Fear As An Election Strategy

Deliver us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush

Mark J. Landau
University of Arizona, mjlandau{at}email.arizona.edu

According to terror management theory, heightened concerns about mortality should intensify the appeal of charismatic leaders. To assess this idea, we investigated how thoughts about death and the 9/11 terrorist attacks influence Americans’ attitudes toward current U.S. President George W. Bush. Study 1 found that reminding people of their own mortality (mortality salience) increased support for Bush and his counterterrorism policies. Study 2 demonstrated that subliminal exposure to 9/11-related stimuli brought death-related thoughts closer to consciousness. Study 3 showed that reminders of both mortality and 9/11 increased support for Bush. In Study 4, mortality salience led participants to become more favorable toward Bush and voting for him in the upcoming election but less favorable toward Presidential candidate John Kerry and voting for him. Discussion focused on the role of terror management processes in allegiance to charismatic leaders and political decision making.

PNAC Website Finally Down

They're finally starting to feel the breathe of those who want to make them pay for the crimes they thought they would never face....nor would they have had to had their plan for empire worked out the way it did on paper. (RAD, 2000) But being the egomaniacal bunch that they are, they didn't stop to think about how reality might intrude on their delusions of absolute power. Apparently their smart-ass comment about how they create reality came back to bite them all in the ass. PNAC was formed by the Kagans with Kristol being there from the beginning due his media savvy and connections. It was up to him to take an extremist vision of Cheney's and make it more palatable for the general public. In his '93 white paper Cheney put down his idea how NOT to pay out the "peace dividend" that Americans felt they had coming after the defeat of the USSR. Another ramification of the Cold War's end was that Israel was no longer as strategically important to America as it had been under the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Bloc. As well, the American "aerospace industry" (weapons manufacturers) were also extremely worried about cuts in the massive flow of money from the Pentagon that their very existence depended on. It was these interests that came together to form what we now know as PNAC. Nearly half the total membership of PNAC are Zionists. Cheney, who represents the military-industrial complex, is also member. Libby, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Abrams, Armitage, and the many, many others were suddenly placed in positions of influence and power upon the swearing-in ceremony of GWBush. All these high-level appointments...... and the media sees no connection between PNAC and the White House? This could only happen if they were being willfully blind. Or.... intentionally misleading, as has been the case with much of the MSM from the beginning of Bush2. But one only need read the "Rearming America" 2000 paper and see that virtually every seemingly bizarre move taken by Bush/Cheney (leaving bin Laden, attacking Iraq, not securing the munitions, guarding the Ministry of Oil building ONLY.....is no mystery at all for anyne who has taken the time to read their website. The reasons for everything, from torture to the lack of WMDs to US using a preemptive attack against a country that posed no real threat to America,a point that is also made by the neocons on their website yet has somehow gone unnoticed by Alternet and the MSM. The reasoning behind the hostility towards the UN is given...the US's decision to remove itself from any and all Treaties, Protocols and Conventions against torture also is given, the reason why so few soldiers were sent into Iraq and why they didn't bother to place guards at the high-explosive depots they had captured thereby allowing them to be looted of the very munitions now being used against American soldiers....all is there for the learning. Obviously the need to find another bogeyman to replace the Soviet threat and thereby keeping the arms industry afloat, same for Israel now that a war on Arabs has conveniently made it back into strategically important ally, as well as keeping "The Condoleeza" and other tankers delivering oil to us at prices I'm sure even never thought possible during her tenure with Big Oil. But who could have predicted an alliance between far-right Israeli's, corporate giants and multinationals, the consolidation of Big Media under the auspices of none other than the Joint Chief Of Staff's own son, anotrher appointment made at the behest of PNAC I have no doubt. Just like the Boltoon appointment to the UN, or Wolfowitz to the World Bank, all these men were opposed to the existence of the very boards of which they were appointed! Just as those appointments were made by devious men with delusional minds, so too is America still in Iraq by design. PNAC called for a FOB, or Forward Operating Base to be established somewhere in the Middle East. That is one reason why America is in Iraq. All the dying going on over there s simply buying more more time to get the military facility