Wisdom Masters Press Newsletter

In today's world, truth has become so obscure and falsehood so widespread that, unless we love and
actively seek the truth, we cannot know it. This is an age of media when the lie has been made dogma,
when supression is a sanctified virtue, and evasion a sacrament. It is the age of words but the words
no longer have meaning, they have been subverted into absurdities. We believe that truth is profoundly
important and absolutely essential, and no argument or excuse or deception, no matter how deeply believed,
can ever replace it. This section of our newsletter is dedicated to that proposition.   —M.G. Hawking

•  The Media — Truth ... Going ... Going ... GONE, by Ashley: A recent Gallup poll found a whopping 86 percent of American adults say that U.S. legacy media outlets have "a great deal of bias" in their reporting, and a stunning 84 percent of Americans believe that "the media is to blame for political division in this country." The poll also revealed that 73 percent of Americans see bias in allegedly objective reporting as "a major problem."
     When asked whether they “trust the corporate news media to tell the truth,” only 14 percent of respondents agreed. 78 percent of those polled said they believed “the corporate news media misrepresents facts to push a political agenda.” And only a dismal 11 percent told Gallup they have a "great deal or quite a lot" of confidence in television news shows on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, or MSNBC. Among registered independent voters, over 85 percent said they thought the news media misrepresented facts to push political agendas. The report further stated: "The nation’s politicized media environment has allowed for dangerous false narratives to take root in all segments of society at a time when factual, trustworthy information is especially critical to the future of our democracy." Credits: The Gallup Organization, Washington, D.C.; The Knight Foundation, Miami, FL.

    
Please be aware that much of what's currently being broadcast through many of the corporate media outlets, rather than being based on supportable facts or truth, is politicized disinformation and cunning propaganda, often combined with truly absurd speculations and exaggerations. Of course, over the course of the last year or so, that became so obvious it was a no-brainer.
     You know the feeling—the one in which you hear a piece of "news" and instinctively sense that something is off. And even though you can't always pin down that intuitive reaction that you're being manipulated, maybe lied to, you can't quite forget it either. That's because honest, objective reporting has become very rare.
     When I talked to anyone at our 4th of July party about the media, their tone turned grim. There was always an evident distaste, like taking a bite of bad fish, spit out with revulsion. By way of proof, consider two statements. First statement: "I love the media, they're fair, balanced, and honest." Said by no one, ever. Second statement: "I hate the media." Said by millions, just yesterday, and will be said by millions more today.
     Abraham Lincoln observed, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Thankfully, Lincoln was right. Very reassuringly, as time passes, more and more people are becoming aware of media propaganda, with Gallup polls showing Americans' trust in the corporate media “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly” dropping to its lowest level in the entire history of polling.
     And yet, emboldened by a degree of success in promoting amongst certain demographics what experts from Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA tell us are some of the absolutely worst, most dangerous and most destructive myths ever widely circulated at any time in U.S. history, the corporate media has provoked a kind of delusional hysteria and are continuing to ramp-up their propaganda campaigns to batshit crazy—sorry, ridiculous—proportions.
     "Disinformation is their playbook," a media expert from Stanford told me. "What do they do if the truth about something contradicts their political agenda? They simply fabricate facts and figures as a way to undermine reality, and they are absolutely adamant when presenting them as being real." As Bertrand Russell observed, "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves."

"The object of life is not to be on the side of either the majority or the minority,
but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."  —Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180)

•  Media Reporting vs. Facts:  Skeptical? I found so many instances of categorically false reporting during my research that I could literally write dozens of pages of examples of how the corporate media has become this country's "vox mendacium" ("voice of lies"). Really, much of their reporting has become utterly devoid of reality. To illustrate this, I wanted to provide at least ten examples, but Michael limited me to just four, based on the legal principle, "Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus," a Latin phrase meaning "false in one thing, false in everything." So here are just some examples of actual, verified facts versus media stories that clearly reveal the extent of the media's corruption and complete contempt for the public's intelligence.

          1. A Definitive Essay    2. The Saving of America    3. Heat Wave Facts    4. Problems in Climate Science

I recognize that in today's world there are many people who care more for agendas and ideologies than realities, and those who belittle, ignore or refuse to believe any truth that contradicts convictions they have chosen or have been impelled or coerced to believe. So, I will open with a cautionary note by remembering the wise observations of two brilliant minds.

1.  A Definitive Essay - The Curious Tragedy of The Atlantic Magazine.  Note from Ashley: A few months ago Amber and I ran across something in 'The Atlantic Magazine' that was really over-the-top, so to say. Honestly, as I read the article, I felt like I had been dropped into a story that emerged from a Vulcan mind-meld of Salvador Dalí and Jeffrey Dahmer. So, after we read it we checked with professional sources and ... well, you're about to see why it's so bizarre. Later, we showed the story to Michael, and after he read it he wrote the following. I found it on his desk and I'm including it here as we feel it reveals some very important facts and insights.

