Category Archives: General Interest

September 20, 2017 · 11:52 am

2016 never ends

Yesterday, I started a blog post, but by the time I wrote it,  the news was in a tizzy about President Trump’s UN speech.  Another mass media spin cycle spun out of control and  I felt very weary of information warfare.  That is what is going on in America though, so I’ll just go ahead and post this, with a bit added to the end of that post.

People often use the trite Groundhog Day movie analogy, about being stuck reliving the same event over and over, but with the 2016 election, we are stuck being barraged with an endless, boring, spin cycle, in a vicious information war waged by two candidates, the mass media, social media and hostile foreign intelligence.

The Players:

President Donald J. Trump – the “winner” of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is the sorest winner ever.  He continues to battle the media, Hillary Clinton, the GOP, history, facts and often reality.   He is a man intent on using mass media optics to create an American-size Potemkin village, where his image reigns supreme and TVs across America blare with his cheering throngs at rousing rallies, flags flapping in the breeze and his voice roaring on about “making America great again”.  For President Trump everything boils down to his “crowd size”.

Hillary Clinton – the loser of U.S. presidential election still believes she really won the election, making her the sorest loser ever.   She is a woman who blames everyone, except herself, for her loss, all while adding caveats to imply she was a victim of Russian influence, misogyny against strong women and even deplorable white women who didn’t vote for her, due to pressure from the Neanderthal, Trump-supporting men in their lives.

The Mass Media – The mass media played a central role in the 2016 scorched earth information war, because SPIN style information warfare requires mass media collusion to work.  American cable news networks are powerful information warfare fronts in America.  CNN, MSNBC and FOX all ran the Trump “GOP Insurgency Show”, in 2015, giving Trump unprecedented free media, running his “winning in all the polls” talking points messaging and broadcasting his large “crowd size” rallies live and in their entirety.  In early 2016, CNN and MSNBC and the liberal media made a pivot to running the Clinton scorched earth messaging, casting Trump as a fascist, while FOX News remained committed to running 24/7 MAGA propaganda.  Most of the print media and Hollywood aligned with the Clinton spin.

Twitter – As the whole world knows, it’s a social media platform President Trump uses and loves to spread his MAGA spin messages and lob petty attacks on his enemies.   He delights in baiting the media into overreaction with incendiary tweets.   It’s also a social media platform journalists use and love too.  This is where you can watch spin cycles burst into life, with journalists retweeting each other’s hot takes and stories, often with no independent fact-checking and it’s a place where those spun stories get thousands of retweets and the corrections only a handful.  This viral spread of misinformation assures these false stories are believed.  And if that weren’t bad enough, Trump has an army of pundit warriors on Twitter, who work tirelessly to attack the Left, the media and especially Republicans and conservatives, who refuse to get on the Trump train.  The media keep reporting that the Russians have troll and bot information warfare attack teams on Twitter and other social media too.

Foreign Intelligence (especially the “hostile” ones) – Of course, the Russians have received the most media attention in regards to trying to influence the 2016 election, but many other countries, both friends and foes, engage in cyber-activities and mass media information warfare, some of which is directed at America.

What Trump’s punditry cheerleaders, like Conrad Black, are touting as Trump’s “pivot” to Democrats, is really just more Trump scorched earth information warfare, to stick it to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who have the power to kill the Russian investigations.  Trump is trying to soften Pelosi and Schumer with deals on some policy issues, in hopes of getting their cooperation to put the brakes on the #Resist/impeachment frenzy of the Left and to align with them in making Republicans in Congress look impotent.

The mass media liberals are working with the Clinton spinners to rehash the 2016 election with the same old hysterical talking points they have used since Trump won the election – more hysteria about Russian interference in our democracy and how the electoral college is a threat to American democracy…  Hollywood is on the case to investigate the Russian interference in 2016 too, all timed to go along with Hillary’s sore loser book tour.  They’re even rerunning the  lame attacks on the electoral college.  Here’s a Politico story from today: The Electoral College Is a National Security Threat.

FOX News is busily spouting lines that sound like they came direct from the Kremlin,  attacking Mueller and the FBI, to cast doubt on their Russia investigation.  The Trump spinners are escalating their attacks on Republican leaders too,  just as news leaked of the FBI having FISA warrants for Manafort and that the Manafort’s phone calls were monitored last year.

The same old 2016 election mass media information war rages on, burning the integrity of all who engage in it to the ground.   If you participate in spin, which is using mass media to try to dupe the American people with LIES, you destroy your own credibility the most.

It’s easy to get drawn into the partisan spin and to be sucked into spin cycles.  The words used by the politicians and the media are designed to evoke emotional responses within their target audience.  The easiest way to discern the spin and the mass media information warfare messaging is to treat all of their messaging as suspect and then work to identify the various messages, try to track the messages back to the original source using that messaging first, follow the spread of that messaging.  Don’t get sucked into reacting emotionally to any political messaging and treat all news with great scepticism.  Work to try to fact-check and independently verify facts yourself – don’t rely on ‘fact-checkers” in the media or sites that are touted as “fact-checking” sites, because many of them have a partisan political taint to their ‘fact-checking”.

Like I said at the beginning, I’m very weary of this mass media information war that is being waged against the American people!

No one wins in this type of mass media information warfare, because invariably the American people are being fed bigger and bigger lies, the trust in our political system and the news media crumble completely and along with the partisan political information warfare propaganda, America’s enemies keep fanning distrust in American political institutions and floating “ways to fix the problems” in our political system that use deceptively “democratic” language, but which are meant to tear apart our constitutional republic.

Words do matter and you can trust America’s enemies to constantly work to hijack the meanings of words – it’s meant to destroy our ability to think freely (see here, here, here).

