I wrote the following blog in 2016 just before the Presidential elections that year. I am often guilty of too many political rants. I wrote the following blog and four others on the search for Truth and the relevance of facts, data, and evidence in this search. Some of the issues I describe here happened 9 years ago but as you will see, they are just as relevant and pertinent today as they were then. In fact, they are even more so. Regardless of your political persuasion, it is important to understand how Truth can be found and whether or not we are being lied to and conned. The US government has for many years developed a variety of means to obfuscate, ignore and/or stretch the Truth. If we as citizens can not see when this is happening than we shall surely be forfeit to any mistreatment that comes down from the Government. I worked for almost 20 years to teach some of these ideas to private business, non-profits, military installations and many levels of government from city to state to federal. This blog is part one of the education I think we all need to deal with what I would call “the Search for Truth.” You will need to read all five parts to get an honorary degree in Truth Seeking and Truth Finding. Following is the start of my blog written in 2016
I watched several shows the other day in which Trump supporters were interviewed. People are as curious about his supporters as they are about Trump. Given the unquestionable fact that Trump is a greedy sexist racist hate monger, why would anyone support him? The assumed knowledge is that his supporters are a bunch of ignorant losers: people who are uneducated or at best semi-literate. However, the data and demographics do not entirely support this conclusion. Many Trump supporters are intelligent educated and literate people. These are also people who believe in the United States of America and care about their country. What then persuades or convinces them that Trump is the right person for the job of POTUS? His qualifications pose a questionable proposition that would seem to fly in the face of all known facts in the entire universe. This dilemma strikes at the heart of the matter. We do not know what to believe any more. What is a fact? What is evidence? What is objective data? Where can we find facts that are truthful (not really a redundancy)?
I think about my graduate students at the college where I have taught for many years. These are students who are working on an MBA and are highly literate, highly educated and highly intelligent individuals. Many of them already hold very well paying jobs and responsible positions in successful companies. Nevertheless, the challenge that I continually face is to teach them the difference between facts, data, evidence and truth. Despite their literacy, few of these students understand the difference. This is a scary situation. If these highly educated students do not understand the difference between these concepts, how can we expect the many uneducated members of the general public to understand and comprehend the essential elements of truth finding? I say essential because facts, data and evidence are the three pillars of truth. If you do not have these, you cannot find the truth.
Several problems make the issue even more complex. In academia, we are dealing with a subset of life in which there is much less confusion over the truth since no one is deliberately trying to distort, lie or sell us anything. There may be stupidity, lack of knowledge and even ignorance by many scientists and professors but the greed motive is much less tangible. I am not saying it does not exist, but for most of my teaching career, I cannot think of anything I have ever tried to sell to my students and make a profit on. I can say with some confidence that this is also true of all the instructors whom I have ever known or worked with. The same situation does not exist outside of academia. The marketplace is a vicious jungle when it comes to searching for the truth while academia is a tame zoo in comparison.
When we enter the marketplace and even more so in the political arena, the motive to convince us of something relies much less on elucidating the truth than it does on obfuscating the truth in order to sell us something. Wells Fargo Bank wants you to open a credit account. They don’t care whether you need it or not. Volkswagen wants to sell you a car even if they have to hide the truth about pollution levels. Every politician in America wants you to vote them into office. They don’t want you to know the real truth about their competition or that they do not have all the answers to the problems facing our country.
Companies and politicians have a vested interest in hiding the truth from you. Stories like Miracle on 31st Street where Macy’s sent people to Gimbels are few and far between and exist mostly in fantasy. Similarly, stories about politicians with ethics such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” have become legendary because they depict a reality that seldom exists. Most politicians will promise you the moon to get your vote and most companies will not tell you the truth about cigarettes, drugs, food or anything else unless forced to do so by some form of government regulation or mandate. It does not matter whether it will kill you or not as long as you buy it or elect them.
Finally, we come to perhaps the biggest ruse of all. If anyone is searching for the truth, they will eventually enter into the Fourth Estate. This hallowed ground is defined as: “A societal or political force or institution whose influence is not consistently or officially recognized. Fourth Estate most commonly refers to the news media, especially print journalism or The Press.” (Wiki). Thomas Jefferson believed that the two pillars of a democratic society were an educated citizenry and a free press. Mark Twain was somewhat more skeptical about the power of the press and information to inform people when he noted that: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” The truth seeker has been taught since early childhood that in the domain of the Fourth Estate is to be found the truth. Little do they know the quagmire they have entered into or that the role of truth finding in the Fourth Estate no longer exists.
Today, the major purpose of the news (whether print or digital or video or audio) is to sell. Sell, sell, sell, sell and sell some more. Sell junk, sell drugs, sell expensive credit cards, sell stuff and more stuff. Stuff you don’t need, won’t need and will probably never need. The job of the media is to convince you that you do need stuff, that you desire stuff and that you can not possibly live without stuff.
I once thought that journalists were a group to be respected. This was based on the knowledge that they had often risked their lives and their reputations to bring us the truth. Today, journalists are little more than pimps for advertisers. They have sold their souls to the devil, descended into hell and may never come out again. The measure of a journalist is not how much information they provide to the public but how many advertisements they can sell. The changing role of journalists has made it even more difficult for people to find the truth. Nothing in the news is remotely objective or unbiased any more. Every paper, every station has their spin on things. The spin is determined by who owns and controls the media.
