Part 1 of 7
Stockton Rush’s name will never be forgotten for his folly that took 5 lives in a contraption doomed to fail. That same wishful thinking in totally unsuitable material — was held by a CIA/WINPAC analyst named Joe Turner:
Who provided a path to war that cost countless lives, unspeakable damage, and $2.2 trillion.
Never heard of him . . .
I imagine not — in a country that can’t even get this straight:
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Attributed to Mark Twain
By Design
America Remains Mired in the Murky
On an issue involving an industry where fractions of a millimeter matter: What does it say to you that the “debate” was hijacked by 10-second sound bites? Shouldn’t any debate establish what the debate is actually about? What does it say about a country that can’t even establish that much on a matter of this magnitude?
The road to reality is blocked by detours designed to keep you going in circles. Purveyors of poppycock reroute you with narratives that avoid detail like Black Death.
The way out is to start with an inconsistency or two that’s narrow in scope — and take the trail where it leads. To ascertain the truth on any topic: If you’ve got something concrete to go on — that’s your point of entry. By all means, keep the door open in every direction.
But by nailing down the definitive first, it paves a clearer path to all the rest. This country does the exact opposite on everything: Lumping it all together and never even approaching where you should have started in the first place:
You’ve probably heard of yellowcake. How about uranium hexafluoride?
Does calling someone a “Bush hater” strike you as a valid counter to that question? Never mind this story goes straight to the top with who’s in the White House right now — on very specific culpability to boot.
How so? How I’d love to live in a world where you’d ask not out of party-line pursuits — but because it’s on the trail to the truth.
The rotor speed required to separate uranium isotopes doesn’t care who’s president, and when it comes to ascertaining the truth, neither do I.
In order to maintain such speeds, the material properties of centrifuges are as critical as it gets. You don’t need to interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist to figure that out — but I like to be thorough.
To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know:
Believe it or not, the best way to serve your interests is to first and foremost — hold your own accountable. If you want to make the opposition look bad, try looking good. If you want to 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.
I designed my doc as a tool to be used for exactly that — by illustrating the wildly out of whack ways in which people debate — clinging to beliefs that have no bearing on reality. Anyone wanting to know the truth would not behave in ways that ensure they never will.
Doing another documentary on WMD alone would not properly address this problem (no matter how exhaustively detailed). It needed something to address the radically irrational behavior that blew off all the great work that paved the way for mine.
I’m addressing problems at their roots while America perpetually spins its wheels on symptoms.
Just picking the “root cause” that works for you doesn’t get it done. You’ve gotta look at interconnected causes across-the-board:
The problems that plague America are interrelated — and anything short of addressing that is going nowhere. But everyone’s wrapped up in their wheelhouse — operating under umbrellas of interests that don’t account for complexities outside of them.
It astounds me that some of the most brilliant minds in the world seem incapable of correlating how “unrelated” issues impact one another. The most harmful pollution on the planet is noise — narrative that drowns out sensible discussion. You could blame those who amplify that deafening noise with delight:
Or be smart by not doing dumb things that drive the narrative in the first place.
Pursuing aims in ways that predictably damage your cause is bad enough. But once the outcome becomes clear, it’s beyond belief that you refuse to reflect on your methods. Even if you’re right and have the best of intentions:
If you’re not smart in making your moves, you can exponentially worsen the problem you’re addressing — along with seemingly unrelated ones.
And already have — again and again:
Like many alternatives, however, it was psychologically impossible. Character is fate, as the Greeks believed. Germans were schooled in winning objectives by force, unschooled in adjustment. They could not bring themselves to forgo aggrandizement even at the risk of defeat.
— Barbara Tuchman
Unschooled in Adjustment
We really don’t understand the character of the collision with the iceberg
Fine, but could we at least leave a little room for understanding what happened to having character in this country? I watched this digital scan of the Titanic wreckage with fascination — and that would have been the end of it until this bit below. I respect the reporting & passion of the people behind these efforts.
What I take issue with is a culture that craves detail at the depths of Titanic — while issues of world-altering consequence are skated over on the surface.
Despite how extensively the Titanic has been explored — there are still many fundamental questions. The hope is this scan could provide answers. We really don’t understand the character of the collision with the iceberg. We don’t even know if she hit it along the starboard side as shown in all the movies. She might have grounded on the iceberg — and this photogrammetry model is one of the first major steps to driving the Titanic Story toward evidence-based research and not speculation.
And then there’s this
I understand the fascination
What I take issue with is that somehow you can magically make sense on this:
I’m a retired engineer, electrical not mechanical. You are absolutely correct about technical limits on materials such as this sub design. It’s insane this guy took the sub to its breaking point. It’s sad but a good lesson to future explorers. Don’t push the physical limitations of the materials and design.
— YouTube user
Then turn into imbeciles on this:
As I said in my doc
The plausibility of these tubes being used as centrifuges was so far-fetched that one D.O.E. analyst said: “If Iraq was really trying to make them into centrifuge rotors — we should just give them the tubes.”
— Richard W. Memmer: Prologue
Since the entire country had no trouble understanding baseline information of material properties on Titan: Comprehending essentially the same story in another context shouldn’t be a problem. But for 20 years America has made it almost impossible to even have that conversation (let alone understand it).
For telling undeniable truth that takes both parties to task — I’ve been practically spit on for following principles those same people promote on a daily basis.
Anything Goes on social media . . .
Or as I coined it
Where you can promote principles in one breath and abandon them the next. And get away with it with ease:
Because you’ve got friends
The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence we have specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, we would expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselyte or to persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
These five conditions specify the circumstances under which increased proselyting would be expected to follow disconfirmation.
— When Prophecy Fails
I did the doc to address that behavior that’s rampant across-the-board, but in the last 2 years — I’ve seen savagery beyond anything that inspired it:
All in defense of one man with a cult-like following unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
As I’ve been in the trenches battling hermetically sealed minds for decades, that’s saying something. His disciples see him as some kind of saint-like Sherlock Holmes — never mind his history being wildly out of sync with his sanctimonious claims. This crowd defends him before they even know what the subject matter is:
And issue unconscionable excuses once they do.
I’m even assailed on things we agree on, because they instantly assume I’m out to discredit him on everything. And this story is a conduit through which to tell a larger story: Driven by an idea that could put us on a path to a new kind of story.
The surgical specificity of this clip puts this lie in its place in 5 minutes alone. To take a story this complex and convoluted and boil its essence down to a few minutes was no small feat.
Trillion Dollar Tube
Imagine what I did with 160
“There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with [Hamilton]. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.”
— Major William Pierce (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton)
Wouldn’t it be absurd to share that quote if my clip contained nothing but trite talking points? Some circles are not burdened by squaring their walk with their talk. They seem to think that advertising virtue equates to embodying it.
Case in point
People who talk glibly about “intelligence failure” act as if intelligence agencies that are doing their job right would know everything.
— Professional Know-It-All (PKIA for short)
D.O.E’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.”
