From the people that brought you "Hillary by a landslide"

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Video: American journalism is dead and the information bubble is real

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The Elephant Grass of the Democratic Party

The hissy fits of the Democratic Party over the election victory of Donald Trump continue. If one pays strict attention to their whining, it all seems to be a cloak for inherent and clandestine fears based on emotion more so than pragmatism and reason.  It reminds me of how one of my uncle friends described being in Vietnam when I was between 11 and 12 years old (1973-74). He told me about how what he would never forget outside of the sounds of war, were the marshy fields he and his company would be dropped off in, feet tall above the head of Elephant grass.  He said these fields were packed with booby traps but what scared him most was not being able to see around him.  The tall grass in addition to the grown-man high ant mounds, concealed the unexpected, seeing that the Elephant grass was tall enough to hide an entire military detail ready for ambush.

I suspect that this is how the democrats feel.  As if they were dropped off in a field of Elephant grass, not know what the future holds in store for them.  Could it be they expect to be invalidated by Trump and the GOP? Could it be that they fear Trump will make good on his campaign promises and lead to the destruction of the Democratic Party for years to come? Or could it be it will show the US citizenry how democratic policy has placed America in its current predicament?

All are possibilities.  Let’s face it, no matter how democrats and the media try to paint Obama’s eight years as a success, math shows the opposite. The math, as pure science reveals the truth that politically the democrats are powerless and stuck in a destitute defensive posture. Thus their primary weapon is crying and/or attacking the incoming administration through mere emotional displacement. Jamil Smith attacks Trump on his “intellectual laziness” suggesting that this “may be the most dangerous thing about him,” and that “Vladimir Putin wanted Donald Trump to be presidentof the United States, and the Russian government deliberately tried to help him win the election.” Jamile Bouie suggest that “Trump is defined by his shameless disregard, and even disdain, for the bonds that hold political life together.” Or in the case of some, they simply stick to praise of Putin as being evidence of incompetence and dishonesty.  All unfounded and groundless allegations pure in rhetoric singularly.

All of these are just emotional invective.  These writers will never back up their words with tangible accomplishments of President Obama to compare these statements of rhetorical grandiose to purport the accuracy of their assertions. Never will they objectively examine real life measure of American success and economic improvement like the Housing Affordability Index for example. The Housing Affordability Index measures whether or not a typical U.S. family makes enough money to just to qualify for a mortgage loan on a typical home let alone buy one. But this will never be included in their writings because data indicates that US housing affordability is at its lowest point since the fourth quarter of 2008. This most likely is a consequence of stagnate wage growth that cannot keep up with increasing home prices.  

They may cite job creation as an indicator of Obama’s success but will go no further than the Whitehouse press statement to examine the fine details of the data, for if they did, as a new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton note, nearly 95%of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were part-time or temporary positions. I won’t even include that additional analysis of liberal media pundits will not note or question how many of these new jobs are being taken by people that already have a job or even two. In all accuracy, since Obama took office, there remains 1 million fewer workers, overall, working than before he took office (Another actor to consider when attempting to comprehend why US housing affordability is so low and wage growth so paralyzed).

In simple terms, although Obama did inherit an economic mess, his policies have led to deteriorating affordability in home ownership, a segment of the U.S. economy that traditionally has proffered parents with the best opportunity to safeguard a better future for their children. Instead, his Keynesian economic approach has added another obstacle for lower-income Americans regardless of race. I mean, the housing market bubble burst almost 10 years ago, yet sales and construction in this sector are well below their peaks in the early 2000s meaning the housing sector is stagnate along with wage growth.

Thus to abrogate the use of data, anything is not only open to vapid complaints by democrats but is also the fault of the man who has not even been sworn in as president yet.    This is the ultimate profile of the traumatized individual. This can be made even worse for progressive peace-loving democrats when we include Obama’s foreign policy record.

When Obama took office he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan.  This too has not happened and to use the same language pundits use to describe the statements of Trump, was a lie.  Not only has he increased military operations in Afghanistan, he has dropped more bombs, employed more drone killings than Bush, and has killed inordinate more innocent civilian in the country when compared to his predecessor. Then there is Libya and Yemen. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winning PresidentAdministration has sold more weapons than any other American president since World War II, totaling plus $200 billion from 2008 to 2015. Sales to Saudi Arabia alone has swollen to $115 billion. Now he has sent US Special Forces to Lithuania to saber rattle on the Russian border.

