Tucker Says They're All Afraid

weltwoche  |  When Tucker Carlson departed the Fox News Channel in April, his enemies cheered. But if they thought the happy warrior had finally been defeated, their judgment was as dismal as their approval ratings. With an assist from Elon Musk, Carlson is reaching an even larger, global audience with his new show, “Tucker Carlson on Twitter (now known as ‘X’).”

The veteran newscaster has expanded his mission: to defeat the mainstream media’s suffocating bias and incuriosity not just about critical events at home but in capitals around the world.

When we reach him, Carlson has just returned from the United Arab Emirates where he met with its president, Mohamed bin Zayed. Carlson pronounces the sheikh “the most interesting, wisest leader I've ever spoken to” — a provocative assessment given that the talk show host sat across from Donald J. Trump last month. Of the Arab leader, Carlson enthuses, “I've never met a more humble leader, ever — and I believe humility is a prerequisite for wisdom.”

Carlson is far less kind about his colleagues in the press. “They're all fearful people,” the 54-year-old scoffs. Instead of holding the powerful to account, “they do exactly the opposite.”  Indeed, “they do their bidding.”

Looking ahead to the Presidential elections in 2024, he says: “They're trying to put Trump in prison for the crime of running against Joe Biden … That's what this election's about. Are we going to allow that, or aren't we? And I just don't think we can.”

 Weltwoche: Since leaving Fox and going solo with your new show, “Tucker Carlson On Twitter (now known as ‘X’),” your posts have logged tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of views. You’re taking off like Buzz Lightyear. Are you feeling the freedom? To explore more topics and ideas? To express your views?

Tucker Carlson: Well, definitely. If anything, I've expressed my views less. I haven't done many straight-to-camera scripts where I write the script and give my opinion. I've done what I've wanted to do for a long time but couldn't, which is get on an airplane and go see the rest of the world. I couldn't because I had a daily show I had to do.

I've become convinced over the past several years — particularly since the war in Ukraine began — that the world is changing much more quickly than most Americans understand. And because there's virtually no coverage of the rest of the world in American media, Americans don't have a good sense of it.

What we, in this country, refer to as the "Post-War Order” — the institutions set up in the wake of World War II to keep the world peaceful and prosperous and the United States at the top of the pyramid, and that would include the dominance of the dollar, the SWIFT system, NATO — all of that appears to me to be crumbling. That's my view of it. I've wanted to travel and see if that is, in fact, happening — and it is.

Elon Musk: George Soros Is Magneto And I Don't Care - I'll Say What I Want To Say

azerbaycan24  |   Washington thinks criticizing the financier is anti-Semitic, while the Israeli government thinks supporting him is anti-Semitic George Soros addresses the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, May 24, 2022 © AFP / Fabrice Coffrini

The US and Israeli anti-Semitism envoys have taken opposing positions on whether supporters or critics of Jewish financier George Soros is anti-Semitic. The argument kicked off when Twitter CEO Elon Musk compared Soros to a cartoon supervillain.

In a tweet on Monday, Musk said that Soros reminds him of “Magneto,” a mutant-supremacist scientist from Marvel’s ‘X-Men’ universe. When a commenter pointed out that Magneto was depicted – like Soros – as a Holocaust survivor and that both have “good intentions,” Musk doubled down.

“You assume they are good intentions,” he wrote. “They are not. He wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

Musk was quickly accused of anti-Semitism, with Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt declaring that by comparing the billionaire “to a Jewish supervillain,” Musk would “embolden extremists.”

Washington thinks criticizing the financier is anti-Semitic, while the Israeli government thinks supporting him is anti-Semitic

Is George Soros actually a real-life Magneto?

The Israeli government disagreed. “The Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model,” Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli tweeted on Thursday, adding that “criticism of Soros – who finances the most hostile organizations to the Jewish people and the state of Israel is anything but anti-Semitism, quite the opposite!”

