Sifting Through Lies

Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Glendale, California



Sifting Through Lies

Reviewing events of the past few days, I am reminded of the near impossibility of finding the TRUTH about any particular topic.

Here are three examples from this week alone:

  1. I watched the documentary, Cowspiracy, a film on Netflix co-directed by Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn. It reveals a number of disturbing truths about the global animal agriculture business. A few choice facts: Raising cattle is responsible for 51 percent of global warming. To create one pound of hamburger meat requires 1200 gallons of water. And, 90 percent of the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is caused by converting that forest into into grazable land. Some critics take issue with these facts but my own research validates them. Perhaps even more troubling, Greenpeace refused to allow its executive director to be interviewed for the film. The Sierra Club did, as did representatives from organizations like Oceana, which support the seas. As a viewer, you learn that these organizations, which operate as businesses themselves, downplay the environmental hazards of animal agriculture. They fear losing members. Instead, they emphasize conservation, weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels, and so-called sustainability. Therefore, an arguably more troubling fact is the biased viewpoint these allegedly environmental organizations share about global warming.
  2. The New York Times claims that, while unlikely, it remains a real possibility that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory just blocks from where the virus was thought to originate. Few believe it was released on purpose. However, and again, highly credentialed individuals, like Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, consider a lab leak a real possibility. The NYT article notes, “China’s integral role in a joint inquiry with the World Health Organization made its dismissal of the lab leak theory difficult to accept, Dr. Iwasaki and 17 other scientists argued in the journal Science this month.”
  3. Just this morning, Vladimir Putin, when questioned about the poisoning and incarceration of political opponent Alexei Navalny, pointed out how organizations like Black Lives Matter, or the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, shows how we Americans deal with political dissent in the same way as him.

These three seemingly random examples illustrate the problem finding out truth in our era of mind-control, an age of propaganda exceeding anything George Orwell could have possibly imagined.

How could Greenpeace, an environmental organization trusted by millions, distort truths about global warming to its members?

How could right wing conspiracy theories about China releasing the Covid-19 virus from a laboratory possibly be accurate?

And how could anyone dare suggest that the poisoning of a political dissident by weapons only available to nation states, namely highly toxic chemical agents, resembles a Black Lives Matter rally?

It is crucial we all WAKE UP to how we are exposed, on historically unprecedented level, to untruths.

We should adopt the wisdom of the late Tom Hayden who proclaimed:

Question Authority!

We should ingest every alleged fact with doubt, and then use our diligence to find out what’s accurate.

Truths do exist.

However, and like no previous time in the history of civilization, our minds are massively manipulated by the media, we are surveilled, and our very way of thinking is invaded.

A way out exists, but it requires some effort.

Thomas Jefferson believed the American democracy rested on an “educated public.”

That’s no longer enough.

We need to not only prop up our educational institutions, but also we must also teach people throughout the world to greet information with skepticism, check multiple sources, and put energy into truth seeking. It cannot be passively acquired.

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