Category Archives: Information War

January 11, 2019 · 10:12 pm

Missed signals beyond the SPIN noise

America is in a totally different place with our partisan divides than even 20 years ago with the Clinton impeachment drama, which fueled an aggressive Clinton-orchestrated scorched earth SPIN effort to keep Bill Clinton from being removed from office. Thinking back to the 1998 scorched earth SPIN war, many questions, in my mind, still remain.

One of the biggest questions I have goes back a bit further than the Clinton years.  In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed.  The Soviet Union ran massive, aggressive active measures in America, including disinformation operations for decades.  What happened to all of the Soviet Union’s active measure operations and operatives (many of them Americans) involved in operations against America after the Soviet Union collapsed?  Where did they go?

Even more importantly, during the 1990s, what happened to America’s aggressive efforts to monitor and counter Soviet active measures?  Did we put down our guard and assume the Soviet threat was defeated and stop paying close attention to Russian operatives?  Where did the Americans working on the Soviet dime or followers of communist ideology, who fueled Soviet disinformation operations in America go to find new homes in American political operations after the collapse of the Soviet Union?  They didn’t all just quit.  Did they just shift to working in American partisan political “media operations” and “opposition research” organizations or were many of them already embedded in American partisan activities? American academia and media were heavily infiltrated by Soviet disinformation operations for decades, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.   What happened to these Soviet operations after the Soviet Union collapsed?

In late December 2018, news broke of a Democrat disinformation operation called Project Birmingham, which was run against Republican senate candidate, Roy Moore, in his 2017 campaign.  This Dem disinformation operation imitated Russian disinformation operations and was funded by a big Dem donor, Reid Hoffman, who claims no knowledge that the money was going to Project Birmingham.  Many Dems, including Doug Jones, condemned the Project Birmingham operation, and are publicly distancing themselves from it.  On December 27, 2018, the Washington Post reported:

“The looming threat of new state and federal investigations adds to the scrutiny facing those involved in the campaign to undermine support for Moore and bolster Jones. Project Birmingham appeared to broadly mirror some of the same tactics adopted by Russian operatives who spread social and political unrest on Facebook and Twitter during the 2016 presidential election. In Alabama, its backers even introduced fake evidence that automated Russian accounts, called bots, were supporting Moore in the race.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/27/disinformation-campaign-targeting-roy-moores-senate-bid-may-have-violated-law-alabama-attorney-general-says/?utm_term=.a886aecf8b13

A few days ago the NY Times had a report, Democrats Faked Online Push to Outlaw Alcohol in Alabama Race, about another Dem false flag operation during the Roy Moore run, which was dubbed “Dry Alabama”.  The NY Times reports:

“The “Dry Alabama” Facebook page, illustrated with stark images of car wrecks and videos of families ruined by drink, had a blunt message: Alcohol is the devil’s work, and the state should ban it entirely.

Along with a companion Twitter feed, the Facebook page appeared to be the work of Baptist teetotalers who supported the Republican, Roy S. Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race. “Pray for Roy Moore,” one tweet exhorted.

In fact, the Dry Alabama campaign, not previously reported, was the stealth creation of progressive Democrats who were out to defeat Mr. Moore — the second such secret effort to be unmasked. In a political bank shot made in the last two weeks of the campaign, they thought associating Mr. Moore with calls for a statewide alcohol ban would hurt him with moderate, business-oriented Republicans and assist the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won the special election by a hair-thin margin.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/politics/alabama-senate-facebook-roy-moore.html

Further in this NY Times piece are details of the people involved in organizing this Dry Alabama false flag operation and this bio stuck out at me, “Evan Coren, a progressive activist who works for the National Archives unit that handles classified documents.”  A person working for the National Archives, handling classified documents, moon lighted as a progressive activist, orchestrating online false flag operations in a Senate race in Alabama.  Anything amiss or unethical with his moonlighting activities here?  Any concerns about him having access to classified documents?

This SPIN agitprop has now devolved to Leftist operatives waging false flag operations to make a Republican senatorial candidate’s social media followers look like Russian bots…  We have assuredly jumped the shark in this scorched earth SPIN info war.

The reason I keep pondering about the beginnings of the America’s mass media SPIN information war is because how spin works has always smelled like classic Soviet disinformation operations to me.  It’s a mass media brainwashing operation to control “public opinion” (sold as the “will of the American people”) as determined by polls.  The media and politicians in America sell the polling and assiduously work to herd Americans to conforming their beliefs to align with this manufactured “public opinion”.  The SPIN operations rely heavily on vicious smear campaigns.

Until Trump, the Left and mainstream media (also predominantly leftists) controlled SPIN operations in America.  FOX News ran a counter SPIN operation, feeding far-right movements and fear mongering about Dems and the Left, but they never managed to meld together a SPIN operation colluding directly with top Republicans, until Trump.

American political news remains abuzz about “Russian collusion”, but the Steele dossier, a melding of Democratic operatives, a former star reporter turned “commercial research and strategic intelligence” entrepreneur, former British intelligence officer/expert on Russia and unknown Russian sources produced information purported to come from sources close to the Kremlin.  That information was fed to the FBI and top American intel officials  as an intelligence product from a former British intelligence professional and it speaks to a melding of partisan SPIN ops  deliberately used to corrupt the judgment of FBI and top American intel officials.

The circuitous routes used to feed the Steele dossier to FBI and DOJ officials speaks to a determination to create an aura of legitimacy about the information in the dossier and to deceive and manipulate them into buying into the dossier.  John McCain despised Trump.  McCain was targeted by a former British ambassador and sold on the dossier.  McCain’s friend, flew to England and personally met with Steele to get a copy of the dossier.  John McCain hand-carried that dossier directly to James Comey.

I can’t prove what happened to me, but during the Clinton impeachment in 1998 I wrote comments on the Excite message boards attacking the Clinton spin, which was worded to corrupt foundational American principles.  I also explained how SPIN works and how it seems like something more at home in Russian disinformation efforts.  My story, Messsages of mhere, at the top of my blog, although written in a rather snarky tone, is what I believe to be the truth about what happened to me in 1998.  I believe false information was deliberately fed to a retired general, who hates me.  I believe he was recruited to silence me.  I can’t prove any of that though.  Realizing the underhanded ways the Steele dossier was fed to top FBI and DOJ officials reminded me of 1998.

