The Propaganda Wars in America

Donald Trump is a propagandist: he is winning that battle. Dan Rather said last night before the AZ immigration speech: "His election strategy is to dominate visibility in every news cycle and to date he is doing that." His thinking and speech are often irrational and appeal to those folk who are largely dominated by their emotions not their wisdom. He doesn't clearly define what the well being of the people means except to focus on reduction of what he has determined is the major threat, the major issue now.

To determine a concern as THE primary concern, to the exclusion of all others - illegal immigration is the only issue we should be concentrating on now - and to repeatedly, vitriolically, loudly harp on that moment by moment, day by day is to use one the THE primary tools of propaganda. 

Without credentials in medicine, I'll say that I think Donald Trump has a mental disorder.  His thinking is often irrational by the terms of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the catalog of cognitive distortions.  Trump regularly labels, predicts the future, reads other people's minds and indulges in catastrophic thinking.  All of those are distorted thinking and not based in facts. Thus they are not rational. Statements based in those distortions unusually bias those that hear them without a critical thinking base of their own, and do also powerfully sway those who do think critically when they are primarily controlled by emotion, like fear.

Donald Trump appears to assume the shape of his container: at a seminar of Hispanic business people he appears rational; with the Mexican President he is measured and kind; at one of his own rallies he is bellicose and presumptive and inflammatory; in a one on one interview he is the negotiator, sidestepping some questions, impugning others and writing his own script on others. 

That inconsistency of value and presentation is a definition of a mental disorder.  Combine that inconsistency and definition by environment with irrational thinking and there is a person who I don't want carrying the nuclear codes, deciding about National Park Status, mental health law or anything else a President of the USA carries.

Conflating, or connecting immigration control and the following ideas is also irrational and fallacious:

1.  keeping jobs

2.  staying safe

3.  stopping drug trade

4.  stopping gun shipment

Mr. Trump simply makes those statements in the midst of his onslaught of words.  He doesn't provide any connection or context for them actually applying to immigration control other than he says they're connected.  That's a propaganda tool.  He uses it effectively.

1.  Keeping jobs:  automation and scientific, technological development removes many jobs from America.  It is not just trade agreements or immigrants illegally manning the battlements of many low paying difficult jobs.

2.  keeping safe:  there are other causes of violence than people from south of the border who are paperless.  Inner city cultural dynamics, mental illness, effects of drug and alcohol abuse among all populations, Wahhabi inspired behaviors, gangs of all stripes and angry former workers all perpetrate violence among the American populace.

3.  Stopping drug trade:  The cartels are evil; limiting their actions would be of benefit to communities on both sides of the border.  However, they primarily traffic in cocaine.         Cocaine and crack cocaine are not the primary drugs fueling the current epidemic in America. Methamphetamine cooked in DOMESTIC labs provides an unchecked supply of the killer white stuff.  

Heroin, the #1 drug epidemic, comes largely from the opium crops of Afghanistan that are controlled by the Taliban.  Trump has not spoken word one about the Taliban and why they are not eradicated and thus lessening the heroin trade . There's a complicated set of spoken and unspoken agreements between US & ISI, the Afghan and US governments, and the US - Saudi Arabian - Israeli agreements.

4. stopping arms trade, like limiting drug trade, relates with observing supply and demand.  Demand for drugs in the US creates the kinetic energy for their manufacture overseas and shipment here. Change the market, the demand, change the trade.  Trump neglects that idea.

Supply of killing machine arms from the US to the world exists - - - recognize the direction of that trade ::: US to them - - - exists in part, because America is the largest manufacturer of weapons.  Limit the manufacture of arms and the traffic is limited too.  

Trump ignores both of those determinant perspectives.  He only concentrates on the propaganda tools of repetition of easy to remember phrases and emotion generating concepts.

      Thus inflaming emotion by talking about the southern border as THE drug and arms trafficking highway is fallacious and incredibly dangerous.  Trump also does not accurately portray the current work of the DEA and CBP who have instituted improvements in policy and tactics and hired many more workers in the recent past.

Donald Trump's propaganda machine garners him attention and draws him closer to election while neglecting substantive needs other than his amplified issue of the day, whether it be The Clinton Foundation, the e-mail server, immigration control.

That attention is sucking up the media's attention and generating mind control of the masses.

