OT: Scapegoats and M.O.s

[Jones Beene]

"Just the facts, ma'am..." The story of political intrigue you are about to hear is true; only the names haven't been changed to protect the guilty. First... you know the term "scapegoat"...if you are a cynic of politics. The scapegoat was once an actual representative of the genus Capra, originally domesticated in the mountainous areas of the Old World. Once per year a particular goat was separated from his herd and driven off into the wilderness as part of the ceremonies of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Don't feel sorry for this particular goat - his fate was somewhat preferable to what normally happens around Jewish religious events. This whole thing goes back in Judaism to the times of the Temple, before the Romans ravaged the place and Jews became Rome's whipping-boy (i.e.scapegoat) for everything bad happening around the empire. The rite of Atonement is described in Leviticus and is very poignant, but nowadays the word refers to anyone who is falsely blamed for another's failure or misfortunes, often as a way of distracting attention from real causes. It does not need to refer to a person or group these days. In the post-modern NeoCon version of Nazism, which we find being practiced in today's petrocracy - the "scapegoat" is of increasing importance, however - since PC proscribes using a race (at least in public) then usually any (vague but pumped up) threat will suffice, like "terrorism"... or an "overdue" and unpredictable disease, such as this year's Avian flu. Think about it: more people died from bee stings last year in the USA than from terrorism, and yet we have this huge expensive bureaucracy in place to deal with - what? what even a small bit of common sense would have prevented prior to 9/11. You do not need a department of homeland security, if you have enough common sense not to teach illiterate foreigners to fly commercial jets, especially if they don't want to learn how to land them. The popularity of the early TV show "Dragnet" is attested to by a number of items that have become embedded in our pop culture, pretty much as "memes": such as the distinctive "dum-de-dum-dum" opening notes of the theme... Sgt. Joe Friday's rapid-fire, dead-pan-staccato delivery; the somber denial - "The story you are about to hear is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent"; and, of course, Joe's famous one-liner catch-phrase, "Just the facts, ma'am." Forget the implied sexism and the idea that only women are prone to advance emotional details of a stressful event which might distort the evidence... hey, as Joe hissef might say... it's just part of their MO. We also use this Latin phrase MO a lot - approximately translated as "mode of operation," often in science, and even more so - on the 'fringes,' to describe the mechanics of operation of some new or not well-understood phenomenon. It is more often used in police work than science, and especially in mystery writing, to describe a criminal's characteristic patterns and style of work. A modus operandi can be used to narrow down an investigation amongst a group of criminals because for some proven but not well-understood reason, even the smartest criminals get into patterns of conduct - and stay there even after they have been discovered. For example, a con-man may typically use an invented "solution" to a pumped-up problem, whether it be water as a fuel or snake-oil as medicine. If one is clever enough, he can even convince many experts of the validity of his proprietary solution - without many facts. Therefore, if from a group of known criminals, one suspected to have committed a certain scam, then their characteristic MOs can be used to help identify them. A criminal's MO can also be used in profiling, where it can be used to find clues to the perpetrator's psychology - but it also goes on at higher levels - in government, for instance. When a government's leadership is failing and popularity is sinking faster than the proverbial lead balloon - the only MO answer is not ta-da but "dum-de-dum-dum"  - yes the "scapegoat"! This is an MO which has been time-and-again before in politics to divert attention away from high level incompetence and corruption. And no, the Nazi's didn't invent this MO - with the Jews as their scapegoats. Actually Jews had been scapegoats for the previous 2000 years, and the Nazis were only the latest to jump on that MO, which is now déclassé and non-PC, even for NeoCons. Having said all this... I will repost a revised previous message below, which may or may not contain a 30 year-old MO. You can be the your own judge of that. Jones Here is another article on Tamiflu, which although seemingly slanted both ways - towards, and against, our favorite drug-monopoly: Roche - is more balanced than the typical pro-Tam spin: http://tinyurl.com/b88qs But the disguised-spin even here, is the avoidance of the newer evidence, ergo some high level bias is still ingrained. If you want to learn more about the "how-to" of high-level spin... i.e. how you can use "reverse-psychology" to your benefit, and especially the use of "scare tactics," to create either national solidarity or a demand for the very "product" you seem to be "dissing" - there is a collection of the English translations of Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda material, including weekly articles for "Das Reich," online: www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/goebmain.htm Cheney/ Rumsfeld & Co are able-students of this material, and of all reverse psychology ploys ("please don't throw me in the briar patch"). Despite the fact that our Prez, and many for-real Public health experts, warn that the world might be close to a repeat of the flu pandemic of 1918, one wonders if this could instead be closer to the rebirth of an old scapegoat - the 1976 version and soap-opera, now known as the "pandemic that wasn't " ?  