Take polls for example. As we go into the final days of the 2016 US presidential election, you can find polls that favor one candidate or the other candidate. If there are seventy polls, half may favor one candidate and half may favor the other candidate. There is no truth even in these so called unbiased statistical polls. Many of my friends have suggested that the news media want the race to be close because this keeps people tuned in. Much like a sports match, we would rather watch an event that had a pair of evenly matched contestants. My friends have suggested that the news seems to do its best to insure that first one candidate gets major media attention thus elevating them in the polls and then it switches to the other candidate providing them attention that elevates their poll numbers. I am not a big conspiracy theorist but this theory does seem to have some merit to it.
Regardless of whether the media intentionally want to keep the race close or not, there is no denying that the candidate who is the most obnoxious, the most outrageous and the most sensational will garner the most press. Trump has been well aware of this and has continually manipulated the media into providing him billions of dollars in free advertising. The fickle public seems to swing from one candidate to the other depending on who they see in the news. Trump has undoubtedly benefitted from his ability to keep the press absorbed with his every utterance regardless of how inane they are. He can tweet at 2AM in the morning and be assured that Fox News will carry his tweet on the 7 AM morning news.
How then can we blame the general public, educated or not, of being uninformed or misinformed when most of our society is conspiring against them finding the truth? It is a trap that I have fallen into when I have railed against the stupid, illiterate and uninformed Trump supporters. Sadly, they are not to blame for their reliance on Trump to give them the truth. The have certainly not found it in academia or the Fourth Estate. I have some solutions to this issue but I do not have the entire answer to it. I do have part of the answer. It is quite clear to me that one must understand the difference between facts, data, evidence and the role of these three elements in helping to shape the truth. In Part 2 of this blog, I will go into the subject of Facts in more depth. In the following parts, I will cover Data, Evidence and Truth.
Time for Questions:
How do you know what to believe? Who do you trust to give you unbiased information? How much do you trust the news? Are you satisfied with the quality of the information you get from journalists and the news? What do you think we need to do to improve the quality of information the American public receives?
Life is just beginning.
“There’s a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don’t have to think, you just have to get more information – gets very dangerous.” — Edward de Bono
Dec 19, 2016 @ 08:09:21
Hello, I appreciate your article and your understanding of the degradation in the media. I also appreciate that you did not totally condemn all trump voters as “deplorables”. I am a white southern male, I have a high school diploma and some trade school. I was a blue collar worker until a car accident disabled me. I am what many would consider “redneck” or “hillbilly”. However I am not racist or homophobic. I take each person as they come(I am not against gay marriage, their right overrides another’s feelings). I don’t believe I’m an idiot either. My point is many people in my “demographic” were faced with an impossible choice (notice I said trump “voter” earlier, not supporter). Frankly, the dems could have nominated a box of rocks and won, but they put up the one soul on this planet that a large portion of people would have rather kissed a rattlesnake while taking a wire brush to a wildcats’ ass than vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I believe the woman is anathema to the U.S. as a free state. We may have shot ourselves in the foot, by trying to avoid shooting the other foot. I personally would not condemn the E.C. for blocking trump, so long as the alternative is not Hillary. I didn’t like her the first time she was president. I swear by all that is holy and precious to me, I don’t care if the person is a black Asian gender reassigned female, so long as they promote a strong and FREE America, they have my vote. Freedom, people, not feelings. Thanks for whomever takes the time to read my rant that took a left turn somewhere in there. I am simply frustrated at being declared racist illiterate scum. (I’ll have you know I know how to use a book and have done so in the past) for making an impossible choice. This election is unique in that it wasn’t”vote for my candidate” but “stop the other candidate”.
P.S. the electoral college is sound. Jacking with the constitution is extremely dangerous. It sets precedent for seriously altering our freedom and way of life, and usually not for the better.
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Dec 19, 2016 @ 15:56:40
Thanks for your comment. Very well said. I hope many readers will regard your comments and reasons. I think they are quite rationale. I will say I disagree with your opinions on Hillary but we are both entitled to our logic for voting. Mine said that the Republicans waged a smear campaign on her for 8 years as they knew she would be the main choice for the Democrats. Constantly calling her a liar was part of their strategy. With that said, I voted for Obama 8 years ago and not Hillary so that gives you some idea that Hillary would not have been my first choice. However, I think we need major changes in this country and I do not see mainstream Republicans or Democrats in power bringing them about. I will support term limits and I hope Trump pursues that. Will Trump bring a Positive or Negative change, because I think change can go either way. I will hope the change he brings is positive doubtful though I may be. ON the other hand, I like many others in this country am fed up with politicians and politics as usual. I would vote them all out if I could, so maybe Trump will really drain the swamp. I hope so.
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Dec 19, 2016 @ 20:05:44
I truly thank you for your time and consideration. You are very correct in that we need changes, I believe more so in our leadership. When you have 3rd and 4th generation politicians, beurocrats and others in office or positions of power long enough to remember when Moses lobbied- they have become so disconnected from the public it’s become more plausible to reach mars than to actually reach them. Plus a rampant epidemic of craniums lodged in their respective colons. To say it will be a chore is an understatement.
On Trump. The man is not stupid. He’s made billions and managed to stay out of prison. I think (hope and pray) that possibly his posturing and tweets and such are more calculated than they appear. I have developed a tenuous idea that he may be pulling a rope-a-dope on his opposition and the fed in general (I pray not the people) to keep them off balance in general. He is a businessman, not a politician. So I hope something good comes of it. It will definitely be interesting to say the least. So I suggest we all get in, buckle up and hope we cross the finish line in one piece. Barring that, alive and active brain scans. Thanks again and truly, have a happy holidays.
