Diversity Implies Bigotry

The highest virtue in the modern left is an unwavering support for Diversity. If you asked your typical social justice warrior what diversity means they'd respond with some platitude such as, "Diversity is the celebration, tolerance, and promotions of a society enriched with people from a large variety of backgrounds." However in practice Diversity means two things:

1. It is an identity categorization of people based on their identity. Ethnicity, gender, and sexuality are the only considered factors. Diversity demands we judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
2. It means fewer white people, fewer men, fewer straight people. Diversity is effectively the open prejudice against straight white men.

Diversity is always about identity politics. The left isn't pushing for diversity of thought. 90% of the media vote Democrat. In some academic fields 80% self-identify as liberal, with most of the rest calling themselves moderates. Almost no in in fields like social psychology are conservative, and there are plenty of testimonies of conservative professors pushed out of their institutions. The closest we they might come to calling for diversity of ideas is for religious beliefs, but even then liberals view Jews and Muslims as racial groups..

That Diversity means fewer white people is self-evident. The amount of sneering I hear from liberals when they say "white male" like it's an insult is truly astonishing. Even here in southwest Missouri! The group that calls for equality of the genders and races does not hesitate to insult white men for their identities. And in practice the liberal programs such as Affirmative Action always penalize white men. Strangely, they also penalize East Asians, though they don't like to talk about that. East Asians are highly intelligent, productive, and adapt to their host cultures. So the left treat them like white people. They can drop identity politics if they are absolutely forced to.

The title of this piece is Diversity Implies Bigotry. You might make the counter argument that you can't use the leftist use of the word diversity (which I have been typing as Diversity to reflect the sacredness they reserve for the word) and you would be correct. Liberals' use of the word is both superficial, and contorted to fit their leftist objective: that successful groups are punished and the underperforming are rewarded. It's socialism. But I would still posit that real diversity, racial,cultural, etc, still requires what they would call bigotry, which is really just discrimination. 

The left thinks diversity means mixing everyone together. The right thinks diversity means keeping people separate. When we all blend in a melting pot, no one is unique. There is no cultural enrichment when everyone is the same culture. This applies genetically as well. The liberal obsession with racial interbreeding (reports from the right in England is that a great number date across ethnic lines just to show how non-racist they are) just means that ethnic variations will be smoothed out. That isn't diversity at all. Take the example of red heads. Their phenotype is very recessive. If they interbreed with dark-skinned people, red heads will virtually disappear from the earth. Is that diversity? Of course not. Diversity should be maintained! But for that to happen, red heads must pledge to breed with their own. They must effectively say to people, "I'm sorry I cannot breed with you because of your genetics if I want to preserve genetic diversity." And that, the left would say, is hateful bigoted racism.

As we see the left's posture on diversity and bigotry is completely self-contradictory, and should be completely ignored by rational people.

Hillary Promotes the Alt-Right

Hillary Clinton just committed what might be the greatest blunder of this election cycle, and this has been one with some doozies. There was Trump's "bleeding out of her whatever" comment, and Jeb meekly asking his audience for applause, and Sanders' truly bizarre strategy of endorsing Clinton but remaining in the primary race.

Yesterday Clinton gave her speech on the alt-right. While most people have probably not heard the term, the alt-right is a reactionary movement against modern liberalism. Most significantly, the alt-right is opposed to multiculturalism and globalism. While fairly obscure, the alt-right has had explosive growth in the last year. I've been frequenting alt-right sites for maybe the past 8 or 9 months.

Part of the alt-right's growth has been natural. The same anti-establishment sentiments that drove Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, and the Bernie Sanders campaign are also fueling the nationalist right. Current events have given even more wind to their sails. The immigration crisis in Europe has people flocking to the right-wing parties there, and in the US the liberal support for radical leftist groups like BLM is having a similar effect.