Why did James Comey and his top people treat the Steele dossier as legitimate intel, even though they couldn’t verify it?  Why doesn’t Comey care about who funded the dossier?  Why didn’t Peter Strzok, the FBI’s top Russian analyst, make tracking the dossier funding and information back to its original sources a priority?  This Trump SPIN hysteria not only manipulates ordinary  Americans and corrodes their judgment, the Trump SPIN hysteria appears to have corroded and corrupted the judgment of top officials in the FBI and intelligence agencies. The Trump SPIN hysteria has also clouded, in some cases, even corrupted the judgment of our elected leaders.

In the Roy Moore situation, I  dislike Moore’s politics and find his bigotry repugnant, however as that smear campaign against Moore raged on in the media, with more and more 30+ year-old allegations of Moore preying on underage teenage girls ramping up SPIN hysteria, I noted how many conservative Republicans began to speak out against Moore and they completely bought into the Dem-orchestrated  media smear campaign.  Initially, I was willing to believe the first allegation in the Roy Moore smear campaign, until Gloria Allred showed up and it bothered me that there were no allegations of Moore’s alleged preying on underage teen girls beyond those 30 + year-old allegations, which struck me as odd.  I wrote a blog post:

I believed the first woman who made allegations against Roy Moore, but once Gloria Allred showed up, the media non-stop redo of the Access Hollywood started, coupled with the Trump is delusional spin and this new “moral purity” purge on the Left began, well, let’s just say I am not sure how to even begin to decide on what is  a “credible allegation” after finding out that the WaPo descended on AL, along with #Resist dirt-diggers to turn up these allegations.  At first the media hyped there were 30 some witnesses to corroborate that Moore chased teenage girls, but I no longer have real trust in any of this reporting.  I keep wondering if he was a total perv, who chased teenagers, where are more recent victims?  Does he have a long list of affairs or anything like that?  I am open to listening to new allegations, but at this point, I see more evidence this was an orchestrated smear campaign and less that he was a child molester.  I still want to believe the first lady.  The one Allred rolled out and all that crying looked just like the Access Hollywood victim she coached.

https://libertybellediaries.com/2017/12/07/metoo-lunacy-begins/

The orchestrated Brett Kavanaugh smear campaign rolled out the same way.  And going back to the 2016 campaign, the Dump on Trump smear campaign rolled out the same way too, with the Access Hollywood tape and the Gloria Allred victim line-up.  Trump, a womanizer, does have real dirt mixed in with the pure Dem spin fabrications, like the Alicia Machado, “fat-shaming” allegation, that Hillary Clinton launched at the end of a presidential debate.  She was totally in on that orchestrated SPIN hit.

These smear campaigns aren’t the result of some peon political operatives run amok; they are run by powerful people in the Dem machine.  The level to which the Dems will go to demonize Trump’s record with women, knows no bounds and while I find the man’s behavior totally unacceptable, so much of the SPIN about Trump and women is deliberately manufactured to incite women against him.

In Dec. 2017, with the Trump/Russian collusion spin and the Trump the Authoritarian spin ramping up, a short-lived spin attack on Trump launched about him “trying to kiss former FOX News employee, Juliet Huddy in an elevator around 2005-2006, painting this as Trump sexually assaulting Huddy.  Huddy quickly backtracked and said she hadn’t felt threatened, but liberal media and even top Dems, like Donna Brazile, retweeted and hyped this story.  The reality check is Huddy was on a date with a rich businessman/celebrity and he leaned over to kiss her after the date, but the media was running wild painting this as Trump tried to sexually assault Huddy.

The Dems at the top are well aware of these smear campaigns and they are the ones, who do nothing to put the brakes on them.  Yet, when some embarrassing details of their corrupt SPIN ops leak out, everyone involved claims they knew nothing.  That Steele dossier had the fingerprints of top Clinton sleaze operatives involved, so I believe the Clintons were the ones in charge.

The entire Clinton SPIN operations from its beginning, in the 90s, which evolved to be embraced by the entire Democratic Party, needs some serious investigation for both corruption and for hostile foreign infiltration.  Ditto that for Trump’s SPIN operations, oh nevermind, Mueller has spent two years investigating that, while the Dems, media, Comey, Clapper and Brennan keep throwing up a massive smokescreen about the Steele dossier.  They pretend that some conservative news organization was behind the GPS Fusion effort and the mainstream media assiduously avoids investigating the Steele dossier.  Instead they give Clapper, Brennan and Dem mouthpieces endless airtime to ramp up Trump/Russian collusion and to insinuate the dossier is a legit intelligence report.

There are strong warning signs that there’s plenty of hostile foreign infiltration of the American news media, especially our political news media.   SPIN disinformation speaks to a melding of Cold War era Soviet-type disinformation operations into the very fabric of American political operations and news reporting.  Figuring out how much is homegrown corruption and how much is hostile foreign info operations remains a pressing national security concern, that no one seems to notice.

In the 90s the domestic partisan SPIN war in America erupted with constant Clinton scandals (some real and some right-wing operative hyped).  The Clintons ran their own SPIN “war room” and vast networks of political operatives, on both sides,  emerged as America’s top spin warriors.  Interestingly, many of those original operatives, on both sides, are key players in this endless 2016 scorched earth SPIN info war, but one can only wonder what the extent of hostile foreign infiltration of our partisan SPIN fronts in America really is?

Looking back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, followed by the eruption of our domestic SPIN war in the 90s, my worry is, that perhaps we missed a whole bunch of signals, because of the constant SPIN noise.

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

January 9, 2019 · 11:47 pm

“Crisis”

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Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money. It is a disgraceful situation in lives & money!

10:25 AM – 9 Jan 2019

I’ve tweeted some about Trump’s chaos lately, but every time I sit down to write a blog post, there’s an internal debate whether to let Trump dominate my blog or write about some other topics.  Truth be told though, worries about Trump’s erratic behavior, his administration in constant personnel turmoil and the Left’s relentless Trump hysteria can’t be avoided.  This endless scorched earth SPIN war is the defining political/media event in America.

