Dress Codes: Language As A Clothing Metaphor

Fig. 1 "Your mother wears combat boots clothing."

Is "talk" cheap because it is a luxury, or is it costly ("words matter") because it is a necessity?

At least one observer indicates that luxury is cheaper than necessity in some scenarios:

Sociologist Joseph Cohen of Queens University is fond of saying that “America is a place where luxuries are cheap and necessities costly.”

A recent chart from economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, illustrates this well. Since 1996, the prices of food and housing have increased by close to 60 percent, faster than the pace of inflation. Costs of health care and child care have more than doubled. The prices of textbooks and higher education nearly tripled.
...
In the case of higher education, the nation’s massive student loan industry bears much of the upfront burden of rising prices. To the typical 18-year-old, a $120,000 tuition bill may seem like an abstraction when you don’t have to start paying it off until your mid-20s or later. As a result, the nation’s college students and graduates now collectively owe upward of $1.3 trillion in student loan debt.

(The stuff we need ... and the other stuff). Down through time clothing and even fruit have been metaphors for behavior (e.g. "wolf in sheep's clothing" and "by their fruits shall ye know them").

Clothing still is metaphorical, in the sense and to the extent that behavior defines us:

Today, we design and define ourselves through clothing more than through any other device. Clothing originally evolved to provide protection and warmth. For centuries, it has also reflected gender, age, cultural identity, and class differences—visually distinguishing the ruling, powerful, and wealthy from everyone else. In the contemporary world of customization, mass production, and globalization—with information disseminated at a rate never before experienced— we can choose from myriad styles and types of clothing to alter how we are perceived and identified.

Since the 1990s, a growing number of international artists have been using apparel as a metaphor for shared, as well as personal, concerns.

(Dress Codes: Clothing as Metaphor, PDF; in other words: Dress Codes: Clothing as Metaphor). On another hand, "clothes don't make the man" and "you can't tell a book by its cover" allege that there are holes in our ability to discern the depths when we merely observing the shallows.

Moving along, one can ask or wonder: "if all of this applies to groups, nations, organizations, or cultures, what would that look like?"

The graphic in Fig. 1 indicates that some clothing is sufficiently revealing to in fact "tell the book by its cover," or "know the man by his clothing," at least in the sense of groups within a society (e.g. "hawks" vs. "doves").

So, you may be wondering what this has to do with "language" being as much of a revelatory indicator as "clothing" can be.

Can language reveal aspects of "the book" or of "the man" who is "wearing" that language?

Ok, fair enough ... as a simple exercise let's investigate cultures that use the word "slay".

But first let's investigate the word's traditional meaning:

slay [sley];  verb (used with object), slew, slain, slaying.

1. to kill by violence.
2. to destroy; extinguish.

(Dictionary). Synonyms usually help with the investigation into the meaning of a word:

Synonyms for slay: kill, assassinate, butcher, destroy, dispatch, execute, exterminate, massacre, murder, slaughter, annihilate, do, down, eliminate, erase, finish, hit, liquidate, neutralize, snuff, waste, cut off, do away with, do in, knock off, put away, rub out ...

(Thesaurus). So, what do we make of it when this word, which describes the most heinous of activity, is used casually by groups within a culture, or even when it is used by whole cultures?

First notice this:

Did you watch the Billboard Music Awards last night and follow along on Twitter or Facebook? Or maybe you skipped it and are just catching up on all of the headlines…

One thing is for sure, there were a lot of females “slaying” last night.

I am over it with this word, especially since it’s now used to describe outfits or performances that are only moderately good. It’s completely lost it’s meaning because it’s been so over used!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “slay” supposed to be reserved for something that is out of this world, over the top, spectacular, cream of the crop, best of the best, most amazing ever, killed it, nailed it, WOW, and holy sh*t that was amazing? Because if you followed Twitter last night, just about every performance was the best thing ever of all time.. Even the ones that were just OK.

(CBS Local News, emphasis added). The commentator was not complaining that the use of the word "slay" in that context represents a watering down of the worst of human behavior (which is human crime).

Instead, the commentator was complaining that "slay" was being used to describe only mediocre performances (the commentator's argument was that "slay" should be reserved for the best human performances).

Perhaps that commentator was a graduate of some astute institutions within our slaying culture (Is War An Art or Is War A Disease?, 2) ?

Or, perhaps just a commentator who wakes up to the lyrics of a "killer" song:

And you killed it, you killed it
You killed it with I love you
And you killed it, you killed it
You killed it with I love you
And you killed with I love you
What am I supposed to say back to you?
You killed it with I love you
(U Killed It). The message subtly broadcast by those who create travesties of art, subversions of language, who extinguish reason, and/or who disable socially mature cultures, is the message that barbaric linguistic behavior is nothing more than fancy clothing.

