Showing posts with label cultural awareness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural awareness. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

The Intelligence Gap Gap



The present spectacle of President Elect Trump’s evasion of the daily briefing system used for the Presidency may appear to be pure arrogance, however, this gap is extremely common amongst the Insecure.  And insecurity in the Executive Pottery is very common to the point that all who read here, know of it personally.  One does not tell the spouse that the favorite attire is nasty, brutal and short.


The Gapped does not want to hear what does not fit the Gap’s Preconceptions particularly if already Tweeted. Hitler’s famous temper tantrums were his style to evading the issue of a challenge to omniscience.  Everyone is gapped in some way, boss or blue collar, but particularly in the ranks of the Corporate Eunuchs (Suits), the Assistant to Roaches (fake suits), and courtiers and courtesans of corporate courts (the dressed) thousands of years so far. 



I fed my family for a decade when I was an IRM manager in the City of Houston on exploiting the Gap’s Gap, filling the Gap with Actionable Intelligence, instead of Glittering Gossip.  This was the continuation of a bad habit I learned in the Army, in Combat, and Behind the Green Door.  The trick was that the Gapped, could understand and intelligently use the data provided, and as such said actionable intelligence became addiction, and my paycheck was dependent upon said addiction.  



My mandate was called the “Chinese Lesson” based on the keen grasp of bureaucratic baffle noted in the Characters of the Chinese language
The "Chinese Lesson: about not building temples in my empire.

In the Case of the Donald, whose firm grasp of complex data is essential to effective management and leadership is a clear and present threat to his Suits, Courtiers, Dressed, Jackals and Roaches.  Powerful leaders know this game and keep the Gilded divided against each other.   FDR put two bureaucrats in charge of the TVA project requiring his interface.  Hitler divvied up propaganda between Goebbels, the Radio/movie studios and Leni Reifenstahl.  Stalin had his closest advisors dance like bears in his place late at night.

The real center of power in a Gapped Regime is often wielded by whomever has the Gap’s Ear, such as the Horse Master (Tudor), Body Guard (Capon), Pheromone Mistress, often the Spouse.   The position of Chamberlain was of the Golden Crapper Emptier, hence the name.  This is the position of the Trump team between rival egos, appetites, and billions where he thinks he can control by Firing. 





Tuesday, September 13, 2016

It's the Village that Counts, not the Pitch





 It's the Village that Counts, not the Pitch



Benito Mussolini




The curse of the Enlightenment on Western values is that there is something called reason, rationality, and logic which govern action.   If an argument is not reasonable, irrational or illogical, it is invalid, and inapplicable.  Its underlying assumption is that everything is reducible into measurable, relevant, consistent and accurate labels for reality, that can be consistently added, subtracted, contrasted, combined, allocated, dispersed, and/or measured to good use.   

Descartes didn’t know ducks. The Irrationality of Reason





It is concentrated into what is called, mental as in conscious, subconscious, and unconscious manipulations in a lump of nerves called the brain (cerebral cortex).  Were that true, decapitation would be an irritation.  Were that true, an erection would be irrelevant, and the flu clueless.  One cannot have a head without a tail.  And that includes the Autonomic Nervous as an example of one of many biological systems networked to keep us alive and kicking.




Or the need for “Stifficade”:

The central function in all life is to survive, day to day, and generation to generation.  Breed and Feed, Dinner and a Date, Laid and Paid, and to ensure that, species develop Roles, Rules and Tools to make that happen.  Failure is starvation or extinction.

And that requires an audience of a critical mass of male and females who breed a critical mass of children to survive to puberty.  And that’s a family, and a village of families who have Roles, Rules and Tools to survive.  From the outside, the village is the audience. 
The Eternal Drama between Victim, Rescuer and Prosecutor

And some villages aren’t listening, some have heard it all, and others soak it up like a Magical Elixir (Beer).  This we have in terrorism, radical polarization, and drug addiction. Depending how the Rules and Tools serve the Roles related to Survival (Village wise).
Rules applicable to all forms of life, coded in culture and DNA.
 The core of the Trump audience is made of the inheritors of the Scot Irish driven from Scotland to Ireland to Appalachia because they didn’t listen to the arrogant, erudite, socially elite, and utterly corrupt.  The more erudite, arrogant, and elitist the arguments are, the more corrupt they must be.

