Unable to Please Everyone, Theresa May Gives Up

Originally published on May 24, 2019 on America Out Loud,
https://americaoutloud.com/unable-to-please-everyone-theresa-may-gives-up/

“Is this like Brexit?” That was the question every Briton asked me and my American companions on November 8, 2016 as we sat at a bar in in London watching the television coverage of President Donald Trump’s win. We were loud, boisterous and irreverent⏤bantering about when Hilary Clinton would come out of hiding and concede. The reserved Londoners looked at us with their stiff upper lips, probably murmuring about what unruly savages we colonials were. They were in shock about this fissure in the timeline; although, not nearly as shocked as the country already beginning to descend into a cultural fragmentation grenade I would come home to a few days later.

I wasn’t sure how to answer their question that day. The United Kingdom had a few months before passed their own titanic change of direction approving Brexit, the vote to leave the European Union. They were still trying to understand what it meant and who to implement the divorce they had voted for.

To many, the European Union was more than just a socialist cooperative economic model beginning to show the stresses of many years of the richer nations supporting the poorer ones. The EU was for them the culmination of a dream of a better that began on the 8th of May 1945, Victory in Europe Day. The people of Western Europe had endured the Cold War paying the price of post-war mobilization of NATO.

In the 1970’s⏤the beginnings of a shift from swords to plowshares in the form of the European Economic Community brought an inkling of a better future to people who finally began to feel that the ghost of the Reich would not return again. And then the European Union expanded that dream to see a world beyond the end of the Cold War.

To abandon such a thing, to possibly return to the individual nation state dangers of pre-NATO Europe, to abandon the safe space of co-dependency was a not an easy thing to wrap their heads around. Being from the other side of the pond and dealing with my own rumblings about what was about to transpire in the New World, I didn’t feel like over focusing on it. So my answer then was, “I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”

In the two and a half years hence, we’ve witness the leadership of the two premier English speaking nations of the world take very different approaches to carrying out their election mandates of 2016.

Where the US’ President Donald Trump accepted the reality that social fissures laid bare by his election and used them to navigate a treacherous maze of opportunities and pitfalls to carry out his mandate, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Theresa May sought to find a solution through painfully inclusive social justice paths seeking to smooth over the social fissures that where also emerging in her country.

May tried three times to package the Brexit mandate as a universal compromise. She failed each time. Few doubt that she meant the best for her country. But equality of outcome for conflicted constituencies within her nation in a nation-state economic divorce was never realistic. Theresa May was trying to hang on the communal dream of EU co-dependency while working on a mandate meant to turn the English Channel back into a defensive moat. It was never going to work.

Prime Minister May’s mistake was strategic. By not allowing hard Brexit divisive forces to have sway alongside soft Brexit preservationist forces that would result in an imperfect, but functional, solution, she instead led her country into an infeasible dead end. She now pays the price for that mistake.

Her successor will most likely not make the same mistake. The odds are the United Kingdom’s next Prime Minister will be more like America’s Donald Trump who is using both division and inclusion as part of his toolkit to lead.

My own opinion is that this is good fo the U.K. May didn’t have the heart to make the tough choices of establishing the self-interests of her country versus the EU in clearer terms. She tried to be nice and succeeded only in creating a self-imposed gridlock condition.

I hope the next Prime Minister does not make the same error. Victory goes to the bold. The U.K. needs to be bold. The reality is that other European Union nations are looking across the moat hoping to see a model of the future they can follow; because the true future of a healthier European Union is one where real equity and merit within it, not imaginary social justice, drives prosperity and stability. Lest the minuet fissures that have been the reality of European conflict since the Hundred Years’ War continue to spread like a the cancer. A cancer that Brexit was meant to cut out.

So how would I answer the comparative question “Is this like Brexit?”

I would say no because of how we tackled the task. The reason is not because the United States didn’t have just as strong a mandate to “Make America Great Again” as the mandate of Brexit. We did. The words are American, but the intent is the same.

It’s because we’ve been bold about pursuing our mandate. We’ve ruffled feathers standing up for ourselves not because we are hegemonistic, that we want to conquer and rule. No, it’s because we seek fairness in the world. It’s a tough love form of coexistence.

That’s the lesson in national interest here for Americans as we ponder our own future. Our dangers are the dead ends of trying to create “designer outcome” compromises; the kind that Theresa May could not achieve.

Trade War Heats Up; Will America or China Blink First?

Originally published May 10, 2019 on America Out Loud,
https://americaoutloud.com/trade-war-heats-up-will-america-or-china-blink-first/

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping have a lot to talk about the next time they meet. The two men lead the two superpower economies of the world. The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China are bound together in what geopolitical strategists current call Grey Zone conflict; a 21st century version of the 20th century’s Cold War fought in economic, political and technology space with the occasional saber rattling of military power projection bravado.

The current hot part of the Grey Zone is trade and tariffs. The US is upping the tension by imposing roughly $200 billion in new tariffs as a way to create pressure to bring the Chinese back to the bargaining table following China’s surprising reneging of a pending trade agreement sending the US a red lined draft deleting almost all of the proposals the US had negotiated with the Chinese in good faith.

The Chinese have done this negotiate then take it away tactic before. They are known to seek to exploit perceived weaknesses in the American bargaining position when the US presidential election cycle begins.

They blunted trade agreement attempts by former President Barack Obama and seem to have believed current President Donald Trump was equally vulnerable to election cycle flaccidity.

It looks like they may have read the tea leaves wrong this time. President Trump doesn’t seem to care about the 2020 election as much as he cares about tending to the business of America in 2019. I don’t know why they thought the man they nicknamed “Donald the Strong” would change his modus operandi because a “circular firing squad”, as former President Barack Obama called it, of twenty plus mediocre Democratic presidential hopefuls are canvasing every bar and stage they can stand on and stump from.

Instead, the US moved to activate tariffs creating a real increase in friction for the global manufacturing supply chain that goes between the US and Chinese economies. Adding fuel to the tension, the US signaled that President Trump is willing to pursue taxing “everything the Chinese sell us” if we must in order to get their attention.

The two countries will next return to the bargaining table with the US likely demanding that every word in the language the Chinese deleted in the last draft of the trade agreement be restored. We’ll soon see how that plays out in the coming episode of the “Art of the Deal”.

Here’s the thing, trade friction is normal.

In an ideal world, there would be free trade between nations with the balance of trade between each counter-party being perfectly equal going both ways. But it’s not an ideal world. In the real world, imbalances are normal and fixing them requires constant tending by the governments to equalize the balances between trading partners.

The trade friction between the US and China is significant. It didn’t happen overnight though. Prior to Richard Nixon opening the door to Red China in the early 1970’s, China was a minor trading partner of the US. Things began to open beginning in the late 70’s and blossomed in the 1980’s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. But the explosion in trade volume and the path that would eventually lead to a severe trade imbalance really began in the 1990’s.

The US globalization and outsourcing of manufacturing and supply chain logistics starting in the 1990’s helped spark a vast economic boom in China that transformed Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution” into Deng Xiaoping’s “To Be Rich is Glorious” vision for the centrally planned Communist nation. It would see China’s economy grow to become the equal in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with the United States of America. It has indeed been a glorious run of growth and prosperity. Entire industries transformed and grew in both the United States and China feeding on the cost of production savings of global outsourcing. The economic system became addicted to it and it benefitted from China’s infrastructure base grandly even as the US infrastructure base atrophied in strategically important industry sectors. America became a factory poor service economy and China forced its indigenous people off their lands and into factory cities for the greater glory of China. But there’s no such thing as a supernormal return that lasts forever.

The most successful beneficiaries of the global economy, the US and China have become conjoined twin 21st century economic superpowers very much the same way the US and the Soviet Union were conjoined twin military superpowers in the late 20th century. But both countries are now reaching inevitable growth plateaus. Both countries are beginning to adapt to reality.

The US has realized that it outsourced too much. America now needs to shift the locus of production back onshore to create job capacity for a population about to experience a massive technological change due to the arrival of artificial intelligence and robotics changing the nature of how work is done. It’s a simple formula. There will be fewer workers needed per business entity or process. To compensate for this, the US needs to increase the number of business entities and processes within its borders in balance with its domestic workforce size. Count that any way you want to; we need jobs for the bodies.

