Category Archives: Media

Why do people think and act diametrically different?

Jeff Leskovar has some interesting answers

From Jeff Leskovar’s article (from 4th December 2021):

Individuals have three main parameters by which they constrain their decisions: property, time, and social hierarchy. Social hierarchies apparently exist to reduce conflict among individuals as do property rights by allowing individuals to know who should defer to whom with regard to each other and physical objects. An individual’s decisions are delimited by these three dimensions, time (time preference), space (property), and social hierarchy. Social hierarchy exists in the minds of individuals so it is like the imaginary plane in the field of mathematics.. We have the real dimensions of time and space along with the dimension of social hierarchy or status. These control the majority of human behavior in the quest for survival and reproduction.

Time preference and social hierarchy are fundamental to understanding the “why” of human action. Putting social hierarchy front and center is especially useful in political science, since politics is the pursuit of social status, as well because it explains why people seem to fall into two different political groups, the left and the right. This theory explains a long list of behaviors engaged in by the left but not the right. Here are some examples:

  • Declining to debate
  • Engaging in ad hominem or using other logical fallacies if they do attempt to debate
  • Becoming emotional if one disagrees with them
  • Refusing to grant the right of free speech to people they disagree with
  • Refusing to associate with people on the right
  • Unfriending people on social media because of political disagreements
  • Marching in the street
  • Living in big cities

Why do leftist seem to have no curiosity about how they may be wrong or why other people may have different opinions? Why do leftist always assume evil motives on the part of those who disagree with them? Why are leftists so hostile to people who disagree with them? Applying considerations of social hierarchy explains all those leftists behaviors and answers all the above questions.

The answer, in short, is that “leftism” is the modern version of tribal, collective, “follow the herd” (which actually means “follow the leader”) thinking, while everyone else to some extent use their faculty of reason to try to figure out what exactly is going on and act on it for their benefit. Both strategies of action are necessary for survival. But they are mutually exclusive. We can engage in both, but not at the same time.

That means inevitably that, in any given circumstance, those choosing one basic survival-strategy will deem those who at the same time choose the other strategy as either “stupid” or “evil”. “Stupid” because they don’t seem to see the danger they are in, or “evil” because they are endangering others – “knowingly”.

Leskovar doesn’t say this, but I think he implies that the “follow the leader” types are much less inclined to discuss their action than the “let’s think this through rationally” types.

In addition, there is a strong incentive for those close to the top of the hierarchy to prevent others from climbing higher. Thus their incentive is to make everyone else a) follow the leader(s) and b) do things that will make it difficult if not impossible for the leaders to be replaced by others. In other words: Leaders are inclined to enhance and support “follow the leader” type behaviour, which will surprise exactly nobody who stops to think about it.

Leskovar explains:

By making some basic simple assertions about human nature and society and then building logically from these statements we can find explanations for many puzzling features of human society, especially politics. These assertions are the following:

  • “Human society always has a natural hierarchy
  • In any moment of decision for human action there are two different fundamental heuristics that can be used to make that decision. One method of decision making is to observe what everyone else is doing and doing the same. The other is to observe reality and use reason to decide how to act at any given moment. These two ways of decision making are fundamental survival strategies. These can be restated as thinking for yourself versus following the crowd. One uses reason and the other does not.
  • It is a fundamental human drive to seek belonging in the group and to seek to rise in the hierarchy. Human decision makers weigh the potential impact on social status at all points in the decision making process.
  • The strength of that drive for status and social belonging varies among people with some having a low drive and others a high drive for improved status. The status drive seems to intensify in people as they rise in status.
  • It is natural to be disdainful of people of lower status and this natural reaction varies in its intensity among individuals. The amount of disdain correlates with the status drive meaning people with a high status drive are probably more likely to disdain lower status people with more intensity than those with less status greed.
  • People tend to worship those of higher status. The intensity of this varies among individuals and probably intensifies as status increases.
  • Since the pursuit of social status is a zero sum game with all gains in status meaning a relative decrease in status for others, people tend to want to prevent lower status people from achieving higher status. Envy is the emotion that tends to trigger action to prevent others from achieving higher social status.”