As a small side note, I’ve mentioned Stella Morabito’s articles in previous posts and she has a 2015 post with a list of books to read to hack-proof your mind.  I’m reading #2 on her list right now  The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Mind Control, Menticide and Brainwashing by Joost A. M. Meerloo.

Morabito also started a book club about propaganda in April 2017.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, ThatWitch2016, The Media

September 17, 2017 · 9:52 am

Bad title, but great story

Dr. Mary-Claire King, American Cancer Society Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, relates, in very personal terms, her awful week she secured a research grant from the National Institutes of Health in 1981:

The Week My Husband Left And My House Was Burgled I Secured A Grant To Begin The Project That Became BRCA1

The title doesn’t do this amazing story justice.  The story isn’t filled with feminist angst or rage.  It’s filled with honesty about a young doctor and mother, faced with a week of terrible personal crises, who almost made a choice not to show up in Washington to pursue her NIH grant for her BRCA1 research, which has greatly advanced the understanding of breast cancer.  And like all good stories, there are some surprises to make you glad you read it.

 

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Filed under General Interest, Inspirations

September 13, 2017 · 9:57 am

A world without people?

Newsweek has a major scare cover, Who’s Killing America’s Sperm? The story, Male Infertility Crisis in U.S. Has Experts Baffled, delves into a decline in male fertility, not only in America, but throughout most of the world, particularly in the industrialized western world.  The article begins:

“Hagai Levine doesn’t scare easily. The Hebrew University public health researcher is the former chief epidemiologist for the Israel Defense Forces, which means he’s acquainted with danger and risk in a way most of his academic counterparts aren’t. So when he raises doubts about the future of the human race, it’s worth listening. Together with Shanna Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Levine authored a major new analysis that tracked male sperm levels over the past few decades, and what he found frightened him. “Reproduction may be the most important function of any species,” says Levine. “Something is very wrong with men.””

The Newsweek article portends great danger to human existence, a world without people.  Back in February, in a blog post, An extreme feminist Utopia, I wrote a book report, of sorts, on Charles Eric Maine’s  1958 dystopian novel, World Without Men:

“I reject feminism, because it’s not just some benign battle for “fairness” in the workplace or expanding opportunities for women, it’s about tearing down the entire framework of western civilization. Maine’s novel, set 5,000 years into the future, describes a world literally without men. Although sounding totally implausible at first glance, Maine offers snapshot-like short chapters into the past, that lay out frightening events along the way to how this “world without men” came to be. While novels like this aren’t to be taken literally or as prescience for what is to come, like 1984, Maine touched on some issues that are worth thinking about.”

Maine’s novel delves into what a world social order, where only females exist, would be like.  His novel centers on a world where humans, over time, began overproducing females, until males became extinct, except for male genetic material saved in labs around the world.  In Maine’s futuristic world, government-controlled scientists work tirelessly to try to reproduce a living male child, while the female world is indoctrinated into a media fed lie about parthenogenesis, that men became obsolete and unnecessary, with all their endless wars and exploration.  A world without men allowed for an evolution to an orderly, stable world of only women:

The official P.A.S. history teaches:

“There never could have been a Utopia while man survived and controlled human affairs, for his innate aggressiveness and insatiable curiosity forced him restlessly to pursue the ever-widening boundary of knowledge without giving a thought to the application of his newly found powers in the service of humanity.  In abolishing man, nature had opened the way to the permanent establishment of peace and plenty.  Several women scientists had pointed out that man had been necessary to nature’s purpose; he had tackled, with considerable energy and ingenuity, the problem of adapting his environment to himself, and had succeeded in wresting from the blind forces of the cosmos all the power he needed to secure the supremacy and ultimate survival of the human race as an entity.  And at that point man became redundant. Worse he became an obstacle to the wise and peaceful exploitation of natural power for the benefit of his species.  So man ceased to exist, and woman became mistress of her planet, and nature provided parthenogenesis to replace the outmoded reproduction mechanism that had vanished with the male sex.”

p. 35, World Without Men, Maine, Charles Eric

In his fictional novel, the catalyst for Maine’s fake parthenogenesis is the advent of female oral contraceptives, which, over several thousand years, led to human reproduction going haywire, overproducing females and the eventual extinction of males.  Oddly enough, the Newsweek article chronicles a lengthy list of concerns for the decrease in male fertility from obesity to chemicals, but it does not include any mention of female oral contraceptives, as something to look into, even though they dramatically alter female hormones levels and the female reproductive system.  The Newsweek article states:

“Most sperm will never come close to an egg—while a fertile man ejaculates 20 million to 300 million sperm per milliliter of semen, only a few dozen might reach their destination, and only one can drill through the egg’s membrane and achieve conception. The chemical makeup of the vagina is actively hostile to sperm, which can only survive because semen contains alkaline substances that offset the acidic environment. That’s the paradox of sperm counts—although one healthy sperm is enough to make a baby, it takes tens of millions of sperm to beat the odds, which means that significant declines in sperm counts will eventually degrade overall male fertility. Notes Swan: “Even a relatively small change in the mean sperm count has a big impact on the percentage of men who will be classified as infertile or subfertile”—meaning a reduced level of fertility that makes it harder to conceive.”

Of course, the article does offer feminist-tinged agendas about how poor women bear such a burden, “it is women who bear the medical and psychological burden of trying to get—and stay—pregnant”…  Despite, the scare headlines warning that human reproduction is at risk,  there’s nary a mention of the increased use of female oral contraceptives in the Newsweek story and that glaring omission bothers me.  You’d  think that scientists, who are looking for all sorts of causes, even cellphones, BPA and smoking, to explain the drop in fertility, both female and male, perhaps they might add looking into the impact of increased use of oral contraceptives on human reproduction too.

