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Tag Archives: credibility

American Presidential Credibility, Integrity, Trust

04 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

credibility, Donald J. Trump, integrity, political evaluation, Trump Administration, trust

pkiss-nash-524x

Opening scene, Putin’s Kiss, 2012 documentary.

Think back a little bit.

Hicks also asked other superiors why Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, had said the attack might have been a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic video. That video was a “non-event” in Libya, Hicks said, adding that it seemed clear from the first that the assault was a terrorist attack.

“The sense I got was I needed to stop the line of questioning,” Hicks told the House panel.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2013/0509/Benghazi-whistleblower-Has-diplomat-Gregory-Hicks-suffered-for-speaking-out-video – 5/9/2013.

Related more recently by former diplomat Gregory Hicks:

When asked about security at Benghazi on Sept. 11, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly asserted her lack of responsibility. Initially, she said that she never read any of the reporting on security conditions or any of the requests for additional security, claiming that “she delegated security to the professionals.” More recently, she stated that “[I]t was not my ball to carry.” But the law says otherwise. Sound familiar?

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/09/11/what-benghazi-attack-taught-me-about-hillary-clinton.html – 9/11/2016.

The Benghazi attack and Hillary Clinton’s explanations — it was a video that did it, but no it wasn’t; security was left to the experts, she reportedly said, but the buck had been by law made to stop at her own desk . . . and she delegated downward and away from herself — became strong talking points for conservatives.

Now there comes a full suite of talking points for liberals questioning President Donald J. Trump’s (” . . . you grab ’em by the pussy”) character and the weight of complex business and political relationships involving “Moscow”, the metonym here for the “Russian State” as headed by Vladimir Putin.

Posted by mtvnations February 13, 2017.

Putin’s Kiss is available for viewing via Amazon by purchase or by subscription to Amazon Prime.

BackChannels assumes, or presumes, that readers wish not to live in President (Forever) Putin’s “Nashti” proto-fascist state (for further reference, enjoy in the World Affairs Journal  Malik Kalyan’s “Mysterious Circumstances Surrounding Russian Murders, Deaths” (March 3, 2017).

Well then . . . .

Are you making the allegation that President Obama conducted electronic surveillance of Trump Tower in your capacity as President of the United States based on intelligence or law enforcement information available to you in that capacity?

If so—that is, if you have executive branch information validating that either a FISA wiretap or a Title III wiretap took place—have you reviewed the applications for the surveillance and have you or your lawyers concluded that they lack merit?

https://www.lawfareblog.com/ten-questions-president-trump – 3/4/2017.

In Benjamin Wittes’ piece, eight additional question follow for President Trump as regards alleged wiretapping by former President Obama.

Let’s move on with moving back in memory.

There’s the Steele report —

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/01/17/address-christopher-steeles-2016-report-involving-president-elect-donald-j-trump/ – 1/17/2017 & https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/01/14/trump-vs-steele-an-emerging-credibility-gap/ – 1/14/2017

Add to the above, the continuing FBI investigation of Trump-associated relationships with “Moscow” (3/4/2017).

Add: The Flynn resignation.

Add: The Sessions recusal.

Worst of all: Rachel Maddow’s connecting the dots between a Russian mogul and a Trump real estate sale, which would not be so bad were Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross not at the center of (the art of) the deal (Feb. 27, 2017).

Trust me?

When an obscure blogger asks that question, it’s time to roll out the ROTFLMAO!

However, please do note this blog’s — this blogger’s — providing ample reference to many (most) of the most reliable sources in journalism and the think-tanks.

When an American President asks / demands trust, that’s something else.

Posted by The Guardian, March 3, 2017.

David Remnick’s most powerful bona fide: the Pulitzer Prize winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993).

Posted by CNN, February 28, 2017.

The complete quotation having to do with absolute power and corruption: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

Published February 8, 2017 in The Chicago Tribune (by Steve Chapman):

Asked about Melissa McCarthy’s portrayal of him on “Saturday Night Live,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer had some advice for the actress: “Dial it back.” May I suggest the president adopt that phrase as his administration motto?

So far, Donald Trump has made it a practice to obliterate every known limit and pump up every grievance. Harvard law professor and former Reagan administration official Charles Fried, marveling at the president’s Twitter volleys at federal judges, said, “There are no lines for him. There is no notion of, this is inappropriate, this is indecent, this is unpresidential.”

Perhaps the word order in this post’s title needs to be changed from the alphabetical “credibility, integrity, trust” to what comes first and last:

Integrity –> Credibility –> Trust

Although this piece would seem to end with Trump, it may be thought to go back some decades to Carter and Reagan (remember “Iran-Contra”?), to Mr. Clinton (how would you define what is and what is not sex) and forward to Obama and Clinton and the New Guy, but it’s that last with whose grandiose posturing and promises and tweets the nation awakes or falls to sleep.

