190714 Polemic – Interaction of People, Health, Environment, Information and War

1. Environment, Is Conflict Inevitable, 1.1. Forevering Contamination, 2. Health, 3. Operations in Hot Zones, 3.1. Venezuela, 3.2. Congo, 3.3. Yemen, 4. Mephysis, Conflict Narratives, 4.1. Biological Strategy, 4.2. Security of Society, 5. Viral Information, 5.1. Seth Rich Rumor Nudge, 5.2. Sexy Standards, 5.3. Fake Ebola is Real, 5.4. Disinformation is Normal, 5.5. Faking Outbreaks, 5.6. Health Disinformation. From PDWN 190714

Other Topics: Shallowfake, Acceptable Attribution, Cholera, Drones

Previous Week 190707-Polemic.

-1. Environment: How Does Climate Change Impact Conflict in the World^$. Climate Change Will Increase Risk of Violent Conflict, Researchers Warn. How Climate Change Can Fuel Wars. Effects of Rapid Climate Change on Violence and Conflict 2017. Climate Change and Collective Violence 2017. How Climate Change Could Lead to More Wars in the 21^st Century 2017. Climate Change, Conflict and Health 2015. Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict 2013. \fs24cf2 Does Climate Change Cause Conflict 2009. Pingree Amendment Would Require Pentagon to Prepare for Climate Change.

-A. Given human history and current events it is to be expected and easy to accept the pessimistic view that environmental change can only lead to conflict. The circumstances are in reality far more complex with numerous complications (complexcated) that this outdated survival of the fittest -2- -3- -4- -5- -6-, killer ape hypothesis -2- -3- -4- -5- -6-, [Still, Still].

-B. Besides the fact that it takes an array of issues of lead to war, not a single cause such as environmental change, there are many cooperative alternatives to adapting to environmental change. The Discovery of Global Warming. Climate Change Poses Increasing Risks to Global Stability, Will Climate Change Lead to Conflict or Cooperation, The Global Climate Change Regime. Survival of the Fittest Has Evolved: Try Survival of the Kindest, Killer Ape Theory Disproved. Man Was Prey; Mutual Aid Prevailed.

-C. The most powerful driver of conflict due to environmental change is not global warming, melting glaciers, sea level rise, forced migration, famine. These are credible excuses for conflict, justifying conflict as the only means keep other people out, or that expansion is the only means to survive. It is the belief in those narratives – Greenprint: Three Big Changes for Countries to Cooperate on Climate Change, Using Story to Change Systems – that will drive conflict. People tend to behave according to their expectations of how other people will behave, their narratives of what will happen and how others will act in a global biosphere calamity. [Still, Still, Lyrics]. -4 -5.4↓.

-1.1. Trump Threatens Veto on Defense Bill That Targets Forever Chemicals. The administration does not want to act swiftly to eliminate toxic (cancer causing) chemicals to protect service members and the communities that support them. The intent was probably not to say that by not eliminating the chemicals they are protecting the community and military, but that they are protecting the DoD mission and local community jobs; Trump Promises to Veto a Bill Banning the Military from Using Toxic Products with PFAS. A New Drinking Water Crisis Hits US Military Bases Across the Nation.

-2. Health: Abortion Arguments at Play in Limiting Veterans' IVF Benefit. Why Are Many of America's Military Families Going Hungry. Too Much Pressure: Hypertension a Leading Cause of Heart Disease, War Injury, PTSD Linked to Risk of High Blood Pressure, -5.1↓.

-3. Operations in Hot Zones:

-3.1. Venezuela. <ADDED 190714-181209-4>. Venezuelan Government's Death Squads Kill Thousands: UN -2- -3-. Because medical personnel are likely to be collocated with victims of gubergenics they are likely to become collateral damage, and are likely to become targeted themselves for “aiding the enemy” or because they protest such actions. This is more likely in countries that have Russian support.

