If one picks almost any issue found in the contemporary political system in the United States, the motives of one component of the process either support it or oppose it because of ulterior antecedents - to say it differently by motives which they openly deny having.  I have cited many examples of this in the past.  For Health Insurance Reform see Health Care, Race and Treachery and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon: A Case Study of Greed and Exploitation; examples on Climate Change include Polar Bear Story, Globally Warm - After 2050 and The Waters of Puget Sound.  There really are too many examples to mention but the range of issues goes from Foreign Policy and issues like war and peace to partisan political attacks against elected officials that are disconcerting and in some cases the collective insanity expressed is frightening. It just couldn't happen here could it?

The United States today is one of the few advanced technological countries where a significant portion of the population reject science, scientific research and the scientific method itself as bogus.  Creationism is one example and the denial of evidence supporting Global Warming is another.  The beliefs of Creationism are founded on ignorance while denial of the observable evidence supporting Global Warming is based on entrenched economic interests that see the acceptance of data supporting Global Warming as a threat, that is, a threat to their economic class.  See, for example, my article The Already Wealthy.  

Denial of reality is a part of the overall rejection of scientific research.  As Dana Milbank observed,

It must be very lonely being the last flat-earther.  Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill -- the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee -- turncoats! -- made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe's view that man-made global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

That’s fine but evidence to the contrary just keeps rolling in.

The decade of the 2000s is very likely the warmest decade in the modern record, dating back 150 years, according to a provisional summary of climate conditions near the end of 2009, the organization said. The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s and so on,” said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, speaking at a news conference at the climate talks in Copenhagen. The international assessment largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Climatic Data Center and NASA in the United States, both of which independently estimate global and regional temperature and other weather trends.

To follow the process of denial of facts to where it logically ends produces ideological inconsistencies.  Such inconsistencies both lead to and originate from a mechanism of behavior which frames the world strictly in terms of outcome. Kant rejects this idea, according to Kant, good outcomes could result from accident.  The reason Kant didn't accept this is found in his belief regarding categorical imperatives.

(1) Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law.  (2) Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.  (3) Act as though you were, through your maxims, a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.

To Kant, what was good is as much defined by intent as by action, that is to say, action is preceded by "good" intent.  Personal motives were not considered as a valid justification for action.  Only universal intent is considered. 

This is still relevant now.  One political party is attempting to follow these precepts today with the other is intent on playing the role of obstructionist and use the fears and uneducated beliefs of the masses as a base to exploit.  What they are attempting to gain is, shall we say, unclear. As C. Wright Mills noted in The Higher Immorality:

There is no virtue in starting out poor and becoming rich. Only where the ways of becoming rich are such as to require virtue or to lead to virtue does personal enrichment imply virtue. In a system of cooptation from above, whether you began rich or poor seems less relevant in revealing what kind of (person) you are when you have arrived than in revealing the principles of those in charge of selecting the ones who succeed.

Those opposing the majority party and its ideas today in the United States have arrived where they are by negating the formulation by Kant and gladly accepting what Mills calls The Higher Immorality.   Clearly careers are made and great wealth has been accumulated in the process of cooptation without discernable virtue.

Is this the kind of political system a majority of Americans want or is it only a small number who hold great wealth and power that sustain this system?  A better question would be do most Americans truly understand - or care - how it does or, increasingly, doesn't  function? 

Take Global warming.  Many feel that Global Warming is a hoax perpetrated in a conspiracy by those who oppose the continued use of fossil fuel energy sources. 

If they are wrong and Global Warming is real, the following describes what could occur in the United States.  

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.

Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human induced emissions of heat-trapping gases.)

2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.

Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow.

3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.

Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change.

4. Climate change will stress water resources.

Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage.

5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.

Many crops show positive responses to elevated carbon dioxide and low levels of warming, but higher levels of warming often negatively affect growth and yields. Increased pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production.

6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.

Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected.