America’s problem isn’t just Trump’s chaos. The endless scorched earth SPIN information war between Trump/Fox vs. Dems/mainstream media looms as a very grave national security crisis, that no one seems to see.

Often, I feel like I am a lone voice in the wilderness tweeting and blogging warnings about spin.  Since 1998, I’ve been trying to examine ways this SPIN war could evolve in America and what the final stages of this self-destructive SPIN war would look like.  I never in a million years would have dreamed up a Trump’s “GOP Insurgency”, the complete dismantling of the GOP,  or the alliance of Trump and FOX News to create a spin front to combat the Dems/mainstream media lock on controlling the news media in America.

The culmination of the vast corruption by both the Clintons and Trump in 2016, the corruption within the highest levels of the Obama administration, the corruption of the media portends things won’t end well for America without a dramatic sea change in our politics and in the media.  That said, here’s the latest on our national embarrassment – Trump, the Dems and media’s  SPIN war.

America endured another Trump, Chuck and Nancy Show last night, in this ongoing government shutdown showdown/The Wall stand-off.   All three of them looked and sounded stiff and ridiculous.  These speeches were just one more spin battle to fight for owning another spin cycle and the media obliged with high-pitched lamentations about whether the networks should grant Trump prime time to make his wall showdown speech, followed by demands for Democrats to be granted equal time to offer a response to Trump’s speech.  Of course, then the feverish media doom-casting about “What if Trump declares a state of emergency?” erupted.  Trump, of course gloried in the media spotlight and many of his loyal FOX pundits, as usual, helped sell the Trump “CRISIS!” hysteria, to manipulate Trump’s base.

At the same time, many Congressional Democrats and Republicans were urging Trump not to declare a state of emergency, as were some Trump advisers.

Trump opted not to pull that state of emergency trigger (yet).  Schumer and Pelosi offered the same “no money for the wall” red line.  Each side, as usual, declared victory in this staged spin battle and American endured another political spectacle that only fueled more media hysterics, more extreme partisanship and eroded our American political culture a bit more.

By this morning, Trump, lashed out on Twitter with the above tweet.

Reporters immediately contacted FEMA for comment and FEMA had no comment.  And therein lies the seeds of Trump’s self-destruction, if anyone cares to cut through the spin and partisan hysteria.  Once again, Trump, likely from watching something on TV this morning, impulsively decided to lash out at Democrats in CA.  He tweeted this without any consultation with this advisers or talking to FEMA.  He’s going to pressure CA pols to reform their forest management programs by cutting funds, to aid helpless victims of forest fires.

This impulsive lashing out, one-man-show tweeting, leaving his own top advisers in the dark, assures Trump will never settle into the presidency or build any sort of unified team.  It’s always going to be endless chaos, emanating from the top.

Many Trump mouthpieces and supporters in the punditry class, ignore or downplay Trump’s tweeting as just, “Trump letting off steam” or  pretend the tweets aren’t really presidential announcements.   Other Trump supporters, play dumb, dismissing his tweets, by airily waving them aside, claiming they don’t follow his tweets or pay attention to social media.

This morning’s impulsive presidential order will fade from memory quickly and in the scheme of  Trump impulsively executing his presidential duties via tweets, this one ranks as small fries compared to his Syria announcement after a phone call with Erdogan.

With that tweet Trump announced a military withdrawal without informing or consulting anyone on his national security team or America’s allies.  They all found out via his tweet.

The Syria tweet proved the last straw for Sec. of Defense, General Mattis, but that wasn’t the first military decision via tweet, that Trump announced without informing the Pentagon.

Trump’s toxic leadership assures constant chaos in the highest office in America, but even more ominously it assures confusion and distrust at the highest levels of the Pentagon.

In this stand-off with Schumer and Pelosi over funding for his wall, it would not surprise me in the least if some TV news coverage of the stand-off incites him and he furiously lashes out via tweet, declaring a state of emergency… because he can and because he knows it will propel him to be the star of the SPIN universe, outshining every other news story in the world.

Even if America inches along, without a real constitutional crisis due to Trump’s melding the Office of the Presidency into a third-rate reality TV show with constant social media interactions with his fans and the media, the prestige and the dignity of the presidency have been forever cheapened.

The larger scorched earth spin war, could spiral into a real national crisis in many different ways, including hostile info war operations inciting mass panic, faking news stories of civil disruptions, and looming dangers from “fake news” coming not from Trump or the mainstream media, but from America’s enemies.  A few days ago Trump floated a “military version of eminent domain”, asserting he could send the military to seize private property along the border for his wall.  That Trump threat made me think of the Obama era conspiracy hysteria in the Southwest over Jade Helm, a 2015 US military training exercise.  In 2018 former NSA director Michael Hayden stated:

“AUSTIN — Former CIA director Michael Hayden said Thursday during a television interview that the 2015 Jade Helm controversy in Texas was an early example of Russian efforts to spread misinformation in the United States.

Speaking on MSNBC’s Morning Joe as part of a book tour, Hayden, a retired Air Force four-star general who also ran the National Security Agency, said Russians fueled the distrust over the military training exercise in an attempt to influence the American public.

“There was an exercise in Texas called Jade Helm 15 that Russian bots and the American alt-right media convinced most — many — Texans was an Obama plan to round up political dissidents,” Hayden said.”

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2018/05/03/former-cia-director-says-russians-spread-misinformation-jade-helm

America faces plenty of SPIN information war worries, well beyond just Trump, but Americans seem too busy fighting each other to notice the real threats from a nation torn apart by constant, aggressive domestic and foreign disinformation operations targeting the American people.  And sadly, President Trump seems the most ill-equipped leader, who might be called upon to avert complete civil disorder, if this SPIN war spirals totally out of control.

Ending on a positive note, the TRUTH is the strongest weapon against SPIN (lies), so each of us has the power to defeat SPIN in our own lives.  No American is helpless or unarmed to combat SPIN – that’s the TRUTH.  Just pull yourself from the partisan extremes,  learn to recognize spin messaging attacks against the American people and don’t allow media and politicians’ repetitive messaging agitation propaganda make you afraid or angry.  When all else fails, turn off the news media in your home for a bit and spend time with your family, do things with friends, or take up a hobby.