17th Century Version of the MBA


And some villages, like families are dysfunctional and/or broken into competing parts.  The street gang, the drug den, high schools, corporations, and political parties are part family, part village, and a part of something else.  The more arrogant, erudite, and elitist the arguments be, the battered and beaten shoot back at. 



Selling soap to the Unwashed is problematic.  Selling the Oxymoronic eventually reaches Cognitive Dissonance, and every once in a while, Rage.  Selling the notion that some people are more equal than others became normalized about 1984. Orwell is crying.  The village is dying.



The Pitchfork and Torches are marching.  

ISIS

OBTW - Watch the body language which language is far more effective than words.

Mussolini

Trump












Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Pork, Fake Pork, Hogwash and the Politically Powerful


Parole Officer on Earth in Elysium

The purpose of life is to live, for the individual and the family.  That depends upon Feeding and Breeding, neither of which is much good without bringing home the bacon as in Pork. 
Pork is some concrete benefit to the voter’s district, job, family, and community.  Pork is honest, something useful in the cultural survivability strategy from Food & Family by Roles to Nurture and Protect, in accordance with Rules regarding Social Status and Tools to make it happen, leading back to dinner and a date, feeding and breeding, or not.  There is a direct link between survival and the pork.  Pork is honest.  The question is, always, whose pork is this? And where’s the Pork?
1

Absent real pork, the resources of the policy, tribe, or chamber of commerce eventually cannot sustain the numbers and die off, or dissipate.  It takes, a critical mass, not the uniform efforts of the polity to sustain the numbers.  The Simba and the Stallion have exclusive fornication rights in their pride or herd. The lone stallion of legend is an outsider.  Humans provide an alternate method of gaining political dominance, food, and sex.

2

The Roles, Rules and Tools:
The biologically driven roles of survival goes to the XX/XY exchange of precious bodily fluids giving rise to the Children who must be Nurtured and Protected.  Psychologically this works out to three favorite roles played by people both sick and healthy, that of Rescuing and Protecting the Victim.  People get off playing one or more of these roles, regardless of if Pork is involved.  All is necessary to activate the trilogy is the appearance or creation of the Villain (real, fake, hogwash) in order to activate the fears and ambitions of the Victim, Rescuer, and/or Protector.

3

Precious body fluids…Dr Stranglove.

4
From Dr Strangelove

Villains, in fact, are someone else’s trilogy of nurture and protect their young.  Except we invoke nasty motives to activate the survival instincts of the innocent. 
And Jodie Foster in Elysium as Secretary of Defense, “Do you have children?”

5
From the movie "Elysium" with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster

Pork Technical definitions:

2.       Hogwash favors someone else’s Pork.  Anti-fracking, drilling and oil exploration favors Russian E&P. 

3.       Fake Pork denies Pork for others, without a pork payback.  Anti-immigration policies deny pork to immigrants without pork for the locals.  It is a zero-sum game in which someone gains if someone else loses.  Like at the dinner table. 

4.       Make believe pork is Fake Pork without a real winner or loser.  No food, no dinner table.  The present convulsions of the Islamacate* world of Islamdom in violent extremism is fake pork, as is most of the Western response.  Oil is Pork.

DNA, CULTURE and SURVIVAL

* All of these are normal reactions in the quest to nurture and protect the family and community.  In the Animal Kingdom, the selection and control of what female gets the Y (XY) chromosome from the male to enhance the survivability of the female’s progeny.  The males’ priority protective strategy of his Y goes to denial of any other’s Y into his harem.  

6

In-breeding and Adultery
Adultery is nature’s way to prevent in-breeding with both male and female seeking to enrich the blood line.  Fake Pork is the other males and female need to prevent such cross breeding which may alter the balance of power in the tribe.  Fake Pork and Hogwash have important roles in the Psychological Role, Sociological Rules, and Technological Tools to make up the survival culture of the polity, tribe, family or battalion.  Thus the biological basis for troubling times, stresses, and bloody war is a necessary part of preventing in-breeding. And for breeding healthy offspring. 

