predictions about Trump speech that starts in 2.5 hours

[Warren D Smith]

Yogi Berra: It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

A good theory should be able to predict the future. And there is a
(paranoid?) theory that
President Trump's actions are intended to help Vladimir Putin, who is
pulling Trump's strings behind the scenes.

Examples:
Q. Why did Trump appoint Rex Tillerson Secy of State?
A. Because he was obviously the one American most wanted for that job
by Vladimir Putin.
Q. Why did Trump appoint Paul Manafort (who actually offered to do the
job for free?!!)
his campaign manager?
A. Because he was (not so obviously, until you found out about
Manafort's millions of dollars in secret and corrupt income given to
him by Putin cronies) the one American most wanted for that job by
Vladimir Putin.
Q. Press claimed the original version of the Republican Party platform
contained a plank
advocating arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia. A campaign by
Trump surrogates
led by Manafort changed that plank and omitted any recommendation
about arming Ukraine. This was according to every member of that
committee telling
the press. But the Trump team denied they had any involvement, as
well as admitting they organized it, depending when/who was asked.And
this was, as far as the press could tell, the only plank in the whole
party platform that Trump tried to change. Why?
A. Because this was obviously the one plank Vladimir Putin most wanted changed.

And so forth.
However, all those things were "postdictions" not "predictions."

So now let me collect, for the purpose of the record and for the first(?) time,
actual predictions that arise from this theory.
Trump is about to make a speech (at 9pm Eastern Time) about Afghanistan.
What he will say, is not yet known. Previously, Trump claimed
starting the Iraq and Afghan wars were huge mistakes by the USA. But
of course, 100s of experiences documented by fact-checking
organizations have shown that "what Trump said" has nothing
necessarily to do with what he will do, what he will say tomorrow,
reality, the truth, etc.

So: What would Vladimir Putin want Trump to say?
1. Putin wants the USA to stay in Afghanistan wasting US resources and
keeping terrorist types distracted and USA-focused so they do not
attack Russia.
2. As an extra bonus, Putin would like to be able to exploit Afghan
natural resources such as natural gas. To help make that happen, he'd
like the Afghan government to stay venal and corruptible.

So the paranoia-theory will predict that Trump will
1. reverse his previous claims and now go for a troop-buildup in Afghanistan
with no end in sight,
2. not do anything to cause the development of an uncorrupted and
genuine democracy
in Afghanistan.
3. possibly deals involving resource exploitation will be enabled or mentioned.

So, in 3 hours, let us see how well these predictions pan out...


--
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking
"endorse" as 1st step)

[Warren D Smith]

A transcript of Trump's speech is here:

http://www.npr.org/2017/08/21/545038935/watch-live-trump-s-address-on-afghanistan-next-steps-for-u-s-engagement

There's a lot of bullshit words that say nothing. Trying to focus on
the rare moments
when Trump actually genuinely says something...

"My original instinct was to pull out [of Afghanistan], and
historically I like following my instincts. But... the consequences of
a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable...
A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists, including
ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill... the security threats we
face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense...I’ve said it
many times, how counterproductive it is for the United States to
announce in advance the dates we intend to begin or end military
operations...
[We will employ] all instruments of American power, diplomatic,
economic, and military, toward a successful outcome....America will
continue its support for the Afghan government and the Afghan
military."

So Trump claims he is going to up the military effort in Afghanistan,
NOT ending the war,
reversing Trump's earlier claims (as he admits), and presumably
sending MORE troops, but he is not saying how many and when and for
what, and NOT saying when the war will end or what it even would mean
for it to end or what it even would mean for his efforts to be a
success (because explaining that would help the enemy). He claims he
will use American "economic" power but without explaining what that
means exactly but
I presume it involves deals to have some companies somewhere somehow exploit
Afghan natural resources.
Finally Trump intends to support the current (ultra-corrupt) Afghan
government and military.

So... my pre-speech predictions based on the "what Putin wants"
hypothesis, made in total ignorance of what Trump would say, have been
100% confirmed!

Yogi Berra must be in awe.

