Gibney’s “A Generation of Sociopaths” apparently has now hit paperback.
I haven’t read it, but from the interview I heard with him, I might agree with his observations, definitely disagree with part of his diagnosis, and almost certainly disagree with his prescription entirely.
It appears that an appeals court has struck down the fiduciary rule https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/03/15/dol-fiduciary-rule-struck-down-by-appeals-court/?slreturn=20180216224856 (5th cirucit). All the new rule should require that every piece of advice be delivered with the caveat that the advice is not necessarily in the investors best interest, and the advisors be renamed salepeople not advisors as their goal is to sell things, what makes them the most commission not what is good for the company.
Heavily partisan politics is showing the internal abuse, malfeasance and misfeasance of the past administration. Before, partisan investigations were suppressed, because it could always be turned a against the investigating administration. Only in the worst of administrations has investigations USUALLY been practiced after power loss.
It’s still too early to determine how bad (what level of WORST) was the Obama administration. Early indications are that it will at least make the list, at least for abuse of powers.
Andrew McCabe fired before he can collect his pension. The administrative fight should take years and add another layer of discovered “bad actions” and abuse of power.
if only the same action was still possible for Lois Lerner Eric Holder and several other agenda driven Obama administration power abusers officials.
The covers are slowly being removed from the past administration, and other investigations will follow.
The only hope for several of the Obama officials is that Democrats win the House.
“Brains have two kinds of attention. The first, called “top-down” or decision-making attention, is what you use when you decide to focus on a stimulus or task (such as this article). Top-down attention is controlled by the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Second, we employ “bottom-up” or surprise attention when we quickly shift our focus onto an unexpected stimulus, such as a ringing phone. This is a more primitive response system controlled in areas of the brain called the sensory cortices.
Magicians trick you by occupying both forms of your attention. Left with no others, you’re completely and hopelessly distracted from their sleights-of-hand.
In “Brain Games,” a sleight-of-hand artist named Apollo Robbins, who once made headlines by pick-pocketing Secret Service agents who were accompanying former President Jimmy Carter, says, “Distracting people can be quite simple.” [Why We Zone Out ]
Robbins employs “top-down distractions” by getting people to focus either on a conversation or on his actions. By being entertaining or just confusing he demands their attention. Meanwhile, on the side, he quietly removes their watches or scarves. “If I need to steal from a difficult spot, I like to use a ‘bottom-up’ attention strategy to direct the focus,” Robbins says. Clapping loudly, a sudden movement, or in an example demonstrated in the show, waving a spoon in the air, are all examples of such strategies.
You might think that you, unlike most other people, wouldn’t fall for such simple strategies, because you’re a multitasker you can pay close attention to several things at once. However, according to experts, multitasking is an illusion.
“Realistically, we can only process one thing at a time. We’re effectively ‘serial processors,'” says David Strayer, a psychologist who conducts research on attention at the University of Utah. “When we try and multitask, we’re just switching from one activity to another.”
Nice that someone can figure out who the bad guys are.
“What we should be worrying about instead is the remarkable staying power of the American voters who put these guys in office. They’re in for the long game no matter the fate of the current administration. Trumpism predates Trump and Pence by decades and is a more powerful, enduring, and scary force than either of them. Trump learned this himself the hard way when Alabama Republicans voting in the Senate primary this fall chose the more Trumpist candidate, the gun-totin’ crackpot bigot and alleged sexual predator Roy Moore, over Mitch McConnell’s candidate, the garden-variety right-winger Trump had impulsively and mistakenly endorsed. The toxic anger that defines Trumpism — a rage at America’s cultural and economic elites in both political parties as well as at minorities and immigrants — will only grow darker and fiercer once its namesake leaves office, no matter how he does so. If Trump departs involuntarily, his followers will elevate him to martyrdom as the victim of a coup perpetrated by the scoundrels of “fake news” and “the swamp.” If Trump serves one or two full terms, his base will still be livid because he will not have bestowed the lavish gifts he promised, from a Rust Belt manufacturing comeback to a border wall. His voters won’t pin these failures on Trump but on the same swamp creatures they’ll hold responsible if he’s run out of office. They’re already blaming the cratering of “repeal and replace” and other broken Trump promises on what Bannon and his allies call “the McConnell-industrial complex.”
Right-wing nationalist populism is nothing new in America; the genealogical lines of Trump and his immediate antecedents, Sarah Palin and the tea party, trace back at least to the later years of the Great Depression, when the demagogic and anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin turned against the New Deal and vilified Jewish “money changers” masterminding an international conspiracy to plunder his working-class flock. The movement was rebooted with a vengeance once the civil-rights revolution took hold in the 1960s: The term “backlash” grew out of the economic columnist Eliot Janeway’s 1963 observation that white blue-collar workers might “lash back” at new black competitors entering a contracting job market. That anger coursed through the quixotic presidential campaigns of the onetime Nixon aide Pat Buchanan from 1992 to 2000, through Ross Perot’s in 1992, and, most especially, through the four presidential runs of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace between 1964 and 1976.
What these campaigns had in common besides a similar core of grievances is that the candidates failed to win national elections. And they lost no matter what banner they ran under; like Trump, they and their voters variously identified as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. But Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016, claiming the Oval Office for unabashedly nationalist right-wing populism, changed history’s trajectory. His capture of the presidency and a major political party makes it highly unlikely that his adherents will now follow the pattern of their dejected forebears, who retreated to lick their wounds and regroup in the shadows after their electoral defeats.”
Gibney’s “A Generation of Sociopaths” apparently has now hit paperback.
I haven’t read it, but from the interview I heard with him, I might agree with his observations, definitely disagree with part of his diagnosis, and almost certainly disagree with his prescription entirely.
