Headline March 04, 2018/ '' ' UMBRA-FULL DARK UNTRUTHS ' ''

'' ' UMBRA-FULL DARK UNTRUTHS ' ''

PROUD PAKISTAN should prepare for the ''worst case scenario''. The Line of Control is 'searing hell' with cross-fire and activity and loss of precious lives.

THE TRAGIC SADNESS OF HISTORY is, that even great thinkers stumble upon the obvious truths, but just walk away, with self-serving conclusions, unconcerned.

I DO NOT WISH TO DWELL on the past facts of a tragic, wretched history, of the subcontinent,  most great readers would know that history, just too well,

BUT India's highest ever, so swift a build up smacks of a.................. ''Grave Master Plan''. And with that I turn to address this great man, O''Captain Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of  Pakistan.

O''Captain : Great work and handling so far. Let nothing eclipse the sunshine of obvious and realistic thinking and of past and present facts.   
As this very great man and boxer Mohammed Ali would have summed up : ''Rope A Dope''.

''ALTERNATIVE FACTS'' : The term manages to be tedious, ridiculous and perilous at once - a real sign of the times............

For anyone who doesn't remember, Kellyanne Conway introduced it in early 2017 to defend the  White House's falsehoods about attendance numbers at Donald Trump's inauguration the week before.

There she was on ''Meet the Press,'' serenely chiding an exasperated Chuck Todd for being ''overly dramatic'' as he repeatedly tried to get her to concede that lying to the American public was bad.

Her phrasing may have been new, but Conway was taking part in what has apparently become a conservative tradition - performing a skepticism to so extreme that it makes the ancient Greek skeptics look like babies in the woods.

Recall a senior aide in the Bush administration needling a journalist for belonging to ''the reality-based community.'' A respect for facts, the aide suggested, was ultimately for suckers : ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.''

You might think this kind of postmodernism would appeal to the French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, who spent a year studying how knowledge is socially constructed. You would be wrong.

Such pretensions to reality-creating grandeur, Latour suggests, amount to little more than a vulgar, self-defeating cynicism.

In ''Down To Earth : Politics in the New Climatic Regime'', Latour argues that climate change is forcing all of us to confront truths that seem hard to reconcile but turn out to be two sides of the same thing.

1. Reality exists, whether we like it or not; and

2. Our attempts to apprehend it are contingent on our social context. Along with O'Connor's and James Owen Weatherall's ''The Misinformation Age'' :

How False Beliefs Spread,'' Latour's new book offers a way to think through the seemingly insurmountable impasse carved out out by political polarization and fake news.

Of the two volumes. ''The Misinformation Age'' takes the more methodical and earnest approach. O''Connor and Weatherall are professors of logic, and they break down the mechanics of misinformation accordingly.

They introduce their subject with the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary - a tree that reportedly grew  gourdlike fruit filled with tiny lambs.

The claim was propagated during medieval times by so many respected naturalists and scholars that it took nearly four centuries before it was satisfactorily debunked.

Those medieval scholars kept citing one another rather than verifying [or disapproving] the  Vegetable Lamb for themselves.

''Social factors are essential to understanding the spread of beliefs,'' O Connor and Weatherall write,  ''including - especially - false beliefs.'' Similar to the network of right-wing sites that nurtured  elaborate conspiracy theories about a -

A Hillary Clinton sponsored pedophilia ring in a Washington pizzeria......... [ a notion only slightly less outlandish than lambs growing on trees], the medieval scholars had created their own ecosystem for fake news.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on Fake News, Propaganda and War escalations, continues. The World Students Society thanks author and researcher Jennifer Szalai.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors, and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare for Great Global Elections and ''register'' on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and.....................  Twitter-E-!WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Time After Time '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless