Tag: Fear Card

Fear An Old Foe!

Closing Thought–09May19

Is it 1950?

No?

Then why am I having to listen to yet another mental midget whip up fear from 60 years ago?

The Commies are coming! The Commies are coming!

It seems that the art of lying is rubbing off on all those Congressional enablers of Donald Trump…..just recently the chants of the Commies are coming could be heard from a rally of GOPer Matt Shea of Washington…..

Washington state Republican representative Matt Shea and several associates regaled an audience with conspiracy theories, separatist visions, and exhortations for listeners to arm themselves ahead of a looming civil war, at a gathering at a remote north-eastern religious compound last year.

In recordings obtained by the Guardian, Shea and Jack Robertson, also known as radio personality John Jacob Schmidt, invoked their visions and fears of a violent leftist revolt in speeches at the 2018 God and Country event in Marble.

The Guardian last week published leaked chat records in which Shea and Robertson were revealed to have discussed the use of surveillance, “psyops” and violence against liberal and leftist activists.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/01/republican-matt-shea-rightwing-rally-guns
 
Are there truly still those so goddamn ignorant that they will believe this lie?
 
There must be for I hear it repeated (in various forms) almost daily….and not all from the GOP…..even the corporate Dems have a version of this meme……
 
Of course it is bullshit but that never stopped a politician from voicing such crap…..I will have more to say on this as the election draws nearer……
 
That is it from me for the day…..have a day…..

That DAMN Moon!

A Sunday and I like to give you something to think about while you take time to relax…..

The Moon.

First the planets have satellites and they have names like Phobus, Io, Europa etc…etc…then why is our satellite called “the Moon”?  Did they run out of clever names? Or what?

Just something to think about.

I like history and I am always looking for interesting a little known history that I can write about and that brings me to Project A119……

Project A119 was a plan to make our night skies a little less bright…..

It was the height of the Cold War. At odds were the United States and the former Soviet Union, both attempting to posture and propagandize their way to a win in a geopolitical dispute that dragged on nearly 50 years. Complicating matters was a burgeoning space race, one the US was losing after the Soviets launched their first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957.

To avoid losing the propaganda war, the US went into scramble mode. First it launched a satellite of its own, Explorer 1. Then it assembled a team of the best and brightest — including a young Carl Sagan — to figure out how to blow up the Moon.

The project, known as Project A119, was never carried out, but is every bit as odd as it sounds.

https://thenextweb.com/space/2019/02/08/project-a119-inside-the-united-states-secret-plan-to-blow-up-the-moon/

See what fear and a Red Scare can make you do?

Silly right?

Remember that when you hear your local politician trying to spread some sort of fear no matter the subject it is usually total manure.

That be it for me for today…..have a great day and live life….be well, be safe….chuq

A Return Of McCarthyism?

The history of the US has some embarrassing moments and the days of the Red Scare and McCarthyism is one such time….

But first any idea what I mean when I say McCarthyism?  No?

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?”

In the 1950s, thousands of Americans who toiled in the government, served in the army, worked in the movie industry, or came from various walks of life had to answer that question before a congressional panel.

Senator Joseph McCarthy rose to national prominence by initiating a probe to ferret out communists holding prominent positions. During his investigations, safeguards promised by the Constitution were trampled.

http://www.ushistory.org/us/53a.asp

And trying to reach the most people with my historical looks at our world..I also have a video for those that get trip up over the big words……

Now that the stage has been set…..

I do a lot of reading and research and I find a lot of stuff that I should be using but I am only one old fart trying to make sense of the world around me…..recently while reading I found an article that looks at the return of McCarthyism……

Almost fifty years ago, an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, used fear as a means to initiate widespread panic and intimidate the innocent.

Fear can do this to people. Fear makes the rational become irrational, the innocent become guilty, the mainstream become evil. McCarthy used the fear of communism to instigate mass panic throughout America. Seemingly rational people began to accuse others of being communist without any evidence whatsoever. The panic gained momentum. Anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was accused of being a communist. Anyone who spoke out against the fear-inspired panic became guilty for even questioning the relevance of the panic. The McCarthyists, emboldened by a narrative of lies that became a pseudo-truth, went after anyone who displeased them: the reasonable, the level-headed, those who reserved judgment, those who realized that such fear-inspired panic is a constant throughout human history.

Read more…….

The Return to McCarthyism

We are living in a country that is trying to force fear on us all…make us afraid of our neighbor or anyone that does not look as we do…….I refuse to buy into this crap lead by Our Dear Leader….I refuse to see the fear that he wants me to see….and I refuse to judge a people….I judge the person…..and so far I see NOTHING about Our Dear Leader that should be followed.