Would looking into the impact of oral contraceptives rock the boat of acceptable scientific inquiry?  I suspect, that although we aren’t living in a “world without men”, we, to include our scientific research, are rigidly controlled by politically correct, feminist-driven conformity.  Is our scientific research ideologically castrated, to be performed only by PC-indoctrinated eunuchs?

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Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought, General Interest, Politics

September 8, 2017 · 5:41 am

Trump’s #CharlottesvilleVendetta

After watching how President Trump and his information warrior army operate since 2015, you’d think most political pundits would understand, not only his information warfare strategy, by now, but also realize that he has no political ideological core, no principles, no concern for understanding details or facts, and is completely driven by his own popularity.   What makes Donald J. Trump look great matters most.

So, when Trump met with McConnell, Ryan, Schumer and Pelosi Wednesday and stabbed Republicans in the back, by agreeing to Schumer and Pelosi’s deal, the political punditry broke down two ways.  The Trump information warriors, his loyal Carvillian spinmeisters, who have spun  Trump as “great”, “the magnificent builder”, “doesn’t play by the rules”, and most of all “winning”, naturally began spinning this deal as wonderful, but many other political pundits seemed dazed and confused again.  The reaction was sort of  “what the heck just happened?”.

Once again, they are making the mistake of thinking of Trump in American democratic political norms.  He is not really a Republican or a Democrat; he’s a puffed up, pampered prince, our own Peter III, who is used to getting his own way.  If it feeds his image and therefore his ego, all is well.   This is why he doesn’t care about policy, only watching TV and talking about his popularity (crowd size).  His other consuming concern is shutting down the Russia investigation.  He wants to make sure he is not impeached.

The Trump/Schumer/Pelosi deal was Trump’s  #CharlottesvilleVendetta in action.  Any Republicans who spoke out against him after Charlottesville will be targeted  for destruction by Trump and his sleazy political operatives.  Ryan and McConnell are at the top of Trump’s hit list, because they could be very influential in killing the Russian investigation.  This has nothing to do with moving the so-called Trump political agenda, which really was just a bunch of jingoistic flag-waving, “America First”, xenophobic tirades to galvanize his base.

He will rally, and repeat that performance, as often as necessary, to keep his 5th Avenue Loyalists marching in lockstep.  Seriously, he will revert to his large rallies, even if he has to hire a crowd to project a great “crowd size”.

Trump’s spinmeisters are spinning this deal as Ryan’s fault and that will be a recurring theme from now on.  Trump’s spinners will target Ryan and McConnell.  Since Trump has Fox News as a 24/7 propaganda channel, his spin will likely work with his 5th Avenue Loyalists.  They believe not what he says or does (don’t take him literally; but take him seriously).  They believe in Trump the “Great”.

Republicans, who are not on the Trump train, would be wise to realize that Trump is not a Republican and the GOP is no longer the Republican party.  That party was burned to the ground.  When the Trump train kept touting Trump’s “GOP Insurgency”, well, believe it.  He did not want to become a Republican; he wanted the party to become Trumpian.  And it has.  His sleazy information warriors will say anything to prop him up and lie, lie, lie.  They make the Clinton spinmeisters look like amateurs.  Ryan, McConnell and other Republicans, who aren’t Trump loyalists, should start dealing with Trump like he is the enemy, because he is.   Trump will work tirelessly to destroy anyone who hurts his feelings.

Where this Trump train stops is anyone’s guess.  The one thing I am certain of is it leads to an abandonment of American principles of decency and fair play.  There’s nothing good about using mass media information warfare against the American people, no matter who is doing it.

And one short blog note: My area is under a mandatory evacuation this weekend, so I won’t be blogging for several days. We are packing up.

 

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Politics

September 1, 2017 · 3:44 pm

More paper junk

Warning, warning, this is a crafting post, so escape while you can, if you thought you were going to read a political post.

Above are three traveler’s notebook inserts I made with lined paper for my youngest daughter.  The middle one has some iron-on fabric appliques that are clearance junk I bought at Walmart years ago.   I used tacky glue to attach them.

In my ongoing effort to use scrapbook paper, craft supplies, even old calendars I’ve kept, this “junk journaling” effort is turning into a fun hobby.   When my kids were young, I began the habit of keeping old calendars, because calendar pictures are really great to use in a lot of kids craft projects.  I still have a Strawberry Shortcake and a Holly Hobbie calendar, and I recently used some pictures from a Minnie Mouse calendar to cover plain, 50 cent composition books for my granddaughters.

Years ago, when my granddaughters were little, I found a project in a book, Trash to Treasure (psst, book was a yard sale purchase), for making children’s sewing cards.   I had looked online and in stores for some pretty sewing cards, without much luck. The sewing cards I found were very ugly images, so I bought a puppy and a kitten calendar on clearance, long after the new year, at a local Dollar General store.  I made bunches of very cute sewing cards for my granddaughters and also for some friends at work to give to their young children.

Sewing cards have gone out of style, I guess, but truly they were great for little girls and boys to work on manual dexterity.  My mother sat my oldest daughter on the floor with a stack of magazines when she was a very young toddler.  She handed my daughter a pair of children’s scissors and told her she could cut out pictures.   I told my Mom that she was just making a mess and my mother told me I was missing the point, which was my daughter was learning how to handle scissors and improving her manual dexterity.  By the time my daughter got to kindergarten she was a professional at cutting out images neatly, even around complicated curves.

My youngest daughter was even better with scissors, because when she was a toddler we were living in Germany and I enrolled her in the German kindergarten in our village.   Those teachers handed the little children sharper scissors and taught them Scherenschnitte cutting.  At one of their parent/teacher nights they had a class for parents to learn Scherenschnitte to make a Christmas ornament.  I had my preschool daughter explaining to me that the trick is to move the paper, not your scissors.   Try cutting out images on paper with  some sharp curves and notice the difference it makes if you move the paper instead of trying to move your scissors.