Stamp Collecting in Drama
At present, the public mind is consumed with the introduction of a New Villain to replace the Red Menace, and that is “Islamic Extremism”.  The Red menace was set on stealing the Pork and running the polity, while Islamic Extremism is merely to create the illusion that the Pork will walk away.  The biggest fool in this tragedy is the Islamic extremist or terrorist is that there is no pork in the equation for the Umma. Only fake pork and hogwash.

7

Consider the role of the protection of XX/XY swap of precious bodily fluids in Islamdom in the veil and robes found in many Islamicate* societies is a collective women’s fake pork effort to keep out the competition.  Or maybe an elaborate hogwash.

*ISLAMICATE AND ISLAMDOM
*Islamacate is the term used by Daniel Pipes to distinguish between a society that in part runs on Islamic rules and regulations, and in part with other influences to mollify and adapt where Islam lacks the necessary flexibility and profit.
The Qur'an and the Hadith Reports nowhere prescribe mosque decorations or attitudes toward rulers, yet these did typically resemble each other across Islamdom. Lacking a term for what is characteristic of the Muslim experience but not required by the Islamic faith or law, Marshall G. S. Hodgson coined the term "Islamicate."
At the time of this writing there is a mass movement underway to keep the US free of the Sharia XY chromosome as if by insidious inclusion, the republic would convert to Islam, instead of the default Protestant mindset.  This Protestant mindset, so closely tied to the greatness of America, has always felt threatened by foreign religious XY or XX chromosomes such as Catholicism. It wasn’t until a Soviet sniper sainted JFK with a bullet that the furor over Papist influence in America dissipated.
That’s how serious it gets,

Hogwash, Washing Someone Else’s Pork
By way of contrast, Hogwash is washing someone else’s pork which leverages the roles of rescuer, victim, protector vs villainy, even when there is no pork benefit from the Hogwash.   Sometimes hogwash is often bullshit. 
 
Communist Activists in Action
8
By way of example in the current political imbroglio starting with the Democrats (liberals, progressives) with their demands for student loan deferments, schooling and medical care for the less fortunate constitute pork for the less fortunate, but hogwash for the affluent advocates seeking to play rescuer and protector to the stupid and unwashed. 

The latter Democratic Hogwash campaigns against fracking, offshore drilling, nuclear power and the Polar Ice Melt are camouflage for someone else’s pork, which is to say the Russian Energy and Defense Industries.  Long standing linkages back to the days of the Comintern of the Thirties theoretically in line with Communist World Conquest, but now are acting in the corporate interests of Gasprom, Lukoil and  Uralvagonzavod. 

The flap over depleted uranium rounds in Leftish Academia after Russian built tanks were shredded by uranium depleted rounds from relatively small cannon. 

Inverse Attribution.
What simplifies the confusion is the application of the Law of the Inverse Attribution Reflex (LIAR). Inverse Attribution (Bragging & Blaming).
9


Accusations by the Left of Corporate Greed, Wall Street Avarice and Capitalist Excess fall under the category of inverse attribution (blaming with one’s strongest vice) as greed, avarice and excess are inherent in the offensive nature of the defense of pork.   Likewise, the Right’s accusation of the Liberal’s Class Warfare, is an example of the Right’s War against the “welfare cheat” and losers, and in favor of the protection of wealthy welfare (tax breaks, contracts, etc).

GREAT AMERICA
Before there was a Buchanan, or a Trump, there were the isolationists and the elite culminating in WW 2 and the Cold War.  Well illustrated in the movie, the Good Shepherd

As Matt Damon put in in The Good Shepherd “The rest of you just visiting” in response to Joe Pesci’s comment concerning what Jews, Blacks, Catholics, and Italians had in their cultures, asking what did “youse guys have”

“The United States of America.  The rest of you are just visiting”
10
Matt Damon in the Good Shepherd


 Not long after “Mother” left the agency, the collective repression and control of the normal irrepressible American spirit, failed and the demons of chaos, revolution, and psychedelic tie died non conformity were let slip resulting in the first major defeat of US forces in war.  That was the Pork of the Sixties and Seventies, hogwash and fake pork. 

Great music, terrible clothes, and the counter counter-revolutionary restriction of the law enforcement capabilities of the nation were trimmed to protect future treasonous endeavors of the pro-Soviet kind.   Communism has now morphed into Russian imperial capitalism and the Celestial Empire of China have been restored to what was before the age of Steam powered ships. 