[Warren D Smith]

News story explaining Trump's speech:
"Donald Trump says he'll expand US military intervention in Afghanistan"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/21/donald-trump-expand-us-military-intervention-afghanistan-pakistan

[Phil Uhrich]

Why does everyone have this two bit thug image of Putin? He is simultaneously the evil mastermind that whispered in the ears of thousands of rust belt voters getting them to change their minds and also stupid enough to leave tracks. Mind you, Clinton fingered Putin before her convention so her poodles in the press could breathlessly condemn foreign involvement in the election every time someone mentioned the substance of the emails showing DNC favoritism. With that narrative in place already and absolutely every poll and pundit saying Trump had no chance of winning he decided to hack and release Podesta's emails and let Guccifer 2.0 loose because with all the fingers already pointing at him he expected he would be able to inch Trump across the finish line at which point Trump would have free reign to do his bidding. Who could possibly have predicted that the mainstream media, who has never so universally despised any politician as much as they do Trump, would have reincarnated McCarthy and started pushing for a new cold war? /sarc

The evidence behind Putin Hacked the DNC is getting thinner every day.
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-new-report-raises-big-questions-about-last-years-dnc-hack/
And a reply to the pathetically week attacks on that.
http://g-2.space/distortions/

IF (and that is a HUGE if) Putin had anything to do with the hacking he certainly didn't need any incentivising from Trump. Clinton, who has never seen an opportunity to go to war she didn't latch onto immediately, was salivating at the chance to topple Assad. She didn't care that the only other forces on the ground that had any strength were Al Qaeda and ISIS. She didn't care that we have absolutely NO strategic interest there, unlike Russia and their one warm water port. She didn't care that there was no way for Russia to save face and leave after they had been heavily deployed there for years. She just knew that Haim Saban, her biggest campaign donor, is a one issue guy and that one issue is Israel. Israel has made nice with the sunni extremists in the gulf states and has joined with them in the nihilistic war on anything shiite, including Syria.

It also didn't help any that Clinton compared Putin to Hitler.... You know after 20 million Russians died killing the Nazi's.

Or that Bill was largely responsible for putting Russia through an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression leaving them with oligarchs that own everything..... By rigging their elections. If you are interested in the history of US russian relations this is a nice summary:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2017-03-10/russia-trump-and-new-d-tente
(If you don't want to create an account here is an non paywalled version. http://ge.tt/5jmoOHm2)

Trump is fully capable of being an incompetent leader who filled his entire cabinet with generals who profit off the military industrial complex with out being the manchurian candidate.

[Warren D Smith]

On 8/24/17, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why does everyone have this two bit thug image of Putin? He is
> simultaneously the evil mastermind that whispered in the ears of thousands
> of rust belt voters getting them to change their minds and also stupid
> enough to leave tracks.

--well, (a) it was pretty impossible to avoid leaving tracks and (b)
Putin did not much care
since he figured Trump once elected would cover for him and shut down all
investigations and pretend it did not happen.

> Mind you, Clinton fingered Putin before her
> convention so her poodles in the press could breathlessly condemn foreign
> involvement in the election every time someone mentioned the substance of
> the emails showing DNC favoritism. With that narrative in place already and
> absolutely every poll and pundit saying Trump had no chance of winning he
> decided to hack and release Podesta's emails and let Guccifer 2.0 loose
> because with all the fingers already pointing at him he expected he would be
> able to inch Trump across the finish line at which point Trump would have
> free reign to do his bidding. Who could possibly have predicted that the
> mainstream media, who has never so universally despised any politician as
> much as they do Trump, would have reincarnated McCarthy and started pushing
> for a new cold war? /sarc
>
> The evidence behind Putin Hacked the DNC is getting thinner every day.

--it is pretty clear there was a conspiracy to produce "fake news"
which did genuinely get produced, was genuinely massively pro-trump
anti-clinton, did have an effect on the election of the right order of
magnitude to throw it, and was produced in substantial part by forces
under Putin control. Plus US intel actually intercepted a command from
Putin to do it. Plus Putin then did the same kind of thing
(unsuccessfully this time) to the French election that followed.

So the debate on that is over.

> Trump is fully capable of being an incompetent leader who filled his entire
> cabinet with generals who profit off the military industrial complex with
> out being the manchurian candidate.

--I do not know what Trump did exactly in all this. I personally
believe he is corrupt in
various ways including in Russian-money-laundering-related ways.

In any case, I tried in the present case of this speech prediction to adopt an
unbiased attitude. I had no idea what Trump would say 3 hours later. I did not
attempt to decide what I thought the best USA<-->Afghanistan policies would be.
I simply asked "what would Putin want?" used that to make predictions,
and then a few hours later my predictions 100% confirmed. You can tell
I did that because
it was genuinely a prediction about the future by me, there was no way
I could have been cheating since I'm some evil biased Hillary
supporter. (Actually, I wasn't a Hillary supporter, but whatever.)
Maybe this prediction-success is just a suspicious coincidence.
I don't know if I'd mind it terribly by itself. It is just that when
you keep multiplying
up ALL the suspicious coincidences it gets to be hard to ascribe it
all merely to chance coincidence.

