FILLED FULL OF LEAD: Fundamental learnings emerge!

SATURDAY, MARCH 31, 2018

Credibility, cash money and threats: Was Stephanie Clifford—TV's "Stormy Daniels"—physically threatened in 2011? Was she physically threatened, by a thug, on a parking lot out in Vegas?

So she alleged, last Sunday night, during a special guest appearance inside Anderson's Playpen. So Stephanie Clifford alleged—unless you work as an upper-end journalist, in which case she revealed that she'd been so threatened.

Was Stephanie Clifford physically threatened? All across the upper-end corporate press corps, "journalists" stampeded off to say or suggest that she had been.

Their principal sachem was the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin. One night after Clifford's star turn, Rubin told Lawrence this:

LAWRENCE (3/26/18): Jennifer, I want to get your reaction to what you saw on 60 Minutes last night, and are you in the 62 percent who believe Stormy Daniels perhaps? And where do you think we are in this story now?

RUBIN: Yeah, I'm definitely in the 62 percent!

Listen, I admire her as a woman who made her life in film, but I don't think she's that good an actress. I think it's very hard to come across as she did, with the inflection, with the body language.

You know when someone is telling you something that's true, and I think that was evident to most everyone who was watching, with the exception of the real Kool-Aid drinkers of Donald Trump.

You know when someone is telling the truth! All over our upper-end news orgs, the children said and suggested that they really believe this.

This brought "the eternal note of sadness in," if we might borrow from Trump.

Warning! When a nation's upper-end "journalists" reason in the manner described, the nation which finds them entertaining may have tumbled all the way down to a state of idiocracy. After consulting with an array of anthropologists, we recommend this take-away from the performances our "journalists" have staged throughout the past week:

Our highly imperfect human brain simply may not be equipped to deal with the challenges of the current era.

This era started long before Trump; he's simply its latest effect. At any rate, we offer these fundamental learnings in the wake of the latest stampede by the upper-end corporate-paid press:

Again and again, we fallible humans really can't tell if someone is telling the truth.

Our journalists have proved this point again and again over the past thirty years. Their group assessments have been hopelessly wrong about major public figures and obscure story-tellers alike. In one especially embarrassing example, they were hopelessly wrong in their Instant Group Judgment concerning the obvious moral greatness of their darling sex accuser, Kathleen Willey.

Despite that embarrassing failure, they were eager to jump to the same conclusion when Clifford appeared in the Playpen. There's really no way to protect ourselves against the judgments of people like these.

Sometimes people invent false stories, sometimes in search of cash.

Again and again in the past thirty years, people have come forward with stories about love affairs, f**king and threats. In some cases, these stories seem to have been invented in the pursuit of cash.

Willey was trying to sell her story for $300,000. Her false accusations about one threat almost got somebody killed.

(Later, Ken Starr's successor said she had lied to investigators so much that they considered charging her with perjury. On first encounter, a wide range of upper-end pundits had sworn she was telling the truth.)

Gennifer Flowers sold her story, in various ways, for more than $500,000. There's almost no chance that her overall story was true or even made sense.

Clifford kept trying to sell her story—and finally did, for $130,000. Her current story only works if you believe the part about The Threat.

Sometimes, people invent bogus stories for cash. Sadly, our journalists seem completely unable to process this obvious fact.

Let's restate our basic learnings:

Sometimes, people invent false stories in the pursuit of big cash. Our corporate journalists, with their tiny small brains, seem to be completely unable to understand this fact.

When a pleasing claim comes along, they stampede off to assert that the claim is true. This is especially true if the claim involves smokin' hot sex, which they find insuperably dull and don't care about at all.

In these embarrassing cases, they plainly don't know if the claim is true. In Rubinesque fashion, they rarely show any signs of understanding this fact.

Did exposure to lead produce that statement by Rubin? Does such exposure explain why Lawrence treated her claim as if it was plausible, perhaps even true?

Or could it be that our human brain, even absent exposure to lead, wasn't built to handle the challenges of this modern era? This organ developed long ago, as we crawled from the swamp. Is it simply ill-equipped to handle the demands of a post-factual mass society?

We don't know to answer those questions. We do know this:

The world of Rubin and Lawrence is, in effect, a full-blown idiocracy. In our view, we've all been living in such a lapsed state since 1987.

Also this:

If we might borrow from Professor Kuhn, it's time to adopt this new paradigm about our human functioning. Our analyses will make more sense if we simply adopt, as a basic idea, the notion that our journalists are now, functionally, a pre- or post-human species.

Rubin told Lawrence that she can just tell. According to major anthropologists, the pair may even believe this!

Also this, and just to be clear: Was Stephanie Clifford physically threatened?

Like you, we don't know.

In line with this obvious fact, the anthropologists have suggested that we post one more key learning:

Given the way their flawed brain works, humans are strongly disinclined to acknowledge that they don't know.

They're strongly inclined to "finish the story." They start inventing pleasing facts—facts they can't possibly know.

They especially do this on corporate cable, top anthropologists suggest.