@Wink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zV2_htGpV0

Teens Go NUTS Over Bernie’s Surprise Appearance At A Walkout Rally
The Rational National

Published on 15 Mar 2018

Teens went nuts over Bernie Sanders' surprise appearance at a National Walkout Rally.

What other politician actually supports protest demanding a public good, never mind the public good itself? What other politician promotes grassroot moves into politics and the taking back of government to be of, by and for the people. This is unheard of in America; Bernie is a first, last and only chance upon which the American people need to build.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/why-does-the-left-attack-itself-gener...

Caitlin Johnstone
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerilla poet. Utopia prepper.
Oct 17, 2017
Why Does The Left Attack Itself? Generations Of Government Psyops.

...Why does the left eat its own so aggressively and consistently when there’s every reason to look past small disagreements and collaborate toward shared goals? Why is it considered normal in leftist circles to try to destroy someone you used to support the second they express one opinion you find objectionable?

My theory is that, like so many other dynamics in western politics, the most overlooked and underappreciated factor in this phenomenon is propaganda and psyops.

As we’ve discussed many times before, there is nothing more threatening to America’s unelected power establishment than economic justice. The oligarchy exists because America has a system wherein money equals political power, and the oligarchs are therefore incentivized to try and keep all the money for themselves in order to maintain their rule. The socioeconomic equality that socialism and leftist ideology moves the needle toward poses the single greatest existential threat to this oligarchy.

Is it any wonder, then, that the intelligence community and law enforcement agencies which are built to protect the investments of these oligarchs has been up to its elbows in the psyches of Americans for generations, trying to manipulate them away from a large-scale movement to the left? ...

...These things have an effect. To deny that they have an effect would be to deny that advertising, a half-trillion dollar industry, has an effect. I’m not saying that there are no legitimate grievances at all between the various factions on the American political left, but I am saying that this nonstop sectarian vitriol is exactly what we’d expect to see in a population that has been deliberately manipulated into self-destructive neurotic impotence by generations of government psyops.

And it’s not like America has gotten less Orwellian since J Edgar Hoover. The sprawling surveillance networks in intelligence agencies like the NSA and the CIA have enabled the same political establishment that benefited from COINTELPRO to get even deeper into our minds, and there’s no reason to think that in-person tactics employed in COINTELPRO wouldn’t be employed digitally online. Indeed, there’s already plenty of evidence that this is happening extensively.

Again, I’m not trying to dismiss anyone’s personal grievances here. It’s just that sometimes the lefty infighting reminds me of a harem of sex slaves imprisoned in a basement, attacking each other instead of plotting an escape from their captor. We’ve become like an autoimmune disease, attacking the healthy cells instead of the pathogens. These manipulative sociopaths have been pummelling our psyches and emotions for decades, and in my opinion we should turn and face them, our real enemy.

about two years ago when it became abundantly clear that the Beltway and Party Establishment were out to fuck Bernie every which way they could and twice on Sunday just for good measure. Is why and how we see all the Bernie spinoff groups doing just that - ground up organizing.
Speaking of Bernie, did you see all the H.S. kids screaming like school girls for Bernie as they spotted him at one of their gun violence protest walk outs? Running - running - toward him when they saw him, girls screaming like the school girls they are! Guys hollering "Bernie!" I swear to the political gods I have NEVER never seen a reaction like that to Any candidate Ever! Maybe JFK, but I wasn't paying attention then. It was Beatlesesqe! Talkin' 1964 Beatles as they got off the plane! I was paying attention to that. Beatles on the Ed Sullivan stage! Bernie a rock god! And many of those kids vote in 2020.
But, nope. Bernie wrong on all the important issues, stabbed us all in the back, is totally irrelevant. Wait 'til you see that video. It showed once again that Bernie still the most popular politician on the planet. Goose bumps watching that! Not becuz it was Bernie. But becuz those kids are woke! Woke! And vote in 2020.

beating the Trumpster.
@Alligator Ed
Not a one.
I Do see Bernie - running as an Indy - beating the Trumpster. Like a drum. Bigly. Not even close.
But I doubt Bernie runs as an Indy. Hell, I doubt he runs at all, becuz he can't win as a Dem any more than he could two years ago. So it looks like four more years!
Better Trump than Pence.