And this is being done against the backdrop of our culture.

A culture which has been counseled from the beginning to avoid this state of mind, or maybe better said as this mind of state:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied: and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals, engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. Those truths are well established.

(The Greatest Source Of Power Toxins?). The warmonger depicted in Fig. 1 was telling the truth when it said to the president: "it's us or them."

It is getting to be all "US" without "THEM," because "US" is slaying, "US" is killing "THEM" softly with those "US" words.

Anyway, getting back to the words that work, listen to a former Secretary of the Treasury talk with sober words about work clothing:

On the basis of these factors, I expect that more than one-third of all men between 25 and 54 will be out work at mid-century. Very likely more than half of men will experience a year of non-work at least one year out of every five. This would be in the range of the rate of non-work for high school drop-outs and exceeds the rate of non-work for African Americans today.

Will we be able to support these people and a growing retired share of the population? What will this mean for the American family? For prevailing ethics of self-reliance? For alienation and support for toxic populism? These are vital questions. Even more vital is the question of what is to be done.

These questions should preoccupy social science researchers. They are vital to our future.

(A disaster is looming for American men). The bill for wising "US" up will slay "THEM" who are "killing it" :

The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

(The Atlantic). What the cavalier attitude about barbarianism subconsciously encourages is the spread of a social barbarianism which will slay our society by killing its middle class.

Resist.

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Really Roberta, softly?

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Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 8

"Truth is never the fault of the Messenger" - Dredd

Maybe some of you have been agitated by the reminders in this series of what the famous historian Arnold J. Toynbee said.

Or at least you have been agitated by my quoting him several times.

Maybe several times too many.

But something happened recently, an archaeological discovery of a lost civilization.

So once again, let's take another look at what Toynbee said, and then apply it to the residue, debris, and cultural artefacts of that civilization to help us understand how accurate he was:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch). So, after that civilization was murdered or more likely, committed suicide, someone stumbled upon "it":

The story of this discovery begins in 2012 when an aerial survey of a remote valley in La Mosquitia, Honduras, revealed evidence of the ruins of a pre-Columbian city. Some experts thought the ruins might be part of the legendary “White City.”

(Ancient City, "Has Ancient Ferguson Been Found" - just kidding). The scientists going over the area are of a different, and much more interesting opinion than the hypothesis that it is a city:

Archaeologists, however, no longer believe in the existence of a single “lost city,” or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legends. They believe Mosquitia harbors many such “lost cities,” which taken together represent something far more important—a lost civilization.

(National Geographic). It was a civilization thriving like any other, with commerce, politics, religion, love, hate, life and death.

Then it was gone.

The jungle grew over it, it became a myth or legend like Atlantis or the Hittite Empire, once a "shining city on a hill," then poof, empty, decaying, and gone from memory.

The cities and people surrounding the recently found civilization are evidence that there was no reason that civilization, whatever it was called, absolutely had to cease to exist.

As Toynbee said, "a society does not ever die 'from natural causes'", no, a society is perpetual, with citizens both being born and dying within its gates, as it lives on beyond the generation that founded it.

Egypt, for example, existed long before this newly discovered civilization, and still exists today, long after it.

Egypt's ancient glory is gone, but still it remains.

None of the old timers who built the pyramids, and other bloviating architecture, are around any more, but Egypt still is.

To the contrary, the mysterious civilization now hidden beneath the jungle overgrowth just went away.

Who knows when or why.

Except as Toynbee says, by suicide or by murder.

This series brings all that to our attention, because, we are in The Sixth Mass Extinction period, and are sure to try to become extinct too.

It seems that current civilization is more like "Jones Town," which was a murder suicide (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5).

I would not be surprised if some, or many, survived the lost civilization we are talking about today, because, some were likely to see it coming and escape.

But, our civilization's weapons and poisons are strong beyond any civilization before us, to the point that we can destroy our civilization with nuclear weapons, or with our use of fossil fuels.

Potentially without any escape.

And, we are eagerly doing everything we need to do to "make it so."

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

Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 5

You are not up there, you are down here

If you think the statement that "civilization is now on suicide watch" is unreal, then you are a nutbag, kook, out of touch, hopeamine / hopium addict, not to mention being without a clue.

Scientists @ the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the doomsday clock to three minutes until midnight.

What three minutes to midnight means is that ~95% of the cushion between lights out for civilization and security for civilization, has been used up, and there is only ~5% remaining (5% is optimistic; it could be less than 1% on an annual scale).

In previous posts in this series (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch, 2, 3, 4) I have focused on the creeping danger of nuclear war, together with the screaming danger of climate catastrophe.

