Key Answers

Consortium News is the single most trustworthy organization of Journalists in the West if not the entire world.  It is not surprising therefore that they are constantly smeared as "disinformation" by many likely intelligence operated media "watchdogs" in the West.

Once again they've been smeared, this time by the new kid on the watchdog set, Newsguard who smears the entire website based on a few comments regarding the war in Ukraine.

Consortium News responded with some of the best answers ever written on these topics.

On the US Backed Coup in Kiev.

On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine.

An Answer from Ray McGovern.

A compendium of some of the best articles on Ukraine.

Additional comment from Joe Lauria.

Another very respectable journalist covering the War in Ukraine is MoonOfAlabama, based in Germany.  His latest coverage debunks the current iteration of "Russia is Disintegrating Fast" which I have recently been hearing from US dupes and dupers.

Earlier, MoA debunked the widespread claims that Russia had threatened to use nuclear weapons.  Actually, it was Zelensky who called for the use of nuclear weapons.

Don't Worry about Lead in Chocolate

 It will be a good think when and if chocolate producers comply with California's MADL regarding Lead, I think, so long as this doesn't introduce other harmful substances.

But the same could well be asked of fruits and vegetables, which are generally except if lead comes from "natural sources" such as the water or ground.  It has been reported that many of these would exceed the MADL otherwise.

Chocolate is not so exempt because it appears the lead arises not from the beans when they are picked, but afterwards from dust.

According to my calculation, one gallon of water in Los Angeles California has the same amount of lead as 14 bars of Hershey's Special Dark, the bar having the highest reported lead by Consumer Reports (2.65x MADL per ounce) in 1.5oz "Standard" (small traditional) size.  Meanwhile, LA water is fully in compliance with federal standards, having less than half of the lead that federal law permits .

For San Antonio, where I live, water has only 1/3 as much lead as LA, so one gallon of water here only has as much lead as 6 Standard bars of Hershey's Special Dark.

I remember when there was a long eco-socialist drive (that persists a bit) against bottled water, with the message that tap water is fine.  Maybe.  I myself use Reverse Osmosis water, which I concede comes at some environmental and social cost.  But it wasn't much for lead as much as Chlorine and Chlorine byproducts.  But they also reduce lead, so a good idea in that regards also.

With the lead I'm saving from RO, I could eat a very unhealthy amount of chocolate and still not get that much.

BTW, 1.5 oz is probably about all you should eat in a whole day, or you'll have trouble not gaining weight as in Slick's Law (1 oz chocolate yields 1 pound weight gain).  I can actually eat about 2 oz chocolate per day without gaining weight (and I'm fairly sedentary, except for my 40 min daily exercise, and I'm working on being less sedentary too).  But if I eat 3 oz of chocolate, Slick's Law immediately kicks in, and I gain 1 pound of weight, and 2 pounds weight for 4 oz, etc.

The Real Twitter Files

IMO the most important revelations from the Twitter files, which are surely the tip of the iceberg, is how the Social Media giant was used by the national security state, as revealed in Lee Fang's article in The Intercept.

In my view, this kind of thing was what it (and Facebook) was all about in the first place.   Facebook for sure was a CIA invention, "spun off" to one if it's developers to appear independent.  Social Media is he ultimate surveillance nirvana, with powerful levers for narrative management as well, though it seems especially (as now configured) designed to enable the destruction of social cohesion (ie polarization).

Nevertheless, Twitter has remained less (though not entirely not) hostile to communists, anti hegemonists, and so on than most media, and so remains valuable at this moment.  There are clear examples of good people STILL being banned (Scott Ritter) and one is fairly certain some kinds of comments are not well promoted.  But I can read a lot of people who won't be found elsewhere.

It neither was perfect, nor has it been destroyed yet.  It is not the way things should be done, but won't be easy to replace--and certainly communists are not now in a good position to do so.

Chickenfeed

The term Chickenfeed was introduced by former spy Jean Le Carre in his novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to refer to the bits of true information included in a cache of misinformation in order to make the misinformation seem real.  This true information is presumably of far less consequence compared to the desired misinformation (which might not be believed anyway).