Leskovar was given an interview with Tom Woods recently, in which he pointed out something highly interesting (prompted here). Namely that ‘Christianity said to people: “Don’t treat the low-status people badly. They are all equal in the eyes of God.” That could have a big part in explaining the rise of Europe. For a thousand years or more, people at the top of the hierarchy were less likely to oppress low-status people. I think that is now going away, and I think we’re getting the fruits from that from this Covid thing, which was very oppressive.’

The host, Tom Woods, doesn’t explore this aspect further, but the whole interview is worth listening to nonetheless.

Vaccine-injured US-Congresswoman asks ex-Twitter executive why they banned and censored warnings by medical experts against the vaccine

The squirming addressee's facial expression is priceless

See here (5 min video).

Update (11/02/2023): Renowned publicist Naomi Wolf chimes in:

Ms. Navaroli ends her hectoring introductory peroration with a pious, condescending conclusion that her mission is to make communication online “safe.” Her evidence of the crimes committed by speaking on Twitter, include this 1984-level sentence: “The President said he liked to send out his tweets like “little missiles”; and to me that sounded like weaponization of a platform.”’ Has the woman never taken an English class or learned about metaphors? Still later in the hearing, she accuses “fan fiction” of leading directly to the murder of people on Jan 6 — putting herself right in line with the many despots and tyrants who, since the birth of the novel, have accused the act of reading of causing social mayhem.

It is so painful for me to see these faces. I have a very intimate relationship to these people.

They tried to destroy me, and did a fair job of it, by some measures.

These are the people — “my” people, paradoxically; people educated like me, people who shared my political views until 2020; these are people who vacationed where I used to vacation, who hang out with people I know — who were the agents behind full- on Stalinist-type persecution of innocent Americans; of me; these are the people who ruined my life, or sought to do so, and destroyed my career, or sought to do so. These emotionally ugly, these nasty, self-satisfied folks, so sure that they are right, so very, very wrong; are here at last; right here on C-Span.

They persecuted not just me but Dr Martin Kulldorff; Dr Jay Bhattacharya; Dr Paul Alexander; Dr Peter McCullough. So many others. They scrubbed and manipulated the discourse of a platform that has no right to be any more censorious than a telecom company, because they were willing to collude illegally with the government to decide what can be said in America. The messaging from the FBI via “the super-secret James Bond tele-portal”, as Rep Jim Jordan so brilliantly and rightly put it, reached into the voices of Americans and strangled Americans’ rights; but Twitter and the company’s political friends went further than mere silencing. These smarmy people ultimately hurt, and may have helped to injure and kill, many thousands.

Wolf is learning a painful lesson:

I cannot believe that “my own” people, my former tribe on the elite left, are joining forces with the government to violate the First Amendment rights of all Americans and then, worse still, to justify having done so. I can’t believe that Democrat after Democrat, liberal after liberal, is on C-Span singing the praises of censorship and inventing imaginary roles for government officials and social media platforms to keep Americans “safe” from the “threats“ of discourse and ideas. We used to be the side of Howl and Lady Chatterley’s Lover; of The Well of Loneliness. Heck, of the Free Speech Movement! What happened to us?

She concludes:

We will, rather, be in a Nazi reality in which petty officials distort and dictate culture itself and reputationally behead those cultural leaders who pose challenges to the power structure.

Berlin, Munich, in this respect, are here again, in their darkest sense; those who decided, based on a party line, on proper and improper art, books, views — are not dead and gone; lost in history; no; here they are.

But this time they appear in our America, in their bad blue suits, with their pompous nasal voices; saying “I have no knowledge of this matter”; or “I can’t hear the question”; as they occupy, with their damaged consciences, their nauseating excuses, seats in a hearing room on Capitol Hill in the United States of America.

Will we let these cultural functionaries — who operate just like those petty tyrants of the cultures of Berlin and Munich not so long ago — take up space, with impunity, in the heart of our America?

