Once global Warring was in full swing here comes Global Warming into the big time. Aside from some pathological corporate executives, we all care about the environment, right? So let's have a look at this issue, which is also being used to usher in AGI.
Okay, now CO2 has definitely gone up, and odds are humans have surely contributed to it. CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That's "A greenhouse gas", not "THE greenhouse gas". Now does this mean that humans have CAUSED all of the perceived warming? Surely we have contributed to it, but to say without exception we have caused all of it is irrational. How much have we contributed to it? Nobody knows. Nobody can even say for sure how much a doubling of CO2 would increase global temperatures, or what the historical temperature record even equates to. Another important fact is that all of the warnings and projections you've ever seen have been made by computers. The problem with that is no human anywhere is smart enough to be able to properly program a computer to do this, and no array of supercomputers anywhere is powerful enough to even handle the job. The scientists all know this, and even NASA admits doubt in the computer models.
Humans certainly are contributing CO2 to the natural cycles, CO2 has been on the rise, and it is a greenhouse gas. Naturally, we should strive to not increase such any more than we can avoid...
The point with all of this isn't to try and convince that the threat of global warming isn't real. I don't know for sure that it is or isn't, and neither does anybody else. If they try and tell you they know for sure in one direction or another then their motives and rationale should be in question. It could be the worst case scenario, irrelevant, or we could go into a mini ice age for all anybody knows. Now you might be able to build a case that leans more to one direction, but to speak anything with absolute certainty is still akin to declaring you know for a fact whether or not a "god" is real. You're certainly free to believe that any given "god" is or isn't real, but that is still faith in your belief. We probably shouldn't care what people believe in this regard, unless they said we need a trillion dollars per year to fund something based on their given faith.
--CONTINUED--
Footlinks:
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.vinylacetate.org...
www.wallstats.com...
www.nytimes.com...
www.zee.me...
www.acq.osd.mil...
www.vspa.com...
www.wired.com...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
agimanhattanproject.com...
www.sciencedaily.com...
wattsupwiththat.com...
--CONTINUED--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
What do we know about historical temperatures? Not as much as you might think. We have historical records going back a hundred years or so, modern
satellites we've had for about 30 years, and the scientific "proxy" record that is mainly from various types of core samples. Core samples can
often be accurate for their regions. The problem is when climate scientists try and match them to modern temperature records, from the mid-1900's on,
they end up with a "decline". That's what the better part of the whole Climategate fiasco was about. The infamous quotes about them trying to
"hide the decline" was the climate scientists trying to make their proxies actually match what we have a pretty good idea of what temperatures
actually have been in more modern times. So to make proxies "match" modern records they have to "artificially adjust" the data. The results often
look like this:
Here's another example of "corrected" data, this time by NASA:
The following animation shows the vastness of lack of land temperature stations across the globe:
Only being able to look back 30 years with satellites, even if they didn't have flaws doesn't actually get us very far, but we do have the historical surface records? The problem surface data is spotty record keeping, total lack of records for vast periods of time and over vast regions, and the Urban Heat Island Effect to keep in mind.
UHIE is the reality that urban modernization skews surface temperatures, and it turns out that most US based surface stations are located in urban or at least semi-urban locations. SurfaceStations.org is an open database project to visit and photo each of the over 1200 station sites in the US. So far they’ve visited over 80% of US sites, and the results are ‘alarming’:
The results thus far show that only about 10% of U.S. based surface stations are what we’d consider scientific. Wait, the unscientific ones are only projected to be off by a degree or 2. The problem is, about one degree Celsius is the only rise in temperatures we've even seen in the 100 years, and that's according to the IPCC.
Here is an example of a scientific station, and its 100 year data graph:
[img]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c49/IgnoranceIsntbliss/global%20warming/urbanheatisland/OrlandCA_USHCN_Site_small.jpg[img]
A study released in 2010 compares rural & urban station data, between raw & "corrected" data, and the results are striking. First is the raw data, and second is the "corrected" data:
What that clearly shows is that "corrections", made by the U.S. National Climate Data Center, adjust rural stations up, instead of urban stations down.