–33–

Be Careful of the Truth – Crucifixion in Yemen Appears True

31 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Yemen

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

advocacy journalism, credibility, crucifixion, globalization, integrity, journalism, mind, online, propaganda, reporting, war on terror, Yemen

On August 22, 2012, I picked up a story making the rounds on Facebook having to do with reporting the emergence of crucifixion in Egypt, and I looked into it (“Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated”).

A downloaded copy of the photograph accompanying the claim yielded no IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) data, and continued web searching led me to what I considered a reliable debunking.

However, with credit extended to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), not only the picture but a video clip of the same appeared in relation to a spy caught having betrayed an Islamist group in Yemen.

I saw it first here on the Blazing Cat Fur blog, n.d.

And found a listing for something at least like it here:

#3552 – Man Crucified by Al-Qaeda in Yemen – Viewer Discretion Advised
The Internet – August 27, 2012 – 01:14

A subscription is required to view it — same or different, but same category — on the MEMRI site, and I’m looking into that.

The flip with dates (August 22, first round; August 27, posted by MEMRI; by August 30, well along in the anti-Jihad industry) I take as indicative of how information continues to crawl off the street and up to the web from the world’s most remote locales.

In the meantime, the Blogosphere seems to have picked it up and gotten its facts straight — “Sheik Yer Mami” (Winds of Jihad) notes a Jihad source on YouTube as a  primary location (see “Crucifixion in Yemen,” August 30, 2012 for the video plus that detail).

I suspect most believe the “War on Terror” involves neutralizing a number of violent moral entrepreneurs and their networks, but to my mind that’s a small part of a much, much larger story having to do with the development, installation, and continuing support of certain critical and laudable values and virtues worldwide, starting with the definition of “good conscience” (it’s not mapped the same for  everywhere, one reason I’ve launched this blog)) and then the possession by persons and groups of credibility and integrity within themselves and in relation to other persons across a world rapidly integrating its communicating and information resources and content.

War may be called deception; taqiyya may be advised: evil, however, begins with such easily digested lies and the lies to come from having swallowed both.

In war, deception may be a tactic, but wars are about other things — e.g., the possession of resources; the displacement, modification, or termination of cultures and their customs and languages — and “taqiyya”, ever loosely accessed (one well may lie to save life — for the western mind, there’s not much need to put a label on that), seems only to serve to make liars out of people who would otherwise be forthright.

When an overzealous, special interest press chooses to copy a photograph appearing in one context or application in an event alleged to have taken place elsewhere, it corrupts, dishonors, and sabotages itself.

Yesterday in Eritrea; yesterday in Somalia; yesterday in Waziristan; yesterday in Gaza: aggressive spoilers, parties to war, parties to cultural imperialism or annihilation (both) in the name of one cause or another, could, would, and did, with impunity, fabricate stories a very few or none could check.  Their common intention (never mind ends): power through the manipulation of perception in line with  mercenary agendas.

For the more remote regions of our planet, that thing called “yesterday” is closing, swept away by camera phones, tablets with recorders, and the World Wide Web.

It may go shaking its fists.

It may go slowly.

However difficult it may be to see it; however short our lives in comparison to such processes — and this across a frontier unique in recorded history, i.e., a frontier about mind globally — the past that has been past for some time will recede.

“I C U”.

Remember that?

Do.

Be Careful of the Truth — Crucified Christians in Egypt — Not Corroborated

22 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

conscience, credibility, epistemology, integrity, journalism, knowing, libel, rumor, slander, truth

I’ve pulled directly from my Facebook wall on this.  It’s too long a rant for my “A Little Wisdom” section, which may one day make a fine chapbook, but for any coming aboard the good blogship Backchannels, it’s a fair reflection of how I think:

—–

Be careful of the truth — whatever it may be — and be even more cautious with insinuation and rumor.http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/22/jonathan-kay-how-egypts-crucifixion-hoax-became-a-classic-internet-urban-legend/ Those who mislead to lead always lose their followers. It may take a while; the damage done by sewing animus and confusion may be immeasurable; but, God willing, and often proven so, those arrows called “libel” and “slander” have a way of turning around and returning direct to the hearts of their owners.

Within the complexity of what I call the ‘Islamic Small Wars” and in the interface with many traditions, there are two words that may determine how things go: they are “credibility” and “integrity” — and they are ideal. They refer not only to what people may tell others and what others may accept or choose to accept even well aware of their existence as lies, but they are all things said within hearing of God, or, if the reader should not believe, that good sense of better nature one might call “conscience”.

—–

My experience with the habits of the special interest press has not been reassuring.  Horrific political accommodations, limited press access to hot spots, remoteness itself seem to encourage lying, whatever the writer (and publication) can get away with until someone plods through the muck to check it out.

There may be one problem with our heads on this topic: can a way out story — a good conspiracy theory, say, or simply a tree that fell in the forest with one “listener” reporting — be definitively scotched?

Welcome to the land of things left unsaid (so many things, eh?) and things not shown (there were not many people around or no one had a cell phone or no one wanted to take the picture).

Uh huh.

Be wary of tarrying too long long in the Land of Unconfirmed — and impossible to disprove — Possibilities.

  • Compassion
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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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