Category Archives: General Interest

September 17, 2018 · 2:01 am

About diversity

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Happy Constitution Day, September 17, 2018

Words have always fascinated me, probably because speaking was such a long, hard struggle for me as a child.  Even now, in my late 50s, I still stutter sometimes when I am nervous or even more distressing, I begin to chatter on and on… kind of like how I write so many long rambling blog posts… only worse.

I wrote my Messages of mhere story in an annoying third person, with a snarky tone and pseudonyms, but it really is a true story, all of the characters are real people, but I have no way to prove what happened to me in 1998, so I live my life looking over my shoulder and trusting no one.  That’s the truth. I mentioned that story, not to rehash all that, but because I wrote a lot about my childhood fascination with words and how people use them there.

As a child I developed a lot of obsessive-compulsive behaviors.  One of them was a dedicated, pretty much daily habit of spending an hour or two reading the dictionary.  I loved to read books and I even developed a habit for reading from our set of World Book Encyclopedias too.  At first I used a paperback dictionary for my dictionary reading, but I guess I was around 11 or 12 years old when my parents bought a set of encyclopedias, which came with a large, lovely dictionary.

I’ve mentioned that dictionary in a previous blog post, I think.  When our parents died, I inherited that set of encyclopedias and this fantastic “encyclopedic”  dictionary, which is in need of repair:

From those childhood OCD habits, I still constantly google the definition of words and anguish over the words I choose when writing.  Words have meaning, some words have several meanings, but even the meaning of a word, with several meanings, can almost always be winnowed down to what that word means in a sentence, based on the other words and punctuation in the sentence.  We don’t need to meander to the Lynne Truss punctuation lamentations extreme to agree that how we use words matters.

The PC culture relies on Orwellian doublespeak tactics to impose their cultural dictates on all political discourse in the American public square and then throughout the other mass media avenues, like the entertainment industry.  It permeates our society from top to bottom.  The PC lingo isn’t slang or some sort of shorthand terminology, it’s specifically designed to corrupt and confuse American foundational principles, constitutional precepts and even common moral beliefs.

The other day on Twitter, several prominent journalists and political commentators, in their usual strident anti-Trump fashion, bashed Trump and waxed on that,  “diversity is what makes America great.”   Diversity isn’t what makes or made America great.  Diversity is just a bunch of people from different groups.

The fixation on “diversity” followed a progression of leftist efforts to divide Americans into seething groups, whom they could exploit with identity political efforts.  Americans embracing hyphenated identities became  a visible manifestation of this Leftist political effort, which advanced to our current PC fixation on “diversity”.

What made America great is our common belief in individual liberty, our foundational principles and The Constitution, which codified our individual rights.  The strength of America is that regardless of  your race, ethnicity, religion or sex, anyone can become an American.  It’s one nation united by these beliefs that makes America not only great, but also a unique country in the history of mankind.  Absent these common beliefs which unite us, America will devolve into a hot mess of factionaled fighting, of the type President George Washington warned about in his farewell address.

Among the right, there’s been a backlash to the PC diversity culture and President Trump plays to their xenophobic impulse, but even more disturbing to me is the belief gaining traction among some conservative intellectuals that America must dramatically decrease immigration to preserve traditional American culture.

Being a culture of people from diverse religious, racial, ethnic backgrouns isn’t the problem causing disunity or a fracturing in America society.  The disunity stems from an abandonment of our civic beliefs and a profound lack on commitment to any common values and a lack of American spirit.  It will take a concerted effort to quit the PC faux “diversity” identity politics fixated on factional alliances and work hard to rebuild a common American identity dedicated to uniting Americans to this common purpose:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Preamble to the United States Constitution

American culture has always been a smorgasbord of ethnic communities springing up, who maintained many of their home country habits, cuisine and lifestyle, but even when the first generation struggled with assimilation, the second generation became completely Americanized.

The U.S.military can serve as a role model at rapid assimilation efforts.  Our military is a true diversity soup and very quickly, through basic training, followed by advanced individual training for a specific military job, service members swear an oath to defend The Constitution, embrace a clear, concise set of values, eat, sleep and work together 24/7 and learn to work as one team committed to a common purpose.

The “common purpose” training in civilian life in America has been deliberately ground down in our schools and civic institutions and replaced with diversity worship, which was a deliberate, leftist political effort to erode traditional American values, confuse people, and fuel factional divides.

What America really needs is a rededication to good citizenship training, especially in American schools.  Instead of investing so much time to PC issues, American children would be better served if more time was dedicated to teaching them about not only their rights as Americans citizens, but also about their responsibilities.  Freedom isn’t free and each citizen really does a have a civic duty to embrace upholding The Constitution.

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Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics

September 15, 2018 · 11:49 am

Carly Fiorina explains zoomin’

All week, I’ve been intending to get a blog post written, but so far all I’ve got are some drafts that didn’t go anywhere.  So, for now here’s a very worthwhile bit of advice from Carly Fiorina:

Carly Fiorina: Between Trump and the media, ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who?’

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Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, The Media

September 7, 2018 · 2:05 pm

Enabling the corruption to continue

Yesterday, began with numerous top White House officials releasing public statements denying authorship of the NYT anonymous op-ed detailing the chaos and unfitness for office of President Trump.  Each denial serves as a building block of The Wall of top administration officials, who will now work harder to defend and protect this president from his detractors and from impeachment, if that comes.

These people, whether fully conscious of the long-term ramifications of these public statements,  now have placed their own credibility more firmly behind President Trump and against both the anonymous op-ed writer and the charges of gross unfitness for office laid out in this op-ed.  These people have now openly entwined their personal integrity with President Trump’s.  No one stepped forward and said any of the statements in the op-ed letter were true.  Their statements of support for the president, actually worked to disavow the veracity of the op-ed accounting.

Several pundits and politicians urged the op-ed writer to go public and testify to Congress under oath, so that the charges can be investigated.  That would be the honorable and brave thing to do, because it seems highly likely, in this political and rapidly spinning information environment, that the identity will be revealed sooner rather than later.

Honor is a rare and often lonely path to follow.

President Trump reminds me of a store manager I worked for.  Before President Trump came on the scene, I thought this store manager was the most toxic leader I had ever seen.  Along with being  a thoroughly toxic manager of people, he was also the most talented merchandiser I had ever seen.  Often I thought, “With just a tiny bit of integrity, he could be the best store manager in that retail chain.”

Likewise, with some integrity, President Trump could actually be a “great” president, but the way he operates – playing his team members against each other, lying constantly, manipulating everyone around him and his refusal to listen to anyone, all spell doom for his achieving “great” things.  He, just like that store manager, is his own worst enemy.

I worked in a subordinate managerial position and felt this store manager wanted me gone from the moment he arrived as a store manager.  The thing is, I, and many others in this store, knew this guy well, as he had worked in our store as a store co-manager a few years before, after he had been demoted from being a store manager at another store.  We got to see his corrupt way of operating many, many times.

The incident that sticks in my mind is this guy, was working the overnight shift as the co-manager, and one morning I went into the back room to throw some trash away in the baler.  He was standing there with his cellphone in hand, laughing and bragging that he had just sent pictures to the market manager of all the things that were screwed up in the store and the fault of the store manager.  He was trying to get the store manager in trouble.

The store manager asked this co-manager to be the best man at his wedding and I assume that store manager believed this guy was his friend, because this co-manager always acted like he and the store manager were old friends.

Long story short, that store manager did get fired and I never forgot how this co-manager operated, so I was uneasy when I found out he was coming back to be our store manager.  I knew he wanted me gone about a month after he became our store manager, when I was given my annual evaluation.  In more than a decade at this store, most of it in supervisory positions, I had always received exceeds expectations evals.

This eval was a “needs improvement” and I was both dismayed and confused as the assistant manager read through my eval.  I asked several questions about why I was getting such low ratings and on one metric, this assistant manager told me that I had failed to coach a department manager about the high number of out-of-stock items in her department.  Never once in the previous year had this assistant manager or any other manager suggested that I should coach this long-time department manager, who was a prima donna in the store and who salaried managers allowed to do whatever she wanted.   Even more bizarre was not long before my evaluation, I sat in, as this very assistant manager gave this department manager her glowing exceeds expectations annual evaluation and he apologized to her that he wasn’t able to give her the highest “role model” evaluation, because the store manager would not approve any of those.  He assuredly did not mention her high number of out-of-stock items.