These are some small scrap paper note pads and a traveler’s notebook insert for me.   The patriotic images are from my 2011 lovely, large wall calendar, Long May She Wave.  I used the small images from the back cover of the calendar for this insert.  The center image is a WWI rallying poster with an Army Corps nurse at the Liberty Bell, raising the flag.  There are soldiers marching off to war, with the Statue of Liberty in the background.  Someday I might frame the large print of this image and put it in my “I love America” room.

The other night I was just playing at my craft desk and looking through a stack of old calendars, so I cut up my 2002 Provence calendar, which had lovely photos by Mark Downey.  I turned the calendar cover into a soft cover.  I used the other calendar pictures, with the addition of some other papers, to make this thin junk journal.   I think this calendar was just a dollar store calendar.

This is my latest project, another junk journal made with a cereal box cover.  The picture is a Monet print from my 2005 wall calendar, which I glued onto the cereal box cover.  I printed out a Monet quote I found online and added it to the cover.  Then I coated the cover with 4 coats of matte finish Mod Podge to seal it.  I might add a ribbon to tie around it or add more embellishments to the cover.

The spine is covered in scrapbook paper and sewn with the 5-hole pamphlet stitch.

There are 3 signatures, with a good bit of room to grow, so that once I start adding embellishments and paper ephemera, it won’t get too bulky.

The good thing is I haven’t gone out and bought anything new while making these.

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Filed under General Interest

August 31, 2017 · 1:37 pm

How To Defeat Scorched Earth Information Warfare

Every American has the power to help defeat scorched earth information warfare.  It doesn’t take military might, new laws to restrict the media or trying to shut down free speech.

Stop being a participant in the scorched earth information warfare.

Don’t be a participant in engaging in scorched earth information warfare and learn to recognize it and not fall for it.

Here’s my battle plan to defeat scorched earth information warfare:

The best thing leaders can do is pull our politics back from the extremes, condemn violence by fringe kooks on the extreme ends and work to find ways to build a few bridges between the virulent partisan factions, that are our two major political parties.

The drumbeat that we are approaching a civil war or that our political system is on the verge of collapse may feed the scorched earth partisans, but it does nothing to fix anything that is wrong in America.

I think what everyone should be doing is work to bolster The Constitution and that means respecting the results at the ballot box. I think people should be working to try to get Trump to rein in the scorched earth, quit the crazy reality TV presidency show, and buckle down and do the job.

Trump’s “war against the media” isn’t happening in a vacuum. Much of the media, the Clinton political machine and many factions on the Left are working tirelessly waging a scorched earth information warfare campaign to #Resist, which is a euphemism for overturn the results of a legal election, by any means necessary.

The best thing the news media could do is take a long, hard look at their news reporting operations & strive to get back to “who, what, when, where, why and how” reporting rather than rushing to retweet the latest “hot take” or editorializing in hard news reporting.  Trust is earned and every time reporters leap into retweeting or running news stories that aren’t true, they erode the trust Americans have in their reporting.

Those entrusted with safeguarding our nation’s most sensitive information should quit with the endless leaking of intel, to try and destroy Trump.

This endless scorched earth information warfare is a serious national security threat, in my opinion.  Many of America’s foreign adversaries are working to foment chaos in this ongoing scorched earth information war, because a divided, chaotic, dysfunctional American political system and the constant visuals of America in chaos feed their political objective of taking down America.

Our elected officials in Washington should spend more time buckling down and finding bi-partisan solutions, to fix many of our nation’s problems, rather than regurgitating partisan talking points and rushing for photo-ops to get attention.

It would be very bad for our republic, if President Trump was impeached over frivolous charges and I am very dubious about that “unfit” gambit under the 25th. Trying to contain the damage he does as a loose cannon, while trying to teach him some restraint (tall order there) would be better for our constitutional order than to have a president ousted, basically by a massive media campaign and unpopular polls numbers.  Poll numbers should never substitute for the ballot box in America, especially in light of the massive information warfare used to generate manufactured public opinion (creating opinion cascades).

If Mueller finds things that warrant impeachment; he should send that information to Congress.

If there aren’t any grounds to impeach him, America will survive a bad president. We’ve survived others.

And most of all, more Americans need to read more and think more, before falling for media-generated outrage and hysteria or leaping onto the bandwagon of these media-driven hot button issues. Quit falling for these media-generated contentious topics that the media punditry and social media spread under the guise of “national conversations”.

What America really needs is more citizens talking to their neighbors and within their own communities, to find solutions for most of the problems within their own communities.  They also need to work to get to know each other.   The putrid punditry fueling anger, distrust and hate, from the partisan fringes poisons our politics.

Everyone should work to promote respect and civility in the public square.

To quote Maya Angelou, a poet, whose poetry I don’t care for at all, but who sure had some memorable quotes that speak the truth:

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but it has not solved one yet.”

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Filed under American Character, Civility, Corrupt Media Collusion, Culture Wars, General Interest, Politics, The Constitution, The Media

August 24, 2017 · 2:10 pm

All leadership boils down to trust.

Last week, President Trump retweeted a meme about General Pershing, which according to military historians is not true:

  
More

Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!

11:45 AM – 17 Aug 2017
Alex Horton, a reporter at the Washington Post, writes:

“Brian M. Linn, a history professor at Texas A&M University, did just that nearly two decades ago when he published “Guardians of Empire,” a book on the U.S. military presence in Asia from 1902 to 1940.

His verdict on Trump’s claim?

“There is absolutely no evidence this occurred,” he told The Washington Post.

“It’s a made-up story. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times people say this isn’t true. No one can say where or when this occurred.”

But Trump’s claims, and the wider belief in a routinely debunked story, have far-reaching effects. Not only is the story untrue, but the convenient twist — of an insurgency defeated only with the use of brutal war tactics — points to precisely the opposite lessons Pershing and his troops learned in the Philippines campaign from 1899 to 1913, Linn said.

