PROFITS OF CONSPIRACY

 

I am tired of reading about willfully stupid humans, such as the well education and well intentioned  drones at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. For decades the LRC was mired in intellectual orthodoxy and mediocrity, investigating what you would expect and discovering what you would expect.. Then in 1982 a 2 ½ year old bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi shattered their academic ethos. 

 Bonoboos look like chimpanzees and like humans they mate all year long, But Bonoboos do it five or six times a day. And whenever they get nervous or bored.  Which makes it amazing that Kanzi ever found the time to think up what he thought up.  Using American Sign language, which he had picked up from his mother, Kanzi spontaneously signed “marshmallow” and then “fire”. Given matches and marshmallows by the obliging staff - thank God he didn't ask for fissionable material -  Kanzi gathered twigs, struck a match (above) and set the wood to burning. 

Next he jammed a stick into a marshmallow (above), which he then toasted and gleefully ate. What the humans finally learned from this “Noah Chimp-anski” was that language is not about syntax, its about communication. The revelation changed their whole scientific process...for a time.

Then, long after Kanzi had retired to a farm in Iowa, the humans in Atlanta appear to have fallen back into their academic lethargy, as they recently released a study indicating that apes not only think about food, but they also think about thinking about food. 

To the humans with degrees this is “metacognation” or big thinking   As one of the two directors of the experiment explained, “There has been an intense debate in the scientific literature in recent years over whether metacognition is unique to humans.”  This was the statement which convinced me that homo-sapains are still in search of a clue. And the clue that occurred to me was the element Flourine.

 

The nine electrons of Flourine are the bonoboo ape of the periodic table,  eager to share its electrons with any other element.  It took 74 years to purify and isolate Flourine because it bonds with whatever container you put it in, corroding right through it. Even when finally isolated the pale yellow gas desperately bonds to itself – which is why it is called a diatomic. This hunger to mate made Flourine an industrial wunderkind, transferring wanted qualities from one compound to others. It is essential for the smelting of metals. It is the F, in CFC, once used in cooling systems. And when you hit the button on a spray can, there's still a good chance the effective material that jets out, is being carried on some isotope of Flourine.

Flouride is one of those isotopes, one electron short of its parent Flourine, making it twice as eager to bond with any available electron, even ones already happily married - as when six atoms of Florine mate with two atoms of hydrogen already bonded to a sodium atom or to a single atom of chloride. And those are the two most common chemicals, hexafluorosilicic acid and hexafluorosilicate, used in water fluoridation in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control, also in Atlanta, calls drinking water fluoridation "one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century.” And yet there are some humans who call it a government intrusion, and even spreading poison. To which I am inclined to respond by screeching and throwing my poo at them.

Yes, Flouride is toxic. And toxic is always bad. Just remember that salt, which is vital to your survival, is made up of sodium and chlorine, both of which are extremely toxic. And drinking salt water will quickly kill you. Fresh water, on the other hand, is good for you, unless you are drowning. Sugar gives you energy, but is toxic to a diabetic. Eat enough sugar and you will become diabetic. Toxic is a level of consumption, not an absolute. Flouride is toxic in anything over moderate amounts. But at minimal levels, it is a powerful weapon against tooth decay. 

Areas in Colorado with naturally occurring Flouride in their drinking water had lower rates of tooth decay, which is why it occurred to late 19th century doctors to suggest adding Floride to public water supplies. And stopping tooth decay turns out to also be a defense against heart attacks. It is now clear that some heart problems are not cause only by fat blockages, but also by a virus which grows in your mouth. So adding Floride to public water supplies is a public health measure that costs the average American family less than a dollar a year. But try telling any of that to a libertarian, and you are liable to get a riacin tainted post card from hell. And that is what I really want to talk about – the politics and the profits of conspiracy.  

Any discussion of American conspiracy theories over the last 100 years, must include a mention of Robert Henry Wineborn Welch, Jr. (above).  

This North Carolina native invented the “Sugar Daddy”, a 40 gram hunk of Carmel on a stick, 24 grams of which are sugar. The confection made Mr. Welch very rich, which predisposed him to believe anyone suggesting that sugar caused tooth cavities must be a dirty stinking anti-capitalist communist agent. 