At least we have satellites, right? Well we have for about 30 years now, but even these have some flaws. Compare the two maps:
wattsupwiththat.com...
Wait, everybody knows that the tropics don't warm nearly as much as the arctic regions. Here we can see one of the longest surface temperature records from the Arctic region, Jan Mayen Island 350 miles northeast of Iceland on the fringes of the Arctic Ocean:
According to these numerous remote surface stations, no major long term warming in Denmark worth discussing:
In fact that graph shows actual cooling after 1940 and even more after 1960, much like the “hide the decline” Climategate computer code that is in reference to the proxy data. Following IPCC's 20th Century graph,with future projections, it doesn’t show the post-1940 decline as seen above (described by Tom Wigley as a “blip” here):
But does any of this prove that we don't have to worry about "global warming"? Maybe not. The one thing it does prove is uncertainty in what we do know. The fact is we humans know more about the moon than we know about the oceans, and understanding oceans is critical to understanding and therefore predicting climate. Is all of that worth running down the street like our hair is on fire and Godzilla is behind us? The earth could very well have warmed like they say it has, but the truth is even they aren't certain what the actual temperature record is.
The classical city of Venice proves humans can handle some rising water levels just fine. People romanticize over Venice, some even go as far as calling it "the most beautiful city built by man", while it's time we all realize that poverty is the greatest threat to the environment.
Like with the global War on Terror, we need to be rational about how we approach these complex challenges. The one thing that cannot be debated is the looming, near term, economic mega-crisis that promises to harm more people than terrorists or a rise in global temperatures could ever dream of in their worst nightmare scenarios.
Drought? One thing that can be said of technology is that in 20+ years humans should have no problem mastering energy, which means more water desalination for all. We adapt, and many people would actually prosper if 'global warming' were to happen. Consider the vast often desolate spans of land in Russia and Canada. Yet today, literally billions are currently facing economic despair in the short term.
Islamic terrorism, in its most dire projection, could harm several tens of thousands, via a theoretical suitcase nuke, which Bush, one of the biggest proponents of that claimed threat, didn't even take hardly a single step to prevent via controlling the borders. A terrorist could easily slip through amongst the literally hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that do each year. At this point we might ask ourselves, in the face of the suitcase armed Al Qaeda terrorists, why didn't it happen already years ago?
Then we have Obama, who doesn't only wish to give safe haven to almost literally every illegal immigrant within the border, he actively works to keep the borders unprotected. What makes things crazy here is he even carries on about the threats we face in this world, giving credence to the threats faced by the global "War on Terror". Then we have Global Warming, a perceived far off decades away threat, to millions, if we don't act now. The problem with both of these scenarios is each promises to cost into the range of trillions every year, now, risking the liberty and prosperity of literally billions of people in the immediate near term.
The underlying problem with both major issues is ultimately fossil fuels, especially oil. Who couldn't even deep down admit that oil is the major driving force for U.S. presence in the Middle East, or that getting off fossil fuels would be a good thing? Meanwhile, we face a potentially larger problem: nuclear waste.
--CONTINUED--
Footlinks:
www.nytimes.com...
www.smalldeadanimals.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
wattsupwiththat.com...
www.surfacestations.org...
wattsupwiththat.com...
www.ncdc.noaa.gov...
www.john-daly.com...
www.eastangliaemails.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.nytimes.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
--CONTINUED--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Here's another example of "corrected" data, this time by NASA:
The following animation shows the vastness of lack of land temperature stations across the globe:
Only being able to look back 30 years with satellites, even if they didn't have flaws doesn't actually get us very far, but we do have the historical surface records? The problem surface data is spotty record keeping, total lack of records for vast periods of time and over vast regions, and the Urban Heat Island Effect to keep in mind.