By Michael:  In a recent brazen tome, The Atlantic Magazine—complete with a title so maudlin it nearly preempts mockery—has gifted us with a climate catastrophe tale so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so demonstrably false, and so shameless that one is almost astonished that they dared. "Climate Crisis Extreme Weather Events Generating Record Death Tolls Worldwide" screams the headline. This is not journalism.
     The Atlantic's own sacraments apparently involved searching for the most grotesque fear-mongering—something so bloodcurdling it would gut all happiness from children and cause the elderly to despair of enduring—so you may forgive them if their search, in failing to find facts, ultimately led them up their own asses. Not unexpectedly, what they did not find in that darkness was any resemblance of reality.
     The actual reality—the truth—reveals one of the greatest accomplishments of modern civilization: Comprehensive analysis from the OFDA/CRED International Disaster Center, The Global Change Data Lab, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows a dramatic decrease in the global annual death rate from all climate related events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, landslides, extreme temperatures) over the last century. Deaths have fallen from a high of 0.61 per 100,000 people in the 1920s, when records begin, to 0.04 per 100,000 people in the 2010s, a decrease of 93.4%. The data for 2020 indicates a further drop to an estimated 0.031 per 100,000 people, an average decrease in climate related deaths of 22.5% from the decade of 2010 to 2019.
     And the International Disaster Center, Global Change Data Lab, and Institute for Health Metrics released this report on 24 July 2023:  "For 2022, the data is complete and shows a 98.7% reduction in the number of deaths from climate-related events over the period of the last 100 years. Additionally, 2022 shows a reduction of 58.8% in climate-related deaths from the year 2020."      
     Sources: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters), Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium;  The Global Change Data Lab, a co-operative organization of University College London, University of Oxford, and the University of Bristol, England, UK;  and The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Population Health Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
     NOTE: For more information and a very revealing chart from 'Our World in Data' please see Section 4 of "Examples
     of Climate Change Disinformation" titled "Deaths resulting from climate change influenced events" (new window).

It is important to understand that this kind of “reporting” requires the The Atlantic Magazine—and they're scarcely the only one—to make four critical decisions:
          1) To abandon every standard of professional journalism;
          2) To reject well-proven facts and reality in favor of a purely political-agenda-driven narrative;
          3) To fully renounce all ethical responsibility to be truthful with their readers;
          4) To willfully and intentionally compose, publish, and/or otherwise publicize wholly false propaganda.
•    Despite the Atlantic's story being intellectually imbecilic, it stands as a sort of accomplishment in conjuring up deranged hallucinations of the world to fit their "woke" ideology and serve their preening virtue-signaling and self-aggrandizement. Preferring delusional nonsense to the study of reality itself, it manages to combine the fey simplicity of a children’s horror tale with near unreadable feats of lies and convolution, with a low cunning that passes for intelligence.
•    But why? A brief look at an interview with the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, will provide some insight. The interviewer, a Stanford media researcher, described it as follows:
     Throughout our conversation, Goldberg conveyed his concept of journalism as, quote, "A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians continuously at work adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions."
     Goldberg described his work with The Atlantic as a response to what he called a “transhistoric concern”: "The requirement, for those people in power, to shape the attitudes and voting behavior of the general population. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in molding society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an essential part of the true ruling power of our country. We pull the wires which control the public mind, harnessing old social forces and contriving new ways to control the outcome of elections."
     Such complete immersion in blind arrogance, immorality, and egoistic illusions of elitist supremacy ventures well into the realm of the sociopathic, yet it fully exposes the attitudes underlying the agenda of the left's media apparatus and their maniacal focus on upholding utterly false narratives at all costs, reality be damned.
•    This approach to "journalism" has not been without consequences. Billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of former Apple Inc. chairman and CEO Steve Jobs) has majority ownership of The Atlantic Magazine. According to a report from NBC News, the magazine lost a whopping $20 million in 2020, and another $16 million in 2021. The magazine is dealing with a declining subscription base as readers realize it creates stories that are later exposed to have been fabrications or hoaxes. But major donors on the “woke-left” such as Laurene Jobs apparently consider these losses a remarkably low price to pay for their all-too-often successful endeavor to control the outcome of elections. The Atlantic doesn’t exist to put out journalism but to create and control narratives. And even with the sharply declining quality of its "journalism", a sufficiently malicious or simply gullible "woke" media establishment is more than happy to lap it up and spread the propaganda around in a process sociologists and psychologists call ‘propagandic convergence.’
•    According to Stanford researchers, here's how propagandic convergence operates: A narrative is fabricated by a malevolent actor to further a political agenda, then circulated to various media newsrooms. Initially, knowing it contains wholly false information, no media outlet is willing to base a story on it. However, on occasion, often motivated by an event that could relate to the fictitious narrative—wildfire, flood, drought, hurricane, etc—one news producer will decide to publicize the story. That decision is often based on a risk/reward analysis imagining that the political benefit of the story is worth the risk of it being exposed as fabricated, and/or the perception that its readers/viewers are too unsophisticated to realize the story is false, or simply based on the old adage "never let the truth stand in the way of a good story."
     Once it's published by a "news" organization like The Atlantic Magazine, The New York Times, or similar media, other news producers feel justified in running the story as well. When that occurs, often literally within 24 hours, the same fabricated story—with slightly modified headlines—will appear in numerous other publications, on television news shows, websites and so forth, completing the cycle of convergence of pure propaganda across the media spectrum.
•    Here are a few examples of the same blatantly dishonest reporting from some of the media outlets who specialize in it:  "Extreme Weather Events Taking An Unprecedented Toll on Human Life" (CNN);  "Climate-Fueled Extreme Weather Events Having Deadly Consequences" (MSNBC);  "Huge Death Toll From Extreme Weather Disasters" (The Washington Post);  "Climate Change Causing All-Time Record Number of Deaths From Weather Disasters" (The New York Times);  "Extreme Weather from Climate Change Increased Deaths by 68% in Populations Worldwide" (The Associated Press).
•    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. This adage agreeably adorns the tale and nicely points the moral:  Never dwell solely on a monomaniacal ideology. Those that do become intensely myopic. It is as if a person, always shut in a room with one small window through which nearby surroundings can be seen, believes that all the things he sees belong to that window, and all things not seen do not exist.  (Adage from George Bernard Shaw.)
•                          And so, the first and only law of the majority of the media's reporting has become this:
                                         There are no lies too big, and no such thing as rock bottom.
     That once respected media organizations—and certain politicians—are now deeply invested in spreading baseless fabrications, viciously slandering political opponents, and relentless fear-mongering, reveals a lot about what they hope to gain, or believe they stand to lose. Whatever the brilliance of the professional disinformation architects within the media and political speech writers, the nature of their work inevitably places them in an indefensible position in the contemporary debate about partisan propaganda, truth in reporting, objectivity, and public awareness.
     Yet, no matter how dedicated to deception they may be, they will never succeed in their effort to dethrone facts. Of course, reality cannot be fooled. Truth will always validate truth as the first principle of the Universe—what else can it do?