It is absent any attention to the candidates positions on:

1. mental health - to neglect the profound mental health crisis in America now is to ignore a source of monetary drain, violence, sorrow and confusion in all American communities.

2. health care - the system is now very convoluted and needs refinement.  Just throwing out everything and starting again is a nightmare of the same magnitude as deporting 5 million criminal and visa overstay Latinos.  The actual logistics of such things are impossible to imagine as a quick fix or a long term process.  Just consider what must happen - boots on the ground perspective - to do either of those things.

3. employment - America dropped the ball on training and anticipation of market direction.  Jobs were outsourced, yes. For those jobs, and for the ones lost to automation, there has been inadequate re-training of distressed workers.  Poor foresight, staffing, coordination among state and federal and local policy and planning have been a cluster f..k.

All those things are AS IMPORTANT if not more important than controlling immigration and creating a false reality by continually saying that illegal immigration is the cause of the problems in America.

That's a conflating, diversionary, scapegoating way of thinking that ignores other crucial concerns.  It is the definition of the danger and potential disaster of electing the appealing personality and entertainment magnetism of Donald Trump.  He is appealing, for certain. If we as an entire population can see past the image and stop eating the menu I don't know. God's will.

quotes from D. Trump's speech in Arizona on immigration 8.31.2016

"If we can save American lives, American jobs and American futures, together we can save America itself."

"there is only one core issue in the immigration debate and it is this: the well-being of the American people. Nothing even comes a close second."

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/31/text-donald-trumps-speech-in-phoenix-on-illegal-immigration/#ixzz4J2c7Kauf

Marshall McCluhan on the 2016 Election

              
Marshall McLuhan on 2016 Election
The medium and one's ability to respond and adapt quickly to it and its rapid nuances and broad brushes both is the message.  And dare I say, Hillary can't keep up the way she's going.  Trump outflanked her today, and outrageously. Can she recover somehow or only rely of Mr. Trump's proclivity to self sabotage?

Today, Donald Trump left the press corps in AZ and went to Mexico where he looked downright Presidential.  While his is a Twitter speed world, Secretary Clinton plods in another dimension. He whipped that trip together in 24 hours and despite sidestepping concrete methodologies, the meeting occurred.  That is in itself impressive.  Hillary delivered a speech worthy of John F. Kennedy's Vice Presidential running mate.  Oh boy....

Now, about deportation, prior to his AZ speech tonight I will say that deporting 11 - 15 million people simply on the face of it logistically is a potential blood letting.  Who would do the organizing?  Who would do the gathering?  Where would people be gathered?  

Some of the men I've worked with in trade-work, who,although I never asked I am guessing at the time I was with them were not papered, some of them would not go peacefully.  Some would; some wouldn't. To expect such an undertaking to go smoothly is folly, to think that Trump's words are just words in a novel is an egregious harm.  Families, ill folk, small babies, rowdy stoned teenagers who have been in gangs, strong, lean, fit men who literally do two or three times the work of white men in a day, all being put on busses or planes!!! Wow, what a potential for conflagration. Let's see how he modifies, adapts, clarifies his deportation exclusionary baseline.

In terms of baselines and theatrics meeting politics, consider this:  suppose Trump's chicanery of every day a different mood and statement, wild suppositions followed by an casual " oh of course I didn't mean that for real - I was being sarcastic" Suppose all of that was a means of setting the bar so low in unpredictability and poor predicted presidential character, that now with two months to polling he begins to act like the man who has consummated hundreds of big time deals, a guy who can listen and deal at the same time - well, his appeal broadens then.

Meanwhile Hillary dresses superbly, has some amazing policy initiatives, including this much needed and aptly outlined mental health, suicide prevention, addiction treatment integrative proposal:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/clinton-mental-health-agenda-227496

Those policies are lost in Trump's mastery of media. That garners him free air time to do with as he pleases.  Many many people in America are fed up with the slow motion, grinding politico intelligentsia sale of time and condition as the product that generates dispersion of goods and services, including work - so fed up that Donald Trump has a real chance of ending up as President.

Two parting shots:  how is anyone to handle the lunatic fringe that is included in the mass dissatisfaction?  There are people in the hills, some literally, some figuratively, whose anger may turn violent no matter what how the polling on Nov 8th turns.