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Sep 11, 2026 @ 07:10:59
Dear John and chronocide,
Look very closely at this special image:
Can you see the lies?
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
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Dec 23, 2016 @ 21:50:01
Thanks Chronocide. I am planning to enjoy the ride. Have a Very Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday and a Happy New Year. May you and your family find good health and much happiness in the coming year.
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Sep 11, 2026 @ 06:30:08
“This dilemma strikes at the heart of the matter.” – Yes! I agree. I noticed this around 2016 and I see it now too.
You have a valuable perspective with your background in education, seeing the gaps in the skills of literate, educated people.
Access to information is not the same as developing skills to think critically. And I like your point about understanding the definitions of these things- what is truth, evidence, reason, belief, etc. Precise definitions can help people understand what their minds are even doing, which could increase capacity for autonomy.
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Sep 11, 2026 @ 13:52:48
Thank you Deermoonflower, I hope that education can make some inroads any the narrowmindedness and stupidity that so often girds the human race. Perhaps I am being too idealistic, but I do not believe in giving up and like the Starfish story, I am going to keep trying to inform and perhaps even enlighten people one person at a time. John
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Sep 11, 2026 @ 13:24:00
Sir, Is there no better place than the American justice system to “search for the truth”? We are now seeing this play out in the Lindsay Clancy case. Have you been watching? Thoughts? https://markedwardjabbour.com/2026/09/10/the-lindsay-clancy-case-thoughts/
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Sep 11, 2026 @ 13:50:09
DId I say the American Justice system was an asylum for truth and facts? God forbid. If so, I will have a major editing to do. The American Justice system is at best a compromise in the search for truth. Juries and judges willing to settle for 1/2 truths based on very tenuous facts and or observations. I have followed the Clancy case and as with many criminal or other bizarre activities, I do not think there is any truth possible except the facts. She killed her kids period. Did she have a GOOD motive? I doubt Clancy could even answer that question? Should justice prevail and we hang her or should we give her a good talking to and let her go? Only God if he/she exists could answer that question IMHO. Perhaps if Solomon were alive he could make a better judgement than any jury or judge. I only think the whole thing is sad. Sad for her children. Sad for Clancy. Sad for society. Should compassion and mercy play a role here? Matthew 5:7, Jesus said, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” He taught that people who show kindness and forgiveness will receive that same grace from God
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Sep 12, 2026 @ 03:28:14
I seriously believe that the more religion is kept out of ‘justice’ and ‘politics’ the better. Yes, I know, how is that possible?! Sad!
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Sep 13, 2026 @ 03:16:00
My feelings exactly. The Founding Fathers and Mothers were right in wanting to separate the two and also not pick a “Best” religion for the country to be. I do not understand this Christian Nationalist movement which would make this country a theocracy.
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Oct 30, 2026 @ 09:14:00
John,Your article raises an important question, but I believe the problem goes deeper than distinguishing facts, data, evidence, and truth. The real challenge is understanding how these elements are produced, selected, interpreted, tested, and sometimes manipulated within systems of power.There is an important epistemological distinction here: facts do not automatically become evidence, data do not interpret themselves, and evidence does not necessarily lead to truth. Each requires context, methodology, verification, and an awareness of the assumptions through which we interpret reality. Without these safeguards, even accurate information can be arranged into a misleading narrative.I would also challenge one of the assumptions in your argument. You describe the university as a relatively protected environment for the pursuit of truth, in contrast to the commercial and political marketplace. Yet academia is not entirely insulated from institutional interests, funding pressures, professional incentives, ideological commitments, or confirmation bias. The difference may be one of institutional structure and degree of exposure, rather than the presence or absence of competing interests.The same caution applies to your criticism of the media. Commercial incentives, ownership structures, political affiliations, and the economics of attention undoubtedly influence journalism. However, treating journalism as a single compromised institution risks overlooking the essential distinctions between investigative reporting, editorial commentary, institutional propaganda, and evidence-based journalism. Criticism becomes stronger when it discriminates rather than generalizes.There is another contradiction worth examining. You rightly question the tendency to dismiss Trump voters as ignorant or unintelligent, yet some of the language used to describe political actors and their supporters risks reproducing the very intellectual shortcuts that your article asks readers to overcome. Understanding why people believe something requires examining their circumstances, interests, identities, experiences, and information environments—not simply judging the intelligence of their conclusions.For me, the most important question is not merely whether we possess facts, data, or evidence, but whether we have a reliable process for testing the relationship between them.I would propose an additional dimension: the difference between information and knowledge, and between knowledge and judgment. Information becomes knowledge through examination and interpretation; knowledge becomes sound judgment only when tested against context, competing explanations, and observable consequences.Perhaps the search for truth should therefore be understood not as a collection of three pillars, but as a continuous process:Observation → Evidence → Verification → Analysis → Interpretation → Judgment → Testing → Revision.And this process must remain open to correction. Otherwise, the search for truth can quietly become the defense of a truth we have already decided to believe.My question is this: How do we distinguish between evidence that genuinely challenges our existing beliefs and evidence that merely reinforces the conclusions we already want to reach?I believe that is where the real discipline of truth-seeking begins.With respect,Wahidullah Noorzai
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Oct 30, 2026 @ 22:12:46
Dear Wahiddullah,
You make some good points but this was Part 1 of a five part series. You might want to read all the other four parts and see if and where your critique still applies.