Trust me, that’s what I’ve been doing.  Yep, more crafting pictures coming soon:-)

12 Comments

Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics

December 24, 2018 · 5:18 pm

Trump the Builder & our Syria Policy

The truth matters.

Thinking about America’s “big picture” strategy, first I’m going to meander on about America’s War on Terror a bit and then pivot to the “little picture” homegrown “Trump problems”, which in the end are probably way more important to America than our regional strategy in the Mid-East.

President Trump did not cause America’s failures in the War on Terror.  America’s foreign policy experts, on both sides of the aisle, have made plenty of disastrous strategic mistakes in America’s endless War on Terror, since 2001.   Our extreme partisan Trump Hysterics United echo chamber in the media makes it difficult, for these foreign policy experts to concede this fact, but it’s the truth.

The people who did formulate and carry-out these policies that failed, came from both sides of the political aisle, in previous administrations.   Some of them now are the loudest Trump critics, while at the same time refusing to admit their own policies failed.  In the spirit of the season, it’s also only right to concede that they acted with good intentions to do what they believed was best for America.

Thinking back over my many angry and scathing blog posts about Obama administration decisions, made in the heady, High-On-Arab-Spring delusions days, that’s quite a big concession, considering how disgusted I was by their massive media “narrative-writing” efforts to sugarcoat American strategic blunders and their refusal to admit mistakes and failures.  To this day, many of the loudest Trump critics, who underwrote failed Bush and Obama era foreign policy, still determinedly spin their failures as successes.

For many years, I’ve believed we should completely rethink our War on Terror, expand our focus to be more about regional stability and less about a myopic fixation on killing Islamic radical terrorists.  By turning American interests into strictly destroying Al Qaeda, Inc. we’ve overlooked many other key American interests in the region and we’ve allowed ourselves to get stuck on repeating failed approaches, over and over and over.

Even more alarming, in our zeal to invest more in military options rather than other tools of American power, we’ve failed to weigh the real damage grinding down our military, decades of endless war has wrought on our military readiness.  We’ve been so used to believing our military is invincible, that American policymakers too often grab for a military option, without even considering how that option might impact bigger picture American strategic issues.

It’s easy to get lost in Trump outrage spin cycles, just like many conservatives (myself included), often got lost in the Obama outrage spin cycles, but the real strategic issue America needs to deal with is we need a larger regional strategy that bolsters American national interests.  That’s how I began thinking about the late General William Odom last night, even as my ire simmered at how President Trump went about handling his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.   The above video of General Odom is worth watching and thinking about.

America needs a new regional strategy to deal with the Mid-East and the umbrella of Sharia-inspired terrorists, like Al Qaeda and ISIS, regardless who is in the Oval Office.

There are many larger foreign policy strategic problems that might be fall-out from the “how” Trump operates, but in my view, the greatest problem remains, not just Trump, but our, by any means necessary,  2016 scorched earth SPIN information war, that has destabilized and corrupted both political parties and most especially the media, both FOX News and the mainstream media.

Trump might be an indiscriminate flamethrower, but he isn’t the only one intent on using SPIN info war guerrilla warfare.   The constant no holds barred smear campaigns, character assassination attacks and orchestrated disinformation attacks on the American people provide an open information warfare battlefield for America’s adversaries to easily operate at fueling American divides, without ever having to deploy a single military unit to American soil.

The entire Syria mess has been so mired in spin lies, that it’s hard to figure out what is going on in Syria and what our mission even is in Syria.

I didn’t believe we should get involved in the Syrian hot mess, despite the ISIS threat, the larger humanitarian refugee crisis, or the “Assad the Butcher” arguments ( all of which had some validity).  The “how” U.S. involvement would help advance U.S. national interests and how the lessons learned about problems from our previous regime change efforts would be avoided in a Syria intervention never made any sense to me.

After Russia took action in Syria to prop up Assad, the U.S. involvement chorus morphed into competing discordant parts.  The arming “Syrian Moderates Rebels” delusions set the stage for more delusions about how removing ISIS from Raqqa was the key to destroying ISIS and somehow that would lead to stability in Syria, that removing ISIS was the key to the humanitarian crisis in Syria and then for good measure there was the larger strategic argument about how getting involved in Syria would help deter Russian and Iranian regional dominance.

None of the arguments ever made much sense to me, as part of a larger regional stability strategy… probably because I don’t think we ever had a big picture strategy.  We have a bullet point presentation of talking points strategy.  Islamist terrorist groups quickly relocate, regroup, rearm, and rebrand.  Assad and the Russians had effectively broken the Syrian rebels.  I wondered how we would deter Iranians in Syria when we hadn’t figured out how to deter the Iranian-backed militias in Baghdad from increasing their influence in the Baghdad government, which vast amounts of American money and thousands of precious American lives went into nursing into existence and bolstering.

How Trump went about this decision will likely lead to damage to America’s relationship with our allies and he does operate like a one-man wrecking ball to our international system, which many of his supporters will cheer on, just like they cheered on his “GOP Insurgency”, asserting the GOP deserved to be burned to the ground.

The problem with Trump, the touted “Builder” is he seems particularly uninterested in the most important part of any building, whether a Trump Tower or a new political movement.  He prefers to stay ensconced in his ivory tower mean tweeting his “enemies, than he does in building a solid foundation for his new GOP or his MAGA effort.

I remember the conservative fainting couch reactions to President Obama’s clashes with the generals, because I spent a good deal of time blogging while prostrate on my own fainting couch.   I’m trying not to get too worked up about Trump’s impulsive Syria decision, although the difference seems, to me at least, that  Obama was prone to foot-dragging and kicking the can down the road, rather than making tough decisions.  Trump, on the other hand, makes impulsive decisions based on “his gut”…

In my view, President Trump prefers being the one-man show in his MAGA circular firing squad.  He takes aim at people in his own administration,  America’s intelligence agencies, the FBI, Congressional Republicans, the media and now – General Mattis.  His ammo is low-grade, scattershot mean tweets and petty name-calling.  His attacks on General Mattis will likely lead to dissension within the top levels of the Pentagon and his “playing his own team against each other antics ” could create some dangerous confusion and distrust at the highest levels of the American chain of command.

