Donald Trump, Stormy Daniels, Kellyanne Conway & Bad Energy

With a sidebar discussing revelations concerning Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ

Did you hear the latest joke about Stormy Daniels? She’s starting a new site called sex-with-a-porn-star-dot-com. Terms are flexible. You can pay now, or you can — ahem… pay later.

The good and wise know that most things in life come with a price tag. Sex with a porn star isn’t free. If you don’t pay now, you’ll end up having to pay later. (Perhaps that’s a reason to avoid such liaisons.)

In his sci-fi novel Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein suggested that an honest politician is one who “stays bought.” Stormy Daniels is one of The Donald’s cronies from his bad boy days, his days as a chronic philanderer. And though she got paid $130,000 (which is a lot), she didn’t stay bought.

These people are sharks, the lot of them. I don’t mean to be unkind or judgmental, I’m just saying… This within the larger context that Donald Trump needs to be removed from office by constitutional means, because he’s a massive embarrassment to this great and good nation.

Yes, our democratic institutions are strong(ish), but we shouldn’t whistle past the graveyard and assume that they can withstand anything we might throw at them. Four (or more) years of Donald Trump may be one shock too many.

Yes, we are a rich nation, but that doesn’t mean we have the luxury of keeping an incompetent buffoon in office just because he provides daily excitement and good entertainment value. Government needs to work. When it doesn’t, people die — from needless wars, or because in this nation of plenty, no one could be bothered getting them the health care they needed to survive for one more day; no one could be bothered fixing the roads and bridges they needed to drive over in order to make it to work, and home again safely.

One way of looking at the problem of Donald Trump as president is that it’s a problem of bad energy. I want to be careful how I frame this. I believe in science in scientific matters, and in mathematics in matters mathematical. Based on my study and experience, I also believe there are deeper spiritual causes for many phenomena we encounter in life. For more about how scientific rationalism and spiritual idealism can coexist happily together, see this discussion of freedom of mind and freedom of heart.

The concept of “bad energy” is somewhat amorphous, but not entirely unfathomable. On a personal level, when you meet some people you get a certain feeling about them, that they are not quite right. This feeling is then borne out by experience: they lie, they cheat, they’re always getting into trouble; and while they may have a certain charm, personal magnetism, or vital energy which propels them forward, they are not good people. They appeal to the lowest drives in human nature, to greed, lust, and hatred. Their success (if any) has a cheap and gaudy quality. Measured against the long arc of history, their works are short-lived and shoddy. They do not do good works or build upon a solid foundation; rather, they do works which bring temporary notoriety but are apt to crumble and fall. That is Donald Trump to a T.

The concept of bad energy also applies to particular ventures. You don’t plan a picnic for a day when it’s supposed to rain buckets. The universe has subtle inner forces which are roughly akin to weather. In some cultures, an important undertaking is planned with the help of astrologers and priests, and a blessing is sought to invoke the higher forces of light, compassion, and wisdom.

The truly wise human being knows that he or she cannot do great and good things merely by dint of personal ambition. The wise try to act in concert with the higher forces and to receive their blessing before beginning any important undertaking.

The first day of a new venture — how it is launched — can tell you much about the energy behind it and how it will fare in the future. Donald Trump’s campaign for president began with a hateful attack on Mexican-Americans. (He called them rapists.) The PR event was launched with an “audience” consisting of paid actors meant to look like political supporters. As the venture began, so it continues. This is the type of president we now have — one whose presidency consists largely of stagecraft, and poor stagecraft at that.

When you get involved with people with bad energy who launch inauspicious ventures based solely on personal ambition, you find that things are constantly going wrong and you’re being forced to lower your standard just to accommodate them. A leader with bad energy attracts hirelings with bad energy: wife-beaters, compulsive gamblers, foreign agents committing treason and socking millions away in secret bank accounts; technophiles who steal people’s personal data and create psychographic profiles used to tailor propaganda to manipulate election results; crackpot militarists who want to bomb first and ask questions later; or PR people with legal training who lie as casually as a kitten scratches.