And, most importantly, does Mr. Trump truly want the responsibilities of being President of the United State?  The hair trigger Cuban Missile crisis?  The White House Lawn Easter egg hunt? The visit to the Vatican, to West Africa, to places that have nothing to do with resolving Syrian and Yemeni internecine slaughter?  How will he handle the reality of Saudi Arabia - that they control the world oil markets and petro chemical culture AND that they contribute financially to reprobate sociopaths' violence - Al Queda and ISIL?  

One can't just say those people are assholes, the hell with them.  That 16 year old strength will wreak havoc.

What does he think he's going to do about ISIL - bomb exactly what, and with what and who?  Does he have a clue what a forward observer is and how many of them die in the desert?  Does he realize that rambunctious tactics like COIN thought out by brilliant strategists David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal cost millions of American dollars - cash in the suitcase delivered by the truckload to sheiks who one day are your friend and next cut you into pieces to boil in water?

Too many days of shenanigans by Mr. Trump in the past have most likely dimmed the chance of his brilliant mastery of media and showmanship to sway the day.

Photo ID's:  
NYMA in the flatlight [ New York Military Academy, D. Trump's alma mater]
Two of North Eleuthera, including The Cove's 16' 150 horse that can go 50 miles open flat water to Nassau
Part of my knife collection

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Not far from where I live, in May of 2002, George Bush changed the rules.
He did that because he said he could. He did that because he said he needed to.For a long time, at least since WWI, war, that fundamental on earth which strains
my ability to be present and accept life on life's terms, war had been fought among civilized nations on the basis of response to a specific attack or imminent danger of attack. 

At the USMA commencement, Mr Bush on behalf of his group, including Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Perle, Yoo, Wolfowitz, Card and many others known and unknown said we, the USA, can attack other nations should we feel, intuit, suspect, decide that any nation is a threat to our interests, or is cooperating or suspected of cooperating with any nation in such standing. He did not specify what it is that our interests are clearly. He said simply we can do this. He did not define " our interests".  He left that as a given, that everyone simply understands what " Our National Interest" is.  It's a threat to our National interest.  Is that not something that changes as the time changes. Or is it an absolute.  If it is an absolute, who in the world determines what that is?

In Germany in the 1930's, Dietrich Bonhoffer said " this will not stand " when faced with Nazi tyranny and when he saw what was actually being done in the name of the Holy Fatherland. He began to take action and eventually life was sacrificed for his beliefs and values.

Vaclav Havlev stood up in Czechoslovkia.
Lech Valesa stood up in Poland.

Where are these people here?  Watching Netflix? The latest "Big Game"? 
Minding their own business up in the hills growing food and hunting deer for food?
Perhaps it is better that way.

What is power?

Just because we are powerful does not mean that we
must use that power.

This bus here rocks. Totally.
It's super warm in the winter, has great torque on hills -
filled to the gills at United States Military Academy with football fans or in Cornwall going up 9W S past the Towne Houses loaded with bubbling middle schoolers on a hot spring day. It tracks great on 84 in the midst of the heavy duty 5 pm truck races and handles the broken streets of Newburgh like a Baptist Choir Director. It's got 153, 658 miles on it. It's a Freightliner with either a Cummins ISB or a Caterpillar 3126 Diesel engine in it. It's really powerful, power to transport your children to school and home and activities, safely. To have the bus ride be a safe part of the school day, included in the learning and growing experience - that's power, the power of the School District, the Bus Co., the mechanics, the dispatchers, the safety managers and the drivers.

True warriors, especially a Bodhisattva warrior, those cultivating awakening, compassion, mercy and courage, will I believe say that being powerful is about mindfulness, awareness, noticing what is and being with it.

Yes, that is different than threat assessment and response. Must we always be threatened? Is that my identity? To have an opponent? Fundamental Chinese martial art allows for sinking into the earth, being rooted like a tree, relaxed and quiet. No roid rage football players there - only standing, completely still and silent. And in the silence, there is power. In that power is grace and forgiveness.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/heroes/chrishughes.html Is an example where Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, early in the Iraq campaign, averted a debacle in An Najaf. Would his leadership be able to prevail. The world seems bent on crucifixion, on chaos, conflict and vain shows of power.