I mentioned that and this assistant manager just stuck to, “oh well” attitude.  I used the open door policy and talked to a co-manager about my evaluation and told her I did not understand why I was being trashed in this evaluation, even though I knew that with a needs improvement eval, a few months down the road, I would be reevaluated and if deemed still below par, I would be terminated.  This co-manager changed my evaluation to a meets expectations.

A few days later she pulled me aside and told me how the store manager flew into a rage about her changing my evaluation and she told me she believed he wanted her gone too.  She resigned and left shortly thereafter, because in her words, she couldn’t deal with his  “reign of terror.”

The thing about working for an extremely toxic leader is they don’t bully, harass and intimidate just one person.  I was not the first, last or only person this store manager made a target to eliminate.  He targeted associates and managers constantly and he manipulated or intimidated other managers to participate in his unethical behavior.  He delighted in playing managers against each other.

Many times associates complained higher up and one time a department manager even called Human Resources higher than our market level.  That human resource manager came with an asset protection manager to conduct interviews with associates privately and also some group sessions to discuss the work atmosphere in the store.

Nothing happened to that store manager and he continued as before, only worse, as he targeted people he believed were snitches.  He surrounded himself with only managers who would do his bidding, unquestioned, and who would operate just like him.  He corrupted everyone who stayed working close to him, because he spewed a constant stream of  bs to rationalize the unethical conduct.  Sadly, many of the managers quickly learned to act just like him.

I put in my two-week notice when he ordered me to write-up an elderly black associate for not getting enough work done.  He made motions of hunching his shoulders and walking like an ape, telling me that is how she moves.  He was red in the face with rage as he bellowed , “I want her coached TODAY!”  I had gone in early that morning to work on a shelf reset and I was rushing to clean up, because the market manager was coming to visit our store that morning.

The rule was all the pallets in the back room had to be binned in and off the floor in the morning.  A manager informed me there were several pallets of freight belonging to my departments that the overnight stockers hadn’t even worked.

A little while later, a woman who had been a co-manager in our store, but had been out on sick leave, came back and was in limbo working in our store, came to tell me that the store manager told her to get down several old overstock pallets of back-to-school merchandise from on top of the steel bins, for me to work that day.  I looked at this woman, who did whatever the store manager told her to do, no questions asked, and told her that I already had several unworked pallets of new freight the overnight stockers hadn’t worked.  I asked her why on earth he wanted old freight pulled down to clutter up the back room floor when the market manager was coming to visit our store soon.  She shrugged her shoulders and told me that’s what the store manager wanted.

During the market manager’s visit, the store manager called me to the stationery department, so the market manager could berate me in front of the management team.  I asked the market manager if I could speak to him privately and we walked a few yards away.  I told him I had faxed a letter to him months earlier about problems with management in our store.  He told me he hadn’t read it and the HR guy handles that.

That HR guy had been a store manager in our store 2 separate times over the many years I worked there.  He signed off on all the exceeds expectations evals I received and even more than that, whenever new programs were implemented that involved department managers, this HR guy would hand the written guidance and packet of information to me, ask me to read it and he told the other department managers, “Sue, will figure it out and train everyone on how it works.”  He did this several times.  With my letter months before, he called me once and was dismissive of my complaints about the store manager.

He knew this store manager and knew he had been in store manager positions before and bumped down several times.  Other associates told me they had contacted this HR guy too and complained about the store manager’s actions.

I put in my two-week notice and left.  That elderly associate was a long-time associate, who trained me how to zone when I first started working in that store.  She was a dedicated employee and a hard worker always.  The failure to get enough work done had nothing to do with her work habits and everything to do with the chaotic management style of the store manager, who constantly changed his mind about what he wanted done, when he wanted it done and he was forever sending subordinate managers around the store yanking associates and department managers and sending them on some other tasks that he wanted done immediately, while the work in their own departments was interrupted.

I had been down this road with this store manager about a year before, when I was a zone manager over the Hardlines side of the store and we were doing a lawn and garden Spring set.  He and his co-manager failed to supervise a new assistant manager, but let her run wild on taking charge of the Spring set.  She did not know what she was doing, she refused to listen to me or the lawn and garden department manager and she created huge messes as the reset progressed – pallets of freight everywhere on the patio, chaos inside too.  Each day, the co-manager bitched out me and the department manager about the escalating chaos, as if it was our fault.

That new assistant manager called me at home one evening and ordered me to come in to work overnight that night to work the new modular freight and she told me the department manager was coming in too.  She had gotten associates to pull out over 20 pallets of new mod freight.  As the night wore on, the department manager kept telling me there was no way we could work through all of these pallets, plus many of pallets had become overstock pallets of new mod freight that we worked and it didn’t fit on the shelves.  Starting after the overnight lunch hour (2 am-3 am) I began asking this assistant manager what her plan was to clear these pallets off the floor in the morning, because pallets have to be off the sales floor by 7 am.  She ignored me and ordered me to just stock.  I asked her a couple more times as the hours went by, because two major problems worried me.  There was nowhere in the back room for that many lawn and garden pallets and it would take a good while to pull that many pallets.  She had no plan.

The co-manager responsible for lawn and garden arrived a bit before 7 am and she chewed out the department manager and me about the chaos and she berated the department manager and told her she didn’t want to hear it, because the department manager didn’t do anything about scheduling more associates to work.  The truth was that the department manager and I were hourly employees.   Salaried management was 100% responsible for scheduling.  She was fuming at me and the department manager and she angrily told us that the store manager was going to have a fit when he saw the mess.

He did and he ordered me to write-up the department manager for failing to do her job and creating such a mess.  I refused and stepped down as a zone manager on the spot, while he and that co-manager berated me for not holding the department manager accountable or helping the assistant manager.  The truth was they both failed to do their jobs as salaried managers to train and supervise that assistant manager.

Throughout the days leading up to this, the department manager and I had tried to talk to this assistant manager, but she blew us off and ignored us completely.  When you do major department resets, it’s a recipe for failure if you begin the reset with not even a floor plan drawn up and haven’t read the modular cover sheets and diagram pages assessing the fixtures and manpower you’ll need.  I went back to being a department manager.

After the scene in the store manager’s office with that co-manager present, I went back to lawn and garden and spent several hours moving all of those pallets by myself.  That assistant manager, who created the chaos, had gone home to start her vacation, before I was even called into the store manager’s office.

When it was deja vu all over again, a year later, I refused to throw that elderly associate under the bus and when I told her I had put in my two-week notice and why, she said, “Sue, I’m right behind you.”  She put in her two-week notice too.

Back to our toxic leader-in-chief.  He is that store manager writ large.  Does President Trump have star power?  Absolutely.  Is he entertaining to watch?  Depends on taste, but there’s something riveting about his sideshow antics, that make him the star of any stage.  Could he be a “great” president, well, just like that store manager:

“With just a tiny bit of integrity, he could be the best store manager in that retail chain.”

Character really is destiny.

This anonymous op-ed pits one “senior administration official” against not only President Trump, but all those who have allowed themselves to be corrupted, by either turning a blind-eye to the president’s personal corruption or they’ve found ways “to manage” this president’s chaotic, amoral directives, by running this two-track presidency to prop him up.  None of them are abiding by their oath to protect The Constitution, because there is no “two-track” decision-making power in The Constitution.

They cast their lot with President Trump long before this op-ed letter.

To work around a corrupt manipulator like President Trump requires constantly sacrificing chunks of your personal integrity, as you either turn a blind-eye to the corruption, work to keep your distance from the corruption or make flimsy rationalizations that you’re working to a higher-purpose trying to contain the corruption.

The truth is they are enabling the corruption to continue, unchecked.

