I Give Trump 3 Months

Before an assassination attempt, successful or otherwise.

He's running a narrative that is the very opposite to the one the intelligence agencies are trying to push.

"The Russians hacked the election!" is being shouted by the CIA and others, yet "It didn't impact the election result!" they say.

Now excuse me for being a bit dumb, but IF the election was hacked, IF it didn't cause a problem, why is it such a big deal?

Now, is this a ploy to piss off the half of the US population that didn't vote for Trump? Is this a ploy to de-legitemise him?

As far as I can tell, the Russian hacking amounted to breaking into the Democrat's poorly secured computers and passing the information to Wikileaks. Hardly the crime of the century or an attempt to destabilise a country. In fact its almost the sort of thing that journalists should be doing, if they were true journalists. The exposure of yet more high-level emails on unsecured servers just shows how poor the Democrats view net security.

I thought it was a felony in the US to have top security documents on unsecured servers or to export them from high security servers to low security ones.

I remember my time working for big finance companies. Cyber security was taken extremely seriously.
The data centres were like Fort Knox, with x-ray scans of baggage and metal detectors for the human traffic, lest you secrete a memory stick on your person.

Emails were only sent internally and to vetted addresses whose network was confirmed as secure as the home network in advance. Emails transferred between networks were always encrypted by a secondary encryption system.

Now that's just a financial company. For feck's sake, this is government traffic we're talking about in the US. Something that should NEVER be on servers less secure than the source.

Anyway, I'll stop digressing. The CIA "briefings" for me are pretty strange. Either they affected the election result and are actionable, or they didn't and aren't. A handful of Russian teenagers hacking into Democrat email servers is not a reason to go to war. The intelligence agencies are not chumps and they don't like being made to look fools. Okay, this time they sort of did it to themselves, but still...

Obviously there's a bit of disagreement between Trump and the intelligence agencies. If I were him, I'd watch out. If just one anti-Trump person is incensed enough to take a pot shot then the intelligence agencies have the smokescreen they need to cover any attempt to get rid of Trump and impose a replacement. Better look into who the vice-president is a bit closer  then....

The Brexit plan in less than 15 seconds.

1. Prepare for the end game of being completely out and trading under WTO rules.

2. Spend 2 years negotiating better access and terms at no extra cost to us and with Referendum promises intact..

3. If regotiations fail to deliver 2. fall back to option1.

That. Is. It.

I still can't understand all the endless hours of TV coverage, with numerous talking heads espousing opinions.

All the clamour for a plan from the government. The plan is: plan for the worst, negotiate a better option.

That's what negotiations are all about. it's the same as trading: you negotiate to buy at a low price, without revealing to the seller how high you are willing to buy, how much you are willing to spend. You then negotiate to sell without revealing how low you would sell at. It's something you don't reveal in advance. Ever.

It's called maximising profit, leverage, commercial advantage.

Something those MPs in Parliament baying to be told the plan have no clue about.

Hence the apallingly poor deals we've had on PPI, Defence, Health, and virtually any other contract the government have negotiated.

Post-Truth... Post-Expert??

There was an interesting debate on Radio 4 this morning between Michael Gove and Stephanie Flanders on the role of experts in determining policy, reporting on trends and generally advising on all things.

The problem with so-called "expert opinion" is it's just that: an opinion. However, if that opinion suits a media agenda is is jumped upon and reiterated as fact ad nauseum. Despite a mandate for fairness, the BBC are one of the worst culprits, offering no counter argument to whatever claim they are making.But they are no worse than Sky, Fox, CNN, RT or any other news channel.

Doing this is essentially biased reporting and at worst no better than propaganda.

I've watched TV news since I was a kid and the most startling change in my lifetime is the introduction of news processed as drama and the increase of biased viewpoints. Way back when, news was factual with very little overt bias. Any bias was easily identified by an opposing viewpoint and a reasoned brain filtering the outlandish claims from the facts.

I've already noted the issue with Brexit: because the BBC are biased against Brexit (and I suppose their fat subsidies from the EU) they report everything bad as "because of Brexit" and anything good as "despite Brexit". So much so I see Guido has started a #DespiteBrexit hashtag on his website. So called experts are wheeled in front of cameras and microphones to decry leave voters, to prophesy doom and gloom, to the exclusion of the opposing viewpoint. Well, only to expose people with an opposite viewpoint as loonies, cranks or people not to be taken seriously.

The other problem for "experts" is their dire warnings of doom don't occur. Which is what happens with opinions and theories. They are a viewpoint, they are extrapolations of what MAY happen in the future.

Their opinions and theories have no more weight than any other but are touted as absolute truth..

The same goes for any other. Global warming is gospel according to the BBC, the science is settled, with absolutely no physical evidence. It's all heresay, statistical, with no proven mechanism, no proof that increased CO2 drives global warming, let alone man made CO2 is the main influence. It could be that the globe warming is a totally natural process and the increase of CO2 is driven by the warming rather than the other way round. But no science is being done to prove that hypothesis, there's no money in it. Science is very much made to fit the model. You'll never hear that viewpoint taken seriously on any mainstream media.

The phrase post-truth has emerged this year to describe the rise of populism, the rejection of the elitist version of reality reported to us as absolute truth. It's supposed to be an unhealthy thing. But it's plain that the media and elites are just as bad at offering lies as truth.

Getting back to the point, the problem isn't "experts" per se, it's the media's attempt to process opinion as fact, theories as proof, without opposition. Telling us what we should believe, rather than reporting both sides of the story and allowing us to weigh either side of the argument and divine the truth for ourselves.