Intellectual Bravery
I was struck by this recent observation from Timothy Clark in his HBR article on cultivating “Intellectual Bravery”:
“Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy buries boldness. Efficiency crushes creativity. From there, the status quo calcifies and stagnation sets in.
“The responsibility for creating a culture of intellectual bravery lies in leadership. As a leader, you set the tone, create the vibe, and define the prevailing norms. Whether or not your company has a culture of intellectual bravery depends on your ability to establish a pattern of rewarded rather than punished vulnerability.”
You can tell a lot about an organization by what gets punished and what gets rewarded. Stanford professor Bob Sutton famously observed twenty years ago that many organizations follow an unspoken motto to “reward success and inaction, punish failure.”
He advised instead to “reward success and failure, punish inaction.”
20-year-old filmmaker wins award for powerful 1-minute film about marriage
Amazing what can be conveyed in just 60 seconds.
You may not be able to understand their words, but the gestures and subtitles help to convey the beautiful message of this short award-winning film made by 20-year-old Iranian filmmaker Syed Mohammad Reza Kheradmand.
The film, called Thursday Appointment, recently won an award at the Luxor African Film Festival, a non-profit organization that encourages and celebrates film-making from Africa.
The powerful short movie depicts an older married couple reciting the Poem of Hafez to one another in the car, when they stop at a red light and notice a couple fighting loudly with their young daughter in the back seat. The older couple make a gesture that says a lot about their own marriage, and about how married love can help reconcile and restore others around us.
https://aleteia.org/2020/01/02/20-year-old-filmmaker-wins-award-for-powerful-1-minute-film-about-marriage/
A Legal Way To Fight Back And Burden Our Attackers With Personal Liability
There is a brilliant notice you can serve on the Australian government ministers that will, if enough of us do it, cause them to back pedal so hard on the subject of mandatory vaccines that you will hear the tyres squeal around the world! Click here https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/Notice_Govt_Form.pdf to download and print the document then send it off.
Do you know that a NOTICE becomes legally binding on both parties if there is no written objection to the notice?
Do you know that if this Notice is not responded to as directed in the notice, then the other party (employer) automatically becomes contracted to your conditions stated in the notice?
Do you know that a Notice is able to be used as evidence in court but a letter is not?
Do you know that signing or autographing your name on the right side of the page makes you the creditor (person in charge) of the contract, the debtor (the one who must take action) is always detailed on the left side of the document?
Do you know that you can put any value on your life as YOU choose? We are not bound by their grossly unfair compensation rates of their choosing, we can set our own value on our own lives.
Do you know that the introduction by all countries of the Hague Convention agreed to International Contract Law (Universal Commercial Codes) almost 70 years ago? This means that every law or supposed law and statute is a CONTRACT and if you have no written objection to it then you have agreed to the contract.
This document is written as a NOTICE and becomes CONTRACT by either the other party response or acquiescence (lack of response or a response not in the way detailed in this notice).
Your Job Is Not To Wake The Sheep. It Is To Gather The Lions!
There are two references I like to share with truth warriors because without them, you may lose motivation when your messages fall on deaf ears. Knowing this data could mean the difference between burnout and failure versus getting through to the people who make a difference.
1. Is an excerpt from the book: Committee Of 300, by Dr. John Coleman
This sample is on page 105 of the PDF file.
Re WWI
The project was housed in Wellington House, named after the Duke of Wellesly.
American specialists drafted to help Lords Rothmere and Northcliffe included Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman. The group held “brain storming” sessions to work out techniques for mobilizing mass support for the war, especially among the working class people whose sons were expected to go to the slaughter fields of Flanders in record numbers.
Using Lord Rothmere’s newspaper, new manipulative techniques were tried out and, after a period of about 6 months, it was apparent that they were a success. What the researchers discovered was that only a very small group of people understood the process of reasoning and the ability to observe the problem as opposed to passing an opinion on it. This, said Lord Rothmere, was the way in which 87% of the British public approached the war, and that the same principle applied not only to the war, but to every conceivable problem in society in general.
In this manner, irrationality was elevated to a high level of public consciousness. The manipulators then played upon this to undermine and distract the grasp of reality governing any given situation and, the more complex the problems of a modern industrial society became, the easier it became to bring greater and greater distractions to bear so that what we ended up with was that the absolutely inconsequential opinions of masses of people, created by skilled manipulators, assumed the position of scientific fact.