The Chinese plateau is that it needs to wean itself of an excessive dependency being the world’s largest export economy in a world where all their first and second world customers, not only the United States, will be adapting to the coming AI and robot workforce revolution.

China is, to be blunt, the world’s largest factory reduction in force waiting to happen. They need to reduce their exposure. They need to restructure the design of their economy, probably even their culture and governance, so it is not as dependent on the outside world’s need for goods to be internally rich and glorious.

Desperately seeking balance.

Economic negotiations have been ongoing to rebalance the costs and incentives to improve the trade balance positions between the US and China for years. People have worried about the consequence effects of becoming addicted to outsourcing since it began. The two countries struggle in parallel trying to create a way to evolve from a house of cards to an equilibrium that is sustainable and perpetual.

While American and Chinese leadership negotiate, it turns out, there is a narrower set of self-interests in the domestic socio-economic realities of both nations that retards their ability to find that equilibrium.

In the US, many industry sectors have calibrated their economics such that they are dependent on outsourced manufacturing of both finished goods as well as components and subassemblies. Distributed supply chain manufacturing was one of the great achievements of globalization and it has turned many US industry sectors into industrial outsourcing drug addicts.

Wall Street has a heart attack anytime this river of industrial cocaine hints at slowing down or being cut off. No one in the US wants to make the capital investment to replace what can be ordered over the internet from China. Capitalism is entirely myopic and short sighted.

US markets see only the now of the next earnings report. But that’s not going to stop the day the American labor force takes a cold shower. The machines and bots are still coming.

It’s, to use an old term, an inconvenient truth. No one other than Trump really wants to face it. It’s impossible to even discuss something this difficult in DC because Congress is so busy playing political games about hating the president it’s completely ignoring the national interest. There are even some Congress who want the country to fall into the losing side of a trade war thinking maybe the turmoil is good for their political fortune. Really? Since when is plunging a country into a depression a good thing?

If you think we have problems, a trade war is far worse for the Chinese. They have the same professional class myopic greed and addiction to an outsourcing business model planet economy too. It’s been very, very glorious. The Roman concept of Momento Mori applies here; the legend of the slave Auriga whispering in the ear of the victorious Roman general on his chariot that “glory is fleeting”.

Historically, the Chinese are in a quandary they’ve been in many times over their 10,000-year history. Simply put. What happens when the aspirations of your professional class depart from the existential needs of your peasant base? Chinese dynasties, including the present communist one, have struggled with this repeatedly and the solutions have mostly not been “nice”.

For the Chinese, the Xiaoping glory period of high growth is rapidly reaching a limit line. China’s leadership knows this probably more acutely than anyone else on the planet. They know they stand at a difficult precipice.

They must either seek a peaceful equilibrium with the league of nations as trading partners taking account of the realities of what technology is about to do to everyone, a path leads to working with the community of nations constructively. Or, the Chinese must begin to prepare to become Asia’s next pretender to the throne of hegemonic owner of Greater East Asia to manufacture artificial prosperity by force. It’s a decision point that is coming for the Chinese and it is something the world needs to be dealing with head on and helping the Chinese make the right choice.

My observation? The hegemon option is a really, really bad idea for China. The People’s Liberation Army is good but it’s military might is best used as a projection of power for negotiating leverage vs. in actual imperial conquest. Basically, it’s not going to work. China shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking it’s better than Japan was at such an endeavor. Chinese hyper patriotism is an admirable thing for the pride of the Chinese people in themselves and their achievements. It’s also a slippery stone on the path to the dangers of Bushido. The Japanese lost by the way. To the United States of America. Just saying.

Going operations analyst for a paragraph, the conflict calculus prognosis in any form of protracted economic conflict between the US and China, once fully engaged, is the same. The odds heavily favor the Americans. All conflicts are about one’s financial staying power. While both the US and China have $16 trillion GDP’s, the GDP per capita available for sustaining so-called Grey Zone conflict, meaning at a high state of open animosity on the ragged edge of war and peace, overwhelmingly favors the US at 300 million mouths to feed on a $16T base vs. Chinas 1.4 billion people sustainment load.

An economic war will stress the Chinese cultural-political system 4 ½ times more per day of conflict than it will America.

That is a simple siege warfare cost multiplied by time formula as old as conflict itself. It determines who’s house of cards will crumble first. It’s icky. Everyone will lose. Don’t do it.

Something Better to “Get to Yes” About.

As I step back from the noise of the moment, I’m struck by the realization that there actually is a straightforward and sensible outcome that both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping need to work towards.

The US needs to get to a trade level and mix that brings back onshore enough industry to sustain the quality of life of its population.

The US and China both need to redesign their foreign trade models so that they work together to target a long run 1-to-1 balance of trade such that most favored nation status with as close to friction free tariffless interaction becomes sustainable between the two counterparties.

For the US to achieve its aims, it needs to mobilize domestically to recapitalize what was excessively outsourced while continuing to interact with the global supply chain fairly. The US clearly cannot do this while the political climate of America is fractious. Until then, America has no unified national direction. That means, election year acrimony be damned, President Trump needs to find a way to bring selfish political tribes together, at least on this issue, to the point that the US begins to work on matters of national interest, even if as a very reluctant team. If this doesn’t happen, China will win.

For the Chinese to achieve their aims, they need to similarly reorganize their culture and politics to develop a stable domestic economy that is internally self-sustaining and balances interaction with the global supply chain fairly. I suspect that to do this will be more problematic for China. The Chinese will likely have to explore alternative national designs such as creating interdependent regions within their country much like the US has natural regions of separation that allows it to have internal cycles that smooth things over time. The single nation centrally controlled model they have now is probably too difficult to sustain. If China cannot do this, then America will win.

If the two countries can begin to discuss these things constructively, the world wins.

To be honest, an uncomfortable tariff skirmish might be just the thing to get both countries scared enough to start thinking about the 21st century more productively.

So be it.

Is the U.S. In Danger of Blowing the World’s Chance for Change?

Originally published May 6, 2019 on America Out Loud,

https://americaoutloud.com/is-the-u-s-in-danger-of-blowing-the-worlds-chance-for-change/#prettyPhoto

Rocket Man is back. Kim Jung Un’s North Korea has started test firing missiles again. This follows a failed Vietnam summit with U.S. president Donald Trump in Korea where the “Getting to Yes” strategy of that had been drawing the hermit nation’s leader into the open was hit with the cold water of a positional impasse over the de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

A disappointed Un went through a predictable process of being spurned. He went to China and found that the Chinese have their own issues and agendas with the United States; that he’s a side show in a far grander game between two $16 trillion GDP behemoths balancing vastly differing domestic challenges while negotiating bi-lateral economic matters unique to the interests of the only true economic superpowers on the planet. Un went to Russia, the other military superpower and discovered little relief from Vladimir Putin’s tiny $1.2 trillion GDP was forthcoming. Putin knows he’s a guppy in an economic world war and is right to opt out of that fight. Kim Jung Un realized he is once again alone and isolated. When in doubt, you do what you know.

Following the Summit, the U.S. returned to a tougher Neocon stance of sanctions under the new leadership of John Bolton. Donald Trump’s world leadership signature “Art of the Deal” approach that to international policy all but disappeared.

It’s all about sanctions now. The U.S. is playing tough guy all over the planet again with predictable results; a hardening of battle lines and a lessening chance that the change the international landscape of the planet breakthroughs of the Trump rebellion will survive the establishment empire’s striking back.

Under Bolton, it’s all about compromising our enemies using economic sanctions as our spear for asymmetric warfare. At a recent conference on technology held at the FDIC, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin noted that as much as fifty-percent of his days now can be spent on sanctions. That tells me we have weaponized our economy straying far afield of the free market principles that make America great domestically and internationally.

It has rankled our allies and adversaries alike. Germany’s Andrea Merkel welcomed former president Barack Obama who basically told the European Union that he’s not sure America’s opposition party, the Democrats, have anything in the way of a useful alternative to offer.