According to the atomic scientists, those are the two main reasons the hands on the doomsday clock have moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes until lights out for human civilization:

In 2015, unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity, and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.
...
The science is clear: Insufficient action to slash worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases can produce global climatic catastrophe. Even a

Tic-talk tic-talk tic-talk

so-called “limited” nuclear weapons exchange will produce massive casualties and severe effects on the global environment. We implore the political leaders of the world to take coordinated, quick action to drastically reduce global emissions of heat-trapping gases, especially carbon dioxide, and shrink nuclear weapons arsenals.

We also implore the citizens of the world to demand action from their leaders. The threat looms over all of humanity. Humanity needs to respond now, while there is still time.

(Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, emphasis added). When are we going to realize that we are involuntarily part of a Suicide-Murder Pact (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5) while suffering from a cultural trance not unlike Stockholm Syndrome (Stockholm Syndrome on Steroids?, 2)?

I will not stop warning of these things because I do not want us to commit suicide or to be murdered by Oil-Qaeda.

Those not part of the solution state of mind are part of the murder and suicide state of mind.

If possible, let's stop Oil-Qaeda in their tracks.

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

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A 1958 video which shows we went into the catastrophe with our "eyes wide open."

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Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 4

Ten Thousand Species 52% Gone

The health of a civilization, in both mind and body, is fairly easy to discern.

At least that is so when the same criteria for diagnosing a nation is utilized.

Notable people have diagnosed large groups which we call nations.

One famous activist put it this way: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

A recent scientific report makes it all the more clear, as applied to civilization, how human greatness and moral progress is doing:

This latest edition of the Living Planet Report is not for the faint-hearted. One key point that jumps out and captures the overall picture is that the Living Planet Index (LPI), which measures more than 10,000 representative populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, has declined by 52 per cent since 1970. Put another way, in less than two human generations, population sizes of vertebrate species have dropped by half. These are the living forms that constitute the fabric of the ecosystems which sustain life on Earth – and the barometer of what we are doing to our own planet, our only home. We ignore their decline at our peril.

(Living Planet Report 2014, PDF, emphasis added; cf. Nature). There is no proper way to say we have destroyed over half of 10,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, except to say "we are very quickly committing omnicide (a.k.a. 'suicide')."

The bees, which are also essential to our global food endeavors, are in the emergency operating room too (Will We Destroy Food - The Bees? - 2).

In this series Dredd Blog has pointed out that nuclear war, global warming induced climate change, and habitat destruction are serious threats to human existence.

The graph just to the upper right (click to enlarge) shows a continuation of the graph at the top of today's post.

It graphs the current loss of 1.14 % per annum of the fauna population applied to the remaining 48% of fauna on the planet Earth.

Our current civilization is no different than those that have gone before us, those societies who committed suicide:

Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive ...

(Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch). Human civilization is in grave danger of making true what the following three observers are quoted as saying:

“One would say that [man] is destined to exterminate himself after having rendered the globe uninhabitable.” - Lamarck (1817)
...
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
...
"Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this --hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension." - Sigmund Freud

I am reminded that there are two approaches to evolutionary concepts.

The original perspective, which is out of favor now, was that evolution has some purpose which fundamentally includes ever increasing improvement, a progressive dynamic, whereby everything improves with time (e.g. Change Is Not An Option - It Is A Must, The Fittest Stars, Planets, & Species).

Evolution and improvement are practically synonymous in that perspective.

The contrary perspective is that evolution just happens randomly with no particular end result or purpose programmed into it.

Noam Chomsky quotes Ernst Mayr, a notable evolutionist, on the latter version:

I'LL BEGIN with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn't have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it's very unlikely that we'll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let's take a look at Earth. And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation ... you're just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won't find it here for very long either because it's just a lethal mutation ... With the environmental crisis, we're now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we'll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

(What Kind of Intelligence Is A Lethal Mutation?). Everyday I see on the mainstream media commentators laughing and giggling when they are discussing climate change or nuclear war.

Is it nervous laughter or are they in a trance (Comparing a Group-Mind Trance to a Cultural Amygdala)?

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

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Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch - 3

Serious as a heart attack comes to mind.

Regular readers of Daily Kos know that it is a moderate site when it comes to global warming and conspiracy theories because those regular readers know Daily Kos tends to be highly cautious about such matters.

So, I was a bit taken aback with a post there by Meteor Blades, who read some information on another moderate site that was alarming.

The subject was methane release in the Arctic, specifically in the sense of a "tipping point" being reached, a point of no return to business as usual.

It is not "radical" to consider what is real and what is happening now, nor is it "radical" to contemplate the consequences of the government ignoring Oil-Qaeda madness that seems to be designed to kill a lot of people.

The Time Magazine cover, above, from some years back, conveys the feeling generated by the post at Daily Kos:

This week, scientists made a disturbing discovery in the Arctic Ocean: They saw "vast methane plumes escaping from the seafloor," as the Stockholm University put it in a release disclosing the observations. The plume of methane—a potent greenhouse gas that traps heat more powerfully than carbon dioxide, the chief driver of climate change—was unsettling to the scientists.