What is planned:
Euthanasia for the terminally ill and the aged shall be compulsory. No cities shall be larger than a predetermined number as described in the work of Kalgeri. Essential workers will be moved to other cities if the one they are in becomes overpopulated. Other non-essential workers will be chosen at random and sent to underpopulated cities to fill “quotas.”
At least 4 billion “useless eaters” shall be eliminated by the year 2050 by means of limited wars, organized epidemics of fatal rapid-acting diseases and starvation. Energy, food and water shall be kept at subsistence levels for the non-elite, starting with the white populations of Western Europe and North America and then spreading to other races. The population of Canada, Western Europe and the United States will be decimated more rapidly than on other continents, until the world’s population reaches a manageable level of 1 billion, of which 500 million will consist of Chinese and Japanese.
Here is a link to the above excerpt: http://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=29173
You can view the original document on the CIA’s own website:
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/4A/4A92FD2FB4DAE3F773DB0B7742CF0F65_Coleman.-.CONSPIRATORS.HIERARCHY.-.THE.STORY.OF.THE.COMMITTEE.OF.300.R.pdf
Despite the facts hitting them in the face with all the power of a wet fish, most have no idea of the present truth let alone the future.
80-87% of people don’t think with facts, they “feel”.
I read some time ago that a researcher found about 95% of people have been so badly hurt so often they are in the status of degraded beings. Robots, if you will, that accept whatever authority tells them to do and blindly follow orders.
Apparently there are only about 10,000 on the planet capable of doing a little steering or leading.
10,000 / 7,000,000,000 * 100 = .000142857% or one in 70,000!
That’s a lot of followers. Too many followers and too few leaders.
So do not be disheartened that your warnings fall on largely deaf ears. They are simply not up to the level where they can receive or assimilate your message.
2. Appealing to the Remnant Rather Than The Masses
This is a resoundingly good listen for those who are aware and who despair of the masses.
https://mises.org/library/isaiahs-job-0
Government Negligence (Or Malfeasance) On Grand Scale
Dr. Ari Joffe is a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at University of Alberta. He has written a paper titled COVID-19: Rethinking the Lockdown Groupthink that finds the harms of lockdowns are 10 times greater than their benefits.
You were a strong proponent of lockdowns initially but have since changed your mind. Why is that?
There are a few reasons why I supported lockdowns at first.
First, initial data falsely suggested that the infection fatality rate was up to 2-3%, that over 80% of the population would be infected, and modelling suggested repeated lockdowns would be necessary. But emerging data showed that the median infection fatality rate is 0.23%, that the median infection fatality rate in people under 70 years old is 0.05%, and that the high-risk group is older people especially those with severe co-morbidities. In addition, it is likely that in most situations only 20-40% of the population would be infected before ongoing transmission is limited (i.e., herd-immunity).
Second, I am an infectious diseases and critical care physician, and am not trained to make public policy decisions. I was only considering the direct effects of COVID-19 and my knowledge of how to prevent these direct effects. I was not considering the immense effects of the response to COVID-19 (that is, lockdowns) on public health and wellbeing.
Emerging data has shown a staggering amount of so-called ‘collateral damage’ due to the lockdowns. This can be predicted to adversely affect many millions of people globally with food insecurity [82-132 million more people], severe poverty [70 million more people], maternal and under age-5 mortality from interrupted healthcare [1.7 million more people], infectious diseases deaths from interrupted services [millions of people with Tuberculosis, Malaria, and HIV], school closures for children [affecting children’s future earning potential and lifespan], interrupted vaccination campaigns for millions of children, and intimate partner violence for millions of women. In high-income countries adverse effects also occur from delayed and interrupted healthcare, unemployment, loneliness, deteriorating mental health, increased opioid crisis deaths, and more.
Third, a formal cost-benefit analysis of different responses to the pandemic was not done by government or public health experts. Initially, I simply assumed that lockdowns to suppress the pandemic were the best approach. But policy decisions on public health should require a cost-benefit analysis. Since lockdowns are a public health intervention, aiming to improve the population wellbeing, we must consider both benefits of lockdowns, and costs of lockdowns on the population wellbeing. Once I became more informed, I realized that lockdowns cause far more harm than they prevent.
