Without Passion or Prejudice

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to know where this is going:

Half the country is with me on this — and I just lost the other half.

Had I started with the image below — it would be the opposite half.

One picture is worth a thousand words. Without passion or prejudice in the way, you would wonder what the image is about:

And fill in some of the words for yourself.

You’d have questions

“Who are you to criticize the great Thomas Sowell?” — would not be one of ’em. The second you do that, you’re in gross breach of the standards he espouses.

What should go off in your mind is:

“Said so and so” doesn’t strike me as Sowell’s standards. This guy seems to know something about him that I don’t — maybe I should find out what that is.

But if you’re a fan of Sowell’s and/or a Bush apologist — the second you see it’s about Iraq WMD, the discussion is over before it begins.

You defend before you consider

I didn’t write Mentality of a Mob from my imagination.

The first videographer I called about filming my documentary — was initially ecstatic about what I had in mind . . .

When he realized I wasn’t just taking both parties to task on WMD — that I was also going after liberals for being in lockstep on Trayvon.

That call came to an abrupt end.

Such willful ignorance is what I’ve dealing with for nearly 2 decades on WMD.

Same goes for liberals after Obama pissed away his presidency on the Democratic Party Playbook:

Rigging race-related incidents for maximum outrage.

Past is prologue

He was always weak and he caved . . .

I don’t think for one second that he wanted to get involved in this crap. But he’s largely to blame for much of what we see today.

Obama’s actions opened my eyes to why the Right gets so infuriated by the Left. I was never in denial of anything — I just wasn’t paying much attention.

That I voted for him in 2008 was irrelevant to my willingness to recognize reality.

Since half the country is rightly disgusted by Black Lives Matter bullshit — I’d like to think that you’d wanna know how you helped create the conditions for it to happen.

So you can learn from it.

That’s what a rational and reflective person would do. But when it comes to accepting responsibility, you do nothing of the kind.

You double down.

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

Whatever seems confusing on this site — is that way because you make it IMPOSSIBLE to reach you by any means.

That behavior is hardly new — but America has turbocharged it over the last 20 years.

It seems we have all the time in the world to promote the false — but not a second to spare for the truth. 

“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” — a quote that’s been around in various forms for over 300 years (evidently the original being from 1710):

Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.

Look around

Safety Dance of Self-Delusion

Everything on this site is three-dimensional thinking.

The moment I mention one dimension — you seize on it because that’s what you’re used to. You think it’s about one thing . . .

Because it almost invariably is

Your world revolves around pummeling the opposition — so you operate only in that universe.

I operate in a whole other world — a far more hopeful place.

You are turned off by non-linear arguments and seemingly unrelated imagery.

You insult what you don’t instantly understand.

Never mind that it’s your pride & prejudice that makes it impossible to penetrate your perception with linear arguments on matters of this depth.

Nevertheless, I’m gonna lay it all out for ya in a straight line — the key arguments of my case momentarily.

In relatively short read

Short sidebar to set the stage. I recently started a new job and in the interview a guy said:

You’ve been in IT for over 20 years — you must have a lot of stories to tell

There’s a spirit in that inquiry that’s increasingly rare. Someone like that would see such imagery below and think . . .

That’s interesting — I’ve never seen anything like that before

He might draw a correlation between the methodical thinking, creativity, attention to detail, and monumental effort involved in this kind of craftsmanship — and what you see on this site.

He’d probably see that I’m trying to connect with people on a personal level.

Maybe you’ve got woodworking experience — or any kind of background in creating things. Or maybe an appreciation of the arts alone would be enough to connect on a human level.

Wouldn’t that be something

Almost all pages and posts begin and end with music. Sometimes it’s related, sometimes not.

Once again, it’s an attempt to connect. Maybe you’ll like the song or the kind of music. Maybe you love the artist and you’ve never heard it before — so I’ve given ya a gift from the get-go.

Something to remind you that we can still share something in common. Let’s start with that.

wouldn’t that be something

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If I didn’t understand what someone was trying to say — I’d start from the beginning.

Thank you, Rick Memmer, for your brilliant commentary. I am honored by it.

— Glenn Loury

I’d wanna see what built the foundation of their thinking. That it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen — would drive my desire to understand it all the more.

I love the demands of difficulty and discernment.

If I were making my arguments to people without a vested interest in the outcome — what would that look like?

That each dimension would be objectively seen as another building block in my case — without worry of anyone seizing on isolated elements before they see it all unfold.