Soros has donated more than $32 billion to liberal political causes through his Open Society Foundations NGO, and was the largest donor in last year’s midterm elections in the US, gifting $128 million to Democratic Party candidates and organizations. Soros funds a number of Palestinian activist groups that accuse the Israeli state of war crimes, and several international organizations that promote boycotts of Israeli goods and sanctions against its leaders.

In the US, the Biden administration sided with its leading donor against Chikli’s criticism.

“Irrespective of how one feels about George Soros’s politics or policies, it is entirely disingenuous to deny that many ad hominem attacks on him rely on classic antisemitic tropes and rhetoric,” US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt tweeted on Friday.

“In bygone eras, the antisemites invoked the Rothschild family to advance their conspiracies about Jews. Today they use Soros to do so,” she declared.

Neither Soros nor his Open Society Foundations have responded to Musk’s comments. Asked on Tuesday whether he was worried his controversial tweets would drive advertisers away from Twitter, Musk told CNBC News “I don’t care. I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequences are losing money, so be it.” (RT)

 

Does Scott Adams Have Your Attention Yet?

bloomberg  |  Elon Musk called the media racist after a cartoonist he regularly engages with on Twitter faced blowback for encouraging White Americans to avoid Black people.

While discussing a Rasmussen Reports poll in which almost half of Black respondents disagreed or were unsure about the statement that it’s OK to be White, Scott Adams, creator of the long-running Dilbert comic strip, said during his YouTube show last week that his best advice for White Americans “is to get the hell away from Black people.” 

Newspaper publishers, including Gannett Co.’s USA Today Network, denounced the comments and said they’ll no longer publish Adams’ cartoons, which satirize office culture.

Musk waded into the controversy, first by responding to Adams, who quote-tweeted a Washington Post columnist encouraged by the newspaper dropping Dilbert. “What exactly are they complaining about?” Musk asked in a post he later deleted.

When another account on the social network Musk owns spoke out against coverage of Adams, Musk replied: “The media is racist.”

“For a *very* long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk said in another post. “Same thing happened with elite colleges & high schools in America. Maybe they can try not being racist.”

Musk unsettled many Black users of Twitter Inc. last year by repeatedly saying past management had gone too far in moderating content on the platform, and had infringed on free speech as a result. Shortly after taking over the company, he made fun of #StayWoke t-shirts he found at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that dated back to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Tesla Inc. is facing a lawsuit by the California Civil Rights Department that accuses the company of engaging in a pattern of racial harassment and bias at its electric-vehicle factory. Tesla published a blog post responding to the allegations before the agency filed suit in February 2022.

In June, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued a cause finding against Tesla that closely parallels California’s allegations, according to the company. Tesla said last month that it was in the process of setting up a mandatory mediation with the federal agency.

Is Fuck You Money A Prerequisite For Freedom Of Speech, Freedom Of Choice, and Moral Bravery?

Trump Is A Consummate Showman - He Knocked This One Out of the Park

airforcemag |  President Donald Trump honored Tuskegee Airman Charles McGee during his State of the Union address on Feb. 4, hours after pinning stars on McGee’s shoulders in the Oval Office.

McGee, who turned 100 on Dec. 7, was honorarily promoted from colonel to brigadier general in the 2020 defense policy bill. 

The Air Force legend served three decades in uniform, launching his career in the U.S. Army Air Corps. McGee escorted bombers over Germany, Austria, and the Balkans in the P-39Q Airacobra, P-47D Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang during World War II. During the Korean War, McGee flew the F-51 on 100 interdiction missions from Japan, and he flew an additional 173 reconnaissance missions in the RF-4C during Vietnam. 

Throughout his career, McGee flew a record 409 combat missions, more than any other pilot in the three wars.  

“Incredible story. After more than 130 combat missions in World War II, he came back home to a country still struggling for civil rights and went on to serve America in Korea and Vietnam,” Trump said. He added, “Gen. McGee, our nation salutes you. Thank you, sir.” 

