Category Archives: General Interest

February 29, 2016 · 12:17 pm

Black helicopters or thatwitch2016 circling?

Time for another LB conspiracy theory re-run on Trump, the media Svengali, who can singlehandedly, through his unparalleled media savvy and brilliance, push the Overton window and lead the media and GOPe elites by the nose.  It’s all a contrived set-up and a bunch of bunkum.

A good chunk of Trump’s followers were fans from watching his reality TV show, which he augmented by attracting the most virulent racists and bottom-feeders, the low-information voters and that portion of the GOP most angry about GOP establishment duplicity, through the brilliant use of a slick leftist propaganda technique – mass media saturation and manufacturing an opinion cascade via endless repetition of buzz words, key phrases, but most of all the “winning in every poll” mantra. That got him to the 20-30% range of the GOP base that he hung at for months.

Rather than him owning the media, it looks to me, that the media colluded to create these endless Trump mini-dramas, which allow him to get the free air time in the news cycles. The media and punditry, who control the Overton window put a great deal of effort into promoting Trump, because frankly, the media overwhelmingly wants a Hillary in the White House and the corollary is this “insurgent campaign” narrative creates an endless agitprop script, which easily boosts ratings and makes them money. It’s a win/win for the mainstream media to promote Trump now.

I am sticking to my own conspiracy theory based on watching the Clinton political machine operate since the 1990s and personally knowing how far they will go to win. My Messages of mhere story tabbed on my home page, while written in a snarky, light, third person manner, replete with cutesy names like thatwitch2016 (pseudonyms) is the truth – it did happen during the Clinton Impeachment saga.  And this same propaganda technique was used by the Clinton machine then too and I wrote about it extensively on the Excite message boards during the Clinton impeachment scandal.

I do believe that Bill Clinton called Trump when he heard rumors about Trump  seriously considering entering the race last Spring. I believe Bill Clinton offered Trump some friendly advice, about how hard a Presidential run is and how hiring the best political operatives is crucial. I believe Bill Clinton gave Trump some names of “the best ones” – dem ones.

Trump had his good friend, Roger Stone, a true sleaze, as the face of his campaign, but in August when Trump went after Megyn Kelly – Stone says he quit, but the Trump campaign said he was fired, yet the Trumpathon moved ahead without even a hiccup. The public faces in the Trump campaign are a facade and hardly “the best” – he didn’t even have a campaign spokesperson until November, but all through this the hype in the press, the meme of “Trump the Insurgent” continued and the media saturation, but most of all Trump came loaded down with the dirt to sling, at the perfect moments, doing the Carville, throw as much dirt as you can and hope it sticks better than Carville himself.  Trump’s genius for controlling the media is the media giving Trump incredible amounts of free air time and helping spread the memes about Trump being a media genius, leading in every poll, connecting with ordinary people, and aiding and abetting Trump’s popularity in every way they can.  On Saturday on Fox news, they went live to a Rubio campaign rally for about 5 minutes, yet they followed that with an hour or more of Trump’s entire rally.  And this has been the trend on all three cable news networks all along….  while Hillary has carefully been reinvented on late night, very friendly, venues.

I believe that Trump, rather than being some media-controlling Svengali, really has been the ultimate dupe of Bill Clinton all along and at the appropriate time – Trump will be demolished as the media turns on him (the Clinton machine moves in for the kill).  I think the turn came a little earlier, because the Clinton sewer rats live on polling data and Trump started gaining in parts of the electorate that aren’t traditional GOP voters – hence this past weekend turned into Trump the racist/fascist meme, which will replace “Trump the Insurgent”.  Do I think Trump is colluding with Clinton – no way.  Trump believes when you hire people, they work for you.

I believe the Clinton machine has manufactured the GOP Insurgent and Trump was set-up. The amount of free air time given to Trump aided Hillary the most – it’s allowed her the time to recast herself as the inevitable Dem candidate and it’s back-burnered her email server scandal. The Clintons already cut the deals with Obama, otherwise Biden would have jumped in and she would be on her way out, not poised to sedately march to her coronation. Trump keeps saying more and more outrageous stuff  to keep the attention on him, like last weekend’s clinging to a Mussolini quote and hesitating about denouncing white supremacists…  Bernie remains lost in a 60s Marxist haze.  The Clintons aren’t going to lose this time. Since last Fall, I’ve seen Bill Clinton’s perfect triangulation strategy lining up – extreme kooks on the left and right and Hillary regained her stride, she’s talking about “love and kindness” and controlling the middle.

