Morning Report: 2023-02-21

 OHIO:  EXPLOSION AND FIRE AT MANUFACTURING PLANT.

Fox:  explotion at metal manufacturing plant in Oakwood.  As of the time of the report, at least one person has died and 13 have been hospitalized, one in critical condition.

PROJECT VERITAS:  STATEMENT FROM JAMES O'KEEFE.

James O'Keefe posted a 45-minute video detailing the events of the past three weeks and his removal by the PV Board of Directors, following the Pfizer expose.

AFRICA:  ISLAMIST EXTREMISM IN SAHEL VS. CHAD.

Helga Dickow via AllAfrica on Chad:  'The country fulfils all the conditions associated with Islamist terrorism. But, so far, the threat reaches Chad from the neighbouring countries and not from the inside. So then, what holds Chadian society together?'

Morning Report: 2023-02-20

 UK:  GREAT LITERATURE = RIGHT-WING EXTREMISM.

Reclaim the Net:  Prevent, the UK's counter-terrorism program, flagged works of classic literature such as 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare' and George Orwell's '1984' as possible signs of right-wing extremism in the making.  'A report by Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) said that far-right extremists promoted “reading lists” online. It referenced an image of a list of “important texts” that was being shared in the far-right corners of the internet.  Other works of fiction that were flagged include The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, George Orwell’s 1984, and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, The Daily Mail reported.'

 

 

Notes on the individual and community.

 
(1) Man comes into the world with needs and wants, and must function in a world of other people with needs and wants.  We learn self-discipline and empathy, first with our past and future selves by way of experience and foresight; and then we extend and extrapolate this process to others, and in the process we learn negotiation, social skills, and empathy.  (See Peterson.)

(2) We can best help those people whose needs we know best, which is to say the people closest to us.  This is the deep meaning of "charity begins at home" and it is the rational basis for the idea of loyalty.  Your duty to those closest to you is greater, not because they are more precious in G-d's sight than the stranger, but because it is they whom you know best how to help, and it is to them that you will be held accountable for your failings.

(3) The negotiation of economic and social exchanges is a distributed process, conducted iteratively by the many parties involved.  (See Sowell.)  From this process emerge the relationships and networks that form society.  It is not a top-down process.

(4) There is an exact analogy between the economic market (the exchange of goods, services, currency, and credit) and the social market (wherein are exchanged intangibles such as love, friendship, honor, trust, and loyalty).  In our daily interactions with others, we constantly negotiate the boundaries of such things as greetings, courtesies, modes of dress, physical contact, compliments and insults, and so on.  This, too, is not, and cannot be, a top-down process.

(5) In the social world, trust (with its complementary trait, loyalty) is the analog of credit in the economic sphere:  it is built over time, as a function of an established beneficial relationship, and it makes possible things that would not be possible without it.  Specifically, trust, like credit, facilitates planning for the future.

(6) Most of what 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.  Finding our way in the world of people is the hardest and most important mental work we do in life.  Whether we are born into a happy family or a broken home, a stable society or one teetering on the brink of collapse, our path to security and happiness lies in building and keeping the bonds that tie us to our families, tribes, bands, communities, and nations.

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.