Control and Chaos...

Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Diversity, Human Rights, Humor

Note: Enjoy the holidays. I'll be on break until 7 January 2019.

"He's a 'Chaos Candidate' and He’d Be a 'Chaos President,'" former Florida Governor John Edward ("JEB") Bush in an alarmingly accurate moment of prescience.

Maxwell Smart, a.k.a. Agent 86, works for CONTROL, a Washington, D.C.-based counterintelligence agency. Totally inept as a secret agent, Smart can barely use the gadgetry the agency provides him (including a phone embedded in his shoe). Nevertheless, he and his fellow agents always seem to thwart the operations of KAOS, an organized crime outfit dedicated to evil. Agent 99 is Smart's smarter partner, a resourceful agent who eventually marries her bumbling cohort. Smart and Agent 99's boss is a man known only as The Chief. Source: Google users search

His "charity" has met the fate of his "university": eventual oblivion. The market has erased all its gains in 2018 in November, and it doesn't show any signs of slowing down. We are at this posting, hours from a reality TV inspired government shutdown that the current occupant of the Executive Mansion proudly owned to the surprised delight of "Nan-Chuck-Ku," who needed no mental Jujitsu to outwit a nitwit. Michael Cohen is "rat" and Michael Flynn a "saint," at the moment - the jury's still out on Roger Stone. With his 3-month delayed Mulligan sentence to think about Flynn and his lawyer's cute "perjury trap" stunt and Judge Sullivan's disgust, he'll likely be Mus musculus by poetically, the Ides of March and a morning bowel movement/Twitter rant. Wired published a complete guide to 17 investigations related to him. So...much..."winning."

"Who's going to pay for the wall? MEXICO!"

This was the refrain at rallies before and after the election. It was shtick; an applause line that appealed to his audience's racism and xenophobia. He embarrassed himself literally begging the previous Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto to fund it, who patently refused. Now he's demanding 5 billion dollars - an arbitrary number I'm certain - or, the equivalent of a screaming match from a toddler ensues. A toddler that until January has control of the Executive Branch, Supreme Court, the Senate and the House he lost in the midterms. Mattis is out; and the stock market is in free fall. So a shutdown is the chaos that goes down well, in the spirit of the season with sugar, coal and golf at Mar-a-Lago. The secret service will by duty protect him, albeit unpaid.

New Knowledge published a White Paper "The Tactics and Troupes of the Internet Research Agency." You should read it. We all should read it. At 101 pages, it's shorter than a novel. At 10 pages a day, you could have it finished in over a week. The social media companies have always made money on the aggregation of information our behaviors log on their platforms. They then sell that typically to companies. It's why your "like" of something on social media turns up on Amazon or other websites as an associated product to sell you. It's not too far a reach to speculate they'd sell it to governmental agencies, or extra-governmental agencies (i.e. "spies"), some interested in exploiting the fissures in our society. If the most famous democratic republic in history falls, it's dominoes across the planet. We are literally, the linchpin to chaos.

I participated in the Facebook boycott, adding Twitter and Google since those are the main platforms I use. Before we wait on the slow grind of government to finally regulate social media companies, we should regulate our own behaviors. They gather that aggregate data by the sheer number of times we engage their platforms, typically now through social media apps on our mobile phones. Rather than a single day's abstinence, why not delete the apps from our phones? That is what I did. I imagine it would cut engagement times from a surprising number of hours to minutes. I think you'll find yourselves less distracted, and like I said, it's an easy, voluntary implementation. The companies will regulate themselves to survive and get some of your business back.

My theory of the case is simple: he never meant to win, and Putin never envisioned him winning. His biggest fear isn't pee tapes, but that Putin knows his actual net worth (which we'd know if he released his taxes). He wanted to hamper his opponent - who he really hated - from implementing her agenda. It's why he has that Cheshire cat smirk every time he and Orange Doofus are in the same room: he despises him, thinks he's an idiot and the pee tapes are probably on permanent loop at the Kremlin with Vodka and laughter. And like a cat, Cheshire or otherwise, he's playing with his prey before he's done with it. Any collusion by his Keystone Cop campaign was clumsy and stupid. It's why the tower in Russia was still on the table. His payoffs of an adult film star and a Playboy centerfold was pure ego. The affairs happened years before: If he was going to lose, he WASN'T going to lose for that! Though, he would rather have lost, and just not admitted to losing. Then he could scream from the bleachers "the system is rigged," get another Apprentice gig and his own Faux News 2.0 station with his buddies Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

It was the PERFECT plan...until he won.

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