Black helicopters or  thatwitch2016 circling – well, all I can say is this isn’t 1998 anymore, I don’t wear ruby slippers, they can’t shut up everyone now and “Surrender Dorothy” has never been part of my personality.  Somehow, with all the electronic fingerprints we all leave and the sloppy data security protocols practiced by the Clintons – the veracity of my “crazy conspiracy theory” should be easy to prove now.  What happened to me in 1998 and the records of those Excite message board postings, well, I suspect the only ones who might have those saved are the Chinese, who do maintain excellent security protocols and records.  Stay tuned.

 

 

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Filed under Culture Wars, General Interest, Messages of mhere, Politics, Public Corruption, The Media

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Small things for small minds

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A couple days ago I witnessed another small, hopeful sign that actual paper books will not die out.  My 10 year-old granddaughter asked if I would buy a book for her from amazon.com.  Now, I did give all four of my granddaughters Kindle Fires for Christmas, so I assumed she would want the kindle book.  Happily, she told me that she really likes her Kindle Fire, but that when it comes to books, she prefers actual books.  The paperback version cost a dollar less than the kindle book and since it was a Prime item, it should arrive today, with free shipping.  My 13 year-old granddaughter also prefers to have actual books and she and her 10 year-old sister love keeping their bookcase in their room neatly arranged with their growing collection of books, stuffed animals and other knick knacks.

In other tech news from the homefront, where the technologically clueless, like yours truly, encounter and attempt to understand the brave new computer world, recently I’ve been watching my granddaughters use a program from school that they can access on any PC – Wixie, an online authoring platform.  It amazed me how easily they could import photos, graphics, record narration, draw their own pictures and rearrange their page designs with blocks of text.  Of course, one of my sons tried to burst my bubble and tell me that it’s just a kid version of Power Point, but regardless, thinking back to writing journals and trying to assemble my own scrapbooks and booklets as a kid, well, this Wixie program won me over completely.  The girls have used their Kindle Fire tablets and their school Ipads, which they can bring home, to take their own photos and import them into these journals they’ve written and they’re creating professional looking journals that make my blog look paltry.  My 10 year-old granddaughter just won the 5th grade essay contest for the school district with her story on the Holocaust, that she put together using this Wixie program.

Small things for small minds the techno-types will scoff, but it’s really nice that the technology designers keep creating new programs which even idiots like me can easily use.  And when I get confused, I’ve got four granddaughters who can show me what to do, a habit developed in the 80s,  when my own kids were mere toddlers and I handed them the remote to figure out first the VCR player and later the DVD player.  Now, if I could only get my smartphone to connect correctly to the bluetooth in my car.  My old phone connected with no problem, but even following the car manual instructions, this new phone isn’t connected properly – incoming calls come through on the car’s bluetooth and if I make a call from my smart phone from inside my car, the car’s bluetooth turns on, but I can’t use the bluetooth controls on the steering wheel to initiate a call.  Perhaps, I need to hand my phone to my granddaughters and tell them to figure it out.

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February 26, 2016 · 9:11 pm
February 26, 2016 · 7:53 pm

Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy advances

Well, last night’s GOP debate and finally some GOP candidates came armed with more than lame talking points.  Trump, who can’t be bothered to prepare for debates by studying issues and policies, but comes loaded down with sleaze and scurrilous dirt to hurl, hoping some of it sticks, got a taste of his own medicine.  Rubio finally called Trump a con man and all I can wonder is why on earth they waited so long to throw Trump’s corrupt and slippery business dealings and practices into the mix.   Rubio delivered last night in a big way, with Cruz putting in a decent showing too, although Trump, at this point, has already established a strong lead and last night’s Trump take down may have started way too late to alter the course of the race.  The GOP deserves to go down in flames if Donald Trump ends up as their candidate.

The interesting part was after the debate, CNN gave Trump plenty of free air time to ramble on, the same as FOX and MSNBC have given him way more free air time and they helped create this entire “insurgent campaign” narrative and allowed him to spew his nonsense unchallenged.  All the sleaze from his past – they never mention. The press ran Cruz’s video from his teenage years and have dissected Rubio’s home loan and student loans, yet on Trump’s decades of sleeazy business deals, endless lawsuits and corruption – they have been silent!   One might believe they want Trump as the GOP candidate, because most of them are liberals and want a Democrat in the White House.

Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy advances.

 

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February 24, 2016 · 1:31 pm

Justice for Jessica?

Here’s an update on the Jessica Lane Chambers case, the young woman in Mississippi, who was burned alive in 2014:

27-year-old man indicted for murder of Jessica Chambers

Somehow, I don’t believe he acted alone.  In all fairness, let me refer readers to the Last Refuge blog, for extensive dissection of this case (http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/02/23/breaking-new-developments-in-jessica-lane-chambers-murder-case-press-conference-tomorrow/ ).