UHIE is the reality that urban modernization skews surface temperatures, and it turns out that most US based surface stations are located in urban or at least semi-urban locations. SurfaceStations.org is an open database project to visit and photo each of the over 1200 station sites in the US. So far they’ve visited over 80% of US sites, and the results are ‘alarming’:
The results thus far show that only about 10% of U.S. based surface stations are what we’d consider scientific. Wait, the unscientific ones are only projected to be off by a degree or 2. The problem is, about one degree Celsius is the only rise in temperatures we've even seen in the 100 years, and that's according to the IPCC.
Here is an example of a scientific station, and its 100 year data graph:
[img]http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c49/IgnoranceIsntbliss/global%20warming/urbanheatisland/OrlandCA_USHCN_Site_small.jpg[img]
A study released in 2010 compares rural & urban station data, between raw & "corrected" data, and the results are striking. First is the raw data, and second is the "corrected" data:
What that clearly shows is that "corrections", made by the U.S. National Climate Data Center, adjust rural stations up, instead of urban stations down.
At least we have satellites, right? Well we have for about 30 years now, but even these have some flaws. Compare the two maps:
wattsupwiththat.com...
Wait, everybody knows that the tropics don't warm nearly as much as the arctic regions. Here we can see one of the longest surface temperature records from the Arctic region, Jan Mayen Island 350 miles northeast of Iceland on the fringes of the Arctic Ocean:
According to these numerous remote surface stations, no major long term warming in Denmark worth discussing:
In fact that graph shows actual cooling after 1940 and even more after 1960, much like the “hide the decline” Climategate computer code that is in reference to the proxy data. Following IPCC's 20th Century graph,with future projections, it doesn’t show the post-1940 decline as seen above (described by Tom Wigley as a “blip” here):
But does any of this prove that we don't have to worry about "global warming"? Maybe not. The one thing it does prove is uncertainty in what we do know. The fact is we humans know more about the moon than we know about the oceans, and understanding oceans is critical to understanding and therefore predicting climate. Is all of that worth running down the street like our hair is on fire and Godzilla is behind us? The earth could very well have warmed like they say it has, but the truth is even they aren't certain what the actual temperature record is.
The classical city of Venice proves humans can handle some rising water levels just fine. People romanticize over Venice, some even go as far as calling it "the most beautiful city built by man", while it's time we all realize that poverty is the greatest threat to the environment.
Like with the global War on Terror, we need to be rational about how we approach these complex challenges. The one thing that cannot be debated is the looming, near term, economic mega-crisis that promises to harm more people than terrorists or a rise in global temperatures could ever dream of in their worst nightmare scenarios.
Drought? One thing that can be said of technology is that in 20+ years humans should have no problem mastering energy, which means more water desalination for all. We adapt, and many people would actually prosper if 'global warming' were to happen. Consider the vast often desolate spans of land in Russia and Canada. Yet today, literally billions are currently facing economic despair in the short term.
Islamic terrorism, in its most dire projection, could harm several tens of thousands, via a theoretical suitcase nuke, which Bush, one of the biggest proponents of that claimed threat, didn't even take hardly a single step to prevent via controlling the borders. A terrorist could easily slip through amongst the literally hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that do each year. At this point we might ask ourselves, in the face of the suitcase armed Al Qaeda terrorists, why didn't it happen already years ago?
Then we have Obama, who doesn't only wish to give safe haven to almost literally every illegal immigrant within the border, he actively works to keep the borders unprotected. What makes things crazy here is he even carries on about the threats we face in this world, giving credence to the threats faced by the global "War on Terror". Then we have Global Warming, a perceived far off decades away threat, to millions, if we don't act now. The problem with both of these scenarios is each promises to cost into the range of trillions every year, now, risking the liberty and prosperity of literally billions of people in the immediate near term.
The underlying problem with both major issues is ultimately fossil fuels, especially oil. Who couldn't even deep down admit that oil is the major driving force for U.S. presence in the Middle East, or that getting off fossil fuels would be a good thing? Meanwhile, we face a potentially larger problem: nuclear waste.
