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The Clintonistas, the Putinites and others would like to think this is how the 2016 election played out. But no.
Fresh waves of hysteria have arisen about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as a result of new reports on its dimensions prepared for the US Senate and released this week. “Reports show Russia mounted sweeping effort to sow divisions,” fulminated Politico. [Emphasis added.] Other headlines — too many to read, let alone link to — screamed about “millions” of posts on “every major social network,” an effort that “shows the sophistication of the disinformation campaign.” The cunning devils “focused intensely on African Americans as they sought to deliver a victory for Trump.”
The mainstream media should have used, and provided its readers with, brown paper bags for fighting off hyperventilation.
But here’s an interesting thing about all those news stories, and indeed about the reports they are discussing. The weasel words used to characterize the Russian efforts are all about intentions: it was a “sweeping” effort, it was intense, it “sought” victory for Trump. You may read all these stories, and both these reports, from stem to stern and you will not find any evidence presented that the Russians succeeded. Because there isn’t any.
The notion that anyone can be turned into a racist, or a Republican, or a misogynist, by fleeting exposure to a brain-dead “meme” or conspiracy-sucking fake-news story is just that — a notion, held by people who would hotly deny any suggestion that such a thing would work on them. It’s a notion that appeals most strongly to the least experienced politicians, because it takes a few turns around the track before you learn that practical politics is not about changing minds, but about finding and motivating people who are predisposed to support your candidate. If the Russians were any good at our politics, they would not have bothered with this.
Speaking of people who are not very good at our politics, during the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton’s people mounted a million-dollar-plus trolling operation funded by a Super PAC that, when considered along with her advertising budget on social media of about $24 million for the year, exceeds by a factor of two what Trump spent on social media and what the Russians spent (about $1.25 million a month in 2016, according to Robert Mueller’s indictment of the operatives). Just to refresh your memory — Hillary lost.
There are lots of things that are fashionable to believe — driverless cars will soon be everywhere, drones will be delivering our packages, Facebook controls minds, the Russians are brilliant conspirators — but that however popular have no independent existence in reality. I wrote here over a year ago [Digital Advertising: The Rise and Fall of Crappy Crap] that Procter and Gamble, one of the world’s biggest spenders on advertising, began to wonder if the $1.5 million per day it was putting into digital advertising was doing any good. (Question No. 1: Really? They didn’t know?) So they stopped it for three months. And nothing happened. Sales did not drop. Nobody noticed.
Small wonder. How much has your life been changed by offers of a simple trick to remove belly fat, a quick and easy way to pay off your mortgage, the searing truth about Hillary’s pizza-shop child-sex-slave operation. No? Didn’t work on you? Then why would you assume it would work on me? You must be a Russian.
For the record: I do not doubt that the Russians intended to mess with our politics, nor that anyone who helped them do it broke the law and should be prosecuted. I just don’t think they were successful, and one measure of that, it seems to me, is that the much-anticipated reprise in the 2018 midterm elections never happened.
If at first you don’t succeed, na zdarovje .
[See also, “The Russians Are Not Coming,” February, 2018]
i will wait for the completion of the muller investigation and indictments before deciding the trump crime family is innocent.
Imagine if the Russians had a string of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and ABM batteries running from Halifax to Vancouver, and another string of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and ABM batteries running from Cancun to Mexicali; how would an American President even get out of bed in the morning, facing that?
Putin is a cornered rat. Sometimes he cowers, sometimes he lashes out, sometimes he does something just plain weird,* but no matter how he plays it, he is still just a corned rat.
His position ranging somewhere between tenuous, and hopeless, Vlad decided to take a shot in 2016. I can’t blame him for it, but still, I think it was mistake. An old Soviet apparatchik such as himself should’ve known better. It doesn’t matter who the American President is, the Pentagon is going to continue loading up on his borders with everything it’s got, whether it’s Barrack, Hillary or Donald “making policy” from the Oval Office.
*Yeah, Putin’s speech back in October was a doozy. I know exactly what the intention was, but it was an awfully weird way to deliver a message to first strike planners at the Pentagon. Here’s a snip:
“An aggressor should know that vengeance is inevitable, that he will be annihilated, and we would be the victims of the aggression. We will go to heaven as martyrs, and they will just drop dead. They will not even have time to repent for this,”
I’m writing in regard to your startling post titled, “The Silence of the Leaves”. The mainstream press is beginning to catch on. I suggest an article in “The Atlantic” titled, “Trees That Have Lived for Millennia Are Suddenly Dying”. The article describes how baobab trees that have lived for 1,500 years or more are now dying throughout the plains of Africa.