 

 

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption

September 5, 2018 · 9:43 pm

American Insurgency worries

Earlier today, an anonymous New York Times op-ed, I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, ignited another Trump meltdown.  In the first minutes after reading this op-ed, I was angered at the smug self-righteous tone and disgusted by the dereliction of duty to actively engage in this:

“The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.”

Our constitutional system bestows the power to a duly elected president, not to a bunch of selected presidential staffers.

However, within a short while, after thinking about this op-ed and the bigger picture events of the President now completely surrounded by FOX News Spin Force advisors, a disturbing thought struck.

I believe this op-ed was not meant to reassure Americans that there are adults in the room, as the op-ed writer confided.  This op-ed was meant to incite President Donald J. Trump.  Coming right on the tail of the news media revelations yesterday of White House staffers unflattering comments about Trump, this was timed to push Trump over the edge and egg on more erratic firings and chaos.

Two of the main targets the news media consistently works to incite Trump against are the two remaining generals, John Kelly and Jim Mattis.  They were part of the mainstream media Woodward spin, quoting comments attributed to both generals that were very insulting of Trump.  They both issued statements refuting the Woodward quotes, but now along comes this letter, which went into detail of the foreign policy/national security efforts to thwart Trump’s impulses.

This op-ed sure smells like an orchestrated hit to prod Trump to oust the generals and stable foreign policy/national security advisers.

There are determined players behind the “GOP Insurgent” who really want way more than to see the GOP burn to the ground.  Their “drain the swamp” rhetoric brims with imagery of a coming American civil war and urgings of “burning down the entire system in Washington”.

I firmly believe this op-ed letter was meant to prod Trump into more rash and erratic behavior – especially mass firings from within his inner circle.  This op-ed assuredly was not meant to assuage concern or reassure Americans.

The most vital question, now more than ever, is for our national security experts to get a handle on the scope of our scorched earth SPIN information war and identify hostile foreign influences.

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics, The Media

September 3, 2018 · 1:42 pm

Jack Ryan enters the digital age

President Trump’s biggest advantages in the ongoing scorched earth  SPIN information war rest on his willingness to devote most of the energy of his presidency to waging scorched earth character assassinations and his use of his personal Twitter account to lob attacks that not only disrupt the Left/mainstream media SPIN attack, but to actually successfully win control of the SPIN cycles.  Although, everything in this information war takes on names and terminology that make it sound benign, even the shorthand name itself “spinning”,  our SPIN information war provides 24/7 media disinformation and confusion about basic facts on most news stories, foments extreme polarization and disunity, erodes America’s reputation abroad and fuels distrust of the news media and our political institutions.

Yesterday, I spent most of my day watching Amazon Prime’s new Jack Ryan series, after my youngest daughter sent me a message telling me it’s very good and she insisted I would like it.  She knew I was a Tom Clancy fan back when the Cold War provided the setting of his stories.  The writers of this series took the Jack Ryan character and wrote him into a modern-day, fighting Islamic terrorists scenario rather than the Cold War.  I was hooked on this series quickly and watched 6 episodes yesterday.

I’ve often wondered if Tom Clancy was a Sidney Sheldon fan, because the Clancy plotting, using alarming, seemingly unconnected incidents around the globe, then gradually pulling all those incidents together in a dramatic, cataclysmic clash between the good and bad guys, reminded me a great deal of Sidney Sheldon’s high-octane, recipe for plot drama.  Clancy also added an unmatched ability to parlay highly technical military info into terms laymen could easily understand.

I bring this up, because binge-watching Jack Ryan, several things stuck in my mind about how the terrorists operate compared to the doddering hierarchy in our intel agencies.  The terrorists were using a rapid-fire digital means to transfer large sums of money in $10,000 increments, that the fictional new head of  ISIS, developed while studying international banking, living in France as a refugee since the 1980s.

Another interesting operational aspect was one that has been reported in the news in recent years as a means for how terrorists can communicate via some online computer games messaging applications.  The scene in the show, where the tech savvy intel peeps explain the use of a computer game messaging by the terrorists to older government officials, realistically depicts the generational gap when it comes to modern technology.  This gap runs much deeper in real life, I believe, and has caused a grave institutional blindspot to recognizing the threats posed by social media and even recognizing our SPIN information war as actual information warfare rather than benign political public relations work.

Many people working in law enforcement, national security, top military leadership and top government positions don’t use any social media.  In recent years, advice galore permeates warning people in government and law enforcement positions of responsibility to eschew or be very cautious in their social media use.  Too many of them are totally clueless of social media’s reach, so when young people in a foreign country are waging large protests or mobilize sophisticated terrorist recruitment video campaigns, with global reach, on shoestring budgets, often our elected officials and top executive branch officials seem amazed and alarmed, while still not bothering to study online social media and messaging platforms as a serious national security concern.

This awareness gap is, in and of itself, a gaping national security vulnerability. 

Back in 1990s our modern SPIN information war in America began as a one-sided, left-wing operation run by the Clinton’s political operatives.  These people introduced SPIN info war to America, although they masked it as just modern political PR efforts.

At the same time SPIN info war gained prominence among the Left, the political Right began to gain a foothold on using talk radio to galvanize conservatives.  By the late 90s, the SPIN-dominated mainstream media (Leftists) began to hype right-wing talk radio as a national security threat and after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 , a massive SPIN effort by the Left worked to create, what I believe is more urban myth than reality, a huge national security threat from right-wing militias… who communicated using online forums.  In 2016, the Left reinvigorated this old 90s scare-mongering with a vast, new national security threat – the “alt-right”… who, um, da-ding, were organizing and communicating… online.  All that is old is new again, especially in the world of the Left’s SPIN messaging campaigns.  They are relentlessly repetitive, in thought and deed, rerunning the same tired old themes trying to cast their political enemies as Nazis or gun-toting extremists.

The main media battlefield for SPIN information warfare in the 1990s was the 24/7  cable news networks, which spawned whole armies of partisan spinmeisters to wage non-stop spin war.  In 1996, Fox News opened a potent, new front, giving right-wing  partisans a foot on the national cable news SPIN information war battlefield.

President Trump, reportedly, does not use the internet or use email, but he does tweet from his private cell phone.  His information appears to be gleaned from extensive TV viewing of the cable TV news spin battles.  He also uses Twitter, but follows very few people  (47 follows today).  Although, Twitter does not explain exactly what “algorithms” they use to generate each user’s Twitter feed, it is safe to assume that it is based on your followers list, which informs what your interests are.  Trump’s Twitter feed should be of keen interest to America’s national security people, because he is so prone to exploitation and manipulation, with his Twitter supposedly being his only online information source.  Trump’s media follows include: The Drudge Report, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Jesse Waters, Geraldo Rivera, Diamond and Silk, Greta Van Susteren

Trump was burned retweeting an Ann Coulter tweet by a far-right extremist in the UK, as I’ve mentioned before.  He also got burned earlier than the Coulter retweet over a of a Mussolini quote retweet.  Trump retweets stuff he sees in his Twitter feed.  Now, let that sink in as to the importance of knowing what on earth shows up in Trump’s Twitter feed and who determines what goes into his feed.  I feel sure Trump’s Twitter feed is not left to some benign algorithms to determine what he sees.

Social media political formats come and go.  The Excite message boards disappeared shortly after impeachment.  Much later I used the Yahoo politics chat rooms, always looking for a way to find an online medium to expose what happened to me in 1998.  The yahoo politics chat room crowd migrated to another chat room messaging site, same as how the National Review Disqus comment section ended and supposedly a couple of  NRO Disqus moderators migrated to Qwiket to set up a NR refugee comment section.  Very quickly that Qwiket NRO refugee site morphed into a more modern version of The Drudge Report… The America First News.