And once ya did — you wouldn’t smack it down with some smug 10-second reply. We’d have a conversation like adults.

You would not seek to win — you would seek the truth whether it serves you or not:

And through an exchange of questions, courtesy, and consideration:

We’d aim high

I wouldn’t have to prove anything about my commitment to honesty, integrity, and fairness:

Everything I offered would be considered on the merits alone.

Here’s how I’d do it

In the aftermath of 9/11, we invaded a country that had nothing to do with it. Republicans wanted to invade Iraq and Democrats didn’t have to guts to get in the way.

That makes them even worse. Regardless of the lies, Republicans believed in what they were doing — Democrats just went with the wind:

Standard operating procedure

Here we have a perfect expression of the most self-destructive Democratic disease which they seem unable to cure. More than anything — they fear looking weak. To avoid this, they cave, surrender, capitulate — and stand for nothing.

— Glenn Greenwald

So both parties lied and share equal responsibility.

No one was held accountable

That greatly concerned me — not only because all politicians should be held accountable (especially on a matter of this magnitude):

But also because of the damage this lie would continue to do — irreparably poisoning political discourse (at least in our lifetime).

So I wrote and produced a documentary about it 7 years ago.

To illustrate the psychological gymnastics of human nature, I intertwine the Trayvon story with the Iraq WMD delusion — an echo chamber of timeless deceit by Democrats and Republicans alike.

On the nuclear front, I dismantle Colin Powell’s UN speech.

But in a society that systematically derails reason, evidence alone cannot penetrate calcified convictions — so I took an artistic approach to it all.

The Trayvon element is the hook into the whole thing — and the origin of that connection is explained on Mount Everest of the Obvious.

By intersecting these topics, I show no favoritism in illustrating how emotion runs roughshod over reason.

The underlying message of my doc in 3 minutes and 26 seconds:

This 5-minute excerpt obliterates Colin Powell’s claims on the nuclear front at the U.N.

And in the 2 hours and 40 minutes of my 7-part series — I expose these lies on every front.

On the biggest and most costly lie in modern history — Thomas Sowell didn’t go anywhere near those facts.

and that’s a fact:

truth verifiable from experience or observation

A sample of the information available by July 10, 2004 (date of article above):

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People who talk glibly about “intelligence failure” act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything. 

— Thomas Sowell

Between my quote below and Sowell’s excerpt that follows — which one strikes you as glib?

DOE’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of “rough indication”

— Richard W. Memmer (Act II)

Not only did he flagrantly fail to follow the facts — he brazenly ignored the debauchery in his own camp to politely pounce on the other.

Thomas Sowell played a role in creating the poisonous partisanship we see today — and with my idea, he could make amends for the damage he’s done.

I have been stunned by the religious-like following around this guy — but that is what gave me the idea for how he could be the catalyst to turn the tide.

This — is demonstrably false

While his quote below is talking about people who make the decisions, it also applies to people of influence — especially since they can shape those decisions.

Loury, McWhorter, and Hughes would do far more good by holding Sowell accountable than all their efforts combined.

As accountability would frame those efforts in broader light.

How can they expect people to follow their standards when they won’t?

We can talk about race and responsibility till the end of time — but heaven forbid we have a single conversation about war and responsibility.

Loury & McWhorter don’t stray from their lane . . .

But they made sweeping assumptions to praise Thomas Sowell for stepping outside of his. Would they step back out to correct him?

The Glenn Loury of 37 years ago might have:

High up in the speech throwing down the gauntlet came my signature declaration, the Civil Rights Movement is over, I asserted.

I claimed that the problems of the lower classes of African American society plagued by poverty and joblessness were, at the end of the day, not remediable by the means which had been so effective in the 1960s of protest and petitioning for fair treatment.

What we now faced, I suggested, was a new American dilemma. The formulation I ultimately settled on contrasted an enemy without, that would be white racism, with an enemy within — black society.

“The Civil Rights Movement is over” — in 1984!

That — took guts

I watched him on Tucker Carlson Today . . .

Out of all the good stuff in Glenn’s interview — this caught my attention the most:

We’re a university. We should be above whatever the fad or the fashion is of any given day. We should be looking at the deep questions. We should be analytical. We should be emphasizing reason. Instead, it was like a kind of emotional rush — in which . . . the president and provost and the top leadership of my university — wanted to jump on a bandwagon. They wanted to wave a banner.

And I thought to myself, what have we come to at the university — that the first reaction to grave matters — and the rioting in the street after George Floyd died is a grave matter.