But it was even more unnerving to Dr. Jason Box, a widely published climatologist who had been following the expedition. As I was digging into the new development, I stumbled upon his tweet, which, coming from a scientist, was downright chilling:

If even a small fraction of Arctic sea floor carbon is released to the atmosphere, we're f'd.
— @climate_ice

Box, who is currently a professor of glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, has been studying the Arctic for decades. His accolade-packed Wikipedia page notes that he's made some 20 expeditions to the Arctic since 1994, and served as the lead author on the Greenland section of NOAA's State of the Climate report from 2008-2012. He also runs the Dark Snow project and writes about the latest findings in the field at his blog, Meltfactor. In other words, Box knows the Arctic, and he knows climate change—and the methane plumes had him blitzed enough to bring out the F bombs.

Now, the scientists in the Arctic didn't fully understand why the plumes were occurring. But they speculated that a warmer "tongue" of ocean current was destabilizing methane hydrates on the Arctic slope.

I called the scientist at his office in Copenhagen, and he talked frankly and emphatically about the new threat, and about the specter of climate change in general. He also swore like a sailor, which I've often wondered how climatologists refrain from doing, given the urgency of the problem—it's certainly an entirely accurate way to communicate the climate plight. […]

(Meteor Blades, cf. Motherboard, Salon, Stockholm Univ.). Regular readers here at Dredd Blog know that "radical" is not a word we shy away from, so long as it is the reality going on around us.

From posts in this series, one will quickly discern that Dredd Blog wants you to know what is going on, whether that knowledge is disturbing or not, such as in Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch where I speculated that the recent, mysterious Siberian Craters were methane related.

As it turns out, Dredd Blog suspicions are, more often than not, confirmed (Nature: Siberian Craters Methane Related).

Regular readers know that together we have been watching the methane plumes for years:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

(New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5, cf. Perfect Storm ...). On the other hand, those who want to water reality down (so people don't "panic") are not doing a service, they are deceiving others.

They are doing the bidding of Oil-Qaeda.

In this context, the governments of the world that are not serious about saving civilization are serious about destroying it (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, 2, 3, 4, 5).

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

Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch

Truth is never the fault of the Messenger

Yesterday, I presented the "optimistic" view in the debate about "Near Term Human Extinction" (NTHE) compared and contrasted with "Long Term Human Extinction" (LTHE).

That "optimistic" view favors the long term LTHE, as if that is "optimistic" in and of itself, rather than just being the better of two terrible potentials.

LTHE is something like "humanity won't go extinct in your lifetime" but will go extinct circa 2100.

The NTHE is the "pessimistic" view that "humanity will go extinct in your lifetime" by about 2050, soooo, there is only about a 50 year, or five decades, difference in the two models (which both seem "pessimistic" to me).

However, neither "pessimistic" nor "optimistic" are relevant, rather, what is relevant is that both NTHE and LTHE are pointing out human extinction in a relatively short time frame.

If either one of them happens to be reality,  then your kids and mine will go extinct along with the rest of humanity in their lifetimes, which is anywhere from circa 2050 to circa 2100 !!!

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has repeatedly posted about civilization going down, but that was not intended to say that the human species would go down too:

There is a tendency to think that the catastrophe of global warming is an extinction threat to the human species.

The threat however, in the sequence of events, is the extinction of human civilization, not the human species.

Civilization can go down with a billion or so human survivors still remaining, yet only being taken back into the dark ages by a "time machine" built by the civilization that erased itself from the face of the earth.
...
World civilization means the nations of the world interconnected by trade, travel, treaties, and international commerce.

So, when climate change scientists talk about dangers to the existence of civilization they do not mean that the population of human beings as a species is going to become extinct.

In other words, the human species would live on even if civilization ended.

(Confusing "Civilization" With "Species"). So, all you readers who thought I have been "pessimistic" now must blush at how "optimistic" I may have been.

In either NTHE or LTHE speak, we are driven by "hopium" when we are optimistic without reason (or driven by "doomium" if we are pessimistic without reason).

But as I said, neither pessimism nor optimism are relevant or useful terms, rather, what is relevant and useful is the scientific reality.

That is what we want to determine, whether it makes us cry because humanity has no chance, or on the other hand makes us shout for joy because there is still a chance for our species.

We have to face it, because it is not going away until we face up and get it right.

Today's post is about civilization being on "suicide" watch, but, of course the proper word to describe when a civilization kills itself is omnicide ("human extinction caused by human action").