-3.2. DR Congo: After Ebola. "We remember wars and then gradually forget them, while we forget pandemics and then gradually remember them". When the DRC has gone 42 days without a new Ebola case, amnesia will likely kick in as the Congolese in North Kivu and Ituri try to get on with their lives – meaning the ongoing struggle to make a living and bring up children amid dozens of armed groups that have made their living for 25 years by killing people and kidnaping their children to serve as soldiers. Conflict and Insecurity Driving Spread of Diseases like Ebola, WHO Chief Warns. <ADDED 190714-180513-1.1>. -5.3↓.

-A. Six Years On, Still No News of Our Colleagues Held Hostage by Armed Group ADF. Rarely has there been kidnaping of medical personnel for the purpose of providing medical care for the group who committed the crime. Intent is usually for ransom, medical people being more valuable than others. Kidnaping may also be a tactic to force shut down of medical facilities, discourage medical personnel coming into an area, or as human shields.

-3.3. Yemen Cholera Outbreak Hits over 200,000 Children in 2019, Charities Warn, accounting for nearly half of 440,000 suspected cases of the deadly waterborne disease in civil war struck nation. Yemen: Over 460K Cases of Cholera Registered to Date this Year. Yemen Crisis: Why Is There a War. Yemeni Rebels Unveil New Weapons to Change Course of the War. Vibrio Cholerae - As Biological Weapons. [Photo].

-4. Mephysis: Is conflict more about a conflict of narratives, rather than a narrative on conflict -1C↑, -5.4↓. Narratives of Conflict, Taming Chaos: The Dynamics of Narrative and Conflict.

-4.1. Meeting of the States Parties to the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. The United States of America’s National Biodefense Strategy orchestrates the full range of activity that is carried out across the United States Government to protect the American people from biological threats. For the first time, efforts to address the full range of biological threats – whether naturally occurring or deliberate, domestic or international, and whether they threaten humans, animals, or plants — are being pursued in a single, coordinated framework. The Strategy outlines how the United States Government will manage its activities more effectively to assess, prevent, detect, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats, coordinating its biodefense efforts with those of international partners, industry, academia, non governmental entities, and the private sector. Looks like a good start of a plan but hardly the first time, and it does not cover the full range of biological threats. Is partly hampered by still using the 5 (or 4) Emergency Response Phases [Chart].

-A. Biodefense Summit Transcripts has all of the following and more: Goal 1: Enabling Risk Awareness to Inform Decision Making Across the Biodefense Enterprise, 190714-1.3 -3.1. Goal 2: Ensure Biodefense Enterprise Capabilities to Prevent Bioincidents. Goal 3: Ensure Biodefense Preparedness Enterprise to Reduce the Impacts of Bioincidents. Goal 4: Rapidly Respond to Limit the Impacts of Bioincidents. Goal 5: Facilitate Recovery to Restore the Community, the Economy, and the Environment after a Bioincident. One of the disagreements I have with this is the term Bioincident. This implies discrete events that are separate from what happens before and after. Though most probably understand this, decision makers may not 190714-1.3 -3.1. Policies made in the past can increase or decrease prevention, capabilities and preparedness to respond and mitigation. Recovery and restoration can take decades, if not longer, and unlikely will be complete before the next bioevent. This is part of why PDWN does not use the phase model of disasters.

-4.2. Security and the Holographic Society. Cyberattack is slowly becoming the preeminent form of international engagement, so much so that it’s simply been assumed that current U.S. retaliation against Iran includes cyberattacks. That is part of an ongoing, “larger pattern of cyber exchanges” between the two adversaries, and of the growing presence of cyber operations in global conflict. A Holographic View of Reality.

-5. Viral Misinformation

-5.2. Facebook’s Ex Security Chief on Disinformation Campaigns: The Sexiest Explanation Is Usually Not True. A lot of the people who work in the intelligence teams in companies like Google and Facebook come from Western intelligence agencies: the NSA, CIA, GCHQ and the like. Those organisations have done a lot of internal work on acceptable attribution models, and the kind of data that lines up for different levels of confidence, and definitions of what they mean by confidence levels. Facebook, within our internal discussions, would have standards for our attribution of confidence, and then, effectively, another set of standards for what we would publicly say. One of the big differences between companies and the media is that companies generally will not feel comfortable using strategic purpose as a source of attribution. Another example of SLAI 190616-Polemic-5.2. Standards Sessions #1: Source Attribution, Shallowfakes and Amplification. UW Professor: The Information War Is Real, and We're Losing It^$ 2017. The Web of Conspiracy Theorists That Was Ready for Donald Trump^$ 2017.

