Trust Elements: POSTMODERN WARFARE: Hactivists say they hacked Belarus rail system

Op-ed: Two years into Covid and we’re still not getting the message: It’s airborne! Crain’s New York Business

AND HERE WE GO:  Ukraine Pres. Zelensky And British Intelligence Reveal Russian Plan To Overturn Ukraine Govt.

POSTMODERN WARFARE: Hactivists say they hacked Belarus rail system to stop Russian military buildup.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: US puts 8,500 troops on heightened alert amid Russia tension. “The Pentagon said Monday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has put up to 8,500 troops on heightened alert, so they will be prepared to deploy if needed to reassure NATO allies in the face of ongoing Russian aggression on the border of Ukraine. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said no final decisions have been made on deployments. He said the order is about ensuring that the U.S. is ready to respond if NATO decides to deploy its response force.”

BOUGHT AND PUTIN-PAID FOR:  Who is Nord Stream’s Matthias Warnig, Putin’s friend from East Germany?“Matthias Warnig is, in various ways, an exceptional person. The 65-year-old is the oldest German friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the most active German in Russian business circles. He is a former Stasi agent who became a banker in the 1990s. Since then, he has sat on the supervisory boards of numerous German-Russian banks and companies. He is currently the CEO of Nord Stream 2, and happens to play a part in the latest YouTube video by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), in which Russian opposition activists uncover an extensive network of corruption around the construction of a palatial estate for the Russian president on the Black Sea coast.”

Meanwhile, I suspect that rather a lot of German politicians are on Putin’s payroll. Both China and Russia seem to have discovered that it’s easier and cheaper to buy off the West’s corrupt, feckless ruling class than to wage traditional war.

23 Australians on ship delivering aid to Tonga have virus AP. More on Tonga:

It is amazing that after 7 days the #Tonga #eruption shock wave continues to circle the planet (10 times!) and can still be detected in the infrared by geostationary satellites such as #GOES16 and #GOES17.

@matplotlib

@xarray_dev

@Satellite_GOES

 Miriama McDowell

Theatre, in particular, is a huge demand. Miriamam recalls one project she worked on while shooting Head High, where, after six weeks of intensive work on both projects at once, she made approximately zero dollars.

“It’s so economically not viable,” she laughs, shaking her head, “but I do it because I love it so much. In the last five years, I’ve really understood what my riches are.”

The turning point came when she was 35 and, in the spirit of following her heart, decided to go to clown school in Paris. But while visiting friends around the world and hearing their stories compared to hers, she had an epiphany.

ollowing up on my previous post on Nicholas R. Parrillo (Yale), A Critical Assessment of the Originalist Case Against Administrative Regulatory Power: New Evidence from the Federal Tax on Private Real Estate in the 1790s, 130 Yale L.J. 1288 (2021):  Ann Woolhandler (Virginia; Google Scholar), Public Rights and Taxation: A Brief Response to Professor Parrillo:

A division exists between scholars who claim that Congress made only limited delegations to executive officials in the early Republic, and those who see more extensive delegations. In A Critical Assessment of the Originalist Case Against Administrative Regulatory Power: New Evidence from the Federal Tax on Private Real Estate in the 1790s, Professor Nicholas Parrillo claims that congressional delegations under the direct tax of 1798 undercut arguments that early delegations of rulemaking either addressed unimportant issues or were limited to special categories. Nondelegation scholar Professor Ilan Wurman responded to Parrillo in the volume of the Yale Law Journal in which Parrillo’s article appeared [Nondelegation at the Founding], particularly arguing that Congress itself addressed the important issues as to the 1798 tax. 

