There’s fake news that’s done on purpose, and then there’s fake news that just happens because people make mistakes.
This weekend, the world almost went to war because of a cock-up by a couple of nooze agencies ( http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-14/chinese-media-almost-sets-world-war-3-erroneous-north-korea-headline ).
North Korea was having its annual “Day of the Sun” parade, honoring the depraved homicidal maniacs who run the place: this after repeatedly declaring they were going to test a nuclear weapon, breaking an international treaty, and threatening to bomb America’s allies and military bases. So that made a lot of people nervous.
Well, they haven’t set off the nuke yet. What they did was to trot out their new improved long-range missile for the parade.
First China’s Xinhua news agency reported–oh, boy!–“North Korea Fires Projectile.” Shoulda been North Korea displays projectile. America’s Bloomberg news agency picked up the Chicoms’ fumble and ran with it, full speed to the wrong goal line. And it seems there was a bit of a military scramble started until someone sorted out the error before anyone could start shooting.
Remember, in Jaws, Roy Scheider sees the giant monster shark and tells Robert Shaw, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”? And Shaw doesn’t listen to him, does he–and his boat gets wrecked and sunk and he gets eaten by the shark.
We need a bigger boat than the one designed and built by what passes for human wisdom.
God is the only one who has such a boat. Reminds me of a boat He once lent to Noah and his family…
I have long maintained that one of the factors leading to the Great Depression was radio. Stock prices, and other market/economic information was suddenly far more accessible than it had been before radio and all sorts of people decided that they were knowledgable enough to play the markets. There was a huge bubble, followed by a massive collapse.
Information has power, but so does misinformation and false information. With the Internet as a source, we can learn all sorts of things very quickly and it is quite possible for false information to spread like wildfire. With a wildcard player, such as Kim Jong-un in play, it’s more important than ever to verify everything. With people like that, my policy is to believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.
Fortunately, someone in the military had the sense to verify before they attacked. If they had relied upon emotion alone, they could have triggered something truly horrible. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were all sorts of things that could have gone wrong, had the people involved not been exceptionally prudent. (I’m speaking of what happened during the crisis itself, and not praising the lack of prudence which may have caused the crisis in the first place.)
The point here is simple, people have to be exceptionally careful in all things. We must be truthful and choose our words to be accurate in conveying meaning, as opposed to choosing words for the maximum emotional effect. When translating between languages the need for caution only increases. Translation is rocky ground, to say the least and when military matters hang in the balance, it is almost impossible to be too cautious.
All of the above having been stated, it all harkens back to the fallen state of mankind. The true cause of the problems we face is rooted in sin. Had the peoples of the earth dispersed as instructed after the Flood, we may well have continued with one set of words and not had the obstacle of multiple languages. Were people everywhere devoted to their Creator above all other considerations, the strife we see around us would not exist. I’m just thankful that I didn’t wake up to news about a conflagration of massive proportion.