It appears that an appeals court has struck down the fiduciary rule https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2018/03/15/dol-fiduciary-rule-struck-down-by-appeals-court/?slreturn=20180216224856 (5th cirucit). All the new rule should require that every piece of advice be delivered with the caveat that the advice is not necessarily in the investors best interest, and the advisors be renamed salepeople not advisors as their goal is to sell things, what makes them the most commission not what is good for the company.
“The Fifth Circuit’s opinion was released in the same week as a Tenth Circuit decision, which upheld the rule, resulting in a circuit split.”
https://onlabor.org/todays-news-commentary-march-16-2018/
Heavily partisan politics is showing the internal abuse, malfeasance and misfeasance of the past administration. Before, partisan investigations were suppressed, because it could always be turned a against the investigating administration. Only in the worst of administrations has investigations USUALLY been practiced after power loss.
It’s still too early to determine how bad (what level of WORST) was the Obama administration. Early indications are that it will at least make the list, at least for abuse of powers.
Andrew McCabe fired before he can collect his pension. The administrative fight should take years and add another layer of discovered “bad actions” and abuse of power.
if only the same action was still possible for Lois Lerner Eric Holder and several other agenda driven Obama administration power abusers officials.
The covers are slowly being removed from the past administration, and other investigations will follow.
The only hope for several of the Obama officials is that Democrats win the House.
“Brains have two kinds of attention. The first, called “top-down” or decision-making attention, is what you use when you decide to focus on a stimulus or task (such as this article). Top-down attention is controlled by the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. Second, we employ “bottom-up” or surprise attention when we quickly shift our focus onto an unexpected stimulus, such as a ringing phone. This is a more primitive response system controlled in areas of the brain called the sensory cortices.
Magicians trick you by occupying both forms of your attention. Left with no others, you’re completely and hopelessly distracted from their sleights-of-hand.
In “Brain Games,” a sleight-of-hand artist named Apollo Robbins, who once made headlines by pick-pocketing Secret Service agents who were accompanying former President Jimmy Carter, says, “Distracting people can be quite simple.” [Why We Zone Out ]
Robbins employs “top-down distractions” by getting people to focus either on a conversation or on his actions. By being entertaining or just confusing he demands their attention. Meanwhile, on the side, he quietly removes their watches or scarves. “If I need to steal from a difficult spot, I like to use a ‘bottom-up’ attention strategy to direct the focus,” Robbins says. Clapping loudly, a sudden movement, or in an example demonstrated in the show, waving a spoon in the air, are all examples of such strategies.
You might think that you, unlike most other people, wouldn’t fall for such simple strategies, because you’re a multitasker you can pay close attention to several things at once. However, according to experts, multitasking is an illusion.
“Realistically, we can only process one thing at a time. We’re effectively ‘serial processors,'” says David Strayer, a psychologist who conducts research on attention at the University of Utah. “When we try and multitask, we’re just switching from one activity to another.”
https://www.livescience.com/33543-sleight-of-hand-magicians-brains.html
Good read.
Nice that someone can figure out who the bad guys are.
“What we should be worrying about instead is the remarkable staying power of the American voters who put these guys in office. They’re in for the long game no matter the fate of the current administration. Trumpism predates Trump and Pence by decades and is a more powerful, enduring, and scary force than either of them. Trump learned this himself the hard way when Alabama Republicans voting in the Senate primary this fall chose the more Trumpist candidate, the gun-totin’ crackpot bigot and alleged sexual predator Roy Moore, over Mitch McConnell’s candidate, the garden-variety right-winger Trump had impulsively and mistakenly endorsed. The toxic anger that defines Trumpism — a rage at America’s cultural and economic elites in both political parties as well as at minorities and immigrants — will only grow darker and fiercer once its namesake leaves office, no matter how he does so. If Trump departs involuntarily, his followers will elevate him to martyrdom as the victim of a coup perpetrated by the scoundrels of “fake news” and “the swamp.” If Trump serves one or two full terms, his base will still be livid because he will not have bestowed the lavish gifts he promised, from a Rust Belt manufacturing comeback to a border wall. His voters won’t pin these failures on Trump but on the same swamp creatures they’ll hold responsible if he’s run out of office. They’re already blaming the cratering of “repeal and replace” and other broken Trump promises on what Bannon and his allies call “the McConnell-industrial complex.”
Right-wing nationalist populism is nothing new in America; the genealogical lines of Trump and his immediate antecedents, Sarah Palin and the tea party, trace back at least to the later years of the Great Depression, when the demagogic and anti-Semitic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin turned against the New Deal and vilified Jewish “money changers” masterminding an international conspiracy to plunder his working-class flock. The movement was rebooted with a vengeance once the civil-rights revolution took hold in the 1960s: The term “backlash” grew out of the economic columnist Eliot Janeway’s 1963 observation that white blue-collar workers might “lash back” at new black competitors entering a contracting job market. That anger coursed through the quixotic presidential campaigns of the onetime Nixon aide Pat Buchanan from 1992 to 2000, through Ross Perot’s in 1992, and, most especially, through the four presidential runs of the segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace between 1964 and 1976.
What these campaigns had in common besides a similar core of grievances is that the candidates failed to win national elections. And they lost no matter what banner they ran under; like Trump, they and their voters variously identified as Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. But Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016, claiming the Oval Office for unabashedly nationalist right-wing populism, changed history’s trajectory. His capture of the presidency and a major political party makes it highly unlikely that his adherents will now follow the pattern of their dejected forebears, who retreated to lick their wounds and regroup in the shadows after their electoral defeats.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/frank-rich-trumpism-after-trump.html
The picture(s) that lead the story is worth more than a thousand words.