Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it
UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment.

Instead she’s gone down a dark rabbit hole, one that wends through the back warrens of the web and all the way up to the White House.

Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.

It features sites such as Infowars.com, hosted by informal President Donald Trump adviser Alex Jones, which has pushed a range of conspiracies, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged fake.

There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com. Starbird cataloged 81 of them, linked through a huge community of interest connected by shared followers on Twitter, with many of the tweets replicated by automated bots.

Infowars.com alone is roughly equivalent in visitors and page views to the Chicago Tribune, according to Alexa.com, the web-traffic analysis firm.

“More people are dipping into this stuff than I ever imagined,” Starbird says.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The word ‘duffer’ is defined as 'a person inexperienced at something, especially at playing golf'.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

But there is a certain logic to Trump’s tweet. The only problem is that Trump’s reliance on this very logic itself shows what a precarious political position he currently finds himself in.

Here’s the logic at work: Trump thinks his tweet lends support to the justification that Flynn has offered for seeking immunity, and thus plays down the significance Flynn’s request has for the probe into his own campaign’s conduct. In a statement last night, Flynn’s lawyer explained the request for immunity this way: “No reasonable person, who has advice from counsel, would submit to questioning in such a highly publicized, witch-hunt environment without assurances against unfair prosecution.”

In other words, Flynn’s request for immunity is not an admission of legal vulnerability. It’s merely a safeguard against a process that has become hopelessly unfair. Trump is trying to bolster this argument: He’s saying Flynn’s request for immunity can naturally be explained by the fact that the probe is nothing but a witch hunt orchestrated by his enemies — Democrats, the media and so forth. So of course Flynn should seek immunity, since no treatment of him (or Trump’s campaign and administration) could possibly be fair.

But missing from Trump’s tweet is the fact that law enforcement agencies, not the media and Democrats, are conducting the official probe into his own campaign’s conduct, as FBI Director James Comey revealed the other day. Additionally, Republican-controlled congressional committees — the Senate and House intelligence committees — are conducting investigations. Trump is so determined to make those facts disappear — or at least to render them politically irrelevant — that it has led him stumbling into a convoluted argument that ends with him urging a former senior official to ask for immunity as part of a process that is investigating his own campaign’s conduct.

But Trump cannot make all of these facts disappear. Recall, Trump did nothing for weeks to remove Flynn as national security adviser, even though he knew Flynn had misled his own administration about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Here is the bottom line. We don’t know whether the probes will ever produce any serious revelations of collusion. They very well may not. But we do know that the White House is doing all it can to discourage a full accounting into what happened, even though this accounting is also supposed to establish the full extent of what, precisely, Russia did to undermine our democracy, something Trump and Republicans should want to establish. Thus today’s tweet, which casts this entire investigative effort as nothing but a “witch hunt.” We also know that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) is now going to absurd lengths to hamstring his own investigation, apparently to protect Trump.

But Senate Republicans are now beginning to take this way more seriously, and such efforts to frustrate a full accounting are growing increasingly untenable. The absurdity of Trump’s tweet today neatly captures that.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[Happy Now!!!]



President Donald Trump’s aides have publicly promised a crackdown on states that have legalized marijuana — and the new White House administration may already be taking steps to make good on that pledge, according to an email obtained by International Business Times.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

[Winning...]