Democrats and in particular Obama, really do see Donald Trump’s election victory as a personal repudiation of his pluralistic and globalist agenda and legacy. Add to this that democrats need to not only figure out how to have policy messages that include all instead of dividing the nation in to mutually exclusive voting blocs based on labels and message of race, gender and sexuality, they also have to figure out how to formulate new integrative domestic policies with how to communicates those policies with a single unified message for all (and this can’t be done by just speaking at colleges, universities, unions and big cities).

The democrats understand that what they have to stand on are Obama’s past eight years and the political agenda of the democratic elite.  While murder rates in traditionally democratic cities like Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore and DC are out of the atmosphere, they are doubling down. By some estimates, the Obama Administration and sanctuary cities and their mayor including in NYC, San Francisco and Chicago spend around $113 billion on illegal aliens annually but they ignore that there are U.S. citizens that can use these funds including but not limited to homeless veterans, our inner cities, our youth and/or rural areas, all being poor black and white folk alike.

Yes the Democrats have their own battle of Ia Drang Valley and they cannot see for the Elephant grass and are taking fire from all sides yet responding by shooting in all directions and at anything that moves from a Simon & Schuster book deal for Milo Yiannopoulos, to theHBCU band from Talladega College performing at the inauguration to GM CEO Mary Barra being appointed to Trump’s business Advisory council (yet don't mention how Obama pimped US tax payers for GM), to Putin, WikiLeaks and so-called ‘fake news’. They have been dropped off in the middle of their own Landing Zone (LZ) X-ray and do not know what to do. They never look at themselves to determine if their battle plan was defective yet instead blame everything else. But now they have run out of replacement parts for the Iroquois “Huey” helicopters that carried them into battle and are running out of ammunition and have few if any reinforcements arriving for some time. The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley was one of the most noteworthy battles of the Vietnam war, likewise, the battle the Democrats have on their hands after the 2016 presidential election loss, will be just as significant.

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A Clash of Cultures: Trump versus the Media Elite

The Election of Donald Trump resulted in very severe outbreak of what I call Trumpsessive Trumpulsive Disorder (TDD).  It is something that in my opinion has been created by a uniquely disingenuous cult of protagonist I simply call elitist east coast media.  This is not a geographical description but rather a cultural ethos that can also be applied to big city media cats in general.

From the very beginning there was a bias in the Clinton versus Trump narrative and even before then, the Clinton versus Sanders narrative as presented by this media cult.  If we take the example of race, nonstop coverage has hurled the same invectives towards Trump including but not limited to bigot, racist and xenophobic. They ignored any mention of Clinton regarding her categorization of blacks as super predators or how she loaded her campaign coffers with big money from the corporate prison industrial complex.  They never reviewed any of her past including her 2008 attempt to receive the democratic nomination for president including how her campaign floated around an image of Barack Obama in African/Muslim attire. The media especially the New York Times or Washington Post never discussed this instead they continuously attacked Trump as being a racist who was anti-black, anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim who repeatedly made insensitive comments about the aforementioned groups. With regards to Sanders several DNC top officials including Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were forced to resign after WikiLeaks emails revealed that not only were they favoring HRC, they were also trying to present Bernie Sanders as an atheist albeit he was a Jew because it was easier to get people to vote against an atheist. Instead of addressing this, they floated fake news that this was a Russian plot and continued to attempt to program the citizenry that Clinton was winning and would win by a wide margin.  WikiLeaks also revealed the high level extent to which collusion between the DNC, Clinton and the East coast media elites was occurring.

What the Trump coverage revealed is that these media big shots considered Trump as being alien to them, as not being one of them and even precluded this same judgment down upon his supporters. It is as if these elite east coast media folk are mad at the folk whom voted for Trump, as if they are the gatekeepers saying we voted the wrong way, or how dare you by pass our suggestions of how bad Mr. Trump is and make up your minds for yourself without our blessings – how dare you go against us who are smarter and know better for you. But are they?

Now to be objective, maybe they are.  Slate, Salon, the Washington Post and NY Times practically served as a PR firms for camp HRC. From NBC’s Chuck Todd hosting dinner for Jennifer Palmieri and John Podesta to John Podesta hosting a dinner for all of the media fat cats at his house, they do have an insight into the HRC camp that the average person doesn’t have.  This is what I call the modern equivalent of the god ole boy’s network.