Trump also offered a glimpse of future generations of airmen, touting the U.S. Space Force—the nation’s newest military service—and honoring McGee’s grandson, Iain Lanphier, an eighth grader in Arizona, who “aspires to go to the Air Force Academy” and one day work for the Space Force. 

“Most people look up at space. Ian says, ‘I want to look down on the world.’”

Deep State Sore and Itchy From .45's Reckless Grabbing and Fingering...,

TheIntercept |  Jeremy Scahill: Ralph Nader, welcome to this extended episode of Intercepted.

Ralph Nader: Thank you, Jeremy.

JS: Let’s start with Gina Haspel. This campaign that the CIA is publicly waging to support her nomination, leaking or publicizing memos that seem to exonerate her of any direct role in the destruction of torture tapes. First question is just: Have you ever seen anything like the CIA social media campaign that’s being waged right now in an effort to get Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA director?

RN: No, and the reason why, one is that the CIA desperately wants someone from their own ranks, they don’t want an outsider. They’ve been battered at times by Trump and others, which is pretty unheard of for a president to do that. So they’re hunkering down, and they don’t want to lose this one.

JS: Right, but, at the same time, isn’t the CIA supposed to be prohibited from engaging in domestic propaganda? I mean, it does seem like they’re utilizing their social media platforms to campaign for someone that there’s very serious questions about her role in torture, black sites and other issues.

RN: Well, who has ever found a boundary for the CIA? I mean they’re not supposed to deal with overt armed action abroad, according to their original charter, they’re just supposed to collect intelligence, and we know where that’s gone — that’s out of the window.

The CIA does what it wants, under the cloak of secrecy and national security, does whatever it wants, and who’s going to stop it? It has so many feelers all over the country and the world, and they really want her in because they think that Trump is perfectly capable of nominating an outsider who would give them a lot of trouble. And they’ve been jolted more than usual, publicly, as an agency, and they want stability, as they define it. And it doesn’t matter what she did in Asia in terms of the Thailand episode and torture. I mean, that’s what they do. That’s what the CIA does all over the world.

JS: You know it’s interesting, as I watch Trump supporters who are railing against the deep state and saying that, you know, you have all of these powerful people within the CIA/NSA/FBI bureaucracy that are plotting against Trump, the thing that comes to my mind is that if I were a really dark character within the CIA, right now, I’d be very content with Trump being the commander-in-chief because he doesn’t seem to understand the full range of powers that the CIA has. And it seems to me like they’re able to do basically whatever they want right now without much questioning from the White House.

RN: Well that’s been true of prior presidents. They want deniability. They don’t really want to know what the NSA and CIA do. President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton — they don’t want to know that the NSA was dragnet snooping on virtually all Americans, a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the FISA Act.

And President Trump is no different in that way. What they are really upset about is: When was the last time we ever heard a president attack “the deep state”? He’s not attacking some rogue outfit in Afghanistan that’s an offshoot and maybe under contract. He’s attacking the military industrial complex’s core secrecy operations and that is freaking out people at the CIA, especially career people who have never been fingered that way from the White House. That’s why they want the stability of this present nominee.

Scott Free Never Was...,

WaPo |  President Trump apparently had an affair with a porn star while his model wife was home with their newborn son. No surprise there. Keeping the affair out of the newspapers before the 2016 election reportedly cost him $130,000, around a measly 0.004 percent of his claimed net worth of $3.1 billion — nothing to him. The fact that you might be unsettled by this news also means nothing to him. Trump is impervious to scandal and immune to social censure. He is insulated from consequence by power, money and fame in a way not imaginable to the ordinary person. He is the freest man alive.

Americans like to think we invented freedom, but we really only extended it to an absurd conclusion in the person of Trump. The ancients had their version of freedom, and they were as fiercely protective of it as we are of ours. For Plato, people are free when they are fully in control of themselves, with their self-mastery uninhibited by passions or appetites. Much the same for Aristotle, who saw freedom in rational, intelligent self-direction. On that foundational principle, they and the other worthies of the ancient world formed the idea of democracy as a system balancing equality and responsibility, for, as Aristotle wrote, “where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.” How right he was.