2.  A Motivational Article by Kimberly - The Saving of America.  The last several years have obviously been pretty rough—economically, politically, culturally, just about every way you can think of, actually. It’s had a huge impact on Americans in every walk of life, in every state, in every city, and at every income level. And that explains the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.
     You may not have heard this, but an August 26th survey of focus groups nationwide showed a whopping 8 out of 10 Americans (84%) said the quality of life in the U.S. is "rapidly declining," a new Gallup poll showed 6 out of 10 Americans (63%) describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either "very serious" or "extremely serious," a Monmouth University poll showed nearly 9 out of 10 Americans (88%) said “the country is headed in the wrong direction," and a Gallup poll revealed that only 23% of Americans have "confidence in the presidency," the lowest poll numbers for a presidential administration in polling history. What factors are driving this overwhelming discontent?
     The USDA reports that food prices are up over 30% from 2020, outpacing overall inflation of 20%, and a record 49 million people in the U.S.—including 16 million children—now cannot afford adequate food. The average family has to spend $925 more each month than they did in 2020, and an estimated 39% of American families are now unable to pay their bills. A Harvard study shows housing in our country is now unaffordable for a record 22.4 million people, and over 50% of all renters. The National Association of Realtors reports that the average price of a home is now $426,900, up over 73% from the 2020 average! Homelessness has reached a record high, with more than 650,000 people living in shelters or outside, up a stunning 32% from 2020. KBB reports that car and truck repossessions are up by 52% from 2020, and up 23% from just last year.
     Energy prices are up an average of 70% since 2020. As of the end of August, Americans owe a stunning $220 billion in medical debt, up a staggering 70% from 2020. And a recent study reveals that inflation is putting "over 50 percent of retirees at risk of running out of money," as "rising prices require bigger withdrawals from retirement savings," said The Wall Street Journal. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 14.1% of adults aged 65 and older now live in poverty, an increase of 50% since 2020, meaning about 8 million older adults now live below the poverty line. On August 20, the New York Fed reported that more than 28% of Americans are searching for jobs—the highest rate in a decade.
     According to Homeland Security documents recently sent to Congress, as of September 1st the U.S. has more than
10 million illegal aliens in the country who have either been released into the nation’s interior or evaded the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since January 2021—more than the individual population of 36 of our U.S. states! Thousands are pouring in each day, and the administration has refused to remove over 98% of those illegals. Only between 22,000 and 38,000 of them are or will be in detention facilities. On what officials term the 'non-detained docket,' the vast majority are now free in cities and towns across the country, including over 2 million 'high-priority' cases of illegal aliens who have known criminal records, who are known career criminals, who have pending criminal charges in their home country, or who are known to have been associated with or have connections to active terrorist organizations.
     Historically unprecedented quantities of deadly drugs are flowing across the border. Customs and Border Protection reports that an estimated 4500 to 5000 Mexican cartel tenientes (lieutenants) with their sicarios (enforcers/hitmen) have penetrated into the U.S., responsible for setting-up sex trafficking and drug trafficking operations in cities and towns nationwide, resulting in a massive increase in overdose deaths, with over 112,000 Americans dying in 2023 alone.
     A new NBC poll showed 3 out of 4 Americans (76%) said they “do not feel confident” that life for their children will be better than it has been for them. That’s a shocking 81% increase in “no confidence” from the same poll in January 2020. In many ways, the core belief that today’s children will be better off than their parents is the foundation of “The American Dream.” It's appalling to see that dream dying so quickly.
•   Analysis of polling place exit polls nationwide reveals that people remembered and often discussed what the county was like just a few years ago. This includes facts that are literally kryptonite to the media, things they never mention. For example, the success of the previous administration in controlling the influx of illegal aliens. Statistical data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows that both border encounters and successful illegal entries in 2019 were at the lowest numbers in 56 years, since 1963, and in 2020 were at the lowest numbers in 58 years, since 1962.
     People remember what the economy was like. In 2019 and early 2020, inflation was 1.6 percent, the lowest it had been in 50 years; mortgage interest rates were around 3 percent; median family income had reached the highest level in U.S. history; unemployment was the lowest in half-a-century; unemployment for women and minorities was the lowest in history; the poverty rate was at the lowest level in over three decades; the country had achieved energy independence, and in April 2020 the average price of regular gas was $1.94 a gallon.
     Moreover, in early 2020 the Consumer Confidence Index was at an historic high and Americans’ average FICO credit score had reached an all-time high, according to Ethan Dornhelm, FICO's vice president for analytics, who attributed the record high average credit score to what was "the best economy in many generations." "Record wage growth and record high income minimized reliance on debt to pay the bills, and the low-wage and middle-wage sectors grew the most by far," Dornhelm said, adding, "This was welcome news and yet another sign that the economy was working for more people than ever before." The economy was working for more people than ever before. That was then. And now?
•   "Now is the winter of our discontent," wrote Shakespeare in the famous opening line of Richard III. This applies very well to our present times as it created a powerful motive for change. I spoke to several scholars in the fields of political science and sociology, all of whom expressed essentially the same observation, that America has entered a phase resembling a “late-stage republic.” What this means is that civilizations have a “life-cycle”—they are born, they go through various stages of development, and they mature to flourish during the “main sequence” of their existence.
     Yet, if their founding principles and values are allowed to erode, they begin to decay, leading to the type of moral degeneration, decline of personal liberty and safety, economic strife and societal deterioration now impacting much of our country. The United States, they say, is struggling with “corruption, malfeasance, an uncontrolled influx of illegal migrants, a growing failure to enforce essential laws, and the failure to reverse destabilizing levels of cultural conflict.” Civilizations which decay like this, if it goes unchecked, eventually collapse, generally devolving into authoritarian rule, or a structure of “statism,” or disappear from history altogether.
    In the 2024 presidential election the majority of Americans defied the cynicism and propaganda that autocrats and power-hungry politicians attempted to utilize to manipulate public opinion. Clearly, people did not buy into the absurd lies and outrageous slandering of the former president.
    The damage that has been inflicted on America in recent years can be reversed. It will not be an easy or quick process, much of the corruption will take years to repair, but it can be done. This process has now begun thanks to voters who leveraged their discontent to put aside differences and biases and worked together to save our country by restoring freedom, the rule of law, equal application of justice, by supporting and protecting the U.S. Constitution, and by assuring that government obeys the will of the people rather than the other way around.
•   Our focus must be on reestablishing the fundamental values on which our country was built. Patriotism and Unity. Freedom and Self-reliance. Respect for Truth. Courage, Strength and Optimism. Community and Family. Fairness, Equality and Justice.
    This is profoundly important because the abject failures of the Biden administration must not now or ever be observed with detachment—it is extremely dangerous for the stability and future of our country, and we would all be wise to remember this warning from President Abraham Lincoln: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves from within."
•   If things had gone the other way, if owing to biases, prejudices, and blind adherence to destructive ideologies, voters had failed to work together to demand and accomplish a restoration of America—and a complete renewal of its values—it would have been another matter. It would have marked the beginning of a new story—the story of ever more rapid decline of our country, the story of its continuing deterioration, of its passing from one world into another, of the initiation of Americans into a far different life than in past decades. That would have been a strikingly different life, one that would have marked the end of how we once lived with liberty, freedom, justice, opportunity, and prosperity.