Obama described his party’s condition akin to a circular firing squad more intent in infighting than cohesion at this junction. I doubt that offered much comfort to the Germans or any of the other socialist leaning governments in the EU.

Sanction-based international policy by the US seems to be increasing the desperation of countries like Iran whose rhetoric is becoming increasingly belligerent, albeit nonsensical. I mean how many times can you look at a side story on TV about an Iranian Revolutionary Guard general threatening to attack everything in the waters off Chah Bahar and Bandar Abbas if the US closes the Gulf, which we aren’t. What we are doing is working with other countries using our economic muscle to increase oil production elsewhere on the planet to crowd our Iranian and Venezuelan oil. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf State Sunni kingdoms, who have little love for Iran’s Shia Crescent ambitions, are more than happy to support the US in a classic the enemy of my enemy is my friend bedfellow arrangement. Meanwhile, Iran’s general’s wonder when they’ll be declared an international terrorist cell this enabling the now fully weaponized Treasury Department of Steve Mnuchin to launch a frontal assault on their bank accounts.

This is a weird world scenario where the dangers of someone going off half-cocked making a mistake are highly amplified. That’s always been the danger of establishment thinking in D.C. and it’s clearly returning to the conduct of U.S. international policy.

For instance, Venezuela’s Juan Guaido is attempting to draw the United States into taking overt action to overthrow Nicolas Maduro. This is like reading a chronicle of the Bay of Pigs all over again. Like then, the United States has little real incentive to involve itself in a shooting war between political factions in a sovereign nation to inherit a devastated economy and take on a minimum two-decade nation building project. Didn’t we just get out of one of those PTSD nightmares?

So what next?

I really think President Trump should trust his broken field innovation instincts again. It’s ok to upset the Establishment Mr. President. I offer the following observations.

First. With regards to North Korea, it’s never too late to launch a new series of incentives to bring Kim Jung Un back to the table. I believe the stick we applied at the Vietnam Summit setting the strong expectation that full denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was the predicate for future progress was rightfully necessary. But we knew internal factions inside North Korea dissonant and we were remiss in failing to anticipate it by having a basket full of diplomatic carrot incentives ready to go even as the summit was faltering to work the problem of preventing the North Korean from going hermit. We’ve lost time and momentum that we didn’t have to. The National Security Council should be directed to come up with a comprehensive strategy to recapture that momentum that isn’t based on positional bargaining principles.

The same applies to managing places like Iran and Venezuela. Yes sir, the leadership of these rogue nations is questionable. All self-serving dictatorships are. But sanctions alone that offer no pathway out of the predicament won’t work either. Pride, even misguided pride, is a factor in global stability. These are proud and misguided people. They will apply themselves in misguided ways such as cheating on sanctions and hurting their own people to make a point of their belligerence to us. And they will find cracks in the world enough to survive almost any sanctioning regime we come up with. America is one of the lousiest empires to ever attempt siege warfare. That’s reality. We need to be more innovative.

Your administration was elected because we needed these changes in how things were done. The world needed these changes. Now is not the time to go conventional. If we do, the dream of making America great again will be lost.

And finally, we need to keep working with the Chinese. It’s tedious but the economic war between us is the world’s new Cold War. It’s fought with tariffs, trade agreements, import quotas, intellectual property as force elements instead of missile counts. But like it was with the Soviets, the global stability of the planet depends on two counter-parties working to get it right. We are much more partners in what we can do for the planet than we both realize. But the planet is depending of both of us figuring it out. We should devote ourselves to doing so.

Restoring Reason After the Mueller Anti-Climax

Originally published April 15, 2019 on America Out Loud
https://americaoutloud.com/restoring-reason-after-the-mueller-anti-climax/#prettyPhoto

What interesting times we live in. The anti-climax of the Mueller investigation continues to play out as we await the arrival of the redacted report. I am amazed at how quickly the house of cards that awaited the smoke to emerge from the political canon pointed at President Trump is evaporating.

The consequences of the betrayal of the left by the establishment left and their media allies are just beginning. The disenfranchised army of orphaned Democrats is just beginning to react. By summer, we shall see where this anger leads. I don’t think it will be pointed at the White House.

To be sure, there are vestiges of the evil Empire that continue to struggle to survive, ever more feebly. In Congress, the Schiff and Nadler committees pretend to carry on even as the evidence grows that there is nothing to carry-on about. The leaks coming from Congress are ever more obvious these days. They are now concentrated coming from the politicians. Comically so if one judges efficacy by looking at the memes on social media. I mean, since when is topping how you put your foot in your mouth yesterday the next day a good thing? Establishment or New Progressive? Racing to the bottom isn’t serving the Nation.

Previously, just as many leaks were coming from agency sources, three letter ones in particular. I get the distinct impression that these are now being reined in.

The consequences to one’s government service career for being an Alinsky radical inside the castle keep are becoming too great. That’s good. Bureaucrats are supposed to serve their mission and stay in their lanes while on the clock.

The news media too behaves more and more. The landscape of the mainstream media is changing before our eyes as audiences abandon the programming that misled them. It’s like being gut punched by someone who pretended to be your best friend.

The profitability Trump headlining the news cycle as a way the beguile the confirmation biases of target audience segments is fading. The raw truth audiences were fed stories not because they were true, but because that’s what kept people watching is coming out loud and clear. I always said that CNN needed President Trump more than he needed CNN. That’s certain proving the be the case as ratings adjust to reality. I have confidence that the economics of being a for-profit business are about take brutal effect; in some cases, they already have.

The country is clearly ready to move on. I think the Democrats risk losing everything if they don’t move along with the country. They may not be able to because they now have too many factions inside their tents to have any hope of cohesion in messaging the American people. As the old saying goes “divided we fall” may have to be the fate of that party until it learns to purge its fringe, find its center again, and be interesting enough to bring the walk away orphaned people they chose to abandon back in, if ever.

A Midterm Pendulum Swinging to Trump?

The country’s “moving on” manifesting as a Trump backlash against the Establishment is clearly emerging.

Attorney General William Barr is beginning to examine the other side of the conspiracy coin. He should! The people who cried wolf that there was collusion in the Trump camp always worried me as the kind of people who were reflecting actions of their own in the mirror as they antagonized their foes. That always struck me as a little bit weird with me. In my experience, when someone accuses others that angrily they are usually describing things that they have done; that they are covering up their own actions.

I think it is right to ask to what degree the establishment of Washington DC including elected officials and bureaucratic officials particularly in the Cabinet agencies were party to, duped by, or derelict in these matters. I believe it is important for the national interest of the United States to ferret these people and the institutional behaviors they perpetrated out into the open so a proper vetting of our government apparatus can take place. We could use a good spring cleaning of our own house.

I am particularly pleased that Julian Assange is finally going to have his day in court. Removing the shroud of mystery so that what he knew becomes something everyone knows will be, despite the price he will have to pay as an individual, a cathartic revelation for the people of America. I’ll be keen to see how much they try to suppress and hide what he has to say under veils of secrecy, redaction and gag orders. Personally, let all the poisons that lie in the mud hatch out sounds good to me.

Reason Begets More Reason

I am pleased to observe that the beltway swamp is not the only place this phenomenon of reason is emerging in the United States. It’s too easy to become obsessed with one aspect of the American story to the detriment of seeing other things that appearing to remind us that we are a great country capable of tackling many things. Here are a couple that attracted my attention thanks more to social media than the mainstream media.

The malarkey of the so-called “Green New Deal” was poignantly challenged by an article by National Public Radio discussing evidence that the banning of plastic grocery bags is actually more harmful for the environment because it causes people to buy thicker plastic garbage bags to you use to pick up their dog poop and take out their cat litter.

Bear in mind that NPR had been one of the biggest proponents of pushing the concept of using reusable grocery bags for many years. Their article confessed the truth that one would have to use such a bag thousands of times beyond its useful life of one of these bags in order to negate the carbon footprint offset of manufacturing one such bag vs. plastic grocery bags. Finally, apparently the damage to forests from using paper bags is far higher than the environmental damage from manufacturing plastic ones.

It’s not unlike the carbon cost of making an electric car vs. nursing your old clunker along a few more years. Kind of makes you wonder about why that “cash for clunkers” thing from several years ago doesn’t it?