7. Risks to human health will increase.

Harmful health impacts of climate change are related to increasing heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Reduced cold stress provides some benefits. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts.

8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.

Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone.

9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.

There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected.

10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.

The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable.

Enough on global warming?   It is then easy to conclude that the U.S. government because of the obstructionist minority, has turned its institutions into a non-functional entity.  Needed legislation is becoming more difficult to get enacted as in the case of the Senate, a feeble 1% of its members can prevent legislation from passing.

And even more profound perhaps is that a sizable percentage of the public doesn't have a problem with that.   In many ways, they could be looked at as the cause.  When lunatic fringe legislators continue to be elected based on the paranoid fears in their constituents they exploit, it is little wonder that important issues that face the United States as well as concerns that endanger the entire planet are subjected to the moral equivalent of carpet bombing.  I’ve delineated specific cases of this elsewhere.

There are three issues facing the United States right now that should be seen through a lens of consensus.  One is global warming and climate change.  The second is health care reform and the third is continuing high levels of unemployment in the U.S. economy. 

Yet it isn't happening.  There is no consensus, there are elected members of the U.S. Congress who deny the problems that face the entire planet.  The U.S. is alone in that regard, every other country, even developing countries, have leaders that recognize the threat;  this denial of reality is rooted either in mental illness or ulterior motives.   Just to be clear, the largest "ulterior motive" there can be is individual wealth and a person or legislator who has individual wealth will go to unbelievable extremes to preserve it.

The same can be said regarding health care reform as many members of the U.S. Senate represent corporations instead of the American citizens they are obligated to serve who happen to lack adequate heath care and whose lives that are shortened as a consequence.

The third issue is unemployment.  The opposition to this is predominantly ideological.  Their problem is the failure to grasp the most elemental concepts of state capitalism.  They still think about “free markets” although the individual most responsible for its resurgence over the past 30 years has recanted much of what he professed during that time.  To deal with unemployment, the U.S. economy requires additional public sector spending as a stimulus to the lagging growth in jobs.

The obvious conclusion is that there is a reality denying culture in the United States, unwilling to face problems that could affect their lives; additionally there are reality denying politicians whom they elect.   The largely belong to a single party, a party whose members do not want to solve problems - even when it was their neglegence that created them.  Thus when something like public sector spending to create jobs is advanced, they present a halucinary diatribe about the federal deficit. 

The problem though is that the U.S. Government is unable to act with any degree of urgency on these and other issues because of the relatively small number of  people who continue to be reelected whose chief contribution after taking office is to oppose any kind of change.  Change in the status quo, even in a crisis where all else has failed, is viewed as undesirable and usually labeled as a threat to entrenched interests.  And many Americans are so ignorant  and uninformed to believe this propaganda. 

The equating of anything the federal government is involved in as "socialist" is an example.  One wonders how these people continue to survive?  Generation after generation they continue to fight a battle that has ended everywhere else in the modern world.

Well there is a simple way to put an end to this and reduce the deficit and stimulate job growth at the same time: increase a broad range of taxation primarily on the very wealthy.  A good idea would be to force corporations that contribute to global warming and exploit the environment in other ways out of existence through aggressive taxation and direct expropriation of capital. The funds obtained through the expropriation of capital from those corporations that have acquired great wealth by destroying life should be used to eliminate poverty in the United States and the rest should go to helping the so-called developing nations retrieve the wealth that was taken from them through centuries of imperialistic exploitation.

Is this likely to happen?  No and that is the point.  While everything I've detailed is easily proven to be true, it can also be easily denied by many and since there aren't immediate consequences, everything will just continue on as it has.  Nothing changes when reality can be plausibly denied. 

But this can go on for only so long.   At some point  the physical consequences of what is real are going to become evident to everyone.  

Bcause of that I'm glad that I was born when I was and probably won't be around when all of the really negative consequences of corporate fascism begin to occur.  Some folks though have created a time capsule for future generations.  It is in the video I've attached.  It is more of an apology than anything but unless many things change in the next 30 years, the future may not be in a terribly forgiving mood.

