Trump populism propaganda in the Age of Information is retro 

Opinion

By Tom Thorne

President Donald J. Trump’s  populist message of Tweets releasing alleged policy statements, announcements of White House hirings and firings are wrapped inside lies and propaganda that has become so common that it now almost passes for normal. Trump uses social media as his press office. He needs no one but himself to do this work. White House media relations staff are sacrificial lambs for his media beat up.

Trump’s press officers live in a world where they rarely know what they can expect from Trump and certainly have brought the management of embarrassment in their job to a comedy of errors that offer late night talk shows lots of Trump fodder. They walk a fine line of denial, filling in innuendo that often drifts towards lying. Trump’s press office is largely a group that denies, clarifies or sets aside Trump Tweets with lame excuses for the president’s excesses.

Of course Trump’s contempt for the White House press corp and all media outlets is well known. They are, in his view,  all providers of “false news” or they are biased and he makes it plain that his information spewing bypasses them and goes directly to the public or more to the point to his populist base.

By defying the norms of White House media relations, Trump creates a situation where only in depth journalism can hope to come close to dealing with where the White House is on any topic or issue. Hence books and longer analytical pieces are beginning to surface to get the low down on the Trump White House.

Trump Tweets, of course, always deny any journalistic attempts to analyze or uncover his daily announcements and motives. It’s all false news to Trump. False news stands in the way of Making America Great Again.

Congress seems content on the whole to pass without too much comment Trump’s Tweets. They poo poo sometimes but waffle a lot. Only when a senator or congressman plans not to run in the mid term elections do we see any response to the madness rampant in the White House. After all they are the swamp that Trump says he needs to drain. The swamp meme is Trump’s propaganda that blames Congress for not making America great again.

Trump of course is all propaganda and demagoguery. His approach is a mind tutored and shaped by the the worst excesses of the Information Age. Trump intrinsically and instinctually understands that today there is too much information. He uses new social short hand social media by making Tweetable points that his base can grasp. Then he flies at huge public expense to his base public rallies where it can be re-spewed in acid dollops of information that can be grasped as making America great again or slapping down those who don’t support this idea.

Trump is becoming a cultural meme that encodes a mindless set of behaviours that are unsupported and without facts so they can be grasped easily by the untutored minds like his own. In an Information Age where information creates knowledge complexity Trump breaks through with simplicity. Most of his Tweets end with Make America Great Again or versions on this theme.

Everything he touches by Tweet falls on this meme and it is rehashed in his public rallies so the practitioners of false news can cover his successes. Notice that Trump never fails. He just moves on focused on making America great again. Criticism no matter how detailed is scoffed off with hatred, riddle and contempt for those who don’t support his populist propaganda.

Mythical walls are being built, jobs are being taken back from China, taxes are being cut all in the name of Making America Great Again. Trade deals are bad (all of them) unless they make America great again. Worthy trading partners in NAFTA are suspect if they don’t ensure that America is made great again.

Actually Trump understands the meme. Keep it simple stupid. Tell the same story over and over again and it will stick with the base who got you to the White House. These are old techniques of advertising and political propaganda. They defy the nature of a complex post industrial information based society. they return us just in time to a simpler model by holding information and knowledge in contempt. In Trump’s retro world coal is OK and climate change is a myth.

That is why media organizations are false news. They are part of the post industrial information society that is destroying America in Trump’s view. Only by denying them can Trump make America great again which means returning to something that has disappeared. Jobs for example are fewer because of automation. To Donald Trump jobs were shipped to Mexico and China. That is unfair. That denies a great America.

Nostalgia for a simpler time is a powerful message that in an information society with endless internet, artificial intelligence and automated high technologies become a threat to jobs in America’s factories. Trump’s propaganda appeals to conservative minds of the lowest order. People who see science and technology as bad. People see ideas such as Darwin’s evolutionary ideas as going against God. Vice President Mike Pence is the leader of the Trump base. He is on record as saying that he will check the theory of evolution after he dies and gets to heaven.

So to make America great again we knock the environment, automation, trading partners, immigrants, refugees and Congressional leaders. Trump spins his simple message because he does not understand the nature of post industrial society. His term is a four year retro experience for a time that is gone. If we are fortunate the term will be truncated by impeachment but then we would get Mike Pence in the White House.

Vladimir Putin is my Man of The Year choice....

President Putin shows considerable

surprise by the eJournal's choice of

him as their Man of the Year.

The World Wide Web is a chaotic place where artificial intelligence can evolve.

The Web and Artificial Intelligence: heading towards a profound technical change and non biological evolution.

The Web has no beginning, middle or end. It is a vast network of connections, computers and servers. It cannot be shut down or turned off. It is almost alive.

The Web grows on fragmentation and complexity. It is not a linear system but an endless loop within many other loops. It can be compared to neural pathways of a human brain.

The truth is no one really controls the Web short of building protocols for its technical cross platform performance. It is omnipresent and users carry devices with nodes that are connected to it and  its corporate form. Any one of these nodes can originate information content and launch it onto the Web. They can also receive information. It enables painless access to launch personal information onto the system. Many people using this device have been surprised when what they wrote went “viral”.

The Web is also a vast memory of what individuals launch onto it. It builds information and its search engines retrieve that information at the speed of light. Obscure facts can emerge from millions of informational documents stored on host and server computers.

The Web is a software for archiving and retrieving information. Each human user is connected through devices to this vast information entity.

The Web is now sitting on he edge of making its great stores of information into knowledge and content when artificial intelligence operates the information storage, retrieval and search systems. This new approach will constantly and automatically organize information first into modules of interest and then refine those interests into knowledge bases. Disparate  seemingly unrelated data will graduate to information and then knowledge under automated process controls. Information will be gathered into knowledge first by human input but eventually without human intervention.

A simple example of this version of The Web would be capable of creating a news module that could search the latest information about any newsworthy topic. It could automatically filter and check information. It could automate a human news gathering efforts of a newsroom applying all the principles of good journalism. It could do this without human help or interference. Such systems already work on and present stock market information often making decisions about the timing of trades and the fate of companies in the marketplace.

Facebook is a social media service that stores and retrieves millions of information pieces placed there by its users. This system can already pull together like interests of its users painlessly. Its first role is for advertisers to find groups of useful likely consumers. Equally it could be used by intelligence services to filter for ISIS activity and probably is already doing that. Anyone with a Facebook account is an open book to automated systems.

Add artificial intelligence to Facebook and information on any topic discussed by its users can be accessed and accumulated into a knowledge base. President-elect Donald Trump is a big topic on Facebook and generally across the Web. The system could assemble information in time and space and build a knowledge base of some depth on him and everything associated with him. This knowledge base could be used by artificial intelligence systems to write a book or put together an online magazine or provide an intelligence service with his vulnerabilities on the world stage.

Such a publication would never rest. It would be constantly updated and altered. Humans would have little to do but read the knowledge accumulated. Perhaps a few experts would be able to strip apart the systems to see how the information was assembled, edited and presented. Most of us would simply see the finished product on our screens.

Properly designed with safeguards this could work very well. Each piece of information about any topic would be tagged about its origins and reliability with detailed references similar to academic bibliographies. However, designing how to check facts and reliability if it is automated fully would be hard to control as the false news debate has indicated recently about Web reliability. Could we trust or even design the artificial intelligence systems that devised themselves through new Web pathways to do this work in the interest of humans. The anxiety about high information automation under the control of artificial intelligence is that humans could become the last consideration in an AI set of protocols created by the system itself.

Artificial intelligence can create and build its own reality. It can choose what is important to itself. The human dimension in this situation may be foreign to the reality built by AI that does much more than process information. When AI chooses and interprets what is important it may be doing it only for itself and its perceptions of a situation. The cognition of AI may first mirror and complement humans but at some point it will take its own viewpoints of all situations it works with as the truth and that truth could well be in conflict with human views of the world.