Can you imagine such a story in the era of Establishment Entitlement America? Or Global Economic Elitism? I think it is good people are beginning to question blindly following the environmental fad of the moment without considering the potential negative consequences of those initiatives.

I think asking tougher questions of environmental activists is a much better way to protect the environment than trying every half-baked idea that comes along and fixing the mess later. And yes, I would like a straw with that please.

I mean if you ever bothered to read the details of Paris Climate Accord that the United States rejected you would have seen that it was a formula that was doomed to failure. The approach relied on eliminating mobility, limiting food sources, and ultimately, reducing population. The Paris 2050 mid-century plan was either dangerously naïve or diabolically genocidal.

The US Progressive activist plan is a basket case compared to the Paris one. We can do better. We should do better.

Then there’s that pesky Second Amendment

As New Zealand decided that its citizens cannot not be trusted with firearms, in America US District Judge Roger Benitez declared California’s 20-year old ban on firearms magazines holding more than 10 rounds unconstitutional. Downplayed in the mainstream media even as it exploded on social media, for a week between the judge’s decision striking down two California’s laws and a Voter Referendum and the same issuing a stay to a desperate State of California to attempt to mount an appeal, ordinary gun owning Americans in the state of California bought nearly the entire inventory available for sale throughout the United States taking advantage of a one week window to acquire them legally. People called freedom week in California. It’s over and the process is back in the hands of the Courts to grind on slowly; but it was a breath of fresh air for red blooded Americans in a very blue state.

Judge Benitez wrote a scathing defense of the Second Amendment of the US Bill of Rights attacking nearly every gun control argument ever posed on the issue in his decision beginning with three cases of women defending themselves, two of whom ran out of ammunition while under attack. It’s an interesting case that, should California pursue an appeal, could overturn similar laws in nine other states; the other forty-one states in the Union have no such restrictions. It brings a gun control debate that has long relied on skirting around the constitutionality issue out in the open. Tactically, this is not exactly what the people who dream of a USA that looks like New Zealand were daydreaming about the week before Havana born Benitez issued his ruling.

The phenomenon speaks volumes about just how powerful the US Constitution and Bill of Rights continue to be in this country. It appeared literally as a bolt out of the blue, a reminder that the Founder’s vision is still alive.

It is something that every American who believes that this country should be great again should take note of. It remains vital that all of us, we ordinary Americans, support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic, so help us God. It is a ruler that gives us all fair and equal measure. That is what it takes to make our nation a healthier place where debate is rational, and pluralism is tolerant … for all.

After Mueller, Time to Tell the Resistance to Let It Go; Using Alinsky Against Itself

Photo Credit: USP News

I've been saying for months that nothing would come of the Mueller investigation. At long last, we have a report that says exactly that. There’s no smoking gun; that would have surfaced a long time ago if it existed. There are no major Indictments; and many abandoned minor ones. Mostly, in the grand scheme of things, it’s much to do about nothing. About the only thing the Mueller investigation did prove is that President Donald Trump had some oddball personalities who orbited him. What man of means doesn’t?

Mr. Muller was certainly methodical and thorough. Thorough to the point that there aren't really any stones left worth turning. Despite what some people may hope, there’s nothing worth looking into further. And don’t give me any of that Southern District of New York double speak. Any investigation that squeezes stool pigeon after stool pigeon granting immunity to obtain accusations is another dead end. The wait for the shoe to drop game is over. The fat lady is singing.

I suspect Mr. Mueller wanted it that way. To have a conclusion that an Attorney General would have overwhelming guidance to either pursue an indictment or let it go. In this case, US Attorney General William Barr quickly determined the conclusion is the latter.

And so once again, two years after the November election of 2016, acrimony once again begins by those who cannot believe they have lost again. For me, as soon as I saw the breaking headlines come across the wire feed in my phone, I quickly made the decision that it would be a good day to just ignore television and skip over anything that wasn’t a picture of cats or food on social media.

Bye Felicia. Mic Drop Time

I’m mentally done with this episode. I have better things to concern myself with besides looking in the rear view mirror. I am much more inclined to focus on the future.

Things like how Trump and Bolton will get Korean Peninsula de-nuclearization back on track for instance. The Vietnam Summit did not go well. I sense dissonance between the two American architects, one looking to deal flexibly and the other looking to bargain positionally. The US two headed snake problem very much plays to the advantage of the Chinese and North Koreans while we continue to dawdle.

With no Trump-Russia collusion conclusion, maybe the long overdue process of finding constructive ways the US and Russia can work together that should have started on January 1, 2017 can finally get back on track. There’s certainly a need. ISIS as a military force in Syria is gone but the even more complex task of keeping Assad’s Alawites, the Iranians, the Turks, and the Kurds from plunging into chaos is certainly an area where the US and Russia have much to discuss. That and the US needs to recognize that the only other $16 Trillion GDP economy on this planet is seeking influence with Russia while we aren’t.

That is not very smart playbook for US national interests. The so-called “Resistance” has harmed these processes and the end of Mueller gives us a tiny window of opportunity to get back in our wheelhouse. We won't win on the world stage unless we have a national agenda united behind our Executive Branch and that means telling Congress to move along. Every one of our global adversaries knows this. Every one of our global adversaries hopes we don't remember how important it is. A distracted America is a loser America.

Establishment Elites and Social Justice Warriors

Sadly, we have forces within our country that want us to lose even more than our international adversaries. We have a political establishment class dedicated to gridlocking the United States until the 2020 election. These are the haves of our nation, the elites, the betters, the money, the power mongers, the yellow journalists, the ones who would tell us how to lead our lives.

We ordinary Americans are the have nots. We are the orphans from political parties gone mad with internal factional fighting that has little to do with us and more to do with the circus theater they use to distract us. Vladimir Lenin used to say that one percent of truth is the perfect amount of cover to sell a 99% lie. That's certainly true today when one looks at the world or of mainstream media news where fair and balanced reporting has been replaced by opinion punditry that cares only about packaging the message to maximize capturing the confirmation bias of target audiences. These too are the haves of our times running rough shod over us have nots.

Thank goodness for the discord of the internet with its infinitely segmented social media, a forest of independent websites and podcast networks, and robotic web crawling search engines. Otherwise, alternative views would never be heard. At least for now. Or haven’t you noticed that the Establishment, at the behest of academia’s elites, is trying to clamp down in the internet? The forces of control are predictably tireless.

Changing the Game

What chance to ordinary Americans stand to take back control? We who are the silent orphans from the political parties who can’t stomach the vitriol of politics because, like refugees from political strife the world over, we are deep down tolerant and caring people who don’t things it’s cool to turn our guns on our neighbors. What rules of change management to we pursue to rein in the haves of our times? Melt the wax in their wings? Pour water on their feet of clay? Bring their egos back down to size? How to we be revolutionary Americans again?

Just remember this throughout what follows. Don’t just force the enemy to live within their rules. Force them to live within our rules. And then, break the rules. Because Americans do that.

Let’s try a thought experiment together. What if we, the silent majority stopped being silent? What if we turned the rules of radicalism used by those who have been trying to control us against them?

Saul Alinsky, author of "Rules for Radicals"

When Saul Alinsky wrote his rules for radicals, he clearly stated these were tools for the have nots to take power back from the haves. In 21st century American, the have nots are the ordinary Americans. Therefore, we should be using these rules. So let’s give it a try turning Alinsky philosophy against itself shall we?

By the Numbers

Alinsky #1: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

Santiago #1: Know your enemy’s facts. Power is not about believing what your enemy wants you to think. Power is about knowing where the enemy is advantaged, disadvantaged and just plain full of it.

Alinsky #2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

Santiago #2: Teach your people to have the insight and expertise to deal with what is going on. Educate your fellow Americans until we’ve negated whatever experience advantage our enemies have, or think they have.

Alinsky #3: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy.

Santiago #3: We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all Americans are equal. Always strive to level the playing field. Educate the enemy as much as you educate yourself. Make them know that their denial is what causes them to be disadvantaged, ostracized and losers.

Alinsky #4: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

Santiago #4: Make the enemy live up to a common book of rules that are based on tolerance and respect among equal Americans.