The other part has been intentional and strategic. If you look at different players associated with the alt-right, Trump, Milo Yiannopoulos, Brexit, and r/the_donald (now Reddit's second most active community) there is a consistent 2-part strategy:

1. Trigger liberals to generate exposure
2. Shift the Overton window to the right

Triggering liberals has become the specialty of the alt-right. When they trigger liberal institutions such as the media, they are basically hijacking those institutions for their own benefit. Milo has nearly perfected the craft. Being banned from Twitter, despite not saying anything worse really than calling a girl ugly, has helped him break out into mainstream exposure. Trump also is a master of this. The best example that comes to mind, and there are many, was when he said of the judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit, "and he's a Mexican." The media jumped on it as a careless blunder. I believe he had picked the phrase out ahead of time. I guarantee he knew all the background on this judge. He knew prying would show the judge's association with Mexican racialist organizations and affinity for illegal immigrants. He also knew the phrasing would trigger the hell out of liberals, but still give him plausible deniability and ultimately vindication. And of course it did enrage the left. Because the phrasing feels racist. And so, they embarked on another rabid witch hunt, which ultimately did nothing but keep Trump front-and-center for like a whole week. It's ironic, really, they are utterly convinced that Trump's popularity has been base appeal to emotion to conservatives. And yet, if he couldn't so consistently trigger their emotions he probably never would have generated the buzz to knock off Jeb and the rest in the primaries. They'so so incensed by the emotional right backing Trump that their own emotional responses are what actually fuel his campaign. I can't think of anything more ironic than that. 

You won't have to hang out around the alt-right very long to learn about the Overton window, which is just the range of discussion permissible in the mainstream. The goal of the alt-right is to always push the Overton window to the right. Think about this: a year ago there could have been a conversation about building a wall at the US southern border. Trump has single-handedly pushed that topic into the Overton window, as well as the suggestion of banning Muslims from immigration. It's interesting that shifting the window is a victory in itself. So if Trump gets the US talking about the wall and it never gets built, well he's still had some success. The alt-right know that they have a superior ideology and that their biggest enemy is censorship. If they can just shift the Overton window, then converts to the right will be inevitable.

Which brings us back to Hillary's speech.

In what was either a desperate play to take heat off the growing coverage of the Clinton Foundation scandals, or sheer ignorance, her campaign decided it would be a good idea to dedicate an entire rally -- and she doesn't do very many -- to the alt right. The speech was a combination of "Trump is a racist" and "look how eeeevil the alt-right is!" To the first case: yawn. This was also the primary argument of the Brexit remain camp (hint: they lost). Towards the end of the speech, the only part I caught live, she was making reference to black and white teammates in the Olympics, and how it proves America needs everyone for greatness, or something like that. As if Trump was calling to ban blacks from the Olympics, or for segregation or whatever she is trying to imply. She might as well have played Clash of the Titans and said, "look at that team, you need to vote for me."

But that was just tired race-baiting. Her speech also included describing the alt-right, and attacking some of its adherents by name. For instance, attacking Alex Jones. He is well-known among conspiracy theorists, and has grown his appeal recently as he's become something more akin to an anti-globalism activist, but he is still a fringe personality. Hillary has given him the one true gift you can give obscure public personalities trying to break out: EXPOSURE! Not only that, but she's brought into the spotlight someone from the right who makes Trump look quite moderate by comparison. 

Not to outdo herself, she also read a few provocative headlines from Breitbart, a right-wing online news organization that has seen explosive growth. The headlines included such Milo-written jewels such as "Would you rather your child have feminism or cancer?" Here is a headline that is, (a) hilarious, and (b), designed to grab attention and get you to read his article. I guess Hillary thinks Milo needs more attention?? (Maybe she thinks the extra bump to his ego will literally explode his head.)

She has basically done everything for the alt-right that they have been working to do themselves: stoke controversy, generate exposure, and push the Overton window to the right. It was almost the greatest ever for the alt-right. And it would have been, except it doesn't seem like very many people actually listen to her speeches.

In Defense of Passive Aggression

Introduction

It is now common knowledge that passive aggressive behavior is unproductive, self-defeating, and should always be avoided. In Wikipedia, passive aggression is defined as:

... the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible.

