OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #191, AUGUST 21, 2024.

 OMNI WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #191, AUGUST 21, 2024.   Compiled by Dick Bennett.

PEACEMAKING: DEMONSTRATE TO PREVENT PREPARING FOR WAR AND TO STOP WARS.    

 Protest in Rogers Thursday.
Bernard Patten.  Critical Thinking

PROTEST THURSDAY IN ROGERS,   Abel Tomlinson <abeltomlinson@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Y'all,

This Thursday at 8 A.M., many of the top Military-Industrial Complex* war profiteering corporations are holding a "Mid-America Defense Summit" at Embassy Suites in Rogers, AR (3303 Pinnacle Hills Parkway). This event will feature speeches by Congressman Steve Womack, Senator John Boozman and Governor Sarah H. Sanders, and leaders from the war profiteering industry. Sponsors of the event include arms dealers Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Aerojet Rocketdyne, General Dynamics and others. Strikingly, the University of Arkansas, who has a nuclear weapons research contract with the Honeywell Corporation, is also a sponsor.

 

These arms dealers are making hundreds of billions in blood money from Gaza to Ukraine, as they arm Israel's "Textbook Case of Genocide," and arm an escalating proxy war with nuclear-armed Russia, which gravely risks becoming a Nuclear Omnicide. Trillions of our taxpayer dollars are also being wasted on the endless bipartisan wars they promote. We must speak out.

The War Profiteer Summit event starts at 8 AM on Thursday, followed by speeches from the politicians at 9 AM onward. We will be protesting on the sidewalks in front of Embassy Suites event center in Rogers. Please be there at about 7:45, so we are visible to event attendees as they are driving into the event. There are large parking lots nearby.

 If you are on Facebook, please share the event page and invite your friends:

Military-Industrial Complex Protest: Stop Arming Genocide & No Nuclear Omnicide! | Facebook

 Summit Event details: https://web.cvent.com/.../F9227F53-D43B-46DD-8211.../summary

 *This summit is a perfect encapsulated example of what President Eisenhower warned us against when he said, "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

 Please join us,  Abel Tomlinson

Arkansas Antiwar Alliance, Organizer   (479)283-5762

  

EXPOSING THE FALLACIES THAT ENABLE WARS, WARMING, and FASCISM
(See WWW #189, Robert Edwards, Resisting the Right, and #188, the Heritage Foundation’s  Project 2025.)

BERNARD M. PATTEN.  Truth, Knowledge, Or Just Plain Bull: How To Tell The Difference : A Handbook of Practical Logic and Clear Thinking.  Prometheus Books, 2004. 

Publisher’s description

Want to sort out the claims of experts, pseudo-experts, scam artists, and liars alike? Want to protect yourself from the dangers of the ubiquitous nonsense and outright frauds that assault you from every side? Want to become acquainted with the pleasurable activity of discovering truth while enhancing your sophistication as a thinker?  In this erudite yet entertaining handbook on critical thinking, Dr. Bernard M. Patten uses neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to teach you to do all this and more.  . . . Each exercise is specifically formulated with the neuropsychology of learning in mind (repetition, tied association, visual images, distribution of tasks in time, modularity, etc.), so the reader acquires valuable knowledge quickly and painlessly.   Emphasizing practical usefulness in real-life situations and evidence-based analysis, Dr. Patten examines:-investment frauds and other scams-groupthink-the psychology of belief-content analysis-hidden meanings-negotiation strategies.   He also gives careful attention to the rules of clear thinking, discusses the reality principle, explains inductive and deductive logic, exposes traditional fallacies, and elucidates truth tables, syllogisms, and symbolic logic.   Fast, fact-filled, and fun, this superb self-help guide to better thinking teaches you to take control of your own destiny by accurately determining the truth value of statements and behaviors in many contexts.

Chapter 1. Overgeneralization.  2. Vague Definition.  3.  Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc.  4. False Analogy.  5. Partial Selection of Evidence.  6. Groupthink.  7.  Scams, Deceptions, Ruses, Swindles, Hoaxes, and Gaslights.  8.  Begging the Question.  9. Read Me (on the uniform field theory that truth is based on the understanding of all the evidence).  10.  The Logic of Alice (practicing the principles and devices via examples from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).      

Dick’s response:  I hope Patten had will continue his analyses with books on the fallacies in US and Israeli and in US,  NATO, and Ukrainian  propaganda.   (Hamas and Russian propaganda too, but they have been under constant attack by the US/NATO security juggernaut with its annual trillions of dollars war preparations and wars.).  We need a larger number of people skilled in such analysis if we are ever to prevent and stop wars.  So we must help, and Patten provides the course 101 for it.  Also, he recommends T. Edward Damer’s book, Attacking Faulty Reasoning (2001). “One of the best books on the subject.  More than sixty fallacies are attacked.”   And he calls Irving Janis’ Groupthink “this classic of social psychology.”  The US public suffers from groupthink, massively, daily reinforced by the multibillion-dollars budgets of the Pentagon, State Dept., and executive branch and the many pro-war media and think tanks.   The two main political parties compose the US War Party.   We need more autonomous citizens scrutinizing and exposing –saying NO to--the US Propaganda Machine.