This is the beginning of Part 5
“If you have been following my series on searching for the Truth, you will now understand the role of Facts, Data and Evidence in Truth seeking. Unfortunately, understanding these concepts is not enough. Regardless of how many Facts or how much Data and Evidence you collect, it is no guarantee that you will find the Truth. The problem is that there are some substantial roadblocks that often blind us to the Truth. In the final part of my series on Truth Searching, I will review some of the major roadblocks that hinders or obscures our search for the Truth.”
I started this series with a look at distinquishing facts, data and evidence since these are the building blocks in a search for the truth, but as I point out in Part Five, they are never enough by themselves as you noted.
“There are four general ways that have been identified which could be called methods or strategies for seeking and accepting the Truth. Collecting Facts, Data and Evidence are generally indicative of rational thinking, but that strategy is not the only pathway to the Truth. Many people rely on one or more of these other methods.”
The four stratagems to Truth searching are:
By Authority (Someone in authority tells you what to believe)
By Experience ( Some life experience you had conditioned your thoughts)
By Rational Thinking (You have some Facts, Data or Evidence you trust)
By Tradition (Your tribe, family, culture etc., has always done it this way)
For a more detailed discussion of these four strategies, please see my blog “How Do I Know What to Believe”
Facts, Data, Evidence and the Search for Truth – Part 2 – What is a Fact?
Facts, Data, Evidence and the Search for Truth – Part 3 – What is Data?
Facts, Data, Evidence and the Search for Truth – Part 4 – What is Evidence?
Facts, Data, Evidence and the Search for Truth – Part 5 – Roadblocks to the Truth
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 02:59:13
Dear Wahidullah Noorzai,
Thank you for your exceptionally lucid, rigorous and deeply considered critique. Your commentary pierces straight to the heart of contemporary epistemological crises, moving the conversation from a foundationalist categorization of facts towards a post-foundational, systemic critique of knowledge production. You are entirely correct that facts do not speak for themselves, for they are rendered legible only through the sociopolitical architectures and interpretive paradigms that govern their collection and deployment.
Your analysis elegantly aligns with what Michel Foucault conceptualised as “regimes of truth”, insofar as the structural mechanisms through which certain statements are sanctioned as true or false, deeply intertwined with institutional power. To address the profound question that you pose at the end of your response, and to expand upon your proposed linear-recursive process of truth-seeking, we must look more closely at the intersection of social epistemology, cognitive psychology and institutional theory.
Firstly, your critique of the university as a uniquely insulated, pristine space is highly astute. To treat academia as a “tame zoo” free from market or ideological pressures overlooks the structural dynamics of academic capitalism, political economy and what Pierre Bourdieu termed the “academic field”, a space defined by the struggle for scientific authority, cultural capital and funding. The difference between academia and the political marketplace is not the absence of interest, but rather the specific rules of justification and validation that govern the space. In academia, peer review, methodological transparency and institutionalized scepticism function as countervailing mechanisms against individual bias, although they are under continuous pressure from corporatized funding and systemic confirmation biases. The pressure of having to satisfy research quotas or agendas, and the stress to fulfil corporate expectations and business interests, can create or exacerbate issues about integrity, transparency and reproducibility of scientific research, and also increase the likelihood of questionable research practices involving fraud, misconduct, misrepresentation and falsification, often in an effort to obtain some desired outcomes. One can no longer automatically assume that those who have been conscientious and ethical in applying research can remain untainted or unaffected by such practices, since retractions of scientific papers and the reasons for their retractions are not always publicized. Given that the transparency of the retraction process can be dubious, other researchers as well as the media and the public unaware of the retractions may quote or broadcast invalid research findings, or even make decisions or commitments based on invalid results.
We should be acutely aware of the worrying and worsening corporatization of the journal publishing market (as well as the tertiary education sector), not to mention that scholarly and scientific communities should take back control of the editorial process. It is high time for realising the importance of (reimagining) tertiary education, and more specifically and crucially, the (uncompromising) quality and verity of trustworthy education, even more so in the often sordid and highly problematic nature of the contemporary education system. Moreover, we need sustained critical thinking more than ever. The increasingly unruly state of public discourse and the deplorable condition of public education aside, even university education and teaching nowadays can be and are often vocationalized, shortsighted, narrowly focused and coopted by economic, commercial, corporate and political interests. The perennial problems of being underfunded, overburdened, vocationalized and instrumentalized are exacerbated when colleges and universities opt to operate even more aggressively under the model of mass education and customer satisfaction, becoming much more performance-managed, metricized, casualized and marketized under the pervasive influence of privatisation, consumerism, audit culture, managerialism and neoliberal orthodoxy. These issues are discussed in greater detail in my article entitled “Do Plants and Insects Coevolve? 🥀🐝🌺🦋“, which you can easily locate from the Home page of my website.
Secondly, your defence of journalism’s internal differentiation is an important corrective to institutional reductionism. Following Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, the mass media operates as a distinct system with its own binary codes and functions. However, conflating sensationalist infotainment with rigorous, evidence-based investigative journalism does a disservice to democratic accountability, which depends on the stability and integrity of the fourth estate. By applying a more granular critique, we can identify how the “economics of attention” structuralize media platforms whilst still recognizing that certain journalistic methodologies such as double-sourcing, legal vetting and investigative depth can maintain a strong fidelity to empirical verification.