Avoidance of being passive aggressive is so instilled into us, that it is used as something as an insult. "You're being real passive aggressive" translates roughly into "you're being a wimp."  It's the behavior of people who are too spineless to confront their problems directly. We are told that, instead of passive aggression, we should always be direct. Not aggressive, but assertive. Assertiveness is always the path of the emotionally mature.

And yet I always have to wonder about advice that seems to run counter to our nature. Can we really say that some evolved behavior is inherently flawed? Why would the behavior arise to begin with if it is harmful to the individual? It reminds me of my time in Air Force basic training, where hydration is an institutionalized obsession. "If you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated," they would preach. Dehydration was seen as the source of all ailments. While I indulged the notion at the time, I now reject it on principle. Does it really make any sense that thirst would occur after dehydration? It does not; such a feedback mechanism would not bode well for a species that arose on the plains of Africa. It may be the case that thirst follows dehydration in some cases. For instance, Air Force basic trainees are placed into a physically active routine in hot & dry southern Texas. So they may in fact need to overhydrate until their dehydration / thirst loop normalizes. So we see the advice is not a generality, but does hold in specific circumstances.

I suspect that the same is true for passive aggression. There are times when it should be avoided, but that doesn't mean it's always a bad strategy. Passive aggression gets a bad rap because there are some people who are painfully passive aggressive. These are the irritable wimps who are almost incapable of being either direct or passive. They can't accept things how they are, nor are they capable or courageous enough to evoke the change they want, so they default to passive aggression always. These people are annoying as hell to deal with.

Also, as so many of us work in organizations, we see what passive aggression can do to efficiency and productivity. If a person responds passive aggressively to some policy change, we see that, not only does the policy not get fixed, but that person's foot dragging may start making things difficult for us, not to mention killing the profitability of the business we rely on for our paychecks. Thus we become annoyed with passive aggressive behavior, and believe the hype that it's always bad. We know that ideally the disgruntled worker would channel his angst productively, and would be direct, assertive, and evoke positive change rather than adding to the drag of the organization.

But idealism is problematic. Idealism lends us to obsessing on how things should be. And the word should leads invariably to frustration, which often leads to depression. We all know, intuitively, that being direct and assertive can backfire, especially when the recipient of our directness is insecure or has a chip on his shoulder. We cringe when we see the new guy who is convinced "as long as I'm correct and honest, my directness will be appreciated." That naivety can get otherwise top performers put on the chopping block. The advice "always be direct and assertive" is a dangerous trap!

Intent of hostility, and signaling of response

So far this discussion has come to two conclusions:

1. Passive aggressive behavior is suitable sometimes
2. Passive aggressive behavior is not suitable all the time

That doesn't help much for normal humans who live somewhere in the middle. We still don't know much about when passive aggression is a fair play. I'll put forth here a very simple model which might provide some rubric for success. We'll define and qualify two terms. Stimulus is the input; it is whatever is being responded to. For instance, maybe our company blocks music streaming ports (looking at you DMP). That is the stimulus.

Stimuli that might evoke passive aggressive behavior can be categorized as intentionally versus unintentionally hostile. In the case of the streaming audio, the decision to block the ports was financial; the bandwidth use was costing a lot of money. However, the same action could have been intentionally hostile: the boss is just ego-tripping or whatever. Like all things in behavior, the line is blurred, and it can be difficult to tell what is intentional. Paranoia can cause us to falsely flag stimuli as intentionally hostile, and naivety has the opposite effect.

An individual's resulting behavior is the response. Responses can be qualified as signaling or nonsignaling. Signaling behavior is intended to be noticed by the source of the stimulus. We anticipate that not only will the behavior be detected, but that the receiver will also make the connection between the stimulus and the response, while still giving some protection of plausible deniability. Think of the wife annoyed by her husband, who suddenly has a pseudo headache come bedtime. Her intent is to send a signal to her husband that she is annoyed with him. But, as so often happens, the husband may not pick up on the signal, thinking she is actually ill, or maybe doesn't care for intimacy any more. The response is only signaling if the recipient picks up on it. Yet it must also be subtle enough for some plausible deniability, otherwise it is merely direct communication. We can never be entirely sure how people will respond to us, but to engage in signaling passive aggression means to respond in a way that has high probability to be interpreted by the recipient but still provide plausible deniability.

