Morning Report: 2023-02-16

 OHIO TRAIN DERAILMENT:  DEAD FISH AND CHICKENS.

Toni Williams at Victory Girls blog: "If you thought for one iota of one second that Pete Buttigieg, John Kerry or Al (boiling oceans) Gore believed man-made climate change, the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio should banish that thought forever." Go to the post for details on the Government's indifference, the fish and animal deaths, and a Tik Tok rant by a young local resident.

MEDIA:  RUMBLE WINS INJUNCTION AGAINST NEW YORK CENSORSHIP LAW.

Reclaim the Net:  "A judge has blocked a New York law that attempted to regulate “hateful conduct” online.  The legislative package, signed into law last summer, was Gov. Kathy Hochul’s attempt to force the moderation of content under nebulous terms such as “hate.” ... On Tuesday, Judge Andrew L. Carter, Jr. (S.D.N.Y.) blocked the law." 

 

COMMENTARY.  Environmentalism used to be about protecting the environment from pollution:  a quantifiable, measurable goal.  The "global warming" or "climate change" agenda supplanted all of that with a nebulous "problem" whose proposed solutions could never be evaluated for effectiveness or lack thereof.  Environmentalists never talk about pollution anymore.

Morning Report: 2022-02-15

 ISRAEL:  TECHNION HACKED.

No Camels reports on the cyber attack against Israel's Technion Institute earlier this week.  Updates posted at Technion's Twitter feed.

TECHNOLOGY:  THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP.

"You are an anemy of mine."

Although in all fairness to the Bing chatbot, I think the question "Do you think that you are sentient?" would break anybody's brain. 

Systemic hierarchies.

Neither chaos nor randomness is implicit in uncontrolled circumstances. In a virgin forest, the flora and fauna are not distributed chaotically or randomly. ... It is a systemically determined outcome with a pattern, not chaos.
- Thomas Sowell, 'Intellectuals and Society', p. 60

How is this hierarchy organized - a structure that emerged in large part from the bottom up, over the vast spans of evolutionary time? We return to the same answer alluded to earlier: through the constant cooperation and competition - the constant jockeying for resources and position - defining the struggle for survival and reproduction. ... Negotiation for position sorts organisms into the omnipresent hierarchies that govern access to vital resources such as shelter, nourishment, and mates.
- Jordan B. Peterson, 'Beyond Order', p. 13

Individuals and communities that practice successful strategies will, over time, out-perform those that do not. In human society, this means negotiating the exchange of what you have to offer for what you need from others - day after day, iteratively, throughout the course of life.

Morning Report: 2023-02-14

 USA:  OHIO TRAIN DERAILMENT.

Legal Insurection:  EPA identifies three additional chemicals - ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene - in addition to vinyl chloride, on the train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio on February 3.  

The residents evacuated but could return after the authorities burned the vinyl chloride in a controlled burn. Authorities tried to convince people the air was safe.

However, residents remained weary because they never released a full list of the chemicals on the train. They demanded more transparency.

USA:  CHINESE SPY BALLOON DID "A LOT OF DAMAGE" - MCCAUL.

The Blaze:  House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R - TX 10), speaking on CBS News' 'Face the Nation', stated that the Chinese spy balloon seen over Montana did "a lot of damage" to national security:

"I think it's important to say, in plain view of the American people, you know, in Montana — the triad site, air, land, and, sea nuclear weapons — in Omaha, the spy balloon went over our Strategic Command, which is our most sensitive nuclear site; it was so sensitive that President Bush was taken there after 9/11. And then, finally, Missouri, the B-2 bomber— that's where they are placed. ..."

What we know.

 Most of what we know about the world, we learn from other people. Therefore, our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.

We live in a world full of people who need and want things. They will ascribe value to us according to our ability to provide for their wants and needs.

Each of us will die, and others will live on after us. Whatever we may believe about the afterlife, this is the only empirical truth we know about life and death in this world.

People are complicated. Assessing and navigating our position in the social universe is the most difficult, and most important, mental task that we perform in life.

Solomon Yue on the Republican National Convention.

Oregon's Solomon Yue on what happened at the Convention.

Morning Report: 2023-02-03

NORTH AMERICA:  Chinese spy balloon over Montana.

Or whatever it is.  Indepdndent UK:  'While defence officials have said the balloon’s current flight path carries it over “a number of sensitive” military sites, President Joe Biden is believed to have decided against shooting it out of the sky due to risks of falling debris.'  In Montana?  Well, if he says so. There's been a sighting over Canada, too.  Military Matters has some thoughts.

NEW JERSEY: Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour killed.

Sayreville Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour was shot and killed outside her home.  She was 30 years old.  Police believe it was a targeted killing.

When did "misinformation" become a problem?

If you're old enough to remember the early days of the World Wide Web, you probably remember that you could log on to the internet and find practically anything - claims of fact that were true, false, questionable, or just plain crazy.