The website 538 along with Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, CNN, the Nation and NY Times along with many others told us Trump would never become the Republican nominee, let alone President.  They told us that all of these states were in play like Arizona, Ohio, Texas and Georgia when they were not.  Although it would be easier for them to say “hey, we fucked up, we were wrong,” they will likely spend the next 8 years (if Trump gets two terms) trying to prove the electorate that they were wrong, not them.

The media doesn’t know how to cover Trump but hasn’t the balls to admit this. They condemn Trump for turning politics into reality TV theater but they have been presenting politics as theater for the last two decades. For example, they criticize Trump for his use of Twitter but they use Twitter in the same manner and even more than the President- elect.  It is the ultimate hypocrisy reveal for political journalist the likes of Joy Ann Reid, Jamelle Bouie, Marc Lamont Hill, Jake Tapper, Jamil Smith, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, or a Don Lemmon, when they do the same thing in an effort to maximize their outreach and popularity. Would it be so hard for them just to admit they just hate the fact he uses twitter to by pass them?

Since his election the MSM has changed or altered little in their coverage of President Elect Donald Trump. It is a period of media coverage that is no doubt unique.  The clear outcome is that the elite east coast mainstream big city media holds Donald Trump to one standard and democrats, in particular President Obama and HRC to another. They have even invented a new excuse to cover for their lack of ethics and intellect – Fake news. Fake news propaganda is a cover up to justify the failures of the political media’s coverage of the election. In addition it is an overt attempt to marginalize voices and views outside of their belief orientation and personal collective reality yet in basic terms a new age conspiracy theory. By doing such, it allows them to ignore real news stories and dwell on impractical and unsubstantiated figments of their make believe world. For example, they ignore or are weeks late on covering the #NDPL and the Standing Rock Sioux in the Dakota’s. Why, because Obama a Democrat was President.  You can’t mention that while a black liberal progressive democrat is serving as president that under his administration water cannons are being employed on women and children in sub-freezing temperatures at close range, that law enforcement and federal officers are shooting people with rubber bullets and attack dogs are being let loose on native Americans because it would not be a god look. But you can best believe that If Trump was president they would have plastered it all over the 24 hour news cycle opining that this is a representation of Trump’s racist, sexist and white supremacy views. This is why the fake Russia news story is important.  If they didn’t have this, maybe they would have to cover that there were more votes than voters in more than one-third of Detroit precincts.

This is fake news by omission and own its own it is comical. Just think, the same cats that gave us falsified Iraq news coverage in 2003, said that only a score of folk were killed during the invasion of Panama, cry about Aleppo but never what is happening in Yemen or Mosul, have the audacity to complain about the conspiracy theory of fake news as being why they were wrong regarding this past presidential election. Or worse that Russia cost HRC the election, as if they told HRC not to campaign in Michigan or Wisconsin or not to appear in Lousisana during the massive flooding. The political media doesn’t understand their job.  It is to cover the news, to be journalist, not create the news and predict election outcomes. Fake news is the new conspiracy Theory, and it is being promulgated by the biggest culprit of the production of fake news – the elite east coast mainstream media.

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Trumpsessive Trumpulsive Disorder (TTD)

Some may be aware that in addition to Statistics, I also teach Neuroanatomy and Behavior. I have a keen fascination with brain physiology and functionality as it relates to behavior.  True, I have interest biases such as the retinohypothalamic pathway, synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) role in immunology.  Likewise there are areas I have serious issues with and disdain for such as contrived abnormal behavior and mental illness as defined by any version of the DSMR. But with this said, I have decided to put aside this personal locution and consider the introduction of a new disorder that I will describe as Trumpsessive Trumpulsive Disorder (TTD).

As it is known, obsessions are irrational, disturbing thoughts that intrude into consciousness. Likewise, compulsions are repetitive actions performed to alleviate obsessions.  These have become more prevalent in my opinion after the recent general election which saw DonaldTrump win 83 percent of the geographical region of the United States and approximately 3,000 of the 3,143 counties in the US when compared to Hillary Clinton.