Plenty of history came between the ancient experiments with democracy and ours. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas, though separated by centuries, took more or less the same view: People are naturally inclined to desire goodness and truth, and whatever gets in the way of that pursuit makes us less free. In the late Middle Ages, that thread began to unravel. By the modern era, it was thoroughly frayed. 

Farcical Never Trump Panel Featuring William Kristol and Pat....,

NYTimes |  The Times editorial board has been sharply critical of the Trump presidency, on grounds of policy and personal conduct. Not all readers have been persuaded. In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close. We have also published some letters from readers who voted for Mr. Trump but are now disillusioned, and from those reacting to these letters and our decision to provide Trump voters this platform.

A Shithole Is The Opposite Of A Vacation Destination

Have you ever noticed how the Cathedral insincerely and hypocritically uses language to enforce its orthodoxies and control the free speech and actions of its political opponents?

What is the best way for this tactic to be effectively fought?

The only methods I can think of right now are words, votes, or bullets.  Are there other ways?

cbsnews | Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, refuted President Trump's tweeted denials that he used the phrase "sh*thole countries" when discussing legal protections for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and African countries.  Durbin, who was in the meeting with the president when he made the remarks, said of Mr. Trump's denial,  "It's not true. He said those hateful things, and he said them repeatedly."

Durbin attended an event in Chicago Friday and then held a press conference on the president's comments afterward. He told reporters how the issue came up:

When the question was raised about Haitians, for example, we have a group that have temporary protected status in the United States because they were the victims of crises and disasters and political upheaval. The largest group is El Salvadoran. The second is Honduran and the third is Haitian, and when I mentioned that fact to him, he said 'Haitians? Do we need more Haitians?' And then he went on and started to describe the immigration from Africa that was being protected in this bipartisan measure. That's where he used these vile and vulgar comments, calling the nations they come from "sh*tholes" -- the exact word used by the president not just once, but repeatedly.

Mr. Trump on Friday morning tweeted that he had used "tough language" but denied he had used the profane phrase.

The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made - a big setback for DACA!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2018

And he also denied he had said anything insulting about Haitians, tweeting that he "Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said "take them out." Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately, no trust!"

Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said “take them out.” Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings - unfortunately, no trust!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2018

Durbin said he tried to explain to him why it was he shouldn't use the phrase "chain migration," which refers to the process by which immigrants bring their extended family into the U.S. "When it came to the issue of 'chain migration,' I said to the president, 'Do you realize how painful that term is to so many people?'" Durbin recalled. "'African-Americans believe they migrated to America in chains and when you talk about chain migration, it hurts them personally.' He said, 'Oh, that's a good line.'"

For Those That Are Awake, The Lies Are Plain To See

theburningplatform |  The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

– Edward Bernays, “Propaganda”

Edward Bernays (1891 – 1995) was a famous pioneer in the field of public relations and is, today, often referred to as the Father of Propaganda. Perhaps Bernays became thus known because he authored the above quoted 1928 book titled with that very term. He was actually the nephew of the famed psychopathologist Sigmund Freud and was very proud of his uncle’s work. More than that, however, Bernays accepted the basic premises of Freud towards the use of emotional manipulation of the masses through advertising. It was, in fact, Bernays, who changed the term propaganda into “public relations”.

If the excerpt above from Bernays’ book “Propaganda” is true, then it would imply there are men of great power who utilize psychology in order to message and manipulate the minds of the masses. Are these the men that Thomas Jefferson, supposedly, once warned about? Indeed. They are the ones who control the issue of currency; the ones who first by inflation, then by deflation, caused the banks and corporations to grow up around the people thus depriving them of all property until the people’s children woke up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

These are the men who financially and politically manage sovereign governments as well as the handful of corporations that control 90% of the media today.  It is not hard to imagine, therefore, why it would be in the best interests of these men to mentally maneuver the masses into complacency. But how is this psychological manipulation implemented?

Through lies, of course.