3.  Heat Waves - Historical Facts, by Ashley, and Please Note: Lest anyone misinterpret it, the purpose of the following sections is not to suggest that climate change is not occurring—it definitely is—but rather to provide information and data from top professionals and research centers which can assist in understanding facts that have been suppressed by the corporate media and by social media platforms.
•    According to CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, NPR, PBS, the Associated Press, and many other media organizations, so far this year "more than 1,200 daytime high temperature 'records' have been broken," and that temperatures have been "unprecedented," and "the hottest in history,” and so on and so on. And that's not all.
     'The Washington Post' claimed that temperatures were "the warmest in the last 100,000 years." CNN decided to one-up them by claiming that the temperatures were "the hottest in 120,000 years," and 'The Hill' said the same. But most amazing, 'CBS Saturday Morning' plowed through every professional and ethical guardrail by claiming that recent temperatures have been—Ready? Don't be too sure—"the hottest in three million years."
     These claims, when taken along with their sources, raise more red flags than a Chinese military parade. So, I talked to several climate researchers, including a nice couple who are friends and neighbors and are both atmospheric scientists. I asked them if such reporting could be true. They said it depends on the "time frame" of the claims of "record breaking" temperatures. Regarding records, it's important to point out the obvious: Record-setting temperatures are relative to the time period of actual recorded thermometer measurements. For example, NOAA uses 1895 as the earliest year with sufficient data with which to compare to recent years. As an obvious result, the claims of the hottest temperatures in "100,000 years," or "120,000 years," or "three million years" are nothing more than a few deranged pantomimes in the theater of the absurd that is today's legacy media. So, lacking direct records that go back more than a hundred years or so, what do we know about past temperatures? Insights come from proxy records and extant, written historical records.
•    On a long-term basis, the best overview of our planet's atmospheric temperature trend is derived from the “Marine Stable Isotope Record.” The oceans absorb most of the world's heat, so there's a direct correlation between deep ocean temperatures and global average surface temperatures. As a result, one of the most widely used proxies for determining global mean surface temperature through the past millions of years is the stable isotope record. The stable isotopes of oxygen are utilized to construct paleoclimatic reconstructions of deep ocean temperatures, as shown in this chart which I was provided by the American Geophysical Union, extending back about 67 million years. Note the steady decline since the Eocene epoch, when ocean temperatures averaged about 22.6 degrees Celsius higher than today, then a leveling off in the Oligocene and early-Miocene epochs, when ocean temperatures averaged about 14.1 degrees Celsius higher than today, then the resumption of a steep decline in ocean temperature, leading to the much lower range toward our modern times in the early-Holocene epoch.
• Per the CBS claim: "Three million" years ago deep ocean temperatures averaged 7-8+ degrees Celsius higher than today,
   meaning that average global atmospheric temperatures were about 10-12 degrees Fahrenheit higher than in 2023 or 2024.
   A data analyst from the Geophysical Union told me that, at minimum, at least 700 million days during the last 3 million years
   were definitely much hotter than in recent years. (How did CBS decide to make such a ludicrous claim? Were they drunk?)

