How To Influence Friends and Win Elections

“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.” – Daniel M. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.” – Ibid

The Nightmare Dreams of Jihadists: Following the fall of the Islamic State (IS) caliphate in Mosul, journalists from The New York Times made five trips to Iraq over the course of a year. Rukmini Callimachi, a NYT foreign correspondent who has covered ISIS since 2014, located over 15,000 pages of internal IS documents. After independent experts verified the trove’s authenticity, a team of NYT journalists spent 15 months translating and analyzing each page. The material shows how IS functioned internally and how it was able to maintain power for as long as it did.

Callimachi writes that although the world knows IS for its brutality, the militants kept the traditional institutions and bureaucracy, but with new rules. An example is Iraq’s agriculture department. Female workers were discharged, and the day care center closed. The legal department was shuttered because disputes would be handled according to God’s law alone. Precipitation was no longer measured and recorded, because rain was a gift from Allah, and his gift cannot be measured. Taxation, however, was far different. Ledgers, receipt books, and monthly budgets showed daily commerce and agriculture powered the economy of the caliphate, not oil. IS was self-financed, drawing hundreds of millions of dollars from agriculture alone, taxing every bushel of wheat, every liter of sheep’s milk, and every watermelon sold at markets the group controlled. Because IS had a diversified revenue stream, airstrikes on oilfields weren’t enough by themselves to cripple its economy.

Jihadists had dreamed of establishing a caliphate for generations. The IS documents reveal that for a brief time, the dream was realized. NYT plans to make the trove publicly available to researchers, scholars, Iraqi officials, and anyone else wanting to better understand the Islamic State.

Additional read: Daily Pnut’s publisher co-wrote an essay in The New York Times in 2015 about his unit capturing an ISIS flag and noted: “The barbarity the Islamic State regularly displays is not unfamiliar to American service members who had the unpleasant experience of encountering its antecedent in Iraq. More important, we know from our experience that it can be defeated. The Islamic State’s military successes of the past year should be seen for what they are: fragile and reversible.”

How To Influence Friends and Win Elections: In another important journalistic effort, The Guardian studied materials dated 2011 to 2013 from a secret media operation run by Paul Manafort and aimed at boosting the reputation of then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and undermining his rival, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Yanukovych had defeated Tymoshenko in the 2010 presidential elections. Then in 2011, Yanukovych arrested Tymoshenko and put her in jail. That aroused the ire of other countries, including the US. To deflect the criticism, Yanukovych gave Manafort the go-ahead to approve a clandestine social media project designed to undermine Tymoshenko in key Western countries.

The covert plot was designed by an Italy-based lobbyist and former Wall Street Journal writer, Alan Friedman. In July 2011, Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled “Ukraine – A Digital Roadmap,” which laid out how to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles, and social media. The “roadmap” included a website, blog posts, and “blast emails” sent to targeted audiences in Europe and the US. Known Twitter users were to retweet hostile content. One section called “Black Ops” said: “This could include Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko’s] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”

Three years later, Manafort chaired Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for several months. In 2017, Manafort was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on 12 criminal counts, including conspiracy against the United States.

– Hungary and Poland may have thrown off the shackles of communism, but Western-style democratic governance sure hasn’t been its replacement. And if Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński seem paternalistic, heavy-handed, and obsessed with external enemies, just like their despised predecessors, why does their brand of “conservative nationalism” keep winning the vote? (Politico)

– President Trump will deploy National Guard troops to the US-Mexican border to help deter groups trying to seek asylum or cross illegally into the US. According to NPR, the groups predominantly consist of mothers with small children and minors traveling alone from Central America who are fleeing murderous gangs that have taken over their neighborhoods. (NPR)

– German Chancellor Angela Merkel is surely looking forward to her April 27 visit to the US to meet with President Trump. She has plans to discuss continuing the exemption, due to expire on May 1, for the European Union from US tariffs on steel and aluminum. And she’ll take one more stab at convincing Trump to certify the Iran deal. Good luck with that. (Reuters)

– North Korean leader Kim Jong-un told Chinese President Xi Jinping last week in Beijing he would agree to return to six-party talks on his nation’s nuclear programand missile tests. Don’t cancel that fallout shelter order just yet. (Reuters)

– Palestinians are still holding their six-week long protest at the Israeli border,demanding refugees be allowed to return to lands they fled or were expelled from when Israel was created in 1948. 30,000 Palestinians showed up on the first day last Friday; since then they say 19 have been killed, and 1,492 wounded in confrontations with Israeli troops. (NPR)

Israel’s Upcoming Democratic and Demographic Decision: In 1917, the geopolitical territory of Palestine, home to both Arabs and Jews, was carved out of the old Ottoman Empire in southern Syria and placed under the civil administration of Great Britain. When WWII ended in 1945, the conversation grew louder in support of creating an independent Jewish state in Palestine. In 1947, a UN special commission recommended partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The city of Jerusalem, sacred to both Jews and Arabs, was declared a special international zone. The US State Department, meanwhile, thought it would be better to create a UN trusteeship, with limits on Jewish immigration, and a division of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab provinces, not states. Nevertheless, on May 14, 1948, US President Harry Truman recognized the establishment of the State of Israel. And in the Arab-Israeli War that same year, Israel captured the western half of Palestine.

In 1967, after years of increasing tension and border skirmishes between Arabs and Israelis, war broke out again. In less than a week, Israel routed the armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. Israel annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and built Jewish settlements on the Palestinian territories. Israel now controlled all of Jerusalem, despite both sides claiming it as their political capital and sacred Holy City.

For the past 50 years, demography has been closely studied by both Israel and Palestine. The latest population figures now indicate the two sides are nearing parity. This demographic shift is raising the question of whether Israel can remain a democratic nation while still controlling territory Palestinians believe should rightfully be theirs, a juxtaposition supportive of a “two-state” solution. Contrastingly, should Israel effectively become one state containing two nations, the path to securing democracy might only be through denying Palestinians a vote. Further straitjacketing the decades-old question of whether a lasting peace can ever be achieved between the two sides was President Trump’s declaration last December that the US would formally recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

– “The number of women running for the US House of Representatives set a record Thursday, most of them Democrats motivated by angst over President Donald Trump and policies of the Republican-controlled Congress.” (AP)

– “Thousands of Google employees have signed an open letter asking the internet giant to stop working on a project for the US military.” (The Guardian, no BBC, same thing, j.k)

– Speaking of the internet giant with its giant projects (like YouTube) that have global influence that can spark violence: “Nasim Aghdam sought to build a mass following online but seemed to shun connections in the real world, a world she saw as dark, diseased and unjust.” (The Guardian, seriously)

– “Just hours before she shot and wounded three people at YouTube headquarters, Nasim Aghdam calmly told police who found her sleeping in her car that she was having family problems and had left her home.” (AP)

– Speaking of another internet techopoly, Mark Zuckerberg did a great reprisal of a Tom Petty song by saying “No, I won’t back down”: “Despite the turmoil that continues to surround his company, Mark Zuckerberg has insisted he is still the best person to lead Facebook.” (BBC)

– Zuckerberg did say that “Facebook will apply EU data privacy standards globally. Europe’s tough new data protection rules come into force in May.” (Politico)

– For our American readers, here’s “how tariffs on China could make your life more expensive.” (CNN)

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.” – Carl R. Rogers

“I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways.” – Michael Jackson

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