I don’t like Donald Trump. But that doesn’t mean I should jump in bed with the CIA. Over the past couple weeks, Democrats and progressives across this country have been doing exactly that. If you look at the reports on Russian involvement in the US election objectively, you quickly realize that there’s nothing surprising here. Countries do propaganda and attempt to influence other countries. This is nothing new. James Comey had a lot more to do with Hillary’s losing the election than Russia did and nobody’s going after him. Trump hasn’t helped matters of course, but this scandal has been consciously manufactured over the past few weeks.

Nobody is focusing on why that is. The US foreign policy establishment is terrified that Trump might actually change Russia policy for the first time since the mid-1990s. The point of the intelligence community leaks and press releases over the past month is to keep that from happening. And we’re all helping out. I’m afraid it might actually be working. Trump may want a good deal with Russia, but he won’t do it if he thinks it will hurt him politically.

One of the misconceptions most in need of correcting in this discussion is the idea that we’ve tried being friendly with Russia before. The story is that both George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to make peace with Russia and got burned. This is ridiculous. In fact the exact opposite is what actually happened. Yes, W. claimed to look into Putin’s soul and see a friend or whatever, but his policy trampled all over Russian interests and concerns. In 2004 he over saw the addition of seven countries to NATO, some of which were once members of the Russia friendly Warsaw Pact, and some of which were actually part of the Soviet Union itself. Additionally, the war in Iraq was carried out in violation of international law and against Russia’s security council veto.

Obama also claimed that he was going to “Reset” relations with Russia. He didn’t. There was more noise about NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia, and there was the support of 2014’s ouster of a democratically elected and pro-Russian government in Ukraine. Perhaps most importantly there has been the massive US sponsored proxy war on Syria between 2011 and 2017. Russia has two or three countries in the entire world that are willing to cooperate with them militarily. Syria is one of them.

In addition to that, there is NATO’s little mentioned betrayal of Russia and China in Libya. I made a video about this just a few weeks ago.

Don’t let anybody tell you that we’ve already tried to be friends with Russia. If they do, they’re lying, or they have no idea what they’re talking about.

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This week I go ahead and punch a gift horse in the mouth and raise some questions about the outsize performance of my last video. It’s my second fastest video to 1,000 views ever, and I question the reasons behind that. I’ve easily done 20 times as many videos singling out male politicians for ridicule. But my two videos criticizing female politicians do better than all of those videos combined. The channel goes where the channel goes, but I’ll definitely put more thought into why it is that I’m going after someone in the future.

I mentioned one caveat. Victoria Nuland is a figure I’ve been thinking of doing a video about for quite some time. She is the Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs. Depending on who you ask, she may have been the main driving force behind the disaster in Ukraine in 2014. I’m pretty sure I don’t buy that, as I think the break with Russia was baked into the whole dumb arc of US policy in Eastern Europe since 1992 or so. More research needs to be done. What I am more confident of is that she occupies a weird space at the neocon nexus of the Republican and Democratic parties in Washington, DC. She worked for Dick Cheney, and now she’s helping to run Obama’s Europe policy. I think a video on her career and connections would do a good job of illustrating the point that individual presidents don’t really have all that much to do with the agenda that Washington, DC pursues. Presidents can nudge, but they don’t really steer.

But the more I think about it, why am I even aware of Victoria Nuland? Is it because she’s a woman in power? She’s definitely not the only politician in DC who is more loyal to the Military Industrial Complex than a particular party (actually that’s all of them). She’s probably not the only one married to a self-parodying Neocon pundit either. The only reason I’m aware of her is the fact that folks have gravitated toward her particular scandals and biography. I wonder why that is. Food for thought. Anyway, if she gets up to further hijinks under Trump, I wanted to give myself a pass to mention her.

Something else worth mentioning is the fact that 80% of my audience is male. That’s always been deeply annoying to me. I’ve tried some more explicitly feminist content in the past, but it hasn’t solved the problem. If you’re wondering whether I’m hoping that this video will help me out with that… Of course I am! Also, if I’m going to make a sweeping comment about the behavior of the YouTube audience, I should probably point out that my audience is currently heavily weighted towards dudes who like talking about politics and history. Which is perhaps not all that surprising.