And since the entire point of testing should be to replicate the conditions of centrifuges, one would think that the full-blown testing would be performed before the N.I.E. was completed.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
Between PKIA’s words and mine
Which ones strike you as glib?
And these are on the mild end of the savagery I’ve seen:
You couldn’t carry PKIA‘s jockstrap!
Seriously? Get a life. It doesn’t matter what you say, he’s better than you basically in everything.
You deserved to be treated that way! You’re a moron and pathetic character assassin
Holy shit…. a video of a circle jerks with a nut in the center talking about RPMS. Yet somehow PKIA is a liar.
How do you reconcile that with this?
From the very PKIA you’re protecting?
What does it say to you that I had to come up with an alias for the figure in question — just so his crowd will consider his claims in isolation from his immaculate image? Just as the Condi cartoon captures what words cannot — so too does the implication behind the alias.
What would you call someone who shoots their mouth off without addressing the evidence — but banks on their fabricated reputation to create the impression that they did? Back to PKIA later. For now, I’d like to focus on the facts he flagrantly ignored so he could manufacture a follow-the-facts fantasyland for his followers:
To worship him while butchering his bedrocks beliefs — just as he did.
How can you expect anyone to admit when they’re wrong if you won’t? And every time you allow emotion to run roughshod over reason, you further calcify habits at the other end of the spectrum from these:
Rather than assert that all opinions are equal, students in seminar learn to judge opinions on the basis of the reasons given for those opinions.
Nobody ever had to explain that to me. I’m sure you all feel the same:
And yet here we are
And yet here we are
20 years later . . .
And now, even now: The cat . . . TOTALLY out of the BAG!
And now, even now
The Right wants the Left and the black community to get its act together on matters 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. 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)
Not to mention — this picture:
Half the country took the word of professional know-it-alls over nuclear scientists. And when your camp came up empty on WMD — you just bought more bullshit from the same people who sold you the first batch:
Shrewd!
Preach responsibility and take none
The question comes down to whether or not you’re basing your belief on something in the realm of reason — not some fail-safe fantasy that allows you to believe whatever you want.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act III
Hide and Seek
In an industry where fractions of a millimeter matter, these guys were playing horseshoes with centrifuge physics . . .
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
Who are “these guys” on this fiasco for the ages? Who are the “most experts” Powell was referring to in his UN speech?
That’s the untold story I told in 2014:
When I set out to set the record straight on this endless saga of absurdity.
“To learn to ask: ‘Is that true?’” . . .
Maybe there’s something to what she just said. Let me think about it. That’s interesting. Maybe I should change my mind.’” . . .
When is the last time you can honestly remember a public dialogue — or even a private conversation — that followed that useful course?
Someone wonders
Not long before this Tweet — this PKIA parishioner was condemning my efforts like all the rest that day (and every day).
And then he opened the doc . . .
That’s the exception
This is the rule . . .
And therein lies the rub
As I don’t have situational rules . . .
In reference to its opening image on that post, I wrote the following:
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.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Exploring America’s decline over decades of delight in the Gutter Games of Government — is apples & oranges as it gets when compared to the transactional nature of news and social-media norms.
How do you convey fair-mindedness in a culture that instantly supports or scorns on lickety–split perception alone? You can rattle off personalities you perceive as fair-minded, no doubt. But how many of you have dealt with any of ’em one-on-one? And of that group, how many have put their principles to the test on matters practically woven into their DNA?
Stick around — and you’ll see how some household names of the fair-minded behaved in the face of irrefutable fact.
So I will ask you once again . . .
How do you expose the whole charade — when bona fide fair-mindedness is not welcome here?
When you figure that out, lemme know.
In the meantime . . .
Forget the mile — I’ll settle for just putting on the shoes.
Believing things that have no bearing on reality has become a plague across America:
Erosion of reason that took decades of denying the undeniable.
I don’t know how people find the path of least resistance so satisfying — as I love the demands of difficulty and discernment. To not step up my game in the midst of opportunity or challenge: Would be tantamount to treason upon my very existence.
This nation has no such notion
The Yellow Brick Road is the path of America’s pursuits of predictable failures:
And how systematic oversimplification has taken over to the point where inconvenient correlations are condemned as convoluted. And any attempt to have a conversation on issues that clearly call for careful consideration — is hijacked by baseless beliefs beaten into your brain as bedrock fact.
Arrival is a movie that makes you think — and that’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Their efforts to develop a conduit of communication is in striking contrast to how we talk to each other today. With the word “HUMAN” written on a whiteboard, they were able to build on that by seeing patterns in indecipherable symbols.
We have the most sophisticated communication tools in history — and we can’t even talk to each other in the same language.
Instead of listening and learning — slinging snippets of certitude has become America’s pastime. We’ve created a knee-jerk nation where discernment is derided and negligence is in vogue. What was beyond the pale in the past is now perfectly acceptable.
There was a time when adults acted their age. Those days are long gone — as the internet and the cable clans paved the way for the onslaught of the utterly absurd. From decades of being increasingly accommodating of liars aligned with your interests:
You kept lowering the bar — and now there is no bar.
I don’t roll that way
When it comes to ascertaining the truth — I don’t care what your cause is, who’s in the White House, who controls Congress or the courts. I learned early on in life that what you want gets in the way of what you see. There is no amount of gain you could give me to believe something to be true that is false.
When warranted, I will defend those I despise and call out those I like. I call a spade a spade, period.
I love moments of truth that put my principles to the test. One of my favorites is the Florida election fiasco of 2000. I just wanted the right thing to be done — whether it served my interests or not was irrelevant. That sense of fairness is so foreign I might as well be speaking another language.
The Presentation — is PKIA’S language:
PKIA’S pursuit of truth and accountability is egregiously one-sided:
And that’s a fact:
truth verifiable from experience or observation
Just as my lifelong record of unwavering commitment to the truth and objective scrutiny to find it:
You can’t seem to comprehend that I don’t care what damage the truth inflicts upon politicians of any brand. I have this crazy idea that across-the-board accountability is always in the best interests of the nation.
As for my frustration — I have this thing about people who regurgitate nonsense in the face of overwhelming evidence that counters their baseless beliefs.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
PKIA is lauded for calling out problems he helped create.
A lot of that goin’ around!
True folly, Tuchman found, is generally recognized as counterproductive in its own time, and not merely in hindsight. In Tuchman’s template, true folly only ensues when a clear alternative path of action was available and ruled out.
We’re well beyond “disagreement” in America:
This is madness
Countless millions miserably failing to follow even the most fundamental methods of how understanding works.
The second you shun evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative you want — you have contaminated your judgment. How quickly you come to your conclusions — and what you’re willing to ignore to solidify them:
That is the underlying message of my efforts.
Tuchman alighted on a root cause of folly that she called “wooden-headedness” — defined in part as “assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting contrary information.”
A lot of that goin’ around too
At the heart of why we fail to live up to our potential as a society is because we excel at polluting even the purest form of fact. How can we possibly solve serious problems when we refuse to adhere to some semblance of the fundamentals of making sense?