McCarthyism like Trumpism is nothing more than political babble.

So I Have Written!

Turn The Page!

The Dark History Of Fear

For as far back as the beginning of this republic fear has been used to turn the public to a certain way of thinking…..First it was the Tories and the English….then we went on toward those runaway slaves and what they could do than Native Americans….so on and so on throughout our history….more recently it has been those damn sneaking commies and these days the boogeymen are Muslims and/or immigrants as the next danger to our republic….so the selling of fear is nothing new…..the selling of fear is the same just the targets of that fear change….as needed……

Let’s look at the dark history of fear…….

Back in 1835, Samuel F.B. Morse (who went on to invent the telegraph and the Morse Code), wrote a book about a plot to overthrow the American republic. The conspiracy, Morse wrote, was well-funded, highly secretive, and hatched in Vienna by members of the The St. Leopold Foundation, which had dispatched cells of Jesuit missionaries to the U.S. to forcibly convert the nation to Roman Catholicism. This was no small intrigue: The plot’s leaders, as Morse meticulously catalogued, were Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich, Ferdinand V of Hungary, and (of course) Pope Gregory XVI. “It is high time that we awakened to the apprehension of danger,” Morse wrote.

What is shocking about this nonsense is not that Morse actually believed it, but that millions of other Americans did too. Morse’s book seeded the rise of the nativist “Know-Nothing” party, whose goal was to curb immigration, root out Catholicism, and return America to its protestant ideals. In essence, they were the America-firsters of the nineteenth century. The Know-Nothings swept into office in Chicago, were strong in Massachusetts and, in 1856, nominated a national ticket (Millard Fillmore and Andrew Donelson), for the presidency; they tallied nearly 900,000 votes, one-quarter of those cast. “I know nothing but my country, my whole country and nothing but my country,” they chanted.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/fear-inc-russians-communist-trump-mattis/

SO Irene those boogeymen we hear about from those selling fear are nothing new and this to shall pass.

Get over it!

Terrorists Are No Longer Needed

There was a time when the Islamophobes needed a terrorist attack or the threat there of for them to spread their hatred to the rest of the Americans that fear whatever it is they fear.

Those days are gone!

The Right Wing has sanctuary cities to demonize……and still have immigrants to hate…..without an attack somewhere they hit all the old stand-bys…..

Fearless Fosdick decided to retweet some racist bullshit….. President Donald Trump’s decision to retweet a series of anti-Muslim videos from a British far-right account.  Then afterward his press secretary defended the president saying……”Whether it is a real video, the threat is real,” Sanders told a small group of reporters after appearing on Fox News. “That is what the President is talking about, that is what the President is focused on is dealing with those real threats, and those are real no matter how you look at it.”

When pressed on whether it matters if the video is real, Sanders said reporters were “focusing on the wrong thing.”
“The threat is real,” she said, later adding that “the threat needs to be addressed. The threat has to be talked about and that is what the President is doing in bringing that up.”
So you see terrorists are no longer needed in this country to help drive the Islamophobia……but in case you still cannot see it……
When asked by reporters on Wednesday about President Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim videos, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “what the President is talking about is the need for national security, the need for military spending.”
Her talking points are out of date. The videos are not about “national security” at all. The first supposedly depicts a Muslim migrant beating up a Dutch boy on crutches. (The assailant may have been neither a migrant nor Muslim). The second supposedly shows a Muslim man destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary. It appears to have been filmed in Syria. The third apparently shows an “Islamist mob” pushing “a teenage boy off a roof.” It comes from Egypt. None involves terrorism against the United States or even Europe. None could have been prevented by more “military spending.”
As disgusting as Fearless Fosdick was by retweet these worthless turds of lies…. the outrage was greater in the UK than it was here in the US.  Did you hear anyone from Congress criticize….from the GOP that is?
That is just so sad on so many levels.
WE live in the so-called “Digital Age” and social media is very conducive for the spread of lies and hate….and NO one does it better than Fearless Fosdick……
For many Americans who woke up to President Trump’s tweets Wednesday morning, these videos seemed unduly hateful, and in the case of the video of the boy on the crutches, even fraudulent. (According to Dutch authorities, the assailant was born and raised in The Netherlands.) But for researchers of propaganda, the historical parallels within the videos were more chilling than anything else. There are, they say, just two differences between the German caricatures and the President’s tweets. First, the social media age has given Trump more readers on Twitter than the Der Stürmer or Der Untermensch ever had. And second, we have no way of knowing how this chapter in history will end
Don’t let yourself be fooled by these types of people and their followers……and anyone that retweets their crap is a follower…..they spew nothing but hate…..every word they utter are lies and every thought is hateful.