Inversely Constitutional
The Conservative side  of the political scramble this current election cycle is heavy into hogwash with links to pork not so clear.  Save to sanctify in protect the top one percent. Certain themes made by alleged Conservative punditry, if taken seriously, would call for the violent overthrow of the Constitution to be replaced by a designated dictator subject of back room manipulation.   These are some of the popular arguments:

1.       Courts are supposed to interpret the law, not make it. Since the Anglo-American legal and political systems are based on precedent, case law, and the Common Law which cases go back before the Magna Carta.  The term is “stare decisis”, let the decision stand, all cases with same facts and law should be treated the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law  

2.       Judicial Review is not in the Constitution despite Case Law going back to Marbury vs Madison in 1803.  Statutory law generally over rides case law except when the case law involves a Constitutional precedent such as due process of law, or when the law is arbitrary and capricious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

3.       The Founders were Demi-Gods whose godly pronouncements have been blasphemed by all Amendments after the 12th (The loser in Presidential Elections would not be VP). In fact, the Founders were brilliant and practical men who had just defeated one of the largest empires in the world, and knew the tragic history of abuses and misuses of political power as evidenced during the course of English history, particularly from the Tudors to the Stuarts with the English Civil Wars in between.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

4.       Congress is irremediably corrupt, and should be purged of the politically correct. The essence of a republican form of government (guaranteed in the Constitution) is a legislature.  Anglo-American political systems are built around protecting the legislative function, Federal and State. This goes back to Queen Elizabeth’s barring the bishops during consideration of the Book of Common Prayer, and Cromwell’s purge of Parliament in 1648.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride%27s_Purge

5.       The poor, displaced and unfortunate are a clear and present danger to the successful “doers”.  Denial of basic services is in the best interests of keeping the poor in their places. As in the past, some frustrated lawyer will rise up and arouse the “masses” as they ineptly describe those down on their luck.  

11
Marianne, symbol of French Liberty



What is difficult in the case of Conservative Right Wing propaganda is the nature of the Pork of interest to the Right.   In part, the war over Pork is treated as a zero sum game, someone else’s loss is automatically your gain.  It is difficult, however, to see how a collapse of civil and criminal law benefits the Conservative base.  In short, the four points of how to do a coup should not be taken seriously, as such a coup would destroy the one percent even if the downtrodden stayed in their place.

Geography
The Geography Japan, Britain, and the US have idyllic geographical circumstances, the rest of the world usually have borders that can be crossed in force.  Present technology does not provide anyone else the avenues of approach to the US and its key terrain to present a credible invasion threat.

12


 Regardless of any terrain or population objective, the defense of the US is defined in law as the defense of the Constitution which can be revised only by three quarters of the State legislatures concurring.  This the geographic control of all but thirteen states (one quarter), frustrates any attempt domestic or foreign to overthrow the United States.

Not long ago, we thought that Global Thermonuclear Warfare was an existential threat to the US.  As such the radioactive remains of our enemies would still have to negotiate the formidable geography of the US.     A rule of thumb based on the last full mobilization of the US in WW2 is that ten percent of the total population wing up in uniform and another forty percent are in defense production.  Right now that would 32,000,000 in uniform using the same factors.  And doable in four years.

The important pork is here, with additional pork necessary to sustain our pork by way of trade. Hence the defense of the nation involves pork export and import capabilities by sea and air, plus whatever land forces are necessary overseas to hold and defend the necessary facilities and locations.  

The Gini Index - Who’s Got the Pork?

The Gini Index measures income inequalities with a simple set of numbers and graphs.  It comes as no big surprise that income inequalities have skyrocketed in the last few decades.  Of revolutionary importance, is the poor people don’t revolt, it is the recently disposed that do.  This was the case of the French after Louis XVI impoverished the nation by supporting the US revolution, plus the failure of the wheat crops.  And in Russia during WW 1, the Russians had been improving their economy after the fashion of Western Europe and the US, but it failed due to incompetent leadership, resulted in more incompetence under the Bolsheviks who denounced free markets and human ingenuity. 