--CONTINUED--
Footlinks:
www.nytimes.com...
www.smalldeadanimals.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
wattsupwiththat.com...
www.surfacestations.org...
wattsupwiththat.com...
www.ncdc.noaa.gov...
www.john-daly.com...
www.eastangliaemails.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.nytimes.com...
en.wikipedia.org...
--CONTINUED--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
--CONTINUED--
We truly need to make a massive impact on GHG emissions, end the burning of coal and create a hydrogen economy to virtually eliminate the use of petroleum as a fuel (and war). At the same time, we have nuclear waste to deal with. There do exist various forms of renewable energy, but currently prices aren't entirely financially practical for the average person to hope to become energy self-sufficient via these means. Eventually it will become affordable for most people out there, assuming economic collapse doesn't come first, via wasted money on the War on Terror and Global Warming. Even if people could afford more renewable energy platforms it still doesn't solve all of the energy problems of civilization and the world, so unless something radical changes with the way we garner energy we're going to have no hope of drastic GHG emissions (short of global poverty).
The Einstein's of today have numerous designs for Generation IV nuclear power plants. Over 95% of the potential fuel in uranium ore is wasted using today's less safe GenII and GenIII reactors. GenIV plants promise vastly more safety, and potentially less than 10% of the physical footprint of today's reactors. These reactors, coupled with next-gen pyrometallurgical processing, promise to utilize the vast 'reserves' of what we currently refer to as 'spent' nuclear 'waste'. Just going by the stores of current waste, humanity could be powered for over a century, without having to mine more radioactive ores.
The problem is environmentalists oppose anything to do with nuclear energy, and newer generation plants have been prevented since the 1970's. In the U.S. we're using plants built in the Three Mile Island era, and large funding of nuclear development has been thwarted. In the meantime, obscene amounts of nuclear waste has built up and has been ejected into the atmosphere via burning coal.
If people really want to see peace in the world, then this is the ticket. Not only does this process allow existing nuclear weapons to be converted into electricity, it makes the necessity of refinement for energy production mute. No more weapons as a by-product of energy production, and it enables a hydrogen economy meaning less petroleum usage. It doesn't solve the challenge of all of the things we make from oil derivatives (plastics, paints, etc), but such endless cheap energy would fuel enormous growth that could allow everyone to be able to afford more economically friendly replacements that are almost always far more expensive than oil derivatives. On top of it all, nations can all work together to fund and develop these technologies that promise to end wars instead of fuel an arms race as in the past.
What Gives?
Clearly each issue is over-exaggerated, but even if they aren't we have the solutions on the horizon, yet rational responses are non-existent while we're on the brink of economic collapse and unnecessary world war. The thing is the policy makers all know these facts, odds and solutions.
The push for near-trillion dollar military budgets to fight "terrorists", as if they're beyond the scope of the Soviet Union, doesn't make much sense. Neither does the extreme global warming related proposals, such as a global government and a global carbon tax which would cost trillions and therefore promises to bankrupt what's left of the worlds economy
(click to open player in new window)
Proposals like Kyoto are well known to do little to actually solve the perceived problem. All this push, while the premise of each issue is highly debatable and their risks over-stated. That's the truth that the advocates pushing for either issue don't want to admit.
Some explanation for this wreckless nonsense is control. As scholar Robert Higgs points out, in his paper titled "Fear: The Foundation of Every Governments Power":
What you might ask yourself is why is it that each of these '2 parties' are so perfectly tuned against the other on almost every issue imaginable. The bigger question is how does a population of 300 million people end up being molded and shaped by 2 different viewpoints? How can that be rational? Again, how can one side of every issue be totally correct? Use your reason: what are the odds?
Now consider all the the issues we're all divided over. Abortion, health care, crime, drugs, immigration, guns, liberty, death penalty, terrorism, climate change, and so on. Add the others to that list. Now which ones aren't emotional issues? Almost literally every issue that each of the two dominant political party's push, and fights against, are logic destroying emotional issues.
