The Dallas News has the opinion piece How we Americans can turn the tables on Steve Bannon’s shock event.

What Steve Bannon is doing, most dramatically with the ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries — is creating what is known as a “shock event.”

Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order.

For “corroboration” of this take on events, I hark back to some earlier posts of mine The Shock Doctrine. In her book and lectures, Naomi Klein gives a thorough exposition of the shock doctrine. It is shocking.

There is another very valuable short YouTube video Unemployment Is Created By Government And Can Only Be Solved By Government. This video is true to its headline, but did not lead to where I expected.

YouTube has a short video Real Terms Of Trade: Imports Are Good And Exports Are Bad with excellent written introduction to support the video. I’ll just quote the first paragraph of the introduction.

Warren Mosler and Professor Stephanie Kelton discussing the real terms of trade. When we import something from a foreign country, we get the thing and they get dollars. When we export something to a foreign country, they get the thing and we get their currency. Which one is better for us? Imports are goods and services that we can consume but didn’t have to work to produce, while exports are goods and services that we had to work to produce but don’t get to consume. So from the point of view of our society as a whole, exports are a cost, while imports are a benefit.

We need to stop buying the major baloney that our politicians want to feed us about trade, and start thinking about and understanding the reality.

If you are tempted to reject what this video is saying, I suggest you read the article in my previous post Ignore the Trade Balance: Concentrate on Full Employment.

The Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity has this fabulous paper Ignore the Trade Balance: Concentrate on Full Employment.

Do not attempt to discuss this unless and until you read, understand, and accept the limitations expressed in the words in the excerpts below that I have chosen to emphasize.

Monetary sovereignty involves having your own currency and central bank, not being on a gold standard, not being on any kind of fixed exchange rate system, and not having significant foreign currency debt. Under these circumstances, it is no longer clear that a current account surplus is beneficial and a deficit costly, and indeed, the opposite may be true, however provocative though the claim may appear.
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The currency in which a country accumulates net foreign liabilities over time is of vital importance. If public and private foreign debt is denominated in foreign currency, this creates the risk of national insolvency and a costly financial crisis. It also implies that the government of that country does not enjoy full monetary sovereignty, especially if the foreign currency debt is public debt, or effectively guaranteed by the public sector.

If the rest of the world has chosen to net save in the currency of a country, however, it is not clear that the resulting net foreign liabilities are a debt which needs to be repaid using real resources at all. This is at most potentially the case. The accumulation of domestic currency financial assets by the foreign sector is a portfolio decision of the foreign sector , and not something that the government can control precisely, or arguably should seek to control, except in so far as speculative c apital flows are viewed as destabilising to financial markets.

For those of us who understand the accounting identity that underlies Modern Money Theory, this result should be no surprise. However, for those of us who did not go through the process of figuring out MMT’s implications on trade balances, this is a particularly nice result to read about.

You won’t find an inkling of this logical conclusion in any of the standard wisdom about trade policy. You certainly won’t find it in the idiotic ideas of Trump or Obama or Clinton. Here they are negotiating trade deals without a clue as to the consequences of whatever agreement they are trying to get.

TED has the interesting video Where is cybercrime really coming from?.

Cybercrime netted a whopping $450 billion in profits last year, with 2 billion records lost or stolen worldwide. Security expert Caleb Barlow calls out the insufficiency of our current strategies to protect our data. His solution? We need to respond to cybercrime with the same collective effort as we apply to a health care crisis, sharing timely information on who is infected and how the disease is spreading. If we’re not sharing, he says, then we’re part of the problem.

IBM’s Caleb Barlow is focused on how we solve the cyber security problem by changing the economics for the bad guys.

Remember George Soros’ insight into the reflexivity of social science. The ebola virus does not read about how the world is trying to combat it, and then change its behavior accordingly. Cyber Criminals will read about how we are trying to defeat them and will adjust accordingly.

My statement is not meant to disparage ideas presented in this video for protecting us. It is meant to warn us about how much more sophisticated we are going to have to be in these efforts than when fighting a disease.

Townhall has the article Chuck Todd: Media Knew, But Downplayed, How Much Hillary Was Hated in Rural America.

