A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 12: The Elephants in the Room

Blind spots in science, scholarship, and the media

I recently wrote about the Homo sapiens bias among scientists and scholars, as they absolve their species of various crimes against Earth and each other, with their Anything But Homo Sapiens (“ABHS”) hypotheses. I recently finished what may be the best single volume on prehistoric humanity that I have seen. But the author took it too easy on humans regarding the megafauna extinctions, with his chapter on it titled, “Humanity in the dock.” He gave far too much credit to the “defense,” and I am happy to render the guilty verdict.

Maybe somebody has done it, but I have yet to see anybody involved with the issue, as far as I can recall, deal with the elephant family extinction in the Americas, especially by comparing it to how the rest of the world’s elephants fared at the same time. The elephant family was the most successful mammal ever before the rise of humans, and they thrived everywhere in the Americas that they could get to for over 16 million years, to suddenly all go extinct soon after humans arrived. Everywhere else in the world, at least for the survivors of the human onslaught, they did OK at the same time that they went extinct in the Americas. How much more obvious can it get? But I have had to suffer through papers and books that argued that humans had little or nothing to do with the megafauna extinctions, and not one of them dealt with that little anomaly. Even those who argue for the human factor have never comprehensively dealt with the elephant family extinction in the Americas that I ever saw, which should be a “case closed” moment. The elephant was literally in the room, and nearly everybody ignored it, from both sides of the argument.

Even in Paul Martin’s last book, and Martin was the modern dean of the overkill hypothesis, he ranked the ground-sloth extinction over the elephant extinction in the Americas as the most dramatic extinction. Martin spent a few paragraphs on the elephant extinction in the Americas, but he did not emphasize that it was a 100% extinction in the Americas, while the elephants in Africa and Asia did fine. There is not a more dramatic contrast than that, but nobody picked up that ball that I ever saw, and ABHS-hypothesis promoters have studiously ignored the issue. It is ludicrous to argue that climate change completely wiped out the elephants in the Americas while it spared those in Africa and Asia. This is more than a conflict between the tunnel-vision of specialists and the pattern-recognition of generalists, but it is about the human ego and conflicts of interest, as those scientists defend their in-group: humanity.

At the risk of overusing the metaphor, in my studies, elephants in the room have been studiously ignored by scientists, scholars, and pundits on many subjects. I began this short course on comprehensive thinking with the media, and the Propaganda Model in particular. Noam Chomsky wrote that the Propaganda Model would not be discussable in the media, as it threatens the media’s very legitimacy, so the media has avidly ignored the Propaganda Model and it stands unrebutted to this day, nearly 40 years after Ed Herman first proposed it. Herman and Chomsky wrote that the idea that the USA committed a crime, even a genocide, in Indochina is unthinkable in the American media. Elephants rampage through the room, and they are completely ignored.

Vaccine promoters rarely mention the fact that there has never been credible safety testing of any vaccine given to American children, and on the rare occasion that they do, their excuses are idiotic. That deniers or minimizers of Global Warming dismiss the significance of this trend is stupefying. The role of carbon dioxide in Earth’s climate is pretty easy to understand. The year before Chomsky had his debilitating stroke, he remarked that the mainstream media universally described the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “unprovoked,” which really meant that it was provoked, as the media constantly turns reality upside down and we risk nuclear war once again.

Many elephants like those wander the rooms, but the biggest elephant in the room is free energy, which is a forbidden topic in nearly every venue on Earth, even though elites know all about it and free-energy technology is older than I am. Near his life’s end, Brian O’Leary was beside himself at how forbidden the topic was, especially among “progressives.” It is the single biggest issue on Earth, and there has never been a significant discussion of it that ever reached beyond the small and insular free-energy community, much less a comprehensive one. The free-energy field has long been stuck in arrested development. My work is all about beginning that conversation so that elephant will finally get the attention that it deserves.