Thirdly, you rightly locate a performative contradiction in the dismissal of political actors. When we pathologize political choices as simple “ignorance” or “stupidity”, we rely on the exact intellectual shortcuts that we claim to oppose. This reflects what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, blended with political tribalism. To understand political behaviour requires a hermeneutics of empathy and structural analysis for mapping out how cognitive horizons are shaped by specific information ecologies, socioeconomic precarity and deeply ingrained identity architectures.
This brings us to your vital concluding question: How do we distinguish between evidence that genuinely challenges our existing beliefs and evidence that merely reinforces conclusions that we already want to reach? At a systemic and psychological level, this is perhaps the ultimate discipline of truth-seeking, and it requires shifting from a passive observation of evidence to an active, adversarial epistemology. We can delineate this discipline through three core practices:
Institutionalized Falsification and Critical Rationalism: Borrowing from Karl Popper’s framework, a true discipline of truth-seeking requires that we do not look for evidence to verify our hypotheses, but rather design conditions under which our core hypotheses would actively fail. Instead of asking, “What evidence supports my view?” we must ask, “What specific, observable piece of evidence would completely falsify my worldview, and where can I go to find it?” If a belief system cannot articulate its own conditions for falsification, it has ceased to be an empirical framework and has become an ideology.
Acknowledge the Extended Mind and Information Ecologies: In an era dominated by algorithmic architecture, our cognitive processes are deeply extended into our digital environments. Algorithms are engineered to capitalize on our confirmation biases to maximize engagement. To combat this, truth-seeking cannot rely solely on individual willpower; it requires systemic hygiene. We must intentionally inject adversarial inputs into our cognitive networks, engaging with the strongest, most intellectually sophisticated versions of opposing arguments (ideological “steelmanning”) rather than the easily defeated “strawmen” presented by our preferred media silos.
The Distinction Between Bayesian Updating and Identity Protection: In Bayesian epistemology, a rational actor updates their beliefs incrementally based on the conditional probability of new data. However, cognitive scientists like Dan Kahan have demonstrated that when an issue becomes deeply tied to social identity or group membership, our processing shifts from “accuracy-driven reasoning” to “identity-protective cognition”. When confronted with challenging data, our minds do not update; instead, we deploy cognitive energy to find flaws in the methodology of the counter-evidence to protect our standing within our social tribe. Therefore, the litmus test for whether evidence genuinely challenges us is emotional: if new evidence makes us feel defensive, socially threatened or anxious, it is highly likely that the evidence is hitting a legitimate blind spot rather than merely being integrated into our existing comforts.
Your proposed recursive model (Observation → Evidence → Verification → Analysis → Interpretation → Judgment → Testing → Revision) is an excellent epistemological roadmap. To ensure that it remains open to correction, I would like to suggest adding a final loop: Reflexivity. After all, we must constantly turn our analytical tools back upon our own positions, examining the funding of our thoughts, the historical contingency of our assumptions, and the hidden power dynamics of our own perspectives.
Truth-seeking is fundamentally not an intellectual destination but an ethical stance. It is an ongoing, uncomfortable willingness to experience cognitive friction and to prioritize empirical fidelity over psychological comfort. Your commentary reminds us that this discipline is rare, demanding and absolutely essential for the survival of a rational public sphere.
I would like to conclude here by stating that the best and most dedicated amongst the likes of us are also inveterate teachers of everlasting, transcendental wisdom to save humans from themselves, their self-interests and their destructive ways. I often even have to coin new words to do so. The latest examples are my three neologisms “Misquotation Pandemic“, “Disinformation Polemic” and “Viral Falsity“, as discussed in my extensive and analytical post entitled “💬 Misquotation Pandemic and Disinformation Polemic: 🧠 Mind Pollution by Viral Falsity 🦠“. This post of mine has twelve major sections (plus a detailed annotated gallery) instantly accessible from a navigational menu, which can help you to jump to any section of the post instantly so that you can more easily resume reading at any point of the post over multiple sessions in your own time. The post can be easily located from the Home page of my blog. For your convenience, it is available at:
As discussed in the post, without proper education, the overall situation and trajectory of democracy and humanity seem to be rather bleak, and even science and politics can provide little comfort in reducing the severity and frequency of some of those outstanding issues, for there are two major Achilles’ heels: Viral Falsity and Paleolithic Emotions. In addition, my own multidisciplinary perspective proposes in the post with detailed analyses that four of the most insidious and corrosive conditions have exacerbated these issues dramatically:
(1) The prevailing anti-intellectualism
(2) The cult of anti-expertise sentiment
(3) The politicization of science
(4) The prevalent manifestation of populism
Gathering all the diverse and important strands together in the grand finale of the said post, I have attempted to sum up and reflect deeply the state of affairs with hard truths, especially in the twelfth and last section named “Denouement: Democracy, Education, Legislation & Sustainability”, which even gives a very dire warning of what humanity is heading towards if there is still no concerted, meaningful and large-scale change for the better.
Happy November to you very soon!
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 07:01:09
Thank you again SoundEagle for taking the time to make such a thoughtful and penetrating reply. I cannot disagree with much of the critique that you both have made. I did suggest thought that without reading parts 2-5 some of the critique was incomplete since I did cover some of the objections made in later parts. However, as is my nature, ten years ago, I might have been more opinionated and less objective. Nevertheless, I think I might be even more so now. I subscribe to Karl Poppers thesis that we cannot tolerate intolerance, no matter how objective we think we are being. I also sent Mr Noozai a quote by Frederic Douglas that summarizes some of my thoughts these days on tolerance.