— Richard W. Memmer: Epilogue
Debunking the WMD delusion & Trayvon tale is a conduit for showing how this nation systematically derails debate. “Everybody believed Iraq had WMD” is not a valid argument any more than “armed only with Skittles.” By the way — how many know what Trayvon actually looked like? It’s not the kid on People magazine I assure you.
I’m not interested in defending Zimmerman: My aim is to expose the irrational behavior of blindly defending Martin and the damage you did by doing so.
To conform to fact
We must agree that it was watermelon and consider what it means: Maybe nothing, maybe everything. But you pollute the debate when you won’t even acknowledge the irrefutable.
Worse than that — you poison your purpose . . .
On that front — and this one
Marching to Black Lives Matter with the first black president sitting in the White House — was that a smart move? The answer should be abundantly clear and yet the question is not even considered.
I’ve been blocked on Twitter for just politely suggesting that BLM is a counterproductive cause.
Instead of considering how you could fight for justice more intelligently — you act like I’m saying you shouldn’t fight for it at all. You want to be taken seriously about having conversations on race when you won’t even agree to what kind of can he was carrying?
Was that a smart move?
Instantly firing back with boilerplate beliefs is not an indicator of understanding the premise of that question (or even caring to). Such inquiry requires reflection and the willingness to examine the efficacy of your efforts:
And what role you play in harming your own interests by the manner in which you pursue them. The Right is not always wrong — and the smart move is to agree with them when they’re making sense.
It’s also the right thing to do.
The right thing tends to be the demanding thing — the difficult that can’t be captured in slogans, kneeling, and knocking down monuments. I don’t care if Kaepernick kneels — I care that you can’t solve multidimensional problems with one-dimensional gestures.
And if you’re think you’re making progress because of ever-increasing attention to your concerns:
I suggest you reconsider
And That Goes for All of America
Repeatedly rehashing issues is not the mark of problem solving: It’s the mark of a market. All these channels are blunt instruments (including those I agree with).
You’re just pounding away at problems without any examination of the efficacy of your efforts.
At the core of our country’s decline — is the unrelenting refusal to get to the bottom of anything. Like this 1619 business: You wanna draw correlations from the past while flagrantly ignoring crystal-clear connections in the present. Black Lives Matter, monuments, kneeling, and now this?
You’re all over the place — and you’ve got company:
My idea is simple:
Cutting through our Crap is King culture to get you to see it — is not.
Where infantile insults are celebrated
The doubt-free who don’t do their homework are the experts.
Those who belittle and outright reject correction — are the righteous and wise. The ones with courage to admit when they’re wrong — are the weak. Tireless dedication is mercilessly mocked — while intellectual laziness is esteemed.
Original thinking and uniqueness are bashed — while conforming to the trite is trumpeted. Depth is discarded with disdain — while shallowness is embraced with love.
The honest & sincere are shunned — while manipulators & liars are welcomed with open arms.
This is my story — and if you read it in full, you’ll find it’s part of your story too. You’ve all dealt with the same behavior I have — the difference is that I get it from every direction.
You don’t really need to find out what’s goin’ on
You don’t really wanna know just how far it’s gone
Just leave well enough alone Eat your dirty laundry . . .
We can do “The Innuendo,” we can dance and sing
When it’s said and done, we haven’t told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Speaking of bias
This image is especially fitting for the times — since it’s a myth popularized by Washington Irving and others. According to The Flat Earth Myth . . .
The Real Myth is the Idea That Anyone Ever Believed in a Flat Earth
“Bias” gets all the press
When prejudice is paramount to the problem. If it were just bias, convincing you with overwhelming and irrefutable evidence might still be difficult — but you’d be willing to be convinced.
Prejudice doesn’t roll that way. In fact, it doesn’t roll anywhere — as you don’t budge one bit and take pride in it to boot. As a friend comically put it:
It’s not “Pride and Bias”
Would Einstein’s quote would have the same bite with “bias”? How about “Without Passion or Prejudice”? The divide between “bias” and “prejudice” is not a distinction without a difference — meaning matters (or at least it used to).
He wasn’t talking about any particular type of prejudice. But right on cue, in response to a Tweet I wrote that included:
The prejudice in Einstein’s era pales in comparison to today
Someone seized on it instantly assuming it was about racial prejudice . . .
Never mind the context
After all, why bother trying to understand what someone’s saying when it’s so much easier to jump to conclusions first and never ask questions later? You’d be amazed by what you can see when you just take a little time and leave your assumptions behind.
People really don’t listen.
People are just either not that interested in what you’re saying, or they are too focused on their own agenda. It’s ridiculous to see two people acting like they can’t really hear each other — by choice.
In “The Significance Principle,” authors Les Carter and Jim Underwood posit that we should listen past where the other person has finished. We should even pause before answering. Let them get their point, their story, their compliment, and even their criticism out. Completely. . . .
The ability to hear is a gift. The willingness to listen is a choice.”
— Mike Greene, Why you should first seek to understand — before trying to be understood
On the title alone
If I came across this and hadn’t done my homework — my first thought would be:
I must be missing something pretty big . . .
you have other ideas:
Button your lip and don’t let the shield slip
Take a fresh grip on your bulletproof mask
And if they try to break down your disguise with their questions
You can hide hide hide behind Paranoid Eyes
On Titan, time-honored materials and safety standards of DSVs are taken into account to accurately assess the situation. We listen to experts and respect their input because it makes sense. Had Stockton done the same, he and his crew would still be alive.
And if this nation didn’t look at everything through a political lens — a lot of people would still be alive.
And lo and behold: The number of experts who thought carbon fiber was sound for DSVs — matches the number of nuclear scientists who supported Powell’s baseless assertions on the tubes that took us to war:
Exactly Zero
Something’s Not Right
Just as something wasn’t right with Stockton Rush and Elizabeth Holmes (both of ’em dying to be disruptors — and one of ’em went all the way). Yeah, Rush got Titan to work for a while, but it was pure folly from the start — just like the hackery behind her claim to fame.
Why would anyone believe that you could conduct 200 blood tests in this little box? Maybe someday someone will — what do I know? I know something’s not right when I see it. To be sure, I’ve been fooled a time or two — but that’s at the core of what this is all about:
To learn from our mistakes.
And lo and behold: Those who bought into her fantasy would have seen who she really was had they simply started with these 3 words and followed their instincts:
Something’s not right . . .
A.K.A.
Speaking of Holmes
Another parallel is how our culture places excessive faith in people based on image, not the totality of their record. Titan’s passengers put their trust in their pilot — because surely if he’s going along, it must OK. I’m hardly comparing the naivete of Titan’s crew to the wildly misguided belief in this media darling.
I’m simply saying we’ve become a country that’s way too easily accepting of those who speak to us.
In a society that’s either gushing with over-the-top praise or seething with over-the-top scorn — whatever happened to something in between? Ya know, balance — which was nowhere to be found in the fallacies that follow:
The Mariana Trench of False Equivalence
But if an experimental approach to discovery is a crime, then we might as well put the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Apollo’s lunar-bound astronauts on trial.
