LEARNINGS.SUBSTACK.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1989: "Knowledge is constantly changing, must ever be challenged and extended." ~~ Hazar Imam, 2003: "The true test [of education] is the ability of students and graduates to engage with what they do not know and to work out a solution."] ARTICLE: In 2019, the WSJ asked senior economists for their 12 month interest rate predictions. And boy, did they turn out to be wrong. All predicted rising rates but rates fell. Although experts are often wrong, we treat their knowledge, when it's outside our fields, as sacrosanct. This is called Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: we can spot flaws in an "expert's" report related to our fields but, when it comes to another field, we treat those "experts" as gurus. Institutions do the same, large ones more so than small ones. Large institutions always an "expert" to which individuals will outsource their thinking. However, it is just as important to try and figure things out for yourself. And if an expert's prediction doesn't make sense to you, ...

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RT.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: While we normally do not post on political matters, we are posting on the situation in Ukraine because it is an invaluable case study about Western media.] ARTICLE: Putin was right, Stoltenberg was wrong: NATO "brazenly deceived" Russia about expansion. A newly discovered British document confirms NATO pledged not to expand eastward towards Russia, proving Moscow right, a top German weekly discovers. The document are the minutes of a March 6, 1991 meeting between political directors of the foreign ministries of the US, UK, France, and Germany. "We had made it clear during the 2+4 negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe [sic]," said West German diplomat Juergen Hrobog. "We could not therefore offer Poland and others membership in NATO." NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and Czechia in March 1999, just before launching an air war against Yugoslavia without the permission of the UN Security Council. This put NATO directly on the Russian border for the first time ever. The next round of expansion, in 2004, included Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, placing NATO's eastern frontier just ...

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MAAJIDNAWAZ.SUBSTACK.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: While we normally do not post on political matters, we are posting on the situation in Ukraine because it is an invaluable case study about Western media.] ARTICLE: NATO promised Russia it would not expand Eastwards, however this BBC map depicts NATO's eastward expansion since 1997. It explains why Russian felt threatened by the 2014, Western backed, bloody Maidan uprising that led to a Ukraine regime change and Ukraine's touted and potential NATO membership. This was a red line for Russia. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, America feared Soviet nuclear missiles placed 103 miles from the US border. We have now returned to similar tensions, but in reverse. Then there's the eight year war in Donbas, which you would be forgiven for not knowing about due to a media blackout. Perhaps they were ashamed that we directly funded and armed the Azov who were, after all, documented by the UN as having committing war-crimes and atrocities. With this background, and context, it is now possible to understand Russia's interests in Ukraine, and how to ...

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MIDDLEEASTEYE.NET -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Hazar Imam, 1996: "For centuries, the press has cast itself as the champion of understanding and enlightenment. And yet, even as the press has become more international, it has often left a trail of misunderstanding in its wake." ~~ Hazar Imam: 2015: "Is that message clear? You listen to people you don't like!"] ARTICLE: The double standards are glaring and everywhere. Suddenly it's sexy to make improvised explosives. Western journalists' support for Ukraine's civilian "resistance" must be maddening to Palestinians in tiny Gaza, confined to a cage by a military occupier for decades. Russia's intervention in Ukraine has gotten much more coverage, in just 24 hours, than the US-Saudi war on Yemen in 7 years despite 377,000 dead. In the midst of this rampant, often unhinged western war propaganda, especially from the BBC, the British state broadcaster, Europe has banned Russia's state broadcaster, RT. Obviously RT's editorial line is generally sympathetic to Moscow's positions, just as the BBC's is generally sympathetic to Britain's positions. But the problem for western audiences is not exposure to Russian state propaganda, it is constant exposure to relentless western state propaganda. We need voices from Russia to understand what Putin thinks and wants, not what the BBC's "chief international correspondents" think he wants. And most of all we need ...

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