13

Where’s the Pork?
People, Pork and Geography

14


Monday, April 18, 2016

ISIS - THE NAZI STATE


ISIS – THE NAZI STATE
SS Division Handshar - Bosnian SS

The ideological underpinnings of ISIS came from WW 2 resistance against Britain and France with the support of Nazi Germany and later Stalin of the Soviet Union.  The fusion of Arab nationalism plus bits and pieces of Arab Socialism aka National Socialism took shape in the Baath Party which held power in Iraq and had been influential in other Arab states.  Nasser and Sadat were both German agents in the period before El Alamein to time the Egyptian Army’s revolt from garrison against the British.

 The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al Husseini was a Nazi who raised Bosnian and Arabs SS units.

Fig 1
The pattern of total submission to ISIS version of Islam and the execution of all others is a purely Western notion, the worst examples being the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges.
The default manner of dealing with minorities ethnic groups by Islam from the time of the Rashidun Caliphs, through the Ottoman Sultans was flexible and accommodating of various groups’ values closest to family, village and tribe. 


Fig 2
Proof of the matter is the fate of minorities in Iraq and Syria who have survived the entire period of Muslim rule, and some go back before the Israelites.  The Yazidun, for example go back before Zoroastrianism.   Now for the first time in all that time, they are being butchered like the Nazi Death Squads was loose. 
Under the Ottomans, minorities were ruled in a flexible and conciliatory mode, known as the Millet System. 

“In the heterogeneous Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1923), a millet was an autonomous self-governing religious community, each organized under its own laws and headed by a religious leader, who was responsible to the central government for the fulfillment of millet responsibilities and duties, particularly those of paying taxes and maintaining internal security. In addition, each millet assumed responsibility for social and administrative functions not provided by the state, conducting affairs through a communal council (meclisimillî) without intervention from outside. From 1856 on, a series of imperial reform edicts introduced secular law codes for all citizens, and much of the millets’ administrative autonomy was lost.”
Encyclopedia Britannica
 
Massacre at Sinjar
Fig 3
The early Muslim empires from the Rashidun Caliphs, Umayad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Fatimid and Ottomans offered the conquered a simple choice, of minding their own business plus tax, or converting with a tax break.  The loss of revenue from those converted then, as now, operated as an incentive to keep the peace. 

Otherwise, Islam would have been forced back into the desert instead of fostering a higher degree of tolerance for minorities than the Europe until after the French Revolution allowed Jews to be treated as mensch.  Jews were driven out of Spain and found home in the Ottoman Empire.  Jews and other minority figures could rise to positions of wealth and power, by playing according to the rules.
While many can argue about script and dogma, the treatment of minorities was practical, pragmatic, and profitable. Consequently the arguments used by ISIS to massacre those who Islam has protect for over a thousand years, are insults to the Caliphates they purport to represent. 

It should be remembered that Iraq revolted against the British with Nazi assistance (that didn’t amount to much).   Saddam Hussein’s surrogate father, his maternal uncle Kairallah, had fought in the 1941 uprising against Britain, and suffered thereafter because of it.  The Ba’th (Arab National Socialist) party was nationalist not religious, and subsequent use of religion since 9-11 is convenient propaganda for Saddam’s humiliated legions. 


Fig 4
Saddam’s butchery to his own people are legend, and the tradition continues with ISIS. 
Suffer the Children,


Fig 6

Gordon S Fowkes, LTC USA RET

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Flipping the Bird instead of COIN

Flipping Birds at Counter Insurgency, Flipping Bass Ackwards.
By Gordon S Fowkes,
LTC USA RET, KCTJ, M.Ed.

ST Bartholemew's Massacre of French Calvinits, 1572

Now is the time for Bass Wholes on both sides of the Aisle to bay at the winds and microphones of how “nation building is not a military job” or how “remotely piloted vehicles” with pin point precision is a war crime, unlike carpet bombing of Japan and Germany which were not.   Now is also the time when virgin pundits describe that which never happened in Vietnam, or those whose scope of understanding of the nuances of mortal combat are confused with Four Quarters or Nine Innings. War is not a game, nor is it an election, nor a debate.  War Sucks, but somebody has to do it. 

And it better be done right.

