President Donald John Trump

[Happy Monkey]

via

Originally Posted by Huffington Post

Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.

“The winners will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned,” Strauss and Howe wrote in The Fourth Turning. “This new regime will enthrone itself for the duration of the Crisis. Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.”

...

“This is the fourth great crisis in American history,” Bannon told an audience at the Liberty Restoration Foundation, a conservative nonprofit, in 2011. “We had the Revolution. We had the Civil War. We had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the great Fourth Turning in American history, and we’re going to be one thing on the other side.”

...

The “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing,” he went on. “It’s imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous.”

War is coming, Bannon has warned. In fact, it’s already here.

It’s war. It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war. White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, 2015

“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China,” he said during a 2016 radio appearance. “They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”

“Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war,” he told Political Vindication Radio in 2011.

“We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to 10 years, aren’t we?” Bannon asked during a 2016 interview with Reagan biographer Lee Edwards.

“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a speech to a Vatican conference in 2014. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”

In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon described how he ran Breitbart, the far-right news site he chaired at the time. “It’s war,” he said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”

To confront this threat, Bannon argued, the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. He called Islam a “religion of submission” in 2016 — a refutation of President George W. Bush’s post-9/11 description of Islam as a religion of peace. In 2007, Bannon wrote a draft movie treatment for a documentary depicting a “fifth column” of Muslim community groups, the media, Jewish organizations and government agencies working to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law.

“There’s clearly a fifth column here in the United States,” Bannon warned in July 2016. “There’s rot at the center of the Judeo-Christian West,” he said in November 2015. “Secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals,” he argued at the Vatican conference. The “aristocratic Washington class” and the media, he has claimed, are in league with the entire religion of Islam and an expansionist China to undermine Judeo-Christian America.

This sort of existential conflict is central to Strauss and Howe’s predictions. There are four ways a Fourth Turning can end, they argued, and three of them involve some kind of massive collapse. America might “be reborn,” and we’d wait another 80 to 100 years for a new cycle to culminate in a crisis again. The modern world — the era of Western history that Strauss and Howe believe began in the 15th century — might come to an end. We might “spare modernity but mark the end of our nation.” Or we might face “the end of man,” in a global war leading to “omnicidal Armageddon.”

Now, a believer in these vague and unfounded predictions sits in the White House, at the right hand of the president.

“We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America,” Bannon warned in 2010. “We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”

[xoxoxoBruce]

I find it scary how many people hang on his every word.

[Happy Monkey]

I find it scary how one person in particular does.

[sexobon]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

I find it scary how one person in particular does.

Shades of Park Geun-hye.

[Undertoad]

https://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=523

I was a big fan of the book, as I believe was SteveDallas. Ask Me Anything

[xoxoxoBruce]

Orwell

[Clodfobble]

I find it ironic that Bannon uses "Judeo-Christian West" as code for "white people," even though he hates the Judeos.

I agree that crisis was/is inevitable, and that America will fall someday, but only because these things happen everywhere forever. Where are the great Turnings in other cultures and societies? I guess you could argue that it's the very fact that ours happen so close together that makes their results so extra dramatic...

[BigV]

Michael Flynn is the first casualty of the Trump administration cabinet. If the allegations are true, he should be prosecuted.

WASHINGTON — Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, resigned on Monday night after it was revealed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other top White House officials about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Mr. Flynn, who served in the job for less than a month, said he had given “incomplete information” to about a telephone call he had with the ambassador in late December about American sanctions against Russia, weeks before Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Mr. Flynn previously had denied that he had any substantive conversations with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak, and Mr. Pence repeated that claim in television as recently as earlier this month.

But on Monday, a former administration official said the Justice Department last month warned the White House that Mr. Flynn had not been fully forthright about his conversations with the ambassador. As a result, the Justice Department feared that Mr. Flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.

In his resignation letter, which the White House emailed to reporters, Mr. Flynn said he had held numerous calls with foreign officials during the transition. “Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador,” he wrote. “I have sincerely apologized to the President and the Vice President, and they have accepted my apology.”

I'm not sorry to see him go. I found him frighteningly drunk on the Trump Kool-Aid. Yes to torture, calling Islam an ideology and not a religion, etc, etc. Good fucking riddance.

[Griff]

WARNING: random thoughts falling, paranoia...

This is kind of interesting because there is a fair chance the leaks are really just opposition to Trump's stated goal of improving relations with Russia. Apparently Presidents fall somewhere below the national security apparatus in the pecking order when choosing enemies, because the NSA has dirt on everyone. I'm kind of a fatalist on this progression of the surveillance state; W reacted, Obama made it permanent, and Trump maybe pays the price... feel safer? If they were doing this to Saint Hillary how would Democrats react? She hates Russia sufficiently for the complex though.

I dislike Trump a fair amount but this particular dog should have been put down a long time ago.

Our Allies are investigating his business dealings, that dog may hunt. It may force us to confront our kleptocracy. Nah, we'll let the system slide, but maybe punish this one guy for over-reach.

