Only two words really matter with information — empiricism and integrity. Where we dismiss the former, people will entertain anything; where the latter goes missing, people will tell others anything — and they’ll do it for greed and lust expressed as money and power.
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We know the characteristics of good information.
There is the reporter’s standard, “clear, accurate, and complete”.
The empiricist may want to know what is cogent, valid, and reliable — and in what precise measure against chance (probability).
Most of the time we want to know “how things work”, and we want answers we may rely on for making decisions, but in difficult times — or just with troubled machinery — we may want to know as well why things don’t work.
Agitation, disinformation, and propaganda fail always the two-part test: is it true? Is it honest?
That articulated attitude and belief provided the impetus for this response.
From the Awesome Conversation
From Nixon’s day forward, China has been an American trading partner, its chief source of cheap labor (since when have we complained about the prices of goods “Made in China”?), a major contributor — as well as thief — associated with our college- and university-level science programs, a major purchases of our agricultural and other products, and a major lender responding to OUR national lifestyle and its debts. Perhaps unwittingly but more likely knowingly, Beijing has become a capital for capitalism.
Our war fighting capability has and will continue to trim China’s “exuberance” in the South China Sea but to responds to the breadth of China’s efforts to subject the world to its abuses and subvert it to its worldviews requires a broader spectrum of response than the penchant of some to launch missiles.
I’m sure I’m not the only foreign affairs observer who has heard through Facebook the drumming for war with China. The modern truth: we are every day at war with China across the broadest spectrum of competition imaginable, from banking to superficial ideological arguments; in fact, the realpolitik comes down always to banking, business, global competition for influence and trade, and appropriate western support for broad enfranchisement in political power and the promotion of human rights.
Beijing, along with Moscow and Tehran — and briefly across the term of the Trump Administration in Washington — has chosen an updated expression of civilizational narcissism and centralized feudal power, albeit vested in the Chinese Communist Party and a powerful head of state — as standing behind its brand in the world and has acted accordingly and, well, disrespectfully in its handling of its clients around the world. As word gets around and states rise to the defense of their own leadership and cultural and political influences, one may expect China’s ambitious political methods to find resistance in negotiated banking, business, cultural, and trade agreements and policies.
Recommended web searches: “China’s Billionaires”; “China, Human Rights”; China, Debt Trap Diplomacy”; “China, Dominance, South China Sea”; “China, Biological Warfare Convention”; “China, Covid-19, Origins”.
China’s business and political elites are certain to see themselves in the mirror created by the World Wide Web, and they themselves — as well as the world and their greatest business and state clients — will see how they respond to information accurately conveying and detailing their own image.
Where is one to start taking apart the chaos brought to America by Russian Active Measures, President Trump, the Strident White Right (say it three times fast) — the United States this day has reaped with others less noble, less honorably motivated, have sown.
As neighbors make the neighborhood, who gets into government in relation to whom (and why) should tell Americans and the world quite a bit about what has transpired to bring America’s most patriotic souls — and most delusional as well — to violence, disorder, and this afternoon’s attempt to disrupt Congress, ignore the courts of the land, and to in fact ignore the results of possibly the most well observed and secured election in the history of the nation.
Donald’s mob knows better?
Donald’s mob know nothing!
Try to remember that the United States of America has some deeply experiences, malicious, and sophisticated enemies, Putin’s Moscow foremost with its general “full court press” — broad spectrum hybrid warfare — against EU/NATO’s and all other evidence of western liberalism and authentic democracy.
So there’s Donald’s mob on the steps of the Capitol and in the building shouting “USA! USA! USA!” except what they’re doing is not “USA!”.
What DJT’s mob is doing is “banana republic”, i.e., would-be rule by the most corrupt, violent, and ruthless — and rallying and driving a disorderly mob into government buildings is how that works.
Live at Posting, 1/6/2021.
Reported: Protesters inside the Capitol; tear gas deployed; members of Congress being evacuated with masks on; condemnations all over the news . . . .
We may take some personal defense-related comfort in appropriate firearms ownership . . . and hunting now and then is a healthy good thing — good to be out on the range, beating the brush, getting into some “position” before dawn on the “opener” of deer gun season — but it’s amazing what can be done by nefarious actors with someone else’s imagination.
Excerpt from relatively conservative personal correspondence just this morning, January 6, 2021. Active Measures and massive foreign and domestic disinformation may well account for this latest in off-the-wall American spectacle made this afternoon by a deluded and deliberately lied to political base.