Historically, self-destruction is the common denominator for past human civilization, culture, and society:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). As regular readers know, I have posted Sigmund Freud's writings where he indicated that psychoanalysis of groups, including civilization itself, would not prove unproductive:

If the evolution of civilization has such a far reaching similarity with the development of an individual, and if the same methods are employed in both, would not the diagnosis be justified that many systems of civilization——or epochs of it——possibly even the whole of humanity——have become neurotic under the pressure of the civilizing trends? To analytic dissection of these neuroses, therapeutic recommendations might follow which could claim a great practical interest. I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness. But it behooves us to be very careful, not to forget that after all we are dealing only with analogies, and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to drag them out of the region where they originated and have matured. The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities. [p. 39]
...
Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature
to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this——hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. [p. 40]

(MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 5, "Civilization and Its Discontents"). As to individuals, those who have a habit of trying to kill themselves are at greater risk than those who tried it once, failed, and never tried again.

That is because the data show that 54% of individuals who try suicide more than once have "comorbid mental disorders" (Suicide Attempt Self-Injury Interview, SASII, PDF).

Since civilizations, empires, nations, and societies that were studied by Toynbee had a much higher "suicide success" rate than individuals tend to have, there is a proclivity toward omnicide that merits pessimism for civilization today.

Since we looked at LTHE yesterday, let's be aware of other concepts by taking a look at some of the work of the NTHE folk to ascertain what propels them toward an expectation of near term omnicide:

There are such massive reserves of methane in the subsea Arctic methane hydrates, that if only a few percent of them are released, they will lead to a jump in the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere of 10 degrees C and produce a "Permian" style major extinction event which will kill us all.

The whole northern hemisphere is now covered by a thickening atmospheric methane veil that is spreading southwards at about 1 km a day and it already totally envelopes the United States.

A giant hole in the equatorial ozone layer has also been discovered in the west Pacific, which acts like an elevator transferring methane from lower altitudes to the stratosphere, where it already forms a dense equatorial global warming stratospheric band that is spreading into the Polar regions.

The spreading atmospheric methane global warming veil is raising the temperature of the lower atmosphere many times faster than carbon dioxide does, causing the extreme summer temperatures in Australia and the US.

During the last winter, the high Arctic winter temperatures and pressures displaced the normal freezing Arctic air south into Canada and the United States, producing never before seen, freezing winter storms and massive power failures.

When the Arctic ice cap finally melts towards the end of next year, the Arctic sea will be aggressively heated by the sun and the Gulf Stream. The cold Arctic air will then be confined to the Greenland Ice cap and the hot Arctic air with its methane will flow south to the United States to further heat up the Gulf Stream, setting up an anticlockwise circulation around Greenland.

Under these circumstances Great Britain and Europe must expect even more catastrophic storm systems, hurricane force winds and massive flooding after the end of next year, due to a further acceleration in the energy transport of the Gulf Stream. If this process continues unchecked the mean temperature of the atmosphere will rise a further 8 degrees centigrade and we will be facing global deglaciation, a more than 200 feet rise in sea level rise and a major terminal extinction event by the 2050s.

(Focus on Methane, emphasis added). Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has also focused on the methane tipping point in times past (e.g The Bubbling Up To Rude Awakening, New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5).

And, in the interest of comprehensive coverage, we have also taken a look at the dynamics of denial in the past (Convergence - Fear of Death Syndrome), and have posted two videos of Dr. Guy McPherson who expounds upon NTHE (A Cure For Congress & The Supreme Five: Fickle Fecal Transplants).

In future posts in this series we will take an even closer look at the dynamics of denial dementia.

The next post in this series is here.

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This large crater/hole (unknown depth, ~80m / ~263 ft diameter) in the Siberian permafrost may be related to methane gas release (Confirmed here) caused by thawing over a high pressure area:

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A Heart Grown Cold - 2

Silver & Gold Won't Bring Back a Heart Grown Cold

In the first post of this series we included an actual photo, taken in a city in the U.S., showing that some of us no longer have that "old time" empathy, compassion, or care for the welfare of others in our midst (The Common Good).

In this photo (left), an American drowned in his sleep after rolling over into water in an abandoned building, then froze in death as the water he had fallen into became solid ice.

There will be more of that as our nation goes through the throes of freezing to death, while becoming something other than what our nation once was when it was known as a light on a hill.

Those charged with caring for the people like the deceased person in the photo, those in Washington, D.C., have cut off unemployment insurance and food stamps to millions of people like the American in the photo:

This city has not always been a gentle place, but a series of events over the past few, frigid days causes one to wonder how cold the collective heart has grown.

It starts with a phone call made by a man who said his friend found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the city's west side.