This is all over the place but it comes back to the Executive Branch appearing too powerful and the Legislative Branch being too broken to provide balance. The two of them are trying unsuccessfully so far to wreck the judicial. It's popcorn time.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Griff

I'm kind of a fatalist on this progression of the surveillance state; W reacted, Obama made it permanent, and Trump maybe pays the price... feel safer?

I'm pretty sure that tapping the Russians predates W by a few decades. I'm with you on the general theme, but in this particular instance, that call would have been tapped just as certainly in the '50s or '70s as it was in the '10s.

[xoxoxoBruce]

And there have been traitors on both sides since the Rosenbergs.

[tw]

Start by eliminating some fictional emotions. ISIS is a mythical threat similar to Saddam. Timothy McVeigh types remain, by far, a greater threat. Fear only exists because wackos promote it.

We support allies who are at risk due to ISIS. Support does not constitute and should not be considered war. It is their threat and their war. And only they can solve it by first acting in an informed and unified manner - a statement directing attention to Turkey and Israel.

Second, we have no idea what Flynn and Putin discussed. Those details are essential long before making any conclusions. And those details should be considered by Justice to make appropriate decisions.

Ironically, Trump fired Flynn for lying. Then blames the press for his 'resignation' rather than admit his administration said, "Your fired." How many apprentices were also forced to resign by the press?

Third, a whole third issue exists with cozy and constant communication between Russian spies and top Trump officials. That third issue also required extensive vetting in part because we know lying in the Trump administration (for advancing Trump; not America) is situation normal.

[monster]

Sweden, FFS? Using it as an excuse to shop at IKEA.....

[BigV]

One of the many things I find frustrating and disheartening about President Trump is the regular, endless contradiction in his communications.

When he, himself contradicts himself, and just breezes right by it, it erodes my confidence in him. My ability to trust what he says has been ground down. It is compounded when he just makes shit up like the incandescent non-issue of the attendance of his inauguration, and when he gets shit wrong from an obvious absence of critical thinking like his remarks about trouble in Sweden. And there's a special kind of contradiction that I find deeply worrying. It's the thinning, the dilution of meaning.

Today's news gives a perfect example, though hardly unique, hardly even unusual. Trump spoke today about his plans and instructions for deportation:

"We're getting really bad dudes out of this country, and at a rate that nobody's ever seen before," Trump said Thursday. "And they're the bad ones. And it's a military operation."

He added: "You see what's happening at the border. All of a sudden for the first time, we're getting gang members out. We're getting drug lords out."

That, my friends, is news. Hello?! We have a military operation inside the borders of the United States? WTF.

But just wait, here comes the dilution, the smoke and mirrors, the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

A White House spokesperson said Trump did not misspeak by calling deportations a 'military operation,' but clarified the President meant "military" as an "adjective."

Come on. Just on the face of it when Trump says military and his spokeperson says "military is not military, it's an adjective".... shut up. What does it mean? And from the lips of the people very close to the situation, discussing it in the same room as their counterparts from Mexico, our Secretary of State Tillerson and the Head of Homeland Security Kelley said:

Trump, though, is not using the military to deport undocumented immigrants. Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told reporters in Mexico City Thursday that there would be "no use of military force in immigration operations, none,"

So, *not* war? Ok, good, good.

A lot of the people around this administration *do* think before speaking, like Kelly and Tillerson (so far). Many just ... don't . Spicer, Conway, Bannon, Preibus. And most of all Trump. (Let's not get started about "alternative facts" and the media as the "opposition of the American people", that is huge, deserving of it's own conversation.)

I feel like when I'm tracking what's being said, and the words are ALL OVER THE GODDAMN PLACE, and some are pretty scary--let's face it, the stakes are high, I'm definitely not the only one paying attention--it's overwhelming. I'm getting zapped and stabbed and tagged from every direction. One of my most effective sanity preserving reactions is to turn the volume down on the words and look at the actions. What the fuck is actually going on? What's the vibe here? Where is the center of gravity? Feel it... Like Luke lowering the blast shield of his helmet to better understand what the fuck is going on and (this is key) respond appropriately. By reducing the distracting and contradictory input from the main (visual channel), he understood the situation better.

I'm not encouraged by his actions.

I used to think that the calls for diagnosing his mental health from a distance were just kinda bullshit, but he clearly does not think and communicate like practically everybody I interact with (even at a distance, like I do with him). But I've noticed some similarities in the communication styles of Trump and of other people of my long and close acquaintance that I consider mentally unhealthy. Now I wonder more. It seems clear, he's a privileged, old, white guy that just doesn't connect with the kind of people I know in my life. "A champion of the working man" just.. just makes me laugh. He betrays ZERO knowledge or empathy of anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck. Worse, he thinks he does and sees others through the lens of his own experience. I think his capacity for empathy is near zero.

There's consistency and predictability to Trump, but it doesn't come from just paying attention to what he's saying. That's largely a diversion.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Though apparently intelligent, he appears to be dyslexic, and works with what snippets he's told. Kind of like Charlie McCarthy.
Rhetoric bullshit won the campaign so he's sticking to it. I don't think he realizes many of his voters would accept it during the campaign but now they want concrete results.