That’s way more worrying to me than whether we pull out of Syria.  He was tweeting late last night:

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President of Turkey has very strongly informed me that he will eradicate whatever is left of ISIS in Syria….and he is a man who can do it plus, Turkey is right “next door.” Our troops are coming home!

11:54 PM – 23 Dec 2018

He’s trusting his good friend, Erdogan, and today he’s on a twitter rant, taking wild pot shots at his assorted “enemies” (Americans whom he thinks have personally wronged him).  What he isn’t doing is studying policy or strategy  or working on a better big picture strategy for America in the ME, after we pull out of Syria and he isn’t working to build any sort of foundation of support for his domestic agenda.

It’s hard to envision any sort of regional ME strategy developing in an administration where the POTUS gets more energized waging war against his own cabinet than he does reading anything about foreign policy.   His strategic depth really is his simplistic “killing ISIS family members to scare ISIS fighters into submission plan”, which he doubled-down on during the 2016 primary.  He believes that was a brilliant strategy, so expecting him to grasp a larger regional strategy is hopeless…  Trump also isn’t going to hire the best people and seems to struggle keeping any competent people.  He isn’t going to do anything other than foment more chaos and be an endless, one-man show circular firing squad.

You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, but often some unexpected things grow from manure piles.  When I was a kid, in the summer time we used to sit on the flat roof of our rabbit coop, which was 3 or so feet high.  Often we’d eat watermelon slices perched there and spit the seeds toward the nearby pile of rabbit manure.  Many summers, that manure pile was covered with robust watermelon plants that sent out long runners, which produced lots of watermelons.

Perhaps, we should all be trying to spit out as many good policy seeds toward the Trump manure pile and hope some sprout and grow…

14 Comments

Filed under Foreign Policy, General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics

December 15, 2018 · 2:08 pm

Another Russian ramble

Here’s a timely link to a NATO Defense College publication: Handbook of Russian Information Warfare,  which I saw in a tweet yesterday.  In America, a great deal of fear mongering substitutes for actual understanding of the Russian information warfare strategies and how the Russians view information warfare in their overall military strategic operations.

The Russian approach to information warfare seems to both terrify and mystify many American policymakers and journalists.  The key, I think, relies on wrapping your mind around the Russian’s reliance on reflexive control, which this handbook explains in easy to understand terms.

Here’s a quick explanation of  reflexive control from a Small Wars Journal article written by Ronald Sprang:

“The second modern Russian theoretical concept is reflexive control. Reflexive control is applied as a means to interfere and manipulate an opponent’s decision-making cycle. It can target human decision making and organizational decision-making systems and processes. Reflexive control can also be applied through automated systems and digital mission command architecture. Reflexive control is “a means of conveying to a partner or an opponent specially prepared information to incline him to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action.”[x] One of the goals of reflexive control is the temporary slowdown of the adversary’s tempo and operational level decision making process.[xi] This adjustment in tempo creates windows of opportunity for Russian exploitation of changes in tempo and potential opponent decisions that shape the operational level forces into the overall Russian operational design and approach.”

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/russian-operational-art-new-type-warfare-and-reflexive-control

To explain how the Russians approach to information warfare developed requires going back further in Russian history than the Soviet era, I think.  The Russian state secret police dates back to 1565, when Ivan the Terrible formed the Oprichnina.

Recently, I began watching the Amazon Prime Russian TV series, Ekaterina, about the life of Catherine the Great,  which originally aired on Russia 1 TV, a few years ago.   My Russian vocabulary consists of only a dozen or so words these days, having forgotten most of what I learned in two years of high school Russian class, but thankfully this series has English subtitles.  The series emphasizes the endless palace intrigue, the imperial scheming of Empress Elizabeth of Russia and especially the machinations of the secret police.  Elizabeth had seized the crown in a coup d’etat, having the infant heir to the throne, Ivan VI,  imprisoned for his entire life.

This long history of Russian state secret police and the Russian people being culturally indoctrinated to the supreme power of the state to control their lives, to invade their privacy at will, and to basically monitor all of their activities has been the norm since medieval times.  I’ve written about this before on my blog, in a 2016 blog post, The War of Words (Part 2):

I have been thinking a great deal about what I consider cultural DNA, with how peoples the world over develop patterns of behavior ( culture) that endure, despite the changes in government.  In fact, the people’s behavior determines how long and how much control they will tolerate from their government, to maintain the status quo and social order.

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Above: My copy of “Letters from Russia.  To the right is a folk-art wooden container my son brought back from Russia, painted in a Russian folk art style called Khohkloma.

Thinking about what to write in this Part 2 post, I ordered a book, which I had read about a long while back, that explains the Russian cultural DNA, a few years after Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America.  That cultural DNA still persists in Russia today.  The book is “Letters from Russia” and like de Tocqueville’s, “Democracy in America”, the book on Russia was written by another French nobleman, Astolphe de Custine.  Although his trip to Russia in 1839 was only three months long,  he captured life in Russia under the despot, Czar Nicholas I, in such prescient, stark detail, that historians still study his letters.  His book was banned by both, Czar Nicholas I and the Bolsheviks, who didn’t much like Custine’s letters.  I can relate, heck, my posts on the Excite message boards in 1998 evoked quite a response too and there I was fighting hordes of new posters who showed up to take over the boards with the Clinton talking points……… hummm, I likened them to being like Genghis Khan.

In their own words these two French nobleman present their opinions on the cultural DNA differences between a people who accept rulers and a people who don’t.  In 1996, renowned journalist, Steven Erlanger, wrote a NY Times piece on Custine’s book, that gives you Custine in his own words.  Here’s a short excerpt:

“In Russia, everything you notice, and everything that happens around you, has a terrifying uniformity; and the first thought that comes into the traveler’s mind, as he contemplates this symmetry, is that such entire consistency and regularity, so contrary to the natural inclination of mankind, cannot have been achieved and could not survive without violence. . . . Officially, such brutal tyranny is called respect for unity and love of order; and this bitter fruit of despotism appears so precious to the methodical mind that you are told it cannot be purchased at too high a price.

Faced with the pervasiveness of the secret police and the immensity of the bureaucracy, Custine at first is shocked. He sees the dead weight that these hordes of state employees place on Russia, and their own dehumanization.