As I write, Kellyanne Conway is being considered for the position of Trump’s new Communications Director. Comparing one show business personality with another: In 2009, Stormy Daniels launched a mock campaign for U.S. Senate with the slogan “Screwing people honestly.” Kellyanne Conway’s slogan should be “Screwing people dishonestly” (with alternative facts). Both women are apparently for hire if the price is right, and the functions they perform are not substantially different. Both are gold diggers; they simply employ different digging apparatus. (Daniels ended her Senate bid around the same time she was booked by Tampa police on a domestic violence charge. She was held overnight, then released on $1,000 bail. The charge was later dropped.)

Kellyanne Conway appears on CNN in 2016, touting then candidate Donald Trump.

Like Trump himself, these Trump hangers-on are sharks. I say this not to demean them, but because when you have this type of sharklike behaviour connected with high office, you have to recognize it and root it out. Otherwise, the fish rots from the head, and our nation rots with it. The distasteful Madison Avenue concept of being “noseblind” finds its proper application here. With the daily stench coming from the White House, Americans are gradually becoming noseblind, but our allies not inured to this level of corruption are reeling from the stench. The solution is not to spray PR Febreze over the mess, but to do some genuine housecleaning.

To the extent that I’m at all political, I’m a liberal but not a knee-jerk liberal. I don’t automatically assume that anyone who goes up against Trump is an ally. This is a mistake some liberals are making about lawyer Michael Avenatti and his client Stormy Daniels. The latter are further specimens of carcharodon carcharias — opportunists nosing their way onto the media stage in order to grub for money and fame. Both Avenatti and Daniels already enjoy considerable money and fame, but what they share with Donald Trump is that they are insatiable and lack basic ethics. It’s all about the almighty dollar.

The fact that Trump and Daniels/Avenatti are of the same species doesn’t mean they won’t cannibalize each other. An unappetitlich fact about sharks is that even in the womb, the stronger embryos eat the weaker ones. Our nation is presently being dragged underwater, pulled down by the bad energy and sharklike behaviour of Trump and his cohort.

A short (transmogrified) clip from the Beatles film Yellow Submarine. Perhaps a metaphor for Washington politics, where strange creatures sometimes reach accommodations — or else gobble each other up.

Despite these harsh criticisms, I mean no ill-will to anyone. But our nation is presently in danger from an administration which is incompetent and corrupt, was brought into power by corrupt means, and is sustained by corrupt means, including the Fox News propaganda machine. We face the danger of totalitarianism. People with this type of bad energy often turn to totalitarianism as the most efficient means of ensuring their perpetual power, notoriety, and riches. In this respect, craziness for wealth and fame is turning us into a Bananas republic:

I come from an arts and spirituality background, and am not happy about devoting so much of my time to writing about politics. But as in the Vietnam era, people may need to speak up in order to encourage positive change. The present level of corruption in government is unacceptable, and leads to the general breakdown of society. We need to recognize that America is, at its core, a good nation and can do much good for its own people and for the world at large. But to be good and do good, America must resist the bad energy which has descended wholesale upon our capital, and is fed in secret by billions in dark money.

In his testimony before a British House of Commons committee, whistleblower Chris Wylie explained that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica (of which he is former research director) doesn’t have to turn a profit like a normal company because it’s subsidized by New York billionaire Robert Mercer. It can therefore act as a covert means of funneling huge contributions to political causes handpicked by Mercer, regardless of supposed limits set by law. This is a concrete example of dark money being used to rig elections, employing hi-tech means as well as the latest psychological theories about how to manipulate voters by getting inside their heads and playing to their fears, using personal data scraped from Facebook.

This is the brave new world in which we presently live, where thinking people are held hostage to a populist majority which reacts slavishly to psychological stimuli supplied by political operatives obsessed with kingmaking. It is an ugly world, and just as we have a duty to leave our children a clean environment, we also have a duty to apply an emissions test to our politicians, rejecting and removing those who cast an odiferous pall over our nation, or pollute the seas of discourse with the toxic sludge of “alternative facts.”

Stormy Daniels is not an opponent of Donald Trump in any meaningful sense; just another distasteful aspect of the Trump reality TV show. While the general public is crying out for photos, videos, and detailed descriptions of genitalia, the nation’s public institutions are being methodically ransacked, gutted, and primed for privatization. That is the main spectacle to which Stormy Daniels is only a sideshow.

I apologize for being so hard on those in power, but their energy is not good, and there is every indication that they will continue to stumble “from frustration-window to destruction-door.”