There is nothing more dangerous to a democracy than a country of cowards that will not speak out for what they believe and fight for what they want. To quote the great Frederic Douglas:
“The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.” —- Frederic Douglas, ‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress’, West India Emancipation speech – 3 August, 1857, Canandaigua, New York, USA
John
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 10:01:20
Thank you, my dear friend, for your thoughtful words and generous appreciation. I truly value the depth of your reflections and the time you have devoted to engaging with my work.With your permission, I would like to study all the sections you have shared carefully and prepare a considered response drawing on my personal and field experiences, professional perspective, and reflective and literary approach. Some of these thoughts may go beyond what is appropriate or practical for a public comment. Therefore, I would prefer to bring them together in a Word document and share it with you privately.I believe this would allow me to engage more fully with your ideas and give each of the points the attention it deserves.Thank you again for your generosity, intellectual openness, and continued friendship.
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 11:37:59
Wahidullah, I think this is a good idea. You can share more thoughts this way together. SoundEagle has a fantastic site with lots of good articles on a wide range of subject. https://soundeagle.wordpress.com/
I like to use Word because I have often lost thoughts when a glitch in a program or a burb in my computer caused me to lose my post. With Word, I backup my ideas frequently while writing. John
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 13:48:05
Dear Wahidullah Noorzai,
You are very welcome. I am delighted and honoured to be acquainted with you. Thank you very much for contacting me and introducing yourself via the 📧 Contact 📳 page of my website. I am replying to you here rather than via email. I shall also reply to the comment that you submitted to the said page about an nour ago. Please give me an hour or two to do so.
Since you are going to pay much closer attention to my work, it would be prudent of me to let you know that if you need more help and wonderful tips on using and/or understanding a plethora of features and tools of my website, you will be pleased to know that I have prepared a detailed User Guide for maximizing and optimizing your experience of my significantly complex and multifaceted website. You are very welcome to consult the new and comprehensive User Guide to familiarize yourself with the many features and tools of my highly unusual, uniquely customized and multidisciplinary website. The User Guide is entitled “🥳🪟🎖️ How to Enjoy SoundEagle🦅 to the Utmost 🥇🏢🍹“, and is available to you at:
Once you finish consulting this User Guide, I hope that you will realize just how much more we can do and communicate with each other at my website equipped with fascinating bells and whistles for people to enjoy at their leisure to their heart’s content. Please feel free to express whatever ideas and topics however you wish, as I do not censor at all. Moreover, my two long comments directed to you that you just recently read and replied to at Dr John Persico’s blog posts look very different and subpar, for they are originally formatted properly with larger headings as well as numbered and unnumbered bullet points, all of which were stripped by WordPress Reader’s text-oriented limiting format, thus rendering my comments less user-friendly to digest their complexities. At my website, these problems do not exist, and we can express ourselves far better. You are at complete liberty to submit very long comments. You mentioned that “[s]ome of these thoughts may go beyond what is appropriate or practical for a public comment. Therefore, [you] would prefer to bring them together in a Word document and share it with [me] privately.” This is completely unnecessary because you can just choose certain post(s) on my website to submit one comment after another as you bring these thoughts together. I can then respond to your comments with bespoke replies containing advanced formatting, illustrations, animations and/or even multimedia materials, which cannot be achieved via email correspondences.
I would strongly recommend that since you are familiar with Microsoft Word, draft and edit your thoughts in Microsoft Word, and apply whatever formats to the texts, which can even such things as bullet points and one or more formatted tables. After that, go to your chosen post(s) or page(s) of my website, where you then copy the contents from Microsoft Word and paste them to the respective commenting section(s) of your chosen post(s) or page(s) to submit them as comments. Make sure that you do so right at my website in situ, not via an intermediary such as the WordPress Reader, which will strip out your refined edits and formats that you have earlier applied to your drafts in Microsoft Word. After all, there are plenty of comments at my website for you to see how various interactions and exchanges of ideas have taken place. Dr John Persico and I have had numerous and elaborate conversations there, as you will soon discover.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 13:57:48
Dear Wahidullah Noorzai,
I am resubmitting this comment again as I am not sure as to whether it has got through.
You are very welcome. I am delighted and honoured to be acquainted with you. Thank you very much for contacting me and introducing yourself via the 📧 Contact 📳 page of my website. I am replying to you here rather than via email. I shall also reply to the comment that you submitted to the said page about an hour ago. Please give me an hour or two to do so.
Since you are going to pay much closer attention to my work, it would be prudent of me to let you know that if you need more help and wonderful tips on using and/or understanding a plethora of features and tools of my website, you will be pleased to know that I have prepared a detailed User Guide for maximizing and optimizing your experience of my significantly complex and multifaceted website. You are very welcome to consult the new and comprehensive User Guide to familiarize yourself with the many features and tools of my highly unusual, uniquely customized and multidisciplinary website. The User Guide is entitled “🥳🪟🎖️ How to Enjoy SoundEagle🦅 to the Utmost 🥇🏢🍹“, which you can locate in three ways: using the search function on my website; looking for it at the Home page; or clicking on the User Guide button located near the top of the right-hand column of my website.