“This isn’t an isolated event. Of the 13 oldest known baobabs in the world, four have completely died in the last dozen years, and another five are on the way, having lost their oldest stems. “These large and monumental trees, which can live for 2,000 years or more, were dying one after another,” says Adrian Patrut from Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, who has cataloged the deaths. “It’s sad that in our short lives, we are able to live through such an experience.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/baobab-trees-dying-climate-change/562499/
Climate change is real. 10,000 years ago the Sahara Desert was lush and heavily forested. 100 years ago the passenger pigeon was flourishing. There’s a very long list of extinction events found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_extinct_animals. And it is disheartening. The Earths population has doubled to 7,400,000,000 since 1960. And it doesn’t look good for the future. I hear much about the problem but very little in the way of a solution. Eliminating meat might be a step in the right direction. I wonder how one would go about that. Maybe a tax. But then President Macron tried that with fuel, lo and behold the Yellow Vests. It’s possible it may just bring down his government. $10 a gallon for gas would mean it would cost me $130.00 to fill the tank of my lowly Corolla. I could eliminate meat but not driving to work. Oh, I loved The Atlantic right up to when they discontinued comments. That happened when Laurene Powell Jobs (the widow of former Apple Inc. chairman and CEO Steve Jobs) purchased the magazine. A multi billionaire who also founded the Emerson Collective. Along with George Soros Open Society Foundations they want to fundamentally change the world. And are very open about it. Open borders and mass migration are at the top of the list. Jeez, a little long winded here. Back to the baobabs. Seems like another victim of millennia of now accelerating climate change. I think I’ll add tofu to my shopping list. Wanna do my part.
When I was a young teen I lived in Germany. At night I listened to classical music on a station dubbed ‘Radio Moscow’. Between selections, there were news segments with brief commentaries – all in the King’s English. Two things occurred to me: that this was the Soviet equivalent of ‘Radio Free Europe, and that the content was rather measured – far from the propagandist raving that characterized like U.S. broadcasts.
I never told my dad about this; he commanded a tank battalion on the East-West German border and was firmly convinced that the Reds were the spawn of the Evil One himself…Thank God for German technology, my Telefunken transistor radio was no bigger than a cigarette pack and came equipped with an earphone for private listening. Dad would have shit a cinder block!*
Anyway, I never bought into the “the Russians are coming, the Rusians are coming” scenario.
*To be fair, I was already under suspecion for having commented, years before while watching TV news,”Dad, if the Russians are all starving to death due to their commie ways, how come you never see any skinny Rusians on any of these newsreels from that country?” The Old Man wasn’t the least bit amused.
Fascinating.
Well, in fairness to your “Old Man”, while there may not have been a whole lot of people literally starving in the old USSR, there were quite a few people who weren’t eating very well on account of agricultural collectivization being such an abject, inefficient failure.
🍾 2019 Collapse Political and Attitude Survey (Merry Collapse Christmas & Doomy New Year to all Kollapsniks! 🎅 This survey is quite detailed and covers many of the topics discussed here on the Daily Impact among the Collapse Aware. Fill out sitting by an open fire drinking a glass of Eggnog.)
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2018/12/23/2019-collapse-political-and-attitude-survey/
Every time I think about the state of modern journalism, I’m reminded of the 1,000 mile fighting retreat of the Nez Perce.
Bonnie Faulkner is still fighting (and so are you, Tom, so are you). This is masterclass in how to conduct an interview with one of the great thinkers humans have produced.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/12/michael-hudson-the-vocabulary-of-economic-deception.html
I think it’s worth pointing out that Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election had she been able to garner a mere 100,000 more votes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. That she didn’t wasn’t so much due to “Russian influence” as it was to the simple fact that the working class in the Rust Belt resented the DNC’s attempt to ram the Clintons down the country’s throat for a noncontiguous third term. Literally anyone else including a goat wearing a cocktail dress would have been able to beat Donald Trump. Oh, but confronting this basic fact would involve some introspection on the part of the DNC and its Kool-Aid drinkers, and we USAmericans don’t do *that*, perish the very thought!