With these two parties, and their subsets of issues, that are supposed to represent 300 million people, ask yourself which ones they agree upon. How long is that list? Such a list is almost non-existent. How can these two parties be almost perfectly opposed to each other on virtually every issue that is important to people? What are the odds of such an occurrence to be natural?
Have you ever read Sun Tsu's ancient manuscript "The Art of War"? It contains edifices of tactics of warfare that are still used by the Pentagon to this day. In particular, the concepts of divide and conquer and winning wars without direct military conflicts as the paths of true victory as the supreme methods of warfare. Isn't it amazing that political polling and voter turnouts over the past decade have demonstrated a near 50/50 division of political ideology? What are the odds of that?
So we're in the middle of a collapse that by all measures looks deliberate, that was caused by the Federal Reserve and its 'private' stock-holder banks, who sucked in unfathomable amounts of cash on the ways up and down, and were handed trillions of unaccountable dollars in "bailout" money in the aftermath. Despite all of this, there's still this push for a near-trillion dollar military budget (in the US alone), along with a global government based on a $1+ trillion per year global carbon tax.
Meanwhile the Obama administration is spending at all time record levels on all other fronts, even outpacing the Bush administration. We're already on the brink here, how can they push harder, and tax us in all new ways? The numbers and facts shows this looming total collapse to be a deliberately orchestrated "Economic World War" by the ruling plutocrat elitists. Why won't the politicians stop spending and dividing us over trivial issues? And is there something else to this money crisis that answers these questions as well as the nonsense of the 2 major threat issues? The answer is yes.
Between the extreme budgets for the War on Terror, the extreme measures being pushed for Global Warming, on top of the cash crunch we face in this technological 21st Century, it's hard to make sense of this world gone mad. That is until we factor in the common thread that unites all three issues... Enter the AGI Manhattan Project.
Footlinks:
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.ossfoundation.us...
www.wallstats.com...
www.independent.org...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
www.usdebtclock.org...
agimanhattanproject.com...
--END--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
We truly need to make a massive impact on GHG emissions, end the burning of coal and create a hydrogen economy to virtually eliminate the use of petroleum as a fuel (and war). At the same time, we have nuclear waste to deal with. There do exist various forms of renewable energy, but currently prices aren't entirely financially practical for the average person to hope to become energy self-sufficient via these means. Eventually it will become affordable for most people out there, assuming economic collapse doesn't come first, via wasted money on the War on Terror and Global Warming. Even if people could afford more renewable energy platforms it still doesn't solve all of the energy problems of civilization and the world, so unless something radical changes with the way we garner energy we're going to have no hope of drastic GHG emissions (short of global poverty).
The Einstein's of today have numerous designs for Generation IV nuclear power plants. Over 95% of the potential fuel in uranium ore is wasted using today's less safe GenII and GenIII reactors. GenIV plants promise vastly more safety, and potentially less than 10% of the physical footprint of today's reactors. These reactors, coupled with next-gen pyrometallurgical processing, promise to utilize the vast 'reserves' of what we currently refer to as 'spent' nuclear 'waste'. Just going by the stores of current waste, humanity could be powered for over a century, without having to mine more radioactive ores.
The problem is environmentalists oppose anything to do with nuclear energy, and newer generation plants have been prevented since the 1970's. In the U.S. we're using plants built in the Three Mile Island era, and large funding of nuclear development has been thwarted. In the meantime, obscene amounts of nuclear waste has built up and has been ejected into the atmosphere via burning coal.
If people really want to see peace in the world, then this is the ticket. Not only does this process allow existing nuclear weapons to be converted into electricity, it makes the necessity of refinement for energy production mute. No more weapons as a by-product of energy production, and it enables a hydrogen economy meaning less petroleum usage. It doesn't solve the challenge of all of the things we make from oil derivatives (plastics, paints, etc), but such endless cheap energy would fuel enormous growth that could allow everyone to be able to afford more economically friendly replacements that are almost always far more expensive than oil derivatives. On top of it all, nations can all work together to fund and develop these technologies that promise to end wars instead of fuel an arms race as in the past.