So naturally the political organization which Welch founded, “The John Birch Society”, saw fluoridation of the nation's water supply as a communist mind control plot. Lots of people wanted to believe in that conspiracy. Millions still do, including a profit driven con man named Robert Kennedy junior.  But the first man who made millions of dollars propagating that myth was Robert Welch (above).

Among the 12 acolytes at the first meeting of the JBS, on 8 December, 1958, was a chemical engineer from Texas named Fred Chase Koch (above). An admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Fred was described by a family friend as “a monarch, untouchable.” Just out of college in the 1920's, he had invented a better method for cracking gasoline out of oil. But the big four oil companies, with millions invested in their older methods,  drove him out of business in the United States.  

So Fred Koch moved to Europe, where he built a dozen new oil refineries for Adolf Hitler and Uncle Joe Stalin. While the communists made Fred rich, he also found their regulations restricting. When the Second World War forced him home, he felt much the same way about the U.S. government. Anyone who stood between Fred Koch and what Fred Koch wanted, which was money, was not merely wrong, they were evil Communists. Fred came to see a communist hiding under every bed, and like his friend Robert Welch, Fred believed Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and even Eisenhower were either communists or had been duped by them.  And he indoctrinated his four sons with those ideas, as well.

Fred's son David admitted in 2007, “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government.… It’s something I grew up with....He could do that sort of thing so effectively." And when the old man died in 1967 while shooting ducks, he left behind a huge fortune and a quartet of sons who felt entitled, inferior, cheated and arrogant. As a progressive writer described them, “The two middle brothers, Charles and David, are the crazy ones. The other two, Frederick and William, are the loony ones.”

David and Charles (center and right, above) took control of the family fortune, cutting William (above, left) out of the loop after he heavily invested in coal mines, which have never lived up to the Koch profitability standards. So William began decades of litigation against his two brothers. He sued over his share of a trust fund, over the sale of company stock, over a coin collection. At one point he even dragged their 87 year old mother onto the witness stand just months after she had suffered a stroke. Did I mention that William and David are twins?

If Fred is looking on from Valhalla, he must be proud of David and Charles, especially for the political groups they have founded and funded with more than $200 million, such as Americans For Prosperity, and The Tea Party. They even found a way to make William's erratic coal mine profits more dependable, by funding a large part of the "global warming is a conspiracy" conspiracy movement. 

It was the lesson handed down by Robert Welch (above) and his war against floride, via his John Birch Society.  Many climate change critics are honestly driven, or just honestly stupid.  Every “green” project stands the same chance of failure and fraud as any “non-green” business.  But the people who profited the most from climate change denial were Charles and David Koch. And that is not an accident.

Which brings me back to our cousins the bonobos. Another recent research paper out of Yale and Duke University “discovered” that our fellow primates “exhibit emotional responses to negative outcomes of their decisions by pouting or throwing angry tantrums when a risk-taking strategy fails to pay off”. This research may be worthy of a reward for restating the obvious 

We might ask Kanzi (above) about the Koch brothers, and their reaction to facing unpleasant truths, but the old boy is now retired on a farm outside Des Moines, Iowa. He is approaching 44 now, and approaching the end of his life.  Like Charles and David, Kanzi is an alpha male , but since bonoboos are matriarchal, his is largely a symbolic role. He spends his time constructing complex sentences complaining about his grandchildren and screwing any and all of his fellow bonoboos within reach. Just like the Koch brothers. 

But in the Bonoboo world, screwing each other is a way of reducing tension. In the ethos of the Koch brothers, its a form of aggression. And that is the difference between humans and the "less evolved" apes. They know something we don't.  You can see it in Kanzi's eyes.   Just look close into those deep brown wise and sexy eyes. Quick! Let's screw!

- 30 -   

WHO ARE THESE GUYS? The John Birch Society

 

I would not have gotten along with John Birch. One of his college professors described Birch as “a one-way valve; everything coming out and no room to take anything in”. Honestly I think the odds were pretty good that eventually somebody somewhere was going to shoot him for shooting his mouth off.  It  happened on a road in northern China, and that the hot head who pulled the trigger happened to have been a communist. It was just as likely the shooter would have been his next door neighbor.

“Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight. You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right. Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft. But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left. Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society. Here to save our country from a communistic plot. Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks. To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.” (lyrics and music by Michael Brown) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG6taS9R1KM

His commanding officer in the forerunner of the CIA, Major Gustav Krause, described the situation rather simply; “Militarily, John Birch brought about his own death.” Birch was a life long missionary on a military mission on 25 August, 1945, when he ran into a patrol of Mao’s Red Army. The commander asked Birch to hand over his revolver, and, surrounded by nervous soldiers, Birch decided to argue about it.  Eventually, embarrassed and frustrated, the Communist officer shot him. The other members of Birch’s group had already handed over their weapons. They were held for a few hours and then released unharmed and rearmed. But the role of the missed opportunity for the application of simple common sense in John Birch's death did not stop candy-king Robert Welch from building an elaborate conspiracy theory around Birch’s death, Welch saw Birch as the first hero of World War Three the war against the international communist plan for world domination. Welch's vision of Birch as a hero evolved until it became a virtual black hole of paranoia and invective that eventually sucked into it everything Welch came in contact with, including the Republican Party, tooth decay, the Republican President Dwight David Eisenhower –whom Welch accused of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist Conspiracy” - and, believe it or not, the entire state of Alaska.

I’m not kidding about the Alaska thing. Conservative deity William F. Buckley even mentioned it in a column posthumously published in March of 2008, entitled “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.”  In discussing how to distance conservatism from the "Birchers", Buckley described Welch's belief that "the state of Alaska was being prepared to house anyone who doubted his doctrine that fluoridated water was a Communist-backed plot to weaken the minds of the American public.” I guess Alaska was supposed to be the new Texas.

The John Birch Society is and was part of a long line of paranoia  that stains the American psyche, from the anti-French and anti-Irish ‘Alien and Sedition Acts’ of 1798, through the “Order of United Americans”, the “Know Nothing Party”, the Immigration Restriction League, the anarchists scare, the “Yellow Peril”, the imaginary Pearl Harbor betrayal plots, the Black helicopters hiding in our national parks, the militia movement and the mythical bombs planted in the twin towers on 9/11. In fact the John Birch Society cemented all that lunacy together on a firm foundation of anti-Semitism and racism. And this legacy of lunacy and head-up-your-exclusion-duct thinking officially began in Indianapolis on 9 December, 1958.

Robert Welch organized and financed the meeting. He had made his fortune by inventing “Sugar Babies”, “Junior Mints” and “Pom Poms”. And that wealth built on the little holes in children's teeth gave Welch the authority to lecture to 12 true believers for two days straight, about the worldwide communist conspiracy. Welch spewed out such gems of wisdom as, “When Woodrow Wilson, cajoled and guided...by the collectivists of Europe, took us into the First World War, while solemnly swearing that he would never do so, he did much more than end America's great period of happy and wholesome independence of Europe. He put his healthy young country in the same house, and for a while in the same bed, with this parent who was already yielding to the collectivist cancer. We never got out of that house again. We were once more put back even in the same bed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, also while lying in his teeth about his intentions, and we have never been able to get out of that bed since.”  You might notice a disturbing repetition of bed (and parent) analogies throughout Welch’s theology, whether the commies are in the bed or under the bed, alone in the bed or sharing the bed, there are a lot of beds and Commies. And cancer - he refers to cancer a lot.

Warned, Mr Welch, “…both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government.'” Did I mention that the John Birch Society was anti-Semitic?  Ayn Rand, no Semitic lover herself, complained, “What is wrong with them (the JBS) is that they don't seem to have any specific, clearly defined political philosophy.” She might have been talking about the Tea Party, who, in fact, have been encouraged and funded by the JBS - a sort of thinking man’s Klu Klux Klan, while the KKK remains a sort of the idiot's version of the “Tea Party”.