Or will we drag America back into daylight and sunlight again, and force these equivocating wretches to face their own degenerate crimes — crimes against freedom of speech and the Constitution?

Is an Nuremberg-style trial on the mRNA “vaccines” about to begin?

Looks like it

Writes Paul Craig Roberts:

The Swiss President and the Minister of Health are under investigation, indictment, and prosecution by the Swiss Attorney General for Covid Crimes involving lying about the vaccine effectiveness and safety. 

Thailand is convening war crime tribunals to nullify Pfizer Contracts.

Listen to the 19 minute video where you will learn that the mRNA deadly envelop is now the basis of flu shots and vaccination of all animals.  

That video is on Twitter here.

The Swiss banker – who claims to the triple vaccinated – who initiated the prosecution, invokes Jesus at about 10:55 minutes.

Update (11/02/2022): Caveat: Have not found independent confirmation for this yet. Will post it here when I find some.

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline

Seymour Hersh's report

“The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now“.

Most of the media say “one anonymous source” is not enough proof.

Correct. So, when are they going to start doing their job and looking for more – or to find indications that refute the above claim?

Here‘s Tucker Carlson on the whole thing.

Update (10/02/2023):

Independent Evidence Video Confirms Key Part of Sy Hersh’s Report on the Attack on Nord Stream 2

Update (13/02/2023): Tom Luongo calls Hersh a “useful idiot” who is “advancing what is clearly only half the story”. He points out that Hersh mentions the US and Norway as culprits, but never mentions the UK: “This pathological need to absolve the UK of any involvement in the Nordstream bombings and setting the world on a course for total infrastructural war, like Russia is now doing in Ukraine, borders on creepy.”

Luongo’s conclusion:

I could spin out a host of possible Act IIIs here:

  • A quid pro quo between sovereigntist US forces and NATO to keep the UK and Poland out of the story to scapegoat “Biden” and begin cleaning up the State Department of the Nulandistas and British Intelligence influences to begin winding down the war in Ukraine This is my preferred story.
  • Further put the US and Russia on a collision course by having a journalist of Sy Hersh’s reputation confirm what everyone wants to believe, the US is a rogue state. This further degrades the US’s reputation and hastening the collapse of the US (Soros’ openly stated goal) on the eve of the Munich Security Conference (next week).
  • Leave Putin with even fewer domestically-palatable political options at home other than further escalation pushing the world closer to the brink of nuclear war to effect Davos’ Great Reset

To name a few.

But what’s really clear here is that there are no Ethan Hunts or even Jason Bournes out there to swoop in at the last second and stop this runaway train of evolution through catastrophe from going off the cliff and going boom.

Update (14/02/2023):

Edward Snowden Says UFO Hysteria Is “Engineered” Distraction From Nord Stream Pipeline Bombshell

Update (15/02/2023):

Pepe Escobar has some interesting things to say about this (“The Plot Thickens“):

The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.

So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.

While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.

In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.

Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.

[…]

What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.

The mainstream media have given up on truth

The Washington Post is openly calling on news outlets to abandon objectivity.

Writes Jenny Holland:

Journalism’s brief period of objectivity was an interregnum between the rough-and-tumble newspaper class wars of the early 20th century and whatever you want to call the pantomime hellscape of today. Now, that period of objectivity is officially dead and buried. It is clear from Downie’s article that the industry has been wholly captured. What used to be thought of as a workman-like job, in which you dug up facts and presented them to your readership, has been taken over by an elite clique of pampered millennials. Members of this clique went to all the same schools and have all the same opinions. Their sworn mission is to make sure their shrinking readership knows how ideologically pure they are. Factual reality – once the king of the newsroom – doesn’t come into the equation. The king is dead. Long live the king.

[…]

There is a silver lining in this op-ed, and I found it in the comments. Judging from the people commenting under the piece, even the ultra-liberal, vote-blue-no-matter-who readers of the Washington Post were not buying what Downie was trying to sell them.