Adolf Hitler’s Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, once asserted that:

 A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

In like manner, I now question if this sentence could be modified as follows:

A lie told to a few people is still a lie but a lie told to thousands, even millions, of people becomes the truth.

Yet, it is those who question the lies today that are labeled the conspiracy theorists.  What irony.

Carroll Quigley in his book “Tragedy and Hope: The History of the World in Our Time” exposed the takeover of the world’s financial system by these few, powerful men when he wrote on page 51:

In time the (the “Order”) brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other.

It appears control is the result of money equaling power as both give rise to an alternative reality which, paradoxically, is subsidized by the vanquished; by those who want to believe.  Yes, it is the masses of people who finance their own dreams via various monthly installment plans while their own eyes rely upon what they see on any number of electronic screens before them. The people pay their taxes, they borrow, they consume, they believe.

Trump Off-Script On Bankster Bondage of Puerto Rico

nakedcapitalism  |  And speaking of Goldman, notice that Trump takes an explicit swipe at the investment bank turned Beltway heavyweight. He must be chafing at have been leashed and collared by the generals and the Goldmanites.

From Reuters:

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday while on a trip to Puerto Rico to observe hurricane recovery efforts that the island’s massive debt will have to be wiped out.
“They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You’re going to say goodbye to that, I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs but whoever it is you can wave goodbye to that,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

CNBC picked up on the Reuters story quickly and highlighted the bleak fundamentals:

Even before the storm brought Puerto Rico to a near standstill, the government there already struggled with an economy in shambles and a default on billions of dollars of public debt.
Today, the U.S. territory has nearly $70 billion in debt, an unemployment rate 2.5 times the U.S. average, a 45 percent poverty rate, nearly insolvent pension systems and a chronically underfunded Medicaid insurance program for the poor.
Puerto Rico’s job base continues to shrink, taking its economy along with it. Since the recession ended, a lack of job prospects has sent many Puerto Ricans fleeing to the mainland, where the job market is much stronger.

However, it is unlikely that Goldman would suffer much, if at all, in a Puerto Rico bankruptcy. It might hold some bonds in its trading inventory, but its big exposure would come via funds it manages. On those, under the Volcker Rule, Goldman is limited to owning a small percentage of the equity investment in the fund (3% is the nominal amount, although there may be some tricks of the trade for increasing the exposure). 

But David Dayen has found one of the big owners of Puerto Rico debt, as reported in a new story at the Intercept. If you read the article in full, tracking down the who was behind the shell company used to hide the ultimate owners is very reminiscent of the sort of gumshoe work that Richard Smith does chasing international scammers.

Sonora Series 4500 Aero Trump

airminded |  The 'aeros' themselves look not much like any real airships that flew later; they are more spherical than elongated and so not streamlined. (It's tempting to read the image at the top of this post as showing an airship from the front and below, but comparing it with his other paintings in fact it's a side, or 'Flanck' in Dellschau's idiosyncratic English, view.) Then there's the 'Lifting Fluid', suppa, with its wonderful properties. There are only a few possible lifting gases, and the only ones not discovered by the 1850s are neon (which is only just viable) and (much better) helium, both of which are very rare on Earth and difficult to extract. It's conceivable that they could have been discovered earlier than we currently believe, but it would require a substantial of resources to produce enough for use in airships (as is well known, Germany was forced to use hydrogen for its airships in the 1930s due to a US embargo on helium exports). And again, we would then have to accept that this discovery was then forgotten for decades, like the secret of the aeros themselves. The improbabilities are piling up alarmingly.

[Dellschau] illustrates a remarkable number of designs -- maybe as many as 100 -- for airships with names such as Aero Mio, Aero Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero Mary. (There's even an Aero Jourdan.) All were powered by a secret formula that Dellschau called both "supe" and "suppe"; it could both negate gravity and drive the ships' wheels, side paddles and compressor motors.

One drawing tells the story of Adolf Goetz's Aero Goeit, recklessly commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the airship got tangled in a Sequoia tree, and the interloper died of a broken neck. Another cautionary tale involves Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went down in flames in the Aero Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged by other club members, who suspected him of using the aircraft to make money by hauling cargo.