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We keep hearing about how Trump is “Not Normal”. That’s true, but it’s not where we should be focusing our energies. Shouting that repeatedly into the echo chamber is a sort of paralysis. What we need to do now is focus on ways to manage Donald Trump, and handle his not normal presidency. The most direct bit of action I suggest is subscribing to a newspaper, physically or on-line. I subscribed to the Washington Post, but there are hundreds of options across the United States, and even abroad. They all need our support, and we need them. The outlets below are all anti-Trump to some degree, or at least will spend time trying to see beyond Trump’s tweets to what he’s actually doing to our government.

“Right-Wing” Marketing Segment:

The Wall Street Journal

The National Review

Reason Magazine

“Left-Wing” Marketing Segment:

The Washington Post

I don’t consider myself to be part of the “Left-Wing” marketing segment, but I subscribed to the Washington Post because they fought Donald Trump in the past election a lot more effectively than the Democratic Party did.

The New York Times

The Guardian

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Donald Trump really does change everything. I’ve been making videos full time for almost three years now. As you can probably gather if you’ve read my essay advocating for third parties, I had a plan going to the 2016 election. My bone-deep loathing for Trump changed all that. But it’s changed more than that. Starting out, my attitude towards the world and the US government in particular was pretty antagonistic. Now I’m pretty convinced that the world, and the US government need to be saved from themselves. This has led to some reformatting of the mission of this whole thing. I’ve laid it out in this video, and in some changes to the website you can see here. There’s more to come!

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Argh! Occasionally an article comes a long that is dumb enough that it must be addressed immediately and at length. “How Chicago’s Streets Became the Wild West” published today on the WSJ’s opinion page is one such example. It’s another entry in the Wall Street Journal’s crusade to blame homicide in the US on the Black Lives Matter movement (A crusade they share with the FBI, and the New York Times, who are also trying to push the idea of the “Ferguson Effect”). There are a couple massive problems with this article that would keep it from being published in a real newspaper.

A: There is real suffering in Chicago, and there were more murders in 2015 (488) than there were in 2014 (432). But there were less than there were in 2012 (513) and the numbers are consistently around half of what they were in the 1990s. There are real problems that must be addressed in Chicago, but this idea that the city is going to hell in a bucket is media-driven hogwash. The propaganda value of the article would be de-fanged by any honest look at the figures though, so they are not included.

B: On the topic of those real problems: Mostly because she can’t avoid it, the author of this article mentions the fact that a police superintendent had to resign in 2015 over a video tape of the racist murder of an unarmed black man in 2014. (This isn’t one of the ambiguous ones, an officer is on trial for murder). The author concedes the awfulness of this event, but then goes on to assert that it has nothing to do with the broader culture of the Chicago police department. She then spends the rest of the article whining about the Mayor’s attempts to improve the police department’s culture. The Superintendent’s resignation is a one-off, nothing to see here, the Chicago PD is just being victimized by BLM and those nasty ACLU Social Justice Warriors…

There’s a simple data point here, that kind of destroys her entire argument. In 2007, another Chicago Police Superintendent, Philip J. Cline, had to resign over video-taped police brutality. So two of the last three Chicago police superintendents had to resign over police misconduct. Gawrsh. Maybe the culture of the Chicago police is something that we actually should be looking at. Maybe the Black Lives Matter movement should be praised for raising these issues rather than condemned. Maybe if the Wall Street Journal had any interest in adding to the conversation on urban crime they’d have tried to paint a vaguely accurate picture of Chicago.

Sadly, this isn’t the first WSJ article on this topic and it’s certain that it won’t be the last. The powers that be really want to make the “Ferguson Effect” a thing. If you’re interested I’ve put together a couple videos to combat that effort. The author of this article, Heather MacDonald is the “Ferguson Effect’s” head propagandist. I made a video on her deeply warped view of the world and statistics a couple weeks back. Even if this effect exists, which is nowhere near proven, blaming protesters for this is abjectly amoral, as I pointed out in another video I made last year. I’ve also got a whole playlist on the problem of racial justice in the US, that lays out the problems we should actually be addressing if we’re serious about keeping people safe.