The woman's headache gives her plausible deniability. The husband may call her out. "You're just mad because I tracked mud in the house!" Not wanting to proven as spiteful, she can always respond, "No dear, I really have a headache." The husband may suspect she does not, but can't know for sure.

Nonsignaling responses are those which we don't intend to be caught doing. No one wants to get caught sabotaging production; they just want the boss to look bad before his superiors. Or maybe just to inflict some suffering.

As a rule of thumb, passive aggression can be permitted as illustrated:

Passive aggressive chart. Don't tape to desk.

• Intentional / Signaling: If someone has intentionally irked you, signaling passive aggression is probably not your best card. They know they bugged you. They're waiting for a response. Passive aggression will only display weakness. Not only that, but they are likely to turn your passive aggression around to attack you with. Perhaps you can be so overt in your passive aggression that there is no chance for the recipient to miss it, or for any plausible deniability. But as I said before, that is closer to direct communication that passive aggression. Call it indirect assertiveness.
• Intentional / Nonsignaling: If someone is purposely annoying you, and you have no other option, then nonsignaling passive aggression is your ticket to sanity. If you know directness will only lead to punishment, and you have no other ideas to outmaneuver your adversary, then by all means pee in your boss's coffee. Just don't get caught.
• Unintentional / Signaling: The best use of passive aggression. If someone has accidentally inconvenienced you, the best and most efficient route is to be direct. But for many reasons, it may not be plausible. Maybe the recipient is too sensitive for critique, or too anger-prone. Maybe you're in a culture where pushing back on the boss isn't tolerated, like a strict military unit. Maybe you have a friendship with the person you don't want to alienate. In these cases signaling through plausibly deniable passive aggression is your best tactic. Hopefully they get the message, with minimal risk of blowback.
• Unintentional / Nonsignaling: This is the worst, and is what gives passive aggression such a bad wrap. If someone doesn't know they've wronged you, a nonsignaling passive aggressive response achieves nothing. There is no way for the other person to get any feedback to correct the mistake. By being the only one intentionally causing harm, you become the bad actor. You might be tempted to do this if you have an incompetent supervisor. The idea being that you'll drag your feet so they'll look bad, and maybe get replaced. But, you're just as likely to make yourself look like the incompetent one. If your boss is incapable, you need to move somewhere else, or outshine the bastard and replace him.

Conclusion

Passive aggression is not inherently immoral, and can often be your best approach. Understanding when the approach works best, as shown here, coupled with some basic human intuition, will keep you safe from the pitfalls of using it. If you've enjoyed this article please like it and share it, or I might quietly start some rumors about you behind your back ;)

Trump: not just evil, but double evil

I just saw this today. This is the first I've heard that the Imam killer in New York was a Hispanic. Which would probably explain why I haven't really heard anything about it. Of course there was all kinds of news right after the matter, mostly blaming the incident on Donald Trump. If you understand the media bias you can pretty well predict their coverage on things. This quieted down because the shooting didn't fit the left-wing narrative. If it had been a white NRA member then it'd still be the national rage, probably with "protests" burning down more black neighborhoods.

Out of this we see another example of Trump being not just evil, but double evil. He's already evil because he's racist against Hispanics and wants to kick them all out. But despite that he's been able to incite them to violence against another group he hates, the Muslims. Normal people could not accomplish such a feat. A normal politician could not simultaneously demonize a demographic and direct them to preferred outcomes. But Trump is double evil; the normal rules of cognitive dissonance do not apply.

This is not the first time Trump has proven himself to be double evil. For instance, he's so evil that he's running for President of the United States even though he's a Russian agent. But he's probably going to end up nuking Russia and starting World War III, because he's double evil. We have to thank the government media complex for exposing a truth that would otherwise seem logically inconsistent.