Thousands of President Trump’s supporters are in Washington for rallies Wednesday to falsely assert that the presidential election was stolen from him. Many in attendance see the demonstrations as a last stand for Trump on the same day that Congress votes to certify that President-elect Joe Biden won the election.
Trump — who lost the popular and electoral college vote — continues to dispute the results, without evidence, and has encouraged his supporters to attend the rallies in the nation’s capital. He took the stage about noon to roaring crowds, claiming he had won the election.
Moments ago, Harun Abu Aram of al Rakeez, located in the South Hebron Hills, was shot by #IDF forces as he attempted to prevent his property from being confiscated. Israeli soldiers had entered the area in order to confiscate a generator belonging to the victim of this violence. pic.twitter.com/gyzmr6JX9W
— Good Shepherd Collective (@Shepherds4Good) January 1, 2021
How convenient for the camera to have followed the tug-of-war over the generator and not the assault (by whom) on Harun Abu Aram.
“The claim that a Palestinian was wounded by live ammunition is known and the incident is being investigated,” the IDF said.
Channel 12 reported on Friday night that an initial investigation indicated that Abu Aram was shot unintentionally when the weapon of one of the soldiers at the scene discharged accidentally.
Screen capture at 0:31 seconds on January 3, 2021.
The generator and its owner had been separated, albeit not entirely in the IDF’s direction. Still, what would have been the point?
I’m inclined to leave the original header in place on this post even while changing its course, a reminder to myself to have the hard independent look first and shill neither Left nor Right.
While “Palestinian Resistance” picks up with its habitual protests — and those are certain to draw others toward injury — the facade covering Iranian involvement (backed by Moscow) will slip mightily as Sunni Arab states further cement their both new and strategic relationship with Israel. Those that have done that are no fans of Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re not behind the Red-Green Far Out Left either. That pack of howling hyenas has worked as hard as the Palestinian “leadership” to encourage and sustain Palestinian self-destruction via abuse and corruption, disingenuous (the fix is always in!) speech, old Soviet communist (KGB) alliance, and deep exploitation (from use as “Pallywood” actors to child tunnel diggers to human shields).
In the Middle East as well as elsewhere across the world’s conflicted regions, appearances may be deceiving. Here, however, I would be surprised if IDF investigation were to refuse IDF fault in the injuring of Harun Abu Aram. The case now seems other — at least at this desktop — than a my-side-your-side thing. Still, states and territories have their agreements and understandings for the everyday working of their respective societies, and the suspended Palestinian semi-state and its residents should know better than to build where Israel has refused permit.
If there’s another fact irrefutable on the Palestinian side, it is just exactly that.
On Facebook and on YouTube, Ibtidah (The Beginning), the presence appears to represent the modern argument for intellectual freedom and integrity in states in which politics have been bound to religion and the state and others control education in the cause of medieval intellectual enslavement.
Personal Note on the Issue of Education in Transitioning Medieval Societies
I shared this note with the editor of Ibtidah —
Broad spectrum of choice should yield toward reason in the dissemination and uptake of information, but as some societies remain medieval in relation to power and worldviews, the medieval within societies may choose to cling to what becomes with greater knowledge simply archaic information. That doesn’t help anyone and least of all fanatical adherents to reactionary political or religious dogma.
Our species boasts the possession of about 4,300 religions with atheism quite low in percentage against believers in God or gods. Having become conscious as human (see Genesis chapters two and three as depicted in the Tenach and read without presumptions), we appear to have come equipped with imagination and moral sense that reliably, far more than less, extends into metaphysics. If we hadn’t, we would handle bodies — or perhaps presence — as we do animal nuisances and trash. That we don’t speaks to greater consciousness in the way of awareness and self-awareness: within our separable cultures, we wish children to be born and ourselves married and buried in customary ways fit to sustained cultural and social precepts.
With such ways, we take cultural form.
We may even believe ourselves beautiful by doing so.
🙂
By comparison, science may be crude in its marriage with reality and practical issues, but given the want of a compassionate modern world, the accurate conveyance of scientific information becomes all the more important for the broad and broadly distributed services we may bring to ourselves globally.
Orbán’s political takeover – buttressed by a German industrial lobby that relies on cheap labour in Hungarian plants – has largely been bankrolled by cash plundered from the European Union that he rails so fervently against. A 2019 New York Times investigation found that Orbán uses billions of euros in EU subsidies as a patronage fund that enriches his allies, protects his political interests and punishes his rivals. “The ideology is a ruse. The money is where the action is,” said Lane Scheppele.
