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Note: for some links on recent developments in cold fusion, please see my last diary,
Cold Fusion Course at MIT Last Month; Enviros and Fossil Fuel Junkies BOTH pretend not to notice
“Controlling the public mind”, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, involves framing debates, limiting them so that options undesired by the elite class get scant mention, or no mention, at all. And God forbid that taboo viewpoints get serious, detailed discussion.
It’s not enough to control Mainstream Media – some things need to be kept out of what’s called the “alternative media”. You need gatekeepers on the left, and also on the right, if you’re serious about duping the public, on a continual basis. Elites want “full spectrum dominance” of their preferred memes (including “loyal opposition”, veal pen compatible memes), and have been very successful at getting what they want.
On the ideologically right side of the spectrum, yours truly found out that ALEC is something that right wing talking heads do not talk about. From my diary Progressives are Stupid if they don’t seize their opportunity to educate their Republican neighbors:
Basically, there is no mention of ALEC as a suspicious entity, which betrays the public interest. ALEC is mostly just mentioned as the source of a quote. Moreover, it’s rarely mentioned at all (even in passing). Below are the hit counts:
michellemalkin.com: 2 hits
RushLimaugh.com 4 hits
Hannity.com 4 hits
Only one of the links explained what ALEC is, in any detail, and this was by a member of the Hannity forum, on page 7 of a forum thread, not by Hannity or his staff.
As to the ideological left side of the specturm: The graph on this page, regarding funding flows, was originally at leftgatekeers.com, which doesn’t exist any more (though the URL resolves to some unrelated website). Take a look, please.
Here’s the results of my lefty website survey, re “cold fusion”:
thenation.com (just 1 reference – a negative analogy
rawstory.com only passing references as analogies; all seem negative (e.g.: “The Navy has a ways to go to make that laser into a useful weapon. At this rate, they’re sure to have it before cold fusion invented.”)
dailykos.com Many hits (I didn’t check front-pager vs. community contributor)
democracynow.org 0 hits
350.org apparently 1 main hit at http://350.org/en/node/26077 ; numerous links back to this page by listings, such as this http://350.org/fr/oct10/reports/26797?page=20&order=created&sort=desc&country=&city=
truthout.org 3 hits, none substantial; 2 were from commenters; only 1 – a comment – was positive: “As for solar and wind power, if we had spent as much effort and money on those technologies, as well as geothermal power, energy saving technologies, even cold fusion for that matter, we’d be doing just fine.”
Honorable mention goes to dailykos – please remember that next time you’re tempted to bad mouth it as totally without redeeming social value. In spite of it’s considerable warts, it’s at least allowing un-elitist memes to be presented.
14 Comments
The Great Orange Satan allows open postings.
But when special interests show up with team-shill strategies, the “moderation” effort breaks down.
That has been repeated with NRA, the big coal interests attacking nuclear power, and China’s efforts to malign critics of the 3,000,000-murder “Cultural Revolution.”
Organized Far Right intrusions can make dailykos all but useless.
They have an active NRA-lover group called “RKBA” that set about clicking the HIDE icons on opponents for month after month. It took the Newtown massacre to get them to lower their level of intrusion.
The site, itself, never did a damn thing. “RKBA” drove out scores of normal pro-democrat left-center people.
Of course no web site is perfect.
Dailykos may indeed be allowing nonelitist memes but its a veal pen. They refuse to allow it’s membership to even discuss engaging in an action that allows them to support anything other than the Democratic establishment choices. It’s something I have found particularly amusing since they have no problem utilizing an Independant like Sanders to fundraise for their veal pen. Additionally, you don’t hear them excoriating the Democratic Party for using third parties to thwart activists like they did with Lieberman or with the Democratic candidate in Maine. It’s only activists that are locked into the Democrats suck less paradigm.
For sure. I think blogs can be better constructed to make moderation and justified filtering easier, and lessen the temptation (and possibly need) to ban people, completely. My thoughts on this subject: Improving Blog Mechanics, to Cut Down on Trolling and Irrationality
Sure, no argument from me that, overall, it’s a veal pen.
I’m a little skeptical of this statement.
So, the lessons of your post seem to be: 1) The left is the real enemy of the left and/or progressivism, as opposed to the right; and 2) The right doesn’t mention ALEC just as the left doesn’t mention cold fusion, presumably because they don’t want people to know about either of the two things.
As for 1, this is the usual obvious and silly Koch-inspired libertard theorism meant to gratuitously demean the left. As for 2, there is a glaringly obvious difference: ALEC actually exists, and in fact is quite common.
I did love that now you’re approvingly associating yourself with a bit of the thinking of Noam Chomsky. It certainly might give the illusion to the uninitiated that you’re a lefty of some kind. Wink wink, nudge nudge, old boy.
No. Co-optation is about leaders misleading. The media are ‘thought leaders’. It’s the corrupted left leaders who are the enemy of the left.
Saying “as opposed to” sets up a strawman. Not only is it possible for righties to be the enemies of lefties, it is also possible that corrupted left leaders are simultaneously the enemies of lefties.
By “lefties” I mean, of course, the left base that actually wants to realize changes in the world, rather than just feel a little better by complaining, engaging in some designed-to-fail activism, etc..
