Posted April 18th, 2017 @ 11:32am in #Trump #taxes
In January of this year, President Trump’s critics were marching in the streets because they believed he was about to go full-Hitler. Or maybe he was just crazy, and about to do something dangerously stupid.
Today their biggest complaint is that President Trump hasn’t shared his tax returns with the public.
How’s everything else looking?
0 CommentsPosted April 17th, 2017 @ 6:06am in #Trump #North Korea
One of the most useful things I learned in business school was that you can usually make a deal whenever the parties involved don’t want full control of the same limited resources. That’s why a peace deal in Israel is impossible – because both sides want the same land. But that’s a rare situation (fortunately).
The more normal situation is the one we see with North Korea and the United States. The United States doesn’t want the same limited resource that North Korea wants. And China has their own interests. That kind of situation almost always means you can reach a deal if you look hard enough.
0 CommentsPosted April 14th, 2017 @ 9:37am in #Trump #Twitter #shadowban
Earlier this week, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey contacted me to discuss my ongoing public observations that Twitter appears to be “shadowbanning” me because of my writings about Trump. Jack introduced me via Direct Message to Del Harvey, Twitter’s Head of Trust & Safety, for the official answer.
The official answer is that no one, including me, is shadowbanned on Twitter. It has never happened.
0 CommentsPosted April 13th, 2017 @ 8:15am in #Trump #Putin
Everyone is saying the relationship between the United States and Russia is really, really bad right now. President Trump says it is bad. Russia agrees. All the pundits agree too.
So it must be true, right?
In the 2nd dimension – where things are just the way they look – it does seem that the U.S. and Russia are in a bad place with each other. The United States attacked Russia’s little buddy, Assad, for allegedly using chemical weapons. But Russia says Assad didn’t use chemical weapons. Now Russia is mad at the United States.
Maybe the situation is exactly what I just described.
But just for fun, let’s hop up to the 3rd dimension (of persuasion) and see what the view looks like.
Hopping up now. Looking around…
0 CommentsPosted April 12th, 2017 @ 11:59am in #North Korea #China #Trump #potus
Prior U.S. presidents framed the North Korean nuclear program as a problem between the United States and North Korea, with China as an unhelpful third party with its own interests. That framing was weak and useless. North Korea did whatever it wanted to do.
President Trump recently changed the frame. Now it’s not so much a problem between the United States and North Korea as it is a branding battle between China and the U.S., with North Korea being the less-important part of the equation. President Trump has said clearly and repeatedly that if China doesn’t fix the problem in its own backyard, the USA will step in to do what China couldn’t get done.
See the power in that framing? China doesn’t want a weak “brand.”
0 CommentsPosted April 10th, 2017 @ 11:23am in #syriahoax #Syria #Trump #POTUS #ISIS
President Trump’s critics and supporters agree on one thing: Our new president has a history of “stretching” the truth whenever there is some advantage in doing so, and sometimes even when there is not. You might say he is famous for playing loose with the facts. We all expect a high degree of “hyperbole” from President Trump, to put it kindly. He gets away with it because barely-enough Americans believe his intentions are in line with America’s best interests.
The odd exception to our universal understanding of President Trump’s mode of operation is his claim that he is totally certain Assad was responsible for the chemical attack on his own people last week. The President’s critics and most of his supporters believe President Trump when he suggests that our military can track any plane in Syria and know what that plane did to whom.
Do you believe that?
0 CommentsPosted April 7th, 2017 @ 8:32am in #syria #Trump
As I blogged yesterday, the claim that Assad ordered a chemical attack on his own people in the past week doesn’t pass my sniff test. For Assad to order a gas attack now – while his side is finally winning – he would have to be willing to risk his life and his regime for no real military advantage. I’m not buying that.
But let’s say the world believes Assad or a rogue general under his command gassed his own people. What’s an American President to do? If Trump does nothing, he appears weak, and it invites mischief from other countries. But if he launches 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian military air base base within a few days, which he did, the U.S. gets several benefits at low cost:
0 CommentsPosted April 6th, 2017 @ 9:07am in #Trump #POTUS #Syria #war crimes #Assad
According to the mainstream media – that has been wrong about almost everything for a solid 18 months in a row – the Syrian government allegedly bombed its own people with a nerve agent.
The reason the Assad government would bomb its own people with a nerve agent right now is obvious. Syrian President Assad – who has been fighting for his life for several years, and is only lately feeling safer – suddenly decided to commit suicide-by-Trump. Because the best way to make that happen is to commit a war crime against your own people in exactly the way that would force President Trump to respond or else suffer humiliation at the hands of the mainstream media.
0 CommentsPosted March 29th, 2017 @ 8:39am in #healthcare #Trump
Was President Trump’s first attempt at getting a healthcare bill a failure?
Your answer to that question probably depends on whether you are a goals-thinker or a systems-thinker.
If you see the world in terms of goals, you would say the healthcare bill did not get enough votes on the first try, and therefore it is clearly a Trump/Ryan failure.
But if you see the world in terms of systems, things look a lot better. I talk about the advantages of systems over goals in my book. The quick summary is that a system is something you do on a regular basis that improves your odds of success in a non-specific way. Systems-thinkers choose paths that allow them to come out ahead in the long run even if they appear to be “failing” along the way.
0 CommentsPosted March 16th, 2017 @ 9:12am in #leak #Trump
After the hilarious Rachel Maddow face-plant on live television, with her scoop on President Trump’s 2005 taxes – all two pages of it – the big question in the news today is about who leaked it.
The worst punditry you will see on this question is coming from the people who say Trump couldn’t have leaked it himself because he wouldn’t leak it to a guy who has been his critic for many years.
What????
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