The Intercept has the story Leading Putin Critic Warns of Xenophobic Conspiracy Theories Drowning U.S. Discourse and Helping Trump.

She now has a new article in the New York Review of Books – entitled “Russia: the Conspiracy Trap” – that I cannot recommend highly enough. Its primary purpose is to describe, and warn about, the insane and toxic conspiracy-mongering about Russia that has taken over not the fringe, dark corners of the internet that normally traffic in such delusional tripe, but rather mainstream U.S. media outlets and the Democratic Party. Few articles have illustrated the serious, multi-faceted dangers of what has become this collective mania in the U.S. as well as Gessen’s does.

So, I went to look at The New York Review of Books article Russia: The Conspiracy Trap.

The most solid part of the story to date is the hack of the Democratic National Committee, apparently carried out by people connected to Russian intelligence.

I find this ironic because I find the hack of the Democratic National Committee to be the flimsiest part of the story. I refer to a previous post of mine, Election Hack Report FAQ: What You Need to Know. Even the skeptics about the Russia story aren’t skeptical enough.

Even Glenn Greenwald, the author of the first article came to mention this at the end:

Indeed, even the most plausible plank of the story – that the Russians were behind the hacking of Podesta and the DNC – has been widely accepted as Truth despite no evidence from the U.S. Government.

However, there is not only a lack of evidence from the government, there even seems to be anti–evidence from the government. If anything, there “proof” offers more evidence that it is unlikely the work of Russian intelligence.

To make sure you don’t think I am saying that Trump is innocent, here is the conclusion of Greenwald’s and Gessen’s two articles.

As Gessen concludes: “What is indisputable is that the protracted national game of connecting the Trump-Putin dots is an exercise in conspiracy thinking. That does not mean there was no conspiracy. And yet, a possible conspiracy is a poor excuse for conspiracy thinking.”

Hedge Clippers has the article Why Won’t Hedge Funders Confess Their Role in Multi-Million-Dollar Lobbying Campaign?

According to Moody’s, charter growth can cripple the credit ratings of urban school districts, leading to increased borrowing costs and declining public school enrollments.

This stress, largely due to district’s inability to reduce operation costs in response to declining enrollment, can touch off a “death spiral” where district costs increase, leading to an increase in charter enrollments.

Some of the anti-liberal Democrats I know who are so horrified about 45 being the President are also backers of the charter school movement. Makes me wonder what they are thinking.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding.

To illustrate one of its signature follies, Kanth refers to that great Hollywood ode to the Western spirit, “The Sound of Music.” Early in the film, the Mother Superior bursts into song, calling on the nun Maria to “climb every mountain, ford every stream.”

Sounds exhilarating, but to what end? Why exactly do we need to ford every stream? From the Eurocentric modernist viewpoint, Kanth says, the answer is not so innocent: we secretly do it so that we can say to ourselves, “Look, I achieved something that’s beyond the reach of somebody else.” Hooray for me!

I think “The Sound of Music” example was grossly misunderstood. One of the reasons to climb every mountain is to achieve a personal or team goal. For the really big mountains, climbers go out in teams. They tie themselves together to get the team to the top of the mountain. It is humans vying against inanimate obstacles to see what they can achieve. It is a group of self-actualized people working in cooperation to achieve a goal they set for themselves.

The article does provide some food for thought, but like any idea of this type, reducing nature and humans to a single overriding principle is too simplified. It is just a model of reality. Models of reality leave things out so that the model can be understood. Modelers always have to remember the process that got them to the model so that they can always be on the look out for situations in which what they have left out becomes essential.

The Hill has the story Dem seeks to block US troops going to Syria after Marines deployed.

“The bill I am introducing today prohibits the Department of Defense from funding any attempt by the administration to expand our presence in Syria by putting U.S. combat boots on the ground,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a statement to The Hill.

“It is our constitutional duty as members of Congress to place a check on the executive branch in matters of war and peace,” she said.

One thing you can say for 45 is that he has caused a few people to stiffen their spines, and stand up to what he is doing. To be fair to Rep. Barbara Lee, this is not something new for her.

Lee was the lone lawmaker to vote against the authorization for the use of military force in the days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which has been used as the legal justification for the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Truth Out has the article Cutting Off Capital: How to Resist Trump’s Corporate Collaborators.

Instead of it being an isolated battle, it was Trump’s job czar actually involved in cutting wages, benefits and outsourcing work. This is one of the pieces that I think is the most critical, which is showing that the people that Trump has put in charge, like Wilbur Ross, are actually job destroyers. We want to completely change the story by putting the spotlight on them by saying, “These are actually the people that got rich destroying good jobs. It is not evil foreigners or immigrants. It is these guys.” That lets you raise a whole set of issues in terms of showing who they are and then, all the different ways that they gamed the system to enrich themselves at the expense of workers.

I thought I had been following the issues even before I started writing this blog. However, what is in this article is a far more sickening exposure what is going on. Since I already read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, I wasn’t made quite as badly physically ill as when I read her books. I guess she immunized me a little.

Vox has the article The dark psychology of dehumanization, explained.

Dehumanizing policies can kick-start a cycle of retribution and hostility

During the Republican presidential primary, Kteily and Bruneau surveyed 200 Muslims in the US, and asked them to respond to statements such as, “Donald Trump sees people from Muslim backgrounds as sub-human,” and, “Donald Trump thinks of people from Muslim background as animal-like.”

On average, the Muslims in the sample “felt strongly disliked and dehumanized by both Trump and non-Muslim Americans more broadly.” On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 indicating that Muslims did not feel dehumanized at all and 7 meaning they felt it intensely, the group average was 5.66, well beyond the halfway mark. (Similar results were found in a concurrent study of Latino Americans.)