AI cognition can at first simply be an assistant to human decision making. However, the moment that a machine and software intelligence becomes self-aware there is a fundamental change on this planet. It is a new evolution which can be built into cyborgs and robots but more likely it will evolve in the chaos of the World Wide Web and like its host humans will be unable to turn it off. 

Brexit negotiations will open many European Union cans of worms.

 

Brexit: The fragmentation of EU insensitive largeness.

By Tom Thorne

I have purposely let a couple of weeks go by before commenting on Britain leaving the European Union. The main reason for waiting is simply chaos of this kind usually generates a lot of flack. It also takes a few weeks for the dust to settle and political trends to begin to emerge. Markets and currencies go through a down cycle. The market takes a dip and the smart money buys value cheap and then allows normalcy to a reassert itself. All this masquerades as a recovery after profits have been siphoned and reinvested by the smart money experts.

The failures of those who promoted staying in the EU resign before their heads roll. And in this case it is now clear that David Cameron is already replaced by Theresa May whom I suspect is a kind of Thatcher Lite in the annals and ranks of the Conservative Party. David Cameron announced yesterday that he is leaving the PM job within 48 hours. It looks like he has been packing his stuff at 10 Downing Street for the past three weeks. He is surrendering the mess he created to Madame May. His original plan was to cling to the PMship until the fall was a pipe dream. The Conservative parliamentary group unloaded a lame duck as soon as possible.

The Labour Party is in tatters. Jeremy Corbyn its frazzled rudderless leader is denying the inevitable. Corbyn picked up the scattered Labour pieces after the 2015  general election when a throughly thrashed Labour Party and its then leader Ed Milliband became a pariah by Labour parliamentary members after a lacklustre result at the polls in 2015. Both these Labour leaders seem to be victims of internal Labour Party battles and discontent.

Madame May will now see the Queen and form a new government by playing musical chairs with the Conservative parliamentary group that enabled her to froth to the top. Surely this astute monarch will ask questions about how the EU departure will be implemented. Perhaps this is a moment to discern whether an election is needed to confirm the non binding nature of the recent referendum. At any rate a new Prime Minister has the opportunity to provide leadership on this issue that will tamp down the anxiety. Will she do it?

Apparently not. She has decided to soldier on with Brexit despite being opposed to it herself. Then she appointed Boris Johnson as Foreign Minister. This is a fax pas of giant proportions because Johnson is loathed in Europe after supporting Brexit. Comments from Euro leaders could best be described as restrained fuming. 

And it is really time for leadership. Brexit is not a done deal because it is not binding on the Conservative government.  It is 52-48 percent split and with parts of the country like Scotland  registering a 62 percent  pro Europe vote. Internally, if Scotland's wishes to remain in Europe are thwarted by Westminster, the separation of Scotland is much more likely. Scotland gets 59 seats in the House of Commons in 2015 The Scottish National Party (SNP) took 56 of them. The other three seats went one each to Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

The turnout was 71 percent in 2015. Scotland is clearly for staying in Europe after the EU referendum and their heavy return of the SNP in the 2015 general election demonstrates they are interested in preserving their independence within Britain and getting more. Brexit changes this political dynamic profoundly. If Britain leaves the EU, Scotland will want to stay. Perhaps Northern Ireland as well. Brexit is a clear recipe for fragmenting Britain. Scotland make rue staying in Europe because their tiny population won't give them the same clout they had as part of Britain. It is all a accident looking for a place to happen.

Madame May must now walk a very tight line. She would be wise to call a general election soon although 2015 seems so close that that may be hard to do. However she shows right off the bat an inclination to execute Brexit negotiations with Brussels then Scotland's parliament will act on another separation referendum. With their Westminster mandate frustrated by a Conservative Government they may declare unilateral independence or at least petition Brussels for a direct seat at any negotiations. 

The word to describe this developing situation is the fragmentation of Britain's external policies. With Scots on the separation warpath it could spell the destruction of the 1707 Act of Union and it certainly can be seen as the final gasp of the British Empire. It looks bad because a fragmented Britain loses negotiation clout.

