Pausing For Thought

I’ve reached a point with this blog where I’ve laid out a lot of the things that concern me –and I’ll recap some of that– and for the time being I need to ‘go deep’ and get familiar with the guiding authorities that are shaping this New World into which we’re being delivered. People who generally are not concerned with controlling others have a tendency in common –they don’t explore the mechanisms of control or the literature that supports it, at least not until it becomes a problem. I have this tendency.

 

I’m in the process now of rereading a book that was initially loathsome, B.F. Skinner’s “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” –I highly recommend it. Skinner worked for Army Intel and trained a generation of Harvard behaviorists to create a science of social control. It’s been exceptionally thought-provoking to give Skinner’s book another go ’round and carry his ideas, published in 1971, forward to the state-of-the-art contributions in control made by science and technology. Behaviorism was Skinner’s technology.

 

I’ll give you a taste:

[page 42]

“Man’s struggle for freedom is not due to a will to be free, but to certain behavioral processes characteristic of the human organism, the chief effect of which is the avoidance of or escape from so-called “aversive” features of the environment. Physical and biological technologies have been mainly concerned with natural aversive stimuli; the struggle for freedom is concerned with stimuli arranged by other people. The literature of freedom has identified the other people and has proposed ways of escaping from them or weakening or destroying their power. It has been successful in reducing the aversive stimuli used in intentional control, but it has made the mistake of defining freedom in terms of states of mind or feelings, and it has therefore not been able to deal effectively with techniques of control which do not breed escape or revolt but nevertheless have aversive consequences. It has been forced to brand all control as wrong and to misrepresent many of the advantages to be gained from a social environment. It is unprepared for the next step, which is not to free men from control but to analyze and change the kinds of control to which they are exposed.”

_______________

 

I’m nearly bubbling-over to use Skinner’s book as a touchstone and apply what I’ve learned about the ‘state’ we’re in to his exposition of behavior. That will take some time, but doing so can only be helpful to know where to look and how to strengthen and extend the concepts of the “literature of freedom and dignity” to cover the areas implied by Skinner but not addressed; namely tools of control such as biological/pharmaceutical and electronic means which have slipped into “legal” development –like the article just below endeavors to point out. Freedom and dignity are concepts that Skinner believed to be artifacts from an earlier time when humans “aggrandized the individual” –they could be fatal, he believed, for a culture wishing to preserve itself. What culture, exactly, does Skinner hope to preserve? He answers only ‘our’ culture. His allegiance is to the controller-designers who esteemed him to develop a methodology; and so man is not the autonomous being of his thought and spirit. He is an automaton in motion, subject to the contingencies of the environment and the ‘reinforcers’ that condition him. That’s all.

 

If  governments can manipulate our DNA, and program entirely novel organisms into existence (they can and they do!), nothing prevents them from using it to solve the “Human Question” once and for all. In fact, every aspect of this scientific pursuit has been accelerated. It’s not a moral question in behaviorism, but a contigency. 

 

The Battle of Chernobyl

Watch the film

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-battle-of-chernobyl/

____

“The Battle of Chernobyl” is a Controlled Message, similar to the “DoE Openness Project” which was begun in 1994 after the coverup of human radiation experiments was exposed to the public. While telling the story of what happened at the Chernobyl plant in the aftermath of the explosion, the scope of the documentary is narrow enough to encapsulate the event in a construct of time-and-place that continues to minimize the “lesson” of Chernobyl –paraphrasing: we woke a monster, endured its rampage, and put it back to sleep knowing someday it will awaken again.

An interview segment with Gorbachev, who led the USSR into the policy of Glasnost (openness) as a direct result of the disaster, is heard saying that the international community must come together and cooperate in creating new and safer sources of energy. These are the same approximate words of the internationalists who literally created nuclear power in the first place! They knew in the 1940s that “Chernobyls” would occur. They knew that “containment” was impossible –impossible!! And still they advocated bringing this menace into the world as a means of obtaining the Grand Prize: world government.

