By ann summers
Here’s what Trump wants to distract you from today: https://t.co/APSh0vCRGFpic.twitter.com/KTHaT5dRqt
â Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) January 5, 2017
I would recommend not putting off important plans in anticipation of the Big Russia Reveal. Trump has a habit of claiming that he has really important information and that the press will simply have to wait on tenterhooks for the big unveiling, but he never bothers to cough it up.
Just like any other reality TV producer, he’s not particularly worried if he doesn’t have the goods. Getting everyone chattering around the water cooler is the only thing that matters…
Trump’s public search for secretary of state fit the pattern of a reality TV show like “The Apprentice” or “The Bachelor,” where contestants are put through a bunch of humiliating trials.
Trump taking Mitt Romney out for a candlelight dinner to build anticipation — and then making a spectacle of not choosing him — was a tactic straight out of “The Bachelor.”
“In the end, he doesn’t get the rose and has to go home humiliated,”
If, as Trump says, he has secret information that will clear this up, why speculate at all? Why not just reveal the information? The answer is that he doesn’t have it. He’s using reality TV tactics to create hype, and never had any intention of delivering on it.
The sad part is that this strategy will work, just like it did in the campaign. Journalists will get all hyped up about the big reveal, waiting on him instead of doing their own digging and actually covering the news. Trump just has to bide his time until all the steam has run out of the story and everyone has moved on to something else.
TeenVogue, so much better than Tiger Beat on the Potomac a.k.a. Politico…
And consider this: In just 56 days as the president-elect, Trump’s frequent daily use of Twitter has already resulted in inciting world leaders, insulting global organizations, causing domestic market volatility, and disregarding America’s intelligence agencies. The vast majority of what Trump spews onto his timeline has not only been gravely inaccurate, but it’s also mostly comments that have clearly avoided serious vetting from experienced and knowledgeable sources who, at the very least, could communicate to him the controversies he creates with his off-the-cuff remarks.
Pippa Norris, a Harvard professor, political scientist and the director of the Electoral Integrity Project, tells Teen Vogue, “diplomatic signaling (when state officials use platforms such as the media or the internet, to exchange informal information between government leaders) is a delicate art that requires considerable finesses about the exact choice of words. Any unfiltered commentary, without carefully consulting professional diplomats in the State Department, could easily send inappropriate signals that generate confusion and uncertainty about America’s foreign policies and thereby destabilize the world.” Unfortunately, this statement has already proven to be all too accurate.
The cruelest, most condescending, and also devastatingly correct indictment of Donald Trump’s supporters was uttered not by a member of the liberal media but by Donald Trump himself, when he mentioned that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. Trump’s insinuation that his fans will ignore any evidence of his guilt, however plain, has been vindicated. Perhaps no episode has demonstrated the Fifth Avenue Principle more dramatically than the case of the Russian email hack.
The very firm conclusion by 19 U.S. intelligence agencies that it was Russia that carried out the email hacks of Democratic emails, as well as the conclusion by both the CIA and the FBI that it did so in order to benefit Trump (a candidate it had openly touted for months) is inconvenient for Trump. We don’t and can’t know whether Russian hacking tipped the balance of the election, but it’s possible to believe it did; the election was extremely close, and the emails, while substantively minor, fed into the narratives of embittered Bernie Sanders supporters and generated more news stories with “Clinton” and “emails” in their headlines. Trump has thus set out to convince his supporters that Russia did not conduct the hacks.
To this end, Trump has employed many of the same techniques he used to attract attention to the cause of disputing President Obama’s citizenship. He has exploited popular distrust of institutions, portraying their documentation and conclusions to be suspicious, and promised that he alone either has obtained the real facts, or will soon get to the bottom of them. He has supplied his fans with plausible-sounding alternative suspects — the Chinese, a morbidly obese man, teenage boys — or attributed the issue to the general complications entailed by computers.
Another official added, “It’s a sad day when politicians place more stock in (Russian President Vladimir Putin and (WikiLeaks founder) Julian Assange than in the Americans who risk their lives daily to provide objective, non-partisan intelligence analysis.”Julian Assange said “a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta” – why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!
That was a reference to Trump’s tweet on Wednesday noting that Assange said he didn’t get hacked Democratic Party emails from the Russians, who have also denied the hacking allegations…Adding to the concern, officials said there is a disconnect between Trump’s public pronouncements about the intelligence community and his behind-the-scenes behavior when he’s sitting across the table at closed-door intel briefings.US officials familiar with the briefings said Trump is for the most part professional, deferential and polite. He listens but does not engage frequently during the briefings, other officials said, although at times he has challenged and questioned information.
When one reads transcripts of Stalin’s meetings regarding the Winter War before the Purges, he didn’t say much either… “US officials familiar with the briefings said Trump is for the most part professional, deferential and polite. He listens but does not engage frequently during the briefings, ”
Warwick University academic Sara Salem said that while such comedy set out to show how “ridiculous” Islamophobic ideas were, it ended up reinforcing such stereotypes instead.
“The trouble with this type of humour is that it ignores the broader context in which it will be revived, namely British society,” Salem said.
“While it may challenge some people’s conceptions of Muslim women by making light of tropes we hear of constantly, for many others it won’t serve as anything more than comedy based on things they already believe in and will continue believing in.
“Not only is it not a challenge to these stereotypes, it is using them to make light of what is ultimately not a very funny situation.”
Nicole Plyler Fisk
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Flowers For Socrates 
Lt. General Sir John Glubb was a soldier, historian, world traveler, and a futurist before the term was even coined. He wrote a small essay in the 1970s, in which he posited that the life of any empire was about 250 years. Even China, with its three thousand year history, is broken up into multiple dynasties of varying lengths, none of which lasted more than about three centuries. Sir John described the stages of an empire, based on his studies of past empires that have come and gone. Using his model, it is fairly clear to me that the US is in the final throes of empire. What happens next is up to all of us.
This little video give a brief excerpt of Sir John Glubb’s analysis of the course of empires.