Alinsky #5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

Santiago #5: Politically incorrect ridicule is an even more potent weapon.

Alinsky #6: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

Santiago #6: A great tactic is one based on truth.

Alinsky #7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

Santiago #7: A clear vision and strategy defeats any tactic of the moment. Great visions, like the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights can be passed from generation to generation. Never forget that the United States is one of the youngest cultures on planet Earth. More important, at this point in time, we are also the oldest continuous government on planet Earth. Think about that for a minute. And then be proud, very proud.

Alinsky #8: Keep the pressure on.

Santiago #8: Pressure my behind. No one can make you feel inferior without your permission. Or maybe Saul forgot to read Eleanor. Don’t let someone else’s pressure cooker and need to eat Xanax as a food group affect you. Find the elegance in the truth of the moment. Savor the tranquility of your clarity. Let the desperate enemy burn themselves our as you watch and smile knowingly.

Alinsky #9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

Santiago #9: Nothing is terrifying when you know what’s going on. And everything becomes almost trivial when you take the time to look at things from multiple viewpoints to really understand how and why one person is triggered by something one way and another person responds a completely different way. Then, nothing phases you.

Alinsky #10: The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

Santiago #10: Alinsky repeats himself. He said the same thing cogently enough in his rule #8. That he had to repeat himself is something I’ve always interpreted as a self-admission that he knows he is in the wrong. I now invoke rule #5 and ridicule him thusly and impolitically just because I don’t like jacuzzi revolutionaries. Bite me Saul. So there.

Alinsky #11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.

Santiago #11: This is probably the most important counter rule to remember. Bullshit, no matter how loud or eloquent, is still bullshit. Every American should know how to detect it. No American should ever feel shame in politely pointing it out when detected. This is how you disarm the enemy and make them impotent. This is how we will win.

Alinsky #12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Santiago #12: Advantage is the most fleeting asset in warfare. All warfare goes from one cycle of engagement to the next. One battle is not a campaign. At each engagement, always begin to turn the enemy’s strength into his next bowl of weak sauce. The objective is to move the enemy to more and more untenable positions until they eventually abandon their agenda on their own because it just doesn’t work anymore. Remember, you are part of an American majority. Share what you learn with your fellow minded Americans. An enemy swarmed by a multitude dies a death of a thousand cuts quicker. Just saying.

Alinsky #13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Santiago #13: Learn to fight con artistry. Don’t be that sucker born every minute. Understand the game being attempted on you. If you aren’t sure, develop trusted resources to find out. Do find the weaknesses in the persona of the attacker and exploit it to throw them off their game. It’s ok to be impolitic about it; remember, they are attacking you. You’re just defending yourself.

Freeze on your own terms. Alinsky adopts a classic military tactic called fire and maneuver that allows the enemy to search for your soft spot. But subterfuge is perfectly legitimate in such matters. Suckering a social justice warrior into an argumentative trap where you turn the tables and freeze them on your own terms is perfectly acceptable in political contests.

On the last point of Alinsky’s, pick your target, I finally agree with him. You are allowed to pick your fights. You are allowed to refuse to discuss something stupid with an enemy that isn’t making sense. You’re not crazy, they are.

I hope you found some if this useful. Here’s all of us ordinary Americans and the common values we share. God bless the United States of America.

Privilege with Prejudice

Originally posted at, https://americaoutloud.com/privilege-with-prejudice/

Source: Associated Press

America is rocked by yet another scandal. The latest one by privileged parents bribing a corruptible college recruiting system. As criminal activity goes, it's pretty hard to top federal racketeering. Yet that is what this latest rendition of American affluenza seems to be. Privilege clearly has no philosophical boundary in America given that most of the accused in this case seem to have liberal tendencies. It raises the question of just how far the elite class in this country is willing to go to achieve their aims by any means necessary.

It is something that should worry every ordinary American. Those of us lowly citizens relegated to watch our betters make decisions on our behalf. We may argue that this is not so to our hearts content on the circus that is social media; but the reality is but the elites are getting away with it.

Next to the story about the scandal over college admission bribery In the Wall Street Journal is a parallel story about the thriving industry of legal manipulations by the elite to place their children into colleges. There are 17,000 college admission assistance service businesses in this country. No! What blows my mind is that WSJ article illustrates that the main thing wrong as far as academia is concerned is that this group of people charged by the federal government did not play by their rules of bribery.

There is something fundamentally wrong about our value system highlighted by cases like this. The days of asking what you can do for your country are no more. it's not even about what your country can do for you. Now, it's about what you can get away with. We idolize those who figure out how to cheat the system.

In the real world, celebrities, major office holders, heads of corporations, and professional athletes are few and far between. Regardless of that status, everyone is still, in the end, an ordinary American.

These days, that's no longer enough to be proud about. Today, if you're not an influencer, you're a nothing. Stepping back and thinking about it, it's a macabre version of China’s social scoring system that seeks to rate how good of a citizen you are in that country. In our system, we seem out to prove who has the biggest of any of the three orifices of our bodies.

And it’s extracting a terrible cost. In an America where emotions are amplified by an electronically enhanced sense of confirmation bias, it has turned us into a mean society. Our funniest jokes are demeaning. Our first reactions are snarky at best, indignant on average, cruel far too often. Trolling is considered a skill to be proud of. We are a nation of spineless keyboard warriors who wouldn't last a minute in a real fight. The loudest among us speak with platitudes of promise for their ideals that go hand in hand with declarations of animus for those with whom they disagree even slightly. Pluralism is dead. Tolerance is weakness. To be American is to self-segregate and demand, “Me first!”

Researchers who study social media point out a category of people whose lives have revolved around creating images of success online that are juxtaposed with clinical depression in the real world because no one can live up to their artificial self-images 100% of the time. Cell phones are the leading cause of PTSD particularly among younger Americans.

Punditry has become an art form not of increasing the clarity of the explanation of topics. Instead, it's become a game to extend the hyperbole of nonsensical arguments as far as possible. Whether it's mainstream media, social media commentary or blogging, the name of the game is justifying one's biases; objectively, really stupid biases.

How else to explain something as bizarre as the latest cool kid phenomenon of changing the boundaries of the discussion around anti-Semitism? I mean really folks; that's just stupid. That's the kind of thing that leads to genocide happening again. In America, the concepts of “Never Again” and “Never Forget” are being evaporated and the so-called Establishment is going along with it like a bunch of permissive parents who will tolerate the worst behaviors of their spoiled brat children. That's not going to stop them from one day taking power and murdering people they don't like.

And increasingly, they seem not to like anyone. The cancer of the deconstructionist academics who invented political correctness to breakdown the rules of American Society, to make it malleable enough to reshape it in the image of the political theories of their preference, have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. No literally! I mean beyond anything they ever thought.

Look at what happened to 1960’s dream of an equal America turning into white women being the newest privileged villain of social justice warfare. Talk about matricide. The equal rights movement was pioneered by white women. This entire phenomenon is best explained by looking at social justice as a bunch of spoiled children becoming unlikable teenage punks.

Like all trendy things, the day of reckoning is coming for all of it. It's certainly come for the people that were just indicted for bribing the college admission system. Conspiracy and racketeering are serious transgressions against society. The consequences are justly harsh. If these people are smart, they will plead guilty early. They will hope the court is lenient. They should serve their time humbly. Ponder the cost of their hubris. After that, they can begin to pick the pieces of their lives up and, hopefully, spend the rest of their lives asking what they can do for their country.

Someday this “dorm kegger” of malformed notions of the narcissistic powerful dictating to the people in the “cheap seats” will coalesce back to the rules of a complex society based on plurality, tolerance and coexistence. The idea that privilege gives you the right to beat people you don't agree with into submission always ends the same way. Wings of wax always melt; feet of clay always crumble.

In America, it's the ordinary people that still matter the most. None of us is more special than another; that’s what makes us special.

Foxes and Hens; The Changing Landscape of Mainstream Media

Screen captured of FOX and CNN on the 20th of March 2019.  FOX leading with a story of the Nadler committee running into difficulties.  CNN leading with the problems of the Conways.

FOX and CNN business calculus is not about politics, it’s about looking for marginal gain in audience share.