There has never been a full cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns done in Canada. What did you find when you did yours?
First, some background into the cost-benefit analysis. I discovered information I was not aware of before. First, framing decisions as between saving lives versus saving the economy is a false dichotomy. There is a strong long-run relationship between economic recession and public health. This makes sense, as government spending on things like healthcare, education, roads, sanitation, housing, nutrition, vaccines, safety, social security nets, clean energy, and other services determines the population well-being and life-expectancy. If the government is forced to spend less on these social determinants of health, there will be ‘statistical lives’ lost, that is, people will die in the years to come. Second, I had underestimated the effects of loneliness and unemployment on public health. It turns out that loneliness and unemployment are known to be among the strongest risk factors for early mortality, reduced lifespan, and chronic diseases. Third, in making policy decisions there are trade-offs to consider, costs and benefits, and we have to choose between options that each have tragic outcomes in order to advocate for the least people to die as possible.
In the cost-benefit analysis I consider the benefits of lockdowns in preventing deaths from COVID-19, and the costs of lockdowns in terms of the effects of the recession, loneliness, and unemployment on population wellbeing and mortality. I did not consider all of the other so-called ‘collateral damage’ of lockdowns mentioned above. It turned out that the costs of lockdowns are at least 10 times higher than the benefits. That is, lockdowns cause far more harm to population wellbeing than COVID-19 can. It is important to note that I support a focused protection approach, where we aim to protect those truly at high-risk of COVID-19 mortality, including older people, especially those with severe co-morbidities and those in nursing homes and hospitals.
You studied the role modelling played in shaping public opinion. Can you break that down for us?
I think that the initial modelling and forecasting were inaccurate. This led to a contagion of fear and policies across the world. Popular media focused on absolute numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths independent of context. There has been a sheer one-sided focus on preventing infection numbers. The economist Paul Frijters wrote that it was “all about seeming to reduce risks of infection and deaths from this one particular disease, to the exclusion of all other health risks or other life concerns.” Fear and anxiety spread, and we elevated COVID-19 above everything else that could possibly matter. Our cognitive biases prevented us from making optimal policy: we ignored hidden ‘statistical deaths’ reported at the population level, we preferred immediate benefits to even larger benefits in the future, we disregarded evidence that disproved our favorite theory, and escalated our commitment in the set course of action.
I found out that in Canada in 2018 there were over 23,000 deaths per month and over 775 deaths per day. In the world in 2019 there were over 58 million deaths and about 160,000 deaths per day. This means that on November 21 this year, COVID-19 accounted for 5.23% of deaths in Canada (2.42% in Alberta), and 3.06% of global deaths. Each day in non-pandemic years over 21,000 people die from tobacco use, 3,600 from pneumonia and diarrhea in children under 5-years-old, and 4,110 from Tuberculosis. We need to consider the tragic COVID-19 numbers in context.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/canadian-experts-research-finds-lockdown-harms-are-10-times-greater-than-benefits
COVID Is A Killer
And The People Refused
Your Brain
Half right.
Your mind is the computer, not your brain.
Your mind is not your brain, it is a function, not a thing.
Your brain is a mechanical switchboard.
It does not even hold enough space to store three months of your memories.
They are stored in your mind.
You are an immortal, indestructible being who uses the function of your mind to run your body.
And the thoughts you allow residency in your mind, the decisions you make, the considerations you hold are all senior to your brain, your body and the physical universe.
So, knowing this, how best do you operate?
1. Find out what your basic purpose is in life.
2. Work out what the product is you want to create that is most closely aligned with your basic purpose.
3. Decide you are going to become world class at producing that product.
4. Start (or continue) gaining expertise and then extreme competence then world leading excellence in producing your product.
5. Along the way, ignore the self-doubts, self-invalidations, negative thoughts and any self or other originated intention counter or opposing your intention that you be world class in creating your chosen product.
If you have read and understood and can think with this and intend to apply it, then I have achieved my product – a more aware you!
Have a world class day!
Betty White Turns 99
Many love Betty White’s hilarious comedic timing so as she turns 99 years old, what else would she do for a birthday photo! This is one funny lady!