Talk politics.

Got to love France.

They may have confined the epidemic of stupidity to the Anglo-Saxon nations. Maybe this pressages a tipping point where certain methods of spreading disinformation will no longer be useful to influence the voting public.

Do the panel think that:

1. We have reached the tipping point, and the use of social media in influencing elections will slowly diminish from this high point?

or

2. It is merely a small oscillation in everyone's ever-increasing reliance on social media. Next time it will be even more important.

or

3. It's all too chaotic to call. Something new may come along to supplant the way we consume social media which will change the paradigm yet again.

It is my contention that having just been through a period where society has had to adapt to the birth and nasceny of social media, some period of consolidation is required. Now with historical cycles of similarities getting of smaller duration, this period of consolidation may only be a few weeks long rather than the decades required to bed down similar changes in society in historical times. But I do wonder if the tactics of dropping some "information bomb" when it is too late to be checked has reached its sell-by date, and may now actually become counter-productive. So I guess the intel bods in this asymmetrical warfare will have to come up with new tactics, if not a new strategy entirely.

So what do we think will replace this tactic in the war for the hearts and minds of folk in the computer-dependent nations? The long term drip-feed of disinformation looks to be a brilliant tactic. Look at Poor Hillary. Can't convict on financial things or anything else, as she has been very well-advised, so... Child molesting? Pizzas? Pure genius. (Right up until some nutter starts shooting-up the Pizza place. But that's just collateral damage and doesn't really count.)

Any other intersting tactics spring to anyone's mind? Then, as and if they happen, we can play Intel Tactic Bingo as a drinking game. Not of course that the rest of us need an excuse to seek oblivion from the bottle.

New drama in the French elections as Penelope-gate moves into full swing.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/27/penelope-gate-casts-dark-shadow-over-fillons-presidential-prospects

And if the centre-right are trumped now I wonder which candidate will step into the fray to rescue the slightly over three-quarters of French folk who think that politicians are corrupt?

Given that the Front National have their own problems with corruption, expenses, and suchlike, you would have thought that they wouldn't benefit that much. But I've put a tenner on Madame Le Pen doing rather better. There appears to be, after all, a distict pattern here: in the UK, US, and next in line France, and then Germany.

If there was a certain pattern to all of this one tends to ask cui bono?

So my question is this: who would the panel nominate for the nation or persons benefitting most from such a state of affairs? George Soros? The Illuminati? Uncle Vlad?

And as an aside for the betting fraternity amongst us, what are the odds that Angela Merkel has some as-yet-unidentified scandal blow-up in her face just before the elections?

As a postscript. Oh Julian, you are a bit of a dupe sometimes. Don't you know when you have been played like a Stradivarius by a master?