     The climatologists I spoke to also suggested that I talk to historians about the written historical records of extreme temperature events. So Heather and I called and spoke to professors at our alma mater, Oxford University, who were very helpful, and they in turn put us in contact with professors at Cambridge University and Yale University. We were provided with a great deal of information found in literature from parts of the world which have had written languages for thousands of years. I'm including a brief overview below. Again, this information is not meant to indicate that climate change is not occurring, but rather to show that there is much more to the story than what's reported by the media.
•    Note:  Each of the following quotes comes directly from a reliable historical source and had to be confirmed by at least
                 two (2) additional credible sources to be included, and in most cases is recorded in dozens of historical records.
•  "In 627, the heat across the continent [Europe] was so great that all springs dried up; water became so scarce that thousands
    of human beings died of thirst."
•  "In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes,
    so powerful was the sun."
•  "In 993, the sun’s rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire. Nuts on the trees were roasted,
    as if in a baker’s oven."
•  "In 1000, rivers throughout the continent ran dry under the protracted heat, the fish were left drying in heaps and putrefied
    in a few hours."  NOTE: Rivers running dry "throughout the continent" has never occurred in contemporary history.
•  "In 1014 in France, and even in Switzerland, all the brooks and the rivers were dried up."  NOTE: ditto to the above.
•  "In the summer of 1022, men and animals venturing in the sun fell down dying."
•  "In 1132, rivers dried up, and the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace dried up."
•  "Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1189; vegetation and plants were burned up; thousands of souls perished."
•  "During the battle of Bela, in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in
    regular rows."
•  "The sun of 1277 was severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage as the fields and forests were scorched and died."
•  "In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire and Seine ran dry."  NOTE: Neither the Loire nor the Seine have ever run dry in
    contemporary history, and they have been running normally during the recent heat waves.
•  "In 1393 and 1394, great numbers of animals fell dead in the heat, and the crops were scorched up."
•  "In 1538 and 1539, all the rivers across the continent were entirely dried up."  NOTE: Again, that has never happened in
    contemporary history, not even close.
•  "England and Scotland suffered extreme heat in 1625; men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely
    exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture outside during the day."
•  "In 1718, extreme heat forced London shops to be closed; the theaters were never opened for several months. Not a drop
    of water fell during six months."
•  "In 1753, in London the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees."  NOTE: The media claimed the "record
    high temperature" recently set in London was 104.5 degrees Fahrenheit, fully 13° lower than in 1753. (The Fahrenheit
    measurement scale was first introduced in 1724 by the German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit.)
•  "In 1779, the heat at Bologna reached one hundred and twenty degrees; it was so great that a large number of people died."
    NOTE: The media claimed the all-time "record" recently set in Bologna was 103.0 degrees Fahrenheit, which was at
    minimum 17° lower than in 1779.
•  "In July, 1793, the heat became intolerable. Vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture
    and woodwork in dwelling-houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour."
•  "In Paris in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the shade."  NOTE: The media claimed
    the all-time "record" recently set in Paris was 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which was at least 16° lower than in 1846.
Sources: The University of Oxford History Department, Oxford, UK;  The Joint Centre for History, Magdalene College and King's College, Cambridge, UK;  and Yale University Department of History, New Haven, CT.
Clearly, the recent heat waves, although significant, are hardly unprecedented, and much worse heat waves have occurred in the past. So why did climate specialists refer us to historians for the truth on "record" temperatures? Simply because historians have been "overlooked," so to say, and have not (yet) been subjected to serious political pressure or threats to cutoff funding to force them and/or their departments to hide or falsify facts contained in historical records.
●  Temperature Records in the United States: Native Americans have lived on the North American continent for millennia, but unfortunately had no formal written language, and the many things the arriving Europeans subjected them to did not include inquiries as to past climate events. So, until many years after the arrival of European colonists from Spain, Portugal and Britain, there are no written records to identify heat waves on the North American continent similar to or exceeding the heat waves that occurred on the European continent. However, climatologists say that many of the same type of extreme heat events that are documented to have occurred in Europe from the 600s and onward would have happened in the U.S. as well, which is confirmed by substantial evidence derived from proxies such as pollens, tree rings, diatoms, forams, and so on.

