It is indeed fascinating, the things that exist in history. These things are so clear, so lucid, that it’s hard to believe that even the most mentally challenged haven’t retained some shred of the information.
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
While the statement above captures the essence of the practice, here’s what was really said:
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“In the primitive simplicity of their minds, they will more easily fall victim to a large lie than a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves, but would be ashamed to tell a lie that was too big. They would never consider telling a lie of such magnitude themselves, or knowing that it would require such impudence, they would not consider it possible for it to be told by others. Even after being enlightened and shown that the lie is a lie, they will continue to doubt and waver for a long time and will still believe there must be some truth behind it somewhere, and there must be some other explanation. For this reason, some part of the most bold and brazen lie is sure to stick. This is a fact that all the great liars and liars’ societies (meaning the Jewish press) in this world know only too well and use regularly.” ~ Adolph Hitler Page 205 Mein Kampf, Ford Translation.
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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” ~ Joseph Goebbels
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over” ~ Joseph Goebbels
This approach is being applied in many areas, facilitated by something Goebbels would have killed a million Romani to have, today’s mass media.
Next time you park yourself in front of your favorite cable news channel, try reflecting on what you’re hearing. Does it make sense? Does it simply cater to your biases?
Could the “echo chamber” be repeating the same “messaging” for your reprogramming needs? Does the same message come out of the babble box over and over and over? Different words, but the same message?
The Lubbock area’s farmers realized conditions had reached critical proportions before Tuesday’s declaration by Agriculture SecretaryTom Vilsack naming all of Texas as eligible to apply for Farm Service Agency assistance.
Mike Swain, who farms south of Brownfield and also is a Terry County commissioner, said he has logged 35/100ths of an inch of rain since Oct. 21.
“I will be real honest, I don’t need a loan – I need rain,” Swain said.
Vilsack’s disaster designation for 213 counties, along with their contiguous counties, means farm operators in all 254 counties may turn to the FSA because of the conditions of “drought, excessive heat, high winds and wildfires.”
The designation makes emergency loan assistance available for eight months.
“FSA will consider each emergency loan application on its own merits, taking into account the extent of production losses, security available, and repayment ability,” the announcement states.
Farmers also may file applications in 2012 for 2011 crop losses under the Supplemental Revenue Assistance Payments Program.
Tyson Knight, who farms in Lubbock and Hale counties, said, “I’ve never seen it as dry as this year has been. We’ve had some dry years, but we’ve always had some wintertime moisture.”
About 60 percent of his farming operation is on irrigated land, with the other 40 percent dryland.
Knight predicts the irrigated crops will make money this year, but the dryland, where cotton never came up, will zero out.
Steve Verett, executive vice president of Plains Cotton Growers, said, “It is good that the USDA has recognized the serious nature of the drought in Texas. Agriculture needs to have available all programs that could be helpful in trying to make it through these unprecedented conditions.”
According to U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Lubbock, the USDA has taken the correct action to help farmers and ranchers mitigate damage caused by wildfires and drought.
“I hope that FEMA will quickly follow suit and declare a major disaster declaration for affected Texas counties,” he said.
Cattle farmers hurt, too.
“A lot of people have lost their livestock, their homes, their fencing. Fencing costs anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a mile, depending on how you do it,” said Swain.
“I have neighbors down here who say if it doesn’t rain by the Fourth of July, they’re going to have to sell their cow herd. And they’ve been years building it up.
“Beef may become a real luxury, instead of ‘Hey, what’s for dinner?’ ”
As far as I can tell, a “Climate Denier” is a person who is certain that global climate disruption (climate change, global warming, etc) is not happening. Climate Denial seems to have become an ideology, impervious to additional information or logical discussion.
For many years now Peter Sinclair and his Greenman Studio LLC have been providing clear, well researched counters to the sometimes outrageous statements made by these climate deniers, along with those who foster climate denial as a way to continue doing “business as usual”.
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In this video, Peter has again focused on a recurring subject, once a darling of the climate denial organizations, Lord Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Lord Monckton is a hereditary peer, meaning that he comes by his titles mostly by way of birth. He often claims to be a member of the House of Lords, a situation that does not obtain, and was formally ended by Parliament in 1999. Lord Monckton likes to style himself an honorary member of the House of Lords, but the House of Lords does not agree are stepping up their efforts to stop Monckton’s false claims, saying “he is not and never has been a member and that there is no such thing as a non-voting or honorary member.”