But most of the airships' flights were safe -- and great fun. Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts, and delights in enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He often bedecked his watercolor paintings with little press clippings -- from Scientific American, the Houston Chronicle and an unidentified German-language newspaper -- that recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms." Against paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the clippings seem intended as an ironic counterpoint.

Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked so hard to protect its secrecy, but he shows the members going to great lengths to do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it could travel open roads undetected. Dellschau writes that a club member was banned from developing a machine because he'd talked to outsiders. And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many of Dellschau's own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.

The first and most obvious thing to note is that the capabilities of these aircraft are far in advance of the technology of the day. The first airship flight was made by Henri Giffard in France in 1852; with only three horsepower and a speed of about six miles an hour it was unable to fly into the wind. His subsequent attempts to build bigger and more powerful airships failed. A decade later, in what is perhaps the closest known parallel to Dellschau's Aeros, Solomon Andrews flew the Aereon, a weird balloon/airship hybrid with three gas envelopes, over Perth Amboy, New Jersey. At about the same time, according to Dellschau, the Sonora Aero Club had perfected controlled, powered, lighter-than-air flight and many of its machines were secretly flying in California's skies -- after which they disappeared, leaving no trace in the documentary record. This is incredible and in fact not credible.

Cathedralist Political Narrative: Trump Is An Internet-Enabled Troll

theatlantic |  The president’s disruption engine is powered by three paradoxes. Each was made possible by technological innovations. All will endure long after this ringmaster moves his circus to another town.

Paradox #1: More information, less credibility

Trump’s cries about fake news get receptive audiences in part because we live in the most complex information age in human history. The volume of data is exploding, and yet credible information is harder to find. The scale of this information universe is staggering. In 2010, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, noted that every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003. Today Google processes 61,000 search queries a second. That’s 5.2 billion queries a day.

Meanwhile, attitudes toward traditional information sources like the mainstream media and universities are souring, particularly among Republicans. Confidence in newspapers has declined by more than 20 points since 1977. Last month, a Pew survey found that for the first time, a majority of Republicans had a negative view of American universities.

Paradox #2: More connectivity, less civility

Today nearly half the world is online. By 2020 more people are expected to have cell phones than running water. But civility has not accelerated in tandem. In earlier times, it took some effort to deliver hurtful messages. In the U.K.’s Parliament building, seating in the House of Commons is designed to space the opposition at least two sword lengths apart from the ruling party—just in case.  Distance has its benefits. 

Paradox #3: The wisdom of crowds, the duplicity of crowds

Technology has unleashed the wisdom of crowds. Now you can find an app harnessing the experiences and ratings of likeminded users for just about anything. The best taco truck in Los Angeles? Yelp. The highest rated puppy crate? Amazon. Youth hostels in Barcelona? TripAdvisor. Researchers are even using the wisdom of crowds to better predict which internet users may have pancreatic cancer and not even know it yet—based on the search histories of other cancer patients.

But the 2016 presidential election revealed that not all crowds are wise, or even real. The wisdom of crowds can be transformed into the duplicity of crowds. Deception is going viral.

Trump Calls Out Absurd 5th Column

BostonGlobe |  President Donald Trump mounted a vigorous defense of his presidency Thursday, pushing back against media reports that his campaign advisers had inappropriate contact with Russian officials and vowing to crack down on the leaking of classified information.

Nearly a month into his presidency, Trump said in a free-wheeling White House news conference that his new administration had made ‘‘significant progress’’ and took credit for an optimistic business climate and a soaring stock market.

The president denounced media reports of a chaotic start to his administration marked by a contentious executive order — now tied up in a legal fight — to place a ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations.

‘‘This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine,’’ Trump declared. He said he would announce a ‘‘new and very comprehensive order to protect our people.’’