Another interesting 2016 site conversion was the site, The Conservative Treehouse, which sports Andrew Breitbart images on the main page wallpaper background.  This site was heavily invested in selling “crowdsourcing” investigations into the black grievance industry pre-Trump.  They do come up with a lot of interesting information, that “crowdsourcing” from commenters does not explain.  They also run the image of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier weekly and post Bible verses to present the image of a conservative right-wing site.  That site morphed into Trump Polling Central during 2016, with detailed, up-to-the-minute Trump rally and polling information.  I suspect both might be foreign front operations.  That the popular Disqus comment section at National Review would be dismantled in 2016, months before the election, then refugees directed to this Qwiket site (there was a piece in The Corner at National Review announcing this Qwiket location) and then that Qwiket location become a another DrudgeReport type news aggregate site with a comments section seems more than a tad odd.  It looked to me like a deliberate effort to sabotage and demolish National Review’s NeverTrump hold-outs.

I’m writing all this, because the “Fake News” hysteria was spin from the Left to use as cover to prod facebook to censor Trump-supporters on facebook and gin up the “Trump/Russian Collusion” spin hysterics.  Trump hijacked that “fake news” spin and turned it right around on the Left.  In recent months allegations of  “shadow-banning” and muting conservatives on facebook and Twitter began rumbling.  A couple weeks ago, several online social media platforms acted in unison to ban Alex Jones from their sites.

This seems to me like a precursor to setting the stage to disband Twitter politics.  The only problem is American journalists rely on the SPIN messaging advantage Twitter provides them to within minutes, using the power of rapid-fire, mass retweets of Dump on Trump “news” stories, to generate SPIN cycles to attack Trump.

Until the Left and mainstream media, who collude constantly to spread Trump dirt, find another online platform, for now Twitter looks to be their default online battlefield.  If they work to dismantle Twitter to take down Trump, they are left with an online vacuum and Trump still controls the POTUS bully pulpit.  All these media hysterics about whether to cover WH briefings, let Kellyanne speak, not cover POTUS are all part of the SPIN information war, not about seriously reporting the news.  That so many “journalists” engage in these debates publicly speaks to the total corruption of American news reporting,  They are as much invested in SPIN information warfare as President Trump.

And back to my original line of thought (until I veered off a bit).  There’s a serious problem when top national security policymakers have no real concept of the power of social media platforms, no realization of the serious threat our scorched earth SPIN information war really is, and remain totally unaware of the importance of becoming well-versed in social media operations as another potent means for information warfare to be waged both in and against America.

We have top generals who don’t have any idea about the power of social media, messaging apps or the grave threat that a SPIN war run amok can create an information void, caused by an overload of SPIN messaging being disseminated and no calm, serious means to sift through the SPIN pile-on to get quick, accurate, reliable information to the American people.  In this SPIN hysteria mode, with the media vs. Trump often running through several spin cycles a day now, it’s becoming obvious that at some point social media and/or SPIN-generated hysteria will incite mass hysteria incidents, flash mobs, or worse.

Are America’s top national security leaders aware and ready for this looming threat?

 

 

 

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics, The Media

August 28, 2018 · 12:58 pm

The truth shall set you free

I’m very weary of writing about our scorched earth SPIN information war, but after another tiresome mainstream media SPIN hysterical attack over President Trump’s reactions to Senator John McCain’s death and competing choruses elevating McCain to sainthood or demon, I’m going to write a bit about my experience with scorched earth SPIN information war, again, and why I am so determined to work to defeat the SPIN in America.

I began writing about SPIN information warfare back in 1998, on the Excite message boards, during the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal.  I was very new to the internet and while my kids were in school, I began spending a lot of time surfing the internet.

When I was in my teens, I had many pen pals from foreign countries and I thought it would be nice to find pen pals around the world again, but then I stumbled upon the Excite message boards.  Being one who loves political debates, I began lurking there for quite a while, but then decided to start posting messages with the user name: mhere.

The entire story of my experience is under the Messages of mhere heading at the top of my blog.

I believe that I was tracked down from those Excite message boards and investigated by Clinton hacks, because my Excite message boards comments were being picked up and used by right-wing pundits in their messaging, during the impeachment spin war raging across cable news networks and in the media.  As a side note to my Excite message board experience, I also saw coordinated gang-up attacks meant to silence and intimidate posters supporting impeachment – sort of a precursor to the reported online Russian troll activities in Disqus comment sections online in 2016.  Not sure who the “trolls” were engaged in those coordinated gang-up attacks back in 1998.

During their investigations of me, I believe, they came across a retired U.S. Army general who hates my guts.  During Desert Storm I sent some negative letters to the desert about his wife’s family assistance efforts in his brigade in Germany.

My husband was a 1SG in a company in one of the battalions in that general’s brigade and I was a family support leader in the company.  I sent those letters to my husband’s company commander, an unmarried Captain, who was deployed to Desert Storm with my husband, to keep him informed of the chaos and problems with family support matters back in Germany.

Deploying soldiers to Desert Storm, who were stationed in a foreign country and dealing with the challenging security and family support needs of leaving family members in Germany, under heightened terrorism concerns, created unique challenges for the Army (and German officials), to keep American families safe.

I believe my letters made it to the Department of the Army, in someone’s after-action report.  And finally, I believe that general was recruited to work quietly to silence me and since he already hated me, I feel sure he would have believed anything negative about me that they fed him.

I believe at the highest levels of the Clinton administration a retired general was fed false information about me, an unarmed, law-abiding Army wife, and that he was recruited to work quietly to silence me.  My husband, a retired U.S. Army Sergeant Major, was still on active duty in 1998.  In 1998, I  was a homemaker in Hinesville, GA, taking care of our home and four children.

I believe that beyond the injustice to me, this corruption of the military chain of command, strictly for partisan political purposes, must be exposed.  We can not have the military chain of command corrupted and politicized by partisans. And assuredly feeding false information to retired generals and sending them on personal or partisan missions can not ever be tolerated in America.

Over the years, we are now at the point where retired generals grace political parties’ convention stages, take up partisan banners in public and we have a sitting president threatening to use his power to revoke security clearances as a partisan tool to fend off his political enemies.

We also have a thoroughly corrupted media, willing to engage in partisan spin attacks, colluding with partisans to spread spin messaging, willing to edit information to feed partisan agendas and way too many who sit on Twitter, working to fuel the daily spin cycles, retweeting news reports without lifting a finger to independently verify the information.  Even the so-called “fact-checkers” are highly partisan and prone to “checking facts” with partisan blinders firmly in place, blinding them to even considering facts that don’t conform to their own partisan biases.

The news media organizations and social media platforms, where spin info war rages, are totally corrupted too.  For instance, big media and the cable news networks all worked to give Trump billions of dollars in free media during the GOP primary.  FOX stayed with Trump, to become, what now disturbingly looks more like state TV than any sort of objective news reporting.  The so-called, mainstream media, colluded with Trump’s “GOP Insurgency” to advance the Clinton Pied Piper strategy, a strategy where they wanted to promote the most extreme GOP candidates, in hopes of burning the GOP primary to the ground and leaving the GOP sitting with the worst possible candidate in 2016.  Once it looked like that had succeeded with only Trump or Cruz really viable, the mainstream media switched to the Clinton’s Dump on Trump effort casting him as a fascist.

The mainstream news media, FOX  and the partisans still remain locked down tight in the scorched earth SPIN information war.

After my experience, I knew that I could never support Hillary Clinton, because I’ve always felt that due to her direct involvement in orchestrating Clinton scandal damage control, she was involved in the attack on me. This is what I believe, but lacking any connections or way to investigate and prove it, I’ve worked to write and warn about the dangers of SPIN information war on my blog, on social media and in various online comment sections over the years.

Likewise, on my blog, I’ve explained why I could never support Donald J. Trump.

I support The Constitution of the United States and believe in following the law.  I am a homemaker and full-time caregiver of my husband, who suffers from COPD and normal pressure hydrocephalus.  He is a 100% disabled vet.  And in my spare time, I still write to try to warn about the dangers to America from our never-ending scorched earth SPIN information war.

I would never support violence or breaking the law for any personal or domestic partisan cause.  I have never belonged to any militia, subversive group of any kind, or terrorist group.  The most “dangerous” organizations I have belonged to are things like being an American Red Cross volunteer and member of the local quilt guild.  I have never owned a firearm in my life and, truth be told, I’ve always been afraid of guns.