[Phil Uhrich]

"--well, (a) it was pretty impossible to avoid leaving tracks and (b)
Putin did not much care
since he figured Trump once elected would cover for him and shut down all
investigations and pretend it did not happen. "

Well A is false. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/07/wikileaks-cia-hacking-group-umbrage-stockpiled-techniques-other-hackers/98867462/

And B. is naive, and Putin isn't naive. How well did Clinton Shut down Whitewater? Reagan Iran Contra? Nixon Watergate?

"-it is pretty clear there was a conspiracy to produce "fake news"
which did genuinely get produced, was genuinely massively pro-trump
anti-clinton, did have an effect on the election of the right order of
magnitude to throw it, and was produced in substantial part by forces
under Putin control. Plus US intel actually intercepted a command from
Putin to do it. Plus Putin then did the same kind of thing
(unsuccessfully this time) to the French election that followed.

So the debate on that is over. "

There sure was a lot of fake news, unfortunately the only actual study done on the effect of fake news on the election concluded it was not decisive. https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf

France also concluded their was no evidence of Russian hacking during their election: https://www.apnews.com/fc570e4b400f4c7db3b0d739e9dc5d4d

You seem to be the kind of news consumer that the oligarchy loves. You are not very critical of anything you read that comes from an authoritative source. The times and the post are unflinching in their support for endless war. It is obvious in every way; from what they choose to cover, what they ignore, and how they frame everything. See this for details: https://monthlyreview.org/2017/07/01/fake-news-on-russia-and-other-official-enemies/

Speaking of framing, your hypothetical assumes that Russia has imperialistic desires and wants the US to get stuck in a quagmire. If they do, it is entirely our fault for constantly provoking them and shooting them down every time they try to improve relations.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/in-his-interview-with-oliver-stone-vladimir-putin-suggested-russia-joining-nato-to-bill-clinton/article18965562.ece

I can only assume that this comes out of some desire to be proud of this country, when any dispassionate observer would easily point to the USA as the one entity responsible for more human suffering and death than any other human creation. From manifest destiny slaughtering natives, to slavery and Jim Crow, to the Monroe doctrine installing dictators in Latin America (which we still do as recently as 2009 in Honduras), to the absolute refusal to muzzle our oligarchs even the slightest bit causing them to go reckless and create the Great Depression and then an encore with the Great Recession (both times destroying lives all over the globe and escaping any consequences), all the way to our complete refusal to do anything that might endanger the profits of big oil which has a decent chance of making this planet uninhabitable and killing the whole species but at the very least it will destroy millions of lives across the globe, and a million other things I'm sure I missed. Sorry to pop your bubble but we live in the heart of the evil empire and the best thing that could happen for the planet was if Russia or North Korea Nuked us. The world is going to S*** and we are driving the bus.

[Warren D Smith]

On 8/26/17, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "--well, (a) it was pretty impossible to avoid leaving tracks and (b)
> Putin did not much care
> since he figured Trump once elected would cover for him and shut down all
> investigations and pretend it did not happen. "
>
> Well A is false.
> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/03/07/wikileaks-cia-hacking-group-umbrage-stockpiled-techniques-other-hackers/98867462/

--come on. You want to change the opinion of the entire population of
a country, and do it in an invisible untraceable manner?

> And B. is naive, and Putin isn't naive. How well did Clinton Shut down
> Whitewater? Reagan Iran Contra? Nixon Watergate?

--why is B naive? Putin simply did not care it it were known he did
it. He wanted Trump. If
Trump shut down investigations, for example the same way that JF
Kennedy appointed his brother Attorney General, plus relied on his pal
Boss Daley in Chicago ad his judicial appointees, who together then
shut down all investigations into the clear election frauds that
occurred in the 1960 election that elected Kennedy, then fine with
Putin.
If, on the other hand, Trump gradually slides into a sea of lies and
the investigators came after him with either small or large success,
then also fine with Putin. Either way, Putin regards situation as a
great success for him.

And in any case, whether or not that is so, the fact is, Putin did it.