“The U.S. military learned escalating counterterrorism was not effective, and they took great steps, including Pershing, to de-escalate,” Linn said.”

Trump said to study General Pershing. Here’s what the president got wrong.

President Trump loves to sound “tough”, so it’s no surprise he’d latch onto this “committing war crimes to defeat terrorists” myth.   This myth is the distillation of his conviction that the US military should murder ISIS family members to scare ISIS terrorists into submission, his “become terrorists to defeat terrorists strategy”.

Atrocities do happen in most wars, I believe, and often when one side employs a brutal tactic or a newer weapon, the other side often decides to do the same.   In World War I, weapons of mass destruction entered the battlefield, first with tear gas, but escalated, as all major belligerents worked to develop more lethal and effective gases, despite being signatories to the agreements that use of these weapons was a war crime:

“The use of poison gas performed by all major belligerents throughout World War I constituted war crimes as its use violated the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases and the 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare, which prohibited the use of “poison or poisoned weapons” in warfare.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_I

General Pershing deserves to be remembered as one of America’s finest generals, not as a war criminal.  He revolutionized the American military during WWI, when he commanded the American Expeditionary Forces.   He went to war without an army, because the American peacetime army had been reduced to a few scattered regiments.  His innovations and relentless pursuit of solutions to complex logistical and tactical problems should be required reading for American military officers.  He defied bureaucracy at every turn, always striving to tackle every obstacle. He dedicated his life to not only leading soldiers, but taking care of his soldiers.  And above all else, General Pershing believed in a stringent code of conduct for all soldiers to follow.  He was not a ruthless killer; he was an American soldier dedicated to serving and protecting America.

General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing is an American hero worth remembering.

I intend to write more about General Pershing in future posts, because we could all learn a great deal about what selfless service means, by studying his leadership example.

President Trump is not the only American to fall for internet myths, fake news, garbled history, fabrications, hoaxes and scams.  Almost everyone who consumes news and information online has fallen for information, that was not true.  For instance, I read news at the Conservative Treehouse, seeing it mentioned in a list of conservative blogs.  The site uses Breitbart wallpaper, imagery of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Biblical quotes to lure people into believing it’s just a conservative site. I now believe it’s a Russian front operation.  I read some information there a few years ago and was fascinated trying to understand their crowdsourcing method for acquiring information.   Their two big topics were exposing the lies about black violence and Islamist terrorism.  I was banned from their site for trying to post a comment about the Islamic Golden Age, and countering some woman, who claimed I was aiding the enemy and touting Islamists. The historical fact is there really was an Islamic Golden Age and Islamic culture was far more advanced in the sciences than Europe, during that time.  My comment was blocked and I was banned, but they allowed and encouraged racist comments.  That site became Trump Polling Central during the 2016 campaign.

I mentioned my concerns about Drudge in previous posts.   Like millions of other political junkies, I started following Drudge during the Clinton impeachment scandal.  In recent years, Drudge started mainstreaming loon, Alex Jones, by featuring Jones’ stories.  Drudge also sensationalized conspiracy stories, like linking Ted Cruz’ father to JFK’s assassination, to destroy Ted Cruz.   Numerous times he headlined unflattering photos of Trump’s opponents.  On one occasion he headlined photos of Hillary, casting her as decrepit or another occasion, he ran photos of her casting her as a drunk.  The oddest thing I noticed on Drudge during the 2016 election was he removed his link to RedState, which went NeverTrump, from his list of links, and replaced it with Zero Hedge.  I’ve seen numerous articles alleging Zero Hedge is a Russian front operation, that recycles Russia Today propaganda.

The scope of Russian front operations online, their troll armies in comment sections to attack and silence anyone not on the Trump train, melded with Trump’s American sleaze operators, like Roger Stone, Peck at the National Enquirer, Richard Mercer’s Trump data operation, and Trump’s largest agitation propaganda front, Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News.

I know I have fallen for things online that turned out to be untrue, believed sites were reliable news and weren’t, but I am not making critical national security decisions, like President Trump.  I’m a homemaker, who writes a blog.

To improve the quality of the information that the president sees, General Kelly is working to institute policies that assure the president sees only vetted information:

“Confronted with a West Wing that treated policymaking as a free-for-all, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly is instituting a system used by previous administrations to limit internal competition —and to make himself the last word on the material that crosses the president’s desk.

It’s a quiet effort to make Trump conform to White House decision-making norms he’s flouted without making him feel shackled or out of the loop. In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide — White House staff secretary Rob Porter, a little-known but highly regarded Rhodes Scholar who overlapped with Jared Kushner as an undergraduate at Harvard — will review all documents that cross the Resolute Desk.”
Kelly moves to control the information Trump sees

President Trump has shown a preference for relying on word-of-mouth information from his friends and sycophants. General Kelly is trying to provide President Trump with fully vetted information, to aid in the president’s decision-making.  Whether he succeeds at weaning Trump off his penchant for trusting in unvetted internet stories remains to be seen. President Trump believes the American intelligence community, who vets that intelligence information, can’t be trusted, .  It’s worth remembering that several months ago President Trump cited Russian reports as factual to back up his assertions about Russian collusion.  He relied on Russian reports, but believes the American intelligence community is the nefarious “Deep State” out to get him.

Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent, whose identity was leaked several years ago, has initiated a crowdsourcing effort to raise money to buy Twitter and kick President Trump off of Twitter.  This is a ridiculous and pointless effort.  He has the bully pulpit  of the presidency and has endless ways to get his message across.  Beyond that, although I believe it would be better for the country if President Trump got off of Twitter, he is free to make that decision himself.  He obviously believes that his tweet war against the media is helping him “win”.  He deliberately tweets to incite the media and his political enemies, who without fail, rush into a spinning frenzy of moral outrage and retweeting rushed stories, many which fall apart quickly.  This aids him in convincing his followers that he is a victim of a vast conspiracy.