built and operational before peace breaks out and ruins their chances for spreading the war further, as per PNAC documents. They explain how and why America should remain as the worlds only superpower "throughout the next century", and that it will do this by "fighting and winning two-front, major theatre war simultaneously". The idea here is to serve as a demonstration to the rest of the world that the US is capable and willing to do whatever it takes "to maintain sole supremacy". Given the above, I find it stunning how alternative and MSMedia have both missed the importance of PNAC. MSM is either on-board with this group of oligarchs, or are afraid of losing their jobs.... the Plame* affair making a similar demonstration of what lengths they will go to to attack anyone who opposes them domestically. That is why they never sought FISA approval for their domestic spying program. All of this should make it very clear what depths they will sink to in their mad plan to rule the world. I realize how crazy such a statement sounds, but that is using their own words...statements that exist on signed documents over at the Project For The New American Century website. Words on documents that obviously far too few people have taken the time to read, yet are possibly the most important documents you will EVER read. Josh? Please. Just read everything over there (as I have, many several times) then come back and tell me that "they are /just/ one of many think-tanks, with no special importance in the bigger picture". Josh...THEY ARE THE BIGGER PICTURE! Notice that t was Armitage who tried to rescue Libby after his indictment? Armitage is a fellow PNAC member, but this too was completely overlooked by the news media, some even implying that they were virtual strangers. Why? Because if there was no sentimental relationship between them, then his story exonerating Libby would sound much more believable. Otoh, had the media revealed that PNAC had moved out of their madman's world and into the WH wholesale, the impossibly high high numbers of PNAC members that were immediately brought into the White house, had they revealed LIbby's ties to Armitage, then people might start looking too closely at PNAC and wondering how such a insane plan and plotters as that could be brought into their democratic nation's WH. How over a dozen members of one group, a group with signatures on a documents meant to incite fear in the public, and to justify their Napoleonic delusions. There are documents signed by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Libby, Wolfowitz, Kagan, Abrams, Perle, which should make it plain to any rational person that PNAC is US foreign policy, a fact that can be verified by looking at the actions Bush has taken. A WH staffed by former PNAC members had clearly embarked on an insane plan to take advantage of the current situation wherein the US is the world's only superpower. This is a moment they took great pains to convey to Bush that it would pass him (and his "mark in history" no doubt) very quickly if they didn't begin with an attack on Iraq immediately. The Iraq War is clearly portrayed as being part of the initial phase of their "Pax Americana" plan, a plan clearly laid out in the Rearming Americas Defenses (2000) document, itself reiterated in the 2002 US Defense Strategy. The object there is not simply oil, but a forward operating base (FOB) for US imperial might to project itself over the Middle East. This renewed strategic importance for the Israeli right-wing was essential to them since they cannot concieve of peace for themselves until the Arabs are wiped out. Hence the war in the ME which is being labelled a "War On Terror" but is in reality a hoax being perpetrated on US voters... a hoax that is being played out to a greatly frustrated and entirely perplexed rest of the world. Mycos | 06.29.07 - 6:22 am | #

A Tragedy of Errors: Excerpt

"In neocon ideology, the United States is reliving the experience of Britain three-quarters of a century ago. Osama bin Laden (or Saddam or the Chinese leadership or Yasir Arafat) is the new Hitler. Bush is the new Churchill, as Reagan was earlier. Moderate Republicans and conservative realists, as well as liberal Democrats, are the new Neville Chamberlains. The working-class Protestant fundamentalists of the rural and suburban American South are equated with the bourgeois dissenting Protestants of Victorian England. The American university is the new Bloomsbury, full of decadent liberals and leftists sapping the morale of young Americans, who many neoconservatives think should be drafted and sent to fight a series of wars abroad to promote democracy. Four years ago, Donald Kagan and Frederick Kagan (Robert Kagan's father and brother, respectively) published a book called While America Sleeps, comparing the United States to Britain in the late 1930s. For the neocons, America is the Britain of Churchill and Chamberlain, and it is always 1939." cont..... http://web.search.cornell.edu/search?q=cache:R4KlAzCjdEoJ:falcon.arts.cornell.edu/Govt/courses/F04/Lind_Nation04).pdf+conservatism+right-wing&access=p&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&client=default_frontend&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&oe=UTF-8 http://snipurl.com/2enh1