Britain is now overcome with an advanced case of Brexit Blues where the referendum results are seen as a bad dream. When this situation is combined with the European Union saying let's get on with the process, Britain is poised to look bad in Europe and the World. This situation confirms most of British history with Europe. Britain has always thought of Europe as troublesome, Scotland always sees Europe as an alliance. They are in a weak position because this is the first time in history that Europe has a political structure to enact pain on Britain.

Is Brexit the way to go to stop immigration you don't want or irritating trade rules from Brussels imposed upon members? Perhaps David Cameron should have approached the EU with a need for significant changes to the Union but that is a bit silly when the UK has retained its currency against the Euro and has tried to maintain its status all along as a member with different rules.

All is not good in the rest of the EU. The Eurozone has created much economic dislocation in Southern Europe probably because the Euro’s value inflates the economies of Spain, Portugal, Greece and even Italy leaving giant gaps in employment and government services that are inequitable to those offered in Northern Europe,

The trend in the EU may very well be like the British referendum experience. There is talk in Holland of leaving the EU. Certainly the economic devastation in Southern Europe is a cause for considerable alarm in Brussels because it too will foment change and demands to get a bigger share of the EU pie.  Think of the pressures of all the Syrian and other refugees passing through Greece, Sicily and the rest of Italy as they try to keep a fiscal lid on their debt. Something is going to give in Southern Europe creating a situation much more negative than Brexit.

Brexit has roots that go deep into a highly bureaucratic EU that makes both poor and solvent countries wonder what are the vital benefits of membership. If countries withdraw for reasons of poverty or opportunity trade and commerce will survive. Problems of British nationals working or living in Europe will hopefully be equitably dealt with. At least one would hope that the humans get a sunset clause in their employment and where they live.

I see it all as an Information Age phenomenon. The EU has been expanding east and has grown more complex and bureaucratic until it is now perhaps unmanageable. Southern Europe is losing faith in the EU model because they remain in unemployment and poverty.  British people think they are losing control of their borders. When the public wants to make sense of this large conglomerate they fragment their part of it to try and make sense of its effects. That leads to the politics of referendums. Fragmentation also leads to what they know. National pride, history,  culture, jobs and economic wellbeing  trumps what Brussels is doing.

The same phenomenon is happening in US politics where grid lock in Congress is leading to rebellion and fragmentation of largeness and control by elites. Fragmentation enables simple ideas and propaganda to emerge and in the hands of the people in referendums and elections that makes for change and perhaps changes that no one will really like in the final analysis.

© Copyright 2016, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

A second case of a 2013 Hyundai Sonata fire surfaces in the US. American driver seeks redress from Hyundai Motor America.

Two photos of the American back seat fire in a 2013 Hyundai Sonata. 

Clearly this is a seat heater fire. Note the three burns that the driver put out 

with a bottle of water. The second picture shows a child's toy that almost 

ignited. Also please note the child seat still in place next to the fire source.

2013 Hyundai Sonata car fire story back in the news. New US case and interest by Korean broadcaster KBS.

Readers may remember stories I did in early 2014 about 2013 Hyundai Sonata car fires. These fires start in the back seats of these Hyundai Sonatas. In the case of the first car fire I covered the flames consumed the inside of the car leaving it a smouldering wreck  on the side of the road in about 20 minutes. The engine compartment was left intact.

That fire was the result of an alleged general computer failure. Before the fire burst out the entire car came to a halt. All dashboard warning lights lit up and then went out when the system crashed leaving the seat heater gate open to start the fire. 

Forensic reports done many months later on the hulk left at a wrecking yard during the Canadian winter stated that no firm cause of the fire could be ascertained but the seat heater switch was open. There is no doubt in the driver’s mind that the fire started in the rear seat.

The point is these cars are dangerous to their drivers and passengers and so far Hyundai and their dealers say nothing probably because they fear liability claims. The general system failure of the first fire locked the back doors and as a result the driver lost her lap top computer and some school records because the doors would not open.