Deep State Draws First Blood - Time to Stick and Move

strategic-culture |  In an article a few weeks ago, I tried to lay the foundations for a future US administration, placing a strong focus on foreign policy and revealing a possible shift in US historic foreign relations. In a passage I wrote:

Donald Trump has emerged with in mind a precise foreign policy strategy, forged by various political thinkers of the realist world such as Waltz and Mearsheimer, trashing all recent neoconservative and neoliberal policies of foreign intervention (R2P - Right to Protect) and soft power campaigns in favor of human rights. No more UN resolutions, subtly used to bomb nations (Libya). Trump doesn’t believe in the central role of the UN and reaffirmed this repeatedly.

In general, the Trump administration intends to end the policy of regime change, interference in foreign governments, Arab springs and color revolutions. They just don’t work. They cost too much in terms of political credibility, in Ukraine the US are allied with supporters of Bandera (historical figure who collaborated with the Nazis) and in Middle East they finance or indirectly support al Qaeda and al Nusra front».

The recent meeting in Washington with Theresa May, the first official encounter with a prominent US ally, revealed, among other things, a possible dramatic change in US policy. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom expressed her desire to follow a new policy of non-intervention, in line with the isolationist strategy Trump has spoken about since running for office. In a joint press conference with the American president, May said: «The era of military intervention is over. London and Washington will not return to the failed policy in the past that has led to intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya».

During the election campaign, Trump made his intentions clear in different contexts, but always coming from the standpoint of non-interventionism inspired by the concept of isolationism. It is becoming apparent that these intentions are being put into action, though the rhetoric regarding Iran has become alarming. In typical Trump fashion (which contrasts with the Iran issue), the situation in Syria is normalizing and the initial threats directed at China appear to have been put aside. The case of Iran is a different and complex story, requiring a deeper analysis that deserves a separate article. What will gradually be important, as the Presidency progresses, is understanding the necessity to distinguish between words and actions, separating provocations from intentions. 

Do Try and Keep Up

Why it's not possible for an IQ-116 to fathom the strategy of an IQ-160+ player...,

oilprice |  Former Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, who also sits on the BoD, along with Former CIA Director and Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, both listed as an Exxon consultant, also were strong backers of Tillerson to Trump.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Henry Kissinger, for decades, the Rockefeller Family’s chief foreign policy advisor, with strong personal connections to Russian President Putin, has emerged as a chief foreign policy advisor to the Trump Administration.

Nor is it surprising that published reports of Kissinger’s advice to Trump is to seek to normalize US/Russian relations, diametrically opposed to the Obama/Clinton policies of confrontation with Russia.

It is also part of a broader strategy to tempt Russia towards closer relations with the US/EU while sacrificing its growing close relations with China, viewed by Trump, as it was by Obama and Clinton, as the chief obstacle to the U.S. dominant global leadership. As a critical part of the deal, Russia is expected to accede to sacrifice its budding alliance with Iran.

Now the human drama watch begins; will Putin cave in to the demands of the West to renounce his allies in exchange for the improved relation and the dropping of sanctions?

The West has in hand some very powerful means of persuasion, including increased Russian access to the huge European energy market, restored western financial credit, access to Western technology, and a seat at the global decision-making table, all of which Russia badly needs and wants. Consider that three Russian proposed natural gas pipelines to Europe have been stalled since sanctions were imposed over Ukraine, leaving billions of dollars on the table.

Foreshadowing all of this was a news leak late last year in Germany’s Bild Zeitung, that Kissinger has drafted a plan to officially recognize Crimea as part of Russia and lift the Obama administration’s economic sanctions.

What this means for Russia, just now emerging from nearly two years of recession, is a possible return to prosperity, an offer that any national leader would find hard to resist. 

Chess Not Checkers...,

theburningplatform |  First, we can all agree that Trump, if nothing else, throws a lot of punches. We really saw this in the primaries where barely a day could go by without some scandal that would supposedly end his presidential bid. His opponents and the press erroneously thought that responding to each and every “outrage” was the correct thing to do without ever taking the time to think whether or not they had just walked into a trap. They would use their turn to block his Twitter attack but he wouldn’t move that piece again once that was in play but, instead, brought on the next outrage – just like my coach instructed me to do.