And while deep exploration of the oceans carries obvious risks, I can’t quite accept the notion that he was cavalier about it all.
Then by definition — you’re as delusional as he was:
- A delusion is a mistaken belief that is held with strong conviction even when presented with superior evidence to the contrary
- Characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument
- Something a person believes and wants to be true, when it is actually not true
And here’s his motive — in the very next sentence:
I knew Stockton through a mutual friend of ours in our hometown of Seattle, and within those circles of acquaintance he was known as a terrific husband, father, grandfather and friend, with an infectious, fun-loving curiosity that will linger as an influence long beyond his death.
His risks were calculated ones, however flawed the calculations might turn out to be.
Right on cue | Never fails
Stockton took shortcuts that cost him his life and the lives of those who placed misguided faith in him. Elizabeth Holmes took shortcuts that put her in prison and made fools out of a lot of people.
Some were young and sincere who simply got lost in the dream of doing something special. Others should have known better, but miserably failed to ask tough questions in a culture that craves ease and the quick win.
Speaking of #winning and records:
Before this guy got cancer — he’s ridden the Tour de France four times. His best place was 36th overall. In a mountain stage, he never finished within 8 minutes of the winner (mostly he was 20 minutes, 25 minutes, 30 minutes behind). So how can you get cancer, come back from cancer, and be completely transformed? And this was a sport that the previous year had been revealed to be a doping circus.
— David Walsh, The Undoing of Tour de France Hero Lance Armstrong
Something’s not right
Walsh asked questions unwelcomed by a world wrapping its arms around a cancer survivor who came back to dominate the sport of cycling. Incredibly, no matter how times the truth comes to light about people claiming to be something they are not:
Even in the face of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence . . .
You still won’t start with those 3 little words of wonder (all the while insisting the other side do what you won’t). Something’s not right and I go way back:
From the Epilogue
And yet America just casually moves on — masking realities with more platitudes in celebration of freedom. I fail to find the liberty in allowing people to engineer your perception. And now we have a skyscraper to symbolize 1776 so that we’ll — “never forget.”
I noticed we had no trouble forgetting 58,000 names on a wall in the run-up to Iraq.
If nothing else, we could have shown some wisdom by demanding a Declaration of War. Instead, we rigged another resolution that echoes the Gulf of Tonkin that got us into Vietnam. Only this time we had a 24/7 news cycle bolstered by the internet — so we could calcify our beliefs more rapidly than ever.
I saw the post-9/11 blitzkrieg of nationalism in another light — that by virtue of volume you can identify patterns of questionable integrity more easily:
- Condoleezza Rice struck me as someone working awfully hard to say something of little substance
- Cheney’s robotic claims were devoid of complexity — and simplistic repetition is a telltale sign of propaganda
- Colin Powell’s U.N. speech seemed more like a laundry list of complaints than a well-argued case
- And the Democrats rolling with the tide could hardly be read as an indicator of authenticity
- And once the trumped-up intelligence started seeping out after the invasion — anyone with an open mind could put that puzzle together
Speaking of behavioral patterns
Richard W. Memmer: Isn’t it curious that Cheney and Libby spent so much time at the C.I.A. — but didn’t bother talking to centrifuge scientists on the tubes? Russ Hoyle’s exceptional book crystalizes that question even more:
GOING TO WAR: A spokesman for Cheney claimed the vice president didn’t know about the internal debate within the intelligence community until the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate was published on October 1st. The notion that Cheney — a meticulous and aggressive investigator, could have been in the dark about the D.O.E’s view on the tubes strains credulity.
Identifying deception revolves around the observation of behavioral patterns. The following interview excerpts typify how the dishonest will deflect, evade, dismiss, and redirect out of desperation.
Ask the right questions and they will dig themselves into a hole every single time.
Unfortunately, the journalists didn’t ask any questions that demand specificity — which left the door wide open for absurdly obfuscated answers.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act III
Putting aside Bill Cosby’s fall from grace . . .
He was a universal icon of goodness growing up. In just this 5-second scene from Picture Pages — a parallel can be drawn to everything I advocate on this site:
The.Deal.Is.That.We.Connect.These.Dots . . .
You see
Imagine!
There are powerful forces that make damn sure you don’t!
Speaking of pages, I had written 50 on Iraq in my unfinished book before I wrote one word of that script. And yet when I went to interview this world-renowned nuclear scientist for my research:
My journey had just begun . . .
Incredibly . . .
I was treated with even more contempt than ever before — by people who wouldn’t watch one second of my work. Not the tiniest trace of reasoning or courtesy can be found in anything I’ve come across in decades of dealing with the doubt-free on WMD.
And of all those I’ve challenged — their knowledge combined could fit into a thimble with space to spare.
Speaking of the moon
I’d suggest heading on back to that backwater school, Purdue, for a little more indoctrination, er, I mean education.
“BACKWATER SCHOOL“
To call the Cradle of Astronauts “backwater”
Is award-worthy for asinine statements.
The “arguments” of “Expert” By Association — taking cue from his kin on Rolodex of Ridicule:
- “You use words like honor, courage and commitment as punch lines at liberal cocktail parties” — ripping off A Few Good Men and thinking I wouldn’t notice
- The “Get help!” routine
- “Academia”
- “I’ve stood on the wall — have you?” — Jesus, why not toss in “You weep for Santiago” while you’re at it?
What does any of THAT have to do with the price of tea in China — or THIS?
Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the C.I.A. seized on as evidence in their favor.
One D.O.E. analyst offered a superb analogy of that contorted conclusion: “Running your car up to 6,500 RPM briefly does not prove that you can run your car at 6,500 RPM cross country. It just doesn’t. Your car’s not going to make it.”
In an industry where fractions of a millimeter matter, these guys were playing horseshoes with centrifuge physics.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
That sounds worthy of consideration — don’t ya think?
Not to PKIA’S camp
And their kin who came before them:
It is as though with some people — those who most avidly embrace the “we are right” view — have minds that are closed from the very get-go, and they are entirely incapable of opening them, even just a crack.
There is no curiosity in them. There are no questions in their minds. There are no “what ifs?” or “maybes.”
— Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Going for Gold in the Gutter Games of Government
All to glorify themselves and their precious PKIA they wanna put on Mount Rushmore. These people pull off spectacular feats of psychological gymnastics to ignore his regurgitated garbage and glaringly obvious history of hypocrisy.
About that “mudslinging” . . .
truth verifiable from experience or observation
If you have a history of hypocrisy and lying — you are a hypocrite and a liar. If you don’t like being called those things, don’t do those things. But so typical of the times — nothing has meaning anymore.
Calling criticism “mudslinging” is just somethin’ to say to escape scrutiny.
And the irony is:
I’ve received almost nothing but mudslinging for decades — by people who cry foul with counterfeit claims on what they do for real. And let’s face it: You need it to be mudslinging, because if it’s not — your binary beliefs are gonna fall apart.