4.  Problems in Climate Science. Introducing Ella: Our team member Kimberly is from Sweden, and her younger sister Ella has come to join us (from Östermalm, Sweden) after graduating from Stockholm University. We're very happy she's here, we adore her. Since arriving, Ella has been surprised by the deceptions and distortions of reality she has seen from the U.S. media. Of course, we're pretty much used to it, but those kind of falsifications do not exist in Sweden, so to Ella it's astonishing. She's become rather fascinated with the TV news shows, and when she watches she sometimes turns to us with an amazed expression and asks, "Hur kan de ljuga så?" ("How can they lie like that?"). Good question. Michael has pointed out that it's actually reassuring since even with her rapidly improving but still incomplete knowledge of English, it's easy for her to spot the media's falsifications and fabrications. Ella wrote the following, some of which is translated from Swedish by Kimberly.
•    We live in interesting times for the sciences. For the past several years, disciplines such as climatology and atmospheric science seem to have unlocked some of the mysteries of nature, or that’s the claim, and academics and laypeople alike couldn’t get enough of what they were reporting. The media, too, uncritically lapped up the narratives.
     Lately, however, the climate-science world has become mired in controversy. Researchers themselves have started to note that many claims and predictions have been debunked—such as, for just one example, the idea that hurricanes have become more frequent or more intense in recent years. Scholars writing in the journal Science examined the research “results” regarding hurricanes published since 2020 in a number of science journals and magazines and found that only 26 percent of those “results” were consistent with the actual data. In other words, over 70 percent of the articles made claims that were diametrically opposed by the actual, factually verified data. In other words, they were wholly false.
     Multiple allegations of unethical data practices have emerged, many of them clearly proven. The misconduct has included so-called “p-hacking”—processing data in search of spurious correlations and publishing them as valid results—and even outright fraud, in which researchers have altered their data to fit a predetermined, "politically-correct" result. Although the majority of climate disinformation is intentionally created, some is the result of scientists engaging in what's called "pathological science." Pathological science is a psychological process in which a scientist—initially conforming to the scientific method—unconsciously veers from a rigorous methodology and begins an intractable process of what's called "wishful data interpretation," generally resulting from the observer-expectancy effect, cognitive bias, and/or the researcher's ideological belief system. Pathological science presents an often convincing but easily falsifiable claim, as is apparent when the claim is compared to the true and factual data.
     For example, regarding hurricanes, what does the actual data show? As Ashley illustrated, the comprehensive record of all hurricanes that have made landfall since 1851 shows no upward trend in the number of major hurricanes over the last 173 years. And there has been a 50 percent reduction in the number of major hurricanes (Category 3 or greater) making landfall in the U.S. over the last 90 years. These facts have been reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Princeton Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory; U.S. Geological Survey; the National Hurricane Center; and the National Weather Service.
•    Making climate disinformation worse is the media. Although media producers are certainly aware of the facts coming from NOAA, the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service and other research organizations, they consistently promote false claims, lies that they know to be lies. Consider a few examples: "Hurricanes have become more extreme than at anytime in history" (CNN); "Recent hurricanes are historically unprecedented" (MSNBC); "Climate change is driving record breaking hurricanes" (Vox); "Hurricanes have become cataclysmic due to climate change" (PBS); "Hurricanes have been getting worse every year as climate change fuels stronger storms" (CBS Mornings); "America and the world are getting bigger and more intense hurricanes" (NBC News); "Climate change is making hurricanes more powerful and more destructive than ever before" (NPR); "Climate Change Is Making Hurricanes Stronger" (New York Times headline).
     An editor of the 'Journal of Climate'—published by the highly respected 'American Meteorological Society' in Boston, MA—suggested that it is long past due to have the scientific community speak out against the prevalence of false reporting, intentional suppression of facts, false data and fabricated conclusions in the media's climate reporting. “We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that any press report is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary,” he wrote.
     This is less hostile than it sounds. He isn’t saying that everything is fraudulent, but rather that everything should be evaluated starting from a baseline of “I don’t believe you” until it's definitely proven otherwise. Think of the airport-security workers who assume that you may be carrying contraband or weapons until you prove that you aren’t. The point is not that everyone is carrying something they shouldn't, but that everybody has to go through the appropriate procedures to be certain.
•    Moreover, media news departments routinely refuse to respond to requests for access to the data underlying their reporting, despite stating their willingness to share it. An American Meteorological Society study found that of about 1,800 instances of "questionable climate reporting" for which the news producers indicated that their sources and data would be available on request, only 14% (252) of them responded to requests for their data, and a mere 6.7% (121) actually shared their data in a usable form. The reason for the media's reticence to share data may be this: When the 6.7% of the data actually provided from 121 "climate change" stories was analyzed, researchers found that 64% of that contained factually inaccurate statistics, while 73% contained sensationalized language promoting indisputably fraudulent claims. Many cited as their source other media stories, making for what I was told is "an echo chamber of fabrications." Can you imagine what would be found in the 93.3% of the "data" that the media refused to share with the American Meteorological Society researchers?
•    A natural conclusion for people who are aware of the facts regarding climate events is grave skepticism about the climate-science field. People are bound to wonder if most of the published claims about climate change simply cannot be trusted.
     I get that, but I reject the notion that the whole field has been discredited. As Ashley described, a peer-reviewed study recently published in three highly-regarded journals—Nature, Science News, and Nature Communications—titled 'Changes in Atlantic Major Hurricane Frequency Since the Late-19th Century', reached this conclusion, quote: "There are not actually more Atlantic hurricanes now than there were roughly 150 years ago," and "There has been a significant decrease in the trend of hurricane energy and intensity over the past 25 years." The study was a cooperative effort of the following: Geosciences Department, Princeton University; High Meadows Environmental Institute; National Hurricane Center; National Weather Service; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering, University of Iowa; and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University.
     Those seven top-tier organizations chose to publish the truth—despite considerable political pressure to suppress the study, and knowing full well that their report would be entirely ignored by the mainstream media—and those research organizations deserve sincere credit for their decision.
     Yet many other organizations involved in climate studies suffer from significant difficulties. Analysts at Stanford University attribute this problem to a series of study flaws. For example: Intentionally using "data samples that are far too small" or "too cherry-picked” to trust, "cases in which a result is made to seem valid because of mathematical sleight of hand but is effectively meaningless," "poor experimental design," "invalid modeling tools," "grave modeling errors," "implausible and inadequately supported assumptions," "claims devoid of any scientific evidence," and—the most entrenched—"academic bias" caused by "career incentives to find predetermined results."
     Those incentives are brutal. In some fields, a professor needs to have published dozens of research articles to have a prayer of getting tenure (without which they are usually shown the door). Imagine studying for a decade through college and graduate school, then beavering away for perhaps another 10 years on research while managing a hefty teaching load, only to be in the position of betting your career on the up-or-out decision of a university committee. As one researcher wrote on Political Science Rumors, an anonymous message board where academics in this field can openly converse, “The tenure track is a dehumanizing process, because it treats us as apprentices until we’re at least well into our 30s and often significantly past 40.”
     At many universities, for research to be good enough for publication is often not good enough. The topic also has to be covered convincingly, the claims must elicit an emotional response, and ideally the findings should be consistent with the accepted narrative. Articles revealing factual, empirical evidence that hurricanes are neither more frequent nor more intense will not get much credit or publicity; but articles claiming that hurricanes have gotten much, much worse—now we’re talking.
     Not surprisingly, perhaps, this impulse to center on what's popular and politically-correct leads to problems. An article titled “Cheat or Perish?” in the journal Research Policy looked at the incentives in academia to cut corners or straight-up cheat. Its authors noted that although “carrots” can encourage work that is high quality, sometimes, to avoid possible defunding or controversy, they encourage the opposite; and even in outwardly dispassionate and non-biased research, “sticks” do not always deter misbehavior. The scholars wrote that fraud and misconduct in research are frequently intentionally overlooked or simply ignored. This means that the carrots heavily outweigh the sticks, predictably affecting the integrity of the work.
     Yet tenure alone does not necessarily eliminate the problematic incentives to publish false claims and conclusions. Senior researchers easily fall prey to hubris and fail to seek advice and constructive criticism. Research has also shown that people with more expertise in a field tend to react more poorly than those with less experience by becoming even more pedantic when they receive “dis-confirming feedback”—in other words, they don’t want to hear that their claims and conclusions are wrong.
     And the stakes rise a great deal in an era when climate scientists can become superstars outside academia, earning speaking engagements and lucrative book deals for their thrillingly disturbing findings. And of course paid TV appearances as well, on media outlets to whom only the narrative matters, not the real facts, in particular the cable outlets CNN and MSNBC, yet also the networks CBS, ABC, and NBC.