Among Russian officials, attention to detail is quite compatible with disorganization. They go to a great deal of trouble to achieve some petty end, never satisfed that they have done enough to demonstrate their zeal. Consequently, in this rivalry between employees, one formality does not guarantee the foreigner against another. It is like a pillaging army: because the traveler has passed through the hands of one regiment, this does not prevent him from meeting another, or a third, and each of these bands spaced out along his route vies with the last in harassing him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/weekinreview/word-for-word-marquis-de-custine-long-ago-look-russia-so-what-else-new.html?pagewanted=all

Interestingly, in the introduction to “Letters from Russia”, editor, Anka Muhlstein,  presents the bulls-eye de Tocqueville quote on the difference between America and Russia:

“There are on earth today two great peoples who, having started from different points, seem to be advancing towards the same end: they are the Russians and the Anglo-Americans.  They both grew up in darkness and whilst Europeans were busy elsewhere, they suddenly placed themselves in the forefront of nations, and the world learned at almost the same time of their births and their greatness

All other nations seem, more or less, to have reached the limits nature has assigned to them and within which they now need only to remain, but those two are still growing…. America is struggling against obstacles of nature,; Russia against men…. The principal means of action for the one is liberty, for the other servitude.”

Letters from Russia, by Astolphe de Custine, edited and with an introduction by Anka Muhlstein, page ix of the introduction.

America is the only place on earth that broke that mold completely and set up a government meant for the people to have control over the government and for the individual’s rights to be paramount.

We are a nation built by free-thinking and free-acting citizens.

The Russian/American “cultural DNA” dichotomy precludes many American analysts from easily grasping the Russian’s dependence on “reflexive control”,  but looking at it from another angle helps.  The Russians don’t have the military might to rely predominantly on military force to achieve their geopolitical aspirations, but they have centuries of experience developing vast spy networks, compiling massive information operations and for engaging in using psychological operations to exert control over factions inside Russia and in their foreign policy.

Americans, on the other hand, understand military force as the way America fights its enemies.  Although we have the most sophisticated technological means to gather information; we just don’t seem to be very adept at developing a comprehensive strategy to utilize information for information warfare operations.

However, America’s partisans, colluding with sympathetic media, have been waging sophisticated SPIN information warfare against each other and against the American people since the early 90s.  Perhaps our military and intel information experts might at some point realize that the Russians are working to fuel the extreme American partisanship, by fanning the flames of our own domestic scorched earth SPIN information war.

Ending the American scorched earth SPIN information war would be a giant blow to the Russians’ info war operations in America.

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Military, Politics

December 10, 2018 · 4:12 pm

Still burning bright

It’s hard to believe we are approaching the close of 2018… and America is still stuck on 2016 campaign corruption.  There are plenty of facts, pointing to corruption, with both candidates.  However, “facts” hold little sway in this neverending 2016 scorched earth spin information war.  Yet, it still burns on.

Americans have heard both sides repeating their version of “The Truth” so many times, that for many of us, our minds drift off into a zombie-like trance as soon as 2016 rehashing begins.  However, for the politically active and engaged Americans, it still looks like they haven’t been burned out by this relentless 2016 scorched earth spin war yet.

Last Friday, James Comey, former FBI director, testified in a closed-door hearing before the combined Judiciary & Oversight committees in the House.  The transcript of that hearing was released over the weekend.  The Republicans grilled Comey, looking for answers on the FBI’s handling of Clinton & Trump related matters during 2016.  The Democrats did another Comey flip, this time they love James Comey and sang his praises, although in 2016 many of them were berating him, demanding his handling of the Weiner laptop probe should be investigated and that he should be fired.  Pelosi and Cummings, both railed that the FBI had “Trump fanboys” who needed to be investigated.  Many of the same Dems, who railed against Comey’s 2016 actions, now act like Comey cheerleaders.

The Republicans, who organized this hearing, are still asking many of the same questions of James Comey, they’ve been asking since 2016, and they’re still hitting an “I don’t remember” Comey brick wall.  Over 200 times Comey could not remember, suffering from what appears to be a severe case of selective amnesia.

Despite Comey’s memory issues, he has now found his new public voice as a “Hillary fanboy”…  The entire spectacle of James Comey trying to become a media gadfly to trash Trump, praise Hillary and act as the defender of truth, justice and the American way only casts more doubt on Comey as a nonpartisan director of the FBI.

James Comey sacrificed his credibility and compromised his integrity in his ruthless quest to take down Donald Trump. However, before that, it sure looks like Comey gradually sacrificed it by going along with the Loretta Lynch/Clinton efforts to bury the FBI criminal investigations of the Clintons. Comey appears to have completely bought into the Dem’s Trump/Russian collusion op dirt, without ever verifying who paid for the Steele dossier or even verifying the information. Even now, he doesn’t want to be questioned about the Steele dossier or what parts of it were ever verified. That Steele dossier information was used in FISA warrant applications.

JK posted a link in a comment for the U.S District Court for District of Columbia’s memorandum opinion by Judge Royce C. Lamberth.  This Dec. 6th opinion relates to questions still unanswered about the State Department’s responses to inquiries of its efforts to respond to FOIA requests for Hillary’s officials Secretary of State emails.  This FOIA request matter goes back to 2014 and still the State Department hasn’t satisfied the court that it made a good faith effort to locate the requested information.  It’s quite amazing to read this opinion from a federal judge, who put into writing that he still doesn’t have answers as to whether Hillary set up running her State Department emails through Bill’s personal Clinton Foundation server to “intentionally flout FOIA”.  While Comey may engage in spin games, complaining about House Republicans still asking questions about Hillary’s emails, it seems a federal judge has plenty more questions about Hillary’s emails too.

Robert Mueller may have solid evidence that President Trump committed crimes, but with Comey’s public halo polishing antics, Comey’s credibility and judgment make him an angel trying to fly with a permanently tarnished halo and even worse, no wings.  The costume store must have been fresh out of extra-tall Superman costumes to fit his 6’8″ frame, but never let it be said, when it comes to  self-righteous media spectacles, James Comey, sans halo or cape, will still keep sanctimoniously preening on and on and on.  The one thing publicly tangling to drag Trump or the Clintons to justice seems to do is destroy the reputations of those trying to fight their corruption, while Trump, just like the Clintons remains unscathed.  Trump and the Clintons, at this point, seem to be above the law.  Comey’s smarmy interviews, trying to sound full of righteousness and then coupling that with calling on Americans to support Democrats, speaks to a man who has lost not only his moral compass, he’s lost any vestige of credibility on anything related to Trump or Hillary.  He’s reduced himself to sounding like a political hack.