This survey wasn’t designed to be nationally representative of all the Muslims living in America. Instead, it was designed to figure out what happens inside the mind of someone who feels dehumanized.

“And the consequences were big,” Bruneau explains. The more Muslims felt dehumanized by Trump, the more they dehumanized Trump. The more they felt dehumanized, the less likely they were to say they’d report suspicious activities in their communities.

The research predicts a vicious cycle. Trump’s policy and rhetoric gin up fear and dehumanize Muslim Americans. That provokes a more violent response from certain individuals in the Muslim community. Trump responds. And suddenly the whole country is a more hostile, less safe place for everyone, the researchers conclude in a paper that was recently published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“We want to be careful to say that any backlash that we might expect isn’t unique to minority groups. In fact, some of our earlier work showed that Americans, too, who think they are dehumanized by Muslims are more likely to dehumanize Muslims,” Kteily says. “We think of this working both ways.”

This is a great explanation of the phenomenon that I have observed many times throughout my life. In Army training I experienced in 1967, I saw this dehumanization process used to take the civilization out of soldiers in training so that they could learn to be killers of other humans. I see this dynamic working in both directions the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I see it in the India/Pakistan conflict. This process was used throughout the Cold War that I lived through.

The article explains what has helped me to stand back and see this as it is.

Overall, the experts I spoke to all said that the No. 1 way to combat dehumanization is also, frustratingly, one of the hardest to accomplish: simply getting to know people who are different from us.

In my life, I have had many opportunities to get to know people of different cultures and from different parts of the world. It is hard to dehumanize people you know who are quite obviously just as human as anyone else.

The New York Times published the article Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates on January 19, 2017.

WASHINGTON — American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

Perhaps it is just a technicality that makes Trump’s accusations about wire tapping “truthfully” deniable by the “intelligence” community and the FBI. Perhaps he just used the wrong words in describing how the eavesdropping was done or who the target was. Of course this story comes from the highly unreliable New York Times who can say in one story that Trump associates were eavesdropped on, and in another story that Trump is crazy to think he is the target of eavesdropping.

How about this quote from the article?

The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.

The American government has not come to any such conclusion no matter how many times the corporate press says this. If you look at the evidence the American government has published, you will see that it is full of assumptions and it ignores its own evidence that points away from their assumptions.

Also note, that the “intercepted Russian communications” says nothing about how they were intercepted. Wouldn’t you think that inquiring minds would want to know even if The New York Times reporters don’t seem to have inquiring minds?

WikiLeaks has a very troubling release of information described on their web site in the article Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.

The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

I don’t own this model TV (I don’t think), but I did discover that I have had some CIA malware installed on my computers for years. I am not about to mention which tool I have, but the CIA knows I have it, I am sure. I am only half-way through reading the article, so there may be other pieces of their software that I have installed on my computers.

Just to be clear, the “mal” in malware means “bad”. I wouldn’t have installed the piece of software if I had known it was malware. I will sit tight on it until I hear from the people who supply my anti-virus software or some other credible source. As long as I have had the software, whatever damage it can do, if any, has probably already been done.

Upon a little investigation, I think I have determined my worries about a particular piece of software are ill-founded. What a relief.

In my continuing efforts to research the cause of the inflation of the 1970s, I have found the article Stagflation in the 1970s. This may put an over emphasis on Nixon as to what started it all, but I think it does add some valid points.

By 1971, pressures produced by the Vietnam War and federal social spending, coupled with the increase in foreign competition, pushed the inflation rate to 5 percent and unemployment to 6 percent. President Richard Nixon responded by increasing federal budget deficits and devaluing the dollar in an attempt to stimulate the economy and to make American goods more competitive overseas. Nixon also imposed a 90-day wage and price freeze, followed by a mandatory set of wage-price guidelines, and then, by voluntary controls. Inflation stayed at about 4 percent during the freeze, but once controls were lifted, inflation resumed its upward climb.

At least it does mention the pressures of the Vietnam War. I have blamed LBJ for refusing to inconvenience the civilian population by raising taxes. Raising taxes would have prevented the civilian population from tying up resources that civilians wanted to use in their daily lives. Increased taxes would have allowed LBJ to divert resources to the war effort without causing inflation. What he left as a result of his policies was the government competing against the private sector for the same resources. This is one of the situations that tends to cause inflation.

Of course, one should not forget the way that Richard Nixon’s administration continued the war, and even escalated it despite promises of winding it down.

Thinking of the economic situation of today, there is such underemployment and idle resources that the private sector is not using, that the same competition between the government and the private sector is not happening. Thus, unfortunately, <sarcasm>we can afford costly wars without creating inflation even though we cut taxes. Income inequality has a neat way of keeping the money out of the hands of the people who would actually need to spend that money and cause inflation if we didn’t cut back on the wars. So it all works out in the end.</sarcasm>

In an effort to find out if I was crazy to think that our inflation problems of the 1970s began before the OPEC oil shocks, I have come across the article Whipping Stagflation. I am not attesting to the truth of this article, but this is the way I seem to remember it.

By 1971, pressures produced by the Vietnam War and federal social spending, coupled with the increase in foreign competition, pushed the inflation rate to 5 percent and unemployment to 6 percent. President Richard Nixon responded by increasing federal budget deficits and devaluing the dollar in an attempt to stimulate the economy and to make American goods more competitive overseas. Nixon also imposed a 90-day wage and price freeze, followed by a mandatory set of wage-price guidelines, and then, by voluntary controls. Inflation stayed at about 4 percent during the freeze, but once controls were lifted, inflation resumed its upward climb.