Category Archives: Politics

October 1, 2017 · 4:16 pm

Trump won the weekend messaging battle

Following the NFL kneeling controversy, where Trump wrapped himself in the American flag, this weekend  it looks like he punched back hard about his administration’s response to Hurricane Maria devastation in Puerto Rico.  The weekend’s not over yet, but I feel safe in calling this one for President Trump.

The Left hasn’t realized yet that President Trump is a master at Alinskyite tactics.  After last weekend’s NFL kneeling controversy and the weeklong attacks on Tom Price’s expensive private jet flights on the taxpayer’s dime,  Trump fired Price on Friday.  The Left smelled blood and decided to go for broke giving Trump the Katrina treatment, trying to drown him in a CAT 5 size negative spin cycle, or perhaps, they wanted to leave him stranded on a bridge to impeachment.

The mayor of San Juan hit the TV news shows, railing against the federal response and many in the media joined the media feeding frenzy, howling about people dying, making up a cholera outbreak and piling on.

Yesterday, President Trump, with his Twitter troopers, FOX News and assorted pundits launched a massive spin counterattack.  Trump went on a major Twitter attack in the morning, assailing the mayor of San Juan, the people of Puerto Rico and refuting the Left’s spin.  He never bothers with getting details or facts straight and he doesn’t care who he insults or offends.

The mayor of San Juan was attacked, not only by Trump, but by Trump Twitter troopers, who countered the mainstream (liberal) media wild spin cycle.  They tweeted about the mayor being invited to the FEMA office to discuss emergency relief, but alleged she told FEMA officials that she didn’t have time.  They reported that instead of visiting FEMA, she went and did several TV interviews attacking Trump and ranting about, “we’re dying”.  They tweeted about her support for a released FALN terrorist and alleged she’s a Communist.

Trump’s tweetstorm yesterday was nasty, came across as bigoted, and certainly demeaned the Office of the President, but he won the weekend messaging battle.

He never backs down and he never apologizes.

That is how he keeps winning the info war against the Left.  He learned how to fight the Left’s spin, by using their same vile, scorched earth tactics and he’s better at it than they are.

There was enough truth in the Trump spin to once again quell desertions from the Trump camp. The Trump mouthpieces in the media always point out how the Left is worse, how Trump is a victim and how he’s a winner. They silence any moral arguments against Trump’s vile attacks, by dismissing those as just “virtue-signaling”.

Trump was right. He probably could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his followers would remain loyal, because his information warriors would be out there spinning it that the person deserved to be shot. They would cast that person as an “enemy”.

America keeps losing more and more of its soul as this scorched earth information war rages on and the divides in America continue to deepen.  For the 5th Avenue Loyalists, the Democrat spinmeisters and the mainstream media, who are devoted to spin, they just double down on their talking points, recycle through old ones and for them there’s always another messaging battle to fight.

Winning…

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

September 27, 2017 · 3:41 pm

Kneeling or Standing: A fake diversion

Kneeling or standing seems to be another one of these “national conversations” America is having.  Here’s another junk journal I made last weekend, using a 2010 military-themed calendar. It was a free calendar, handed out at the military commissary I use on Fort Stewart.  The clothespins are just to hold the pages open. The songbook came in a fundraising letter from the Disabled American Veterans and on the back it has 2014 on it.  The post card is one of several American bicentennial ones, I bought in 1976:

I put my “I love America” junk journal together, using only stuff I had already.  I still have a lot of work to do with embellishing the inside and finding charms or beads or something to add to the strings hanging out the bottom, which are the strings from sewing the page signatures into the book:

I made the cover out of a cereal box and covered it with patriotic fabric I’ve had for many years.  I decided to put several coats of Mod Podge matte sealer on top, because it makes the cover easy to wipe clean (good for messy me) and it also made it feel sturdier.