Daily Democrat News of the Weird

I hate always writing about presidential politics, but I know the media won't give these things a fair shake. If our media did it's job, then I wouldn't feel compelled to write so that people are informed. With that said, here are a few news bits from the last 24 hours or so you might not have heard much about yet.

Hillary's Campaign Gives VIP Seat to Father of America's Biggest Mass Shooter

Yesterday it became news that Seddique Mateen was sitting directly behind Clinton at her rally in Kissimmee Florida, a suburb of Orlando, the city where his son recently committed the largest shooting in our history, and the largest attacks specifically targeting gays. Imagine for a second that the father of Dylan Roof, who killed 9 in a black church, was seen sitting behind Trump at his rally in Charleston. I mean, they ran for a weak shrieking that he kicked a crying baby out of his rally (he didn't), can you imagine if he did something on the level that we see coming out of the Hillary camp every day (and in yesterday's case, multiple times a day)? The bias is so unbelievable.

The best defense that we could offer is that, since Hillary has been pulling fewer than 200 to campaign events, maybe, in fact, those seats weren't vetted. They were merely given to anyone wiling to show up. It would echo the Comey defense: there's no intent, only incompetence. Hillary disavowed his support last night, which is good. But still we are all reminded that the Democrats are the party of criminals. If Hillary wanted my approval she would have drug him up on stage and beat him with a rubber hose until he gave us the location of his daugher-in-law, accomplice to the crime, who has apparently fled the country.

Huma Actively Used Hillary's Email Account, Committed Perjury

A new email released by Wikileaks shows that not only did Huma Abedin have access to Hillary's personal / business email account, but she actively used it. That Huma, a Saudi national with no security clearance, had access to the emails which contained SAP-level (beyond Top-Secret) information isn't news. In fact, Comey confirmed that unauthorized personnel were given access in his deposition before Congress. But most significant is that Huma has, under oath before Congress, denied that she had access to Hillary's account. Here is smoking gun proof that Huma committed perjury. 

The fact that she's not currently in a jail cell is all you need to know. If people are annoyed that mostly all I blog about is presidential politics, it's because two very scary realities are becoming openly obvious: (1) most of the media acts as a propaganda tool for the Democrats, and (2) no crimes will be punished if the president doesn't wish them to be. The notion you hear that the president is a figurehead and has no real power is nonsense. The president can apparently cover any crime within the massive executive branch. In addition to Clinton's stunning criminal record as SoS, we now have veritable proof of Huma's committing a crime by perjuring herself before Congress. It doesn't matter! Go look right now to see who in the media is covering this. Almost no one is. It's being suppressed. There is no reason for any Democrat to tell the truth before Congress as long as they own the White House and the media.

Seth Rich was the DNC Leaker, Was Assassinated by the DNC

Julian Assanage has strongly suggested that Seth Rich was the DNC leaker. He has previous suggested it, as well as suggesting that the Russians were not the source, to the point of saying that in the future "many people will have egg on their face." A strong suggestion isn't quite the same as a confirmation, but at the same time it is unprecedented for Wikileaks to be making these statements. It is almost certain that Rich, a deputy data director for the DNC who was shot twice in the back two weaks before Wikileaks posted their emails, was assassinated by people associated with the DNC. Of course the media was more than happy to trumpet the Russia story, to the point of further damaging our relations with them, to distract the public from the obvious scenario. Again any crime, even assassination, can slip by, so long as you have the president and the media in your favor.

This is not meant to be entirely partisan. Of course right now this is going entirely in favor of the Democrats. We saw something similar with the Bush administration. The crimes surrounding Cheney went unpunished, and the media went to bat for him to go to war. But, what we have right now, is an administration that will cover any crime, and media that serves solely as propaganda to cover the president. They are willing to do anything, even murder their own, to see the administration's rule extended via Hillary Clinton.

Newly Released Emails Reveal Connection Between State Dept and Clinton Foundation

More emails have been released showing collusion between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation criminal web. They continue to confirm that the Clintons were selling political favor. I won't go into any detail here. If you haven't, go watch Clinton Cash for a one-hour intro into how the Clintons used the state department to line their own pockets. It's free!

