[dissident]

Is the usual round of propaganda before all of the foreign military adventures in the last 20 years not good enough? What more could the government do than the "free" media? These politicians should find something more productive to do. Like dealing with peak oil and climate change.

[ralfy]

Interestingly enough, it's been the U.S. military issuing warnings regarding peak oil (via JOE reports) and the Pentagon warned about destabilizing effects of climate change almost a decade ago.

[Keith_McClary]

How Our Energy Needs Are Changing (NYT)

An example of:
Product Placement takes over the Media & subverts the News (John Oliver) (11 min video)
Aug. 5, 2014
“The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That’s not bullshit. It’s repurposed bovine waste.”

[PrestonSturges]

As I was saying in another thread, Steve King is using three classic themes from the Third Reich:

The War on Whites? Seriously, why doesn't he just say "Aryans?" Remember, this is what Hitler claimed, that the Socialist Jews and the Social Democrat party were trying to enslave white people.

King also uses "envy" and this was another classic theme of Nazi propaganda. It was used by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Robert Ley, and in the famous antisemitic children's book, The Poisonous Mushroom.

‘Anger, envy, hatred, rage,
Are in the blood of the Jew,
-The Poisonous Mushroom (1938)

And of course one of the big promises of the Third reich was to save the Fatherland from communism "class struggle." Actually the GOP version of "class warfare" is even better than the original Nazi propaganda.

"..........He who opposes class struggle and fraternal murder, who is looking for the way out of chaos and confusion, this man will vote for Adolf Hitler....."
-Joseph Goebbels (1932)

But seriously he forgot to include the persecution of Christians and how Christianity is chased out of the public square.

That is one of the outstanding characteristics of organized Jewish life in the United States, its active, unceasing, powerful and virulent attacks upon any and all forms of Christianity which may chance to come to public notice.
-The International Jew (1922)

If you want to see propaganda, look up Nazi propaganda, and you will immediately see the same themes today.

[AdamB]

Last year, the vagaries of life led me to chair a commission charged with examining the candidates for the admission to the Italian Chemists Association. It was a rather formal exam that was supposed to provide the successful applicants with the legal status necessary, for instance, for certifying chemical analyses. Overall, the applicants did poorly, but one of them, a young lady, did much better than the others. So much that I thought I could encourage her to do even better. So, let me tell you about a question I asked her during the examination. Me. Dear candidate, I would like to conclude this exam with a question that may be a little outside your area of expertise, but which I think will give you a chance to show your understanding of some basic concepts of chemistry. The question is: can .

How to convince the public of the danger of anthropogenic global warming

[Tanada]

Unfortunately the example Ugo Bardi gives above is not the exception, but the rule. A great many young people 'know' things but only a rare few 'understand what they know' and are thus able to defend it intellectually.

[dissident]

Unfortunately the example Ugo Bardi gives above is not the exception, but the rule. A great many young people 'know' things but only a rare few 'understand what they know' and are thus able to defend it intellectually.

The universal difference between knowledge and wisdom. That latter takes much longer to acquire and why in various societies the stereotype exists of the "wise old one" teaching the young ones a lesson or two when they get too cocky.

I think all generations go through this mode. The millenials are distinguished by being the most technology dependent one ever. I don't think they can actually function without a calculator or cell phone.

[vox_mundi]

American Madrasa: Voucher Schools Are Teaching Kids What Can Only Be Described as Right-Wing Propaganda

The number of private schools that get taxpayer funds via school vouchers or tax credit scholarships is rising rapidly, but few states keep tabs on what these schools are actually teaching.

... In over 7,000 schools around the country participated in a voucher or a tax credit program, three quarters of the schools were religious and about 30 percent were using a curriculum provided by either Abeka, Accelerated Christian Education or Bob Jones.

In Indiana, for example, which has one of the more comprehensive voucher programs, in the last year alone, more than $16 million in taxpayer money were going to schools or scholarships that use one of these curricula. In the vast majority of states that have these programs there is zero oversight over what schools and voucher and tax credit programs are teaching. Quite literally zero.

Klein: I decided to look specifically at those three because I found that they were the most popular curriculum sources being used in evangelical Christian schools. Abeka is affiliated with Pensacola Christian College is a really far right evangelical school in Florida. Bob Jones University Press was developed from professors at Bob Jones University, which famously lost its tax exempt status a few decades ago because it had banned interracial dating on campus. Accelerated Christian Education or ACE is probably the most extreme provider of curriculum of the three.

Its classrooms are really radical. There's no teacher providing lesson plans or having any type of back and forth with students. Instead, ACE students sit in cubicles where they're separated from the nearest peer. All day they're expected to sift silently through workbooks. There's no active teaching going on. And if a child has a question they have either an American flag or a Christian flag that they'll raise to get the attention of the class supervisor. And the supervisors don't need to have college degrees. In fact it’s considered a detriment for supervisors to have a background in education. Instead ACE prefers that they have a background in religion.

... Over the course of creating my database of all the schools that accept public funding through these programs I also came across five schools that use curriculum provided by a group called Applied Scholastics. And if you just took a cursory glance to be Applied Scholastics website you'd see that it's basically dedicated to spreading the ideas of L. Ron Hubbard who is the founder of the Church of Scientology. So while Applied Scholastics and the Church of Scientology say that they’re not directly connected, their ideas are deeply intertwined. For example, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology told me that L. Ron Hubbard.developed the study method used by Applied Scholastics in order to proselytize and spread the word of his new church and teach Scientology to other people.

You interviewed several students who’d been on the receiving end of these textbooks. What did they have to say about their experiences?

They felt like they didn't really know how to think critically.

They didn't know how to question all these things that they had been taught.

They were suddenly faced with contradictions, and when they were in college they were totally overwhelmed because not only had they been taught very specific things and a very specific way of looking at the world, they were taught that other views of looking at the world were evil.

When they met new people or went to job interviews, they didn't really know how to explain the education they had received because it was so different from the typical experience. When they left this very specific isolated environment and entered the real world, they felt like their entire education experience had been meaningless in some ways.

[AdamB]

Interestingly enough, it's been the U.S. military issuing warnings regarding peak oil (via JOE reports) and the Pentagon warned about destabilizing effects of climate change almost a decade ago.

You don't reference these discredited reports anymore, do you ralfy? How selective is your memory, when it comes to your past peak oil fantasies, anyway?