When some "journalist" or blogger delivers apparently true information combined with obvious crap, and if this is deliberate, then apparently the true information is the Chickenfeed which is intended to make the crap more believable.

This seems to apply to a whole host of websites which combine information about the war in Ukraine with Anti-vax misinformation.

By this analysis, the Anti-vax misinformation is the product being sold.  The Chickenfeed is the info about the war in Ukraine, which often looks to be at least partly true if not more.

So why are so many bloggers enamored of Anti-vax misinformation, which often falls apart quickly if you have the least understanding of things like Bayes Theorem.

A lot of this may be that the bloggers are simply believing and reporting things that come to them from their preferred sources.  The tying of war info and vaccine misinformation could be occurring "upstream" say in Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies.  They might have specific goals, such as creating more chaos or upending certain western politicians.  (I don't know that Russia does this, but it's certain that America does it in a big way (and not just through disinformation--though that is one of the most used methods) and it's at least plausible that Russia and China would try their hand at this also.)

Both China and Russia have their own vaccines and vaccination programs and are not Anti-vax governments as such.  Putin has claimed that Russia does not mandate that people take vaccines.  However that is misleading, as individual Russian cities and regions do that.

While western medicine is not crap free, vaccines are by far the least crappy part of western medicine because the essence of it is quite simple (Ancient Greeks had the idea first), subjected to massive pre-use controlled testing, and then further tested in usage by millions or billions of people.

OTOH, it's not possible to test most medical procedures quite as rigorously because it's impossible to do "controlled" experiments with "blind" testing.

Generally, the people who have been opposed to vaccine use going back 100 years are those who have fake cures to sell instead.

Humility

Lack of humility might be the primary error of the nonsense known as Effective Altruism.

The first thing we must all understand is that we don't understand very much.

The important thing for the future is not intelligence, which we don't understand, but as now conceived is something like a combination of better memory and faster symbolic reasoning.

Those "needs" if they even are needs are already handled nicely by computers.

The important thing is wisdom, and that's something humans barely understand at all (and even less act on).

I have always believed that Tao te Ching is one of the best human written primers on Wisdom.

It is not wisdom itself but a pretty good reflection of it.

It's also ambiguous and mysterious.  Wisdom is probably like that.

Wisdom is not like some know-it-all nerds.

Is Zionism compatible with Unitarian-Universalism?

Many recent internal "critics" of "dogmatism" in Unitarian-Universalism point to "wokism" and "critical race theory" as being part of their angst, sounding strangely very much like US far right.

For example, David Cycleback, himself both a Jew (and Zionist) and Unitarian.

https://davidcycleback.com/2022/07/05/intolerance-and-illiberalism-in-unitarian-universalism/

One of the alternatives to the "dogmatists" in UU, Cycleback suggests well known Zionist Bari Weiss and "cranky liberal democrat" John McWhorter.  Wikipedia says this about McWhorter:

McWhorter wrote that black attitudes, rather than white racism, were what held African Americans back in the United States. According to McWhorter, "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues", and "it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as 'understandable' the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it".[36]

But in this article, Cycleback makes it clear that at least part of his objection to "dogmatism" in Unitarian-Universalism has to do with its making Zionists feel uncomfortable:

"Jews, including within Reform and Progressive Judaism and within UU, have a diversity of views, and some Jews agree with the UUA dogma. I am not suggesting otherwise. Though a small minority, there are Jews who are anti-Zionist. I have a Jewish professor friend who supports critical race theory, and we enjoy debating these issues with each other. The issue is that with the diversity of views and the majority of Jews disagreeing with UUA-style dogma and intolerance, a UUA that expects adherence to one ideology or political stance, or that says that “only Jews who agree with our dogma are truly welcome and listened to” makes UU inhospitable to many Jews.

Unitarian Universalism need not suit Zionists.  Zionism is the racist ideology of an apartheid state which erased the rights of its indigenous.  It need not be subject to the kind of "debate" Cycleback seeks.  It is obviously contrary to Unitarian Universalist principles, which are very friendly to Jewish Anti-Zionists--generally the kind of Jews found in Unitarian Universalism, as one would expect.