What Gives?
Clearly each issue is over-exaggerated, but even if they aren't we have the solutions on the horizon, yet rational responses are non-existent while we're on the brink of economic collapse and unnecessary world war. The thing is the policy makers all know these facts, odds and solutions.
The push for near-trillion dollar military budgets to fight "terrorists", as if they're beyond the scope of the Soviet Union, doesn't make much sense. Neither does the extreme global warming related proposals, such as a global government and a global carbon tax which would cost trillions and therefore promises to bankrupt what's left of the worlds economy
(click to open player in new window)
Proposals like Kyoto are well known to do little to actually solve the perceived problem. All this push, while the premise of each issue is highly debatable and their risks over-stated. That's the truth that the advocates pushing for either issue don't want to admit.
Some explanation for this wreckless nonsense is control. As scholar Robert Higgs points out, in his paper titled "Fear: The Foundation of Every Governments Power":
Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are represented to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to nourish the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates.
Were we ever to stop being afraid of the government itself and of the bogus fears it fosters, the government would shrivel and die, and the host would disappear for the tens of millions of parasites in the United States—not to speak of the vast number of others in the rest of the world—who now sap the public’s wealth and energies directly and indirectly by means of government power.
What you might ask yourself is why is it that each of these '2 parties' are so perfectly tuned against the other on almost every issue imaginable. The bigger question is how does a population of 300 million people end up being molded and shaped by 2 different viewpoints? How can that be rational? Again, how can one side of every issue be totally correct? Use your reason: what are the odds?
Now consider all the the issues we're all divided over. Abortion, health care, crime, drugs, immigration, guns, liberty, death penalty, terrorism, climate change, and so on. Add the others to that list. Now which ones aren't emotional issues? Almost literally every issue that each of the two dominant political party's push, and fights against, are logic destroying emotional issues.
With these two parties, and their subsets of issues, that are supposed to represent 300 million people, ask yourself which ones they agree upon. How long is that list? Such a list is almost non-existent. How can these two parties be almost perfectly opposed to each other on virtually every issue that is important to people? What are the odds of such an occurrence to be natural?
Have you ever read Sun Tsu's ancient manuscript "The Art of War"? It contains edifices of tactics of warfare that are still used by the Pentagon to this day. In particular, the concepts of divide and conquer and winning wars without direct military conflicts as the paths of true victory as the supreme methods of warfare. Isn't it amazing that political polling and voter turnouts over the past decade have demonstrated a near 50/50 division of political ideology? What are the odds of that?
So we're in the middle of a collapse that by all measures looks deliberate, that was caused by the Federal Reserve and its 'private' stock-holder banks, who sucked in unfathomable amounts of cash on the ways up and down, and were handed trillions of unaccountable dollars in "bailout" money in the aftermath. Despite all of this, there's still this push for a near-trillion dollar military budget (in the US alone), along with a global government based on a $1+ trillion per year global carbon tax.
Meanwhile the Obama administration is spending at all time record levels on all other fronts, even outpacing the Bush administration. We're already on the brink here, how can they push harder, and tax us in all new ways? The numbers and facts shows this looming total collapse to be a deliberately orchestrated "Economic World War" by the ruling plutocrat elitists. Why won't the politicians stop spending and dividing us over trivial issues? And is there something else to this money crisis that answers these questions as well as the nonsense of the 2 major threat issues? The answer is yes.
Between the extreme budgets for the War on Terror, the extreme measures being pushed for Global Warming, on top of the cash crunch we face in this technological 21st Century, it's hard to make sense of this world gone mad. That is until we factor in the common thread that unites all three issues... Enter the AGI Manhattan Project.
Footlinks:
en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
www.ossfoundation.us...
www.wallstats.com...
www.independent.org...
ignoranceisfutile.wordpress.com...
www.usdebtclock.org...
agimanhattanproject.com...
--END--
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Damn sorry for the hold up it took me over an hour to get it all formatted properly, cleaned up and posted from when I started.
