Fun with Facts

Fun with Facts:

Page: "POTUS (Obama) wants to know everything we are doing"

Go ahead -- tell me this isn't worse than Watergate and doesn't go all the way to the top of the flagpole.

Here are ACTUAL facts for a change -- this comes from page 409 of the Inspector General's report on Strzok and Page's emails.The exchange is reproduced below (and the link to the actual report in PDF form is there for those who have to see it with their own eyes).

This exchange is in the midst of what the agents called the "Midyears" (that was their code for the investigation into Hillary's email server breaches) and just before Wiener's laptop was found with more emails that Hillary had "bleach-bitted" (deleted illegally) and had never turned over as required by law. "TP's for D" in the text refers to "Talking Points for the Director" (Comey) and you will note that the 2 lovebirds clearly state "POTUS (Obama) wants to know everything we are doing"

So here is what is crystal clear at this point -- Stzok and Page building "talking points" for Comey who is illegally coordinating his investigation of Hillary (writing an exoneration before looking at the evidence which Crowdstrike never turned over). He is keeping Obama in the loop and this is 2 months before the election and at the same time these 2 are in other texts trying to build their "insurance policy" against Trump being elected. (Oh - at the same time that people are being illegally unmasked by deep levels of the government that have no business doing such things) -- all based upon a dossier from an MI6 operative filled with lies and innuendo, never vetted, and used as a pretext to the FISA court (which stands for "Foreign" Intelligence) but which is being misrepresented and used against Citizens (in violation of 4th amendment rights).

Did I get all this right? Because I want to understand the rules the next time the pendulum swings and the shoe is on the other foot. While I'm at it, I'm going to pre-order my baby balloon and commission the NYT artist to write me a "protected-class-of-people-phobic" cartoon. Nevermind the fact that anyone else would have been doxxed and lost their jobs over similar behavior but we just reserve that kind of treatment for Christian bakers of cakes.

September 2, 2016:

On September 2, 2016, Page and Strzok exchanged the following text messages. The sender of each message is identified after the timestamp.

09:41:30, Strzok: “Checkout my 9:30 mtg on the 7th”

09:42:40, Page: “I can tell you why you're having that meeting.”

09:42:46, Page: “It’s not what you think.”

09:49:39, Strzok: “TPs for D?”

09:50:29, Page: “Yes, bc potus wants to know everything we are doing.”

09:55:21, Strzok: “I’m sure an honest answer will come out of that meeting....”

https://www.justice.gov/file/1071991/download

The Nonsense I Read

I support conflict resolution -- and that includes President Trump discussing matters with President Putin.

What is going on in the media and among the political left is astonishing, embarrassing, and loathsome.

The last time we had US president build a relationship with a Russian leader it was Ronald Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev. That led to the tearing down of the Berlin wall, and the world breathed a collective sigh as the specter of nuclear annihilation quickly receded into an unlikely possibility. In 37 years of reading about world events, the days following "tear down this wall, Mr. President" was the single most impactful moment of "politics" that I've ever lived through -- yes, even more than the negativity of 9-11.

This is not me parroting what I read -- I remember how the left and the media has loved every horrible excuse of a dictator that has ever walked the planet. I read glowing reports of Castro as credible sources showed the thousands tortured and imprisoned for political beliefs. The left and the MSM supported the rise of the Kim's in Korea -- and ignored the starvation and abject poverty. More recently they supported Chavez and Madure in Venezuela as a beautiful and successful country has been reduced to eating its pets and as millions flee to Columbia. The left has been silent as Columbia with incredible courage took charge of their narco-terrorists -- judges offering lives -- and now thrives as an investment location.

The left praised the Chinese -- as they enforced abortions, a one-child policy, sterilization, the harvesting of organs of prisoners, destroyed churches, and closed down factory after factory through tilted economic playing fields. They refused to report on the "titans of industry" facilitating it all. They have supported and lauded Soros -- a proven and admitted Nazi collaborator, a thief who "broke the bank of England", the funder of astroturf politics and political instability, division, and hatred.

The left never met a true socialist or communist it didn't like. It never met a repressive regime it didn't admire -- the number of glowing articles about the "religion of peace" and the number of hate pieces about Christianity founded upon the "law of love" are twisted and reprehensible.

The left has been silent about the DNC server only ever seen by Crowdstrike - and never turned over to the FBI or CIA. It has run interference for the despicable "insurance policy" of members of the intelligence community. It has ignored the hundreds of millions funneled through the Clinton foundation for Uranium One. It has ignored the abuse of the FISA courts, the infiltration, of a duly elected President's affairs, the abuse of power to destroy friends of people they don't like. The left ignored the Manchurian candidacy of the prior president -- a man whose every record is sealed up -- no record of his time in Indonesia, no explanation for his upbringing in a Madrassa, no proof of his parentage, no reporting on his relationship with known domestic terrorists.