Every time he gets the media and his political enemies to overreact, he feels that is a win. Contrary to President Trump’s assertion that he likes to get the facts, he goes on instinct rather than a careful study of facts and he is very sloppy at presenting detailed information.  None of that matters, because Roger Stone and the other sleazy political strategists behind President Trump came up with his strategy to win in 2016 and they are behind this MAGA 2.0 strategy.  Trump doesn’t understand the details, but he is masterful at the stagecraft and acting the part of a populist flamethrower.

There will be plenty more scorched earth attacks on Trump’s enemies – the media, Republicans, Democrats, or anyone who gets in the way of the Trump train agitation propaganda blitzkrieg.  Roger Stone is back to issuing veiled threats of violence and blood in the streets, to intimidate Republicans into submission again:

“But if the president is impeached, Stone says, there could be disastrous repercussions.

“You will have a spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection like you’ve never seen!” Stone warned. “Both sides are heavily armed.”

“This is not 1974,” Stone explained. “The people will not stand for impeachment.” This, of course, refers to Richard Nixon‘s resignation after the Watergate scandal. Stone worked in the Nixon administration in the Office of Economic Opportunity.

Stone didn’t just predict violence among the public. He said that those in Washington who would support impeachment would be placing themselves at risk.

“A politician who votes for it would be endangering their own life,” he said.

“I’m not advocating violence,” he clarified, “but I’m predicting it.””

https://lawnewz.com/video/roger-stone-anyone-who-votes-for-impeachment-would-be-endangering-their-own-life/

These Trump train thugs, like Stone, want more violence, they especially want the crazies on the left  and right to get more violent.  Most of all they want to intimidate, by using fear.  President Trump will be out there stirring up his base, along with his FOX News army of propagandists, telling Americans that Trump will not put up with violence and he will be tough on crime.

The best defense against Trump train intimidation and fear mongering is to not be afraid.  Don’t back down from threats of violence.  Unite in encouraging civil debate, calm, respect for all Americans and most of all respect for the rule of law.

We should all work tirelessly to pull all Americans away from the partisan extremes.

In the end America’s future does not rest on General Kelly’s ability to rein in Trump, or the media reporting, or getting Trump off of Twitter; it will rest on who the American people choose to trust and follow.

All leadership boils down to trust.

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August 23, 2017 · 2:34 pm

Trump launches MAGA 2.0 campaign

President Trump began his reinvigorated Make America Great Again 2.o propaganda campaign this week.  It’s sure to be more vicious than the 2016 campaign.

President Trump does have a strategy to defeat his political enemies, using mass media manipulation, but it is one that will further divide the country and lead to more violence in the streets.  He wants that violence in the street by Leftists, so he can rally for crackdowns and solidify his support for “tough” law enforcement.  Last night’s Phoenix rally, where he shamelessly lied about his Charlottesville statements, glaringly omitting his “many sides” equivocation, juxtaposed to his using the backdrop of Fort Myers and an audience of soldiers for his “acting presidential” speech, the night before, was just a prelude to his new and invigorated campaign to destroy his enemies.

He wants to bolster his support among soldiers.  He wants to rally support among the military using the generals around him, so expect to see him use more military backdrops for appearances, where he can cheer on the troops and tell them he is with them.  The US military is a captive audience to any president.  They can’t disrespect the commander-in-chief.

He wants the media and his political enemies to attack him.

Igniting racial strife over divisive racial issues, is part of his plan.  Expect to see more black pundits popping up on FOX and other Trump media fronts.  His media operation is using black pundits and black people in memes to convince people he’s not racist and to try and counter the fall-out from his Charlottesville comments. Memes with black people supporting Trump over his Charlottesville comments are already circulating on facebook – using the same equivocation Trump used.   I expect his online troll armies to return in force too.

I hope the generals in his administration stay, to work to persuade the president from his loose cannon tendencies and the last thing America needs is more Bannon/Gorka types nearby egging on this president in his “slash and burn insurgency politics”.  Sadly, many Americans don’t read much and think even less.  He will still have a large base of supporters.

President Trump loves to mention the generals around him and he borrows their honor as his own.  I believe he is a coward at heart.  If the president was not a wealthy, pampered, spoiled egotist, he would likely be one of those “stolen valor” scumbags, whom I detest.  His followers look at those generals and believe that if they are supporting him, he must be great.

My son came up with the best historical figure to compare President Trump to –  Peter III, minus the Prussian uniforms. I think there are many similarities in their personalities, except ours is not an idiot and even more concerning is ours has many wealthy backers, understands mass media propaganda and has millions of American citizens, who do not read history, do not think, and who are mindless followers, led by pop culture icons, celebrities and mass media propaganda.

Considering how much Trump can’t stand women making him look small, Peter III is a good comparison, because Peter III was outclassed and outmaneuvered in his power struggle by a woman, his wife, Catherine The Great.  Unlike Trump, she really was a “great” historical figure (one of my favorite female historical figures too).  And unlike Trump, she studied government policy, she read history and she had real leadership skills.  She paid attention to the details.   I doubt America will resurrect any statues to President Trump or call him a “great” leader, once his presidency is over.