And finally, I believe that “spin” is rapidly repeated lies meant to control public opinion.

The most powerful weapon to defeat  SPIN information warfare is the TRUTH.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Messages of mhere, Politics, The Media

August 23, 2018 · 10:37 am

“Houston, we have a problem.”  

Yep, I’m still on the scorched earth SPIN information war consuming America. I like doing timelines and then stepping back and looking at them, looking for patterns and trends that get lost in the rapidly shifting spin cycles in America.

SPIN information warfare began in America in the 1990s with the Clinton war room.

During the 90s, the constant spin back and forth escalated and America was enmeshed in constant Clinton scandals.

On the Right numerous media operations began to “expose the Clinton corruption” (the scare quotes in no way mean the Clintons weren’t corrupt, they mean that was the  “mission” (ends, if you will) of the operations.  For instance, Judicial Watch began and to me that looks like an American Wikileaks operation ferreting out every bit of FOIA info they can get their hands on and spinning it to the max against the Clintons & Dems.  Many long-established conservative news media outlets joined the “expose Clinton corruption” efforts, but the thing is there was a constant effort to spin wild conspiracy theories to prod the Right further and further toward grassy knoll territory.

By the time Clinton Impeachment rolled around, the American Right was in full Clinton Derangement Syndrome mode.  A couple of names come to mind as becoming overnight star agitation propaganda players on the Right.  Matt Drudge and his Drudge Report broke the Lewinsky scandal and Ann Coulter became a firebrand pundit on cable TV and penned a book on High Crimes and Misdemeanors.  Kellyanne Conway, back then Fitzpatrick, Laura Ingraham and the late Barbara Olson became pundit stars spinning against the Clintons.  Kellyanne Conway worked for Frank Luntz  (more of that polling kabuki inc. in America).

The Bush/Gore campaign was the entire hanging chad hysteria, followed by 8 years of Soros group-funded SPIN agitation propaganda, stirring Bush Derangement Syndrome.  The name, David Brock comes to mind as a big right-wing agitprop player from the 90s working for conservative The American Spectator, who then switched to becoming Soros’ right-hand man running a vast network of agitprop groups on the Left.

America has been played back and forth since the 90s – imagine some movement like Black Lives Matter, which agitates racial distrust and pits black Americans against the police – to discredit law enforcement in America.

Through the 2000s we had more agitprop and a full-blown right-wing effort emerged with the Tea Party movement sucking in American conservatives. And there was Obama Derangement with Birtherism. We’ve had non-stop hysterical SPIN info war working to tear America apart.

Ann Coulter has President Trump’s ear, Kellyanne Conway is in the WH whispering in his ear, and Laura Ingraham is on FOX talking at him too.  The  Murdoch/Soros efforts look to be the two biggest players working to tear America apart and I wonder if there are hostile foreign hands involved too.

Just for historical reference, the Soviets & East German Stasi loved using women to manipulate men.

I find it very interesting that Don Jr. now has a FOX News babe surrounding him.  The POTUS has Kellyanne, Coulter and Ingraham prodding him.  With Melania, I think it would be prudent to gather intelligence on Trump’s foreign business efforts and how Melania came into his orbit.  Her subtle “cyber-bullying” cause and that “I Don’t Care” jacket smack of deliberate agitprop efforts to create more Trump Derangement on the Left.  I liked her though and she seems so nice, so I hesitate to believe that, however I think a clear-eyed, unemotional investigative effort by our intelligence experts is long overdue analyzing this entire SPIN information warfare operation blowing across American media 24/7.

The Tea Party effort spawned a whole new cadre of agitprop operators on the right.  The Glenn Beck operation was another massive con job, probably the test run for using the large crowd rally format to con conservatives, which Trump is using to great effect.

George Stepanoplouslos, a former Clinton War Room Spin Commando sits as ABC’s chief news anchor.  The SPIN FORCES on both sides in America wield total control over American news media.

In recent years, I noticed that The Drudge Report began mainstreaming Alex Jones, featuring stories that were linked to Jones’s site.  This took place over several years.

Some liberals were writing about the right-wing media empire being nothing but grifters and they are, but I believe it’s way worse than just the hawking merchandise and non-stop book mill efforts.  Many of the commercials are geared to fan doomsday (Flight 93, anyone) hysteria.

We are getting close to Trump moving near impeachment territory and even America’s mayor is now so lost in the scorched earth spin info war that he said, “Truth isn’t truth”.

The POTUS and Don Jr. are being manipulated by women and even the State Dept spokeswoman is a FOX babe, who moved to the top of the food chain quickly there.

President Trump recently brought another FOX media pro, Bill Shine, into the White House as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications, so I’ve been concerned all the pieces are in place to orchestrate a massive political and constitutional crisis in America.

Last night POTUS tweeted:

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I have asked Secretary of State to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.”

Tucker Carlson’s show hyped this news and that tweet looks like someone other than the POTUS wrote it.   I suspect it was meant to jazz the white nationalist element of the President’s base, but even more than that it sent the Left and mainstream media into hysteria mode again.  In 2017 Trump retweeted an Ann Coulter tweet praising Jayda Fransen, a British far-right radical.  She worked to make sure Trump saw that.  This South Africa tweet, I believe someone else in the White House wrote that in coordination with FOX having Carlson hype that.  On the Left there’s the Steele dossier working to fuel endless hysteria on both sides, but most alarming is the effort to heighten racial tensions again.

Timelines, oh my, a retired COL is a gung- ho Trump Spin Force Twitter commando – insulting and name-calling non-stop, betraying his Army values -like RESPECT,  every step of the way.   He was recruited by Breitbart.  There’s a former military officer on the Left spewing non-stop Trump Derangement Syndrome too, much of it anti-military…

So many worrying signs all around in the America’s scorched earth SPIN information war and all our so called national security experts on TV do is join in the scorched earth SPIN hysteria.

Finding a way to peacefully and legally defeat America’s scorched earth SPIN information war is a grave national security imperative.   We are ripe for hostile foreign efforts to push us into a major political crisis or system breakdown and we have no means to unify America around anything.

Scorched earth SPIN information war blowing hot across America 24/7 is nothing less than a mutually-assured suicide pact.

“Houston, we have a problem.”

 

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Information War

August 18, 2018 · 3:27 am

Forlorn Hope?

20180818_102917-1.jpg

Speech is power, speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. – Emerson

Hopefully I can get this blog post together tonight and posted.   Yesterday, besides my real life chores, I spent more time watching Twitter than I really wanted to, but that’s a main battlefield in America’s ongoing scorched earth information war.  I find it mind-numbingly boring, but I try to analyze the spin battles, watch how the main spin commandos on both sides operate and most importantly keep my attention focused on the messaging.  The words are the main weapon in all spin information warfare.  My words here aren’t as organized as I had hoped, but I am very tired these days taking care of my husband, trying to keep up with my housework and chores, while still following this spin info war.  Haven’t decided yet which is more draining, lol.

Many news organizations & individual journalists have been aligned with spreading the Dems and Left talking points messaging since the 1990s, while still proclaiming “journalistic ethics” and “unbiased reporting”.  Along with the news operations, the Left widely disseminates their spin messaging among the vast entertainment industry, where their spin messaging often gets spouted by celebrities, on TV talk shows and even written into scripts in TV shows and movies.  The Dems and Left developed a vast network to disseminate their spin messaging.

Over the years, the Left has amassed a wide array of well-funded political groups working to increase the reach of their messaging, but they also have loads of professional political operatives, academics, data analysts, tech experts, polling groups, social psychologists, etc. working to improve their spin messaging operations.    As I stated in previous posts, the Left had a lock on spin information warfare since the 1990s, when it made its debut in America by the Clinton war room political operatives.

The Left’s strategy has been to rely on “professionals” to hone their messaging using all sorts of testing messaging with focus groups and the modern tech savvy that retailers and advertisers use to lure Americans in with very deceptive language and sophisticated manipulation to play on people’s emotions.  It’s a messaging operation that relies on long-established messaging collusion with the big media venues in America, except for talk radio, which the Right dominated since the 90s.  The Left’s messaging is used to advance both Democrat politicians and political causes.