Politely - there is not one word the press writes about world events, Trump, or Putin, or the CIA, or FBI, or the courts, or the world that I believe at this point. What I believe are not "my own facts" or "alternative facts" -- they are shreds gathered from the few uncorrupted sources I can find -- the BBC (occasionally), the Guardian, friends I have in foreign countries who think differently than I do, the Bible's take on the trajectory of history.

The world is better that Trump talked with Kim -- I'm tired of military adventurism and globalist adventures that always seem targeted at anyone threatening the petrodollar or considering the gold standard, or cozying up with the only institutions not aligned with the last vestiges of feudal Europe -- the global bankers, Bilderbergs, Rothschilds, and the varous secret societies -- that 1% that owns 50% and kills and commits evil with impugnity as the papers and television stations they own say "look at this shiny bauble". I'm tired of it.

The world is better with the US and Russia talking -- Europe is being overrun. They have given up. Their leaders are destroying their countries which are becoming violent, divided, and reverting to the 7th century. Russia has been rebuilding its churches, it has been focusing on its Christian history, it has been holding the line against a Medieval viewpoint. It is a possible ally against the monolithic power of the corrupt western banking system. It stands against the reach of globalists -- and their hedonism, their abuse and use of people as mere "human capital".

The people I know - those who believe in love and grace (and also try to persuade people to stop hurting themselves through self-destructive choices) tried time and again to work within the system. I backed countless political candidates who were at best a "rough fit" to my beliefs. They were all respectable, nice, polite, reasonable -- and they went up against the likes of a serial rapist, a manchurian candidate who said "they bring a knife, we bring a gun", and an enabler who personally got rapists of children set free and who destroyed female accusers of her husband. I watched people who are clearly in the early stages of dementia in California get a pass. I watched the most despicable liars and thieves and the corrupt get pushed forward again and again -- and watched the media look the other way and excuse the behavior and refuse to report on it. And I watched accusations of someone I respect who never takes a meeting alone with a woman not his wife get mocked. And then when metoo couldn't take him down, I watched them shift and dare to say that he was keeping women down because he didn't have one-on-ones. The utter hypocrisy. And so again, I accepted a less-than-perfect candidate. A fighter. Unafraid. Dirty. Unclean. Not lily-white. Nothing "they" say can stick -- he has said it about himself. The accusations don't cow him, they energize him. When you hit him, he hits back. He is fearless. He bobs, he weaves, he doesn't hold still, he changes his mind, he changes his tactics. All the "nice" folks got chewed up and spit out. Not this guy. No globalist can scare him. No power structure can intimidate him. You can throw 10,000 journalists at him and he will take every punch.

I picked that guy because he was going into a ring with a bunch of murderous, moral-less thugs. The battle is "300" -- against an army with monsters and giants. You can't send a nice guy into that arena. You need your own monster -- with his own code. And its working. Oh boy is it working. I can tell by the screaming on the other side as the tactics don't work. I can smell the fear in globalists as the drip-drip of truth gets closer and closer to blowing the lid off deeply held secrets. walkaway is a real thing no matter whether they choose to report on it or not. The insanity and hysteria are turning people off. Results matter and there are results. And oh, yes, I do like so much winning. Because I am not ashamed to say that I like it when truth wins. When the constitution wins. When life wins. When the poor and weak win. I like it when the hard-working get paid more. I like it when babies are saved. I like it when dictators are engaged and come out of the shadows as friends. I like it when repressive ideologies are pushed back. I like it when the corrupt are exposed. I like it when hypocrisy is mocked. I like it it when all of the caricatures and stereotypes are proven false. I like it when some people take the red pill and wake up.

Do You Value People First?

Do we really value people enough?  Do we value them enough to prioritize peacefulness, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control?  My Christian friends will recognize that list as a partial one from Galatians 5:22.

What prompts this particular musing is some postings and responses by people I truly love and care about but which made me feel hated, devalued, fearful, generalized, categorized, and as if I would not be accepted were I to interact with them with integrity (i.e. to be myself).  I’m not going to call out any details – I honestly don’t want them to know who they are – because the problem isn’t unique to them.  That has been me in the past.  It is them now.  It is nearly all of us as some point in our lives.  And my response, offense, is also the wrong one – a book calls that “the bait of Satan”.  What I really want to write about is an archaic term:  civility.

The root of civility is civil -- and relates to the idea of public -- it addresses the communal, tribe-like nature of humanity.  There was a time when this was a core value of most regardless of viewpoint.  It is shocking to think that not that long ago, people of faith viewed the engagement in politics as evil, sullying, and being unequally yoked.  Someone reminded me of that viewpoint the other day and I nearly laughed out loud – it sounded ridiculous to me.  Growing up, I heard “never talk about politics and religion in polite company”.  My family roundly ignored the advice – those were the most fun topics – everyone could get riled up and what was more fun than watching adults act like impetuous children?  There is so much adrenaline and anger can do crazy things to people’s appearances – twisted features, glaring eyes . . . as a kid, what could be better -- but watching riots on the streets, violent threats, and destroyed lives and livelihoods makes it not fun at all.  