Malia Obama Caught Smoking Pot

Malia Obama was caught smoking pot. Do I care? No. But, I'll be watching this to see how the media covers it. I predict it will be nothing like the media circus we saw when Jenna Bush was caught underage drinking. Remember, if you're an outsider you can't even make a joke about a crying baby. If you're a Democrat in power, you can get away with murder.

Barrack Obama: America's First Black Pot President

Recently Barrack Obama opined that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. I don't believe that's true, but possibly he's correct. It doesn't matter though, because Obama is unqualified to give such an assessment. You might say his position as president would grant such qualification, but the reality is different. Even his delivery disqualifies him. Watch the video here.

Obama says his previous claim that Trump is unfit has been proven. He then offers up two rounds of evidence. His first bit of proof is Trump's "attack" on a Gold Star family. If you don't know what he's talking about, go listen to Khizr Khan's speech at the DNC. Khan, whose son died twelve years ago in a war in a Muslim country authorized by Hillary Clinton, and who has ties to the Clintons and whose business involves lobbying for increased Muslim immigration, launched a blistering attack on Trump, somehow seeming to equate his son's death with Trump's proposed immigration policies. Later it was leaked that Khan was paid $375,000 for the speech. So Trump's attack was really a defense, or counter-attack. For Obama to make that his foremost claim to Trump's lack of qualification only shows he does not shy away from insulting the intelligence of the American public.

Second, and this is the part you really have to watch, is his master dissertation on Trump's lack of knowledge in world events. Listen to how this man, who is praised as a skilled orator, can barely squeeze out a full intact sentence. He seems to particularly have trouble with articulation when asked about Donald Trump. (Okie doke?) It goes as such:

"He doesn't appear to have basic knowledge of critical issues." Then he pauses. To gather himself. To prepare to enlighten us on how far out of the water Trump really is.
"In...." Long pause. Damn this is going to be good. He's really thinking about what to say.
"Europe." Okay, that is a continent.
"In the Middle East." Yes, another relevant geographical area of the world.
 "In Asia." Right, another continent. Surely he'll specify some of the relevant critical issues and demonstrate Trump's lack of knowledge.
"Means that he's woefully unprepared to do the job."

 That's it?? That's the proof? Basically he responded to Trump's 3rd grade vocabulary with a 3rd grade geography lesson. He can't articulate Trump's inability to articulate. It's ridiculous.

Well, let's give him a brief reminder of the critical issues in those areas.

Europe

• Europe is undergoing a massive immigration crisis caused by American action in the Middle East. This is breaking the Schengen free movement agreement, as some EU countries are walling themselves off.
• England is leaving the EU completely, despite Barrack's heavy lobbying for them to say. In fact, his threats that the UK would be "at the back of the line" not only fueled the Brexit calls for independence, they turned out to be empty.
• Europe is seeing terror attacks almost every day now. Recently Germany had four in one week. ISIS is making terror attacks outside Syria & Iraq at a rate of 1 every 84 hours. The same ISIS that Obama previously called the "JV team", and "contained."
• Right-wing nationalist parties are the fastest growing in Europe. Austria seems to have avoided a hard-right (in Europe's perspective) president only by fraud in the mail-in ballots.
• After a fake military coup, Turkey is fast becoming an Islamist dictatorship. Merkel has bribed and begged Erdogan with money and promises of EU membership if Turkey will the job of protecting Europe's borders that Europe refuses to do itself. So an Islamist dictator now has enormous leverage over Europe.
• The Crimea was annexed by Russia, and there has been bloody civil war in the East of Ukraine between Russian and American aligned factions. Frayed relations between the two nations are largely the result of America's insistence that the EU and NATO be pushed right up to Russia's doorstep.