In 1966 the New York Times described the John Birch Society as “…the most successful and 'respectable' radical right organization in the country”, which, if you think about it, is the equivalent of being named Miss Congeniality in a mental institution -  she even brings smiles to the invisible people. Robert Welch died in 1985 and his creation is now watched over by the Koch brothers, whose father attended the first meeting of the Society. Each year the John Birch Society continues to produce cadres of indoctrinated Johnny Apple Seeds, planting fear in every dark nook and cranny where it might take root – sort of like tooth decay.

But the thing about Johnny Appleseed was that the all the apples which grew from his seeds were sour. Edible apples are possible only through a science of grafting – but then the John Birch Society never believed in science - too many Jews.

- 30 -

PROFITS OF CONSPIRACY

 

I am tired of reading about willfully stupid humans, such as the well education and well intentioned  drones at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. For decades the LRC was mired in intellectual orthodoxy and mediocrity, investigating what you would expect and discovering what you would expect.. Then in 1982 a 2 ½ year old bonobo chimpanzee named Kanzi shattered their academic ethos. 

 Bonoboos look like chimpanzees and like humans they mate all year long, But Bonoboos do it five or six times a day. And whenever they get nervous or bored.  Which makes it amazing that Kanzi ever found the time to think up what he thought up.  Using American Sign language, which he had picked up from his mother, Kanzi spontaneously signed “marshmallow” and then “fire”. Given matches and marshmallows by the obliging staff - thank God he didn't ask for fissionable material -  Kanzi gathered twigs, struck a match (above) and set the wood to burning. 

Next he jammed a stick into a marshmallow (above), which he then toasted and gleefully ate. What the humans finally learned from this “Noah Chimp-anski” was that language is not about syntax, its about communication. The revelation changed their whole scientific process...for a time.

Then, long after Kanzi had retired to a farm in Iowa, the humans in Atlanta appear to have fallen back into their academic lethargy, as they recently released a study indicating that apes not only think about food, but they also think about thinking about food. 

To the humans with degrees this is “metacognation” or big thinking   As one of the two directors of the experiment explained, “There has been an intense debate in the scientific literature in recent years over whether metacognition is unique to humans.”  This was the statement which convinced me that homo-sapains are still in search of a clue. And the clue that occurred to me was the element Flourine.

 

The nine electrons of Flourine are the bonoboo ape of the periodic table,  eager to share its electrons with any other element.  It took 74 years to purify and isolate Flourine because it bonds with whatever container you put it in, corroding right through it. Even when finally isolated the pale yellow gas desperately bonds to itself – which is why it is called a diatomic. This hunger to mate made Flourine an industrial wunderkind, transferring wanted qualities from one compound to others. It is essential for the smelting of metals. It is the F, in CFC, once used in cooling systems. And when you hit the button on a spray can, there's still a good chance the effective material that jets out, is being carried on some isotope of Flourine.

Flouride is one of those isotopes, one electron short of its parent Flourine, making it twice as eager to bond with any available electron, even ones already happily married - as when six atoms of Florine mate with two atoms of hydrogen already bonded to a sodium atom or to a single atom of chloride. And those are the two most common chemicals, hexafluorosilicic acid and hexafluorosilicate, used in water fluoridation in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control, also in Atlanta, calls drinking water fluoridation "one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century.” And yet there are some humans who call it a government intrusion, and even spreading poison. To which I am inclined to respond by screeching and throwing my poo at them.

Yes, Flouride is toxic. And toxic is always bad. But remember that salt, which is vital to your survival, is made up of sodium and chlorine, both of which are extremely toxic. And drinking salt water will quickly kill you. Fresh water, on the other hand, is good for you, unless you are drowning. Sugar gives you energy, but is toxic to a diabetic. Eat enough sugar and you will become diabetic. Toxic is a level of consumption, not an absolute. Flouride is toxic in anything over moderate amounts. But at minimal levels, it is a powerful weapon against tooth decay. 

Areas in Colorado with naturally occurring Flouride in their drinking water had lower rates of tooth decay, which is how it occurred to medical doctors in the late 19^th century to suggest adding Floride to public water supplies. And stopping tooth decay turns out to also be a defense against heart attacks. It is a public health measure that costs less than a dollar a year for the average family. But try telling any of that to a libertarian, and you are liable to get a riacin tainted post card from hell. And that is what I really want to talk about – the politics and the profits of conspiracy.