But through it all — I found way to expose the systematic self-delusion that’s taken this nation totally off the rails.
How do we make people realize they’ve been lied to? You have to knock down one small pillar that’s easier to reach.
The people who Tweeted those lines I combined from a conversation I came across — had no idea that they perfectly captured the principle of my Clear the Clutter plan.
PKIA is the perfect pillar
If you want to start solving problems, first you need to clear the clutter that’s crippled this country. To do that, you don’t go after everything, you go after one thing that ties to everything:
And you do it by holding one man to his own standards.
To the uneducated, abstract ideas are unfamiliar; so is the detachment that is necessary to discover a truth out of one’s own knowledge and mental effort. The uneducated person views life in an intensely personal way — he knows only what he sees, hears or touches and what he is told by friends. As the unknown sage puts it, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”
But more than ever, even the most educated minds act in an uneducated manner in service of their interests:
And do catastrophic damage by doing so.
There are some great minds out there, but they got lost along the way — just as this nation lost its way long ago. But I have to wonder: Just how great they could be and not recognize the futility of forever beating issues into the ground in this manner?
Ripping on woke is all the rage
And outrage industries of dish it but can’t take it — would talk about race and responsibility till the end of time. But heaven forbid we have a single conversation about war and responsibility.
And PKIA helped fashion the very culture he profits from issuing ideas on how to fix.
On the biggest and most costly lie in modern history, PKIA peddled partisan hackery that poisons political discourse and butchers debate to this day. On of top flagrantly ignoring irrefutable evidence of mathematical certainty, he has a habit of toeing the party line:
All of which flies in the face of the principles upon which he’s put on a pedestal.
There are far worse culprits on all-things Iraq, but I’ve been down that road for decades. Discovering PKIA and the underworld of absurdity that shields him — makes him ideal to put these lies in their place once and for all:
And change the dynamic of debate to boot.
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on
That quote’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.
I know the feeling — all too well
All the sarin gas shells in the world would have no bearing on the aluminum tubes and other intel, but loyalists to logical fallacies are not burdened by the inconvenience of FACT.
They will nitpick over pebbles while refusing to even glance at the mountain of evidence that crushes their “convictions.”
— Richard W. Memmer: Act V
For the sake of argument
Let’s say Saddam had full-blown active WMD programs on chemical & biological weapons. The tubes would still be a lie — whether the war would have been justified in that scenario or not.
I’ll go one further: Let’s say he had an enrichment program in operation as well, but that the rotors were carbon fiber — not aluminum.
Once again, the tubes would still be a lie. Getting lucky in finding something you didn’t know about — does not absolve you from a case that was woven out of whole cloth.
This chart is misleading in several respects . . . Beams centrifuge never actually worked . . . We can infer . . .
Sounds pretty sloppy to me . . .
Perhaps we should have a conversation to clear up what all this means on issues that have eroded reason beyond recognition?
The Zippe unclassified report discusses several centrifuge rotor designs but does not explicitly state the wall thickness of any of the rotors.
Based on the limited documentation, we can infer that Zippe used rotors with wall thicknesses that range from I mm to approximately 2.8 mm.
“Based on the limited documentation”?
Why not just pick up the phone and find out from the “father of the modern uranium centrifuge” himself?
Expert, amateur, or anything in between:
If you’re following the facts — seems like you’d take the trail to the most obvious place it would go: To see what two of the foremost experts on the planet had to say . . .
Condi and Co.
Had no such notion:
I’d love to
And I’d ask her to explain this — and a great deal more:
Associated Press, October 3rd, 2004: Rice said she learned of objections by the Energy Department only after making her 2002 comments.
Richard W. Memmer: Are we to believe that the National Security Advisor of the United States was unaware of an intelligence dispute of this magnitude that had been going on for well over a year?
One Congressional investigator went so far as to call it a holy war. And doesn’t it strike you as suspicious that she didn’t bother consulting the D.OE. before serving up images of a nuclear detonation?
— Act II
Anyone entering this discussion with sincerity — would come away realizing that there is no debate and there never was.
They just made it up
In addition to interviewing world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Houston Wood, I also corresponded with David Albright (the physicist above who wrote extensively on the tubes):
As well as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
From the Epilogue
Every intelligence agency in the world thought Iraq had WMD
— Bill Whittle
Those tortured talking points need to be put out of their misery — and I know of no one better for that than Greg Thielmann. I emailed him to ask how he would respond to Whittle’s common claim, and one of the most telling aspects to his answer was the technicality of literal truth in the manufactured myth.
Thielmann acknowledged that nearly everybody thought that Saddam had hidden away some mustard agent left over from the 1980s, but he added that the Bush administration did not make its case for war on the strength of suspicions that Iraq retained World War One-era munitions.
It’s the second half of that statement that Whittle & Company conveniently ignore. Thielmann elucidates one fine point after another for over a page: Germans on the unreliability of Curveball. I.A.E.A. on the tubes and “uranium from Africa” reports. D.I.A. reversing its position on the drones before the invasion.
And as Thielmann talked about on P.B.S. FRONTLINE, a senior Australian intelligence analyst resigned in protest over the fabricated intelligence. . . .
Thielmann also pointed out that few intelligence agencies had independent means of evaluating U.S. intelligence. He brings up the infamous Downing Street Memos that explicitly state that:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action — justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
Thielmann said the following in 2013:
America just casually moved on
I didn’t — as I knew then what few know now:
The immeasurable value in the willingness to be wrong, understanding why, and looking to learn from it. And that not doing so — increasingly compounds the consequences of no accountability.
Look around
Adulthood is about spending the time to think before talking . . . Adulthood is about controlling our emotions, learning to take a deep breath and modulating our moments of anger or frustration.
The gems of genius that await me from one of PKIA’s finest:
So, on an issue involving the separation of uranium isotopes — you wanna ignore the evidence to show off your math skills by splitting hairs over the meaning of “mathematical certainty”?
by the way
Decorating your points with special punctuation does not make meaningless crap magically have merit.
Anybody can rail on Rumsfeld, Rice, Bush, Cheney, and Powell.
The real story is in the machinery behind the scenes — people and places you’ve never heard of. But connecting the dots on the people they employed to engineer this poppycock is where it’s at:
Speaking of lack of seriousness
The more I learn about the sub, the more it sounds like a 50/50 coin flip suicide expedition than exploration.
Lots of intelligent commentary floating around. It’s refreshing to see all the sound analysis I’ve seen on the sub. And from experts to casual observers — most everyone recognizes reality on Rush.
Who doesn’t?
The same people who always don’t see something for what it is: Those too close to the situation to objectively evaluate it (almost invariably with motive in some form — innocent or otherwise). I realize Cameron’s craft was designed to go 3 times deeper than Titanic:
But it’s just a striking contrast on the look of seriousness alone.
And so’s this . . .
Something’s Not Right
I’m not out to “DESTROY” Sowell
Quite the contrary! Stick around — you’ll see.