Middle East

• Obama enabled the overthrow of Ghadaffi in Libya. Rather than risk American boots on the ground (that's such a George W. Bush way of overthrowing a Middle East government), Barrack and Hillary went with an approach of aerial bombardment and arming & funding rebels. Called "moderate", the rebels were often radical Islamists. They armed Al Qaeda to overthrow Ghadaffi. Despite the claim that Ghadaffi was a threat to his own people, leaked emails later showed that the motivation was all geopolitics, and was an attempt to maintain neocolonial control of North Africa and prevent the rise of a Libya-backed pan-North African economic union. The result of the war has been massive migration from all of Africa to Europe, and a failed state where the west gets all the oil contracts and ISIS gets to enjoy long beheadings on the beach. 
• Pleased with the outcome of Libya, Obama attempted a similar maneuver in Syria. The playbook was identical. Portray the leader as a madman, arm the opposition (even if they are Al Qaeda or ISIS), and get a UN-sanctioned no-fly zone. Only they failed in the last regard, because of diplomatic and military outmaneuvering by Putin. While Obama failed at his goal of regime change, the outcomes were the same as Libya. Massive refugee crisis and a vacuum that allows for the dominance of radical Jihadists.
•  ISIS has emerged as public enemy number one, enabled by a power vacuum caused by American actions in Iraq and Syria. ISIS was originally backed and armed by the US. Even after ISIS adopted their current moniker (actually I hear they go by just IS these days) and the reality of their brutality became common knowledge, they still benefited indirectly from American aid. America spent hundred of millions training and arming "moderates" that would typically just take their new weapons and skills to collect a paycheck from ISIS. Even more, the US air war was shown to be a complete farce when Russia showed up and began an effective campaign. To my knowledge, that display by the Russians was the greatest political embarrassment delivered to the US by a foreign country since the Canadians burned down the White House. 
• Probably the most damning thing to occur in the Middle East, from the perspective of presidential competency, were the reports that DOD-backed factions and CIA-backed factions in Syria were fighting each other! There is nothing that could more clearly prove both the lack of a clear strategy and the lack of strong leadership in the executive branch than America fighting a proxy war with itself in the middle east.

Asia

• Relatively quiet in Asia. But in Obama's tenure we've seen China starting to challenge the US Navy, more record trade inequality with China, China continuing to manipulate its currency despite promises not to, and Obama's backing of TPP, which will subvert the US Constitution to international corporations. 

As we can see, that majority of the "critical issues" in those important geographical areas he itemized are aided or outright caused by actions of the Obama presidency. Maybe Trump is unqualified to be president, but he's not proved that despite his attempt. But Obama himself is a proven foreign-policy disaster. When he calls Trump "unfit," it is the pot calling the kettle black. Except the pot is black and the kettle is a lustrous gray bedazzled in red, white, and blue.

They are getting desperate

The media is almost completely unified in standing against Trump. Even Glen Greenwald, who is very anti-Trump, agrees. Most people here probably understand that our media is biased. Everyone knows the major outlets are owned by powerful corporations with their own agendas. Yet they find it difficult to accept just how biased they are in reality.

A book could be written about this compromise of our media in this election cycle, and surely many will, but here are a few very recent examples to solidify the claim.

• The day after Trump's long acceptance speech, the media uniformly used one adjective for it, dark. Does it seem odd that all the media outlets would use the same adjective? What really are the odds? And moreover, did the speech really sound dark to you? He did what any opposition candidate does: highlighted the failures of the current officials and promised to fix them. To the extent it was dark or negative was simply that Obama's legacy is particularly abysmal. But so was Bush. Did they call Obama's acceptance speech dark? In any case, it certainly seems like the media had colluded to present a uniform message to the American people, and probably chose the term dark before the speech was even given.
  