Once you finish consulting this User Guide, I hope that you will realize just how much more we can do and communicate with each other at my website equipped with fascinating bells and whistles for people to enjoy at their leisure to their heart’s content. Please feel free to express whatever ideas and topics however you wish, as I do not censor at all. Moreover, my two long comments directed to you that you just recently read and replied to at Dr John Persico’s blog posts look very different and subpar, for they are originally formatted properly with larger headings as well as numbered and unnumbered bullet points, all of which were stripped by WordPress Reader’s text-oriented limiting format, thus rendering my comments less user-friendly to digest their complexities. At my website, these problems do not exist, and we can express ourselves far better. You are at complete liberty to submit very long comments. You mentioned that “[s]ome of these thoughts may go beyond what is appropriate or practical for a public comment. Therefore, [you] would prefer to bring them together in a Word document and share it with [me] privately.” This is completely unnecessary because you can just choose certain post(s) on my website to submit one comment after another as you bring these thoughts together. I can then respond to your comments with bespoke replies containing advanced formatting, illustrations, animations and/or even multimedia materials, which cannot be achieved via email correspondences.
I would strongly recommend that since you are familiar with Microsoft Word, draft and edit your thoughts in Microsoft Word, and apply whatever formats to the texts, which can even such things as bullet points and one or more formatted tables. After that, go to your chosen post(s) or page(s) of my website, where you then copy the contents from Microsoft Word and paste them to the respective commenting section(s) of your chosen post(s) or page(s) to submit them as comments. Make sure that you do so right at my website in situ, not via an intermediary such as the WordPress Reader, which will strip out your refined edits and formats that you have earlier applied to your drafts in Microsoft Word. After all, there are plenty of comments at my website for you to see how various interactions and exchanges of ideas have taken place. Dr John Persico and I have had numerous and elaborate conversations there, as you will soon discover.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
LikeLiked by 2 people
Nov 01, 2026 @ 03:04:41
Dear SoundEagle,
Your generous welcome has given me a feeling that goes beyond an ordinary exchange of comments. I am genuinely pleased to have encountered someone who understands intellectual interaction not merely as the exchange of words, but as an opportunity to build connections, refine ideas, and discover new dimensions of one another’s thinking.
There is a particular beauty in the way you have arranged and developed your website. Its structure, organization, visual details, and the care given to its many sections reflect more than technical skill. They reveal a thoughtful sense of order, personal taste, and a mind that values both substance and presentation. A well-organized space can itself become an invitation to think, explore, and communicate. I appreciate the opportunity to become acquainted with such a carefully developed environment.
I would be very pleased to contribute through comments, questions, reflections, and ideas. I do not see this as simply participating in online discussions. I see it as a form of shared service: bringing our different experiences and perspectives together to help develop meaningful conversations and create writing that offers something valuable to its readers. Beauty, in my understanding, is not only found in language or appearance; it also emerges when thoughtful people help one another express deeper ideas with greater clarity, dignity, and humanity.
There is one small matter I would also like to mention concerning my poem about love, which was kindly placed on Dr. John’s blog. I remain grateful for the effort and attention he gave to presenting it. Unfortunately, during the process of transferring the poem into the blog format, some of its original rhythm and rhyme were disturbed. In Persian poetry, rhythm and rhyme are not merely decorative elements; they are part of the poem’s inner structure and emotional voice. I mention this only to explain why the published version may not fully convey the form in which I originally wrote it. I sincerely appreciate Dr. John’s kindness and the care he took.
Perhaps I should also offer a brief introduction to the wider intellectual and personal work behind my writing.
My background is rooted in Afghanistan, where I served as a senior officer in the Afghan National Police, with professional experience in public order, security operations, and the strategic realities of the field. Those years shaped the way I observe events, understand human behaviour, assess decisions, and distinguish between immediate operational effects and their wider strategic consequences.
Today, my work extends beyond military and security analysis. Through NIDA — Noorzai International Doctrine Academy — I am developing a body of thought that connects field experience with observation, analysis, principles, doctrine, strategy, practice, and reflection. My intention is not simply to interpret events from a distance, but to examine how experience can become knowledge and how knowledge can contribute to a more thoughtful understanding of the world.
Alongside this professional and strategic work, I am developing a deeply personal literary and historical project entitled Hell Was Here. It is not intended to be merely a retrospective account of the past or a conventional collection of memories. It is a form of testimony, told through the voice of someone whose life unfolded amid conflict, injustice, loss, and resistance.
I often describe my beginnings with the words: I was born between fires. The project follows a human journey from childhood towards the threshold of adulthood, examining how a person grows up in the presence of injustice, how the experience of oppression shapes one’s understanding of dignity, and how the struggle against injustice becomes part of one’s identity. It is built upon lived experience, personal observation, historical circumstances, and the human cost of events—not on invented heroism or a romanticized version of the past.
For me, writing has therefore become both an intellectual responsibility and a human act of testimony. One part of my work seeks to understand power, conflict, security, and strategy; another seeks to preserve the human voice behind those realities—the feelings, relationships, wounds, hopes, and questions that statistics and political narratives often leave unheard.
I believe these two dimensions are not separate. Strategic understanding without humanity can become incomplete, while emotional expression without reflection may lose its wider meaning. I hope to keep both alive in my work.
Thank you once again for your generous invitation and for opening your website as a space for meaningful dialogue. I would be delighted to explore its different sections, contribute wherever my thoughts may be useful, and learn from the perspectives you and other thoughtful contributors bring to the conversation.
I look forward to a dialogue in which mutual respect, intellectual curiosity, and the shared appreciation of meaningful expression allow our ideas to grow.