FOX has likely recognized that they have captured almost 100% of the tv watching conservative audience; and that audience has no alternative venues to watch. Every dollar invested in the right now has very low marginal return on investment (ROI). The calculus says losing 5% of share in conservatives to gain 20% of left leaning viewers is an attractive use of capital. The danger in this strategy is that FOX will become a bipolar two headed snake that no one likes.

CNN is the struggling third network in the news. They know they over invested left of aisle and it did not lead to the number one network position in the marketplace. And they were just eaten by AT&T, a very numbers driven company. The calculus says the ROI to hold position with their current business model probably will not pan out. So time to move out of box. The most attractive option analysis fork is to invest in market segments it has near zero share in. That is right of aisle content hoping to win poll position by becoming the icon of fair and balanced news in the hope of attracting the silent disenfranchised viewer base that had given up on tv news. The danger to CNN is that the walk away viewer base won’t come back. The opportunity for AT&T is that they don’t need cable to be everywhere.

Which one will win? Who knows. But as a long time student of the news business, I’m fascinated to see things like this unfold.

Deep Links in Journalism; Misapplied Tools in an Aggregation Addicted Era

Journalism has evolved considerably since the 1990’s when I first encountered the industry as a founding member of the CBS MarketWatch team. From a very humble beginning at an average internet speed of a dial-up modem, I have watched many experiments in post-McLuhan medium technology come and go.

During that era, I attended a fair few futurist events including the wonderful New Directions for News series media innovation gatherings put on by Professor Jean Gaddy-Wilson. It was a time of discovery of how to use tools that would one day become known as click-bait, search engine optimization, personalization, and, this article’s subject, deep linking.

What is deep linking?

In journalism, deep linking is the practice of embedding direct links to other web pages within a story packaged in a manner to compel a reader to click and look at more content under your company’s control. In internet parlance, it is what makes a site “sticky”; meaning, generating more than one page view per site visit. 

In the design of a web content business, stickiness is where you make the profit.  It turns one ad serve into two ad serves in top line revenue thereby beating the marginal return on investment of single ad serve per visit economics. Among other things in the theory of medium exploitation principles, it allows advertisers to set up a complete “look to book” soft sell journey from door opener to deal close ad presentation strategies embedded within a user’s self-identified confirmation bias envelope aka comfort zone. Sorry, that was an equation. I do that sometimes. But the point is to create that kind of ad services value, you have to package content to be that compelling.

In its most elegant form, one click-bait/echo chamber story randomly attracting a viewer on the internet to a well designed deep linked content page leads a user to an extended “on topic” immersion experience never leaving the journalism business site. It takes between five and ten sequential page views of exposure for a soft sell ad strategy to create statistically significant purchase intention.  Some sites are well capable of delivering this. These days, most news sites aren’t.

What’s gone wrong with it?

These days too many digital news websites aggregate other people's content. In general, news bureaus have lost their ability to package long linger immersion experiences for users. The rise of random tidbit news packaged by teams of superficial reporters and editors almost entirely focused on initial click-bait packaging has degraded many site’s internet business models to over relying on single page view visit economics. It’s an eventual money loser that leads to loyal audience abandonment and channel switching behavior even on the web. The economics are unconvincing and natural audience and agenda burnout cycles lead to internal acrimony and eventually, staff layoffs.

They have little internal material to link through to because they lack the subject matter staff to produce original stories; or in some cases, decent independent coverage. We now have cases of major news outlets that have gotten so bad that their aggregated articles assembled by weak sauce teams that deep link to web pages of major and minor competitor news bureaus. That's basically giving business away.

I'm at a loss to explain why boards of directors are not hammering on top level executives for such practices that are destroyers of shareholder value added (SVA) performance. Some of these news services have gotten so bad their articles borderline plagiarize the sites they point at. Since when is it a good thing that a gossip site has better coverage depth of a major bureau on the same story? That's just sloppy workmanship.

Something is wrong with the organization design and internal controls in such cases. Rewarding single view per visit followed by immediate hand off to a competitor is just weird to me.  Particularly so because the advertisers have technology that can see the came from and sent to flow of the user cookies. They know who's sticky and who isn't.

You can spot news sites suffering from this problem by looking for artifacts of un-compelling linking. We cannot call it "shallow" because that term refers to a link to the home page of a site as opposed to a specific content page. Un-compelling links in news look like this,

A Dearth of Original Content

A lack of original content is the first sign of an un-compelling news service. Every news service needs some degree of premier reporting to create a base of material that will be deep link targets within their systems and from others. The negative economic effects of a lack of original content are tangible.Among other things, it means nobody in the business deep links to you so while your aggregators are sending customers to other people's original sources, no one is sending them you.

The proper company performance metric on original material deep linking in a competitive industry is that, at a minimum, cross site referral traffic going out from your site should be equal to the amount of traffic coming in. The detailed corporate measure should really be that this 1-to-1 ratio should apply versus the top 10 closest competitors and be no worse than 2-to-1 versus specialty content sites you've made traffic exchange deals with.

There should be upper level management assigned to make sure these traffic exchange ratios are managed actively; including, but not limited to, assuring a healthy library of original content is available for use as deep linking destination URL's; and, making opportunistic deals with key specialty content sites for exclusive deep linking arrangements. In original internet parlance, you are "ring" making. The purpose now is the same as the purpose back in the beginning, maximizing effective market share.

Random Linking

Random links to unrelated topics that a user interested in the topic at hand has little reason to click on.  Random links also have the negative effect of forcing the advertiser to re-start the soft sell process from scratch with each page because every random page initiates a different immersion algorithm from the prior page.

It is corporate hubris to think that the news company’s logo is more important than the story that is shaping the advertising customer’s business objectives. I am somewhat surprised that advertisers don’t clamor more to only pay profitable ad serve fees based on a third page view within the same web domain purchase intention lane. It’s certainly measurable … and demand-able.

Plop Linking

Another form of un-compelling linking is “plop linking”. That’s where an editor inserts links in between paragraphs to other stories but there’s no context in the story as to why that link is integral to understanding the current story.  It’s just sitting there like a smelly dead phish, more uninviting than enticing. Yes, I meant the way I spelled that word.

If you see a site packaging with these three characteristics, it’s probably not capable of carrying a viewer ten page views into mind share immersion. The ads on it will be ignored. The look-to-book metrics will be awful.

These practices were never good business. I suspect such methods will fare even worse as artificial intelligence user support technology advance to that point they begin to interfere with advertiser’s ability to use non-cooperative target recognition tools like cross domain cookies that serve on the internet kind of like the equivalent that time synchronized clear channel ad broadcasting works in radio and TV. You’ve seen this driving or sitting at home where no matter what channel you turn to you are hearing the same ad play. That’s not an accident, that is the value-added service of the technology at work.

Foundations and arcs.

Compelling deep links presented in solid context within a news story that generate a high probability of the viewer going to the next story and that page carrying the reader on more and more after that ultimately lead in an inwardly spiraling arc to foundation object stories. These are the underlying basis that create context for every breaking news and opinion editorial built on top of them. They are collections of factually objective pieces that allow additional works to tie in showing off sub-plots of persona, political, diplomatic, economic, technical and philosophical arcs that are the immersion of the reader into an encyclopedic journey of a subject.

To have a persistent visitor experience, you have to invest in deep link material. Following best practices I learned from the early days of the internet when "category killing" was the name of the game, I concentrate on foundation pieces as I compose material on www.pickingnits.com so that as news plays out I have an increasing number of deep links to tie back into. Stories like "Dangerous Skies; Aerial Warfare Over Syria", "America’s Unwanted Young Men" or "Grey Zone Conflict: On Exploiting Human Domain Asymmetry" serve as a basis to frame future breaking news or policy events.

I often wonder why some news bureaus do not have more foundation subject matter expert material prepared in anticipation of future story arcs that they clearly have staffers on board who are smart and connected enough to task to do. Instead I see far too much reactive coverage to breaking news and reliance on pundits and commentators that are painful to listen to even as the public yearns for cogent explanation.

Other news bureaus do exhibit foundation content production. I like them better. They have the depth to weather storms.