That his supporters instantly sling such assumptions (coupled with rapid-fire ridicule for satisfaction in full). I imagine most of the time his opposition probably is out to destroy him (just as you’re out to do the same to them).
That’s your world — not mine.
Discovering the difference is at the core of what abiding by principles is all about: To arrive at conclusions — not jump to them. But thanks to the internet and the cable clans paving the way for the onslaught of the utterly absurd — everything is poisoned by perception and hypocrisy now.
America is in perennial pursuit of ideologies — warfare waged with:
opinions lightly adopted but firmly held . . . forged from a combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion
— Life at the Bottom
Pay no mind to how many times we go backwards by the means in which you move forward. And by the way: Clickbait for battles you’ll do all over again tomorrow — doesn’t strike me as destroying anything.
While you’re destroying everything:
Following Facts Where They Lead
“Said so and so”? . . . that’s one helluva trip you took there, Mr. Sowell.
Stirring Defense!
Sowell’s second article on the subject is a 2-minute read at 752 words — not one of which addresses the tubes that took us to war. And yet this mountain of information below was publicly available before he wrote that article:
How do you reconcile that?
And how do you reconcile that with this?
And what happened to all this? . . .
Just what would it take
For you to do what you say you do?
If you only apply the principles you preach when it serves your interests — they’re just empty claims on a cup and a meaningless mantra touted on a T-shirt.
Or Not . . .
Snowflake, Libtard, Libturd, Cupcake, Bush hater, Bush basher, Bush Derangement Syndrome, TDS, Demon-crat, Democrat Party
Stirring Defense
Anything Goes for apologists trying to preserve what they perceive. I know their Rolodex of Ridicule rabbit-hole routine — all too well:
And Now for the Weather . . .
You introduce statements and arguments of people who aren’t Thomas Sowell
As this story is also
About the behavior of the echo chamber around Sowell — it’s kinda necessary to include other people to properly illustrate the problem. And I wouldn’t mind explaining everything — if you thought about anything.
A passionate observer shares his way of preserving one of our most cherished freedoms — to pursue the truth, no matter how tough the issue, through honest, open, and unflinching discussion.”
— Parade . . .
“Parade” — how fitting!
[The O’Reilly Factor is] a one-hour program that runs 5 days a week — and yet in its entire history, O’Reilly has never even uttered the words “aluminum tubes.”
It just doesn’t register with the likes of O’Reilly that what Clinton and Cohen thought is entirely irrelevant to the tubes — but smugly circulating invalid arguments is the way of the world now.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act IV
How do I know the numbers on O’Reilly and the rest?
I had access — to everything
On this story: 10 pages of reading trumps 10,000 hours of TV — cable clans & broadcast to boot.
And that’s a fact — I did the math. Who cares about 10 pages when “you can’t believe everything you read”? Same standard to snub someone who’s read 10,000 — on world-altering affairs you snicker at. And I noticed “you can’t believe everything you read” only applies to words you don’t like.
This isn’t guesswork, shooting from the hip, or hyperbole: I know, for an absolute fact — that O’Reilly never even uttered the words “aluminum tubes” on his show. In another lifetime, we could acknowledge those things — and operate somewhere in the realm of sanity.
Or at least agree on math — and I know the numbers . . .
These professional know-it-alls breathlessly bitch about issues on a daily basis: And yet somehow on a matter of war in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11 — they just forgot to mention the marquee evidence Powell presented to sell it? And the second a guest brought up the tubes, O’Reilly instantly shut down the discussion (never to be brought up again) . . .
Citing outdated and generic claims from Democrats is an emotional response to outright reject opposing arguments in a wholesale manner.
THAT . . . is the epitome of spin — to engineer an illusion — to make you believe that something meaningless has substance.
— Richard W. Memmer: Act IV
Just what would it take . . .
For “O’Reilly never even uttered the words ‘aluminum tubes‘” to register as something worthy of consideration?
Then there’s this picture
That you even think that a story so complex and convoluted could be explained away so easily — is a monumental problem all by itself.
And without even the most basic insight into anything on this story:
That camp has a habit of glossing over global issues of catastrophic consequences with . . .
“Seems”
Never mind all this
Which is — this
A young man sittin’ on the witness stand
The man with the book says “Raise your hand”
“Repeat after me, I solemnly swear”
The man looked down at his long hair
And although the young man solemnly swore
Nobody seemed to hear anymore
And it didn’t really matter if the truth was there
It was the cut of his clothes and the length of his hair
And we asked each other a lot of questions. I asked you questions, you asked me questions
Wouldn’t that be something
It astounds me that even sharing something in hopes of a human connection — that maybe having something in common could connect in a way that undeniable evidence doesn’t:
Even that is mocked — and conveniently taken as “weakness” in argument.
So in the face of centrifuge physics
Belittling my “disjointed” & “juvenile” website with “irrelevant music & movies” is the best ya got?
I defy you to find a single instance of anyone on the Right even attempting to make an argument on the dimensions, material, and quantity of the tubes. You’ll be lucky to find them mentioned at all.
You think it’s just a coincidence that all the “arguments” on the Right just happen to follow the same pattern (conveniently leaving out the marquee claim on a mushroom cloud)?
That — all by itself, speaks volumes:
To anyone who thinks world-altering wars are more important than whining about websites that expose painfully obvious lies, anyway.
If only you’d laid it all out exactly as I like it — then I’d abide by the principles I preach
Is that how it works?
That’s about the size of it. I guess I figured that if you didn’t understand something — you’d try this on for size, but I’m old-fashioned that way:
Funny how there’s always an excuse . . .
Back in the day — there was no website with an array of illustrations to gripe about. I was just sharing Trillion Dollar Tube to all these fine folks flaunting their badge of beliefs so F.A.I.R.
Showing some courtesy for a 5-minute excerpt doesn’t seem like much to ask such bastions of virtue. But without watching one second — self-satisfied scorn was your gold standard for gleefully gutting the truth.
And why mess with tradition?
To see the character of the government and the country so sported with, exposed to so indelible a blot, puts my heart to the torture. . . . Or what is it that thus torments me at a circumstance so calmly viewed by almost everybody else? Am I a fool, a romantic Quixote, or is there a constitutional defect in the American mind?
Were it not for yourself and a few others, I . . . would say . . . there is something in our climate which belittles every animal, human or brute. . . . I disclose to you without reserve the state of my mind. It is discontented and gloomy in the extreme.
I consider the cause of good government as having been put to an issue and the verdict against it.
If you don’t like my illustrations, go read the bone-dry reports for yourselves: And I’ve got plenty more material to add to your reading list. But that takes work — and why bother when you can just ridicule those who did it for you.
One picture is worth a thousand words:
When you don’t want the pictures and you don’t want the words — what would you have me do?
And once I did it
We both know your next move . . .
A Conflict of Visions
And then some! . . .
The Russians said so.
The British said so.
Bill Clinton said so.
Leaders of both political parties said so.
“The British said so”?
What Bill Clinton said is entirely irrelevant to the tubes: That Sowell never bothered to address — or anything else of substance in this saga of endless absurdity.