When I first posted this on Flickr in July 2008,  I said that I expected criticism for the content from right-wing elements of the American political spectrum.  The picture of the Polar Bear family that I had on Flickr brought personal attacks against me.  I think I mentioned at the time that I was called a lot of names and was accused of wanting to cause “millions of Americans” to lose their jobs because of my concern about polar bears.  Weird, there is no connection, these are crazy ideas!  This brought in the whole right-wing oil drilling lobby.  I said nothing about drilling for oil but all of these "oil drillers" were saying on my photo of Polar Bears that I was advocating such a policy.  This is totally off the wall.  And the attacks became personal and threatening.  After the final one, I was feed up with it and I placed the following statement on my Polar Bear picture on Flicker:

IT IS NOT POSSIBLE THAT THREE ALMOST IDENTICAL PIECES OF RIGHT-WING PROGANDANDA COULD BE PLACED ON MY SITE BY THREE DIFFERENT INDIVIDUALS BY COINCIDENCE. 

After I put this on the Polar Bear Family picture,  the next morning my Flickr account and all the photos on it had been deleted.   This will never be allowed to occur again.  If it did, there wouldn't be a Flickr remaining to post hate comments on.    Believe it or not. 

People who aren’t familiar with U.S. politics don’t understand that there are extreme right-wing groups here.  The American Nazi Party for example; The KKK; so-called Christian Fundamentalist extremists.   They stalk and kill people.  I had to protect myself, my wife and property.  They must have some high-level connections with flickr to get this done.  Flickr allowed them to put threatening and right-wing political propaganda on my photos.  I never put anything on anyone else’s photos.  If I were to decide between keeping polar bears alive and these humans alive, good bye humans, it's been interesting to know you.  So don't give my any grief about polar bears attacking human beings.  When I count the votes the bears have it.

The original story is below.
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I had a picture of a female polar bear and her two cubs standing on an iceberg in the middle of the Arctic Ocean looking across the open sea for…something which didn’t seem to be there.  I decided to put this on flickr and add some comments.  This is going to be the story of what happened to me after I did that.

These were the first comments I made with the picture:

This image consists of a polar bear family which includes a mother and two cubs. Unfortunately polar bears aren't good swimmers when far from shore and many are becoming isolated on the sea ice as seen here. When they are forced to swim to another portion of sea ice or to shore over the open sea, they frequently drown. The mother drowns and her cubs drown.

[To suggest differently would be analogous to asking the Project Mercury astronauts to fly the Apollo 8 spacecraft to the moon and return safely to earth. Such geniuses some of you are. It is amazing how ideological bias warps rational thought. There is a reference I cite below which documents that the bodies of drown Polar Bears and being found in the Arctic Ocean at this point in time.]

During summer and in general, the sea ice is receding in the Arctic. This means the bears have to go further north to locate their primary food source, other marine mammals. So when the sea ice melts, as it now is doing (the reason doesn't matter, it is simply an observable fact), the bears are trapped on the ice with no way to get back to land. The end result is that polar bears are finding it more difficult to locate their primary food source. Among other things, this leads to lower birth weights. Unlike some other bears in the Arctic, polar bears do not hibernate in winter so they require food the entire year.

Right now, the future for polar bears does not look too good. If current trends in global warming continue and sea ice recedes more and more, they could be extinct in 20 years.

Then I provided some excellent video links featuring polar bears.   A very young polar bear cub and mirror.   While it is probably lonely for its mother in a zoo, its natural habitat is also becoming threatening to its existence.   The good news is that this cub has grown up and has quite healthy desire for food.

I received a lot of favorable responses to this which the members of the hate groups could read before the comments were deleted by someone in Flickr.  I mean, I guess they can read. 

There were a few problems that some people had though.  So I had to reply to this.  So I made my first effort at responding to the criticisms of what you see above engendered.