> "-it is pretty clear there was a conspiracy to produce "fake news"
> which did genuinely get produced, was genuinely massively pro-trump
> anti-clinton, did have an effect on the election of the right order of
> magnitude to throw it, and was produced in substantial part by forces
> under Putin control. Plus US intel actually intercepted a command from
> Putin to do it. Plus Putin then did the same kind of thing
> (unsuccessfully this time) to the French election that followed.
>
> So the debate on that is over. "
>
> There sure was a lot of fake news, unfortunately the only actual study done
> on the effect of fake news on the election concluded it was not decisive.
> https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf

--well, first. We know there was a lot of fake news. We know from
the buzzfeed study
it was massively pro-trump / anti-hillary biased. We know the total
amount of fake news readership and re-posting was of the same order of
magnitude or more as needed to swing the election.

Second. In the study you just cited, they say on pp.212-213:
"Second, we confirm that fake news was both widely shared and heavily tilted
in favor of Donald Trump. Our database contains 115 pro-Trump fake stories that
were shared on Facebook a total of 30 million times, and 41
pro-Clinton fake stories
shared a total of 7.6 million times.
Third, we provide several benchmarks of the rate at which voters were exposed
to fake news. The upper end of previously reported statistics for the
ratio of page
visits to shares of stories on social media would suggest that the 38
million shares
of fake news in our database translates into 760 million instances of
a user clicking
through and reading a fake news story, or about three stories read per American
adult. A list of fake news websites, on which just over half of
articles appear to be false,
received 159 million visits during the month of the election, or 0.64
per US adult. In
our post-election survey, about 15 percent of respondents recalled
seeing each of 14
major pre-election fake news headlines, but about 14 percent also
recalled seeing a
set of placebo fake news headlines--untrue headlines that we invented
and that never
actually circulated. Using the difference between fake news headlines
and placebo
headlines as a measure of true recall and projecting this to the
universe of fake news
articles in our database, we estimate that the average adult saw and
remembered 1.14
fake stories."

Considering that and the closeness of the election result, don't you
think it is plausible this swung the election? These numbers make it
obvious the effect was of
the correct order of magnitude or larger.

Third. You just said "the only actual study done

on the effect of fake news on the election concluded it was not decisive"

but unfortunately for your bullshit, what that study actually said
(their "conclusion" page 232) was:
"In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, it was alleged that fake
news might have been pivotal in the election of President Trump. We do
not provide
an assessment of this claim one way or another."

You might want to try reading the study first, and telling me what it
concluded afterwards.
And if that is a "naive" view of how one should proceed by me, then so be it.

> France also concluded their was no evidence of Russian hacking during their
> election: https://www.apnews.com/fc570e4b400f4c7db3b0d739e9dc5d4d

--In the French election, which elected Macron. who took office 14 May 2017,
Macron continued to claim the Russians had been trying to influence
the election (against him) including via cyber means, after he took
office. For example see this 29 May story
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-05-29/frances-macron-alongside-putin-denounces-two-russian-media-for-election-meddling

And wikipedia:
"Macron's campaign had been presented a report before in March 2017 by
the Japanese cyber security firm Trend Micro detailing how En Marche !
had been the target of phishing attacks.[174] Trend Micro said that
the group conducting these attacks were Russian hacking group Fancy
Bear."

So, evidently, if the French intel agency finds no evidence it was Putin, Macron
disagrees. Also, it is know that Le Pen (Macron opponent) had visited
Russia and obtained campaign financing.

I suppose one could claim Macron is lying, but there are certain facts that were
not due to Macron, such as that financing+visit, and also it is just
another strange "coincidence" that Macron should come up with this lie
right at this time,
purely coincidentally.

--there may be some validity to all that ranting, but it is not relevant to
the question of whether Putin tried to influence US election, and
whether that influence was large enough that it plausibly swung it.

The fact is, he did, and it was that large.

You and I both may dislike that fact, but it is by now a sufficiently
established fact
that I have to accept it.
And yes, the New York Times and the Washington Post and fact-checking
agencies like
politifact are, while far from perfect, the best seekers of truth we
have got on this planet now. It is pathetic how Donald Trump, after
being elected plausibly as a result of fake news, then acted as though
the New York Times and Washington Post were (in his actual words)
"fake news." Well no. They are actual news. Fake news is stories
that, e.g. say they are from ABC News, complete with ABC logo and all,
but were never produced by ABC, they simply were fraudulent. Those
are the kinds of fake news stories compiled by
the Buzzfeed study.