The hubris of science and government has changed little. If they ever told us the truth about nuclear accidents and the real dangers of radiation, whole systems would come crashing down, especially that of modern medicine. What we get instead are haunting statements peppered over measured confessions.

    The drama of The Battle of Chernobyl is that only expendable men, by the thousands, could manage the clean-up –robotic machines, too few and expensive presumably, could not hold up in the fatally radioactive environment of the damaged plant. In the film we are treated to images of grainy photos and must imagine that the same volume of disrupting particles that ruins pictures courses through bodies of flesh and blood. And so it does.

*

Americans today are being told that the region around Chernobyl is recovering with record numbers of thriving wildlife, but things are not what they seem. Just beyond the ‘forbidden zone’, in areas where humans are allowed to live, the photo record tells another story. http://snippits-and-slappits.blogspot.com/2011/04/chernobyl-animals-and-lush-forests.html

In the 1970s, before Three-Mile-Island and “The China Syndrome”, I became personally aware of existing ‘safe’ technologies in the process of being squelched by the corporate energy giants. It was a harbinger of the Energy War to come and a certainty that our destiny was being steered for the maximum benefit of the exploiters.  I think we have a name for the war –Global Climate Change.

*

NEW STORIES  11-22-09, news http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091122/ap_on_bi_ge/us_three_mile_island_radiation

The U.S. to Import Nuclear Waste http://newswithviews.com/Peterson/rosalind122.htm

                                                                 _____________________________

This is a routine type of news article for southern California: http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/oceanside/87f165db6-33ec-57d6-bd01-03e292887694.html

Home / News / Local News / Oceanside

SAN ONOFRE: Reactor temporarily shut down after backup generators fail to start

By PAUL SISSON – psisson@nctimes.com | Posted: Monday, December 14, 2009 6:40 pm

Plant operators had to temporarily shut down one of San Onofre Generating Station’s two reactors over the weekend after an emergency generator failed a routine test.

Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison, San Onofre’s majority owner, said Monday that the plant’s Unit 3 reactor was taken off-line at 2 a.m. Saturday when the back-up generators failed to start. A second generator could not be used because it was being repaired.

Generator repairs and testing were completed at around 8 a.m. Saturday and the unit returned to full output, Alexander said.

The incident “posed no risk to public safety,” he said.

Though San Onofre’s nuclear reactors make electricity by heating water and using steam to turn turbines, they still need standard diesel backup generators to provide juice to myriad pumps, valves and other gear that move water through the reactor’s core.

San Onofre usually pulls power off the electrical grid to run that machinery; however, if the plant’s grid connection died, it would need the diesel generators to keep water circulating through the reactor, a process that eventually cools it to a safe temperature.

It was unclear Monday exactly what had caused the back-up generator to fail, but once maintenance was complete on the second, the reactor could be put back into service. A single back-up generator can supply enough power to run the plant in an emergeny, but each reactor at San Onofre has two for redundancy.

It was the maintenance of San Onofre’s backup generators that put Edison under the microscope with Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspectors in August 2008.

An inspection of batteries used to start the generators found that several were connected improperly.

The battery finding led to a special inspection by the commission, which turned up other incidents, including one in which spent nuclear fuel was stored in the wrong location, and brought about several stern public warnings from regulators who said that the plant’s operators have problems spotting and diagnosing minor problems.      [...cont.]

What’s Your BQ?

---

*

“BQ” is your Biological Quotient. It’s closely related to your IQ and EQ. I don’t know if anyone else has coined the term yet, but I happily know that the concept is well illustrated in the body-mind-spirit gestalt (IQ,EQ,BQ) where a tangible proof of wholeness has real life values. A body temple would simply be a flimsy facade without a generous BQ. How do you know if your BQ is low? You would probably feel chronically depressed and run-down, irritable, unsociable, or worse; fearful and unloved.