I don't want to take the focus away from the issue of Polar Bears as an endangered species, I'm putting these comments separately.  When I undertook this project I expected to receive criticism from the vested interests who have for so long denied the existence of global warming and the threat to polar bears if the Arctic sea ice melts.  Especially so if the addiction to carbon based fuels is a primary cause of global warming and the disappearing sea ice in the Arctic. Some of it has gotten pretty insulting, vulgar and obscene. 

One person in particular has told me that polar bears are "great swimmers" and would have “no problem” swimming over miles and miles of open sea to travel from sea ice to shore or one portion of sea ice to another.  So maybe they shouldn't be on the endangered species list at all. The guy said they “have the same DNA as brown bears.”  I think he is a little over his head on this one and maybe confusing me with Barry Scheck the human DNA expert who solves crimes, I don’t know.

To me relevance is lacking here.  Even if this is true, so what?  Brown bears live in much lower latitudes and their diet consists mainly of fish.  Salmon to be exact, which they find in rivers, not oceans. Furthermore they hibernate in winter.  The whole point was the “brown bears and polar bears swim... a little or sometimes a lot, it really doesn't matter.  And they have the same DNA?!?”  Oh wow, I didn’t know about that DNA thing.  Thanks so much for passing that info along.  So back to melting sea ice.  Is some creatures’ DNA involved in that?  Is this like a missing installment from the X-Files maybe? 

In any event, maybe polar bears can just evolve into something like a whale and swim through all the world's oceans. Oh… swimming along the shore is not the same as navigating over dozens and dozens of miles of open sea.   When polar bears swim, it is for usually for relatively short distances along the shore although at times healthy adults do swim over long distances of open sea water.  They are a very intelligent and resourceful species.  However the title of the article says a lot.  Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts.

Another issue that seems appropriate to bring to the table now is what is diminishing oil supplies, leading to huge increases in the price of oil and concomitant oil exploration in risky places just to keep gigantic profits for oil companies and investors, doing to you  and your ability to live a comfortable and secure life with a future for your children.  Just what is “national security”; if citizens have to burn their furniture to keep from freezing to death in the winter? 

I've also been called a lot of nasty names because of the picture I posted with these comments.  Here are the facts on that:  I took the picture with my camera.  It is on my website and everything that is on my website, the entire site, photographs and content, is copyright 1999-2008 Barry K. Wright. If you read my Flickr profile, the same provisions apply to what I choose to present there and this is on record with the Library of Congress of the United States. 

Because of what has happened, I am saying nothing more about my image sources other than I have never made this public and do not intend to do so.  Anyone who doesn't like that can deal with the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.  Actually this controversy with an oil company front or someone who is insanely jealous of me has just made the issues more clear to everyone.  And you know, you may think I’m stretching things in the previous sentence, but when I looked more into the background of the person who said it, I’m 100% sure I’m not.  He’s pretty strange, I did a lot of looking to formulate that.

I thought that was it, I wouldn’t have to deal with any more strangeness.  I was wrong.

The next time I looked at my polar bear content I saw that someone was asking me to sign a petition. He put a link to this petition as a comment in my polar bear content.  The verbiage seemed like the subject line from spam email.  “You need to sign this petition.” 

Oh really... Well my first thought was that it would be something reflecting my own views and those of everyone else who had commented with the one exception duly noted. But when I read it, it was advocating more drilling for oil in the United States saying that this would lower the price of gasoline at the pumps and save Americans money. Well if I'm not mistaken, that is the exact position of the oil drilling interests we all know so well.  I don’t want to mention names but let’s see former VP of the U.S.(the totally insane one) , the former President of the U.S., and a major party candidate for President of the U.S.  That would be John McCain as this was originally written before the 2008 presidential election.  In any event, everyone knows these guys right? Good, then I don’t need to mention any more names as doing so is sickening as one is forced to recall the damage they caused to all life on this planet. 