She was on her way to pick up her teen age children at school. Had they been in the back then it is anyone’s guess whether they would have been able to escape when the electric doors locked. 

Questions that I raised at the time about taking the car back to a heated garage to try and read out the car’s computer was never attempted. It sat in the wrecking yard subject to the extremes of a Canadian winter for any weeks before the forensic examination finally took place.

Recently on 2 November 2015  I was contacted by an American driver of a 2013 Hyundai Sonata after a similar seat fire experience. Photos provided show a hole in the seat and another smaller hole where a second burn was starting. A child’s toy was also burned as the second photo indicates. The driver in this case put the fire out with a bottle of water. ( see the photos above)

The driver of this Hyundai Sonata smelled smoke and stopped the car before the fire got going. The  back seat heater was on. The driver’s dealer indicated that they could see no reason for the fire and repairs were initiated. The driver is reluctant to accept a repair when the safety of children is in doubt. This driver through a lawyer has now contacted Hyundai Motor America who have suddenly gone silent.

The American driver has a lease and won’t accept the car back. At this point the driver is renting cars ( from 15 September 2015) until a satisfactory resolution is found. 

This story is now finally taking hold. I have also been contacted by a Korean broadcaster KBS who has also read the original blog story and wants to interview me about what I know about these Hyundai Sonata seat fires. 

© Copyright 2015, Tom Thorne, All Rights Reserved.

Globe and Mail leaders debate really regurgitated propaganda messages. Where is the election meat?

Still too close to call. We know their stories but how

 does anyone break out?

Globe and Mail economic debate was a disappointment because the moderator allowed the all three leaders to spout their usual campaign stories.

I was hoping that moderator David Walmsley, the Globe’s editor-in-chief would tighten the screws on all the leaders with more acid questioning. That didn’t happen Harper, Mulcair and Trudeau were allowed to stay on their propaganda messages. Walmsley allowed continual regurgitation of their standard messages without checking them for real answers. I expected better of my favourite newspaper.

Walmsley’s misfire was too bad because before the debate started Globe staffers had an excellent 15 minute discussion. They should have been part of the debate and been allowed to engage the leaders to get them off their standard messages. The editor-in-chief was more the managing editor of the paper which was his former job. I think anyone of the Globe’s columnists could have done a better job than the editor-in-chief. My choice would be Geoffrey Stevens as moderator.

Did anyone win any ground? Harper did his steady state message stuff about being a good economic manager. Trudeau managed to get his fairness for the middle class messages out but most of the time he fought with Mulcair instead of getting at Harper. Mulcair revealed a swarmy aspect of his character when he enjoyed his eye rolling zingers too much about his balancing budgets platform. 

There is something about NDP self indulgent rhetoric that has a self-righteous air that is obnoxious especially when it comes from a political chameleon like Mulcair. And when he invokes Tommy Douglas I can only wince that he would dare to compare himself to that important and principled Canadian.

Trudeau’s performance was a bit too hot for television but I suspect that if you heard him on radio or audio alone he would come off well. I watched the debate on CPAC which I get at 420P so Trudeau’s hot argumentative performance was softened by low resolution. Comments by a panel after the debate went from calling him the debate winner to “just not ready” which shows the power of that Conservative destruct commercial. 

I have to say that Harper is steady and a good television performer. He allows the opposition leaders to attack him and he never flinches. He is cool for television even when he is righteously indignant or in a state of denial. In fact he can be effectively dismissive of their attacks and get away with it. However, his steady state story is not really true and is wearing thin. His record is not quite as free from fiscal foibles as he would have us believe. Both opposition leaders made good points about Harper’s economic record.

The bottom line is we got a propaganda debate. It bordered on boring and was very repetitive with each leader’s standard story going without serious challenges. In advertising telling your message over and over is seen as a promotional dictum to register enough times to make a difference. Sadly our political encounters with all three parties is stuck on that level.