I’ve aged and I think shifted my priorities a bit – you see, I interact with people who sometimes think very differently than me.  I love them.  I love their creativity.  I love their heart.  I love their passion.  I even love their tortured personalities because I recognize a lot of myself in them.  We create together – and that is wonderful.  We worship together.  We laugh together.  We cry together.  We “spur each other on to good works”.  We sharpen each other as iron.  So there is no room in my heart for hatred of my friends.

But the whole circus is a huge tempataion for me – I love to argue.  I love to debate.  I love to win.  I’m stubborn.  I’m opinionated.  I’m passionate about helping people – and avoiding hurt – and not repeating the mistakes of history.  And, I’ve watched the movie “Idiocracy” and it is an all too terrifying true representation of the future of civilized behavior.  I'm not an idiot.  My friends aren't idiots.  But yet, somehow, we can't talk like people - like everyone - used to.  And that makes me terribly sad.

I would love to engage these people in a real discussion – I love finding compromises – people who know me deeply would know that I am very much a peacemaker at heart.  Some who know me very well would dispute that claim unless I rephrase it:  I am a problem-solver.  And isn’t peace-making really problem-solving?  But, I am an Engineer down to my toes.

Can I be real a second?  Some would call me a “white guy”.  Some would use the word "privilege".   Those words ignore my personal life story.  They are overly simplistic.  To label me such is to engage in exactly what so many protest but the irony is often lost or unseen.  Instead I believe absolutely in content of character -- God made 2 people -- a man and a woman - and all of us came from them.  Assigning value according to "race" or which chromosomes you have is ridiculous.  

Go ahead and categorize this:  much of my family comes from Eastern Europe and I have a Mediterranean complexion.  I grew up in a part of the country much more ethnically mixed and ethnically proud than all of Indiana – I was a Pollack, and I won’t use the other words everyone else was labelled with – if you’ve watched Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, you get it – if not or if that offends you, you won’t.  The labels were only slightly hurtful because we at least engaged – it was not much harsher than “smack talk” in a ball game.  My test scores proved I wasn't a "dumb" Pollack.  That being said, my identity took as many hits as anyone else's -- whose hasn't?  

My Great-Grandparents immigrated through Ellis Island.  My Polish Grandfather and Russian Grandmother were hated by both contingents in their community because of the Communist takeover of Poland.  I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Case Western Reserve University – you can’t call me uneducated.  No one in my family had guns but my pastor is a hunter (and so is incidentally the artist who founded our theater company).  I've had times in life where I was bordering on upper middle class, but I’ve made below poverty the last 12 years due to various actions and policies by our government which I won’t go into here.  I had a wife die of cancer after $1M worth of care -- $50,000 out of my pocket – and I am strongly opinionated on what should be done to fix the system.  I can tell you how many tens and hundreds of millions of bodies have been caused by various ideologies and philosophies.  And I scrupulously fact-check everything I read.  I’m not Republican – I am a Constitutionalist and I’ll let you infer what that means.  My business partner whom I love dearly is black (he doesn’t prefer the term “African American”) – and he knows I respect him as the most talented Salesman and Entrepreneur I’ve ever known and that is saying a lot because I come from a family of great salesmen.  And I’m a Christian.  And a young-earth creationist.  And a homeschool Dad.  And a missionary.  And a thespian.  I value life -- old and young and everything in-between.  But boy do I sometimes want to call out organizations that mislead people -- even as I love personally the individuals they have harmed with their indoctrination.  Now how would you like to categorize me?  See the problem?  Can the labels encompass who I am?  The forces that shaped me?  And I haven't mentioned the most shaping of all -- I am an Engineer -- a math nerd.  Who loves numbers.

And my love of numbers is what puts me outside the bell curve.  I cannot discuss most of my beliefs with most of my friends.  The reason has nothing to do with their views or mine but everything to do with Civility.  And that nice list from Galatians.  You see, you will never ever win a debate with me on anything connected to feelings.  I have feelings, but every molecule in me builds systems based on facts not feelings.  You see, if I feel that piece of wood is strong enough to support 20 people at a railing on my deck, that just isn't good enough.  Not if it kills people when it collapses.  And not a lot of people think like that.  Things "sound fair" to them in certain ways -- but they don't think 20 steps ahead like I do -- it's not their gift -- or their curse.  So I guess people get to call me "heartless" a lot.  But really I just don’t recognize feelings as persuasive in policy discussions.  I have 8 semesters of college-level calculus, a great understanding of statistics, and a newsman’s eye for biased arguments.