When a party leader (NP) says "we don't need to change" after the most embarrassing political wipeout, since at least 1948 at least, she shows her complete understanding of electoral politics (s/). To her it and always will be who can raise the most money. Chuckles is in the same camp advising "hold steady to the course".

To them the success of the economy is not judged what happens to the population but by rewards to their rich donors.

Oxymoron ever since the term was created: "political science". It is not and never will be a science until MK Ultra is inflicted on the serfs. Much as the Mostly Shit Media tries to fool us, it ain't working. It is THE economy--the one that filters down to the 99%--not to billionaires and criminal government cronies. Being familiar with factor analysis in the overview, even apparently simple problems often yield complex factors which must be teased out of the generalities. Some will be prime factors, exerting effects independent of other variables. Other factors will be dependent on prime variables. Plus, there are interactions between prime variables mutually affecting each other.

How does one separate all the variables in a population of a city, let alone a state or nation? Are the selected variables actually what they seem to be, i.e., prime or dependent? Are all the variables known? How would one discover them? How is each variable weighted? Does such weighting use subjective terms, such as "perceived quality of life"--Compared to what or whom? Even objectively determinable variables may be identified, but how are they weighted?

Such calculations from their outset require underlying analyses--for instance static responses in a society. That's a real joke on the Dems after all the static that Killary generated.

Republicans stand for some really bad stuff, but they don't hide. The Demonrats stand for only one thing (besides greed): we're not Trump.

Fearless prediction, requiring two assumptions:
1. The stock market doesn't crash
2. Trump starts no new wars and/or hopefully diminishing/ending existing ones

= Trump wins in 2020.

Not only will donors desert the Dems, but even more meaningfully so too will the here-to-fore brainwashed establishment Dem remnant.

@Alligator Ed
they had not been asked rhetorically, there are various techniques of statistics, some of which go back over a hundred years, that allow one to make certain kinds of pronouncements and predictions about systems that have complex sets of variables such as you describe. these techniques are the underpinning of "machine learning", including everybody's new favorite buzz-phrase technological solution-to-everything, "deep learning". "Principle Components Analysis" (PCA), "Support Vector Machines" (SVMs), "Hidden Markov Models" (HMMs), "Recurrent Artificial Neural Networks" (RANNs), and so on: when you hear folks talking about "algorithms" for doing this, that, and the other, these mathematical tools are usually at the heart for those algorithms.

that said, collecting the kind of robust data required to train up such a system is a challenge. moreover, social scientists and psychologists have for many years been fond of analyses that rely on self-reported data founded on:
A. Counterfactual hypothetical situations that defy accurate self-reporting: "Who would you have voted for if Nader/Perot/Trump had not run?"
B. Inferring (and then asserting) a hard link between introspective musing and actual behavior: "Does blah blah make you more likely to vote for X?"
C. Poorly phrased questions that presume plasticity that may not exist, often in a well-meaning attempt to avoid the methodological error of herding respondents into a box that might exist mainly in the minds of the researchers. Again: "Does blah blah make you more likely to vote for X?", if interpreted with precision by the subject, would receive the answer "No" in 90% of circumstances, because for 90% of subjects/candidates, there is a likelihood of 0.0 or 1.0 that the subject will vote for that candidate, and nothing short of a "dead girl / live boy" scenario is going to move that likelihood. (Indeed, nothing can make someone "more likely" to do something when there is already a 1.0 likelihood that they are going to do that thing, nor "less likely" to do something when there is already a 0.0 likelihood ...)

