NPR matter of factly introduces this piece by stating that Epstein "took his own life," then NPR reporter Lisa Hagen puts her lack of curiosity on full display. Truly, if one is not going to be curious, why would one choose to be a reporter?
In 2022, as the U.S. was ramping up its support for war in Ukraine and interfering with settlement efforts, there was a coordinated effort to keep you in the dark on this history of U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics, every bit of it true and well-documented. Now 450,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dead. None of this carnage was necessary. More than $100B of U.S. tax $ spent, much of it to line the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers. Joe Biden and his Iraq-failure architects, neocon advisors Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken, have this blood on their hands, as do the U.S. corporate media on the left and right. The following video is short (less than 5 minutes) and it should be required viewing most Americans.
[Added Jan 6, 2024]
Biden's simplistic story about the Ukraine war is "Bad Putin." Now compare that fairy tale with the sprawling nefarious corrupt involvement of Blackrock, as discussed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Corporate greed is also working non-stop to keep Blackrock completely out of the corporate media headlines so you can continue to believe the story about "Bad Putin."
Notice how Greg Lukianoff distinguishes between the free speech issues and the plagiarism issues in which "smart" people at Harvard, pundits and media are using their formidable intellectual training to generate endless streams of bullshit.
I agree completely with Lukianoff who offers several valuable resources for reforming financially-bloated ideology-permeated elite colleges.
Excerpt:
Once Gay resigned, we then saw people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and others (including the Associated Press, with its coverage being mocked for its original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism”), pointing the finger at racism and right-wing animus rather than on the real problem: Harvard itself, and our institutions of higher learning as a whole.
In my and Rikki Schlott’s book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we outline a fourth “Great Untruth” (adding to the first three Jonathan Haidt and I described in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) which is that “bad people only have bad opinions.” This is the foundational assumption of what we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the method by which cancelers on the political Left shut down arguments. By declaring someone a “conservative,” a “right winger,” — or, if you REALLY want them to be ignored, “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “Neo-confederate” — whether they actually are conservative or not, they are also declaring that they are evil and therefore incapable of being correct. This form of non-argumentation, which I have dubbed “fasco-casting”, along with the political Right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress tactics (which similarly use labels like “liberal” and “woke” to automatically dismiss counterarguments) is a near-ubiquitous anti-intellectual habit these days.
Research has demonstrated that the brain is not primarily a truth-seeking organ. It can seek truth, but that is much more likely to happen in specialized environments where enlightenment principles prevail, for instance the type of environment where disciplined scientists and engineers work together to create things that really work in the real world.Out in the wild, the real world, where most of us spend most of our time, brains are mostly used as PR departments, generating "reasons" for doing what we want to do based on our emotions. Lukianoff offers several resources for exploring this counter-intuitive finding:
The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.
But it is a serious problem, summarized well by another Substack, The Prism:
“The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding…Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).
By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
From "The Real Harvard Scandal," by Tyler Austin Harper, at The Atlantic:
The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it.
And from Carl, who has as much patience with the Associated Press as I do . . .
The following excerpt is from a recent interview featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His comments confirm my experience. Everyone I've talked to who "opposes" RFK, Jr. knows next to nothing about him, including on the topic of vaccines. They think he is against all vaccines, which is palpably untrue. He wants them to be subjected to the same safety tests as other pharmaceuticals. This position is made clear in many of his easily accessible interviews and in his 2023 book, Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak (2023). First, an excerpt from this interview:
Patrick Bet-David: What do you say to the people who like many of your policies, who liked the fact that you're pushing the establishment? But at the same time, aren't you just kind of helping President Biden become a president again and get reelected,
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr: I'm running against the two weakest candidates in American history. President Trump has a very, very intense following up, but it's relatively small and President Biden, there's almost nobody that I've met. In fact, I can say, I've never met anybody so far who says you should vote for President Biden, because he has a great vision for the country, that he's energetic, that he can grapple with the big problems on. They all say, "You got to vote for him, because otherwise Trump is going to start a dictatorship." My polls right now: I'm beating both candidates in all Americans under 45 years old. And Americans under 35 years old, I'm beating them both by 10 points. I'm up to now 24% average in the battleground states, which puts me within 10 points of winning the electio., I can win the election, theoretically, with 34%. And I'm already at 24% in key states like Michigan, and I have almost a full year. And this with spending very, very little money compared to them. I'm leading with independent voters 36 with independent voters, and President Trump is at 27, I think and President Biden is at 31. We're essentially in a three way tie with Hispanic voters, I'm leading everybody with mothers who have children at home. The only group that I don't, I don't do well in are baby boomers. And I believe that reason that I'm not doing well with them is that they get their news from television, MSNBC, from CNN, and the New York Times The Washington Post.
I have seven kids. And I would believe that none of them have ever watched an evening news on TV, they get their news from other sources. They get it from the internet, they get it from podcasts, etc. And in that generation, I am dominating. So what we're seeing anecdotally is that people who watch my interviews and long form interviews, even Liberal Democrats have a very, very high conversion rate. So my strategy over the next 11 months, is to get as many of those people to be able to see interviews with me, to ask me questions. And, you know, to get to know, something about me that's outside this kind of stew of defamations and pejoratives that define me in the in the mainstream media.
Now, here are a few excerpts from Kennedy's book, Vax-Unvax:
Since the enactment of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which provides a liability shield for vaccine manufacturers, the vaccination schedule has multiplied considerably. Today, children following the CDC-recommended vaccination schedule receive a minimum of seventy-three shots for seventeen different diseases, with a whopping twenty-eight injections by their first birthday. . .
Long-Term Vaccine Safety Studies Are Lacking
Despite this huge increase in vaccination, researchers have done very little to study the health of these children, either in the short term or the long term. While medical authorities credit universal childhood vaccination programs with eradicating several deadly infectious diseases, these same experts show little interest in studying the acute and long-term adverse effects of vaccination, nor do safety studies focus on the health effects of the collective vaccination schedule. [More . . . ]