Seymour Hersh Blows Up Joe Biden’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Story

Here's a short chronology, then my reaction:

Feb 7, 2022: Joe Biden promises that Russia invades Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline will not be operational: "We will bring an end to it."

Sept 26, 2022 - The Nordstream 2 pipeline is destroyed.

Sept 28, 2022 - The Washington Post scolds Tucker Carlson for reporting that the U.S. destroyed Russia's pipeline.

Sept 30, 2022 - The White house denies U.S. involvement in destroying the pipeline. Accuses the Russians of lying. Claims that Russia destroyed its own pipeline.

Feb 8, 2023 - Highly respected investigative reporter Seymore Hersh issues news article detailing how the U.S. blew up the Nordstream 2 Pipeline. Title: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline: The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now."

Feb 8, 2023 - The White House claims that the article by Hersch, a well-decorated reporter (see comments), is "utterly false and complete fiction."

In a surreal way, it has ceased to become "news" that our political leaders constantly lie to us, even on matters that could dramatically escalate (already high) tensions between the U.S. and Russia, two irresponsible trigger-happy countries, each of which is capable of ruining the entire planet with their over-abundance of nuclear weapons.

You and were not give an opportunity to vote on whether the U.S should engage in such reckless behavior. Congress did not deliberate on whether the U.S. should jump into a proxy war with Russia. You and I were not asked whether the U.S. should destroy a valuable asset of Russia, committing what Russia will undoubtedly consider an act of war.

Witness yet another short-term victory for the Military-Petroleum-Industrial-Complex. We are playing out yet another round of wars of discretion. This should be horrifying to all of us. Why? Here are the ending lines of Hersch's article:

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

At this time, based on my own search of these five websites, not a single word about Hersh's Nordstream 2 reporting at NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC or NPR. The only recent thing I found on MSNBC was this glowing interview of Hersh by David Gura.

Nathan Robinson:

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About Trusting Wikipedia

I just learned about a 2021 article titled "Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia."

Excerpt:

"Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can’t always be trusted to give people the truth.

He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”

“Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” said Mr Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.

He told Lockdown TV that “if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”"

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The Importance of Foundational Principles

From Maya Forstater's article, "On Gender-critical disputes."

Helen Joyce comes up with really good allegories and mental models at the rate of about one a week. But the one that I keep coming back to is one she told me the first time I met her, when I was still scrambling to keep my job at CGD, and trying to understand how it was that my smart and normally convivial colleagues had succumbed to repeating and enforcing irrational, circular nonsense.

1=0

Helen (a mathematician by training) said that pretending that human beings can change sex is like saying 1=0, and that the rules and laws we use for sense-making and decision-making are like a series of interconnected equations. When the 1=0 untruth proliferates through them it breaks things: single-sex becomes mixed-sex, fair becomes unfair, truth becomes lie. It works like kryptonite on safeguards, and causes organisations to operate in direct opposition to their purpose. People who need or want to remain inside those institutions create layers of argument (which may be impenetrable even to themselves) in order to protect the untruth and avoid being cast out.

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Action in the Absence of Evidence: The Case of Compelled Masking and COVID

The Cochrane Review recently declared that there is no evidence supporting the use of masks to prevent COVID. Dr. Vinay Prasad took that Review seriously and uses this finding as an example of a commonly occurring dysfunction in modern public health:

In medicine, when we give therapies without RCT support, at least we know our limitations. We spend time with patients counseling them about the pros and cons. We don’t straight up lie to patients, and say this drug will lower your risk of death 85% (without good data that is true). Kiss them on the forehead and say “shhhh question time is over”, “why don’t you trust me. TrUSt DoCTorS. We don’t want the mis-information police to come get you.”

No, we are honest about what we don’t know. And furthermore, as much as possible, we design and conduct RCTs to reduce our uncertainty. Some of us are more conservative than others, and refrain, in so far as is possible, from prescribing unproven costly drug combinations knowing the unknown risks may exceed unknown benefits. But even the most exuberant prescribers tell patients, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t know for sure this will work”

And yet, public health is actively engaged in a campaign of lies. Cochrane reviewed masking RCTs and it is profoundly negative. In response has been a steady stream of excuses that frankly are inconsistent with how we interpret evidence.

In Public Health, the US government (CDC and NIAID) and WHO literally ran ZERO trials of community masking— for 3 years— while recommending it AGAINST pre-pandemic guidance based on NO NEW data, and then incorporated it into future guidelines. All they while they denied the data from dozens of RCTs. If you did that to a patient, they would remove your license.

Furthermore, if anything, Public Health has a greater obligation to generate data than the cancer doctor. Our interventions are done with the consent of the person, often someone dying. Each day, they feel their body weaken. Our patients are willing to take risks, after all they know what happens if you do nothing.

Public health is for average people. Many are healthy. We impose upon these people and promise them we can make them better off. We need the very best evidence before boosting a 20 year old man who had 3 doses and covid twice, and yet we get worse evidence than a drug for a terminally ill penta-refractory cancer patient. It’s entirely backwards.

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The Main Reasons the US and Russia are Risking Nuclear War

Why is the U.S. risking what Joe Biden has termed nuclear armageddon . .

Cui bono? Dwight Eisenhauer had the answer:

More from the video notes:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, known for its warnings about the growing power of the "military-industrial complex," was nearly two years in the making. This Inside the Vaults video short follows newly discovered papers revealing that Eisenhower was deeply involved in crafting the speech, which was to become one of the most famous in American history. The papers were discovered by the family of Eisenhower speechwriter Malcolm Moos and donated to the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. Eisenhower Library director Karl Weissenbach and presidential historian and Foundation for the National Archives board member Michael Beschloss discuss the evolution of the speech.

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