This old calendar had lots of nice photos, worth saving, so I added them, some patriotic scrapbook paper, old map pages, and some assorted other paper.  It felt better to be working on this journal last weekend, almost like therapy in the age of Trump: The Potemkin American President, which is a bizarre reality show and sequel to Trump: The Potemkin 2016 Campaign.   His MAGA 2.0 is totally fake.  He plays a constant, vile “us vs. them” strategy. It’s the same old Clinton strategy, where they were always the victim of some nefarious, “vast, right-wing conspiracy”.

This kneeling controversy follows his constant borrowing on the American people’s respect for the generals surrounding him, stealing their honor whenever he can.  He uses those generals to bolster his image as “Trump loves the military” and he uses the military as stage props and flags, flags and more flags, to wrap himself in.

Last weekend’s controversy was a classic Trump diversion. He once again changed the subject, latched onto the topic, showing respect for the flag and national anthem, that he knew his base and millions of Americans would rally behind, all to create a controversy, where the Left would screech.  He has played the innocent, standard-bearer victim for MAGA, again. The real issue was not about kneeling or standing. It was an abuse of power by the President of the United States, trying to exert influence on NFL owners to prod them to fire players over players’ political expressions. Most people buy into either Trump’s spin or the liberal media’s spin and do not think for themselves. With Americans trained to take sides on every hot bed issue, few will stop and say, “that’s not really what the issue is.”

As someone who cringed, when President Clinton waxed about feeling people’s pain, watching Clinton’s old golfing buddy, pretend to be a Republican, sickens me, but it also makes me wonder why so many Republicans rolled over and got on the Trump train, even though Trump’s vacillating policies, pronouncements and even his character were things that many of these Republicans railed against.

These days, I wonder who are these Trump loyalists, people who spent decades preaching conservative values?

Who are these people, who still cheer President Trump’s divisive, phony chants at rallies?  Even more worrisome is who are these mouthpieces, who are willing to repeat any Trump talking point, no matter how untruthful, disingenuous, or fake it is?

The Left and the mainstream (liberal) media are running a phony information war too and besides their endless #Resist campaign to delegitimize Trump, there are many bizarre, dishonest headlines and stories from ostensibly hard news reporters.

Their news reporting often makes me cringe, but their opinion pieces often make me feel like revisionist history is being written from the pages of American journalism’s top newspapers. The New York Times ran an opinion piece a couple of days ago, continuing their Duranty heritage of willingly spreading communist propaganda.  When you examine the #Resist, with their Women’s March, then their Immigration and Workers’ Rights March in May, with far-left organizers, communist propaganda seems to be in vogue again. Lately, the target audience for communist indoctrination is women:

“The Communists did many terrible things,” my grandmother always says at the end of her reminiscences. “But they made women’s lives much better.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/women-china-communist-revolution.html

In August, the New York Times ran an opinion piece titled, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism

While President Trump captures media attention daily with his information war, there’s plenty to be disturbed about with the liberal media too.   I’m doing less blogging and more crafting and needlework,  because the raging information war in America worries me a “great” deal.

Junk journal made with a 2009 local bank calendar.  I turned this into my Hurricane Irma evacuation journal and have it almost completely filled up with collages, receipts, lists, and journaling.

Junk journal made with 2004 Country Bouquet calendar.

I used a dollar store 2018 calendar with lovely vintage collage pictures as pages to add to my Monet journal, which had too much empty space along the spine.  I made two more signatures of assorted pages and sewed them into that journal.  I didn’t have enough of the brown cord that I used to sew in the other 3 signatures, so I used a green beading cord.   I didn’t want to throw away the scrap pieces, that I cut off of those vintage collage pages, so I’ve been cutting and tearing them up, making my own collages on index cards, using  paint, rubber stamping and images from an old wildlife book. I coated them with Mod Podge to seal them.