"He's encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks," the caller phoned to tell this reporter.
...
Before calling the police, this reporter went to check on the tip, skeptical of a hoax. Sure enough, in the well of the cargo elevator, two feet jutted out above the ice. Closer inspection revealed that the rest of the body was encased in 2-3 feet of ice, the body prostrate, suspended into the ice ...
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The building is known as the Roosevelt Warehouse, once belonging to the Detroit Public Schools as a book repository. Located near 14th Street and Michigan Avenue, the warehouse burned in 1987 and caused something of a scandal as thousands of books, scissors, footballs and crayons were left to rot while Detroit schoolchildren -- some of the poorest children in the country -- went without supplies.
...
A colony of homeless men live in the warehouse. Wednesday morning a few fires were burning inside oil drums. Scott Ruben, 38, huddled under filthy blankets not 20 paces from the elevator shaft.
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There are at least 19,000 homeless people in Detroit, by some estimates. Put another way, more than 1 in 50 people here are homeless.

The human problem is so bad, and the beds so few, that some shelters in the city provide only a chair. The chair is yours as long as you sit in it. Once you leave, the chair is reassigned.

Thousands of down-on-their-luck adults do nothing more with their day than clutch onto a chair. This passes for normal in some quarters of the city.

(Frozen in Indifference, emphasis added). The corporations down the street which make the vehicles that poison the atmosphere were bailed out when they got themselves into trouble, as were the banks who were and are still plundering us.

The poor and homeless will not be bailed out (Epigovernment: The New Model - 8).

America is an empire that is metaphorically freezing to death (Phases Of An Empire Freezing To Death) as well as being in the process of metaphorically taking off all clothing ("paradoxical undressing").

Just as individuals who freeze to death while awake do (Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death) to later appear naked and stone-cold to a perplexed world (Is The Empress Taking Off Her Clothes?).

The frozen state of "the mind" in "the union" (The State of The Onion Script, True State of the Union) will not tell us we are sinking into the mentality and culture of feudalism (American Feudalism - 6).

The previous post in this series is here.

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America, by Simon & Garfunkel

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Perfect Storm: New Global Ground Zero

Potential source for an Arctic Tsunami

Global warming induced climate change has caused and is causing changes to lifestyle around the globe.

This includes activities from extracting the pollution generating oil from under the Earth, to burning it and thereby releasing green house gases into the atmosphere.

When those green house gases then block release of heat back into space they thereby cause the heating up of the globe as more and more heat is trapped to disturb climate patterns in all nations.

The Dredd Blog System, for some time now, has mentioned that the flora and fauna are on the move:

Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

In a paper published June 7 in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.

(Ents & The Entities Become Nomadic). The same is now also true for the undersea creatures as it is for land inhabiting species:

Narsaq’s largest employer, a shrimp factory, closed a few years ago after the crustaceans fled north to cooler water. Where once there were eight commercial fishing vessels, there is now one.

As a result, the population here, one of southern Greenland’s major towns, has been halved to 1,500 in just a decade. Suicides are up.

(Greenland Changing Due To Warming). The phenomenon is developing at coastal areas of human civilization too:

Mann says the Pacific islands, which are only 4.6 metres above sea level at their highest point, are facing the imminent prospect of flooding, with salt water intrusion destroying fresh water supplies and increased erosion.

Suggesting evacuations would accelerate a change in public consciousness around the issue of climate change, he said: "Thousands of years of culture is at risk of disappearing as the populations of vulnerable island states have no place to go.

"For these people, current sea levels are already representative of dangerous anthropogenic interference because they will lose their world far before the rest of us suffer.

"I think it is an example, one of a number, where the impacts are playing out in real time. It is not an abstract prediction about the future or about far off exotic creatures like polar bears. We are talking about people potentially having to evacuate from places like Tvulu or the Arctic's Kivalina, another low lying island which is already feeling the detrimental impacts of sea level rise."

(Guardian). Perhaps that could also mean mass migrations caused by food and water scarcity:

The Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan are at high risk of food insecurity in coming decades because climate change and ocean acidification are destroying fisheries, according to a report released on Monday.

The report from the campaign group Oceana warns of growing food insecurity, especially for poorer people, from the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, Eritrea, Guyana, Indonesia, Kuwait and Singapore.

Some of the countries at highest risk were in oil-rich – and politically volatile – regions.

"The Persian Gulf is actually expected to be one of the hardest-hit regions. In terms of fish catch they are supposed to lose over 50% of their fisheries," said Matt Huelsenbeck, an Oceana marine scientist and author of the report.

The report put Iran, Libya, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates among the top 10 countries most at risk because of the decline in fish stocks due to climate change.

(Food Scarcity Mid-East, emphasis added). There are new dangers from volatile conditions also beginning to appear, from permafrost melt to undersea tsunami events:

Another important question is how all this methane gas affects the stability of the seafloor. When methane hydrates warm up and release methane gas, the gas takes up much more space than the solid hydrate, putting pressure on the surrounding sediments. Similarly, the decomposition of either methane hydrate or permafrost can reduce the mechanical strength of the surrounding sediment. Either process could make the seafloor more susceptible to submarine landslides.

