The Little Sailboat that Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline

1. Joe Biden promises he will make Nord Stream pipeline inoperable. Someone then destroys the pipeline. Biden then denies that he had anything to do with this act of war. 2. Next, Seymour Hersh publishes detailed investigative article showing how the U.S. destroyed the pipeline. 3. Germany, co-owner of the pipeline, displays what has got to be the most vivid case of Stockholm Syndrome in human history. 4. U.S. news media ignores the Hersh story. 5. The CIA cooks up an absurd alternative story that not-Joe-Biden destroyed the pipeline. The pipeline was destroyed using "Pro-Ukrainian" group that uses a 49 foot sailboat. 6. The NYT, which has now begrudgingly acknowledged Hersh's blockbuster story, laps up the CIA story. 7. Seymour Hersh destroys the NYT-CIA story with a handful of simple questions.

Excerpt from Hersh's newest story, "THE NORD STREAM GHOST SHIP: The false details in the CIA's cover story":

My initial report received coverage around the world but was ignored by the major newspapers and television networks in the United States. As the story gained traction in Europe and elsewhere abroad, the New York Times on March 7 published a report quoting US officials asserting that American intelligence had accumulated information suggesting that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the pipelines. The story said officials who had “reviewed” the new intelligence depicted it to be “a step toward determining responsibility” for the pipeline sabotage. The Times story got worldwide attention, but nothing more has been heard since from the newspaper about who did what. In an interview for a Times podcast, one of the three authors of the article inadvertently explained why the story was dead on arrival. The writer was asked about the involvement of the alleged pro-Ukrainian group: “What makes you think that’s what happened?” He answered: “I should be very clear that we know really very little. Right?”

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About Two “So-Called” Journalists and the Corrupt Congresswoman who Attacked Them

Russell Brand, as animated as ever, showcases the corrupt history of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as he simultaneously advocates for free speech. Brand didn't appreciate that Wasserman-Schultz called Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger "so-called reporters." Got him a bit riled up. I had the same reaction when I watched the hearings live . . .

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Nashville Shooting is a Tale of Two Media Ecosystems

Whatever the story of the day, it will immediately hit the "go" button, causing the two corporate media tribes to roll up their sleeves to reverse-engineer what happened, turbo-charging certain convenient facts and suppressing other inconvenient facts. That is what has happened in the case of 28-year old Audrey Hale, who murdered six people at a Nashville Christian school. In a perverse way, it inspires a feeling of awe to behold the contortionist work product of the two well-oiled media machines. Oh, to be a fly in the wall in the back offices of those two teams!

As a citizen who is not naive, you might be thinking "But what actually happened? Just tell us the facts, please." Instead of becoming well-informed, however, you will be presented with an intensely processed/sterilized/lede-burying/contorted story that will give you, at best, about half of what happened. When we see this results of this process, story after story, week after week, it should challenge all of us to stop trusting any one "news" account. It should remind us that they are preaching to us, not teaching us about the real world. It should deeply insult us that they are coddling, as though we are children. They are convinced that we can't deal with the raw data, the who/what/when/where/why and how of the real world. Even worse, they are motivated by hubris; they think that they are so uniquely intelligent and courageous that only they can deal with harsh reality and that they are protecting us, commandeering the American Project to mold it into their own image and likeness. That has always been the mindset of censors. They self-appoint themselves because they convince themselves that they much smarter than the rest of us. They do this even though censorship is antithetical to free speech and even though, thoughout history, censorship has never worked.  That is the central lesson of Robert Corn-Revere's 2022 book: The Mind of the Censor and the Eye of the Beholder, well summarized at Reason.

The only solution is for each of us to start piecing together what happened bit by bit, from a wide variety of sources from a wide variety of perspectives. That is our plight, yet most people don't have the time to cull through this mess. We have jobs and families and for months, we have put off fixing that leaky faucet in the bathroom. Most of us thus give up in one of two ways.  A) We pick our favorite corporate news shop, assuming it to be credible, perhaps out of habit or perhaps because it is comforting to read that version of of news, thus feeding the confirmation bias.  Or B) We give up on spending time to independently figuring out what is true, thus giving up on being informed citizens, meaning that we will be blindly throwing darts on Election Day, if we vote at all. By giving up entirely, we either avoid "political discussions" or we mutter something like: "It's all a bunch of bullshit." The fact that so many Americans keep picking one of these two paths is reason to believe that the 39 long-dead signatories to the 1787 Constitutional Convention constantly spin in their graves.

Most of us feel this dysfunction with corporate media, as shown by surveys:

Where to turn? One of my favorite writers is Nellie Bowles, who publishes TGIF at The Free Press. Week after week, she does a great job of crystallizing the hypocrisy that runs through the veins of America's news corporations. She does this, writing with aplomb and more than a touch of humor. In today's TGIF, she does what she does best:

An inconvenient killer: The killer, Audrey Hale, was a biological female who identified as a man. My takeaway from this is murderous lunatics come in all shapes and sizes. And it seems likely that this person had some special animosity toward the religious school where they’d been a student.

But the mainstream media became obsessed with obscuring the situation and denying that the killer was trans.

Here’s the Reuters headline: “Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.” Hmm. Or: “CBS News is still working to confirm Hale’s gender identity.” From the NYT: “The suspect appeared to identify as a man in recent months.” Appeared to identify!According to the New Rules, followed strictly by the Times in all other cases, you’re actually not allowed to say someone “appears to identify as a woman.” The person simply is a woman. At worst, if you’re feeling heretical, you say they are a trans woman. Hale had his pronouns in hisbio, for godsake (he/him). But the NYT throws all that out, distancing the shooter from anything trans-related.