One commenter wrote:

‘What’s really happening is young reporters are using emotional blackmail and not-very-sophisticated [postmodern] sophistry to excuse themselves from professional standards. I understand why new reporters would like to be liberated from dull, but necessary, professional standards, but I don’t understand why the grown-ups go along with it to the detriment of their profession.’

The biggest problem with journalists may not even be their recent swing to the left, their intolerance of differing opinions or their backstabbing newsrooms – all characteristics of younger, woke media staff. Instead, the biggest blindspot for journalists of generations new and old is their tendency to vastly overestimate their own importance, and vastly underestimate just how few people share their outlook outside their media bubbles.

I’m not sure this last conclusion is quite right. Journalists do not “vastly overestimate their own importance”. Among the “few people that share their outlook” are the vast majority of the policy makers. And that is all that matters.

On the total absence of evidence for the efficacy of masking

Yet again, The Science follows politics

The blogger Eugyppius writes:

The Cochrane mask review I wrote about last week has hit Team Mask very hard, in fact much harder than I thought it would. They’ve been frantically coping for days now – combing through the fine print, seizing upon every moment of expressed uncertainty or caution in the paper to claim that population-wide masking might still be justified, somehow, because reasons.

[…]

Plainly, the conviction that mask mandates were necessary came first; The Science followed. All the while, though, the evidence didn’t go away. It was just suspended slightly out of view, diluted with weak excuses and deprived of influence over policy, until the ideological fervour dissipated and the plain truth could be spoken again. The lesson is that regime authorities, particularly when they enjoy the collaboration of the press and academia, can tell almost any lie, but suppressing the truth requires active effort, and sooner or later their myths come crashing down. The mask mythology was among the first to take shape, and it has been the first to fall.

In the coming months other pandemic fantasies will also begin unravel.

Update (08/02/2023):

Tom Woods writes:

The Cochrane Library describes itself as “a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties provided by Cochrane and other organizations. At its core is the collection of Cochrane Reviews, a database of systematic reviews and meta-analyses which summarize and interpret the results of medical research.”

It is highly respected, and is known for its serious research methods.

The crazies are hysterical about it. But they can’t refute it.

Vinay Prasad, a political liberal who has been honest during Covid, puts it like this: “It is irrational to mask.”

Prasad sums it up: “Here is the big summary finding. With 276,000 participants in RCTs or cluster RCTs, masking does nothing. No reduction in influenza-like or Covid-like illness and no reduction in confirmed flu or COVID. That’s stone-cold negative. See those effect sizes and confidence intervals.”

(To read the study yourself, do a search for “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses,” from 2023.)

This includes the ballyhooed N95 mask as well.

Everybody in the medical establishment knew masking didn’t do anything, Prasad says:

There was a reason why Tony Fauci went out initially and said it didn’t work. There was a reason why the CDC said not to do it and the WHO said not to do it. And between March 1st and April 15th of 2020, there ain’t no new evidence that was generated of any plausibility. But two things happened.

There was a concerted movement by activists who don’t know evidence-based medicine to hashtag #wearaclothmask and hashtag #savelives and…you know, making stupid TikTok videos.

Why? Because they’re scared. They’re in their house, they’re scared. They don’t know what to do. They just grasp for anything, just like our primitive ancestors would have maybe slaughtered a chicken or done a rain dance. They’re doing the same thing….

They saw that Donald Trump didn’t do it. And the moment he didn’t do it, they knew they were right, because if he didn’t do it, I got to be right on it. It’s got to be right if he doesn’t do it, because he always does the wrong thing.

That was truly how juvenile the universal masking movement was.

Actually, that’s the wrong word. It was frankly sinister.

As with “social distancing,” you were accused of essentially being a murderer if you didn’t go along. It didn’t matter that a scatterplot of places in the US showed no connection between Covid restrictions and health outcomes.

This was never about science or evidence. It was a sinister confluence of some people’s irrational fear with other people’s desire to control, shame, and isolate.

Pfizer Exposed For Exploring “Mutating” COVID-19 Virus For New Vaccines Via ‘Directed Evolution’

Project Veritas video. (Update 30/01/2023: Youtube of course took the video down. No worries, it can be found here. And, BTW, here‘s the total meltdown of the exposed Pfizer employee.)