Foundation content is an art form of story telling that has been degraded in an age where aggregators pick through performance art content on the internet hoping to do little more than create viral blooms of one-trick pony events. And then sent them to a competitor. There’s no look-to-book value proposition pony in that model.  No imprimatur that owns a subject across all market segments.  It’s just a mouse on a wheel chase for the next piece of cheese.

News bureaus that have lost their ability to invest in broad audience story telling are just waiting for the next business cycle downturn to explain why they laid off 5 to 15% of their staff in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 8-K filing to be followed by a lawyerly MD&A section in the next Form 10-K to be explained to one’s unhappy board of directors and activist investors.

You also drop off being relevant to the original source priority search engines.

The “original source priority” what?

Deep inside the internet beyond the once every seven-days web crawlers that catalog the internet every seven days, there the most precious set of search engine support servers on the net.  These are the priority original source servers kept by major search engine operators and government/intelligence systems.

It's not a given. You must be provably relevant to qualify for curation by one of these original source systems.  Provable means passing some form of automated or human driven diligence process that shows what piece of content needs to be hyper-watched on the internet.  If you fall in this category, what you do appears on the net instantaneously.

Become less relevant and you appear seven days later.  In Internet timelines, you’re a LOSER.

To be fair, that criteria has layers. Commercial search engine hyper-watchers tend to be broader in acquisition scope as far as speed is concerned but these days I suspect a lot of that has to do with a business need to spread the dragnet to catch viral content as it begins to blossom.  This is a social media adaptation of the internet.  What I am seeing is that too many news bureaus are trying to do well on social media at the expense of managing to their core business advertising economics. Traffic at the cost of linger. And it's killing them like a cancer.

Other hyper-watchers curate on thought influence relevance.  This is more productive focus area for a news bureau.  There are certain servers at certain IP addresses on this planet you want picking your stuff as the base object reference point the instant it goes live because that server considers you a definitive component of setting the echo chamber debate or policy deliberation and decision process that is about to follow.  And if you know you stuff, your IT people will be monitoring your inbound hit traffic for these IP addresses and reporting on the delay time from content live to first look as in how many seconds. Bear in mind, not all these IP addresses are in the United States.  News bureau imprimatur measurement is a global not local measurement process.

In terms of commercial human curating, I still give the brilliance award to friend Arianna Huffington and her original model of curating a select group of influencers as the imprimatur leverage point of the original Huffington Post.  She assembled a collection of people beyond left or right and built a new media powerhouse that challenged the imprimatur of every old media company in the marketplace.  What most never got was that Huffington carefully curated the leverage.  The rest was letting the cadre write and interact facilitated by a support staff that made sure content was copy edited at least one pass and got up quickly.  That curated list was in turn hyper-watched by an original content server at Google.com creating a breaking news wire effect far more effective than the vertically integrated systems of mainstream news.  Having once been a CTO watching over the server farm of CNBC.com at the end of Dot Com One, I appreciated Arianna’s brilliant move on many levels.  That’s why I did the Move Your Money project with her during the middle of the 2008 financial crisis.  The post-Arianna HuffPost that bought into repetitious drumbeat content? No so bright a star.

I do not see that kind of brilliance in too many of today’s news services.  Mostly, I see mediocre aggregation and a lack of organizational design attention to what it takes to create the next category killer.  Instead, most of the things we feared would come about back in those New Directions for News gatherings have come to pass.

Grey Zone Conflict: On Exploiting Human Domain Asymmetry

Grey Zone conflict is defined as the state of heightened tension that occurs at the junction between peace and war.  It brings disparate force elements into tension as dissimilar cultures and expectations clash both within the same teams and between conflicting sides across grey divides. Training to understand and exploit these human force structure components in scenario planning and execution are mission critical to prevailing in the end-game outcome. This article discusses issues and table top exercises operators can use at all levels of command and control to maximize human factor engagement probability metrics in their favor.

Question: What do you think are the biggest problems in Grey Zone operations and environment.

The main challenge in grey zone operations is the orchestration of the various pieces of military, economic and diplomatic components that constitute a much broader range of force elements that a campaign planner can utilize to execute policy and strategy objectives.

You are operating constantly in a state of asymmetric tactics often putting the narrow views of your own assets in conflict more than the adversary's.

As a note, a master of this art form at the present time is President Donald Trump who's approach to policy and strategy has shown he is willing to trade off force element utilization strategies with little regard to tradition.

It's an approach that works particularly well in the grey zone; something that traditional scenario analysts in many tradition bounded segments of U.S. government apparatus and the NGO community have been slow to embrace.

Note that posture, both threatening and supportive, are powerful force elements in grey zone operations. For instance, the positioning of assets within striking distance to create a deterrent can radically change an adversary’s calculus.

The force element does not have to be military.  It could be economic in the form of a treaty, material aid, actual financing, offers of guarantees, favorable trade terms, or sanctions.  It could be appealing to constituents particularly in cases when significant numbers of the adversary’s people

Even the mere creation of a solution to undermine an enemy's assumptions can be effective. In the 1980’s, we did this as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) aka Star Wars. In 1984 I wrote a paper on the Imperfect Defense Theory of Strategic Missile Defense that challenged the ground rules and assumptions of conventional nuclear war planning models of both the United States and the Soviet Union. It was an example what could today be considered Grey Zone leverage using mathematics that eventually brought both the US and Soviet apparatus to a constructive negotiating table at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986.

I leveraged it again in a series of articles on North Korea in 2017. The North Koreans made a major Grey Zone information blunder.  One of them said the word Guam. That was enough to set the analytics in motion and write, ”A US Missile Defense Architecture Solution Against a Rogue North Korean EMP Attack”,  http://www.pickingnits.com/2017/09/handling-it-us-missile-defense.html?m=1

There's lots of Grey Zone level of operations strategic maneuvering discussed in the articles I've written on www.pickingnits.com.  The topic is not new. I did a class on this for Air War College back in the 1990's.  Back then, Asymmetric Warfare was a very new concept emerging on the heels of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Twin Towers were still standing in New York City. The lessons about leverage just beginning to be studied then still apply, perhaps even more so today.

I pause for an important admonition. The mathematics of grey zone strategies are risky. It's based on something called "uncertainty theory". Within this math is something called post option degradation. It’s fancy talk for nothing goes as planned after the first shot.  Which is why, one of the key tenets of successful operations in a grey area is “don’t fire that first shot”. This is a critical thing to bear in mind if you are the strategy planner.  You need to reach the end game and win before chaos initiates.

Question: The issue with grey zone is that it is a very broad regime. We are trying to narrow focus on the biggest issue and how to approach it. Any thoughts?

It’s not as broad as people would think. Conflict management still follows the same long-term rules it always has. The operational metaphor of force and maneuver still applies. Like any chess game with feints, you create openings and trigger reactions on the opponent.

In Grey Operation, you are really using different chess pieces. For example, fishing rights or oil rights instead of air defense interdiction zones and fields of fire.  You think more openly about the forces you can deploy. It is highly useful to favor passive solutions to manipulate the target into going down the path you want while believing they did it of their own will.  Also become comfortable that combat elements are almost always supporting characters in the grand play of a grey war. The actual “boot on the ground” that wins the US’ physical victory should, if possible, not be military boot but a designer shoe. Truly stable outcomes are elegant.

Suggested Table Top Exercises

Exercise 1: A good thing to focus on for a table exercise is "managing inter-agency rivalry risk". It's a huge factor in whether a grey strategy works or not. Intel, diplomatic, law enforcement and banking agencies tend not to play well with military. It causes more failures than anything in my experience.

Exercise 2: Another zen of the game exercise is a teamwork strategy design focused on "who is the leader what part of the op". How do you hand of leadership smoothly phase by phase? What is the responsibility of the leader when it's their turn? Leading a multi-element team means you must be able to step out of your own comfort zone and step into a frame of mind that values the entire team and the big picture mission while it's your turn to lead.

Quite honestly, most people mess these two things up.  And you have to train to be good at these things. It’s important.  Get it wrong and it means you will kill about 400,000 people over 10 years in whatever region you screw up.

Question:  What are the major challenges and opportunities for influencing the human terrain in warfare? Where are we relative to our adversaries and how can we learn from them?  Note that human terrain is now also known as human domain.