Michael Howard

The views expressed are my own, and do not represent any other person or organization.

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Sidebar: The Turing Test, the Voight-Kampff Test, and Brexit

Just this morning I got another phone call from a bot programmed to address me by my first name and try and strike up an initial conversation for telemarketing purposes. These bots are incredibly annoying, and my initial (un-Christian) impulse was that I’d like to kill it. But there’s probably a law against killing telemarketing bots, passed by lawmakers paid off by the telecom industry. 😉 It sounds like the plot for a story Asimov would have written. (Asimov’s Fifth Law of Robotics: No robot shall pretend to be from Microsoft Tech Support in order to scam innocent old people living on cat food.)

Another sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick, dealt extensively with the question of what constitutes genuine emotion. See his novel Do Andoids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later made into the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott.

What does all this have to do with Brexit and the main topic of this post? The connecting link is Cambridge Analytica, the firm apparently used to unfairly target voters with psychological manipulation during both the 2016 Brexit campaign in Britain, and the 2016 presidential campaign in the U.S. The investigations are ongoing and some of the facts remain murky, including the role of a Canadian company called AggregateIQ with supposed ties to Cambridge Analytica:

The larger question is: Suppose voters hadn’t been subjected to psychological manipulation, but had simply been given neutral facts. Would they still have voted to leave the European Union, or to make Donald Trump their president? Perhaps not.

At what point does political science become the science of psychologically manipulating the masses using lies, propaganda, fear, hatred, high technology, and stolen data?

When people have been subjected to extensive psychological manipulation, including a large quantity of false and hateful depictions (such as graphics which Cambridge Analytica takes credit for, showing Hillary Clinton in handcuffs), how genuine are the resulting emotions?

These are difficult questions since at the populist level, people are taught to treat their emotions as sacrosanct. If the motto of the intellectual was once “I think, therefore I am” the motto of the Facebook consumer may be “I feel it, therefore it must be true.” Yet, emotions can be manipulated. How can we judge their genuineness?

Democracy works best in an environment of openness and honesty. Too much money (especially dark money) is one universal surd in the political mathematic. The use of covert psychological manipulation employing hi-tech means is another significant threat. It remains to be seen whether democracy can survive the dual onslaught of billionaires funding covert psyops to shoe in their handpicked candidates.

It may be that the 2016 presidential election was the most corrupt in U.S. history. Payoffs and ballot-box stuffing are bad enough and perhaps common enough; but what seems most troubling here in retrospect is the hi-tech precision with which people’s emotions were targeted for psychological manipulation, using fake news spread via Facebook, Twitter bots, and the like.

It got so bad that after a fake news story claiming Hillary Clinton was behind a child pornography ring operating out of a pizzeria, one guy showed up there ready to shoot the place up. See the New York Times story “In Washington Pizzeria Attack, Fake News Brought Real Guns.” Also the Los Angeles Times: “Son of Trump’s incoming national security advisor pushes conspiracy theory targeting pizza parlor.”

It’s fairly common to find that politicians are shameless demagogues, but most of their demagoguery is usually out in the open, on display. The wise can see through it, and can perhaps guide the more foolish. But in 2016, so much was done covertly to influence voter sentiment, both by the Trump campaign and by Russian agents. It remains to be seen whether these two camps working toward similar ends using similar techniques engaged in a degree of cooperation which rises to the level of conspiracy.

If anyone needs a food-taster these days, it’s Bob Mueller! Bob, please stay away from doorknobs and park benches. Don’t follow leaders, and watch your parking meters!

Note: If you’d like to know more about the Turing Test and the Voight-Kampff test, try “Of Tortoises and Turing: Creating a Test for Humanity.”

I’ll close with this video from the UK’s Channel Four, as it may tie together some loose ends:

Links

“Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz” (2016)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/cambridge-analytica-facebook-quiz.html

“The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked” (2017)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy

“Cambridge Analytica execs boast of role in getting Donald Trump elected” (2018)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/20/cambridge-analytica-execs-boast-of-role-in-getting-trump-elected

“A Cambridge Analytica Whistle-blower Claims That ‘Cheating’ Swung the Brexit Vote” (2018)
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/a-cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-claims-that-cheating-swung-the-brexit-vote

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