[Warren D Smith]

>France also concluded their was no evidence of Russian hacking during their election: https://www.apnews.com/fc570e4b400f4c7db3b0d739e9dc5d4d

--incidentally, that no-byline AP story dated 1 june 2017 is worth a read.
But here is a more-recent story:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-france-facebook-spies-exclusive-idUSKBN1AC0EI

so evidently it is not true there is "no" evidence.

[Phil Uhrich]

Wow... have you ever read anything that changed your mind? You have a knack for confirmation bias.

"In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, it was alleged that fake
news might have been pivotal in the election of President Trump. We do
not provide
an assessment of this claim one way or another."

You might want to try reading the study first, and telling me what it
concluded afterwards.
And if that is a "naive" view of how one should proceed by me, then so be it."

What it actually said.

"We do not provide
an assessment of this claim one way or another.

That said, the new evidence we present clarifies the level of overall exposure
to fake news, and it can give some sense of how persuasive fake news would need
to have been to have been pivotal. We estimate that the average US adult read and
remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the
election period, with higher exposure to pro-Trump articles than pro-Clinton articles.
How much this affected the election results depends on the effectiveness of
fake news exposure in changing the way people vote. As one benchmark, Spenkuch
and Toniatti (2016) show that exposing voters to one additional television campaign
ad changes vote shares by approximately 0.02 percentage points. This suggests that
if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake
news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order
of hundredths of a percentage point. This is much smaller than Trump’s margin of
victory in the pivotal states on which the outcome depended"

No one is disputing that there was a lot of fake news, but you seem to think that because their was fake news it tipped the election. Sorry, but no matter how many infowars addicted nut jobs who tell me Michelle Obama is a transexual and Barack was actually a gay man I'm not going to believe them. In fact, I'm not even likely to see that story because facebook already filters news feeds to fit people's preconceptions. So in fact the percentage of persuadable voters that saw fake news, took it as fact, and had that be what they used to decide their vote on is so insanely small that it is extremely unlikely that it was decisive, like the paper says. There are no absolutes in social science.

And more unlimited trust of the always truthful and agenda free US intelligence community.
From your Reuters article:
"Russia has repeatedly denied interfering in the French election by hacking and leaking emails and documents. U.S. intelligence agencies told Reuters in May that hackers with connections to the Russian government were involved, but they did not have conclusive evidence that the Kremlin ordered the hacking."

How many wars do we need to get into based on lies from spooks before you show an ounce of skepticism?

I'm sure that the NYT and WaPo covered all of these with due diligence and the appropriate level of outrage.
"35 countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists"
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_backed_international_crime_partner/
Just like they are so even handed in the level of state sanctioned murder and civil rights abuse they tolerate from Israel and Saudi Arabia compared to Syria and Libya.

[Warren D Smith]

On 8/26/17, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:

--well, first of all, millions of people reposted links to, and personally
commented on, fake news stories,
which suggests some degree of voter involvement, which is unlikely to
be duplicated by their attachment to campaign ads on TV. I've often
posted news stories but I doubt I ever even once have posted a link to
a TV ad for
anything (political or not) with me saying "lookee here, this'll persuade you."
The speculation that the two are isomorphic is complete speculation.

Second, you misled people about what that study said as I showed with
verbtim quote,
and I do not appreciate that.

Third, I assume this is the study by
Spenkuch & Toniatti:
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/spenkuch/research/advertising.pdf
and they say
"Applying this approach
to uniquely detailed data on television advertisement broadcasts and viewership
patterns during the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, our results
indicate that
total political advertising has virtually no impact on aggregate
turnout. The point
estimates are precise enough to rule out even moderately sized
effects. By contrast,
we find a positive and economically meaningful effect of advertising
on candidates’
vote shares."

And I rather disagree with the idea a TV ad alters vote share on a
viewer by 0.02%.
First of all, there simply is no study with enough precision to see an
0.02% change.
The only way they can claim to see such a tiny effect is by
aggregating, say, 100s of TV ads. However, I do not believe that
makes any sense for your purposes,
because I assure you that seeing a TV ad 100 times does NOT cause 100x
the effect on
me of seeing it once. Basically, seeing it once might have an effect
on me, but all subsequent times I see it, if anything, reduce that
effect.
So then trying to claim 1 TV ad has effect 0.02% is bullshit, trying
to claim TV ads and fake news stories are isomorphic is bullshit, and
that whole line of reasoning is utterly
worthless.

> No one is disputing that there was a lot of fake news, but you seem to think
> that because their was fake news it tipped the election.