With warm regards and respect,
Wahidullah Noorzai
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Nov 02, 2026 @ 06:02:40
Dear Wahidullah Noorzai,
Continuing from my first expansive comment submitted to this post here regarding “Facts, Data, Evidence and the Search for Truth”, I would like to express my gratitude and appreciation for your rigorous critique on the production and interpretation of knowledge within power structures. Your commentary rightly challenges idealized views of institutions like academia and the media, and highlights the need to avoid intellectual reductionism when evaluating political behaviour. As mentioned in my said comment, your proposed recursive model for truth-seeking offers a valuable framework, which can be further strengthened through Popperian falsification and epistemic steelmanning. Maintaining structural reflexivity ensures that the search for truth remains an ongoing, critical discipline.
Regarding your previous comment, there are plenty of reasons to thank you for your exceptionally illuminating and profoundly human response. Your words remind us that intellectual pursuit achieves its highest utility when it operates not as an ivory-tower isolation mechanism, but as a dynamic space for shared service, existential reconciliation and authentic human connection. Your commentary elegantly bridges the analytical rigour of institutional strategy with the poignant vulnerability of lived testimony, thus offering a masterclass in how to cross the chasm between macro-level frameworks and the raw textures of human suffering.
1. Poetic Formalism and the Violence of Remediation
Your reflection on the alteration of your Persian poem when migrated into a standard digital format highlights a critical issue in modern communication: the systemic violence that standardized digital infrastructure inflicts upon cultural and artistic expression.
In classical Persian poetic traditions — whether rooted in the rigid mathematical symmetry of the arūz system or the intricate architectural geometry of the ghazal — rhythm (vazn) and rhyme (radīf and qāfiyah) are not merely superficial ornaments. They constitute the very ontology of the text, serving as the structural blueprint that holds meaning, emotional resonance and memory together.
When digital platforms like WordPress flatten these structures through rigid text-rendering limitations, they perform an act of cultural erasure because they treat formatting as a cosmetic afterthought rather than an essential element of the text’s meaning. This limitation forces us to ask a vital question: How can marginalized voices express their distinct historical and cultural realities when the digital mediums available to them are structurally built to strip away their internal rhythm and emotional nuance? The answer can be found in what I have to write as follows.
2. The Fusion of Horizon: Operational Reality Meets Strategic Vision
Your professional background within the Afghan National Police offers an invaluable perspective that is often missing from purely academic discussions of power and truth. In typical political and sociological discourse, a stark divide persists:
Academic Theory: Often analyzes power from a safe distance, abstracting structural violence into bloodless concepts.
Purely Operational Perspectives: Can become trapped in immediate, tactical demands, hence failing to see the broader systemic consequences of localized actions.
Your project titled NIDA (Noorzai International Doctrine Academy) actively resists this fragmentation. Your endeavour of developing a body of thought that systematically converts immediate operational feedback into comprehensive doctrine, strategy and reflective knowledge has allowed you to achieve what the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called a “fusion of horizons”, a concept-cum-paradigm that I have analysed and incorporated into my post entitled “👁️ Visualizing 🎼🎹—THE—🎹—LAST—🎹—RAG—🎹🎵🎶 with SoundEagle🦅 音鷹 and Friedrich Zettl 狐胡 🎨” published at
You demonstrate that true strategic wisdom cannot be generated in an intellectual vacuum, for it must be continuously tested against the friction of reality. In areas of conflict and complex public security, truth is not merely a collection of verified facts or datapoints. It is found in the deep, practical understanding of how those facts impact human survival, institutional stability and ethical responsibility on the ground.
3. “Born Between Fires”: The Epistemology of Testimony
Your upcoming literary and historical project, Hell Was Here, carries profound epistemological weight. By framing your narrative around the phrase “I was born between fires”, you shift the focus from a detached critique of historical events to a deeply engaged, first-person testimony.
In mainstream historical accounts, the realities of war, systemic oppression and geopolitical conflict are frequently reduced to cold metrics: casualty counts, territorial shifts and institutional timelines. These statistics often sanitize historical traumas, serving the interests of dominant power structures. In contrast, your approach challenges this clinical detachment by centring the human cost of conflict and treating lived experience as a vital, authoritative source of knowledge. As you beautifully state, “Strategic understanding without humanity can become incomplete, while emotional expression without reflection may lose its wider meaning.”
This balance strikes at the very heart of critical phenomenology. You refuse to reduce human suffering to a mere variable in a political equation, yet you also refuse to let your narrative devolve into unexamined trauma. By holding these two dimensions together, your work functions as an act of profound ethical resistance, preserving a human voice that refuses to be erased by state propaganda or historical apathy.
4. Conclusion: Truth-Seeking as a Humanistic Practice
Ultimately, your reflections remind us that the discipline of truth-seeking is not just an intellectual exercise in categorization; it is a profound ethical commitment. You challenge us to expand our analytical models — which so easily default to rigid systems of logic — to include the complex realities of human emotion, cultural memory and moral courage.
Thank you for replying with such a heartfelt, personal response. I have yet to respond to the two comments that you recently submitted to the 📧 Contact 📳 page of my website. Please bear with me as I would like to take time to give you a decent reply after I manage to expand the temporal and mental space required to wade through many other errands. I am deeply honoured by your presence in this space and look forward to our continued dialogue at my website. Whether through these digital margins or within your meticulously organized platforms, our shared commitment to clarity, dignity and a more humane understanding of the world remains steadfast with unwavering rectitude.
Yours sincerely,
SoundEagle🦅ೋღஜஇ 音鷹
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Oct 31, 2026 @ 05:19:04
Thank you, John. I appreciate your thoughtful response and your willingness to engage seriously with these questions. I have valued this exchange and look forward to continuing our conversation.
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