Fear, The Mind Killer

Once again I have written an op-ed for my friends at the Ace News Room…….Ace is a great source for news….they spend lots of time giving their readers as much info as they can…..they believe an informed world is a better world and I could not agree more.

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Plato “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than ou…

Source: Fear, The Mind Killer

Please stop by Ace if you get the chance….you will not be disappointed….

The Thing We Have to Fear Most is Fear Itself

Where have I heard that before?

My continuing research into terrorism is producing some invaluable insights into the phenom that we are dealing with in the 21st century….Terrorism.

These days with every attack on civilians there is a wealth of media and others that want to spread fear….fear by the way fits in the hands of terrorists perfectly…….the paradigm runs the gambit of who is to blame….

Fear is the best weapon for a terrorist and the next best weapon is ignorance…..and these days there is a wealth of both.

Terrorism is all too real a threat, and mass attacks cause a special kind of fear. Terrorist movements like ISIS kill innocents for the worst of causes and the worst of reasons. They seek to use fear to separate the West from the Muslim world, and to divide the Muslim world and dominate it. They try to use alienated Muslims in the West to create a growing climate of anger and distrust with Europe and the United States. They deliberately seek to get the West to overreact and lash out against all Muslims and Islam, just as they try to use extremism and violence to try to get the populations of Muslim countries to attack their own governments.

They also feed on Western ignorance of Islam, and the fear of new and unfamiliar risks. We in the West have learned to live with most forms of our mortality. We accept the fact that life has a wide range of risks, almost all of which are far more serious than terrorism: Lightning, suicide, traffic, disease, home accidents produce far more deaths than terrorism.

Source: Terrorism: The Thing We Have to Fear Most is Fear Itself | World Affairs Journal

There is way too much regurgitation on terrorism for there to be an understanding by the average person……they are filled with misinformation….not necessarily lies but rather incomplete information that plays into the dialog that some want to have…..the more fear the easier to mold into a the paradigm they want for this country.

I refuse to let Right wing bloggers or scum like Breibart or Alex Jones educate me on terrorism….I even do not trust such rags as NY Times or the WaPo to inform me properly…but then that is me and I have never been one to jump to a conclusion….especially when fear is the subject.

For all the dramatic headlines they generate, ISIS and similar groups are minor players in the scheme of things. Yes, al-Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center and even got a shot at the Pentagon, but it and its mutant offspring never represented an existential threat to the United States and its allies. The most they can do is harass, provoke – and provide a convenient pretext for Western governments to launch military expeditions and extend their powers on the home front.

It is their rhetoric that we seem to fear the most…..and like most rhetorical BS it is mostly….HOT AIR!

What Do You Fear The Most?

I am always fascinated by what we Americans choose to fear……according to some blogs it is creeping socialism (this from a people that have NO idea what socialism is) or possibly the refugees, then there are the immigrants that are stealing thousands of American jobs….or possibly a liberal or for that matter a conservative….my point being is that we Americans are always finding something to fear and the media does its best to feed whatever fear that may be……

But what do we really fear?

Yep, there was a survey to determine this question (there is always a survey or study or poll to help us fear this or that)…….

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—well, that and almost 90 other things. California’s Chapman University last week came out with its second annual Survey of American Fears. The 1,541 adults who were polled were asked about 89 (by our count) fears that fall into what the university describes as four basic categories: personal fears, natural disasters, paranormal fears, and drivers of fear behavior. Participants were asked to assign a number to each fear ranging from 1 (not afraid) to 4 (very afraid), explains the school in a blog post. The following top 10 fears represent those in which the highest percentage of adults said they were “afraid” or “very afraid.”

  1. Corruption of government officials: 58.0%
  2. Cyber-terrorism: 44.8%
  3. Corporate tracking of personal information: 44.6%
  4. Terrorist attacks: 44.4%
  5. Government tracking of personal information: 41.4%
  6. Bio-warfare: 40.9%
  7. Identity theft: 39.6%
  8. Economic collapse: 39.2%
  9. Running of out money in the future: 37.4%
  10. Credit-card fraud: 36.9%

Our top personal anxiety (at No. 17) is reptiles; public speaking comes in at No. 26, with heights just behind at 28; drones occupy No. 46; and we’re more afraid of romantic rejection (No. 76) than we are ghosts (No. 78) and zombies (No. 83). What occupies the final slot? That would be others judging the way we dress, at 4.2%. Full list here.

Now that we have an “official” list……it appears that the majority is not at all afraid of those pesky illegals….of course this report will be wrong simply because it will not feed their hatred and their fear…….

