Transparency

Good morning! This week, I have been thinking about transparency -- some ongoing issues, and some new issues. Issues smaller than the pandemic in general, where lack of transparency was a BIG contributing factor to the inanity of the responses to the crisis.

There are still a few places in America where transparency is cherished, though. Transparency about events, history, government, etc.

O Canada

You do not know a tyranny until it is on top of you; until it has you in a trap. The tyrant is not present until he is omnipresent.

G.K. Chesterton

Galactic levels of projection:

Covers a lot of territory, including doxxing not only by the government of Canada, but also by the American press.

[Incidentally, Dutch has the priceless verb "broodroven" -- "bread-robbing" -- for depriving people of income by destroying their business or getting them fired. This type of "bread-robbing by doxxing" is the main reason why I have been using a pen name on the net for everything not directly related to my day job, and have been at pains to firewall between those two net identities.]

Weird that where authorities are not transparent, ordinary citizens have to mask their identities to be transparent about their thoughts, isn't it?

Example: Forty Dollars. Big story.

Police were not very transparent about the elderly disabled woman they trampled with a horse. She may have died. Awaiting confirmation.

The previous head of the Ottowa police who was canned because he would not give the order may be looking a lot better today in the eyes of citizens.

When Fact Checkers do not check facts

Ace did a great piece on Facebook's idiot fact checkers trying to "fact check" the British Medical Journal recently.

Matt Taibbi's excellent Substack site has a good article up, exposing the fact -- the proven, admitted fact -- that FaceBook's "fact" checkers don't check facts.

They check narratives.

They suppressed -- limited, throttled, blocked users from sharing -- a perfectly factual, accurate, and true story by an investigative journalist with a long history of factual accuracy in exposees corporate and industry shadiness and bad practices.

He published this in the British Medical Journal -- a prestigious journal. No fly-by-night clickbait site.

I think Taibbi's piece is important enough that you might want to read the whole thing this weekend. This issue is not going away any time soon. Re-read Ace's post, too. I missed it the first time, somehow.
He later did an update in the sidebar:

Update: Jimmy Dore says that the editor for FaceBook's "fact" checker, "Lead Stories," the one who claimed the British Medical Journal, a prestigious medical journal since 1840, was a "news blog," and then claimed it was "missing context" and gave it a "hoax alert," was "trying to get in [his] pants" when Dore was trying to find out why he'd rated one of his true statements as "false"

So apparently "fact" checking isn't just a way to propagandize for for the Government-Media Complex, it's also a good way to hit on dudes.

This guy gets "fact-checked" a lot, too. He reports factual information, but people worry that the wrong sorts might use the information to bolster their own positions. He draws a comparison between the Facebook "fact check" of the BMJ and Orwell's '1984'.

He was mightily amused that the Facebook "fact checkers" called the BMJ a "news blog". The piece which was "fact checked" had been peer reviewed, by the way.

Hope for Schools?

There was a story in the Daily Signal about Arizona proposing communist-style community schools this week. How transparent do you think they would be?

Meanwhile, our friend Motionview has a great event report for contrast:

This is how we win - eventually. In a deep red section of a blue county in a deep blue state, 100 of our home school kids from three different co-ops attend a lecture by Rose Schindler, a 92-year old Concentration Camp survivor. Rose insisted on no masks (our co-op has never masked our kids), spoke for an hour, and took questions for another half hour. The young scholars are taking a class on World War 2, and we wanted them to hear first-hand, with no gatekeepers or filters, about the horrors of totalitarianism. A key component of the class is recognizing incremental fascism. Getting more and more difficult to keep the kids from going Wolverine.

Rose's book is Two Who Survived

What a great thing for parents to do for their kids. "No gatekeepers or filters".

News briefs

J.J. Sefton linked an interview with Rush Limbaugh's widow yesterday. It included a message from Rush:

Well, it's never time to panic, folks. It is never, ever going to be time to give up on our country. It'll never be time to give up on the United States. It'll never be time to give up on yourself.

Sorta goes along with Motionview's story above, I think.

Yesterday, we learned that the Berlin Candy Bomber has died at 101 years of age. An inspiring figure.

In 1948, when he was a young U.S. Air Force pilot ferrying humanitarian aid in the Berlin airlift, Gail Halvorsen encountered a group of German children standing by the runway at Tempelhof Airport.

As the kids peppered him with questions, he reached in his pocket and found two sticks of gum, which he broke into pieces and passed around the crowd. But it wasn't nearly enough. Looking at the faces of all the kids who had been left out, he had a brainstorm. Tomorrow when he flew in his load of cargo, he promised the children, he would drop small handkerchief parachutes filled with candy and gum on his approach.

"How will we know it's you?" they asked.

"I'll wiggle my wings," said Halvorsen.

Halvorsen leaves behind a legacy of giving and generosity that goes far beyond the 21 tons of candy he and his fellow pilots collectively dropped to the children of Berlin in 1948 and 1949. Spurred by that event, he continued to participate in humanitarian causes throughout his life, including candy and toy drops across America and countries around the world. He took part in relief efforts in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, Japan, Guam, Iraq and the Micronesian islands.

He steadfastly attributed his lifetime of service to "those two sticks of gum."

There's more to his story. He kept his first candy drops secret, not knowing if they would be approved by the military.

Music

Quarantine Boogie

Hope you have something nice planned for the weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

posted by K.T. at 11:12 AM

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