Second, Trump is very vocal in what he is going to do. Just like I had my students announced to each other their plans, Trump has been nothing but transparent about what he intends to do. After all, announcing your plans only works if your position is unassailable. It demoralizes your opponent. You rub their face in it. Another benefit to being vocal is that it encourages your opponent to bring out his favorite piece to deal with said announced plans. This is a big mistake as any good chess player will quickly recognize which piece his opponent favors and then go take them.

Time has been the one area that our president is having problems. Executive Orders and Twitter Wars have pushed the opposition off balance but he has not been able to use this time to get all of his pieces into play. The Justice Department (his Queen) is still stuck behind a wall of pawns. 

Furthermore, only 5 of his 15 Cabinet picks have been confirmed as of this writing. Without control over these departments, the president can fight a war of attrition but he really can’t go on the offensive. In chess, I will gladly trade a piece for a piece if it means you have to waste your turn dealing with it. It isn’t a long term strategy if you do not have all of your pieces ready to go.

In the end it would appear that Trump is playing the kind of game that I was taught to play by my coach. His opponents are never given time to mount an attack. Their queen – the MSM has been removed from the board and their favorite piece – the Celebrities are locked in a war of attrition while Trump gets the rest of his pieces on the board. Remember, these are all Tactics but Strategy flows from Tactics. Sooner or later the Left will find itself in some terrible position and the Strategy to drain the swamp will present itself.

DJT Had Some Black Visitors Today

boston |  President Donald Trump raised more than a few eyebrows with his remarks Wednesday — the first day of Black History Month — during an “African American History Month Listening Session” at the White House.

Sitting beside Housing secretary nominee Ben Carson in the Roosevelt Room, Trump began the session with a circuitous speech in which the president, among other things, lambasted the media and rehashed a recent controversy involving a Martin Luther King Jr. statue in the Oval Office.

“Donald Trump just gave a Black History Month speech about the persecution of Donald Trump,” reads the headline of the Toronto Star‘s account of the speech. A few highlights below, as noted by reporters:

What Hath Trump Wrought?

buchanan |  “If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.

Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.

Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.

Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.

Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.

Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.

How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?

How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?

Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.

The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.

Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.

But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.

Sweet Current Example of a Limited Hangout

Hope you cats remember what a limited hangout is....,

 

electoralsystemincrisis |  In Electoral System in Crisis, is a 39-page independent in-depth examination of the accuracy and security of U.S. electronic voting equipment. This research has been invited for publication in the Journal of the International Association of Official Statistics (IAOS). Due to the unusual time constraints of the election cycle, and the right of the public to have access to this information, the authors are taking the unusual step of publishing ahead of time online. The full report is now available online at the website of the lead author; and will be posted in a number of locations including the forum of The American Association for Public Opinion Research, and the forum of Social Research Methods. Below is an exerpt of our findings. We encourage everyone to download and read the full report.

The majority of the data we examined suggests that the two candidates currently slated to accept their party’s nomination in the 2016 presidential primary races, received a different number of votes than what has been officially reported.

On the Republican side, statistical analysis indicates that Donald Trump probably received more votes than what has been reported and certified. Because he was able to overcome his opposition, even with the irregularities, his selection as the presumptive Republican nominee is supported by the data.

As we stated in the opening, this is not the case on the Democratic side. The overwhelming majority of the almost two dozen states that we analyzed, demonstrate irregularities. We found suspect statistical patterns in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. These irregularities were significant, as we demonstrate in Louisiana, sometimes as large as 36% and could change the outcome of the election.

In almost every instance the discrepancies favored Hillary Clinton. In all likelihood the current results have assigned her a greater percentage of the vote than she may have actually received, while simultaneously under-reporting Bernie Sanders’ legitimate vote share.

We intend to report on the percentage that the race may be off, based on a statistical analysis of as many states as possible.