Enjoy. That took me about 2 weeks to write and assemble.
I really tried to write so anyone could read it and not get all offended. Please point out any flaws or anything missed. Thanks.
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Enjoy. That took me about 2 weeks to write and assemble.
I really tried to write so anyone could read it and not get all offended. Please point out any flaws or anything missed. Thanks.
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
That's quite the post there sir.
Of course, no one cares.
We must have war, endless welfare, and a total police state.
Government is god, let us all bow before our masters.
Government needs and uses terror to justify its existence constantly.
Of course, no one cares.
We must have war, endless welfare, and a total police state.
Government is god, let us all bow before our masters.
Government needs and uses terror to justify its existence constantly.
reply to post by mnemeth1
Thanks.
Nah. I like to think that when presented with actual solutions they'll be much more actionable. Otherwise, why strive for understanding and solutions to much of anything?
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Thanks.
Nah. I like to think that when presented with actual solutions they'll be much more actionable. Otherwise, why strive for understanding and solutions to much of anything?
[edit on 9-8-2010 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
This is a insane amount of information.
If I doubted that fear was being used, I would go through all this but I dont even need to since its so obvious. But this thread will be great for everybody who thinks "news" is just "news". Its not. Its designed to get you to react with fear most of the time.
Which is why I think any sane person should not watch it.
Global Warming is not a man made phenomenon. Its perfectly natural and is happening on most of the planets and moons. We may contribute to it somewhat on Earth, but we are not causing it.
Islamic Terrorism is not really Islamic Terrorism, its American Terrorism. The United States created the image of it in peoples mind by media manipulation, they built it up as a large problem in the minds of people, they carried out false flag attacks in the name of it, and they declared war against it. All for its own purposes. And its not a war that can be won, which is perfect since the wars needs to be everlasting for the empire building to expand.
Thank you for a great thread!
[edit on 9-8-2010 by Copernicus]
If I doubted that fear was being used, I would go through all this but I dont even need to since its so obvious. But this thread will be great for everybody who thinks "news" is just "news". Its not. Its designed to get you to react with fear most of the time.
Which is why I think any sane person should not watch it.
In the blue corner we have man-caused Global Warming, and in the red corner we have Islamic Terrorism. What are the risks and absurdities of each, and what is really driving these agendas?
Global Warming is not a man made phenomenon. Its perfectly natural and is happening on most of the planets and moons. We may contribute to it somewhat on Earth, but we are not causing it.
Islamic Terrorism is not really Islamic Terrorism, its American Terrorism. The United States created the image of it in peoples mind by media manipulation, they built it up as a large problem in the minds of people, they carried out false flag attacks in the name of it, and they declared war against it. All for its own purposes. And its not a war that can be won, which is perfect since the wars needs to be everlasting for the empire building to expand.
Thank you for a great thread!
[edit on 9-8-2010 by Copernicus]
reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
this is an increadable effort star and flag
education is required by all people of the world and this is a very good start
best post i have ever seen anywhere
the fate of the world is in our hands on a daily basis most people put their hands in the air and shrug what can i do?
well something like this post is a good start
this is an increadable effort star and flag
education is required by all people of the world and this is a very good start
best post i have ever seen anywhere
the fate of the world is in our hands on a daily basis most people put their hands in the air and shrug what can i do?
well something like this post is a good start
reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Two weeks to make this ! dedicated effort there !
You put in a tremendous amount of work on this.
Star and Flag for all the good info and hard work.
If we could get this in front of the ppl of the world they would
see the series of deceptions that has most of the ppl chasing
their own tail in the rigged game.
I think you should make it into a youtube video and post it around
on facebook and other social sites see if you can get it some
global coverage.
Link it to ATS thou or they will get upset, LOL.
[edit on 9-8-2010 by Ex_MislTech]
Two weeks to make this ! dedicated effort there !
You put in a tremendous amount of work on this.
Star and Flag for all the good info and hard work.
If we could get this in front of the ppl of the world they would
see the series of deceptions that has most of the ppl chasing
their own tail in the rigged game.