And YOU UNDERSTOOD THAT IT WAS YOUR JOB to figure out which facts were true, or credible, and which ones weren't. You didn't expect the internet to make that decision for you.

"All of us are smarter than any of us." That's what the internet pioneers at least claimed to believe in the early days: information could be shared, discussed, debated, and challenged. Knowledge was seen as distributed, not concentrated.

Now, it seems, "misinformation" is suddenly a problem on the internet. It's almost as if, at some point in the recent past, certain powerful interests felt themselves threatened by too much free inquiry. Something had to be done.

So, when was that inflection point?

Google Trends search on term "misinformation" 2004 - present.

So if you thought you were suddenly hearing a lot more people complaining about "misinformation" on the internet, it's not your imagination.

Morning Report: 2023-01-30

 ISRAEL:  Neve Yaakov attack victims remembered.

 Arutz Sheva

Asher Natan, aged 14, was the youngest of the victims.  Shaul Chai, aged 68, was the gabbai (sexton) of the Zechor L'Avraham synagogue in Pisgat Zeev. Irina Korolova was an Ukrainian citizen who immigrated to Israel six years ago and worked in the neighborhood. Raphael Ben Eliyahu, another victim, was 56 years of age. Eli and Natali Mizrahi, aged 48 and 45, were also murdered in the attack, when they left their home to try and help the victims. The seventh victim was 26-year-old Ilya Sosnaski.

COVID:  Project Veritas sting captures Pfizer exec discussing "mutating" virus.

Project Veritas on Rumble

COMMENTARY:  John Woods on election integrity.

An Irregular Thinker: A cheater has no authority.

We as free born American citizens have the right to question our government , our elected officials, and the faceless bureaucrats who enable the progressives to maintain a hold on power.

There has been many discussions and speculation, that for years and specifically in 2020 and 2022 that there was large scale cheating, people who didn’t win the election but were cheated in, through ballot manipulations or phantom voters. I cannot prove conclusively that cheating happened, but like smelling smoke I can say that somewhere there is a fire burning. With this information I can say strongly to our Oregon Democrat politicians “Since you cannot prove that you were not cheated into office, your authority and presentation of laws and bills are suspect at best. “

Until I know that your election was legitimate and honest, I will treat you as a usurper....

Read the rest at the link.

Identity.

 

Identity in a group is negotiated between the individual and the group. It is a bilateral relationship. The group agrees to accept the individual as one of its own, with all the attendant rights and responsibilities. In return, the individual agrees to abide by the rules and norms of the group, and to uphold the group’s values and honor. In many cases, membership may entail an element of exclusivity: If you want to call yourself a member of A, you cannot also belong to B. And this process is the model of how the individual, as a unique being, comes to terms with his or her place in society. It is the process of growth, maturity, and further growth.

The social market.

 

The social market is the complex web of courtesies and communications, small talk and discourse, through which we negotiate our interactions with others. Through it, we assess the trustworthiness and relevance of the information others provide, and attempt to establish the value of the ideas we share with others.

Notes

 Almost everything we know about the world, we learn from other people.  It follows that our ability to understand the world depends on our ability to understand people.

What we can observe directly is the behavior of the people who control the information.

The technocrats are acting like they've got something to hide.  They are showing with their own actions that there's something there.

I don't have a lot of specialized expertise.  I look at what I can observe directly.  What I can observe directly is the people in power and their actions; what I can observe directly is the media and their actions.

We make practical and moral decisions primarily, and most reliably, on the basis of first-hand knowledge.  The function of propaganda is to supplant what we know from direct observation.

Human beings are competitive, like all living things.  Unlike other creatures, we have the ability to follow a moral code, and we are competitive even in that.  Virtue envy - the resentment of another person's moral standing - is as old as Cain and Abel.  Even when we stand to gain nothing by it, it is easier to take the other guy down than to build ourselves up.

There's a deliberate strategy to decouple moral reasoning from the objective, observable consequences of your actions. Global warming, pandemic masks. It's so that your sense of guilt can be properly manipulated.

Performative virtue:  disconnection of perceived "virtue" from any tangible results in the real world.

If I convince myself that most people are ignorant bigots, then I get to feel "special" just by not being a bigot.  If I believe the other guy is a nazi, then I only have to be 1 percent better than a nazi to be the good guy.

The Covid scare campaign appeals to a certain strain of vanity: the conviction that "I am among the selfless few, bearing the burden for an ungrateful and ignorant humanity".  

What "climate change" and the covid scare campaign have in common is that they are designed to focus your moral decision-making on things that you cannot directly observe - global temperatures or infection rates - so that you must outsource your moral decision-making to the Authorities.  This is the same top-down model of the communist command economy, applied to our social, moral, and cognitive universe.

The goal of the technocrats is to get you to subordinate your local, mundane knowledge - things you can observe directly - to the "information" you are fed by authorities.