Can you believe it, these people actually watch network television and this is one of the propaganda agencies they watch:

Wow, just imagine what Hilter could have done with Fox News. 

Anyway this guy asking me to sign the petition must have really thought I was as gullible as a photo I was using then for my Flickr "Buddy Icon."  Actually that picture is me when I was much younger.  I can tell you that I wasn’t gullible then either.  And after that picture was taken, my parents sent me to college where I earned an undergraduate and graduate degree at a time that “Phoenix” was only something from Greek Mythology and a city in Arizona.  Get my point?

I had to answer this and spend some more time typing in order to do so.  This is what I said:

No, don't you understand? Drilling for oil, using carbon based fuels, buying cars that burn lots of gas, this is the problem and is a strategy for losers. You've got to break the cycle and move to alternate energy ASAP. Just how long do you think oil is going to last? There were studies in the 1970s that said the world was going to run out of oil sometime in the 21st Century.

Regardless you surely don't think prices at the pump will go down if we drill for more oil? Our military uses the most oil of any single entity. So do you want more wars? Ongoing wars? Decades and decades of wars? No prices aren't going down, the oil companies control prices and they like them high like they are now because they are now recording the most gigantic profits in their history. Why don't you read the news and become informed before you open your mouth?

Anyway this has to end. The United States has to become energy independent and move to an energy economy that isn't based on fossil fuels. Perhaps you don't believe there really are fossils so to put it differently, it's that black liquid stuff that is deep underground. Sorry but that's the only option other than more suffering and death. If you enjoy that sort of thing, maybe you should see a doctor. Personally I'm not into that at all and I'm also not interested in reading any more of your political propaganda. So keep it off my site.

If you had read my profile before putting your politically charged comments attacking me about this, you would know that what you said is now off my site.

It is really convoluted logic to claim that diminishing sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is responsible for gasoline prices in the United States reaching an historical high. Without even mentioning a cause of diminishing sea ice, if one opposes continued oil drilling for what might be a totally unrelated reason to melting ice, I was accused of wanting to hurt poor Americans who can't pay that $4+ a gallon for their weekly (semi-weekly??) gasoline fix.

However here is news all over again. As I said above drilling for oil is a strategy for losers. Want me to say it again? Drilling for oil is a strategy for losers.

Why is that?  Well the world is running out of oil (saying it differently would be there isn't much oil left anywhere) and even if we do nothing, and let all the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melt, let Polar Bears become an extinct species and coincidentally allow the mean temperature of the earth to continue on an upward trend - none of this - will cause the planet's supply of oil to increase or lower its price per barrel. Nope, not a nickel lower. There is no connection between those events. It's the oil companies that are making the huge profits because the price of gasoline is so high. And right now the oil companies are setting the price of gasoline pretty much wherever they want. They still want to keep you hooked of course, they don't want you to get too wise.

And before someone got onto another political agenda binge, I said that I'm not a big fan of Ethanol or "clean coal" (sic) either. Ethanol at least doesn't require drilling under the ground, so it should be less expensive to obtain. It needs more research though and that is the whole point of doing an energy independency study: what are the best alternatives to Fossil Fuel? Supposedly Dick Cheney did that with his oil company comrades in 2001 but the end result was an energy de-independency study. I hope you’ve enjoyed the past 8 years.

Yeah, that's what I said, just go back and read it again.   Here is a like to the story on Flickr.  And for this logical reasoning, I've was called all kinds of names by (1) people who have an authoritarian personality complex with all its derivatives; or (2) people who find the established science of biology too complex to comprehend which no doubt causes them great discomfort when trying to fall asleep after a hard day’s work. These people mean nothing to me now.

I'm going to offer a second opinion. And here it is suggested that political partisanship might be another factor causing these people to do this.   Ahh yes, Driller Instinct.

For some time this entire article was published in world wide media and is now on Facebook as well as several other places that I'm not obligated to reveal.  To put it simply: it isn't going to disappear and neither am I.