Any discussion of American conspiracy theories over the last 100 years, must include a mention of Robert Henry Wineborn Welch, Jr. (above), the North Carolina native who invented the “Sugar Daddy”, a 40 gram hunk of Carmel on a stick, 24 grams of which are sugar. The confection made Mr. Welch very rich, which predisposed him to believe anyone suggesting that sugar caused tooth cavities must be a dirty stinking anti-capitalist communist agent. 

So naturally the political organization which Welch founded, “The John Birch Society”, saw fluoridation of the nation's water supply as a communist mind control plot. Lots of people wanted to believe in that conspiracy. Millions still do.  But the only man who made millions of dollars propagating the myth was Robert Welch (above).

Among the 12 acolytes at the first meeting of the JBS, on 8 December, 1958, was a chemical engineer from Texas named Fred Chase Koch (above). An admirer of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Fred was described by a family friend as “a monarch, untouchable.” Just out of college in the 1920's, he had invented a better method for cracking gasoline out of oil. But the big four oil companies, with millions invested in their older methods,  drove him out of business in the United States.  

So Fred Koch moved to Europe, where he built a dozen new oil refineries for Adolf Hitler and Uncle Joe Stalin. While the communists made Fred rich, he also found their regulations restricting. When the Second World War forced him home, he felt much the same way about the U.S. government. Anyone who stood between Fred Koch and what Fred Koch wanted, which was money, was not merely wrong, they were evil Communists. Fred now saw a communist hiding under every bed, and like his friend Robert Welch, believed Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and even Eisenhower were either communists or had been duped by them.  And he indoctrinated his four sons with those ideas, as well.

Fred's son David admitted in 2007, “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government.… It’s something I grew up with....He could do that sort of thing so effectively." And when the old man died in 1967 while shooting ducks, he left behind a huge fortune and a quartet of sons who felt entitled, inferior, cheated and arrogant. As a progressive writer described them, “The two middle brothers, Charles and David, are the crazy ones. The other two, Frederick and William, are the loony ones.”

David and Charles (center and right, above) took control of the family fortune, cutting William (above, left) out of the loop after he heavily invested in coal mines, which have never lived up to the Koch profitability standards. So William began decades of litigation against his two brothers. He sued over his share of a trust fund, over the sale of company stock, over a coin collection. At one point he even dragged their 87 year old mother onto the witness stand just months after she had suffered a stroke. Did I mention that William and David were twins?

If Fred is looking on from Valhalla, he must be proud of David and Charles, especially for the political groups they have founded and funded with more than $200 million, such as Americans For Prosperity, and The Tea Party. They even found a way to make William's erratic coal mine profits more dependable, by funding a large part of the "global warming is a conspiracy" movement. 

It was the lesson handed down by Robert Welch (above) and his war against floride, via his John Birch Society.  Many climate change critics are honestly driven, or just honestly stupid.  Every “green” project stands the same chance of failure and fraud as any “non-green” business.  But the people who profited from climate change denial were Charles and David Koch. And that is not an accident.

Which brings me back to our cousins the bonobos. Another recent research paper out of Yale and Duke University “discovered” that our fellow primates “exhibit emotional responses to negative outcomes of their decisions by pouting or throwing angry tantrums when a risk-taking strategy fails to pay off”. This research may be worthy of a reward for restating the obvious 

We might ask Kanzi (above) about the Koch brothers, and their reaction to facing unpleasant truths, but the old boy is now retired on a farm outside Des Moines, Iowa. He is approaching 42 now, and approaching the end of his life.  Like Charles and David, Kanzi is an alpha male , but since bonoboos are matriarchal, his is largely a symbolic role. He spends his time constructing complex sentences complaining about his grandchildren and screwing any and all of his fellow bonoboos within reach. Just like the Koch brothers. 

But in the Bonoboo world, screwing each other is a way of reducing tension. In the ethos of the Koch brothers, its a form of aggression. And that is the difference between humans and the "less evolved" apes. They know something we don't.  You can see it in Kanzi's eyes.   Just look close into those deep brown wise and sexy eyes. Quick! Let's screw!

- 30 -