The Left’s spin messaging has been long-established, highly organized, run by professionals, but the Clinton political machine wields a heavy hand on the Democratic Party and since the spin operations began with Clinton loyalists, the most extreme scorched earth spin messaging efforts have gone into propping up the Clintons.

Trump borrowed his scorched earth spin from the Clinton model.  Trump’s spin messaging operation begins and ends with bolstering Trump’s erratic tweeting and impromptu outbursts.  Trump brags about his strategic thinking, but he’s a very impulsive reactionary.  He’s more reactionary than the Left, taking to the streets and fainting couch hysterics constantly and that’s pretty darned reactionary.  His spin operators end up rushing to clean-up and prop up Trump’s loose cannon guerilla attack spin messaging, which is more like a three-year old throwing a tantrum, determined to be the center of attention.

Trump’s erratic, impulsive way of operating requires his “Spin Force” to spend more time on damage control than on any sort of sophisticated political messaging like the Left operates. More often than not, even his own communications people in the White House can’t keep their messaging on track with Trump’s ever-changing opinions and outbursts. It’s constant discordant messaging. Hence, the FOX News Trumpathons evoke an amateurish third-world dictator’s media operations aura, where the media exists only to prop up the dictator and odd fits and starts are common, but when the TV switches to folk dancing or goes dark, beware there’s likely a coup attempt in progress.  For instance after a damaging Trump outburst a few weeks back, Tucker Carlson was caught in limbo and went with UFOs, while Hannity went with more Hillary corruption hysteria, as they awaited some clue as to how to do damage control for Trump.

Beyond messaging glorifying Trump’s “greatness,” the ideological messaging all stems from simplistic, jingoistic sloganeering, which Trump and his Spin Force use to incite his followers.  And while Trump’s larger spin messaging is a hobbled together effort, with FOX News being his largest news spin platform, he’s also amassed an array of pundits, political operatives and friends.  As Trump has become more erratic in his tweeting and outbursts lately and the mainstream media goes into hysterics recycling through old 2016 Dump on Trump spin themes (his finances, the Russians, his women, his authoritarianism), his FOX News spinners revert to running endless whataboutism spin about Hillary & Obama corruption or nefarious “deep state” fear mongering, hysterically opining about Trump’s victimhood.

I expect Trump to escalate his spin efforts and to become more erratic in his outbursts, as the pressure builds with the Mueller investigation findings looming, pressure from Putin over Trump failing to deliver with “the ball in his court” and threats like Omarosa to Cohen all around him closing in.

Another dimension to this scorched earth spin info war is both sides gaslight and engage in projection constantly, not just Trump.  For instance the Left and mainstream media ran a coordinated effort yesterday denouncing Trump’s attacks on the free press.  Along with their hysteria about Trump’s attacks on the media, they project constantly about the grave threat Trump is to free speech in America.

While Trump’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” spin assuredly deserve condemnation, it needs to be noted that the Left loves only the “free press” that backs their causes.  The “fake news” spin is messaging Trump hijacked from the Left and turned it back on them.  The Left has been working to silence political speech they find undesirable for many years with “hate speech” codes, PC  efforts to dictate words that can and cannot be used, and constantly trying to find ways to limit speech on the right, casting those views as a threat to America.  The initial “fake news” hysteria effort was meant to force social media to remove “fake news”, which really meant news leftist “fact-checkers” deemed fake.  That quickly turned into a farce.  Trump hijacked the term and mocks the mainstream media constantly.  Trump however lies constantly too, so his “fake news” is as much of a farce as the initial “fake news” effort by the Left.

Another aspect to the Left’s hysteria, is it always is intended to manufacture a crisis, which they can use as cover to propel political action.  Amidst the free speech sanctimony from the mainstream media there’s some ominous undertones, because they endlessly debated whether to not give air time to Trump (the POTUS) and to his WH spokespeople on the grounds they are liars, yet they reported on Obama “narratives”, which were assuredly bold-faced lies too.  Yet there was never any hysteria about silencing Obama “narratives”.  A couple of weeks ago the WH banned a pool reporter from a WH event, ostensibly because she was rude.  The media went into full hysterics, then Trump baited them with more “enemy of the people”  taunts.  The media was back to:

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libertybelle Retweeted Andrea Mitchell

Trump’s antics are disgusting, but so are the media’s. Lord, the media can never make up their minds about Trump outrage. Now you’re debating relying on one reporter’s reporting on Trump rallies and a week or so ago you were outraged a reporter was barred from a WH event🙄

libertybelle added,

Right now @HeidiPryzbyla agree why send all the cameras and correspondents to Trump rallies so he can threaten the media? How about 1 camera network pool?
10:05 PM – 3 Aug 2018

In a likely future scenario, where Trump’s chaotic outbursts escalate, the media and the Left, that yesterday were pontificating about free speech, would likely start touting ways to silence Trump, FOX news or Trump-supporting pundits.  This movement from the Left is already happening with Alex Jones, shadow-banning of conservatives on social media and bans of “undesirables”, as determined by liberals moderating social media platforms.

The solution in America is never to silence unpopular voices, it’s more free speech.

The attacks in this spin info war can digress to a level of pettiness and childishness that boggles my mind.  From Trump’s petty name-calling to attacks about Melania wearing high heels on the plane to Houston flooding to recently some Trump Spin Force commandos started mocking some Never Trump conservatives, like Bill Kristol,who organize annual cruises for their group, by retweeting Kristol’s tweets and commenting with an emoticon of a ship.  This is the level of childishness back and forth. Here’s an example of the depths of Trump sycophants:

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We have been duped into viewing politicians as royalty when our Founders intended them to be only temp public servants. Complaints is not “presidential” are because he acts like one of us-exactly why our Founders fought in Rev War to win independence from royalty

11:37 AM – 16 Aug 2018

“Duped into viewing politicians as royalty” – what the hell kind of nonsense is that???  Really, “he acts like one of us???”  If you’re engaged in petty-name-calling or bragging about grabbing women by their you-know-what, like Trump brags about, you truly are acting like a lowlife jerk.  If acting “presidential” is too high of a bar, how about acting like we expect young children to behave???  Like I said at the beginning of this post, following the spin war on Twitter is draining, but I have been following it, analyzing it, and trying to find a strategy to defeat scorched earth spin information war in America since 1999.

I believe this form of mass media information warfare is a grave threat to our republic.

I think there are numerous Russian front operations embedded among the right-wing punditry and news media. Now, here’s where the Left runs off screaming about “Russian collusion,” but the truth is the Russians and other hostile foreign intel penetrated America’s media, political system and especially American academia controlled by Leftists,  decades ago.  The Soviets found more dupes and fellow-travelers among American academia than they will possibly ever need.  The American Left is awash in brainwashed Marxist, socialists and anti-American zealots.  The entire PC movement reeks of old Soviet propaganda messaging.  I have believed, long before 2016, that our American media and political system were deeply infiltrated by hostile foreign intelligence operators.

The threat from hostile front operations, I believe comes in ways like yesterday, some Trump Spin Force Twitter commandos were tweeting about some CIA failure in regards to Chinese spying during the Obama years news story(to smear John Brennan). That news story was reported in Zero Hedge, a site reported to routinely run Russian propaganda.  What I know about Zero Hedge is during 2016, Drudge Report (a news aggregator with a visually unappealing site, that has outsized political reach in America) removed the site, RedState (a site that had gone very anti-Trump), from its listings and added Zero Hedge.  Zero Hedge “reporting” is often picked up by Trump spinners and on the right.

Another Drudge Report effort occurred over a number of years, before 2016, where Drudge began highlighting stories from Alex Jones’ site.  Drudge worked to mainstream Alex Jones.  Russian agitprop efforts aren’t geared only toward particular elections, they have always been long-term efforts to be a “march through the institutions”.  The Drudge Report leaped onto the American political scene by breaking the Lewinsky scandal

An honest assessment of America’s scorched earth spin war is Trump and his Spin Force are vile liars.  The Dems & Left with the many in the mainstream media spinning for them and constantly working to create hysteria are vile liars too.  And then we have hostile foreign intel operators gleefully working to egg on both sides and agitate wherever they can.