War is not a continuation of politics by other means, it is politics with other means just as an airstrike is no different from a traffic ticket aimed at reducing the speed of the action. Whatever it takes to feed and protect the family is what the fighting is all about, as is all the rest of survival of the adaptive, fit or not.

And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  That sad tale is how the best equipped, best trained, best led, and best supported military force of the US, was bested by a hollow point between the ears, by a bloated bureaucracy bent on self-aggrandizement and career enhancement.  The latter a sham foisted on those in field grades with eyes on the stars whose chosen slots were shot down by those without branch or insignia.

US MP and German Police on Traffic Duty during Occupation

But enough for the platitudes.  We screwed up, again as we had in the villages and towns of other ancient civilizations. We assumed (ass out of you and me) that our fantasies of what was sacred and absolute truth, were as imaginary as are those of our enemies are towards their own.  

Muslims have this nutty idea that Islam is the central truth of the universe, despite that they aren’t even a (Circle One, or more):
  • American, Texan, Southern Californian, German, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, Chechen, and/or _________________. 


The fundamental motivation of the Rescuer is to convert the Victim and fight villainy, insanity, and heresy.  Nation building is rescuing and converting the helpless and stupid to worship the ground we walk on.


 Civil Affairs (and Military Governance) works to grease the gears that might not mesh, and fix shot up places get to their own feet.  Regardless of what kind of shoes they wear.  The flip side of CAMG is to flip the other guy’s feet. These include Special Forces and Special Operations.  Psychological Operations supports both stand and flip.

THE SHOGUN AND THE EMPEROR

The term counter insurgency became the fad by means obscure to me, as it anoints the counter insurgent with a righteousness not bestowed upon the insurgent.  And, to make it even clearer, what is an insurgent?  The Taliban was the effective government in place in Afghanistan when the US took sides with the Northern Alliance and invaded.  That was a surge against the Taliban, but not an insurgency? The term has a political definition not relevant to military operations. 

Nevertheless, the logical lines of operation (LLO) in the counter insurgency (COIN) as originally spelled out in the Army/Marine Corps manual on Counter Insurgency applies in fact to all of war for or against those whose contributions to success or failure make a difference.  

LLO or LLE or whatever dissected the body politic into functions of a society including governance. Or as it is done by ISIS in reverse to topple and repeat on those toppled.

From one of the manuals LLO are directed at:
  • 1.     Civil Security
  • 2.     Civil Control
  • 3.     Security Forces
  • 4.     Governance
  • 5.     Essential Services
  • 6.     Economy and Infrastructure
  • 7.     Advertising and Public Relations



As one who is retired from the City of Houston (Building Inspections) and member of many a society for the preservation of the good, and disruption of the bad, this is a fairly standard list of logical lines of reelection, election or selection to the higher and mighty.  At present, REMFCOM appears to have decided that local governance is not one of interest to the infantry including those on boots who must travel the routes through those local governances with unpronounceable names.

Just as it is in local elections, the efforts of one side to enhance their version of the LLO, must be destroyed, disrupted and/or discredited by actions against the other’s LLO, and to enhance the other’s own.   This is precisely what the Taliban and ISIS are doing, and have been doing for decades, in one version or another.

There are, therefore, four variants of LLO depending upon which side one is on:
  • 1.     Making your own,
  • 2.     Wrecking someone else’s,
  • 3.     Defending one’s own,
  • 4.     Wrecking the wreckers.

This bears some resemblance to the Tactical Imperatives of combat.

Stability Operations therefore have the same four modes. As such there is Stabilization and Destabilization already under Special Operations Command, as it was under the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.  And therein, lie many a good example of what not to do and what to do.

The Hanging of French Protestants during wars of religion


The Cold War was a religious war in all but name.  The present religious wars are like the political wars of the religion, as the two differ only in name.




 Bloody Awful ISIS is!

Monday, January 4, 2016

Liars, Advertisers, and True Believers



The Truth about Liars, Advertisers and True Believers

I hated it when my father said that all facts are just someone’s opinion.  It was damning as he was a renowned Chemist and decorated artillery officer from WW2 in the Pacific.  His nickname in the 31st Infantry Division (Dixie) was “Fearless Fred”.