  And in truth collusion is exactly what happened. Shortly after the speech we saw in the DNC leaks that the media actually did coordinate to create a narrative against Trump and Sanders. Think about that: a political party controls the narrative being delivered by our media. That is Soviet Union style propaganda. We actually live in a dystopian state, right now.
• By coincidence, both Melania Trump and Hillary Clinton wore all-white outfits. If the media was actively working against Trump and for Clinton, we would expect the media's reaction to essentially the same outfit to be very different. And of course it was, looking at this juxtaposition of the typical media responses. And this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. There are plenty examples of the opposing responses being emitted from the same news organization, such as here. When Hillary wears white, it echoes the women's suffrage movement; when Melania wears it, it is a subtle nod to white supremacy. This is coming from mainstream establishment media.
• After Trump joked that the Russians should turn over Clinton's emails, the media again erupted that Trump was proposing that another state compromise US national security. There is some debate as to whether Trump's comments were a careless off-handed comment, a clever trick to get the media talking again about Hillary's email controversy (they did), or a brilliant ruse to get them to admit Hillary's emails are a threat to national security (they did). Trump understands their bias and plays it to maximum effect.
•  Pat Smith is the mother of a Marine who was killed in Benghazi. She has loudly and publicly blamed Hillary Clinton for the security failure at the US consulate, and for lying about the event afterwards, and then "treating her like dirt." Rather than talk about Hillary's disastrous actions in Libya (the most significant of her vaunted tenure as SoS), the Democratic/media alliance decided they needed a countering bereaved military parent. Enter Khizr Kahn who spoke at the DNC and has been given maximum buzz hype.
  
  As you've probably heard, his son was a Marine Captain and was killed in Iraq. The narrative being pushed is that, if Trump had his way, the US would lose out of heroes like Khan, to our detriment. But that is so wrong for so many reasons. Khan was killed by Islamic radicals 12 years ago in a war authorized by Clinton. If anything, it underscores both Trump's claims that radical Islam is a serious threat to Americans, and that Hillary's decision to authorize the Iraq was a colossal mistake. It always assumes that the media's consumers are very misinformed on Trump's immigration proposals (a fair assumption given all the work they've done to instill that misinformation). So this gives Trump another chance to reiterate that policy to Americans. In fact, the whole thing is kind of bizarre, in that upon analysis it only underscores many of Trump's arguments. And last but not least, Khan is an Muslim activist, who argues for Sharia law, lobbies for increased Muslim immigration to the US, and works for a law firm connected to the Clinton Foundation and the Saudi government. Pat Smith has specific reason to target Clinton; Khan is looking for any leverage for political gain.

What we're seeing is a media that's getting desperate. In all these cases, the headlines which scream proof of how horrible Trump is, actually incriminate Clinton and the media on closer scrutiny. At this point they are not even trying to hide it. Just like Clinton isn't even trying to hide her corruption when she immediately hired Debbie Wasserman Schultz to she was forced out of the DNC after her corruption was exposed by Wikileaks. They're just hoping to sink some anti-Trump headlines into the collective American psyche, and move onto the next debacle before the dust settles. This isn't unprecedented. Remember the "incubator babies" they used to justify the first Iraq war, or the false 9/11 connection they used to justify the second Iraq war. The media is free to promote any lie it wants.

The big lie that we're seeing now is that Clinton got a big boost from the convention and is now leading Trump again. I don't believe it. She's canceling campaign events now due to lack of interest. Her last one had less than a hundred. Reuters, supposedly the gold standard of non-partisan reporting, is not only changing their polling formula to make Clinton look better (such as barely representing those under 35, but is actually going back and changing previous polling results. This is straight out of 1984. Changing the historical record. The only difference is that instead of being directly controlled by the ruling party, the propaganda arm is being indirectly and clandestinely controlled by the ruling party. 

Despite all their efforts, Trump is winning. He's up in the polls. He is routinely filling arenas past capacity. Expect them to get even more desperate as the weeks move towards November. Nothing is out of the question. I highly expect they'll declare Bill to be very ill, to give Hillary cover for skipping debates, or to make Trump look mean for attacking a sad woman in a public debate. They may find some other way to avoid the debates, like making unreasonable demands that Trump would never agree to. I suspect they'll keep pushing faulty polling, and we'll see wide disparities in polling from different sources. The polls that favor Trump will be called biased, but they will present the more accurate numbers.

Brexit will be a precursor to this election, which was heavily underrepresented in the polls. Then after the results, the media threw a huge tantrum, called all kinds of names and made dire predictions. They'll react the same this time. And the more desperate they get, the more people will stop believing them. This is all a good thing. Better to have your enemy out in the open than operating under cover.