Of course, the right thought leaders whose websites I investigated – Limbaugh, Hannity, and Malkin – don’t want their followers to know about ALEC. Also, faux Democrats who are down with the ALEC agenda don’t have any motivation to educate about ALEC, either. When you consider that about 90% of legislators who are known to have associated with ALEC are Republican, and thus, that unaffiliated Dems could have a field day with ALEC and mostly scored points (from the Dem vs. Repub perspective), the fact that Democrats did not undertake a massive education program should tell us something about those silent Dems.
See my diary, How you, too, can figure out that Obama betrays the 99%, and works for the 1%, first and foremost.
I haven’t gotten around to checking those same righty websites for serious treatment of cold fusion, but when I do, I’m expecting them not to have mentioned it, either.
Well Done Meta from Mars. You set up your false equivalence in the the title. Damn lefties, especially Fat Al Gore are the cause of all the world’s problems.
And we have the lefties not being seerius about “Cold Fusion”. But Metamars is seerius. That is so typical. I will tell you how to win this battle because the Scientific Establishment has persecuted you for so long. If you want to prove Cold Fusion, then prove it in a lab. Then you will be famous and rich.
You are part of “Full Spectrum Dominance”. You try to spread disinformation about the sustainable energy sources. You provide nonsense such as Cold Fusion. You ignore the most obvious source, solar energy coupled with a hydrogen fuel cells. That is because you are a Koch Roach.
Metamars did find at least one lefty website, that still allows freedom of speech, Daily Kos. Lots of laughs about that.
Partly correct:
More Correct, I believe:
Hydrogen fuel cells are one form of energy storage. One that has been promising for so long, its sell by date is probably expired.
Cold Fusion is as likely as birth control based on the rhythm method.
I notice that there is not report on what the actual cold fusion content of the MIT independent study course was. Nor any indication about when cold fusion is deployable as a technology. But it seems that Mitchell Swartz looms large in this. Is there no YouTube of his presentation at MIT?
Frank33 is the author of the following, confused, vile, verbal vomit:
You never fail to prove that you are a shill for our criminal energy barons who hold us hostage. But, if you just repeat stuff from the Ghosts of Internets Past, that also proves you are a boring fool.
I have a quote from you.
You are such a victim and you lost ONE MILLION DOLLARS! What could you contribute to the world that is worth one million dollars? So some evil lefty took your money because you were involved in politics.
What a joke you are. Thousands of people are genuine victims of US Government COINTELPRO because they oppose wars and oppose corrupt energy cartels. Full Spectrum Dominance is used against whistleblowers against the wars and against Occupy. And you claim to be a victim of the scientific establishment
Catapult your toxic COINTELPRO elsewhere.
I think that Metamars was born in the wrong century. He would have had a great career as a Snake Oil salesman in a traveling show in the 1800s.
He probably would have graduated from Snake oil to Rainmaker since it required the most advanced scientific equipment of the day.
Cold fusion? WTF? It’s like “ALEC”? Really? Think it’s time to find a better discussion point. This post makes no sense.
First of all, if you’re not willing to look at the cold fusion references I provided, in the linked-to diary, there’s no point in trying to have a discussion with you about it’s lack of visibility in the media. There’s no reason why I should be the least bit interested in a hearing what anybody has to say about a subject they essentially know nothing about.
ALEC serves the plutocracy/corporatocracy. Its ‘work’ is better done out of the limelight, and not only is the mainstream media complying with that, so is the right wing media.
Ignoring or demonizing cold fusion also serves the plutocracy. True to form, most the left gatekeepers are keeping lefties ignorant of the cold fusion possibilities. Left gatekeepers also serve the plutocracy – they are the constrained opposition, though Mike Ruppert prefers to refer to them as “the lilly livered Left”. Passionate guy, that Ruppert.
I haven’t developed this argument much, but it should be obvious that carbon free, dirt cheap energy that doesn’t involve piping tar sands goo, or drilling under phenomenal pressures at the bottom of ocean, doesn’t serve Big Oil’s interests. (And Big Oil’s “interests” are bound up with viability of the US government, itself, via petro-dollars.)
Of course, if Big Oil ends up owning cold fusion technology, then it won’t much matter. They’ll bury it, or release it in dribs and drabs. Which is why the development by Japanese auto companies should concern you.
I’ve known since I was a 17 year old freshman in college that Big Auto was suppressing energy saving technology. That means there’s some kind of ‘arrangement’ with Big Oil. I very recently learned that the electric battery patents used for the cars in the “Who killed the electric car?” documentary were sold to oil interests.
I don’t know if Japanese auto companies are similarly concerned about Big Oil’s financial interests, but why should we even depend on their situation? Where are the Greens when you need them? Didn’t Al Gore tell us that fate of the earth hangs in the balance? What about those horrifying “tipping points”?
The US government doesn’t need Japanese auto companies to mega-fund cold fusion, on it’s own, and donate the patents to all of humanity.
It will do no such thing, in part because there’s no pressure from a Green Veal Pen or co-opted Left, to do so. See, e.g., my diary World Temperature Records in 2012 and the Green Veal Pen