So there’s that — and this:
The Right ripped Bill Clinton to shreds and seemingly lives to assail democrats — and yet Sowell cites their word as solid gold. That — is a magician’s maneuver:
Well, if they “said so” — it must be true.
So when people you despise ostensibly agree with you — it’s gotta be true, because they’d never do such a thing if it weren’t.
That’s it? . . .
Who cares about mathematical certainty in centrifuge physics when you’ve got the word of people who lie for a living? It couldn’t possibly be that your enemy has ulterior motives themselves? Nobody nails Democrats better than Glenn Greenwald’s gold-standard from a 2008 article on Salon.com:
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.
Flagrantly failing to account for motive in Sowell’s “said so and so” in the environment below — is as insulting to your intelligence as it gets. Never mind it’s all meaningless in the context of the tubes.
George W. Bush was one of the last to say so. Yet he alone is accused of lying.
— Thomas Sowell
I don’t play those games, Mr. Sowell:
They all lied
Some circles call that evidence:
I call it cowardice
And don’t you find it suspicious that someone of Sowell’s caliber is gonna come right out of the gate with something so weak as:
What are the known facts about Saddam Hussein’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons? We know that, at one time or other, he was either developing or producing or using such weapons.
Immediately followed by:
“Back in 1981″
Take note of the trite & trendy language that follows: Strikingly in sync with Sowell’s, don’t ya think?
CIA is not the all knowing God of the Bible. The CIA could do everything 100% correct but still not know everything.
There’s another reason why they wouldn’t know everything: Nuclear scientists don’t work there — they work at the Department of Energy: And that — is what this is all about. You’d know that had you watched Trillion Dollar Tube instead of trying to educate me on things you know nothing about.
Note:
I modified the Intelligence Community image above by overlaying CIA on top of Director of National Intelligence — to show how the IC effectively operated pre-9/11 and before DCI took center stage.
Mr. Sowell:
Could you tell me why the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) — got an equal say on the aluminum tubes for the NIE vote?
An agency that does imagery analysis of the Earth . . .
Same for NSA . . .
And other agencies that had no expertise in centrifuge physics. And why wasn’t JAEIC allowed to weigh in?
What’s JAEIC? Allow me.
- “Intellectual Giant”
- “Genius”
- “National Treasure”
- “Brilliant”
- And on and on . . .
And then this
The rolodex of excuses around Sowell is off the charts — which is obscenely out of line for the standards he espouses. There’s a faction for forgiveness — by people who have nothing of the kind for their enemies.
Everyone is human and at least occasionally shows poor judgement.
That doesn’t cut it when you miserably fail to acknowledge that poor judgment: Particularly when you make a living pouncing on others about theirs. On top of all that:
They have no idea of the depths of deception involved here — but have no qualms about issuing instant forgiveness for it.
Faction for the hybrid model
- No big deal
- No authority
- Forgiveness
If your strongest criticism of him is that he was wrong on the Iraq war, I’d frankly say “big deal.” Millions of people were wrong about that shit back then. He had no political authority or say on the matter, so I think he could be forgiven for that mistake. (Assuming that you’re right of course, I’m still waiting for you to supply the evidence).
He has no idea what the deal is . . .
But is perfectly satisfied in blowing it off as “no big deal.”
And right on cue:
I’m still waiting for you to supply the evidence
And this — is just priceless:
Even if he said that stuff, your entire diatribe smacks of the now classic modern progressive tactic of taking a single mistake by anyone whose views they don’t like and using that one error in judgement to try and discredit ALL their work.
Who said I disagreed with his work?
Outside of butchering the debate on WMD — and his partisan hackery in flagrantly ignoring his own camp’s abominable behavior, record of recklessness, systematic lying, and hypocrisy that knows no bounds: I haven’t come across anything I object to.
As for economics — I’m not qualified on that front. Imagine — there are still people who measure their knowledge in such ways.
Then tell me how he was wrong about one thing that he has no expertise in.
lemme get this straight
A layperson with limited resources and no connections:
- Can do countless hours of research & writing
- Interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist
- Correspond with Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence — along with a key physicist
- Spend $15,000 of his own money to write & produce the most detailed documentary ever done on WMD (taking both parties to task for it)
Qualifying me to exhaustively explain how half the country could not be more wrong on this issue of world-altering consequence.
But it’s all good . . .
That Sowell cranked out this crap that any Iraq War cheerleading jackass could issue in chain-letter lies — topped off with smug sloganeering.
After all — he doesn’t have any expertise in it.
As a distinguished scholar once said: “The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.”
— Thomas Sowell
It’s painfully obvious what this guy’s up to: He’s engineering an illusion — and you bought it. So that you’ll cling to quotes on character to look away from where he has none.
“It’s indefensible!
Don’t you know that?”
When I was growing up, it was inconceivable that America would become a country that tap dances around reality on a daily basis:
Delighting in contempt for correction.
A go-to tactic of the doubt-free is to make damn sure the debate never reaches the merits of the matter. I’ve seen highly intelligent people derail discussions by claiming that “everything’s just an opinion.”
Nobody really believes that — it’s just a cop-out. And if you call ‘em on it, they fall back on Old Faithful — “agree to disagree.” How this hijacked-for-hackery ethic caught on over the years can be charted with the times:
Where things that once meant something, now mean nothing.
The United States is now a country obsessed with the worship of its own ignorance. . . . [W]e’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.
It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.
We no longer have those principled and informed arguments. The foundational knowledge of the average American is now so low that it has crashed through the floor of “uninformed,” passed “misinformed” on the way down, and is now plummeting to “aggressively wrong.” People don’t just believe dumb things; they actively resist further learning rather than let go of those beliefs.
I was not alive in the Middle Ages, so I cannot say it is unprecedented, but within my living memory I’ve never seen anything like it.
— The Death of Expertise
At every turn . . .
The faithful tap dance around reality — oily evading anything that requires them to hold Sowell to his own standards.
Hard to Imagine:
That I have to explain that quote to people who seemingly live to flood the internet with his words.
He and his flock incessantly complain about the media — and they don’t make policy. But the second I scrutinize Sowell — suddenly you have new standards.
180 — how fitting
Once again with “seems” . . .
And when you have no idea what the argument is (making no effort or inquiry to understand, no less):
Wrapping quotes around “argument” is as ridiculous as using air quotes incorrectly.
Then there’s this . . .
That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.
Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.
“What is surprising, however” . . .
Is that your crowd treating me with nothing but contempt for the truth for 20 years — slinging baseless beliefs with “hostility and even hatred”:
Doesn’t constitute a “way of life” to you, Mr. Sowell.
I didn’t write Mentality of a Mob from my imagination — and I didn’t write this poem from it either. I wrote it 3 years before Sowell’s piece behind that post — and for decades, this behavior is all I’ve seen from Republicans on Iraq and almost everything else.
It’s not anti-war — it’s pro-thinking
So you found one small crack in Sowell’s character where he defended Iraq having WMD, does that hurt his credibility?