If facts are opinions, so is the truth.    In order to manage getting through the day, one must make decisions on other’s opinions based on opinions that one would like to treat is if they were true facts.  . What we do is to assign a level of confidence in the accuracy, relevance and reliability to the “opinions” we want to treat as “facts”.  After all, doesn’t one and one make two?  One apple and one banana make two fruits if one is from San Francisco. 

But, one can’t get of bed without knowing where the floor is. Or where the car keys are.

Fig_01

When dealing with other people, however, we treat their opinions based on the “truthiness” of that person and/or their opinions. It helps to know when they are diverging from the real truth (whatever one accepts as such).  Such divergence can be categorized as lies which the liar knows is false. There are True Believers who believe the false as true but also lie to themselves as well. Being wrong is not a measure of belief or lie, just being wrong as the facts don’t support the truth (or the other way around).   

Fig_02

Deep down, the liar and the true believer know that the truth they speak of are not true facts, at some level of awareness.  Deep down.  The instinctive cover up is to raise the volume, intensity, and assertion to cover the falsity subject to false attribution as true.  This is especially true when dealing with Virtues and Vices asserted or assigned.  When the volume goes up, they reverse.

I call it, the Law of the Inverse Attribution Reflex which just so happens to work out as an acronym. L.I.A.R.  The braggart brags of his own weakest virtue, and blames other with his own worst vices. 
Fig_03

The True Believer believes in the falsity, but subconsciously doubts.  The Liar knows he is lying.
 


Fig_04
Back in the Sixties, there was the Pam Am auto race from Canada to the Mexican border.  It was not about speed, but upon gas consumption which was touted in the ads for cars of the guzzling Sixties.  The virtue of those old cars was size, glamor and comfort, not safety. Today’s cars are hard to tell apart compared to the Sixties.


Fig_05

In the days before seat belts one could be belted through the windshield on collision.  And, steel cars were more easily reparable even if the driver wasn’t.

 


Fig_06

Then there were the cigarette ads that touted how low the tar in the lungs would be by smoking the Right Brand

 


Fig_07

   And clearly it was sexy. There was a style in how one smoked that would be a personal trade mark.

 


Fig_08

Now we know that gas guzzling and smoking are negative while the comfortable gas guzzler and the sexy smoker are positives.  Both are tweaked in the pitch.  Going out on a date to the drive in movies back then was as roomy as a motel room.  Then came air conditioned inside movie theaters and no foreplay room in the front nor rear. 

Now, as then, one can enhance one’s image and social impact with the display of socially significant toys, trinkets, clothes, big boobs, and hard abs.  In Los Angeles one is what one wears on the wrist and what one drives.  In San Francisco it is how, what and where one eats.  In New York it is what one wears, drinks, as well as how fast one seems to be.  In Texas and Chicago all serious business is done behind closed doors, where it belongs.  If you don’t know who or what, you don’t have the clearance to know.

And everywhere it is what comes out of one’s mouth that marks one’s turf. Sort of a dog walk and whiz.   

 

Fig_09

The dog knows what he is doing, and why.  That’s not always the case with us higher animals.

 


Fig_10

Who knows?

 

Fig_11

It helps to know what role the players are playing, plus the knowledge that the role will switch for a payoff.  Lucy gets a win which she wants, while Linus gets a dump which why he went for Lucy’s predictable switch with the football.

A knight and a murderer often use the same tactics, techniques and procedures so which color the other is doesn’t really alter the truth.  Which is why the Drama Triangle is really a circle.

 


Fig_12

The switch between victim, rescuer and prosecutor can be done in a single sentence, and in the current election especially so.  From the darker side of American demagoguery:

 


Fig_13

It boils down to what’s the tar and what’s so cool that it is hot.  The most impressive mix these days is the ad for the latest drug which pictures a picture of health while reading off a list of all the really sick stuff that could happen.  Music in the background.  The mind easily slides past cognitive dissonance without as much as a hiccup. 

 Cialis, and the four hours:


or “stifficade”


True Believers don’t lie just because they have up and down mixed up, it’s what they believe that separates them from Liars. Liars know which way is up, but they profit from calling it down. True Believers switch sides because the buzz or payoffs are greater, while the Liar lies when it is to his calculated advantage. It is hard to tell one from the other absent objective data of the subjects at hand.