I think you should make it into a youtube video and post it around
on facebook and other social sites see if you can get it some
global coverage.
Link it to ATS thou or they will get upset, LOL.
[edit on 9-8-2010 by Ex_MislTech]
WOW. That was a awesome read. A lot of facts I already knew about but the fact you have them all neatly complied here is fantastic. Great job. I'll
be having many other people read this.
What an amazing thread! Very informative and well laid out. Really appreciate the time and effort put into something like this.
Thought I'd probably already know a lot of it but I read from start to finish anyway and boy am I glad I did because I ended up learning a lot more, so thanks!
Cheers
Thought I'd probably already know a lot of it but I read from start to finish anyway and boy am I glad I did because I ended up learning a lot more, so thanks!
Cheers
Wow! All I can think to say, is... can I be your sidekick? This type of info should be delivered to people who do not frequent sites like these. One
piece of advice that a LOT of people here should take is to tell your stories elsewhere on the net as well as at ats. However you have to do
it...different sites have different ways of managing info. Also, info like this should be spread around to people face to face, not only on the net. I
think a lot of people just need a little push, and they`ll become ats maniacs like the rest of us... You just have to find out their area of interest.
I`ve gotten a lot of people to come here just for speedy news in the "breaking" forum. Some begin to look around elsewhere on the site. Conspiracy
Chicks doesnt hurt either. Soon there will have to be a "newb" forum to help all the newcomers...at least I`d like to see that happen. OF course,
there`s something that gets sacrificed when high popularity is gained, I just hope it takes a long time before the site gives in to social demands
completely. With the right people on staff it could be a very long time indeed .
Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com
Hmm it's interesting that the government tells us to be afraid of terrorism and global warming, yet the most dangerous threat to our freedom and
lives and the lives of people around the world is government.
Well done, Iggy, as always.
Fear is powerful and paralyzing and makes people do and support some whack things. And people do take advantage to control, manipulate, and sell you on all sorts of things.
I attempted a thread on some aspects of fear too (Terrorism: If you are not terrorized, it doesn't work. ) the other day too, but yours is far more detailed.
And this is also nothing new. From that thread:
John Adams said in his book Thoughts on Government, published around 1776:
He also said that political leaders have an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels because that is what maximizes their power. I think there is a strong case that can be made that there are those who intentionally keep us fearful and paralyzed, politicians with the complicit media and even the snowballing effect of people who continue to be fearful...of terrorism...or crime...of war...of Islam...of losing their jobs...of the economy.
[edit on 8/9/2010 by ~Lucidity]
Fear is powerful and paralyzing and makes people do and support some whack things. And people do take advantage to control, manipulate, and sell you on all sorts of things.
I attempted a thread on some aspects of fear too (Terrorism: If you are not terrorized, it doesn't work. ) the other day too, but yours is far more detailed.
And this is also nothing new. From that thread:
John Adams said in his book Thoughts on Government, published around 1776:
Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
He also said that political leaders have an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels because that is what maximizes their power. I think there is a strong case that can be made that there are those who intentionally keep us fearful and paralyzed, politicians with the complicit media and even the snowballing effect of people who continue to be fearful...of terrorism...or crime...of war...of Islam...of losing their jobs...of the economy.
[edit on 8/9/2010 by ~Lucidity]
Awesome thread and very well put together
I have bookmarked this and will be taking a more indepth look later, think you've covered pretty much everything really!
Thanks for going to the time and trouble to document all of this, BIG S&F from me!!
I have bookmarked this and will be taking a more indepth look later, think you've covered pretty much everything really!
Thanks for going to the time and trouble to document all of this, BIG S&F from me!!
Well done OP, excellent post and one of the stand-out threads of the last few weeks. S+F. I'll be sure to go over it some more over the next few
days.
My favourite part was the 'Catapult the propaganda' Vid, hadn't seen that yet.
My favourite part was the 'Catapult the propaganda' Vid, hadn't seen that yet.
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