This is a big question with a complex answer on multiple levels of leadership, operational role and populace.  Human domain is an operating space like a jewel with many facets.  The ground rules and assumptions of one facet can be very different from the next.  For example, cyber hacking has a very different meaning depending on where you are in the world.

Tim Maurer’s book “Cyber Mercenaries” on the state, hackers and power details four very different approaches to cyberwarfare.  The US facet focuses on centralized power and the assumption all enemies are subversive to it.  The Russian/Eastern European facet emphasizes reaping opportunistic benefit from criminal or near-criminal activities aimed outwardly against the world while also punishing inward attempts crime extremely harshly.  The Chinese facet emphasizes the management of hyper-patriotic hacker communities.  And finally, there's an activist/NGO cyber hacking facet that focuses on disjoint political agendas that have little or no profit motive.

To give you an idea of US strategic myopia, the last Cyber Security policy statement published by the White House only dealt with one of these facets.  The remainder were ignored in the policy statement. This tells you that the US position on the logic and preparedness of our adversaries is too often to ignore or discount their relevance to our strategic planning.  This is a dangerous thing that is very exploitable by our adversaries.

More Exercises for Winning

The bottom line is gray operations are highly dependent on exploiting the asymmetric responses of humans to specifically triggering stimuli that are inserted into the scenario on purpose to exploit their weaknesses. It involves profiling both the strengths and weaknesses of your target and of your own assets because it is the interplay between the asymmetry of all components of the battle plan that matters.

Put more simply do you have to know where the vulnerable points are on their side and yours so that you can plan for success based on those realities. The most important thing to do that will cause your team to win the engagement is don't fall for your own bullshit. And that requires a great deal of training and maturity on the part of the leadership ethos of the team.

Exercise 3: The tabletop exercise for this is a series of self assessments of strengths and weaknesses of the individual members of a team. Simultaneously a second team should be doing the same. With that list of strengths and weaknesses by both sides, a third team then looks at how to exploit the two teams to create a desired scenario outcome. The scenario then played and observations made as to whether the assessments, strategies and reaction predictions were accurate. The tabletop exercise continues until each of the three teams has had a turn to be the scenario outcome designer. The debrief for each segment is for the three teams to honestly assess whether or not they got their self assessments correctly and how this scenario design team may have done things better.

The self-assessment elements include things like, cultural background, training and conditioning, susceptibility to triggering from friendly and hostile stimuli, impulsiveness, Things that contribute to understanding the profile of how a person will react under two scenarios. One, how they will react when they are calm. Two, how they will react when they are under stress. Specifically, how they will react under stress created by an external force deliberately attempting to trigger a perceived vulnerability. The training objective is to learn to not be triggered by such things.  It will make a difference in the outcome of missions in the real world.

Ultimately, all conflict is won or lost by who blinks first. Grey Zone operations are, most of all, about causing the other party to blink without having to shoot at each other.

Additional Reading

While you are looking up references, see if the library where you are has a copy of the old book titled "Getting to Yes". The book was used by President Carter to negotiate a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Within that book is a powerful concept called a Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA). It is a classic tool for ensuring have leverage if your primary strategy collapses; which is pretty much inevitable when it comes of high stress campaign scenarios. Most of the book is about diplomatic maneuvering. But, this concept of BATNA is an important one for anyone working the Grey Zone to have in their arsenal. It should be part of any team's mission planning process.

Wall of Words: Trump and the Democrats Face Off Across A Philosophical Border

Associated Press

It’s a new day in America. We have returned to a government digging its heels. Populist outsider Donald Trump fights against the establishment, a growing army of politicians assisted by a ratings hungry media attempts to isolate him and his agenda from the American people.

There’s a philosophical wall between President Donald Trump and the Democratic leadership headed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. That wall is about whether and how the federal government of the United States should secure its border.

The President wishes to create a tangible and credible deterrent that materially changes the politics and economics of crossing the border to a mode where illegal activity is minimized. He asked for assistance from Congress to do so in his State of the Union address on January 30, 2018.

Following that address, Congress passed a budget that contained nothing of what the President asked for. Instead, Congress sent the President the 2019 Budget in September that make Trump swallow a bitter pill to get the Defense Department funded and kicked the can down the road on the border for a showdown in December 2019.

The political maneuver made Trump recoil in disgust and swear that he would never let Congress do that to him again.

Well came to be December 2019 and Congress tried to do it again. With no “can’t do without it” budget appropriation to force Trump to sign it available, Congress attempted to put in little more than lip service budgeting to border security; something that the White House had strongly signaled was a “never again” move.

The result was a partial government shutdown beginning on December 22, 2018 furloughing around 800,000 federal workers out of a civil service workforce of 2.79 million. That’s worth about $2 billion in missing paychecks every two weeks according to US Office of Personnel Management. Trumps wall would cost $5.7 billion, roughly six weeks of the affected workforce’s payroll.

Let’s be frank. That’s not a lot of money for America. Particularly so in the context of the societal costs of the presently less secure border system that the President stated was around $500 billion a year, almost as much as the defense budget. So why are the Democrats continuing to kick the can down the road at each turn? Surely, it’s not about the money.

I am reminded of the besieging of another president against whom another establishment army determined to thwart his quest to save the soul of his nation, Abraham Lincoln. The analogy isn’t as far off as you think. The question in Lincoln’s time was whether to let go of the United States of America as the founding fathers envisioned it or fight to preserve it. We see America divided arbitrarily again, this time not North vs. South, but Coastal vs. Heartland. The vision at stake is the same, should America as we know it be abandoned.

This is the elephant in the room that establishment Washington does not want to face. The thing that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Chuck Schumer “disagree” with President Donald Trump about what to do.

Trump is clearly trying to preserve traditional America. It’s clear he is sincere in his belief that his call to Make America Great Again is something he believes and that he is doing everything he can to bring that vision to fruition. He is being opposed blindly at every turn.

Associated Press/Alex Brandon

Pelosi and Schumer also want to preserve their version of America. Theirs is a one of an establishment political class that acts as the caretakers of America reigning over ordinary Americans as willing vassals of the land. It’s a rose-colored vision of Democratic Camelot. One where importing willing vassals to outnumber unwilling traditionalists is a good thing.

But I’m not so sure that establishment America isn’t about to see this blow up in their face.

The Democratic Party is flush with a new crop of representatives and senators who would change America even more than them. In their America, traditional American culture is the enemy to be wiped away without mercy. Bringing in immigrants to help make that change happen is about the only thing they have in common with their establishment cousins.

The change metaphor can be stated another way. Tradition minded Americans are the new native Americans and the immigrants are coming not to assimilate but to settle on the land and eventually send the traditional Americans off to reservations.

The new breed will all be Democrats of course. Or so Pelosi and Schumer think. I’m not so sure. I worry that, just like the Europeans discovered a century ago, catastrophic revolution is more likely as social cohesion erodes into animus. These things do have a predictable pattern.

Me? I’m really not of a mind to take that much of a risk on losing the core of American culture. I see too much value in it for this country and for the world. American pluralism that respects Americas founding values as the most important beacon for human rights and liberty on this planet. It’s something worth preserving.

Compared to kicking the can down the road endlessly on border security, I see much more merit in the principles of Donald Trump’s approach of securing the border to create the equivalent of what US immigration history in the 20th century called the “immigration pause” where people from Europe stopped coming in large numbers. This slowdown in people coming to America in the early 20th century enabled assimilation.

More important, it enabled the adoption of traditional American culture to take root in the second and third generations of immigrants. It facilitated a Great America culture that would eventually save the world from the Axis and planted the seeds for a view of universal human rights that would see the United States experiment with something called the Great Society.

What’s not to see in the merit of an America that sees that securing the border is about securing the viability of our culture? Why shouldn’t ordinary Americans, including the 2.79 million federal civil service employees and the 5 million federal contractors that work with them let Congress know that preserving the Nation’s culture means something to them.

Personally, I’d pick up the phone and call Congress and tell them to spend the measly $5.7 billion already and see where it goes.

Now if only Donald Trump could Tweet a Gettysburg Address of his own.