Weekly 108

I’m not sure what this will evolve into, but I want to try doing some kind of weekly wrap up for the remainder of the 108 days. I think it might sometimes include links to articles I’ve read or videos I’ve watched, but last week my mind was jammed up with two things.

1. Thinking about martial arts
2. Thinking about disinformation

Martial Arts

I’ve been thinking about taichi’s place in the world of martial arts a lot ever since competing in BJJ a week ago. I mean… I’ve been thinking about taichi’s place in the world of martial arts for over 20 years, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot more than usual lately. I’ve been going down rabbit holes of taichi videos on YouTube and…

There doesn’t seem to be anyone in the world who really understands how taichi fits into modern competitive martial arts. I’m just going to leave that thought there and expand on it in a separate post later this week.

Here are my two matches.

Disinformation

Two things threw me down this rabbit hole…

1. A documentary titled ”Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers” available on Netflix
2. A Joe Rogan interview

Here’s the trailer to the movie and the interview.

I had never heard of Bob Lazar before seeing the movie on Netflix. I watched a little bit of it and then decided to see what else the internet had to say about Bob Lazar. That’s when I found the Joe Rogan episode. I watched about 20 minutes of that and started to look elsewhere.

I’ve always liked conspiracy theories, but now I’m more interested in journalistically and scientifically sound conspiracy theories than mostly theoretical ones. What intrigued me about Bob Lazar wasn’t his story. It was how many people believed his story and that his story was getting promoted on Netflix and Joe Rogan. This got me thinking about disinformation and how it works.

I should probably save what I”m about to write for a more in depth article but…

Disinformation (Wikipedia) is a word with Russian roots and tied to the KGB back in the 1920s. They had a whole department dedicated to disinformation. What blew my mind was discovering that the idea that the US Government created AIDS was actually a disinformation operation led by the Russians called Operation INFEKTION (Wikipedia). The mind boggling thing for me is that this is an idea that’s still pretty firmly in the mind of a percent of the African American population.

Circling back to Bob Lazar… he seems to be some kind of agent of disinformation but… then it gets weird… because Netflix and Joe Rogan end up being distributors of disinformation but then… it gets weird… because who can you trust to be filters of information? It’s unreasonable for individuals to figure out on their own what information is good and what information is bad. It’s also a bad idea to have too much trust placed in the hands of a few distributors of information as even if they’re completely truthful, disinformation happens through omission.

I’ll leave the thinking on that there.