President Trump knows exactly what he is doing, he planned that rally and he planned exactly what he was going to say. My son, who came up with the Peter III comparison, and I have had many discussions over the years about The Constitution and one of the things I have often mentioned was that sometimes I think America would be much better with the office of the President being separate from the duties of the commander-in-chief.   The very argument made for a President to be able to act swiftly in a time of crisis was my argument for why, in a nuclear age, we should have the duties of commander-in-chief vested in a person, who has the credentials, military background, resumé and calm temperament to carry out those duties. I would prefer the nuclear codes in the hands of military leaders who have demonstrated their trustworthiness, by decades of dedicated service to our country.  I would prefer an additional office, whereby Congress and the President must confer before using military force, especially a nuclear strike, and then a separate commander-in-chief has responsibility for carrying out those decisions.   Of course, I understand the opposing arguments to my position.

The Founding Fathers trusted that Americans would choose wise, moral leaders.  That trust was misplaced.

After Trump’s 70+ minute rally last night, where he fixated on relitigating his Charlottesville statements, attacked his enemies and went full scorched earth, the media reacted as usual – overreaction.  James Clapper went Pelosi about Trump’s mental stability, but that will help Trump.  Trump and all his spinners will spin Clapper as a Democrat hack, which to a large extent – he is.

Not engaging with Trump or Trump Derangement hysteria and avoiding escalation in rhetoric is probably the best course of action – ignore his efforts to incitement.  Speak to unity and calming people down. Ignoring him, dismissing him or treating him like a child throwing a tantrum is probably the best course.  I doubt the media or the Left will do that.

During the Obama administration, due to his political ideology, I did not trust President Obama’s judgment on military matters.   I don’t trust President Trump’s temperament when making decisions.  However, I do agree with President Trump’s new strategy on Afghanistan and I am glad he listened to the generals around him.  The risks to national security with pulling out and handing Afghanistan to the jihadists are far greater than staying.  Like many complex geopolitical issues, there are no easy solutions for the larger civilizational challenge of the rise of Islamic imperialism, Islamic radicalism, or whatever term you choose to use for this phenomenon, by a segment of Islamic world,  rejecting modernity and embracing terrorism and religious extremism.  We can’t decide the Islamic world’s future, but we must do what we can to protect American national security interests, at home and abroad, no matter how long it takes.

Americans, at the ballot box, decided our future was better getting behind President Trump rather than Hillary Clinton.  I left the top of my ballot blank in 2016.  I still believe both were choices I could never support.

The most important thing all Americans can do is support The Constitution.

The #Resist movement set out to overturn a legitimate election before President Trump’s inauguration.   That movement will gain many more supporters, as Trump ramps up his scorched earth campaign against the media, the Left, Republicans in Congress and anyone who crosses him.  The calls for impeachment or using the 25th Amendment mechanism to remove him from office will grow.

I don’t support impeaching him or removing him from office, unless there are solid grounds to do so.  Watching his reprehensible attacks on people, the vicious name-calling, the bold-faced lying and shameless manipulation, I wonder when he will cross the line for many of his followers?  Many religious leaders still sit idly by his side, as he engages in his petty name-calling and lying.   They still support him and praise him as a “great” leader.  Sadly, I believe that many of his followers are so trapped in binary thinking and rabid partisanship, that they would follow him, even if he did shoot someone on 5th Avenue.   I suspect many of them would rationalize that the person deserved it.

America is in for a very rocky 3.5 years.

I expect a lot more violence.

Once the smouldering ashes from President Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again 2.0” die out,  I hope Americans can find a way back to being the United States of America.

 

 

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August 17, 2017 · 1:02 pm

America desperately needs moral guidance

One of the worst aspects about “civil wars” is that the political divides often get down to tearing people’s most personal relationships apart too.  Lifelong friendships and even families can be sundered when people feel compelled to choose sides in civil wars.  Few people can maintain neutrality or as my one son says, in most family disputes, “I’m Switzerland on this!”

During the 2016 campaign, many articles reported about the election causing friction and angry disputes within many American families, as the extremely contentious choice between Trump or Hillary began to be hyped as an existential election for America’s future.

Throughout history there have been many of these stories and the American Civil War is rife with stories of the painful “brother against brother” personal tragedy.  During the American Revolution, one of the most famous American founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, and his son, William, who remained loyal to the British crown, severed their relationship over their political divides during the American Revolution:

“On his way back to Philadelphia, Franklin stopped in Rhode Island to meet his sister, Jane Mecom, and take her home with him. The carriage ride through Connecticut and New Jersey was a delight for both Jane and Franklin. The good feelings were so strong that they were able to overcome any political tensions when they made a brief stop at the governor’s mansion in Perth Amboy to call on William. It would turn out to be the last time Franklin would see his son other than a final, tense encounter in England ten years later.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/benjamin-franklin-joins-the-revolution-87199988/#fUU7xOxf8f3vUMLQ.99
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The 2016 election divided the country between left and right, but Donald Trump divided the Republican Party and conservatives with his scorched earth “GOP Insurgency”, in ways that the ashes are still smoldering.

Trump’s divisive “GOP insurgency” tactic melded with his strong-arm rhetoric and vicious online mobs (some alleged to be Russian trolls) leading gang-up attacks on conservative sites’ comment forums left the Republican Party fractured and bleeding. Among the conservative punditry circle, many of these divides have led to the destruction of longtime friendships and have been played out in public.  Bill Kristol and Tucker Carlson are engaged in one now.

I’ve written about experiencing the troll gang-up tactics when commenting on some conservative sites, being called a slut and much worse, and I wrote about a night where I was reading the Disqus comments at National Review Online, for a Jonah Goldberg article, when the Disqus comment forum was taken over by people spewing neo-nazi and reprehensible anti-Semitic comments.  That night, the mob of neo-nazis, who were also Trump supporters, had figured out a way to hijack forum moderators’ names, so they were posting their hateful garbage using moderators’ names.  You could check the user profile and see these were new profiles with hardly any comments.  This attack went on for hours, as National Review moderators worked to delete those comments and ban that mob.