Paul Joseph Watson comments on the fact that this is being suppressed by the mainstream media here.

Update 30/01/2023:

Blogger Eugyppius has some competent things to say about the whole matter. Excerpt:

I’ll be honest: I don’t think what Walker describes is necessarily dangerous. The virus is already training itself against vaccine-elicited antibodies in billions of people. That’s a powerful force that I’m not sure Pfizer’s scientists have any hope of outpacing. Were such a tweaked virus to escape a laboratory, it would just have the antibody-evading properties of many other strains; we might not even recognise it as a lab product. Still, Walker’s revelations are significant, for they reveal how easily demand for vaccines becomes pressure to tinker with viral evolution. Similar research on potential pandemic pathogens that are poorly adapted to humans would indeed be truly dangerous.

Robert Malone, MD comments from the middle of the fray:

Almost immediately after the first Veritas video dropped, we all got a masters class in the amazing power and capabilities to control narrative and information which Pfizer has assembled. Important to remember that it was already well known that there is a very tight relationship between Pfizer and Thompson-Reuters. In fact, revealing that clear conflict of interest was the thing that got me kicked off of Linked-In the first time. The UK-based Daily Mail, one of the largest daily publications in the world, puts out a story summarizing the Veritas video, and it is almost immediately deleted. A decentralized army of internet warriors quickly goes to work seeking any intel concerning Jordon Walker, M.D.. I receive screen shots which fully dox the young physician, including email addresses and phone numbers. Do I dox or do I not, that is the question. Decision = not.

People are hitting Google like crazy with queries regarding Jordon Walker, Pfizer and Veritas. As they did when I said “mass formation psychosis” on Rogan #1757, Google manually interferes with the searches, returning wishy washy “these results are changing rapidly” screens instead of actual links. So, now we have a pretty clear smoking gun involving collusion between Pfizer and Google to suppress the story. Then everything, anything, having to do with Jordon Walker, MD gets memory holed. Wiped from the internet, including the Wayback machine. And then the chaos agents, bots and trolls descend on all social media channels. Sowing doubt that Jordon Walker is even a real person. Floating paranoid conspiracy theories that this is all a big deep-fake set up of Veritas, O’Keefe and myself. Which of course get amplified by the usual actors. Now THAT is an example of Fifth Gen Warfare power! And by the way, I gently advise that readers who were aware of this as it was happening set a check-bit in their brains on the names of those chaos agents who actively promoted this false narrative. Some show the signs of true controlled opposition, and some appear to have been acting as pollinating bees. By their actions you will know them. My advice, if you were one of the bees, is to own up and clearly acknowledge the documentation demonstrating that this Pfizer nightmare is real.

The following day, as promised, Veritas drops another amazing video in which James O’Keefe confronts Jordon Walker in some New York city eatery, and Dr. Walker comes unglued for all the world to see (I think that is about the kindest description possible). Veritas provides more documentation that Walker is/was, as advertised, a senior Pfizer employee with global Director-level responsibilities relating to their mRNA vaccine portfolio.

Clearly Pfizer has decided that the best response at this point is no response. They have disabled comments on all of their websites and social media outlets (except for those that they are “following”). Pfizer has managed to block every single major corporate news outlet from covering the story (except Tucker, who has considerable content freedom by contract with Fox). Jill posts a warning basically stating that we should expect the Empire to Strike Back.

And here‘s a link to a short video on Twitter by Project Veritas leader James O’Keefe commenting on the fact that Youtube deleted the above video. Sounds like PV are going to fight back. That will be interesting to watch.

Here‘s Tucker Carlson’s take on Fox News, the only mainstream outlet that reported on this so far.

And here‘s Dr. Malone again in a half-hour interview about the matter. I haven’t viewed it in full yet but want to keep the link.

Update 03/02/2023: Same Pfizer employee in the same sting as above admits (video) that his company is worried about the effect the “vaccine” is having on menstrual cycles.