zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — see also post on left, center, right news maps ]
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I ran across the AllSides site recently. Their aim seems laudable:

Unlike regular news services, AllSides exposes bias and provides multiple angles on the same story so you can quickly get the full picture, not just one slant.

At the moment, their focus is on Obama and the wiretap:

WHITE HOUSE
Obama Denies Wiretap

From the Center
Trump wants congressional probe of claims on Obama, won’t comment further
President Trump called Sunday for a congressional investigation of his claims that predecessor Barack Obama had him wiretapped…
USA Today Bias: Center

From the Right
The Obama Camp’s Disingenuous Denials on FISA Surveillance of Trump
President Trump’s early Saturday morning tweeting has exploded to the forefront an uncovered scandal I’ve been talking about since…
Guest Writer – Right Bias: Lean Right

From the Left
Obama Refutes Allegation That He Wiretapped Trump Tower During Campaign
U.S. President Donald Trump accused predecessor Barack Obama on Saturday of wiretapping him during the late stages of the 2016…
Huffington Post Bias: Left

They also feature a host of topics you can explore, such as the environment — and there you can find not only relevant news, but also:

Think Tanks from the LEFT

Think Tanks from the CENTER

Think Tanks from the RIGHT

Those pages in turn will take you to:

The Environmental Defense Fund

The Council on Environmental Quality

Brookings Institution

World Wildlife Fund

The Cato Institute

The Heritage Foundation

Are Zenpundit readers already familiar with this site? Does it strike you as fair and balanced? Do you know of other sites that serve the same or a related purpose? Any other comments?

[ by Charles Cameron — see also post on left, center, right news links ]
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To complement a post in this series which provided links to left, center and right news sources, here are two maps to help you sort right from center from left, a response to one of them from InfoWars, and a blank map you can fill in with your own sense of what goes where — or with noughts and crosses if you prefer, or for that matter, moves in a HipBone Game on a weird Venn-diagram influenced board…

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The first map comes from Vanessa Otero:

InfoWars didn’t like its positioning as “garbage” on Otero’s chart, and responded in Alternate Reality: Viral Propaganda Chart Demonizes Independent Media — subtitled Chart exemplifies dying dinosaur media’s extreme liberal bias:

Otero also offers a blank format for do it yourself mapping:

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Pew is, at least theoretically, non-partisan, although they too presumably have an Overton window. The below may, accordingly, seem to you more accurate than Otero’s chart above — but please note, this one dates from 2014:

What do you think?

[ by Charles Cameron — once again, one thing reminds me of another ]
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OTOH, in reality:

Nearly 100,000 people spending their Saturday night crossing the Atlantic.

? https://t.co/N6HvztbMgU pic.twitter.com/kpP56lOMro

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) March 5, 2017

OTOH, in simulation:

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The simple excellence of rulesets in agent-based modeling is wonderfully demonstrated by the way the eye can “recognize” the movements on a flock of birds or a school of fish in Craig Reynolds‘ boids — rulesets notably simpler than the explanations for flocking behavior previously suggested by biologists.

Metacognitive question: what’s the cognitive means by which we humans can “see” that the boid simulation is a sufficiently accurate representation of birds flocking and fishes schooling to account for them? — and ditto for birds flocking and fishes schooling, how do we “see” them as naturally equivalent? — and ditto for those birds flocking and fishes schooling and our earlier biological accounts of their behaviors? —

With a hypothesis, we can test by finding predictable or disconfirmative instances beyond those on which the hypothesis is suggested.. but when the similarity is visually perceived?

[ by Charles Cameron — in which Gartenstein-Ross reminds me of Albrecht Dürer ]
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Daveed speaks:

New at @ForeignAffairs: "The Coming Islamic Culture War."

IMO the most consequential piece I've written in years.https://t.co/k2IqX2YI7X

— Gartenstein-Ross (@DaveedGR) March 4, 2017

Daveed is worth reading and heeding, especially when he says he’s written something of particular consequence — so read his Foreign Affairs piece.

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My topic is triggered by a single sentence in Daveed’s piece, and is orthogonal to his. Daveed writes:

These spaces included both literal ungoverned territory and discursive spaces

In the overall flow of Daveed’s piece that’s a simple introductory remark, an observation of fact. From my point of view, though, there’s more to it than that — it’s a disjunction & conjunction of the two realms of geography and cognition, matter and mind, or “outer and inner space” if you will. And that’s something always worth noting.

In fact, Daveed’s comment reminds me of Albrecht Dürer and his illustrations of Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon, from The Apocalypse:

Here, the supernatural sits comfortably above (Latin: super) the natural.

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The physical-metaphysical (body-mind; outer-inner; objective-subjective) disjunction & conjunction is recognizable in Descartes, and takes contemporary form as the so-called hard problem in consciousness. It’s significant that the “war in heaven” of Durer’s vision no longer fills the skies in our contemporary images of war, though heaven and hell are no less with us than before..

And so I note that, en passant, Daveed has alluded to what is perhaps the great schism of our time, that between visionary and factual truths.

Kathleen Raine, poet — and mentor of my youthful self:

Fact is not the truth of myth; myth is the truth of fact.

Witness her distress as we abandon truth of myth shining “above” truth of fact, for truth of fact alone:

Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to molecular hexagons and carbon-chains,

John of Patmos, the alchemists, Durer, Blake, Jung, Raine, have the richer vision.

[ by Charles Cameron — Benjamin Wittes twice, also a pointer to Clint Watts ]
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Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic at the Lawfare blog have an above-my-unpaid-grade examination of the Presidential oath of office — and what happens when, in the case of a given President, it falls into widespread disrepute: What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? Just the fact that this question is being raised is remarkable. For my purposes, though, it’s the mention of leaks about leaking — a serpent bites tail concept, and hence a signal of potential significance — that I want to capture in passing:

All this culminated rather comically in a recent State Department memo by acting legal advisor Richard Visek condemning leaks and advocating that department employees instead make use of State’s internal dissent channel—a memo which itself promptly leaked to the press. Similarly, when press secretary Sean Spicer demanded to examine the phones of White House staffers to check for leaking and ordered staffers not to speak to the press about the meeting, Politico quickly got hold of the story.

I’d been meaning to find a suitable leak about leaking serpent for a while now, and Wittes’ article affords me this opportunity.

Once again, the self-reflexive form is, as Doug Hofstadter showed us in Gödel, Escher, Bach, a signal of likely special interest. In this regard it resembles such other forms as chiasmus (mirroring, eg “By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth”).

O happy day, here’s a chiasmus from Aeschylus, entirely apt to Wittes’ post:

It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man the oath.

Wittes has a follow-up post, Ten Questions for President Trump, today. Also of note, Clint Watts‘ tweet-streak today beginning here:

1- this may be the single dumbest thing a sitting President has done https://t.co/aFYVW8f1kX

— Clint Watts (@selectedwisdom) March 4, 2017