I made the bird ones, cutting out pieces of paper and using a little bit of ink around the edges, but they looked pretty blah and lifeless.  So, then I tried the butterfly using acrylic paint, inking and gel pen highlights, after, of course, watching more YouTube videos on mixed media collage art.  I cut the words, Timeless Beauty, out of an old magazine.  I opted for tearing out my pieces of paper, like the real collage artists do and I experimented with the paint.   On the bobcat card, I  added paint and some rubber-stamping on the background.  The purrsonality script is from an old sticker sheet.  As a person with zero artistic talent, I am thankful for Pinterest and YouTube videos.

The never-ending information warfare is reforming this die-hard news junkie into a crafting/sewing fanatic.

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

September 22, 2017 · 12:39 pm

Pauline Revere warns the Russians are coming

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

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Left’s hysteria over “Russian influence”, to “Russian collusion” and now “Russian interference” resonates like a McCarthyite Red Scare.  The Left’s hysteria amounts to, “Oh my goodness, there are diabolical Russians around every corner trying to control our minds, our elections, even our very democracy.”  And of course, their remedies to stop the Russian influence operations, in order to ostensibly preserve our constitutional republic, always come back to trying to undo the 2016 election, which of course, there is absolutely no constitutional means to do.  That would mean discounting the results of a legal election, where millions of Americans voted Donald J. Trump and he won the electoral college vote.

To save us from these diabolical Russians, we’ve got Pauline Revere, aka the smartest woman in the world, riding the TV talk circuit, combining her sore loser book tour of 1,001 reasons why she lost the election, combined with her new spin effort to sell Americans the lie that the 2016 election was not legitimate.   She is colluding with her supporters in the  liberal media and Hollywood, using the same mass media information warfare that she is asserting Trump and the Russians used.

These massive media SPIN efforts work only with massive collusion with mass media, who ruthlessly repeat the same talking points and phrases.  This creates an opinion cascade, as Americans start repeating those same talking points (it’s a form of mass media brainwashing).  The political operatives and their friends in the media then begin to repeat the poll numbers, to reinforce those spun messages and create the illusion they reflect the “will of the people”.  Since the 90s, this phrase equating polls as some form of legitimate expression of the “will of the people” has been repeated and reinforced by politicians and the media, especially by those on the Left, who mastered this form of mass media information warfare to brainwash those, the Left’s sleaziest political operatives dubbed “low information voters”

The key point about the 2016 election is Jeh Johnson, the Obama Homeland Security Director, stated that there was no tampering detected on election day.  That makes the election LEGITIMATE.

The Russians’ escalated information warfare activities during the election should be investigated, but in our effort to “protect” Americans from “influence”, more laws or crackdowns on speech will do nothing to protect Americans, but will assuredly do more to destroy our constitutionally protected liberties than anything the Russians can do with their info war against American democracy.

As someone who pointed out the information warfare being waged using “SPIN cycles” since 1998, to include the vicious gang-up attacks on the Excite message boards during the Clinton impeachment, this hysteria about Russian information warfare now seems laughable.  All of a sudden, the people who were the most vicious combatants using this vile form of information warfare are hysterically warning that it’s a dire threat to American democracy…

Again, Donald Trump was only able to knock off 17 other Republican candidates during the GOP primary with the knowing and willing COLLUSION of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX news, along with many print journalists and pundits SPINNING his talking points and memes 24/7, running his rallies live and in their entirety and touting his “GOP Insurgency”.  This was Bill Clinton’s triangulation strategy.  A leaked Podesta email referred to this as their Pied Piper strategy.  They wanted the most extreme Republican candidate to win the GOP primary and they were colluding with the media to sell Trump.  Trump received billions of dollars worth of free media in the primary.

The Bill Clinton triangulation strategy was simple: paint Trump as the far-right fascist kook, paint Bernie as the far-left commie kook, clearing the middle for Queen Hillary to prance back into the White House.

It backfired.