I wrote about her case too here , here, here and here.

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February 24, 2016 · 1:09 pm

Some global hotspots

This will just be a quick list of links to some important events taking place beyond the American presidential primary sideshow:

On Turkey, watch carefully, as Erdogan’s Turkey wobbles:

On China:

On Saudi Arabia:

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Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Military, Politics

February 21, 2016 · 3:21 pm

“I really don’t even know what I mean”

“I really don’t even know what I mean” (minute 4:40)….  yep, that about sums it all up!

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February 21, 2016 · 1:18 pm

The great twit

Trump the “great” twit or tweet or perhaps it’s retweeter….  Hey someone said and pass it on – that’s so “presidential”, but here it is at minute 1:31, with his new sleaze attack on Marco Rubio’s citizenship:

And the “powederedwigsociety”, the original source of the tweet, has a copyright of 2015, although it’s hard to discern who put that website up or runs it, but that didn’t stop Donald Trump from retweeting their garbage.

 

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February 21, 2016 · 11:58 am

“Do your own homework”

Donald Trump, the politician, operates just like the Clintons, which should prove very interesting if he actually does hijack the GOP nomination.  He is a fraud!  His supporters can cough up his carefully crafted book, his sounding tough, he’s a successful businessman and reality TV star and I am sticking to he is a fraud, a con-man, as much a liar as Hillary Clinton, but most of all at heart he’s a petty bully.  Hillary is a very dangerous bully, because she is a woman and women like her (sociopaths) will stop at nothing to get what they want (refer back to The Woman’s Way of War).

Frankly, if Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the best America can do for candidates, we deserve to be relegated to laughingstock status on the world stage.  Trump is no match for Putin, that’s for sure, but even worse he is no match for Hillary Clinton and besides, I still believe in time my suspicions that Trump hired dem political operatives in the beginning, who are operating in the shadows will prove to be true.  No political operatives who really want to win the general election would allow their candidate to intentionally drive his/her negative ratings sky-high and encourage the vile, outrageous outbursts that characterize Trump’s campaign style.  He won Iowa and South Carolina in the GOP primary, in a crowded field, but with way less than 50% of the GOP  primary voters supporting him.  His negative polling consistently is higher than Hillary Clinton’s, often polling above 60% and once the parties have their candidates selected (or a coronation, as the case may be for Hillary), the Clintons will unleash their dirt on Trump and bury him.

Here’s some new oddities in Trump’s sideshow antic out of Iowa, where he held that veteran’s fundraiser to divert attention away from the FOX News debate he was boycotting, because FOX would not let Trump control their choice of moderators.  He tried to strong-arm a cable network based on his “feelings” that he wasn’t “being treated fairly.”

So, what happened to the money raised for veterans?  Well, some has been disbursed to some veterans groups according to this Weekly Standard report, but their report highlights some warning bells that his Trump Foundation operates much like the Clinton Foundation.  When Michael Warren, the reporter emailed the Trump Foundation with questions about the fundraiser this is what happened:

“On Thursday, I contacted the Donald J. Trump Foundation by email with a few questions about how the $6 million had been or was being disbursed. Five minutes later, I received a phone call from Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s presidential campaign manager. Lewandowski said a list of the recipients had been made public and that more recipients were being added all the time. How much had those recipients received? Lewandowski couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. As a non-profit organization, he said, the Trump Foundation would release all the required details of its disbursements at the end of the fiscal year. To find out before then, he said, I’d have to contact the recipients themselves.

“The list is publicly available,” he said. “You can do your homework and ask the veterans’ organizations.”

Why wouldn’t the Trump Foundation want to publicize how much it had donated? (Especially given the fact that in recent years, Trump’s charity organization had given more money to the Clinton Foundationthan to veterans.) And why, when asking about the Foundation’s disbursements, had a representative of the campaign called? With no other options, however, I took Lewandowki’s advice.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/some-vet-groups-still-waiting-for-trump-foundation-checks/article/2001154

Why indeed did Trump’s campaign manager respond to questions about the Trump Foundation?  That melding of the “charity” with the “political operations” is vintage Clinton and as it turns out, the way Trump does business too.  There’s also some big pharmaceutical executive who rents space in Trump Tower, whom some recipients believe is connected to the Trump Foundation:

“”We found out like everybody else did, when the Trump Foundation put the list up on the website,” said Kerri Childress of the Fisher House Foundation, one of the groups on the Trump Foundation’s list. “And frankly we haven’t heard anything since.”