Something interesting that these algorithms can do -- something most political scientists are not really going to like, when all is said and done -- is discover categories of individuals within the electorate that defy the preconceived models owned by the scientists, the psychologists, the politicians, the pundits, and the consultoriat. And here, "preconceived models" should be understood to rest as much on ideology as on anything else. Such algorithms often come within the compass of an approach known as "unsupervised learning". "Unsupervised" means that the system isn't told anything a priori about the classifications into which the subjects fall.

For example, consider a "supervised learning" system that attempted to predict whether an individual identified as "Republican", "Democrat", or "Independent". This system would be given boatloads of demographic information about each subject (income, racial/ethnic self-identification, education, zip code, occupation, faith, etc.), self-reported political information (perhaps something like the questions used to map folks onto that 2-dimensional social/economic libertarian/authoritarian political spectrum), as well as the all-important self-reported party affiliation. The researchers would then apply cool stuff like PCA in order to build a system that, given the data for any given individual, will correctly predict that individual's self-reported party affiliation.

There are at least two major methodological problems with such an approach. The simplest one is that it assumes that those three categories satisfactorily span the universe of voter party self-affiliation. This is fundamentally an error in ideology -- only people who have bought into the conventional duopolistic system would think that these three categories are sufficient. But ... how many options should respondents have? How many alternative parties do we include, before lumping everybody else, not with the "Independent" group, but into "Other"? And don't we need to have separate categories for people whose party affiliation is purely pragmatic, because they live in closed-primary states? Etc.

The more subtle methodological problem is that the analysis assumes that party affiliation is important. But what if it isn't? What if, for most people, predicting their party affiliation tells you little or nothing that you couldn't know without any reference to that affiliation -- or even worse, leads you to make erroneous predictions about those folks' likely response to any given political situation? This is, again, an ideological error, driven by one's buying in to the first principle of our current political establishment.

Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, would simply look for "clusters" of subjects -- people whose demographics and self-reported political views place them relatively closer to one another than to most of the other subjects. (In such a context, party affiliation might be simply one more input variable -- but probably a dangerous one, because it would tend to statistically overshadow more subtle relationships.) The resulting clusters would then themselves become the basis of deeper analysis.

Unsupervised learning is what systems like Netflix's recommendation system are based on. "You like movies A, B and C, and actors D, E, and F, but you hate movies P, Q and R, and actors X, Y, and Z? Well, here's movie M, which was highly rated by other people who like A, B, C, D, E and F, but hate P, Q, R, X, Y and Z".

In practice, the epistemological difference between supervised and unsupervised learning can be quite subtle. After all, the movie recommendation system I just described is learning to classify individuals as either "Will like M" or "Will NOT like M". One subtle difference, though, is that the system was not necessarily "trained" with any information about whether or not anyone does or does not like M. I haven't paid any attention to the current state of Netflix's system -- it got a lot of attention several years ago, when they held a contest for scientists to win a bunch of money by building a better one -- but my guess is that it doesn't need a whole lot of input variables: It could probably cluster people pretty damned accurately based on their 10 favorite actors, 10 favorite movies, and their relative rankings of maybe 20 movies that create a nice span of the universe. (Of course, since any individual might not have seen all of those movies, the system might need a working set of about 100 or so to present to the person.)

Unsupervised learning is not a magical solution to the methodological problems inherent in supervised learning. After all -- the analyst is still choosing which data to collect, and is still constrained by the problems of collecting that data with accuracy and precision. Nonetheless, if applied with some rigor and caution, UL can provide us with "out-of-the-box" interpretations of the population we are studying.

When a party leader (NP) says "we don't need to change" after the most embarrassing political wipeout, since at least 1948 at least, she shows her complete understanding of electoral politics (s/). To her it and always will be who can raise the most money. Chuckles is in the same camp advising "hold steady to the course".

To them the success of the economy is not judged what happens to the population but by rewards to their rich donors.