  •  Summary, by  Ashley:  Please take a moment to consider what these examples really mean, and there are dozens more. Such massive breaches of journalistic integrity are exactly what corruption looks like. Rather than basing their reporting on any investigation into the facts, the news directors, hosts or anchors simply made-up those stories. They fabricated their reporting, not just without any regard for the actual facts, but in direct opposition to the actual facts.
     If you were under the impression that the corporate media is objective, unbiased and report "just the facts" or are "the most trusted name in news," then their behavior should disabuse you of that notion. The social contract between journalist and news consumer—“What I am telling you strictly happened”—has been overruled in that they are incentivized to place all of their observations and reportage into a wholly politicized narrative about "This is what I want it to mean" rather than "This is what really happened." We know that many of these journalists have a well-proved habit of fabricating their reporting. That's been demonstrated over and over again, day after day, week after week.
     NBC News anchor Lester Holt recently gave a monologue on why objectivity, balance or “fairness” in journalism is “overrated.”  "I think it’s become clearer that fairness is overrated," Holt said. "The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in."
     Such a statement, coming from an allegedly objective news reporter, is shocking. (I think it's what Darth Vader said just before he started building the Death Star.) The NBC anchor’s embrace of outright censorship surely ought to outrage any constitutionally-minded and honest American. Holt's words align with a frightening sentiment that the views of anyone who does not agree with or challenges the media's far-left political agenda—in other words, over half of the country—must be muzzled at all costs.
    The corporate media's "news" divisions, in rebelling against the bridle of all professional standards, have integrated partisan propaganda into so much of their political reporting that it has diminished many of our quintessential human capacities, such as intelligence, logic and reason. When coupled with the social media platforms' overt censorship of free speech, it has overall made today's media little more than a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
     The danger of this is clear, as very well expressed by the senior judge of the Washington D.C. Federal Circuit Court: "It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news," wrote Judge Silberman in a libel case. "It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy. It may even give rise to countervailing extremism."
     I feel like I need to get 'Born Free' as my ringtone. I remember taking a course at Oxford optimistically called “Literary Journalism,” which makes me wince for a few reasons. First among them is how we were exposed to a wide range of famous journalists, without our professor discussing the fact that much of their work was substantially fabricated. For weeks, I’d sit there thinking, “This is incredibly revealing material, how did they get it?,” without my earnest young mind considering that it was probably not as conveniently real as depicted, and that “they just made it up” to support their political party and its “talking points” was a strong probability instead of a cynical interpretation.

•  A Critical Crossroads for the U.S., by Heather:  The ongoing crisis in the media has raised alarm for many of the closest international allies of the U.S. who, with the sober, objective analysis allowed by distance, have become increasingly concerned. I'm from Oxfordshire, I have family members in the intelligence sector, and one of them alerted me to a classified study conducted in the U.K. A private symposium composed of high-ranking members of the intelligence and academic communities reached several stunning conclusions regarding the current state of the U.S. media. The critical summary section of their report reads in pertinent part:
     "The majority of America’s principal broadcast and print media organizations have explicitly abandoned the fundamental standards of journalism. Our research found profoundly troubling aspects of political reporting and information suppression, essentially eviscerating truth and freedom of speech...  The manner in which this developed and the propaganda techniques they now commonly utilize have as their closest historical parallel the practices employed in 1930s Germany by Joseph Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Should these dire conditions go uncorrected and a free press not be restored, there is a real question of whether the constitutional republic of the United States will endure."  —United Kingdom MOD Report (Ministry of Defense, sensu lato document), Oxford Brookes (2021)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."  —Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