Coca-Cola includes extracts from Coca leaves for cocaine, and Kola nuts for the caffeine. In 1903, the cocaine was removed from the Coca leaves for making Coca-Cola.  This goes to the everlasting snide commentary about “the Real Thing” that Coke has no coke in it anymore.  Coke was originally sold in drug stores then over drug store counters the last of which disappeared by the Sixties.

 
 

Fig_14

Taking the Coke out of Coke is about Power, not Truth.  The word “truth” when stressed with unnecessary trappings, wrappings, bells and whistles are fairly good lie indicators. 

 


Fig_15

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But it doesn’t cure getting out of the rut, grind, routine and dirty diapers. Or the in-laws.  

It takes no brains to see the link between the erection and vitality side to the core of biological survival. Feed and Breed, Paid and Laid, Dinner and a Date, Food and Family.  Decoding transactions (messages, propaganda, etc.) can be done with connecting the Tools, Rules, and Roles to Food and Family and back again: 
Fig_16

The Rules (Sociological) fall into two groups: Social Status and relations with the Physical World. The arm and hand signals work better than another damn acronym.


Sociological Rules
 
Fig_17

Smoking a sexy cigarette (body) in a sexy manner saves Face and hopefully Fame and maybe fortune which would be applied at the Biological level, which in turn delivers Fame as a successful breeder which enhances one’s Face and possibly fortune to buy a set of wheels to cover the Distance over the Ground in less Time.  Smoking while driving a sexy set of wheels was a definitive statement of savoir faire.

Fig_18

In drinking, driving and smoking were (are) at the core of the attractiveness of who gets bred.  The core of politics goes to the successful survival of the bred.  As in Family and the preservation of what was once called a “bloodline”.   The biological center of survival is the interaction of who controls the bloodline as coded in the DNA of the bred. 

The male and female sides of any given species, or part thereof, are addressed in two distinctive strategies.  The male seeks to control the bloodline by excluding any but him.  The female seeks to control the quality of the bloodline through selection of the right male.   A dominant theme in natural selection is competition between males for the female to select the winner.  An alternate (horses and lions) only one male gets to breed, the Stallion and the Simba while the lesser competitive lurk or wander. 
Fig_19

Biological survival of any given bloodline in humans is delicate compared to other animals by the dangers of in-breeding.  Consequently, and instinctively, the female seeks to enrich the bloodline of her part of the brood by adultery.  In response by the male bloodline is to kill the adulterous, as in stoning. If the male doesn’t suffice, another will.  Rape is the reverse of selective breeding by female selection, hence men comprise six sigma of all rapists.  And adultery is a necessary element in preventing in-breeding.  And arranged marriages relied more on issues the smitten could not. 

 

Fig_20

Even though arranged marriages are largely out of flavor today, save in certain sub-continents, the deep investment in who gets to swap whose genes for whom extends to issues other than gene swapping. It goes to deep sense of who “we” are from nuclear family to family of nations.  “They” are the enemy of the purity and essence of vital bodily fluids, so sayeth Sterling Hayden in the role of General Jack Ripper in the movie classic “Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”. 

Closing scene with Vera Lynn’s “We’ll meet again”, a truly beautiful song. Note the reference to breeding and a mine shaft gap:

 
Fig_21

In this movie, Sterling Hayden plays the role of a True Believer, albeit crazy.  He orders his B-52 Squadron to bomb Russia using a loop hole in the law.  Post this, and double-double checks were made in SAC.  His purpose was to leverage the Murderous side of protecting the Family in accordance with rules (Fate) to break the Body of the Soviets and make them lose Face and Fame. 

 


Fig_22

Elmer Gantry was a liar, Leon Trotsky was a True Believer.   Stalin had Trotsky murdered in Mexico City so much a threat he was to Stalin, a liar.

Gantry plays the (Battering Bastard) aka Murderous parent to cow those seeking a replacement for the Battering Daddy and Manipulative Mother (Bitch) as if disruptive (Brats).   This theme of replicating dysfunctional parenting is very much at the core of True Believer motives.  Themes such as these are found in ISIS, North Korea, and were fundamental in the Soviet Union, Red China under Mao, and Germany under Hitler.

War, however, is serious shit.


 

(to be continued)

Gordon S Fowkes