That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of Black Lives Matter

— Glenn Loury

Remove the references around George Floyd — and that behavior rings a bell.

The aftermath of this

That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of . . .

That’s what happened

To claim that Iraq wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t go to the moon. In denying that reality, you helped create a culture where denying reality is now the norm.

We have no chance of turning this nightmare around until somebody takes the lead on taking responsibility.

No way in the world will that happen on the Left.

The Right wants the Left and the black community to get its act together:

As they should

But however absurd those matters may to be today — those emotions are deeply woven into the fabric of America’s long history of brutality and disgrace . . .

Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, murder, decades of civil rights violations, questionable shootings, and so on . . .

While the Right won’t even look at the material properties of a tube: The manipulation of which f$@*#% up the future of the entire world.

What’s wrong with that picture — and this one?

Hmm, so the dimensions exactly match the tubes used in Iraq’s history of manufacturing the Nasser-81mm artillery rocket (a reverse-engineered version of the Italian Medusa).

Be quite a coincidence if they weren’t . . .

Ya know, connected

The lie of Iraq WMD is as definitive as it gets.

Anyone entering this discussion with sincerity — would come away realizing that there is no debate, and there never was.

They just made it up.

Making It Up As You Go

That the reaction is not to think it through, not to question, not to assemble facts, not to make arguments — but instead to wave banners and spout slogans such that you could hardly distinguish what they were doing from a manifesto that would come out of Black Lives Matter.

If the Right is gonna play that game — why shouldn’t the Left? I’m not saying they should — I’m saying that’s how they see it.

Thomas Sowell could be the catalyst to right this ship.

What the likes of Loury, McWhorter, and Hughes don’t see — is that they unwittingly provide endless fodder for the Right to ridicule the Left:

For the same behavior that the Right has been doing for decades — and getting off scot-free for it.

That the Left brings it on themselves for their weak and woke ways — is another matter.

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So all they’re doing is further calcifying the Right while not reaching the Left.

And they never will

America is too far gone for that now — at least in the way they’re going about it.

If Glenn couldn’t reach ’em for 37 years, what makes you think Glenn & the Gang can make a dent in the trench warfare of today?

Their well-meaning methods are entirely tactical . . .

My plan puts a strategic umbrella over those efforts.

What I have in mind is something of a JSOC — to join forces for a greater good that’s the gold standard of unimpeachable integrity.

Institute for Honesty? Institute for Integrity?

Something along those lines. Let’s just stick with JSOC for now — since it sounds cool and it’s got a nifty badge and all. Whatever the name . . .

JSOC’s scrutiny spares no one

STEP #1: Glenn & the Gang get Sowell to come around.

These are just the first voices that came to mind to float the idea.

I’m really aiming for a Team of Rivals, but I’d need some help in finding people who could put their politics aside when representing JSOC.

When I couldn’t think of anyone else, I looked around and came across Transparency International:

To end corruption we must first understand it. That’s why we look at what causes corruption and what works against it. . . . We advocate for power to be held accountable. Everywhere.

Step #2

Sowell joins JSOC (he doesn’t even have to do anything — just his seal of approval is enough). Then we go after this guy — boxing him in by his own “facts over feelings” standard.

With Sowell’s backing, how does Shapiro escape his own words about what a “terrific thinker” and “ethical guide” Thomas Sowell is?

Thomas Sowell is of course one of the foremost economists in America. He’s a terrific thinker — and more importantly, Thomas Sowell is I think a real ethical guide for a lot of folks because he thinks about issues rationally.

Step #3

I can’t imagine Sowell treating me like Larry Elder did below.

Up against JSOC (with Sowell and hopefully Shapiro on board): Larry’s days are done with dishing but not taking.

And if he stops behaving like a child when challenged — and consistently delivers on “facts over feelings,” JSOC would welcome him right in.

Step #4

JSOC drops the hammer — and this is the short list:

If you’ve got a better idea — I’m all ears

But I don’t see anybody with any ideas — just more of the same that got us here in the first place.

You think my idea is a fantasy? I need a handful of key people and hardly any money to make this happen.

Your ways have repeatedly failed — the fantasy is thinking that they’ll magically work next time.

I don’t see Sowell as a “great man” at all . . .

But he can be

If you wanna make the opposition look bad, try looking good. If you wanna have the moral high ground, try earning it:

The moral high ground, in ethical or political parlance, refers to the status of being respected for remaining moral, and adhering to and upholding a universally recognized standard of justice or goodness.

It’s not a miracle — we just decided to go

Thank you for your time