The concept of BQ emerged from a personal experience of making simple but significant changes to my diet –I went raw; meat, milk, eggs, everything– and the impact was immediate. Previously, my diet was about 50% raw (mainly fruits and vegetables) and for a time I struggled with the challenge of undoing preconditioned aversions to foods like raw meat. The “power of food” took on such a profound meaning that I started a quest for information seeking support and comfort for these ‘new’ ideas –not new at all! In fact, the scientific literature is loaded with studies and experiments that few people have dared to publicize against the prevailing food conventions of our time.

A high BQ is a true measure of health, and no one can tell you how to measure it –you will just know. The word ‘health’ means ‘whole’ and it also means ‘holy’. Your BQ is the natural intelligence that integrates the living substance of the earth with the body-mind of your animal creature. It is 90% of your physical material and mediates the quality of your existence. It’s your ‘in-forming principle’. Raising my own BQ has resulted in a deep sense of groundedness and satisfaction that has stabilized and empowered my ‘other’ intelligences. All I can say is TRY IT!

Getting started:
…is a willingness to improve and eliminate the refined, processed and toxic additives from your diet, choosing instead to eat foods the way nature provides and do your own ‘processing’.
This wonderful essay from the Weston A. Price foundation highlights the gifts of health from the lessons of ‘traditional primitives’. http://www.westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/ancient_dietary_wisdom.html

excerpts:
“Price took photograph after photograph of beautiful smiles and noted that the natives were invariably cheerful and optimistic. Such people were characterized by ‘splendid physical development’ and an almost complete absence of disease, even those living in physical environments that were extremely harsh”.

..”groups that had come into contact with traders or missionaries and had abandoned their traditional diet for foodstuffs [like]..sugar, refined grains, canned foods, pasteurized milk and devitalized fats and oils…[had] rampant tooth decay, infectious illness and degenerative conditions. Children born to parents who had adopted the so-called civilized diet had crowded and crooked teeth, narrowed faces, deformities of bone structure and reduced immunity to disease. Price concluded that race had nothing to do with these changes..”

“In the Swiss village where Price began his investigations, the inhabitants lived on rich dairy products –unpasteurized milk, butter, cream and cheese– dense rye bread, meat occasionally, bone broth soups and the few vegetables they could cultivate during the short summer months…The children went barefoot in frigid streams during weather that forced Dr. Price and his wife to wear heavy wool coats; nevertheless childhood illnesses were virtually nonexistent and there had never been a single case of TB in the village.”

“African cattle-keeping tribes like the Masai consumed no plant foods at all; just meat, blood and milk….Southsea islanders..ate seafood of every sort..along with pork meat and fat and a variety of plant foods including coconut, manioc and fruit. Insects were another common food in all regions except the Arctic…”

“Price discovered ‘The diets of healthy native groups contained at least 10 times more vitamin A and vitamin D than the American diet of his day. These vitamins are found only in animal fats –butter, lard, egg yolks, fish oils and foods with fat-rich cellular membranes like liver and other organ meats, fish eggs and shell fish. Price referred to the fat soluble vitamins as ‘catalysts’ or ‘activators’ upon which the assimilation of all the other nutrients depended..”

“..researchers used such foods very successfully for the treatment of respiratory diseases such as TB, asthma, allergies and emphysema. One of these was Francis Pottenger whose sanirorium in Monrovia California served liberal amounts of liver, butter, cream and eggs to convalescing patients….Dr. Price consistently found that healthy ‘primitives’ whose diets contained adequate nutrients from animal protein and fat had a cheerful, positive attitude to life.”

…more to come

Timeline Project

The Timelines on the right-side are culled from pages and pages of my notes, most relating directly to article content, but I welcome help from you to send entries to the comments or send a good link. At the moment they are ‘bare bones’ and I have lots of additions. The ‘comments’ won’t be saved for timeline posts but rather transfered directly into the pages. If you leave your “mark” (initials or nickname) I’ll post it with your entry, and thanks so much for helping!