Trudeau from a promotional point of view is trying hard to differentiate himself from Mulcair and Harper by running deficits which is a risky strategy. That is risky when two parties create promotional messages that promote balanced budgets. That means Liberal promotion is fighting on two fronts simultaneously. The Liberal plan over the next four to five weeks has to be very special to break through the glut of steady state thinking.

Harper can show a smoke and mirrors surplus. The Liberals will need to show how that surplus is at a cost to programs and hurts people. They need to show that provinces and municipalities and fiscal experts endorse their plans for infrastructure spending. In short we know the plan to run deficits. Now they have to show how Canadians benefit from this plan. That is a lot to do before 19 October. 

Strategic voting is the only way to release Stephen Harper's right wing grip on Canada.

Only the electorate know this for sure. They will have to vote strategically for it to happen.

The electorate understands Stephen Harper’s divide and conquer approach to Canadian federal elections and they don’t like it. Expect Conservatives tired of Harper to switch their vote. Their natural home when discontent with their own party is the Liberals. That is why the New Democrats are looking more like the Liberal Party.

Conservatives of a more socially aware Tory bent are tiring of supporting the right wing ideology that Stephen Harper has attempted for the last decade to impose on Canadians. He has done this with his base of 38.7 percent of voters that in 2011 election that gave him his current majority. 

Tory Conservatives natural home when they are irritated or at least concerned with their own party and leader is the Liberal Party. If enough disenchanted Conservatives do this then Liberals will elect more members for the new parliament in a tight three way race.

Conservatives of this kind often cannot bring themselves to vote for The New Democrats (NDP) unless the NDP looks more Liberal and shrugs off its socialist veneer. That may have happened in the recent Alberta provincial election. The current stance of the federal NDP is to look more like Liberals which could be their way of trying to siphon off traditional Liberal voters. They have a much harder time getting Conservatives to switch but they try by saying they will balance the budget one of Harper’s current election mantras.

In this tight race something has to happen of this kind for any party to get even a minority government. All parties say they will not form coalitions so it is up to the voters to create the government they want. That means a clear shift for Conservatives to either the NDP or the Liberals. In many ridings where the vote is close it will mean strategically voting against Stephen Harper’s view of Canada.

As an example in my own riding Bay of Quinte where the tight race continues. The battle at the moment is between the Conservatives and Liberals although still close with the NDP behind the Liberals by five points. Polls indicate the chances of the riding going either Conservative or Liberal is now 50-50. NDP supporters have to move to the Liberal  to beat out the Conservative candidate. It is like this in many ridings across the country. Conservatives who find Harper too much to take have to also change from their normal voting patterns to the Liberal candidate who at this time is the one who can beat the Conservative in my riding.

The tightness of the current election race indicates that there are many undecided voters who normally have allegiances to one of the three major parties. I believe we are in for a major switch of these allegiances if the election further polarizes to rid Canada of the Harper Government. In those circumstances party loyalties will become less important than the task to stop Harper.

Then there are the voters who are unaligned and with no party affiliations. Their depth of political understanding of the election and what’s happening to Canada may be superficial. They may respond to party propaganda such as the intense He’s just not ready campaign of the Conservatives against Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Equally they may be influenced by Liberal and NDP propaganda. These voters could hold the balance of who forms the next government.

The next five weeks of this campaign compounds because of its 78 day length the perilous outcomes that could happen for Canada. Literally anything can happen. The Conservatives have been beaten back as the front runners by the Duffy trial, migrant refugee issues, the economic news and their stance on the war in Syria. Can they rebound? Can Stephen Harper’s steady state message break through again?

The upcoming five debates may change the tone of the campaign. However, the likelihood of any one pulling away from the other parties with majority numbers seems very remote. The steam has gone out of the most expensive Conservative campaign in recent memory and despite their spending seem at the moment to be going nowhere. 

Can the NDP or Liberals pull away? Only when the electorate marking their ballots vote strategically can we expect a change that will not mean a minority government and then another election to settle the direction of Canada issues. This election is about curbing the right wing direction of Harper and restoring a more humane centralist government. Given the tight race that means voting strategically to stop Harper or to content yourself with perhaps another four years of Harperland.