David French, a conservative pundit at National Review, and many Jewish reporters and writers experienced receiving threats, but so did some of their families.  I never considered supporting Donald Trump, because his personal behavior is antisocial, where his “he’s a fighter” ethos amounts to juvenile, vicious name-calling and insults,  but even worse he rallies, figuratively and literally, to encourage mob violence.  That is a fact.

Megyn Kelly asked him a question at a debate in August 2015.  What followed was a concerted campaign led by Donald Trump, to destroy her career and encourage his friends in the media to trash her personally.  He personally asked Roger Ailes to remove her as a debate moderator and he waged an 8 month campaign, publicly urging his followers not to watch her show.   Megyn Kelly’s family was threatened.  Donald Trump waged his 8 month campaign to destroy her, because she dared to ask him a question he thought was “unfair”.

David French, a conservative writer at National Review, wrote about what happened to his family from gung-ho Trump supporters:

“I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement

Donald Trump and his mouthpieces always lie and say he never encouraged violence, but he did – many times.  During several rallies he urged his followers to punch protesters.  There is plenty of video footage of him doing it.

Why I think it’s important not to lose sight of the real issue about Donald Trump’s moral character is because his performance Tuesday and the smokescreen, about preserving history and “aren’t monuments beautiful”, isn’t the issue.

The issue is the President of the United States gave cover to vile neo-nazis and deliberately mixed a few facts to bolster that lie.

In light of Trump’s some “fine people on both sides” comment on Tuesday and his insistence that the neo-nazis were in Charlottesville to peacefully protest about monuments, it’s important to not lose sight of those “fine people” Donald Trump was talking about.  Here is John Podhoretz’s tweet with their “Unite the Right” poster for the march of “fine people”:

The speakers are a Who’s Who of white supremacists.  Here’s how Robert Tracinski, at The Federalist,  explains:

“Aside from the blatant Nazi style of the imagery, it includes a roster of headliners chosen from various white nationalist groups. So this was a Nazi march from the beginning, planned by Nazis, for Nazis. As to whether any hapless moderates strolled in there thinking this was just about the statue—well, I live in this area and used to be active in the local Tea Party group. I know people who are not white nationalists who oppose the removal of the statues based on high-minded ideas about preserving history. None of them were there, and if they had been, they would have bolted the moment they saw a bunch of guys with torches chanting “Blood and soil.”

What’s truly shocking is that Trump refers twice to “the night before,” that is, to the rally Friday night, before the deadly clash on Saturday, as evidence that some of the protesters weren’t white nationalists. But Friday night was the notorious Citronellanacht, the march with all those tiki-torch-wielding marchers yelling “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.””

http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/16/donald-trump-needs-to-not-be-president-yesterday/

Yes, there were violent anti-fascists at Charlottesville and yes, I am concerned about preserving our history, although for me, I believe in federalism, so with most of these monuments, the decisions should be left up to the cities and states. With those on federal property, a peaceful, thoughtful debate should take place and a decision rendered.  For anyone to believe these tiki-torch wielding neo-nazis parading through Charlottesville represent preserving American history and values, we hold dear, is reprehensible. President Trump gave them legitimacy and cover.

America would be better off if everyone cared more about our moral foundation and principles as a nation than about jumping on the bandwagon of hot button causes.  The idiocy and moral vacuum are stunning.  In Berkeley, Yvette Felarca, a middle school teacher no less, is facing three charges:

“The charges stem from a June 2016 fight at the state capitol.

Felarca’s group, By Any Means Necessary, was protesting against a white nationalist group.

A video shows Felarca repeatedly punching a man.

The man had both hands up, walking to a line of police officers for help.

Felarca and others dragged the man down and kicked him.”

Here’s Felarca’s defense from the same article:

“Felarca said, “Standing up against fascism and the rise of Nazism and fascism in this country is not a crime. We have the right to defend ourselves.””

 http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08/10/berkeley-teacher-filmed-punching-neo-nazi-arraigned-sacramento/

There have been protests against white supremacists, breaking out around the country, with people wearing, “Punch a Nazi” shirts.  That you don’t have a right to punch other people, because you disagree with what they believe  is a simple, fundamental moral construct for civil society.   The scarier thought is this woman is a teacher and she’s got supporters protesting on her behalf.

President Trump fails the moral leadership test, but so many on the Left do too.  President Obama always couched the BLM and attacks on police officers with comments about, “we need to understand their pain”, giving the same kind of cover and legitimacy to people who engage in violent, criminal conduct.

Civil society depends on leaders, who will stand up and speak clearly to who we are as an American people.

President Obama was an expert at framing everything as “this is not who we are”, fueling racial animus by giving cover to violence committed in the name of  civil rights. President Trump is fighting out of petty spite and vanity.  He believes:

“When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.  Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye.”

Be paranoid.  I know this observation doesn’t make any of us sound very good, but let’s face the fact that it’s possible that even your best friend wants to steal your spouse and your money.”

p. 138, Trump: How To Get Rich, by Donald J. Trump

I prefer the affirmative form of leadership, leading by clear moral example and setting the standard.  Treat everyone with respect and work to develop some core values.  I was raised with Christian values.  If you don’t want religious values, here are some excellent secular ones to set you on the path to being a good citizen:

In short, the Seven Core Army Values listed below are what being a Soldier is all about.
  • Loyalty. Bear true faith and allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Army, your unit and other Soldiers. …
  • Duty. Fulfill your obligations. …
  • Respect. …
  • Selfless Service. …
  • Honor. …
  • Integrity. …
  • Personal Courage.

https://www.army.mil/values/

 

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August 17, 2017 · 1:22 am

A very excellent opinion piece

Here’s a link to a very thoughtful piece by David Brooks, How To Roll Back Fanaticism, which ran in the New York Times on August 15, 2017.  I meant to post this, but the ensuing Trump commotion sidetracked me.

 

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