-5.3. Congolese Say Ebola Is Invented Poison. There can be few greater challenges than tackling a lethal epidemic. Imagine trying to do so in a conflict zone ravaged by extreme poverty, insecurity and poor communications amid a population where health workers are feared and distrusted. That is the reality of Ebola in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than 1,500 people have lost their lives from the virus in the past year. Some deny the disease exists, believing it to be a poison invented by the international community to traffic body parts. Others do not trust trained medical staff to look after the sick. Then there are those who simply do not want their loved ones snatched from them, sealed up in a plastic body bag and buried anonymously by someone else. This matters, because the corpse of an Ebola victim is most contagious at the time of death. So, if families are busy cleaning the body as part of customary burial rites, they are all spreading the contagion and almost certainly condemning themselves to a wretched death. Even if a death is reported, that does not solve everything. Not everyone agrees to be vaccinated or provide information about their wider contact groups. There is little the medical staff can do to force them to hand over names and addresses. Some people, even if vaccinated, still contract the disease. It seems inevitable that there can never be enough quick response teams to match the number of Ebola deaths. For all the lessons learned and the huge amount of resources thrown at this outbreak, it continues to spread. To add to this a news article that CDC Made a Synthetic Ebola Virus to Test Treatments. It Worked, can easily be changed to CDC Made a Synthetic Ebola Virus. <ADDED 190630-180513-1.1>8A.

-5.4. Disinformation is not an anomalous narrative that disrupt narratives, misleading down erroneous interpretations. To be successful, disinformation needs to build on existing narratives, to influence stories that are already inclined to go in a desired direction, -1C -4↑. The Importance of Narrative in Fighting Disinformation. Russian Narrative Proxies. The Unspoken Homegrown Threat in the Western Balkans. Common Misconceptions About Disinformation.

-5.5. China Vows to Tackle Dead Pig Scam amid Swine Fever Epidemic, criminal gangs in China are faking outbreaks of African swine fever on farms free of the disease and forcing farmers to sell their healthy pigs at sharply lower prices. <ADDED 190714-181118-VCP-China>. Terrorism faking a bioweapon attack has been discussed before, and there are medical scams that take advantage of an outbreak and/or worries. This however is the first combination I’ve seen for the purpose of extortion.

-5.6. Misinformation and Disinformation: An Increasingly Apparent Threat to Global Health Security 2018. In the broadest possible conception, communication is a system that allows humans to share information with one another. Words and images can shape how we perceive information, a factor that plays a large role in our decision making processes. Messages can incite emotion, provoke dialogue, and, albeit rarely, shift one’s self perception or understanding of their relationship with those around them. At our core, humans are social beings, and communication is the natural product of that reality. Misinformation and disinformation propagation has commanded the public spotlight over the past few years and has significantly damaged the global informational landscape. 190623-Polemic-5.2A.

-From PDWN 190714.

-2C. Is That News Really 'Fake,' or Is it Just Biased. Credibility depends on bias as well as honesty. In an era of concern over fake news, a new study finds that people draw a distinction between information sources that are dishonest and those that are biased. Strategic Storytelling: When Narratives Help Versus Hurt the Persuasive Power of Facts. This seems to contradict such narratives as diseased migrants -1.2A↑ invading the US and In Era of Conspiracy Theorists, Sandy Hook Families Are Having to Prove Their Children Lived and Their Children Died Listicle, -2-.

-181118-VCP-China. Plum Island conspiracy theory as the origin of Lyme Disease.

190714-Vaccine-2. Posing reasonable sounding questions that are actually intended to manipulate people.

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Parademic

Parademic is the complex, complicated, confusing, contradictory and chaotic human behaviors that occurs in the contexts of existential biosphere calamities.

07/12/2019