Actor Miriama McDowell on the industry, representation & mentoring Māori talent

UK Intelligence Agency Targets China’s United Front The Diplomat

How China and Russia forged a friendship after bridging decades-old differences South China Morning Post

2022 Edelman Trust Barometer: “The world is failing to meet the unprecedented challenges of our time because it is ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust. Four interlocking forces drive this cycle, thwarting progress on climate change, global pandemic management, racism and mounting tensions between China and the U.S. Left unchecked, the following four forces, evident in the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, will undermine institutions and further destabilize society:

• Government-media distrust spiral. Two institutions people rely on for truth are doing a dangerous tango of short-term mutual advantage, with exaggeration and division to gain clicks and votes.
• Excessive reliance on business.Government failure has created an over-reliance on business to fill the void, a job that private enterprise was not designed to deliver.
• Mass-class divide. The global pandemic has widened the fissure that surfaced in the wake of the Great Recession. High-income earners have become more trusting of institutions, while lower-income earners remain wary.
• Failure of leadership. Classic societal leaders in government, the media and business have been discredited. Trust, once hierarchical, has become local and dispersed as people rely on my employer, mycolleagues, my family. Coinciding with this upheaval is a collapse of trust within democracies and a trust surge within autocracies.

The media business model has become dependent on generating partisan outrage, while the political model has become dependent on exploiting it. Whatever short-term benefits either institution derives, it is a long-term catastrophe for society. Distrust is now society’s default emotion, with nearly 60 percent inclined to distrust…”

Mashable: “Twitter can be an assault on the eyes, and not just because of its frequently distressing content. The microblogging website’s default white theme can sometimes feel harsh and blinding, particularly if you’re waking up in a cold sweat to check your notifications in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the microblogging platform offers a dark mode to help make those late night scrolling sessions a little easier — at least physically. Twitter first introduced their dark mode option in 2016, initially calling it night mode. It then went even darker in 2019 by adding a third theme: the pitch black “Lights out” mode. This means there are now three shades of Twitter for you to choose from, whether you want it to be glaring white, black, or something in between…”

1. “If I am right, neither the science of physics, nor any other science, could express all the truths; but the world could nonetheless be wholly physical” — Tim Crane (CEU) on the real lesson of Frank Jackson’s famous Mary example
2. What do you know about Nísia Floresta? — Olivia Branscum (Columbia) speaks with Nastassja Pugliese (Federal Univ. of Rio de Janeiro) about the 19th C. Brazilian philosopher, her philosophy of education and her enlightenment critique of slavery and colonialism
3. “Given that academic ethics is about ‘ethical fine tuning’ and that the academy remains disconnected from the government, the potential for ethicists to respond to the climate emergency within the limits of their job description is somewhat limited” — Doug McConnell (Oxford) on the role of moral philosophers in regard to global warming
4. “To prepare students to thrive in a world driven by science and policy, we need to incorporate philosophy in the classroom,” especially philosophy of science — so argue Nicholas Friedman (Stanford) & Stephen Esser (U. Penn) , who also provide links to lesson plans
5. Quantum approaches to mathematical puzzles — it’s “not just fun and games, but has applications for quantum communication and quantum computing”
6. “We need to devise ways of drawing more people voluntarily into the risk social contract, rather than pushing them ever further away” — Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) on fighting the pandemic
7. Philosophy, disability, and social change — videos of several philosophers from a conference on the subject last month hosted by the University of Oxford

SEP

New:

1. Philosophical Approaches to Work and Labor by Michael Cholbi.
2. Economics in Early Modern Philosophy  by Margaret Schabas.
3. Spinoza’s Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind by Karolina Hübner.
4. Cicero by Raphael Woolf.
5. Korean Philosophy by Halla Kim.

Revised: 

1. Omnipotence by Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz.
2. Josiah Royce by Kelly A. Parker and Scott Pratt.
3. John Austin by Brian Bix.
4. Semantic Conceptions of Information by Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson and Luciano Floridi.
5. Black Reparations by Bernard Boxill and J. Angelo Corlett.
6. Social and Political Thought in Chinese Philosophy by Stephen C. Angle.
7. Paul of Venice by Alessandro Conti.
8. Frederick Douglass by Ronald Sundstrom.
9. The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet by Joan Landes.