Oxymoron ever since the term was created: "political science". It is not and never will be a science until MK Ultra is inflicted on the serfs. Much as the Mostly Shit Media tries to fool us, it ain't working. It is THE economy--the one that filters down to the 99%--not to billionaires and criminal government cronies. Being familiar with factor analysis in the overview, even apparently simple problems often yield complex factors which must be teased out of the generalities. Some will be prime factors, exerting effects independent of other variables. Other factors will be dependent on prime variables. Plus, there are interactions between prime variables mutually affecting each other.

How does one separate all the variables in a population of a city, let alone a state or nation? Are the selected variables actually what they seem to be, i.e., prime or dependent? Are all the variables known? How would one discover them? How is each variable weighted? Does such weighting use subjective terms, such as "perceived quality of life"--Compared to what or whom? Even objectively determinable variables may be identified, but how are they weighted?

Such calculations from their outset require underlying analyses--for instance static responses in a society. That's a real joke on the Dems after all the static that Killary generated.

Republicans stand for some really bad stuff, but they don't hide. The Demonrats stand for only one thing (besides greed): we're not Trump.

Fearless prediction, requiring two assumptions:
1. The stock market doesn't crash
2. Trump starts no new wars and/or hopefully diminishing/ending existing ones

= Trump wins in 2020.

Not only will donors desert the Dems, but even more meaningfully so too will the here-to-fore brainwashed establishment Dem remnant.

@snoopydawg
has not crossed over to the consciousness of German Social Democrats or general population. So somehow the way to make your pov and facts clear isn't a success in as far as people outside the US would be able to be convinced of them or knew them or consider.

As unfortunate and sad this might be, but I think it's a fact.

and the Echo Chamber. Ahh, did we have fun with that or not?

This excuse is still being given for why Obama and the democrats could not pass the legislation that they wanted to. It was never their fault, it was always the republicans' obstructionisms blocking them from doing anything.

“In short, proponents of this view contend, Obama and the Democrats are mostly the victims of forces beyond their control.”

For Eight Long Years Obama played football with the republicans only to have them take their ball away at the last minute and go home.

Obama was like Charlie Brown to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner’s Lucy, constantly seeking to kick the football of bipartisan accord.

@UntimelyRippd
Obama did not just benefit from the energy of his supporters, he energized his haters, and by and large support must be earned and maintained, while hatred must simply be. Hatred can only grow, at least without herculean effort. That was when policy comes in. When Obama was running his supporters came out in droves, and not just his black supporters. But when he wasn't running he had to have accomplished something, otherwise his haters would still come out - and did - while his supporters had no energy. (nothing maintained the illusion) This was seen as Obama's failure - no, this was his genius. It allowed him to run, and be elected, on an illusion withut his actually having to maintain (live up to) that illusion. In fact, it allowed him to act counter to that illusion without consequences.
Obama won. Obama betrayed. The Democrats were punished for Obama's betrayal. (in fairness and their own) Obama (Obama's illusion) won again. Obama betrayed. The Democrats were punished. Obama cashed out. The Republicans took the blame for all the failures (well, not really, the Democrats may still lose and lose thanks to Obama's betrayals) that Obama orchestrated. (but really he doesn't care, he's cashed out) He played us.
This is the fallacy that con men live on. I have a friend who has fallen for that "free stuff" bullshit. But it's not quite bullshit. Obama did not give away "free stuff", he actually took away earned stuff, but his supporters believed that they were going to get free stuff from him, that just voting for him would magically create good things without any further effort. You cannot con an honest man, but you can also con a lazy, selfish man.

illustrating Barack Obama's absolutely fundamental failure to comprehend the key to his own success:

In a November 2010 post-midterm election interview aired on 60 Minutes, no less an eminence than presidential polymath Barack Obama echoed the key articles of the fundamentalist faith. “I think first and foremost [the midterm elections were] a referendum on the economy,” the president announced—and added for good measure that “the party in power was held responsible for an economy that is still underperforming.”