That scapegoat didn't work, but as you may remember, it had been designed to unite the country behind its failing leadership, and divert attention away from the horrible economic repercussions of the post-Nam era. That is the year President Gerald Ford announced a crash program to "inoculate every man, woman and child in the United States" against the so-called "swine flu." But the virus never became a killer, more like a late-nite comedy routine for Carson- and eventually vaccinations were halted two months after they began, after reports that 500 people who received the shot developed a paralyzing nerve disease and more than 30 of them died. Ford paid the price when this scapegoat song-and-dance pooped-out. Was it just a training run? Lesson #1 for the sequel of this previous 1976 spin-episode is... ta-da and "dum-de-dum-dum" ... this time we must give the hoi-polloi something which is a bit less potentially harmful (and far financial remunerative). Flu is, after-all the perfect scapegoat - because in any given winter, at least 2 million older citizens will die anyway, flu or not. If their demise is hastened by any agent, then yes, it can be a perfect scapegoat and diversion - when we have the national press firmly in our pocket like no other time since WWII. But if '76 was just a Denzel-Ethan-esque "Training Day", then who is playing Denzel this time around? Curiously ... artist/photog Richard Avedon has a new offering of fine photos out just now, entitled: Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Washington D.C., May 7, 1976 http://tinyurl.com/aw8uy   Coincidental?.. or was 1976 just a training-run for the Rummy grand-finale... I bring up this possibility of a Goebble-esque machination of what could just be another normal flu-season- and the possibility that there now exists a possible "manufactured" scare tactic put firmly in place... not only because of the double Rummy-whammy "coincidental" reappearance in a similar role (and with financial interest this time).. but also in the context of the MO. Normally one might think after such a scapegoat-tactic failed before, it would be irrational to try to revive it. But this is one of those unfathomable questions about human behavior - and in particular about reprehensible behavior: the return of the MO - as even the failed MO often returns - even skipping generations. You fail to march on Baghdad in one generation and your son just has to atone for your failure by marching on Baghdad years later. So-to-speak. If scientists were so very wrong in the previous pandemic scares, like 1976 and the lesser ones before and since, and if the "cure itself" often transmits the (supposedly incapacitated) virus - could they be wrong again? Admittedly not Likely - I know that Tamiflu is not "supposed to" contain any incapacitated virus, but I'm not sure I want to be the volunteer, and the reality is that Tamiflu or any palliative may increase the virulence of Avian anyway (read the "mutation-time" explicatory logic below). Maybe that is why the "planners and spinners" had previously chosen a foreign middleman company (should things go wrong). BTW did you notice that Roche itself may have been carefully picked-out, among all possible drug companies, to handle being the middle-man for Gilead - because of its location? Not that the royalty checks will go into a hidden Swiss bank account, or anything like that. Some arguments being made about "why" a pandemic is looming now - echo those made three decades ago. But many experts with big-Gov and CDC say the situation now is different enough - that a "false alarm" is less likely. I think they are probably correct and that a possible behind the scene manipulation, by someone's spin-machine is an comparatively "unlikely" scenario. However, it is not so unlikely that it should not even be mention - especially in the context of MO.   Anyway, "We just know a lot more about the influenza virus than we did in 1976," said Ira M. Longini Jr., a professor at Emory University who is an expert on epidemics. Still, a lot can be learned both from what did and did not happen back then. The 1976 scare started in February when a handful of soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey got sick and one of them died. IOW it was based on a military threat and that may point to a disguised source. Scientists determined that the virus was one that infected pigs and was different from the human influenza viruses circulating then. The details are eerily similar to today's situation with a 30 year fast forward. But one reason for the previous concern was that scientists thought the 1918 pandemic had been caused by a swine virus, and that the Fort Dix outbreak marked its second coming. Furthermore, experts warned that pandemics tended to be cyclical and that another one was about due. Yup, cyclical and past due. Has a nice ring to it and a cachet of believability. And an MO depends on "believability" and on short memories. Today, thanks to genetic analysis - a technique not available in 1976 - scientists know the 1918 virus was a bird virus that mutated. But yet there is still the "vector" thing involving swine and timing. You see, most scientists agree that swine can be infected by either the avian virus, or the human virus - BUT, and this is a key point - the swine who can catch both types seldom die from either - instead they harbor it, sleep more, and give it time to mutate. They usually do not succumb to the illness - only allow it to become much more virulent for humans.   Curiously, this is the same exact thing that would happen if a certain palliative medicine did not cure the disease but allowed human workers to miss few sick-days. IOW about the same thing happens when some folks get Tamiflu, and others do not because of cost or it and its partial effectiveness as a palliative. They return to work sooner, and have more exposure time to give it to those who may be more at risk, and in any case - allow the virus longer to mutate. We might be better off as a society with no palliative at all. So now, there is concern that the H5N1 avian strain ravaging birds in Asia could in like fashion evolve into a form that can spread easily among porkers and then people, after proper time for mutation in one or the other. It is indeed cynical to think that, in some circles at least, that this outcome of many deaths is actually better than just taking the blame for a failed war. But that is a possibility, which even if unlikely, should not be overlooked.   The avian strain already shows some mutations similar to those in the 1918 virus, said Jeffery K. Taubenberger of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. And experts are again warning that the world is overdue for a pandemic. Is this part of the Rumsflu spin, or no? Edwin M. Kilbourne, a professor emeritus at New York Medical College who argued for the vaccination program in 1976, said there was actually less reason to be concerned about a pandemic today. That is because the swine flu virus at Fort Dix clearly passed easily from person to person, while the current avian flu has not. Is that part of the reverse psychology Rumsflu counter-spin, or no? Many experts disagree with either characterization, however. In retrospect, they say, the 1976 decision to vaccinate was based on zero solid evidence, and may have been influenced by political realities.  "Part of the problem was convictions outpacing evidence," said Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, and co-author of "The Epidemic That Never Was," a book about the 1976 experience. "I don't think that's happening today," he adds. Well, with all due respect Harvey, can you ditch the political naiveté have you read the revised script, and seen the cast for this sequel of "Training Day" 1976?