This man muddied the waters of debate to serve himself: On a little matter of war in the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.
On top of unconscionably ignoring irrefutable evidence of world-altering consequence, he has a habit of toeing the party line. Not only did Sowell flagrantly fail to follow the facts on all-things Iraq — he brazenly ignored the debauchery in his own party to politely pounce on the other.
In light of his history being wildly out of sync with his sanctimonious claims: That “one small crack” is a wide-open window into his character and credibility.
I wouldn’t care if Sowell cured cancer:
You don’t get a pass for basking in baseless beliefs that cripple the country — and have the bottomless nerve to preach responsibility & accountability to boot. That — is a cancer of its own . . .
The poison he pumped into the atmosphere helped destroy the internal organs of America. So we have very different standards as to what qualifies as a National Treasure.
My efforts revolve around how people allow emotion to run roughshod over reason when their interests are at stake. When I returned from interviewing Dr. Houston Wood, the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict gave me a golden opportunity to illustrate exactly that.
I needed a way to illustrate irrational behavior without showing any favoritism — and now I had it.
This connection becomes clear pretty quickly. 3 minutes and 33 seconds into the Prologue — the parallel in the Profile Principle is revealed. Had you not made up your mind inside of 60 seconds: Crying foul in your confusion over my incoherence from injecting a seemingly unrelated issue into the mix . . .
Ahhh . . .now I see where he’s going with this
Imagine!
Adulthood is about spending the time to think before talking . . . Adulthood is about controlling our emotions, learning to take a deep breath and modulating our moments of anger or frustration.
If I had it to do over again
I would have gone with the title above that came to mind later for the promo clips. Trayvon would still be the hook into the whole thing — I just wouldn’t have used his name in the title if I had a better idea. But WMD was old news — and barely even registered when it was hot off the press.
Nobody cared about WMD anymore, and truth be told — the bulk of the bunch who do care, don’t really.
But they sure love to Tweet about it.
And let’s get real: Those who landed on the right side on Iraq: Most of ‘em don’t know jack either. Just because you were right doesn’t necessarily mean you arrived at it intelligently — and being reinforced by casual conviction makes for increasingly sloppy & stupid thinking.
[W]e must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it
— M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled
In a nation that incessantly blames and complains (seemingly for sport) — no one’s taking responsibility for anything. The ever-rising ocean of partisan pettiness is gluttony under the guise of concern.
What would you call untold millions marching to a Twitter-rage parade on WMD — dishing on the deaths of Rumsfeld and Powell (and whatever anniversary marks the moment):
But too lazy to take the time to look at what we can do about it. Of course, that would require holding their own accountable as well:
So there’s that.
Happy 20th Anniversary!
Seize the day to be jacked up on fuel to fire off your fury and excuses in a nation that never learns: But loves to light it up in lip service to virtues.
Ever-so bold behind force fields of fallacy that butcher those “beliefs.“
If I had it to do over again . . .
This nation has no such notion
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 [does it matter?]
— Glenn Loury, Tucker Carlson Today
When the context suits you, such words are solid gold. What you do when it doesn’t — determines the worth of your word.
Loury was rightly talking about the Black Lives Matter manifesto driving the aftermath of George Floyd. But the Left’s ludicrous ways pale in comparison to conservatives going batshit crazy after 9/11. The Right delights in ridiculing the Left for burning buildings to further the cause:
Yet the “party of personal responsibility” set the world ablaze while browbeating anybody out of line in their March of Folly.
Consequences matter or should matter more than some attractive or fashionable theory.
— Thomas Sowell
I couldn’t agree more . . .
Except there were no consequences on the fiasco for the ages driven by this manifesto:
She also saw wooden-headedness as a certain proclivity for “acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by facts.”
The outcome of which fashioned a culture of no consequences.
And along came — this
If you’re not gonna do your part and accept responsibility for the damage you’ve done and dishonesty baked into your beliefs — why should the Left?
Why should anyone?
Wooden-headedness, said Tuchman, was finally — “the refusal to benefit from experience.”
— Russ Hoyle
The Refusal to Benefit from Experience
The Right treating Bush like the Second Coming of Christ — set the stage for the rise of the Rock Star they spent the next 8 years railing against.
That doesn’t strike me as sound strategy. Dumb, dishonest, and delusional wars doesn’t either.
But keep the faith
And now, even now
The cat . . . TOTALLY out of the BAG!
I’ve always hated Twitter and when I’m done doing what I gotta do — I’m never goin’ back. Until then, I’m sending out a certain set of messages looking for intelligent life (fiercely independent thinkers who want to solve problems — not endlessly talk about them).
Think of my signals as a poor man’s SETI:
I’ve got an idea — and it’s got teeth
There’s a way we can harness folly from the past for the benefit of the future. It’s as out-of-the-box as it gets but rooted in timeless truths America made outdated. I’ve already done all the work: I just need a little help in having it land in the right hands.
I have a very specific target audience to get this in gear, so it wouldn’t take much. One email could set off a chain of events that could open the door to the kind of conversation this nation’s never had.
Going by the galaxies filled with rock stars of reasoning across the social media universe — I should have no shortage of people eager to examine my idea and discuss how we could improve on it and proceed.
You tell me where those people are and I’ll gladly send out my signals to them.
If you’re not interested in hearing me out and having meaningful conversation — we have nothing to talk about and I wish you well. I’d just ask that you block me and politely move along. Is that really too much to ask? But if you’re game for good old-fashioned conversation — please contact me through the site, Anchor.Press.gg@gmail.com, or DM (Direct Message) on Twitter:
As I no longer respond to Tweets or superficial fragments of any kind.
I’m working on a companion piece to explain why exposing Sowell is a foolproof plan. In short: You have to understand the different mindsets at the helm of the echo chambers around this guy. Some of these people would forever deny reality, but not all of ’em.
All I need is one
First time I ever heard of John McWhorter was in a 2017 interview with Brian Williams. In talking about take a wild guess, he said . . .
He has a rather narcotic joy in dismissal and belittlement
The likes of Loury & McWhorter miserably fail to see how they are unwittingly conditioning people to act exactly as McWhorter’s quote above. I’m sure it’s intoxicating to amass a following and feel like you’re making a difference. But I’m gonna weigh your impact partly as a reflection of your community: How people behave — not what they believe.
If you can’t get that right, I don’t care how big your following gets — you’re taking this nation nowhere. Not in the right direction, anyway.
What’s more, you’re making matters worse and being rewarded for it. I’m going to show you how to fix the problem you don’t even know you have. And all ya gotta do — is do what you say you do.
You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you an inactive Spectator . . . I greatly fear that the arm of treachery and violence is lifted over us as a Scourge and heavy punishment from heaven for our numerous offences, and for the misimprovement of our great advantages.
If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners, and not sink into inglorious ease.
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
— Abigail Adams, 16 October 1774
Like any story
If you really want to understand what happened:
It’s best to start at the beginning . . .
One Voice Became Two 