thenatureofmind

More nuclear arms proliferation?

We don't want Iran to have it, nor Libia nor North Korea. But Bush needs to get re-elected so.....

Twisting Dr. Nuke's Arm
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF (subscription reqd)

What is Real?

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real -- that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans -- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

-Philip K. Dick

Thanks to Boing, Boing and Cory Doctorow for this pointer to an article by Philip K. Dick titled How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

Truth (once again)

The Truth-Telling Project encourages whistleblowing in the national interest. It urges current and recently retired government officials to reveal the truth to Congress and the public about governmental wrongdoing, lies and cover-up. It aims to change the norms and practices that sustain the cult of secrecy, and to de-legitimize silence that costs lives....

Daniel Ellsberg's Truth-Telling Project

Reaching the horizon

By Robert Mezey from The Geography of Home

Once it was enough simply
to be here. Neither to know
nor to be known, I crossed
in the fullsight of everything
that stood dumbly in sunlight
or drank the standing water

Truth (secrecy)

The qwest of the US government to prevent it's citizens from knowing what it is doing has increased significantly during the current administration. In previous posts I have discussed the fundamental problem of governments that operate in secrecy. The secrecy not only involves the present, but the future and the past as well.

As citizens of the US and the world, we are cut out of the discussion about what our country is doing, has done and will do. History is little more than a fiction created by spin doctors and fed as pablum to the masses. Democracy is impossible under these circumstances. The only thing left is the appearance of democracy... the word democracy. We are living in a world of faith based intelligence.

NEW REPORT SHOWS BUSH INCREASING GOVERNMENT SECRECY

Christopher Allbritton Report from Iraq

It's Worse than you think

The President, The Senator, and the Poet

An article from the "New Partisan" on the presidential race.

The President, The Senator, and the Poet

Our Worldview

We take for granted that the worldview that we live in is real. We make the assumption that the way we see it is actually the way it is. But is it really?

Our notions of the structure of space and time, the notions of the earth whirling in space around a central sun in a very orderly solar system ordered by gravity and centrifugal force, our notions of the irreversible flow of time from past to present to future, and our place in it; all of these notions are based on scientific discoveries, scientific theories that were all formulated prior to 1900. But what of our more recent discoveries?

Truth (cont)

As it turns out there are laws that are so secret that we the poor benighted citizens of the good ole USofA are not even allowed to know 1) that they exist or 2) what they say. They can't be challenged in an open courtroom or by an "ordinary" judge or court. This is worse that 1984, this is a system that abolishes democracy and the protections of the constitution and replaces it with an aristocracy that rules in secret over the serfs. Welcome to serfdom fellow citizens....

DOJ Asks Court for Secrecy In Suit

Gilmore vs. Ashcroft::Home

When should the government be able to demand our papers?

Alaskans Sue to Stop CAPPS II

Stealth Legislation, Secret Police

The Intelligence Failure in the White HouseRunning the country on Feith based intelligence

Recently the congressional intelligence (is that an oxymoron?) committee issued a report finding fault with the intelligence community over the false intelligence relating to Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to Al Queda. The report on how the Bush administration handled the whole matter of intelligence was postponed until after the November elections by the Republican controlled majority of the committee. Convenient huh?

In the summer before the Iraq invasion, I read in a news article about the forming of an “intelligence” unit in the pentagon under the guidance of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith. The unit was called the Office of Special Plans. It was painfully obvious from the article that the unit was founded specifically because the pentagon was not getting the kind if intelligence it wanted from the CIA and other intelligence organizations. Their job was to comb the raw data and find things that supported the conclusions that they wanted to find without assessing the reliability of the sources for the information. This intelligence was then fed directly to the Vice-president’s office without analysis. These became the reasons that were fed to the American public to justify the invasion of Iraq.

For some reasons, the news media can’t seem to devote any significant amount of time to this story. Should we wonder why? I’ll get into media ownership and what the media wants from the government and which party is liable to give them what they want in another post.

Read on…

Fury over Pentagon cell that briefed White House on Iraq's 'imaginary' al-Qaeda links

Feith is once again in the middle of a scandal

Douglas Jay Feith

Global Warming Thaws Arctic

Well, the news is in, actually it has been for a while, but now the ice is really melting....

Global Warming Thaws Arctic (Article)

Union of Concerned Scientists - Global Warming

The 16th Global Warming International Conference

NRDC - Global Warming Puts the Arctic on Thin Ice

'Black Triangle' Sightings on the Rise

In the years between 1990 and 2004 there have been a significant increase in sightings of what are described a 'Black Triangles'. Apparently they cruise low and slow and make no effort to hide themselves. This from a report from the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded science institute with a strong research focusing on aerial phenomena.

News article

NIDS Report

Truth

"History is written by the winners"
- George Orwell

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-George Orwell

Looking at the past 3+ years of the current administration, I am appauled at the extent and pervasiveness of the lying and disinformation. Now, I know that in politics, shading the truth and hiding things is pretty standard fare, but when a person consistently says one thing and the opposite is what happens, how long does it take for the broad base of the public to catch on? I know that there is the constant drumbeat of the Republican media machine, with "reporters" who are little more than PR agents and who constatly present the illusion of the truth while playing down any evidence that might suggest otherwise.

I often look at my fellow citizens of the United States and feel that they are living in a specially scripted fictional novel that bears little resemblance to any thing real. The history we studied in school in the U.S. really did conform to George Orwell's famous quote. The fundamental problem, it seems to me, is at the very core of our system of government. I refer to the pervasive system of secrecy that has existed within the government mostly since World War II. The current administration has used this system to make secret anything that it doesn't want known. But the fact is that the system has grown to such a degree that we do not even know our own history. The history of the past 50 years cannot even be written, because so much information is bound up in secrecy. This to me is of such a drastic and fundamental problem that it dwarfs the abuses of the current administration. For a country that does not even know it's own history, how can there be any kind of future. The realm of history has been removed from public debate and with it the debate on our future and the future of the world.