If Mueller has a case against Trump and he’s banking any of it on James Comey as a witness, it seems likely to be a total PR disaster for Mueller.  The crimes that smack you in the face with Trump are his witness tampering and obstruction of justice antics, played off by Trump mouthpieces, as just Trump letting off steam tweeting.  Just like Bill Clinton, Trump benefits from the protection of the presidential shield and unlimited access to media willing to sell his “victim of a partisan witch hunt” spin for as long as it takes.

If past is prologue, for 20 years, the mainstream media still run the “Hillary victim of a vast, right-wing conspiracy” spin. Trump may not read much, but he’s memorized the Clinton Scandal Survival Playbook.  Impeachment proceedings loom more menacingly for Trump, as House Dems plot their “destroy Trump” investigative schedule, but their two long years of unhinged and undisciplined media attacks on Trump have done as much, possibly more, to destroy their own credibility than Trump’s.  Trump still benefits from the Dem #Resist media hysterics.  Whether that will save him from impeachment remains to be seen.

America remains still aflame in 2016 scorched earth spin…

So much winning… for America’s enemies.

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Hillary's Email Scandal, Information War, Politics, Public Corruption

December 2, 2018 · 3:38 pm

Fears and worst fears

After two years of the mainstream media and Dems breathlessly reporting that, this time really is “the beginning of the end” of Trump’s presidency, perhaps Robert Mueller might be winding toward the end of his Russian interference in 2016 investigation.  These #Resist spin mouthpieces have set the stage for massive unrest among the #Resist loyalists, if Mueller fails to deliver the blow that fells Trump’s presidency.  Some sort of consolation prize, “he acted corruptly, but not enough to warrant a criminal prosecution”, will not satisfy their thirst for Trump to be vanquished from the public square.

With Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, striking a plea deal with Mueller’s team and recent revelations about Trump actively pursuing a Russian real estate deal for a Trump Tower Moscow, in 2016, as he was at the same time running for president, it’s clear Trump lied repeatedly, when he claimed he had no dealings with Russia.  How far up and how deep were Trump’s Russian ties remains unclear, but Trump admitted to and airily dismissed the efforts to make a real estate deal with Russia in 2016.

The revelation of the Cohen assertion about a Trump/Russia deal effort in 2016 and Trump’s response to that assertion explains everything about how Trump operates.  He follows the same spin playbook as the Clintons – deny, when lies are exposed dismiss, deflect and project back at your accusers.  Trump has mastered Hillary’s “victim of a political witch hunt” spin game and it’s still working for him with his loyal followers.

Regardless of what facts Mueller’s investigation exposes, the Trump Spin Force  will automatically dismiss, deflect and defiantly delegitimize Mueller’s report and findings as nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

If these two sides, readying for an epic spin battle, aren’t enough, there’s also the House Republicans waging one more, last-ditch effort, to uncover the facts surrounding the Comey FBI and Obama top intelligence people embracing the Steele dossier, a Clinton & DNC funded opposition research effort, despite being unable to independently verify it.  It seems likely the House Republicans also have some questions for Comey regarding his handling of the Clinton email and Foundation pay-to-play investigations.

Finally, there are the House Dems compiling a massive investigative schedule to bury the Trump administration in subpoenas and enough negative press to completely immobilize the Trump White House.  While Mueller has remained silent and we still don’t really know what his findings are, the House Dems will be running their “investigations” in the most grandstanding way possible, with the mainstream media aiding and abetting sensationalizing every allegation, no matter how flimsy the evidence.  While Trump laments the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt”,  the truth is Trump’s about to find out what a real political witch hunt looks like, as the House Dems wage nuclear level spin attacks on him.

While, sometime very soon the media and political pundits expect some sort of massive “shit show”, being the term tossed around frequently, with these many forces at play in this never-ending 2016 scorched earth spin battle, it seems likely to me, America will be in dire straits.   Unchecked, self-destructive, partisan information warfare will leave only smoldering ashes of our decimated political system.  As I’ve warned for years, there will be no winners in America’s epic spin information war… except for America’s enemies.

A personality like Trump, being cornered and perhaps facing “losing bigly”, well, he won’t be graciously stepping down.  As his admirers tout… “he’s a disruptor”, so how far he’ll go, to take down the whole American political system, remains an open question.  My worst fear remains that, if both the massive Trump and massive Clinton 2016 corruption ever get totally exposed, America’s worst nightmare will be Trump and the Clintons uniting to save themselves from ruin.

Sounds crazy, I know, but that’s where I worry America will end up… trapped in spin hell with Hillary and Trump colluding to silence the truth.

6 Comments

Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics, Public Corruption

November 27, 2018 · 1:22 pm

Odd timing

Since there are still more details unknown than known with what’s going on with Paul Manafort and “Trump/Russian collusion”, here are a few bits of news headlines that have me pondering, both timing and possible connections.

Let’s pretend we’re standing in Putin’s shoes the past few days…

November 25, 2018 – NBC reports:

“Ukraine convened an emergency meeting of what it called its war cabinet on Sunday after it accused Russia of having fired on three of its vessels in the Black Sea, injuring at least six sailors.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, confirmed that it had seized what it called three Ukrainian “warships,” saying they had trespassed into Russian territorial waters. It said that “weapons were used to force the Ukrainian warships to stop” and that three Ukrainian service members were treated for minor injuries, TASS, the official Russian news agency, reported Sunday night.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/russia-attacks-seizes-three-ukrainian-naval-vessels-coast-crimea-black-n939876

A hue and cry of international condemnation of Russian aggression and demands for UN and/or US to take action ensues.

November 26, 2018 – American news breaks on Manafort.  Politico reports:

“Special counsel Robert Mueller is accusing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of violating the plea deal he agreed to earlier this year by repeatedly lying to prosecutors and FBI agents during recent debriefing sessions.