Undersea landslides are common along the continental slope of the Beaufort Sea, but researchers do not yet know when or how they form. However, decomposing methane hydrates are believed to have triggered major landslides in other deep-sea areas. Such landslides could potentially destabilize oil platforms, pipelines, or other equipment on the seafloor, and have the potential to generate tsunamis.

(Tsunami / Hydrate Release / Methane, emphasis added). Another team that has been researching the Arctic for decades had some stern observations too:

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years. In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

(New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 5) One has to wonder sometimes why the 18th Century mentality that is running all things mythical believes this is the economical way to do things:

More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.
...
It calculated that five million deaths occur each year from air pollution, hunger and disease as a result of climate change and carbon-intensive economies, and that toll would likely rise to six million a year by 2030 if current patterns of fossil fuel use continue.

(Reuters, emphasis added). The equivalent of one holocaust dying each year now is not something to procrastinate about any longer, this is about the end of civilization as we know it.

It appears that the human species on this planet is not the brightest bulb in the celestial chandelier.

Natural Economy vs National Economy - 2

Two years ago today we were talking about natural economy, and the plight of California:

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We have discussed the reality that the fate of California (and other states of course) can determine the fate of our national economy. California's current natural economy is troubled because they are running out of water.

The natural economy can "fail" and destroy the state economy. "This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no foolin' around" goes the song.

Yes, this is stone cold for real:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent.

"This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today's action absolutely necessary," the Republican governor said in his statement.

Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient.

The drought has forced farmers to fallow their fields, put thousands of agricultural workers out of work and led to conservation measures in cities throughout the state, which is the nation's top agricultural producer.

Agriculture losses could reach $2.8 billion this year and cost 95,000 jobs, said Lester Snow, the state water director.

(Breitbart, emphasis added). Everyone knows that jobs are the fundamental player in our national recovery plans at this time.

The fact that environmental failure in California is already causing job loss shows us that the natural economy is already impacting the state and national economy.

One of the reasons that global climate change must be taken seriously, then, is the fact that it can damage or destroy national economies.

Nations printing more money or borrowing more money won't start or stop the rains, droughts, storms, and rising oceans.

It will take the greatest of efforts to keep damage to the environment down to current levels, but we are not going to be able to make that goal.

Saving civilization may be the only option remaining to us.

The continuation of Beavis & Butthead national policies will guarantee both natural and national economic collapse at some point in our future or our children's future.

The notion that economy can prevail over environmental concerns is a false notion at the macro level. When the environmental penalty comes it is too late to avoid its impact on economy.

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Even though someone turned on the faucets in California and they got record rains with floods following on the heals of those drought conditions, the principle of that post two years ago holds true today.

Likewise, their drinking water comes from afar, so the "water everywhere but not enough to drink" bleep goes on.

Global weirding marches on.

Death Mostly Ignored - 2

Dredd Blog first posted this information in the first post of this series Death Mostly Ignored.

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Thousands of fellow humans die from the worst possible death, starvation, every day. Somewhere around 85% of these starvation deaths occur in children 5 years of age or younger.

Why are we letting 16,000 - 30,273 of the most beautiful children die (depending on who is saying it) the worst possible death everyday?

Every 2.43 - 5 seconds (depending on who is saying it) another one of our fellow brothers and sisters dies of starvation. Starvation doesn't just happen on Tuesday September 11, 2001, it happens everyday, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day, it never stops.

Our governments are not helpless, they are hapless at this juncture in time.

Visit this website or this website and find out how to get involved.

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Since the time of the first post in this series, MOMCOM has spent about $260,000,000,000 on direct military costs in Afghanistan, $10,000,000,000 on Egypt, hundreds of billions more in Iraq and at some 800-1000 MOMCOM military bases located around the globe.

Based on the low figure in the original post (16,000), 11,680,000 children have died of starvation during that time.

Proud yet?

Water Everywhere But Here

The deadly serious nature of potable water supply was discussed in Global Warming & Potable Water over at the Ecocosmology Blog a while back.

Other deadly serious threats to civilization have been mentioned by Dredd Blog posts such as Embryonic Look At Civilization's Future - 2, along with a post urging us not to forget we have no way out but to address the serious immediate threats to the survival of civilization.

Now The Online Journal Nature points out that 80% of the Earth's population lives in unsecure potable water zones (if you don't subscribe to Nature, the article is discussed here and here).

The stark truth of the report is alarming:

The world's rivers are in crisis including in North America and Europe where governments have invested trillions of dollars to clean up freshwater supplies, a study showed Wednesday.