What are you most in fear of happening?  Are you normal or are you out-there?

Ahmed: One Phobia Deserves Another

See what I miss when I am forced to go outside and watch the world go by……

The big news story of the day yesterday was the one about the kid that got busted for making homemade digital clock…..and since his name sounded Muslim it must be a bomb, right?

Xenophobia…..Islamophobia……ain’t America great?

The original report went something like this……

Ahmed Mohamed says it took him only 20 minutes to build the homemade clock: he wired a circuit board and power supply to a digital display and stuffed the device into a pencil case before bed on Sunday. The next day, the 14-year-old freshman at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas—a member of his middle school robotics club who makes radios and repairs his own go-kart—showed his creation to his engineering teacher, hoping to impress him, per the Dallas Morning News. “He was like, ‘That’s really nice,'” but said not to show the clock to other teachers, Ahmed says. When it beeped during another lesson, however, Ahmed revealed his invention to a teacher, who told him it looked like a bomb. Soon, Ahmed tells NBC Dallas police officers arrived, questioned him, then cuffed him and led him to police headquarters for fingerprints, mugshots, and an interrogation.

Officers, who took the clock and Ahmed’s tablet, tell USA Today Ahmed was being “passive aggressive” during questioning, and though he maintained the device was a clock, couldn’t provide a “reasonable answer” for why he had it. “I brought something to school that wasn’t a threat to anyone. I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ahmed says, adding he was denied a phone call to his father and his surname was repeatedly mentioned by officers. “I think this wouldn’t even be a question if his name wasn’t Ahmed Mohamed,” says a rep for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which is investigating, per the BBC. “He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” Ahmed’s father adds. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.” Ahmed was released to his parents and suspended from school for three days. Police say they may still press charges of making a hoax bomb.

You heard it right sports fans…..he could be charged for making a hoax bomb!

Embedded image permalink

This is just the icing on the cake these days……but there are a few good things that came out of this situation for young Ahmed and his home-made time piece….

Ahmed Mohamed was getting interrogated at a police station because he brought a homemade clock to school and it was mistaken for a bomb. But soon, the Texas 14-year-old might be hanging out in some much, much better locations. Three of the high-profile responses after his story went viral:

  • “Cool clock, Ahmed,” President Obama tweeted. “Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”
  • “Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you. Keep building.”
  • As Business Insider reports, astronauts have also been reaching out to the teen (Ahmed was wearing a NASA T-shirt when he was arrested). “Hi @IStandWithAhmed,” tweeted ISS Commander Chris Hadfield. “I’d love you to join us for our science show Generator in Toronto on 28 Oct. There’s a ticket waiting for you.”

Here is the problem…..NO one at the school knew what a bomb actually looks like and that includes the police…..and apparently they are not sure what the internal workings of a digital clock looks like either……

Would this young man had been put through this crap if his name was Billy Bubba Smith?  Or if had blonde hair and blue eyes?

Source: 7 Kids Not Named Mohamed Who Brought Homemade Clocks to School And Didn’t Get Arrested

“Fear is the mind killer”…….Paul Atradies from Caladan……(my moment of geek)

Who Should Americans Fear Most?

The government and the media is traveling a road hand in hand……almost daily we are told of some situation that can fan the fires of fear.  The obvious is ISIS….but there have been many many others like Ebola, vaccinations, lone wolves, illegal immigrants and the beat goes on…….never fear……. (no pun intended)…….. there will be others depending on the news that is chosen to be reported. My question is, since we will be scared into submission, who should we fear the most? Should we fear ISIS?  How about Russia?  Maybe it should be the “Lone Wolf”?  Let’s look beyond the obvious news and think of others……should it be immigrants?  How about the president? It is maybe same sex marriage…….. No, no, wait…..maybe it should be the government?  We Americans are told to fear a lot……and we do. The answer to the question is simple…..they will fear whatever their news source tells them to fear……besides that is what they, the people, want…..they want to be afraid……of something. What they should fear most is that they seldom get the whole truth from the media.  The news is no longer for the information they can provide but rather whatever dialog the government and corporate world wants them to push. It is solely a tool of propaganda. If a person truly wants the truth or at least an unbiased version then they must go hunting for it……the real problem is that the American people do not want the truth but rather news that will validate any view they may have. But they will continue to be fed fearsome stuff that they can lap up and their concerns for safety will change weekly if not daily. We thump our chests and tell everyone that we are afraid of nothing…….but blogs tell a different story…..if you put any faith in them then we as a country are afraid of just about everything. What will be the driving fear of tomorrow?