In a report filed with a federal judge Monday evening, Mueller’s office alleged that Manafort “committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters.“ Prosecutors said the alleged lies leave Manafort exposed to the possibility of a more severe prison sentence under federal guidelines, but they did not elaborate on what exactly he allegedly lied about.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/26/mueller-manafort-plea-deal-lying-1017278

November 27, 2018 – The British Guardian paper runs this thinly sourced story about Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in 2016:

“Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.

Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

It is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy

The timing of this Guardian story is just too perfectly timed to throw the American media into another “Trump/Russian collusion” hysterical spin cycle and with Republicans in the House subpoenaing James Comey and Loretta Lynch, America is sure to begin 2019,  just like we began 2017 and 2018… still stuck in 2016 scorched earth hell.  And with the pressure building with the Mueller investigation potential endgame moves in sight, Putin would assuredly like to see Trump afraid to cross him, for fear of more leaks, but even more than that Putin would love to see America descend further into “political schizophrenia”.

No bright spots for America’s political system to move to more stable ground in the foreseeable future

We’re stuck in this endless spin cycle of … chaos and more chaos.

 

 

Here’s how I see the Russian hand of cards:

Russian intelligence knows what, if any parts of the Steele dossier, have any veracity.

Russian intelligence knows all about Paul Manafort.

Russian intelligence knows all about the dumb Don Jr. with the Russian lawyer.

Russian intelligence knows all about Trump’s financial dealings, especially if there are any connected to Russians.

Russian intelligence has a vast collection of compromising information on the Clintons.

Russian intelligence has all of the emails that were on the Clinton family server, to include all of Hillary and Huma’s emails, the yoga schedules and wedding plans AND the Bill Clinton foundation emails, which that server was set-up for in the first place.

Russian intelligence has all of the emails that were on the DNC server.

Russian intelligence has all of John Podesta’s emails.

Putin knows everything Trump agreed to in their private July 16, 2018 meeting.

This Guardian leak sure seems like Putin playing World Cup level geopolitical soccer.

Trump doesn’t even know how soccer is played… but he does understand threats, so expect more Trump spin diversions and hysterics, to deflect attention away from himself and more attacks on Mueller’s investigation.

Putin knows Trump is cornered and afraid, leaving Putin free to push his weight around on the world stage without challenge.  The odds of Trump responding forcefully against Russian aggression in Ukraine seem very low.

Putin is banking on America descending further into banana republic territory, with partisan squabbling over 2016 Trump/Russian collusion and Clinton, Steele dossier and Comey/Lynch corruption.  Putin will just keep tossing out banana peels in the western press, to keep American partisans slipping further into spin chaos.

 

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Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics

November 2, 2018 · 1:43 am

Not a single bright spot in this election

Decided to write a short post on the upcoming mid-term elections, since that’s the big news until next Tuesday.  I don’t know if the Republicans will keep or lose control of the House.  Regardless how the election turns out, President Trump’s disgusting antics hyping this Central American migrant caravan heading to the border, along with FOX news’ non-stop agitation propaganda hyping it as some ominous “invasion force” coming to spread destruction and disease,  goes to a new level of Soviet-level propaganda in American media.

For one who thought the Left’s relentless SPIN repetitive messaging information war was the most dangerous propaganda effort in American history, well this latest Trump/FOX  “invasion force” effort has given me a great deal of pause.  It’s hard to believe just a few short weeks ago, the anger I felt about the Dems and mainstream media vicious, orchestrated SPIN character assassination of Brett Kavanaugh had moved me to being a bit more sympathetic toward President Trump.

Leave it to Trump to choose the most divisive, self-destructive path toward ostensibly campaigning for Republican candidates by handing his political enemies a daily super-sized supply of free ammo to use against him and Republicans, that Dems can just kickback and rerun clips of daily streams of Trump bilge.  Trump has managed to sideline the Republican candidates in these races and turn it into all about himself… and the “invasion force”.

President Trump made some bizarre comments on illegal immigration late in the day yesterday.  He keeps hyping the military force he’s ordered to the border to help “repel the invasion force”.  The units being sent are NOT combat units, so all Trump’s hyperbole is just heavy doses of fear mongering to dupe his followers.  He made some comment about the military will shoot back if any migrants throw rocks.  What the military will be doing is working to prevent a humanitarian disaster, they aren’t going to be attacking unarmed migrants.  That FOX news and Trump’s strident pundit mouthpieces cheer on Trump’s saber-rattling is unforgivable.  Funny how so many of these same people would have been screaming bloody murder if any other president was diverting thousands of US troops to the border, when the military struggles to meet its obligations carrying out all the other vital national security missions around the world.  Yet they abandon or talk themselves around to supporting Trump’s morally bankrupt political theater antics every time.  At some point, these people look as pathetic, corrupt and as disgusting as the Democrats they revile.

If Republicans manage to hang on to the House, Trump will proclaim it’s all because of his reprehensible fear mongering and repeating his GOP Insurgent schtick.  If Republicans lose control of the House, rest assured, Trump will take none of the blame.

All that is obvious is Trump has sunk the Republican Party to a level of dishonesty, hypocritical posturing and abhorrent identity politics that rivals the Democratic Party, which leaves America with two totally corrupt parties.  No matter who wins on Tuesday, our political parties will continue to careen toward factionalizing America, to the point of being ungovernable.

There’s not a single bright spot in this election.

Update 11/2/2018:  President Trump walked back his bluster from yesterday asserting US troops would respond with force to migrants who throw rocks at them.  CNN reports:

“When the Trump administration first asked the Pentagon to send troops to the southern border, they wanted them to perform emergency law enforcement functions, CNN has learned.

The Pentagon said no.
According to two defense official familiar with the request, the Department of Homeland Security asked that the Pentagon provide a reserve force that could be called upon to provide “crowd and traffic control” and safeguard Customs and Border Protection personnel at the border to counter a group of Central American migrants walking to the US border to request asylum.
The Pentagon rejected the request on October 26, according to one of the officials, even as it signed off on providing DHS with air and logistics support, medical personnel and engineers.”

 

Also this:

“Defense officials have repeatedly emphasized the troops at the border are there to support civil authorities and that they are not expected to come into any contact with migrants.”

 

5 Comments

Filed under General Interest, Information War, Politics

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.

11 Comments

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