Monckton is no stranger to controversy. In 1987 he proposed that AIDS victims be effectively placed in internment camps. In an article in The American Spectator he stated that, “there is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life.Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.” This would involve isolating between 1.5 and 3 million people in the United States (“not altogether impossible”) and another 30,000 people in the UK (“not insuperably difficult”). (Emphasis mine.) In other venues this man styles himself a conservative and what we would now call a Libertarian. *sigh*
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For those who are like me, of a slightly older generation, or even better, have grown up in Missouri along the Mississippi River just below Hannibal, Lord Monckton’s antics seem very familiar. For any of you who remember Mark Twain‘s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn you may recall the characters The Duke and the King. Unfortunately the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley does not seem to have enjoyed a ride out of town on a rail, or perhaps tarring and feathering. It seems overdue to me.
It may be that his Lordship is running out of juice. Over the course of the last two years Lord Monckton has begun publicly referring to anyone who disagrees with his climate denial positions as being “Nazis” or “Hitler Youth”. Also, he has begun promoting his cure for all sorts of diseases, from including Graves’ Disease, multiple sclerosis, influenza, and herpes simplex. Somewhat ironically his PR people are also claiming that the therapy works on AIDS as well. I visualize a medicine show from a wagon in Lord Monckton’s future.
Please take a peek at Peter’s video, where not only do we get to see the Lord’s tour of Australia begin, but also get to hear a UK journalist experience “ambush” interviewing with “gotcha” questions by a member of the UK Royal Science Society.
June 27, 2011
I took a break from my new solutions video, which will be out soon. I just had to say something in regard to His Immaculate and Beneficent Highness Lord Christopher Monckton’s current tour of Australia. We’re already hearing lots of exciting news, and I’ll cover it here as it happens.
For now, it turns out that The August and Exalted Lord Monckton ‘s scientific expertise is not limited to being the world’s foremost climate expert — he is also a medical practitioner of the highest caliber.
The world’s foremost certifier of safe and sustainable fisheries has just been slapped down in a new op-ed by a top-shelf collection of scientists in the latest issue of Nature. The problem is that the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) is ignoring science in favor of bureaucracy, write the authors, researchers from the University of British Columbia, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and elsewhere. The idea behind the MSC, which was established in 1997 by the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever (one of the world’s largest fish retailers), was to help consumers eat fish “guilt-free” by certifying fisheries. Today, major grocery chains—Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, and Europe’s Waitrose—carry the MSC’s blue check-mark label as a sign of seafood sustainability.
Denial is a defense mechanism where a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. A related psychological concept is that of cognitive dissonance, originally coined by social psychologist Leon Festinger. Cognitive dissonance describes the negative tension that results from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one’s beliefs.
From Wikipedia,
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The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.”
Jared Diamond, in “Collapse” quotes the behaviour of people living below a dam that may break:
“Consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam’s bursting, it’s not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get to just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam’s breaking is found to be the highest, the concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That’s because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one’s sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possibility that it could burst. If something that you perceive arouses in you a painful emotion, you may subconsciously suppress or deny your perception in order to avoid the unbearable pain, even though the practical results of ignoring your perception may prove ultimately disastrous. The emotions most often responsible are terror, anxiety, and grief.”
Reaching social limits to growth is potentially a world-sized dam break. It’s no wonder initial reactions to hearing how the world we know might change are met with skepticism. (Note: interestingly, and something I intend to explore on a subsequent post, is the concept of denial is related to the study of addiction.)
Cognitive load theory suggests humans have a maximum capacity of working memory. At around 7 ‘chunks’ of information, our working memory maxes out and we can’t accept anything else without losing some of the previous ‘chunks’. Try remembering the following numbers 1-9-1-4-7-6-7-5-9-5-9. Its quite hard to do. But if they are rearranged in chunks 1-914-767-5959, it becomes much more manageable. Numerous studies have measured this phenomenon – a notable study by Shiv and Fedhorkhin asked a group of people to memorize a two digit number, walk down a corridor and at the end choose a dessert – either chocolate cake or fruit salad. A different sample of people were then asked to memorize a 7 digit number and walk down the corridor (while internally reciting this 7 digit number) and also choose a dessert. When required to memorize the 7 digit number, almost twice as many people chose the chocolate cake as in the sample only memorizing the 2 digit number – the implication being – ‘my short term memory is full – I cant access my rational, long term decision-making hardware – just give me the damn cake’.
Of course, in a society with cell phones, taxi-cabs, internet, coffee, soccer practice, Grays Anatomy, corporate ladders and a plethora of other chocolate cake-like stimuli, meaningful contemplation and education about energy depletion and our planet’s environment usually represents the fruit salad. Many people are just too cognitively taxed to take on much more.
“Consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the 
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