What is this abnormal behavior? For starters it is emblematic of symptomology of denial and irrational thoughts that are not grounded in fact or reality.  Basic symptomology includes, incessant name calling of Trump and his supporters, violent and destructive outburst directed toward Trump and his supporters and even violence in the form of vandalism and the destruction of property. This can be detected on many of the social media platforms across the internet and even in the print and broadcast of mainstream media.

On the first level, it is evinced in the continuous description of Trump and his supporters as being described as ‘dumb,’ ‘ignorant,’ racist,’ ‘un or undereducated,’ and ‘bigoted’ among others. Never mind that these portrayals are blanket stereotypes and generalizations applied to all equally whom supported Trump, regardless of race, ethnicity and educational attainment, the hilarity is that these same people would be offended for example if one were to generalize that all black men wearing hoodies were thugs or all blacks are lazy. They are the same cats that purport being tolerant to all and get their feelings in a bind when we talk of Muslims and immigrants in similar blanket terms. These are the same folk that state overtly a business owner cannot refuse a customer service based on race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, but you can if they support a different political view or voted for Trump. Thus this disorder is real since it demonstrates that these people say they want blacks, women, Latino, LGBTs and Hispanic all to have a seat at the table, unless they are republican, conservation and the cruncher – they voted for Trump.

Another tale-tale sign is social media activity.  Typically all is either emotional vitriolic attacks against those whom support Trump or even RT a positive Trump story. Or maybe they always RT anything anti-Trump. This was all speculation until I tested it.  How did I test it you query? My methodology was as follows: 1 I counted people whom RT a minimum of 5 anti-Trump tweets (these met the criterion in the prior paragraph), 2 Respond to said tweet with all included to the tweet, 3 count the attacks and tag team attacks.

Example 1:  The tweet in essence said the people voted for Hitler like they voted for Trump, #Heisnotmypresident. My response was that Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by Paul von Hindenburg and assumed presidency upon death of Hindenburg – he was never voted on by the citizenry.

It appears fact is the worst enemy for the person suffering from TTD. My response drew vilification from several group tweets and eventually stopped for my follow up tweet was one in which I use frequently: Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored– Aldous Huxley.

Example 2: This tweet asserted that the Carrier deal was just corporate welfare and thus no big deal. My response was that Obama was the king of corporate welfare – Boeing, Dell, Caterpillar, Chevron (even United Technologies) & gave us the Targeted Investment Program & the Temporary Liquidity Program not tomention TARP or the auto bailout. The results were the same as before, however instead of addressing the content, they resulted to repetitive actions performed to alleviate their obsessions (compulsion) in the form of calling me stupid and uneducated.

The severe or what I call TTD (i) are those with delusional symptomology. These ignore fact entirely and actually pretend that Trump is not their President.  This is just like saying they think they are Jesus Christ or that the Easter bunny and Santa Klaus is REAL. These are also dangerous.  They can destroy property, physically assault and attack Trump supporters and manifest delusion of grandeur that may be hazardous to themselves and all around them. These can be observed in threatening to kill Trump or his supporters or celebrating harm inflicted on a Trump supporter as we say in Chicago and regarding the Gatlinburg fires. But they are easily distracted about a story on Kanye West, a new Beyoncé video or celebrity awards show. It is even worse in mainstream media outlets.

Media outlets are mainly considered mainstream if they are from large cities on the east and west coast.  Their level of TDD (i) is disturbing.  They characteristically relinquish objectivity for partisan opinion making manipulated into being projected as news. They have even resorted to the use of Orwellian Newspeak proffered directly from the Oceana Ministry of Truth creating what they now call ‘Fake News.’  Fake News being anything they disagree with but more importantly, that does not metamorphasize from their pens, desk, computers or intellectual acumen. They even question the rules as most sore losers do after the fact. It seems end the Electoral College is retro chic currently.  Even changing the senate and obviating the Connecticut Compromise so that rural voters cannot have the same or more power than urban voters because they know best and used to getting a trophy even when they do not earn one.  Next it will be changing the rules of the World Series to where it is not the number of games won, but rather the total number of runs scored that determines the champion. This is simply delusional behavior.

TTD is real and it is just as much a sociopathy or psychopathy as gang banging and lynching.  There isn’t a psychopharmacological treatment for it yet nor hotline, albeit safe spaces can be found at your local university or DNC office.

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