Reactionary Personality Detected As Loss Of Brain's Grey-Matter

Brain's gray cells appear to be changed by trauma of major events like 9/11 attack, a study suggests

By Sheri Hall

Provided

Magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of healthy adults more than three years after Sept. 11, 2001, shows areas that have less gray matter volume in those who were near ground zero on 9/11, compared with those who were much farther away. This is three views of the brain areas that have lower gray matter volume in the 9/11-exposed group. Notably, all of these areas (which show up brighter in this image) are associated with the processing of emotion.

Healthy adults who were close to the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, have less gray matter in key emotion centers of their brains compared with people who were more than 200 miles away, finds a new Cornell study.

"This suggests that really bad experiences may have lasting effects on the brain, even in healthy people," said Barbara Ganzel, the study's lead researcher and postdoctoral fellow at Cornell's College of Human Ecology.

The study -- one of the first to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy adults -- is published in the April issue of Neurolmage. It follows a Cornell study by the same authors that found people living near the World Trade Center on 9/11 have brains that are more reactive to such emotional stimuli as photographs of fearful faces. Combined, the two studies provide an emerging picture of what happens in the brains of healthy people who experience a traumatic event.

The smaller volume of gray matter -- composed largely of cells and capillary blood vessels -- that Ganzel found were in areas that process emotion and may be, Ganzel suggests, the brain's normal response to trauma. The subjects in the study did not suffer from any mental or physical health disorders. Gray matter, a major component of the nervous system, is composed of the neuron cell bodies that process information in the brain.

About half of Americans experience a trauma in their lifetime, and scientists know a lot about the effects of trauma on the brains of people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but not about people without clinical disorders. And most people, Ganzel said, who experience a trauma don't get PTSD.

Ganzel

Key brain areas that are smaller are also more responsive to threat, said Ganzel, suggesting that these changes may be a helpful response to living in an uncertain environment.

"We have known for a long time that trauma exposure can lead to subsequent vulnerability to mental health disorders years after the trauma," Ganzel added. "This research gives us clues about the biology underlying that vulnerability."

The researchers used two types of magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 18 people who were within 1.5 miles of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and compared them to scans of 18 people who lived at least 200 miles away at the time. One type showed the gray matter volume, and the other showed the brain's response to emotional stimuli (pictures of fearful and calm faces). Those who were close to the disaster on Sept. 11 showed more emotional reactivity in the amygdala, a brain area that detects the presence of threatening information.

Combining the brain data revealed that those who were near the World Trade Center had smaller, more reactive amygdalas, and this, in turn, was related to how anxious they were years later. Several other brain regions associated with emotion processing were also smaller in those who were close to the disaster.

The researchers also found that study subjects who had experienced other types of trauma (violent crimes, sudden death of a loved one) showed a similar reduction in gray matter and similar response to emotional faces and anxiety.

"This suggests that the differences we see in the brain and behavior of people who were near the Sept. 11 disaster are not specific to that one event," Ganzel said. "And it turns out there is a very similar pattern of gray matter volume loss with normal aging, which raises the question of what role trauma plays in the aging brain."

Co-authors include Elise Temple of Dartmouth College, Cornell graduate student Pilyoung Kim, and Gary Glover of Stanford University.

Sheri Hall is assistant communications director for the College of Human Ecology.

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Mounties Taser Disabled B.C. Man

"Video shows Last Updated: Monday, March 10, 2008 | 10:52 PM ET Comments20Recommended26The Canadian Press A video of a disabled man being jolted by a Taser inside the RCMP detachment in Kamloops, B.C., was released Monday, weeks after the man's death in an unrelated incident."