And that's my other problem -- I was a "paper-boy" (sorry, that's what they called them back when I was a kid when the earth was still cooling).  At 12 and 13 my favorite part of the paper was the editorial page -- and they used 11th grade vocabulary back then not 5th grade.  And they wrote with a pretty sharp pen.  As a consequence, I have a very sharp tongue -- very blunt, to the point, and surgical.  I learned a lot of my intolerance for nonsense naturally, but my kids read the book “The Fallacy Detective” and I learned a whole lot more -- it's a primer on our modern "faux news" across the spectrum.

And the Fallacy Detective is where I’m going to start to wrap up this poorly-structured and rambling post.  Sorry, I'm too personally invested in this to tighten up my argument.  I’ll give you just the chapter headings – “Avoiding the Question”:  Red Herring Falacy, Special Pleading, Ad Hominem attack, Genetic Falacy, Tu Quoque, Appeal to Authority, Appeal to the People, Straw Man arguments, Circular Reasoning, Part-to-Whole, Either-Or.  In one 200 page book written for 5^th to 7^th graders, you have every mistake made by a vast percentage of our modern media and countless people who post on facebook, speak in public, try to “influence”, and the like. 

One example:  Just the other day a real gem came across and got some friends very riled:  “The United States is in the Bottom 10 for Danger to Women” – sounds shocking, doesn’t it?  "We need to go protest".  "It's all the fault of (fill-in-your-favorite-blank)".  
US Makes the List of 10 Most Dangerous Countries for Women

The article came from The Hill rehashing an original article from Reuters.  Scholastically it was utter garbage – in the first sentence:  “548 Experts were Polled”.  Let’s see we have “appeal to authority” from the Fallacy Detective.  They were "polled" so we have an opinion piece masquerading as factual scholarship -- you see in science, you establish a hypothesis, measure some real data, and report results -- you don't "poll" people -- by definition that is "opinion".  In the final paragraph (long after most people quit reading) we finally get the composition of these supposed experts:  members of non-profits with no particular expertise in the subject, people with vested interests in grants and giveaways to solve the problem, "development specialists" -- i.e. tourism boards of various countries, and “social commentators” (in other words, anyone who wants to hang out their shingle and pretend they have something to say).  A real hodge-podge of hand-chosen folks each with an overly loud mouth and a vested interest in pushing a particular narrative.  Fake News.  Click Bait.  Red Meat.  Whatever you call it.  I call it garbage.  

And yet, after a bunch of arguments back-and-forth, friends were at each other’s throats hating each other.  Over some poorly-written, poorly-researched, opinion-non-fact nonsense.  I loved my son's methodology to test this for reasonableness -- he thought of 1 country that he thought might be worse than the US that wasn't on the list.  He looked up their numbers on the survey.  Then he googled "(country name) sexual harassment percentage".  The Reuters survey number:  9.6% from a few people on a government board (it is safe to assume they were all male given this particular country's view on women).  The numbers he found for the same country through more reasonable methods?  60% of males in that country said "women enjoy being touched and harassed", and 99.5% of women reported significant harassment on a daily basis.  Way to go, son.  I raised someone to question what they read.  A bit different than I would go about disproving the claim, but it worked.  Personally I thought of Sweden giving a serial rapist whose most recent victim was a 92 year old a 3 month sentence since the perpetrator was a UN-favored migrant as a pretty good bellwether of other countries that perhaps were mis-sequenced in the "big scary survey" 

And see, just in this little example, I've probably offended some who don't like my numbers-based approach to such topics.  And so basically it isn't safe for me to interact publicly any more -- not if I value friendships over argument.  I'm not big on family pictures because I don’t like being face-captured and profiled, and I love cats but don’t get me started on the relative value of memes.  If I stop posting political things, I might post something twice a year otherwise.  But I’m back to my own email list of a few friends who  know me well enough to slap me on the back and say “There goes Brian proving his tin-foil-hat credentials again.  I love you man.”  The thing is though, this goes the other way too – I’m going to have to start hiding posts from certain people because I want to keep loving them.  And I’m way too tempted to respond.  And I’m not at all sure some of my friends really can handle being pushed with my numbers because that's not their process.  And so It makes me a lot more interested these days in discussing how we even make a framework for discussion and avoiding the actual hot-topics.  Without an agreed framework of Civility, we don’t have any business discussing the other stuff – because that framework is what puts the relationship ahead of the ideal.  And the thing is – I will have that relationship for eternity.  The competing ideologies are a symptom of a fallen world – come to think of it, maybe the old admonitions weren’t so silly after all.  And, if you like to argue and have a thick enough skin, let me know -- heck, if you want to switch sides and let me argue your point while you argue mine, that sounds fun to me.