In reality, the November 2010 midterms can be understood perfectly well by the application of a very lightweight understanding of American electoral politics, and a reference to the actual data (which I'm not going to go seek out, but having investigated in the past, I will comfortably invoke):
A. Presidential elections enjoy a relatively high turnout, because they apply celebrity culture, elevating one representative of each party into something much more interesting than a mere candidate for political office. They receive far more media attention than mid-term elections, stoking the public fervor into a carnival atmosphere comparable to other such artificial seasonal manias, e.g. the Superbowl and the Oscars.
B. Bereft of celebrity context, Midterm elections are about politics and ideology. In other words, they are boring and irrelevant to a significant fraction of the citizenry, which is why turnout is so much lower.
C. Obama came to office with enormous coattails that carried a surge of Democrats into Congress.
D. Obama's victory depended, more than anyone left of Mitch McConnell wanted to admit, on enormous turnout of African American voters. Without Obama to vote for in 2010, those voters stayed home, with the entirely predictable outcome: Elections were determined by voters who were motivated by ideological hatred of Obama in particular and the Democrats in general.

Obama's refusal to accept this essential truth of his own electoral success -- that he was in fact elected, not in spite of his ancestry, but because of it, and that his continued political success depended on his willingness to go out and be the mobilizing factor in the 2010 midterms -- doomed his Presidency, doomed the Party, and may have doomed the whole damned country. (Of course, the alternative interpretation favored by many in these parts is that he simply had no interest in defending the 2008 Democratic gains, as Democratic electoral success would have left him and the Democrat elites without excuses for their ongoing failure to pursue and enact policies that serve the people, rather than the donors.)

@Pluto's Republic to be almost a script. No matter which party is in power there is a common agenda to both parties flying under the propaganda. Policy forwarded either by directed action, or directed inaction on each piece of legislation towards a common goal. The rest is window dressing and cover for the benefit of us rubes.

I have never bought into so many different perspectives, so completely, in so little time. I feel a little like a political slut.

But seriously, everyone is championing a different component (or set of components) for meta-level predictive analysis, and making a fairly inspired case for it. We wouldn't have seen this here two years ago. It's an evolution. After a great deal of practice and shared experience, many musicians with different instruments have become a symphony that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

I read the work product of quite a few think tanks. This is a think tank.

Of course, I have a comment regarding the the topic introduced by Meteor Man. What's in play here is identifying the key variable that will successfully predict federal election outcomes. The essay cites an opinion that proposes "the economy" as that component (or component set) that explains how Americans will inevitably vote, policies and issues aside.

That sounds cynical, of course. I follow an academic who presents 13 true/false variables, and it still sounds cynical and sterile. But it has long been my opinion, based on evidence, that this method is more accurate than human polling and data handling.

Big al calls the samplings and number crunching "elite bullshit" — "predicting how voters will respond to this or that, how they will vote, and zero focus on what the fucking citizens of this country want and need."

There is no denying it. That process is bullshit, but it is something more. It is participatory propaganda.

I think it is important to note that most of the Anglo nations and the US vassal states in Europe, including Germany and France, are experiencing these same experiences and having the same discussions about their elite. And that's no coincidence, especially in relation to Russia. We,re involved in an effort that has been going on for a very long time. "The Narrative." It has taken 70 years of hard work to convince the French, for example, that World War II was won by the Americans and not by the Russians. Only in the past decade has the majority in France finally succumbed to the Narrative.

This was accomplished by the work of three generations of 3000 members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Their steady goal since 1919 has been to position the US to Rule over the World. In that time, they became part of the State Department. They determine US wars and pick heads for the Intelligence agencies and Defense Department for the President. They select US Presidents from their Membership rosters. They follow the Narrative. That's why US leaders never speak of a plan or vision for the future — they denounce making plans as communism — and the people don't know where they are going.

I bring this up only to point out another variable that should be considered when predicting the outcome of federal elections.

______________________________________________________________
* Another Think Tank Weighs in: Center for Strategic Studies, Switzerland. Strategic Trends, 2017