--I did not say it tipped the election, I said it was of the correct
order of magnitude to do so.

And by the way, Trump himself has admitted Putin did embark on a
conspiracy to help elect Trump, and Trump claimed indeed to have
reprimanded Putin for that.

At some point, one needs to admit the obvious.
When you are denying what even Trump has now formally
admitted, you are past that point.

[Warren D Smith]

Today's Washington Post headline:
"As Trump was running for President, his company was pursuing a plan
to build 'Trump tower' in Moscow"

[Warren D Smith]

FaceBook now has released retrospective info about how a known Russian
military intelligence "troll farm" (which had already been reported on
over a year earlier by the New York Times, including a photo of the
building it is located in, as part of a story about
Russian international cyber/propaganda efforts) in St. Petersburg, the
"internet research agency," had created thousands of ads on facebook
for fake news, which they then paid FaceBook $100K to post, for the
purpose of influencing the US election in Trump's favor. FaceBook
accepted the money and did so. They also created thousands of fake
accounts for the trolls.

I would say this campaign by the Russians was very cost-effective...
it also was 100% illegal under USA laws.

So there is no longer any question the Russians mounted an intentional
effort, starting from Vladimir Putin, to influence the US election, in
Trump's favor, by means of "fake news" on the internet (and possibly
other methods too). The fake news stories have been found. The
amount of US public attention paid to them has been measured. Money
paying for the ads for the fake news has been tracked. The source of
the fake news
has been narrowed down to 1 building in Russia. Orders from Putin to
initiate the campaign have been intercepted. Trump has agreed it
happened.

There also is no question that there was some amount of coordination
and communication between Trump's campaign high leaders on one side,
and Russian military intelligence and Putin associates on the other.
There also is no question that Trump and his associates
have lied about that in a way that has always seemed directed to
covering it up; and set up intricate communication methods in ways
obviously intended to escape notice even by USA's own spy agencies.
These include direct meetings in Trump tower with Putin's
personal attack dog lawyer and GRU agents specifically about Russia finding dirt
on Clinton; direct requests to use Russian encrypted communications
devices from Russian embassies in the USA; meetings set up between
Trump and Putin emissaries
on an island in the Indian Ocean; and direct payments of millions of
dollars to Trump and/or associates by Russian "oligarchs" and other
Putin associates.

What I do not know is:
How great this coordination and communication was,
how much the whole shebang influenced the election,
how much Russia expected to get out of it from Trump and why, and
how many corrupt financial deals Trump and associates were involved in.

[Phil Uhrich]

What you don't know is exactly the point. It's not like we haven't tried to interfere with elections, overthrow democratically elected governments to install puppet regimes and worse to just about every country on the planet. Why on earth would it be the least bit surprising that Russia China or just about anyone else wanted to affect our election. Treating people like they are brain dead idiots that respond to a bunch of facebook adds, mostly from 2015 that mostly just talked culture war stuff rather than about candidates was enough to swing the election is rather absurd. The fact that we are destroying our relationship with the only country with more nukes than us over something we did rather blatantly and corruptly to that same country in the 90's (WJC to elect Yeltsin) causing massive economic hardship and deaths of despair worse than we had in the great depression is the insane part.

Unless Sanders wins the house and senate in 2020 I give the planet a about a 15% chance of remaining habitable with a functioning economy in 2100, even then I only give it a 50% chance. Solar and wind do not have the ability to scale up fast enough and it takes over a year before they have generated more fuel than it took to build them. Thanks to shitty plant design requiring super heated water for nuclear reactors switching to MSR's will get bogged down in permitting and NIMBY-ism. We've already locked in about 6 feet of sea level rise by 2100 and still don't have any plans of slowing down.

[Warren D Smith]

On 9/11/17, Phil Uhrich <philu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What you don't know is exactly the point. It's not like we haven't tried to
> interfere with elections, overthrow democratically elected governments to
> install puppet regimes and worse to just about every country on the planet.
> Why on earth would it be the least bit surprising that Russia China or just
> about anyone else wanted to affect our election.

--bests me. You previously claimed it was ridiculous to assert it,
now you claim it is obvious.

> Treating people like they
> are brain dead idiots that respond to a bunch of facebook adds, mostly from
> 2015 that mostly just talked culture war stuff rather than about candidates
> was enough to swing the election is rather absurd.

--no: it is known that fake news promoting Trump was very popular as
can be and was measured by number of reposts, comments, etc on
facebook. We know how popular.
We know the election margin.