All in all a pretty grim assessment for the future of America’s political institutions and the news media.

I believe the only hope for America is to defeat scorched earth spin information war, which doesn’t rest with Trump or the Left’s #Resist efforts “winning”.  Here’s where we get to my strategic take on the situation.  For spin information warfare to work requires massive amounts of mass media collusion to spread the spin messaging and a gullible, lazy, ill-informed populace, who believe all these lies and mindlessly follow.

A news media committed to strong journalistic ethics and careful, factual reporting would eliminate a large volume of the spin messaging in America.  Politicians benefit from spin, so the chances of them forsaking spin (lying) is probably hopeless.  However, every American has the power to defeat spin messaging in their own lives by recognizing it and not buying into it.  That requires a heaping load of learning to think for yourself and resisting reacting to every hysterical news report or piece of information to flit across your social media feed or TV screen.

Efforts to defeat this scorched earth SPIN information war consuming America’s soul seem like a forlorn hope, but I’m going to continue to be one voice speaking out against the use of SPIN information warfare – that’s the bigger picture battle than the Trump vs. the Left/mainstream media war of words.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Politics, The Media

August 15, 2018 · 11:35 am

American nightmare: Trump the American Insurgent

Trump is using guerilla warfare tactics in an information war.

A recurring theme in America’s presidential reality TV show features the power of the possibility of tapes evoking wild outbursts from Donald J. Trump.  Yesterday, the president unleashed a string of slurs against Omarosa, his wicked witch reality TV creation from his previous career as a reality TV star.

I wrote the above paragraph last night before I went to bed and I think that the probability of tapes existing can be gauged by the extremity of Trump’s denials.  Based on this, I think it’s very likely that a Trump using the n-word tape and a Trump with hookers in Moscow tape might exist, because Trump’s reactions indicate (to me at least) that he acts guilty as hell and is worried he was caught on tape.

Yesterday Trump tweeted:

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When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!

7:31 AM – 14 Aug 2018

This morning I read a piece by Jonathan V. Last at The Weekly Standard, echoing some of my own thoughts about the Trump tape sagas that “dog” Trump’s presidency.  Last explains the Trump spin force:

“The other factor in why you need documentary materials is that the president, his advisers, and his supporters in the media use gaslighting as their primary means of defense. They make frictionless transitions from “no one ever met with Russians,” to “the meeting with Russians was about adoption,” to “of course they met with Russians about getting oppo on the Clintons and why do you have have a problem with that?”

Without tapes, or emails, or hard evidence, Trump World simply denies everything as a matter of course.”

https://www.weeklystandard.com/jonathan-v-last/what-happens-if-a-tape-surfaces-of-trump-using-the-n-word-nothing-good

Many of Trump’s opponents refer to the Trump spin effort as “gaslighting” and that term is accurate, but it misses the scope of what spin really is.  Gaslighting using mass media deception, manipulation, deliberately falsified news is information warfare waged on the American people, as I’ve written many times.  Our domestic scorched earth information war is a bigger threat to America than any hostile foreign information warfare operations will ever be.  Our own news media operators engaging in scorched earth spin information warfare foments constant disunity, partisan rage and hysteria.  America’s news media live in crisis mode and it’s destabilizing our American political system.

Getting back to Trump’s present unwinding tape problem, Last lays out what he thinks will happen if a n-word tape surfaces.  He believes it will hollow out one of the few remaining norms in American public life and alienate Trump politically, but it will not lead to Trump’s impeachment.  He also lays out in pretty grim terms how he believes Trump will react:

“So now we must imagine what a weakened Trump would be like for the next two years. Do you think he’d knuckle down, start acting like a statesman, and try to unite the country? Or do you think he’d push for more chaos and division in the hopes of somehow drawing to an inside straight (again)? Assuming he does, the only possible downside of such a strategy, from Trump’s perspective, would be salting the ground of American political life for any potential successor. And he would view this not as a bug, but as a feature.

If you look at the Trump administration and think it can’t get worse, then you haven’t contemplated what a scorched-earth Trump might be like.”

https://www.weeklystandard.com/jonathan-v-last/what-happens-if-a-tape-surfaces-of-trump-using-the-n-word-nothing-good

What happens if a tape surfaces and Trump faces White House and cabinet defections or goes on a firing rampage and decides to choose staff who prod him to more extreme behavior rather than like many of the current ones who keep trying to talk him down from the ledge?  What happens if instead of Trump just waging an “insurgency” to burn down the GOP, he decides he’s going to take down all of his perceived political enemies?  What happens if he starts turning to only advisers prodding him to “burn it all down in Washington”?  What happens if Putin starts putting the screws to Trump, because Trump made all sorts of agreements in his private meeting with Putin in Helsinki and isn’t delivering on them?

All those campaign spin efforts to sell Trump the “GOP Insurgent” may come back to haunt us.  The one that comes to mind is one I first heard from Charles Hurt, a FOX News contributor and strident Trump propagandist, happily chirping on about how great it is that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules.”   All of the LIES used in spin are used to confuse and manipulate people, but most of all to erode their moral grounding by deliberately altering the meaning of words.  In America, a keystone to our republic’s stability is “Everyone must play by the rules.”  Selling a politician who “doesn’t play by the rules” is unabashedly selling public corruption as a good thing.

Last’s questions, as Omarosa’s tell-all book, Unhinged, sets Trump’s hair on fire, got me thinking about what Trump “unhinged” will look like.  I believe he will abuse the powers of the presidency to the fullest extent, to not only remain in office, but to work to burn as much of the political system in Washington to the ground as possible.  He is very much what Sun Tzu termed a “mad bandit”.  A year ago, I wrote a blog post, Our Thoth, God of 140-characters, about Trump’s propaganda efforts:

“Donald J. Trump is the king of conflating issues  His use of words is the polar opposite of Bill Clinton’s brand of “slick”.  Trump uses simplistic “branding” phrases, often divorced from the rest of the sentences he utters.  The sentences don’t matter in Trump’s dumbed-down, branding type of information warfare.

Trump transformed the Clinton spin information warfare, that relied on carefully worded, focus-group tested talking points, repeated by a vast army of colluding journalists and political operatives, into rapid-fire, Army of One, Trump-driven 140-character, daily information warfare guerilla attacks.

He’s using guerilla warfare tactics in an information war.

Trump word salad attacks break all the rules.  He strikes with bold-faced lies and never looks back. Trump doesn’t even bother to obfuscate.  He boldly lies, then insists all those around him repeat and back his lies, no matter how outrageous the lie.

He has perfected the art of conflating issues into being all about “Make America Great Again”. Trump seized on the issue of NFL players kneeling during the national anthem in protest over racial injustice and conflated it into disrespecting the U.S. military.  He creates endless reality TV conflicts, casting himself as the champion of American patriotism, who is the constantly maligned victim of the dastardly “fake news”. He wants to keep his supporters agitated and angry, while he wraps himself in the American flag and MAGA sound bites.

Yesterday, in his effort to deflect from a reporter questioning why he hasn’t called the families of recently fallen soldiers, Trump bold-faced lied about President Obama and other presidents, claiming they didn’t call fallen soldiers’ families.

General Dempsey, who has tried to stay out of the 2016 information war, took to Twitter last night to counter Trump’s LIE.

Our Thoth, God of 140-characters, manages to manipulate millions, mostly poor white people, by playing to their insecurities, their prejudices and most of all their anger.

The smarter Trump followers aren’t blind to his many flaws, but they’ve bought into a Faustian bargain, all prefaced on the belief that America is at the Flight 93 crisis point:

“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/

At every Trump outrage they cringe, but then they fortify themselves by talking amongst themselves about how the Left is worse, but Gorsuch, and turn up the volume of FOX News blaring about how Trump is “making America great again”.  And of course, the Left leads only to American demise… Trump is the last best hope in their view.