“If we sort of were straight-up honest and blunt about hey do we understand the level of hatred that’s out there and you know, all the Hillary for Prison signs that are out there, we certainly would have at least made the viewer know, hey, you know, she’s not well-liked in some places in this country in ways that’s times 10 when it comes to Trump,” he said.

Gee, thanks a lot Chuck Todd. I kept trying to tell the members of the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee about how much Hillary was disliked, but they refused to believe me. Of course, they saw those Hillary for Prison signs as much as I did. I don’t know why they couldn’t see the truth for their own eyes.

I wonder how much my previous post The Data That Turned the World Upside Down explains the difference between what I knew and what some of the other members of the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee knew. Perhaps someone was targeting me for that information, and that soemone was not targeting the others on the committee. The trouble is figuring out if you are being targeted with the truth or targeted with misinformation.

Motherboard a Vice channel has the article The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. This may be the most startling article you will read in a long time.

Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016.

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“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

The Real News Network has the video Do Corporate Democrats Like Charles Schumer Belong in a Progressive Movement Against Trump?.

HENRY GIROUX: I think that’s… I don’t disagree with that. My only concern about that argument is that it needs to be supplemented by another, it seems to me, narrative. And that is, while it might be useful to do everything in one can to make sure that split becomes even wider, and a candidate emerges that can mobilize people in ways that speak to a better… a more democratic future, there also has to be organizations being developed that are creating alternative ways of understanding politics where, you know, organizations that basically are both local, national and international, organizations that are imagining and making clear different ways for people to engage in social relationships, different understandings of how a university can be run, different understandings of what it means to have free healthcare, different ways to sort of empower communities, different ways to speak to communities, alternative media being developed. I mean, I think that there certainly has to be infrastructures that make that question about what an alternative society looks like concrete.

I think the above quote may be the point of the interview. However, I got this from the transcript in the article, not from watching the video.

At about half way into this video, I stopped watching. I had the following reaction:

I can’t stand it. Paul Jay does it again. He brings in an expert to interview, but Paul is more interested in convincing the expert to adopt Paul’s ideas that he won’t ask the expert what his ideas are. Paul should listen to himself. Whenever the words “But don’t you agree …” pass through his lips, he should realize he is going down the wrong track. He should change that sentence to “What do you suggest we do?”

The point should not be to bring on expert guests to use as a foil to interview yourself.

I then, scrolled to the bottom of the transcript and started to backtrack until I found a paragraph that seemed to express what Giroux was almost being prevented from saying.

ABC News has the story Protests Spread at Airports Nationwide Over Trump’s Executive Order.

On another post Trudeau says Canada will take refugees banned by U.S. I quoted and then remarked.

Trump signed a sweeping executive order Friday that he billed as a necessary step to stop “radical Islamic terrorists” from coming to the U.S.

Maybe if we didn’t pay and arm the terrorists they would be less likely to come here. We seem to think we can control what the terrorists do after we give them the resources to terrorize. Not only is it unethical to do what we do, but it predictably backfires on us.

Tulsi Gabbard knows how to stop the carnage. Why not listen to her message rather than trying to kill the messenger?

No wonder we have medicinal drug culture where we take one drug to prevent a symptom, and then we take a second drug to overcome the side-effects of the first one, go back to step one and repeat. This sort of thing seems to fit our mentality these days.

YouTube has the video The Ben Shapiro Show – Tulsi Gabbard Blasts the CIA for their Illegal and Unproductive Wars. The video starts off with an interview by Wolf Blitzer of Tulsi Gabbard. I couldn’t watch the whole thing because Wolf Blitzer just drives me up a wall.

This video confirms my reason for usually switching channels when Wolf Blitzer comes on. After Tulsi Gabbard spends a minute or more explaining why the U.S. effort to get rid of the Bashar El Assad’s regime is counterproductive, Wolf asks the brilliant follow-up question:

Why do you say the U.S. effort to get rid of the Bashar El Assad’s regime is counterproductive and illegal?

Isn’t an interviewer suppose to listen to the answers that the guest makes to his questions. I suspect that many interviewers come in with a list of questions they are going to ask, no matter what the guest has to say.