Childress says the Fisher House Foundation has yet to receive a donation, though she was quick to add that it’s not uncommon for pledged donations to take weeks or months to actually be disbursed. Neither has the Task Force Dagger Foundation received a check, says managing director Keith David. “We did receive a check from the Stewart J. Rahr Foundation, and they share the same floor with the Trump Foundation,” David adds. Rahr, a pharmaceutical executive-turned-Manhattan-playboy, is friends with Trump and rents office space in the Trump Tower. It’s not clear whether or not there is a relationship between Trump’s and Rahr’s foundations.

Another vets group, Operation Homefront, posted on its Facebook page that it received a $50,000 donation Monday from the Rahr Foundation, which the group says they “understand is made in connection with Donald Trump.” Beyond that, says Operation Homefront spokesman Aaron Taylor, they don’t know much about it.”

http://www.weeklystandard.com/some-vet-groups-still-waiting-for-trump-foundation-checks/article/2001154

The similarities between Donald Trump and his friends, the Clintons,  just keep multiplying, so if it ends up that Trump too hired dem political operatives to help him “win,” don’t act surprised!  Sure wish we could track the phone traffic between Trump, some key Clinton sewer rats, and then Bill Clinton…  Oh, to be a fly on the wall….

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Filed under General Interest, Politics, Public Corruption

February 20, 2016 · 12:45 pm

For the girls, mostly

The cathedral theme in my previous post brought to mind this video I saw circulating on facebook recently.  Warning to men, agnostics, atheists and even those who hate schmaltzy stuff,  this is a female-empowerment, feel-good message with a strong religious message tossed in too:

 

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February 20, 2016 · 12:25 pm

The sound of angels’ wings

Moving away from politics for a change, here’s a very interesting article from The Atlantic, “Hearing the Lost Sounds of Antiquity,” explaining how researchers are melding cutting edge technology with historical research to recreate the sounds from history, even sounds from the fourth century:

“History is mostly silent to us now.

Thousands of years of human stories have been told in paintings, and sculptures, and sheet music, and text; in shards and shells, and other fragments of things left behind. But because the history of recorded sound is only 160 years old, the original sounds of the distant past are lost to time.”

The article explains the technology used to recreate the lost sounds from history, but also offers some exciting ways the researchers believe their work could lead to new ways to understand history, beyond reading dry old histories or studying crumbling architecture:

“The data showing what happened to the chirp in each part of the church is fed to a computer, which then registers the impulse response for the unique space. And here’s where it gets really interesting: Once you have a building’s impulse response, you can apply it to a recording captured in another space and make it sound as though that recording had taken place in the original building.

“So you can take chanters with the original [Byzantine era] music and put them in a studio that has no acoustics,” Kyriakakis said. “They can sing a chant, and then we can process it … and all of the sudden we have performances happening in medieval structures. It’s like time travel to me.”

The implications go far beyond the ancient world. Kyriakakis, Donahue, and Gerstel imagine creating a catalog of impulse responses for historic buildings, then recreating the sounds of those structures in what would be, essentially, a museum of lost sound. With an integration of virtual reality technology, visitors could even get the experience of how the sound would have changed as people moved through a given space. (Theoretically, they could share these recordings online, too, but both Kyriakakis and Donahue say it’s harder to render the sound authentically over headphones. They talk more about the idea in a USC Engineering podcast.)

The museum they’re envisioning would include churches, like the ones they’ve already mapped, but other structures, too—everything from ancient theaters and the Parthenon (an experiment that would also require mathematical modeling to bring back the missing part) to modern baseball stadiums and train stations.  “If we open up this idea,” Kyriakakis told me, “there’s no limit as to what can be measured and recreated.””

Now, consider researchers in a free society devoting energy to something that benefits everyone, while in other parts of the world we have a retrogression taking place where all the worst horrors of barbarism and depravity are embraced by religious zealots and their view on preserving history is to loot and then destroy ancient sites:

“So why is Isis blowing to pieces the greatest artefacts of ancient history in Syria and Iraq? The archeologist Joanne Farchakh has a unique answer to a unique crime. First, Isis sells the statues, stone faces and frescoes that international dealers demand. It takes the money, hands over the relics – and blows up the temples and buildings they come from to conceal the evidence of what has been looted.”

Okay, I promised this wasn’t going to delve into politics, so let me end here before launching into a foreign policy rant and let’s think about how these researchers recreating sounds from antiquity have actually come up with a sound in ancient cathedrals referred to as:

““They also discovered something that we call slap echo,” Donahue added, “when you have walls fairly close to one another and the frequencies go back and forth. It goes ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. [In the ancient world,] they described it as the sound of angels’ wings.””

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/byzantine-angel-wings/470076/

The sound of angels’ wings…….. now that’s pretty amazing!

 

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