Mueller may find criminal actions relating to Trump and/or some of his campaign associates.  If so, impeachment could very well be a legitimate remedy.  The Clinton resistance efforts will make it harder for Congress to act, because their constant information warfare is as counterproductive to American democracy as what the Russians are doing.  And then to compound the mess, President Trump is waging the same kind of no holds barred information war too.  They all want to control the hearts and minds of the American people using SPIN, relentlessly repeating and assaulting the American people with gross distortions of the truth and outright lies.

Pauline Revere is several decades late warning about Russian information warfare in America.

Yesterday CNN reported on a fake Tea Party Twitter account and Facebook is working to stop Russian political ad buys. but this hysteria about Russians infiltrating right-wing political sites is so myopic, that it’s stunning.  The Russians infiltrated the American Left, from their political institutions to academia to Hollywood, thoroughly since inception of the Comintern in 1919.  The Russians have a century’s worth of experience building an information warfare capability within the bastions of the American political Left.

I strongly suspect they never left when the Soviet Union collapsed.  I believe SPIN information warfare had some strong foreign information warfare influences in it since the 1990s, although I don’t have proof of that.  All I have is my personal experience during the Clinton impeachment drama, stemming from writing comments on the Excite message boards.  I don’t have proof of what happened there either.

However, if I’m right, then the problem of Russian influence, using mass media information warfare, is larger than just 2016, President Trump, FOX news and Russian run “American right-wing” twitter accounts and sites.  The Soviets had a very captive audience among American academia, Leftist politicians, the press and Hollywood, to spread their messaging.   The Russians didn’t have to work hard to find plenty of useful idiots among the Left to carry their messaging .

That the Russians now have FOX News and many other information avenues working 24/7 to pervert conservative Republican messaging and replace it with a mishmash of Trumpian messaging, strikes me as they now have the means to undermine both political parties, Hollywood, academia, and the media.  That “GOP Insurgency” was meant to destroy the Republican Party.  The Clintons have left the Democratic Party in total disarray.  Congress is dysfunctional.  The courts still function thankfully.

The last bastion where The Constitution is revered, protected and defended is in the U.S. military and President Trump is working to undermine the integrity of that institution with his PR blitz to bolster his support among the military.  Messaging targeting the U.S. military, to undermine morale and military values, will escalate, I believe.  I expect much of that undermining messaging to be at the hands of President Trump, with his endless stream of  “don’t take him literally” strong-man word salads and using military backdrops to bolster his “popular” image.

The messaging war is going to get crazier, of that you can be sure.

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

September 20, 2017 · 11:43 pm

A glimmer of hope

Here’s a thoughtful USA Today opinion piece about our divided America,  I moved from a blue state to a red state and it changed my life, written by Leah Singer.

Singer writes:

“I was raised in California, where we like to believe diversity is applauded and opportunities abound. In many ways, California’s blue state bubble can be a very safe place to live if you subscribe to the popular liberal politics.

Over and over, I was questioned about why I would ever leave the Golden State for a “flyover” red state. This phrase alone troubled me, and the implied perception that one flies over the Midwest just to get to their East or West coast home.”

Living in a bubble cuts both left and right and Singer’s thoughtful piece offers a glimmer of hope for finding common ground again in America.

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

September 20, 2017 · 11:52 am

2016 never ends

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

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

The Players:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 13, 2017 · 9:57 am

A world without people?

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

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

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

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

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

The official P.A.S. history teaches:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 8, 2017 · 5:41 am

Trump’s #CharlottesvilleVendetta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Filed under Corrupt Media Collusion, General Interest, Politics

August 31, 2017 · 1:37 pm

How To Defeat Scorched Earth Information Warfare

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

Stop being a participant in the scorched earth information warfare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 24, 2017 · 2:10 pm

All leadership boils down to trust.

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

  
More

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

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

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

His verdict on Trump’s claim?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All leadership boils down to trust.

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Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, General Interest, Military, Politics, The Media

August 23, 2017 · 2:34 pm

Trump launches MAGA 2.0 campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America is in for a very rocky 3.5 years.

I expect a lot more violence.

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

 

 

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