 
•  Media Analysis, by Ashley:  Of course, it has not gone unnoticed that the corporate media and many social media platforms are supressing free speech and censoring extremely important stories while promoting their own distortions and fabrications.
     According to the newest polls from the Gallup Organization, an estimated 220 MILLION American adults have lost all trust in the accuracy, objectivity and fairness of the media's "news" reporting, and for very good reasons. (Credit: The Gallup Organization, Washington, DC.)
     The summary of an in-depth Stanford University study of the U.S. media concludes, as two illustrations of media corruption: "[C]ampaigns of the purely propagandist cable media MSNBC and CNN are indifferent to truth or truthfulness, knowledge or understanding, and follow a strategic and unrelenting transmission pattern to fully indoctrinate the target audience in a particular synthesis or perception."
     And Stanford reports that it's not just cable media: "The narratives of broadcast media such as NBC, CBS, and ABC can be neutrally defined as systematic forms of purposeful persuasion designed to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and voting behaviors of a specified audience through the consistent utilization of one-sided, non-objective messages, in consort with ridiculing or suppressing elements of reality that do not fit within the accepted framework of their primary political agenda."
     If you've been watching any of the recent broadcast "reporting," you might think Stanford understated their findings. Then there's this—even the editorial board of the liberal newspaper 'The Washington Post' writes: "CNN and MSNBC long ago stopped being news outlets in the sense of going out to find facts ... their hosts, anchors and commentators have become hit-squads that do not investigate, do not have any regard for facts or evidence, and do not make any attempt at balance or fairness." Although a jaw-dropping example of "the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black," that pretty much sums it up.
•  As Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently commented, "What I find most surprising is that CNN still exists." It does, kind of, but in the long run Mr. Musk may be on to something as their ratings have fallen well behind cable networks such as TLC, Discovery, Hallmark, and even Nickelodeon! A striking sign of their rating crisis is in the critical demographic of ages 25 to 54, the most important segment of viewers for advertising revenue, where their viewership is in a near free fall.
  ●Update: CNN's average primetime viewership dropped to the lowest level in 30 years, and the network’s ratings trail even those of MSNBC, which itself has seen a decline in primetime viewership to the lowest level in some 23 years. Executives of the media company Discovery are seeking to set a new course for CNN after merging with the network’s former parent company, WarnerMedia, earlier this year, putting some of the network’s most wildly partisan employees such as Brian Stelter, Jeffrey Toobin, Jim Acosta, Don Lemon and Brianna Keilar on "very shaky ground." Warner Bros. Discovery management wants CNN to eschew the network’s “red-hot liberal opining” and instead focus on objective reporting of hard news, but some Warner Bros. executives believe that the CNN brand is beyond repair.
     Update: Brian Stelter, "legal analyst" Jeffrey Toobin, Don Lemon, and hyper-liberal White House correspondent John Harwood have all been axed. John Malone, a Warner Bros. Discovery board member and major stockholder commented, "I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing." That phrasing—especially the words "actually have journalists," which CNN currently doesn't—was applauded by media experts and especially by journalism professors who are avid to see a return to honest, objective, professional journalism.
     In a rational world, the leadership of NBC-MSNBC would also immediately implement a dramatic course correction away from "pure propaganda" and "purposeful persuasion" toward at least some kind of responsible journalism, but as yet there is no sign that rationality exists there.

• NOTE:  At our last party, I asked a UC Berkeley media analyst why a really liberal newspaper like 'The Washington Post' would write the sharp criticism of CNN and MSNBC that they did. In light of The Washington Post being projected to lose around $100 million in 2023, he said that it has to do with maintaining some degree of credibility, and explained, quote:
     "CNN and MSNBC are not legitimate news sources and most everyone recognizes that. I don't know anyone who takes them seriously, and certainly no one should. Factual accuracy has nothing to do with their stories, facts are typically obstacles to the intended impact of their reporting, so they consider them to be irrelevant. They're not journalists, they're activists, they're fabulists and storytellers.
     "This is not an 'interpretation' of the current state of the U.S. media, any more than dinosaurs are an 'interpretation' of the fossil record. It is simply what CNN and MSNBC have become, and to a significant extent NBC, CBS and ABC also. It helps to understand that we've arrived at a time when nearly every member of the corporate media is a far-left partisan. [Short laugh...] Ashley, if they weren't media figures, they'd be considered nothing more than a radical fringe of the hard-left. With a mix of their own social and occupational homophily and progressive ideology, they view the world through the most distorted lens imaginable. Rather than acting with professionalism, they act on their partisanship by using distortion, fabrication and emotional manipulation as political tools.
     "Truth, objectivity, balance and fairness—everything we work so hard to teach as the invariable standards of professional journalism—have gone completely out the window. The astonishing thing is that it's allowed to continue. In media monitoring and analysis projects across this country, and in most European countries, both CNN and MSNBC are classified as 'Ideological Propaganda Media' and fall in the same category as CCPPD, IRIB, and KCNA."  (CCPPD is China's state-media, the Central Committee of the Communist Party Publicity Department; IRIB is Iran's state-media, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting; and KCNA is North Korea's state-media, the Korean Central News Agency).   
     Best explanation ever. So obviously, in today's world we must be exceptionally discerning where we get day-to-day news that's actually objective, factual, and complete, so as much of the media persists in their propaganda campaigns, please be very selective about what corporate media, social media or other reports you believe.