"Threats to human water security and biological diversity are pandemic," Charles Vorosmarty of the City University of New York, co-lead author of the report in the journal Nature, told Reuters.

The international team of scientists estimated that almost 80 percent of the world's population -- or about 5 billion people -- lived in areas with high levels of threat to water security, caused mainly by river mismanagement and pollution.

(Reuters, emphasis added). The propaganda of government (MOMCOM today) sells fear in the form of making the citizenry afraid of Islam, Communism, Socialism, and other Don Quixote type boogie men.

MOMCOM has been peddling security so as to be able to engage in wars for oil, yet MOMCOM really cares nothing for civilian concerns, seeing as how MOMCOM obsesses over violent solutions to every problem.

Governments are fiddling with madness while the people of all nations are rushed headlong toward unprecedented calamity.

They seem not to have the capacity to care for anything other than their own political career; they work to develop the capacity to stay in a complete state of denial about the deaths of hundreds of millions of the citizens of the Earth; they FAIL the test.

Happy Christmas Bob Dylan

Starvation in the U.S. is being fought by Bob Dylan.

He has made arrangements to have all artist proceeds from his new album Christmas In The Heart, be used to feed the hungry in the United States.

Hopefully his vision will catch on and others will help as the hunger crises increases.

There are many reasons that a food production decrease could lead to lasting hunger here.

There is a danger to the bees, which we talked about here, that could threaten a substantial portion of U.S. food production.

The economy shows no signs of increasing job production, and our economic power in the world is slated to decline.

So, since the government is doing everything to help the banks and the military oil complex, it may be left to artists to help the hungry Americans.

Natural Economy vs National Economy

We have discussed the reality that the fate of California (and other states of course) can determine the fate of our national economy. California's current natural economy is troubled because they are running out of water.

The natural economy can "fail" and destroy the state economy. "This ain't no party. This ain't no disco. This ain't no foolin' around" goes the song.

Yes, this is stone cold for real:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency Friday because of three years of below-average rain and snowfall in California, a step that urges urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent.

"This drought is having a devastating impact on our people, our communities, our economy and our environment, making today's action absolutely necessary," the Republican governor said in his statement.

Mandatory rationing is an option if the declaration and other measures are insufficient.

The drought has forced farmers to fallow their fields, put thousands of agricultural workers out of work and led to conservation measures in cities throughout the state, which is the nation's top agricultural producer.

Agriculture losses could reach $2.8 billion this year and cost 95,000 jobs, said Lester Snow, the state water director.

(Breitbart, emphasis added). Everyone knows that jobs are the fundamental player in our national recovery plans at this time.

The fact that environmental failure in California is already causing job loss shows us that the natural economy is already impacting the state and national economy.

One of the reasons that global climate change must be taken seriously, then, is the fact that it can damage or destroy national economies.

Nations printing more money or borrowing more money won't start or stop the rains, droughts, storms, and rising oceans.

It will take the greatest of efforts to keep damage to the environment down to current levels, but we are not going to be able to make that goal.

Saving civilization may be the only option remaining to us.

The continuation of Beavis & Butthead national policies will guarantee both natural and national economic collapse at some point in our future or our children's future.

The notion that economy can prevail over environmental concerns is a false notion at the macro level. When the environmental penalty comes it is too late to avoid its impact on economy.

A Heart Grown Cold

In some places the heart of America is becoming like the character Silvio in a Bob Dylan song.

Evidently Silvio thought he had better things to do than rescue fellow citizens who were having problems.

Millions of problems, like freezing to death and starving to death.

So, one of the bards of anti-establishment counter culture laid down some lyrics to shine some light on the scene:

Silvio
Silver and gold
Won't buy back the beat of a heart grown cold
Silvio
I gotta go
Find out something only dead men know

(Silvio, by Bob Dylan). The homeless American in the photo attached to this post had frozen to death and was encased in solid ice.

Who knows for how long. Kids played hockey near by, noticed the homeless American, and went on about their business.

House republicans played their fiddles and went on about their business today after voting against an economic recovery package yesterday. As homelessness, joblessness, and hopelessness continued to increase in America.

Meanwhile, in the world around America, tens of thousands of children starved to death just like they did yesterday.

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Death Mostly Ignored

Thousands of fellow humans die from the worst possible death, starvation, every day. Somewhere around 85% of these starvation deaths occur in children 5 years of age or younger.

Why are we letting 16,000 - 30,273 of the most beautiful children die (depending on who is saying it) the worst possible death everyday?

Every 2.43 - 5 seconds (depending on who is saying it) another one of our fellow brothers and sisters dies of starvation. Starvation doesn't just happen on Tuesday September 11, 2001, it happens everyday, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day, it never stops.

Our governments are not helpless, they are hapless at this juncture in time.

Visit this website or this website and find out how to get involved.