Elite Portmanteau Memes Are a Bad Idea – For Them

Could Climate Change Be Al-Qaida's Best Friend in Africa? ... In Mali, "a lot of the unrest is deep-seated," says climate-security analyst Caitlin E. Werrell. For example, the Libyan war brought an influx of weapons and militants, and Tuareg separatists had long operated in the arid north. But the north had been getting a whole lot more arid in recent years, thanks to factors like burning wood for fuel and greenhouse gas emissions from India and China. Much of Mali's French troops are currently planning a swift exit from Mali, but the local government's battle with Islamist insurgents rages on. Meanwhile, the international community continues to ask itself what went wrong in a country once seen as a model for the region. But some climate analysts say they saw the civil war brewing—and, more importantly, that climate change could be an increasingly prominent factor in crises in the region. – Slate

Dominant Social Theme: When you combine global warming with the war on terror you get a real mess. No recovering from this.

Free-Market Analysis: We note there is a prevalence of elite portmanteau memes. These are two memes combined into one analysis. Thanks to what we call the Internet Reformation, the power elite is having trouble getting people to accept even one meme at a time. Combine two together and we would tend to think you have a recipe for continued disbelief. Here from Wikipedia:

The word "portmanteau" was first used in this context by Lewis Carroll in the book Through the Looking-Glass (1871), in which Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice the coinage of the unusual words in Jabberwocky, where "slithy" means "lithe and slimy" and "mimsy" is "flimsy and miserable." Humpty Dumpty explains the practice of combining words in various ways by telling Alice, "You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word."

The power elite that wants to run the world, in our opinion, has used what we call dominant social themes to frighten middle classes into giving up wealth and power to specially prepared elite globalist facilities. All of these dominant social themes are lies, from what we can tell. But that doesn't defuse the unease they cause.

The information on the 'Net has debunked many of these memes but still billions believe in them and moderate their behavior based on them. This provides the power elite with masses of people that are moving in the direction they have apparently chosen.

But tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, are not swayed by these memes anymore. And the promotions themselves have become more chaotic and unbelievable. Today's global warming meme envisions people sucking carbon out of the air and burying it underground. The insanity is palpable.

As a result of the wholesale rejection of memes, the elites have turned to the age old tools of economic terrorism, militarism and regulatory authoritarianism. If people won't willingly travel toward world government, they are to be compelled to move in that direction.

But this doesn't mean that the elites have abandoned their dominant social themes and subthemes. The memes continue to unroll steadily. And as we noted at the beginning of this article, we are seeing the combining of more memes.

We don't believe that there is such a thing as manmade global warming. And we don't believe much in a global war on terror, either. But here at Slate (above) we can see that both of these facilities have been combined into a single article, with one influencing the other.

In many ways this is a quite clever treatment of propaganda. Use one meme to buttress another and perhaps you can develop within the pairing the credibility that people are denying to a single promotion. Here's more from the article:

There's a lot of debate in the global security establishment about how much we can blame climate—let alone climate change—for conflict. On one side, there are thinkers like the team of Columbia and Princeton scientists who claim El Niño contributed to one-fifth of the world's civil wars between 1950 and 2004. On the other, there are analysts like Lionel Beehner, a fellow at the Truman National Security Project, who published an influential article last year refuting such one-to-one relationships. To split the difference, climate-watchers prefer using terms like "threat multiplier" in cases like Mali's.

... Francesco Femia, a founding director of the Center for Climate and Security, agrees with Werrell that there isn't a straightforward cause-effect relationship here. "But when a government has a great deal of difficulty providing basic resources for its public," he says, "and when climate-exacerbated droughts make that situation worse, then the staying power of non-state actors"—such as al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb—"and sympathy for non-state actors can rise."

Right now, many of those ingredients are also being cooked up just a few hundred miles from the Malian border, in Africa's most populous country. "If I had to put money on it, I think we're likely to see similar situations or more violence and instability in Nigeria," said Nancy Brune, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. The Nigerian government is in a growing fight with the Islamist militia known as Boko Haram, and she sees ongoing climate-related problems—like agricultural collapse and rural-to-urban migration—as major contributors to that conflict.

You can see how hedged all of this is. The writer probably knows the thesis is dubious at best but the allure of using one theme to buttress another is almost overwhelming. Whether the writer came up with this subject matter on his own or had it thrust upon him is unknown to us but we think we are seeing more of this kind of journalism recently.

From our point of view, such elite portmanteau memes are not likely to be any more effective than single memes. Once one has figured out that the main point of most of today's social verities is to scare the living crap out of people, mainstream assertions tend to become less compelling.

Perhaps what we can take away from all of this is the elite is "doubling down" in more ways than one. They are pushing forward with their plans even though the "secrecy" surrounding them is entirely penetrated. And they are combining memes – as if illustrating a cause and effect is going to increase believability.

Conclusion: We don't know what the future holds but this sort of combination surely is not apt to change many minds.