Trump is a “fighter”…

Flight 93 had some real heroes on board; the Trump propaganda train jumped the tracks into tin pot dictator level, Dear Leader, bowing and scraping.

Over the weekend, I walked into the room where my husband was watching FOX News, like always.  Jerry Falwell, Jr. was blathering on about how President Trump will likely go down in history as a great president, as great as President Lincoln.  The FOX  sycophantic hosts are as dutiful as the Pink Lady in North Korea.

They smiled, heads nodding, and agreed with Falwell.

Make America Great Again…”

https://libertybellediaries.com/2017/10/17/our-thoth-god-of-140-characters/

If you want to understand Trump’s spin effort, the bold-faced sentence at the beginning needs to be your starting point, not touchy-feely “public relations” dissertations on political media relations.  Trump assuredly is not a politician, in fact he sees himself as a “fighter who doesn’t play by the rules”.

The Trump presidency won’t end soon… or quietly.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Information War, Politics

August 10, 2018 · 6:01 pm

Looking Westward

“Wherever one found informality, unconventionality, a firm handshake, an open door, a breezy rhetoric, an unrestrained manner, there was the West.”

– Carey McWilliams

With our endless silly, shallow, venal political circus in America, I’ve wandered back to America’s pioneer days this summer.  Of course, I am still keeping an eye on politics, because being an unrepentant news-junkie, going cold turkey away from news just ain’t happening.  Since traveling isn’t possible with my husband still recuperating from VP shunt surgery in June, I’m hitting the trail back to the Old West with my reading.

A while back JK left a comment recommending a David McCullough book, Brave Companions: Portraits in History, so I went ahead and ordered the paperback edition.  Some of the portraits are of people whose names did not even ring a bell, like Alexander von Humboldt, the subject of Chapter One: Journey to the Top of the World and the men behind the Panama Railroad, linking the Atlantic to the Pacific in Chapter Six: Steam Road to El Dorado.  Some were familiar names of famous people, but whom McCullough introduced a whole other dimension to their biography, like Charles Lindbergh, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and Beryl Markham of Kenya, the first woman to fly the Atlantic from east to west, in Chapter Nine: Long Distance Vision.  McCullough explains these 20th century aviation pioneers:

“But most remarkable is how many of them proved to be writers of exceptional grace and vision, authors of more than a score of books.  Lindbergh wrote seven, beginning with We, a hugely popular account of his early life and the Paris flight, which was rushed into print that same year.  Anne Morrow Lindbergh, her husband’s copilot and radio operator on later expeditions, was a diarist and poet, who hardly ever stopped writing.  Her first published book, North to the Orient, described the unprecedented survey flight the couple made in 1931 in a small seaplane from New york to China by the great circle route over Canada and Alaska, touching down in Siberia and Japan.”

p. 126, Brave Companions: Portraits in History, by David McCullough.

This short David McCullough book served as my summer reading jumping off point, as I sat here wondering why I had never read any Conrad Richter novels.  Richter is the subject in Chapter Ten: Cross the Blue Mountain.  I love American pioneer novels, so I have no idea how I missed Conrad Richter.  My love of stories about American pioneers settling in a new land began during the 1970s when America’s bicentennial mania hit.  I read every novel in the John Jakes Bicentennial series about the Kent family.   Around that same time I read Owen Wister’s novel, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains, for the first time and fell in love with the main character, the strong, quiet cowboy, the Virginian. This remains my all-time favorite Western novel.

This McCullough book is how many of my reading adventures begin.  I debated buying Conrad Richter’s 3-novel series, The Awakening Land, but even the kindle versions are $11.99 each and I already have piles upon piles of books and many kindle books that I have not read yet, so a bit of book hoarding guilt set-in.

Near the end of McCullough’s portraits, in Chapter Sixteen: Recommended Itinerary, McCullough offers suggestions of places to visit in America, but he also writes, “Look at people when you travel. Talk to people. Listen to what they have to say.”  That’s advice worth heeding always.  He also advises:

“Or go to a tiny graveyard on the Nebraska prairie north of the little town of Red Cloud and look about until you find a small headstone. It reads “Anna Pavelka, 1869-1955.”

By every fashionable index used to measure success and importance, Anna Pavelka was nobody.  Three weeks ago my wife Rosalee and I were among several hundred visitors who arrived in a caravan of Red Cloud school buses to pay her homage.  Who was she and why did we bother?”

She was born Anna Sadilek in Mizzovic, Bohemia, present-day Czechoslovakia, in 1869, at age fourteen she sailed with her family to America to settle on the treeless Nebraska prairie in a sod hut.  Some time later, in despair over the struggle and isolation of his alien new life, her father killed himself.”

p. 223, Brave Companion: Portraits in History, by David McCullough

As soon as I read that I thought, “she’s My Antonia” and sure enough that’s exactly who Anna Sadilek was.  My Antonia is a pioneer novel written by Willa Cather.  In one of my early blog posts, Survival: The Mind-set, back in 2012, I mentioned  this Cather novel:

 “This novel exemplifies the “put one’s hand to the plough” mentality that separates those who persevere and thrive and those who prefer to wallow in misery.  The young male main character, Jim Burden, narrates the story of moving to early 20th century Nebraska to live with his grandparents, who were early homesteaders.  Jim becomes fascinated with neighboring homesteaders, the Shimerdas,  a family of Bohemian immigrants.  Throughout the story, Jack’s grandmother exemplifies the indomitable American spirit and she’s a testament to planning not just to survive, but to live as comfortably as possible in an unforgiving environment.  The Shimerdas, city-dwellers in their home country, fail to take responsibility for their own survival, necessitating good neighbors to prevent their demise.  In one scene the grandmother packs a hamper to take to the Shimerdas, she offers this line:

‘Now, Jake,’ grandmother was saying, ‘if you can find that old rooster that got his comb froze, just give his neck a twist, and we’ll take him along. There’s no good reason why Mrs. Shimerda couldn’t have got hens from her neighbours last fall and had a hen-house going by now. I reckon she was confused and didn’t know where to begin. I’ve come strange to a new country myself, but I never forgot hens are a good thing to have, no matter what you don’t have.”

Despite the Shimerdas family’s hardships and suffering caused by their parents lack of survival skills, Antonia Shimerda and her siblings (thanks to neighbors and others in their rural Nebraska community), get on the path toward successfully homesteading and thriving in America.”

 Survival: The Mind-set

I picked up my tablet and read Cather’s O’Pioneers, which I already had in my kindle library.  Cather’s pioneer novels,  give life and voice to the unforgiving land, taking it from being just the setting of her stories, to being as alive and vibrant as her human characters.  Then I waffled and ordered the kindle version of Conrad Richter’s short-stories, Rawhide Knots & Other Stories, thinking that I could get a taste for his writing and decide if I want to order some of his novels.  My local library doesn’t have any of Richter’s novels, which made me wonder if he was one of those Pulitzer Prize winners whose work appealed to literary critics more than the general public.  By the fourth short story  I’m already a Richter fan. He captures the harshness of that land too and like Cather,  his female main characters aren’t delicate flowers.  These women, just like the men, are gritty survivors in a new land.

I pulled out my old copy of Lonesome Dove, a truly epic Western by Larry McMurtry, which I read decades ago and might reread that and I also pulled out this old hardback book, A Treasury of Western Folklore, that I picked up in an antique/junk store in Clovis, NM in 2006.  My husband and I had driven to Clovis to visit our son serving in the Air Force, before he deployed to Iraq.  I’ve started skimming through this collection and reading some fascinating bits of trivia and tall tales.  The story about how the Stetson became the most recognizable piece of western attire ranks as an amazing merchandising strategy of a hat-maker, who began sending samples out west to merchants and the orders poured East to John B. Stetson’s hat-making factory in Philadelphia.

Once I tire of the Westerns, it will be time to start hunting down the Lindbergh and Beryl Markham writings.  One slim David McCullough book looks like it will keep me exploring new vistas for quite some time.

… and of course I read close to a dozen historical romance novels this summer too… but even several of those were set in the Old West… Some things never change. Have a nice day!

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Filed under American History, General Interest