The year began on a family holiday in Malta. Getting a cheaper flight from Rome to Istanbul meant waiting a couple days after the new year, so I holed up in a hostel by the Termini train station in Rome. This time was spent working, and occasionally leaving to check out a forum or to eat some of the Asian food which is surprisingly hard to find in Istanbul. I was sharing the hostel with my sister, who made a tremendously useful suggestion. As a sort of joint resolution we undertook to write 750 words a day, every day. This has had a fairly revolutionary effect on my productivity this year. Every day I have to write something. Sometimes I really don’t want to do it, but I often get it done. My performance hasn’t been flawless. Five months into the year I’m about a month behind, but I do it more often than not. This has yielded some great videos, a lot of progress on new essays, and the fact that I finally seem to be catching up on these blog posts. It’s a great thing all around.

Finally having an apartment of my own again is fricking fantastic. It made for some healthier living, and allowed me to produce seven videos in January, some of which were quite ambitious. The first video of the year was “The BBC Is Full of It 2 | Chinese Aircraft Carriers“. I like this video. There’s not much to it, but it deals with the format cleverly. I like the acting out of the internal monologue. I also like the turn-around time. I saw the headline, it matched nicely with the previous video complaining about the BBC, and I was able to quickly bang it out. The joys of that speedy Malta internet. “3 Awesome Things Happening in 2016, Cuba, Colombia and Iran” is an attempt at a positive list video that hasn’t gone very far. It reminds me how far behind I am on these contemplated Syria videos. I wanted to do something positive before producing them, but five months later I still haven’t gotten them out yet. Argh!

“Iran V. Saudi Arabia, the One Thing You Need To Know…” was the first video produced in my new bedroom, ahem, I mean studio. I’ve gotten better at these set-ups, but I think this one comes out alright. The mix between animation and on-camera is one that I like, but a mix that I haven’t quite perfected yet. “Watch Me DESTROY Donald Trump’s Campaign Ad” does exactly what it says it does. It is amazing how little this man is offering to the American people, especially his supporters.

The next week featured what is perhaps my favorite one-two punch ever. “Why Do Terrorists Kill People” was my first attempt at filming something on location. The sound is awful, but I really like the way my visit to the scene of an Istanbul suicide bombing works. It was also a nice fraught introduction to a sad fact of journalism: “Oh Look, an atrocity! Let’s find a way to look cool in front of it!” The next day I followed it up with “Why the Cold War Must Be Remembered” one of my favorite videos ever. I’m a huge history dork, and I’m quite proud of what I’ve accomplished here. In seven or so minutes I tell the story of the Cold War, and argue why it’s so important to study it. The next week I got even more ambitious, attempting to put together a video that told the entire post World War II story of the oil industry. I failed to produce that video in January. That Tuesday I was mucking about with After Effects when the power went out. So I decided to bang out “Why Bloomberg For President Should Make You Happy“, with a speed that should be pretty apparent in the production. I kind of like the Chiaroscuro effect forced by the candle light though.

Looking at these videos, it’s pretty clear that I’ve switched to longer ones over the past couple months. I think this may be a side effect of the 750 word pledge. I traditionally aimed for under 500 words a video, but now I aim for 750 to make my quota. This has upsides and downsides. YouTube now prioritizes watch time over views. They are obviously both still important, but this means YouTube likes longer videos. Does that mean that my content is less likely to be clicked on because of its longer times? Probably. It also make for less disciplined videos. Reviewing videos from this month, and from previous years, I’m sometimes kind of amazed by the amount of stuff I manage to cram into three minute running times. Something to consider.

Views continued their upward trend in January 2016, up to 16,224 from 13,939 in December. None of the top five, and three of the top ten videos in January were produced in January. Two of the seven videos crossed 100 views on their first day. Five months later, all seven have topped 200 views, and of those four have also topped 300. At the end of January 2016 we had 142 videos, all but four of which were viewed in January, 70 of which were viewed 10 or more times, 22 of which were viewed more than 100 times, and four of which were viewed more than 1,000 times (FATCA, John Oliver, Hillary Clinton, Putin-Estonia).

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