Eli Erlick, one of America’s most prominent trans activists, argued that sometimes shooters only take on a trans identity for convenience: “The Colorado shooter only temporarily took on the identity to avoid hate crime charges.” Weird to see Eli admitting that some people might take advantage of gender self-ID for their own nefarious purposes. Now, let’s talk about a 45-year-old male convict who suddenly identifies as a woman. . . wait, where are you going, Eli?

Others blamed Nashville for bringing the slaughter on themselves. Here’s New York Times contributor Benjamin Ryan on the situation: “Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, where @benshapiro & @mattwalshblog have led an ideological war against trans people.” Many deranged people online echoed this notion that Nashville had it coming. A few hours after the Nashville shooting, Arizona governor Katie Hobbs’ press secretary, Josselyn Berry, posted an image of a woman wielding two guns and wrote: “Us when we see transphobes.” She’s since resigned, though I’m sure she will pop up with a much better-paying job soon.

Anyway, the most important thing to happen in an inconvenient situation is to suppress it quickly. And that’s what has happened. Soon after the shooting, it had fallen from the top story slot. And within a day or two, it was all about gun control efforts and how Republicans were getting in the way.

Bad timing for your Day of Vengeance: It was very awkward that this week is the planned Trans Day of Vengeance. Days before the Nashville school shooting, leftist media personality Cenk Uygur had encouragedtrans people to get tons of guns: “If anyone should get guns, it should be trans Americans.”

How do we break out of these silos?  Jonathan Haidt urges us to reach out to those with whom we disagree in order to to have a more robust understanding of what is going on around us.

More . . .

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The Lack of Attention to Reverse Asymmetries

In 2019, after writing 214 articles, Michael Shermer was booted out of Scientific American because the "science" magazine increasingly became scientific. One of the problems he noticed is that the editors were quick to criticize group disparities only when they ran in the woke direction.  An excerpt from "Scientific American Goes Woke: A case study in how identity politics poisons science":

[R]everse asymmetries never warrant explanations of reverse biases. To wit, this same study reported that “women earned 57%, 60% and 52% of all Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degrees respectively in the U.S. in 2013-14,” but proposed no reverse biases against men to account for such imbalances. Neither did a 2019 Council of Graduate Schools study that found for the 11th year in a row women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities (41,943 vs. 37,365, or 52.9% vs. 47.1%). Our attention is drawn to the lower percentages of female doctorates in engineering (25.1%), mathematics and computer sciences (26.8%), physical and earth sciences (35.1%), and business (46.7%), followed by discussions of systemic bias, but no such structural issues are on offer for the lower percentages of male doctorates in public administration (26.4%), health and medical sciences (29%), education (31.6%), social and behavioral sciences (39%), arts and humanities (48.1%), and biological sciences (48.6%). When the data is presented in a bar graph rank ordered from highest to lowest percentages for females earning doctorates (below), the claim that the fields in which women earn lower percentages than men can only be explained by misogyny and bias is gainsaid by the top bars where the valance is reversed, unless we are to believe that only in those bottom fields are faculty and administrators still bigoted against women whereas those in the top fields are enlightened.

About four years ago, Jordan Peterson illustrated another asymmetry, one for which many people only see one side of the equation. That's the confirmation bias at work, once again.

The question addressed in this video is whether western culture is a "patriarchy." Here's the video (I cannot figure out the name of the woman not the right). I made the following transcript:

Interviewer: I mean, that's the that's my idea of the patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society.

Jordan Peterson: But that's not my sense of the patriarchy.

Interviewer: So what's yours?

Jordan Peterson: Well, in what sense is our society male dominated?

Interviewer: The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men, the vast majority of capital and is owned by men, women do more unpaid labor

Jordan Peterson: A tiny proportion of men. And a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Who most people who are on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people commit suicide and men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men. It's like, where's the dominance here precisely, what you're doing is you're taking a tiny substrata of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of the Western society. There's nothing about that that's vaguely appropriate.

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Who Has Been Running Ukraine Since 2013? The United States.

Glenn Greenwald details how we know that the United States has been running Ukraine since 2013. The story is a long one, but Greenwald lays out the evidence and it's not difficult to connect the dots. You can watch the entire show on Rumble. You can read the transcript here. And here's a long excerpt from that transcript:

But the entire idea that we weren't involved in Ukraine intimately and directly and aggressively since the change of government in 2013 is long been so preposterous that it's amazing that anyone could say it with a straight face, in part because let's remember the scandal of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and Burisma energy – not the part of the scandal that people like to talk about, the part of the scandal that even Biden administration supporters admit is genuine. Namely, you have this energy company, Burisma, that was facing serious legal problems with a prosecutor in Ukraine and another legal jeopardy as well and they did what American companies often do when they're facing legal jeopardy, which is they thought to themselves, let's try and get on our side, by paying them, someone with access to power so that we're protected. That's a common thing for a company to do. But no, the Burisma did not go looking for the son or a relative of a Ukrainian official, which is what you would do if Ukrainian officials were running Ukraine. They instead went and looked for the son of the United States Vice-President Joe Biden. Why would Burisma, an energy company facing legal problems in Ukraine, try and curry favor with Joe Biden to protect itself from prosecutorial pressure if Ukraine is a sovereign and democratic country in which the United States plays no role? Obviously, they did that because the real country running Ukraine for the last eight years, right on that side of the Soviet mob, the Russian border, has been the United States. And anyone who knows anything about that series of events knows that that's true. And that alone proves it, that Burisma's actions reflected their recognition of who the real power in Ukraine was. It wasn't Ukraine. It wasn't the elected leaders of Ukraine. It was the United States. [More . . . ]

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