Guest Post by Brent Regan: Thoughts on Syria...

Thoughts on Syria
Brent Regan

One of the biggest struggles I have is to evaluate a situation objectively.  We all view reality through the lens of our own experiences and weigh information on a scale tipped with our biases.  Add to that emotion, and it is a miracle if you can find the truth.  I prefer to take the situation apart and examine the components to better understand how they work together.

Brent Regan

Middle East Politics: People get the government they deserve; the one they will tolerate.  BOB (before Obama & Bush) many countries in the middle east were run by brutal dictators. Why?  Because that is what it takes to govern a culture that promises heaven if you die killing your enemy.  What we call crimes against humanity, they call Tuesday.  These cultures have evolved to have a keen sense when someone is weak.  Obama's 'apology tour' sent the message that he was weak and the inevitable chaos followed.  Some say by neglect and some say it was deliberate, when in fact it does not matter 'how'.  We are where we are. The only important question is, "What now?"

Trump: Trump is a deal maker. That is his party trick. He spells it out in his book "The Art of the Deal".  If you haven't read that book, and most talking head pundits haven't, then you have near zero chance of understanding what Trump does. You will be watching one movie while listening to the sound track of a different movie and nothing will make sense. This is why CNN and others describe Trump as irrational, unhinged, dangerous, and every other pejorative because they don't understand the situation while being paid to understand, so their explanation is "Trump=crazy". Trump is not crazy and he consistently follows patterns.

Chemical Weapons: Why is there a ban on chemical weapons? Because they are not "humane"?  If so, then are weapons not banned humane?  If you die from a nerve agent or by stepping on a land mine or being shot or..... are you any more or less dead?  Is the horror of war somehow less horrible?  How do you draw the line. Shouldn't war be horrible so that it is avoided?  That has worked to prevent nuclear war since 1945.  Chemical weapons are banned because they are cheap and effective.  Wars used to be highly profitable.  Raid your neighbor and take his stuff.  Wars are still highly profitable, for the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about.  We can't have people being killed with 10 cents of Chlorine when there are $1000 rifles that fire $300 worth of bullets per minute. Remember the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon"? Look it up. If you want continuous war, make war "civilized".

Syria situation: What information do we have about Syria that we know is true? Nothing. We have no information that we know is true. Everything we know comes from proven unreliable sources, but that doesn't stop people from becoming experts and arguing about who's inaccurate information is less inaccurate. Besides, since nobody reading this can actually do something about the situation then the veracity of the information we have is irrelevant. The next question is then, "Does Trump have accurate information?"  Maybe or maybe not.  Have people in his administration lied to him in the past?  Yes.  Could they be lying now?  Yes.  Does Trump know he may be lied to?  Yes.

It is reported that there have been more than two (NY Times says 34) instances of chemical attacks in Syria. If true then another chemical attack is an excuse, not a reason, for a retaliatory attack. What relevant events can we correlate to this particular chemical attack? Trump expressing a desire to egress Syria.  Have you ever seen Trump walk away from a fight?

What I think is happening: If you apply the "Trump the deal maker" paradigm with the objective of getting out of Syria without it becoming a bigger problem then the first thing you would expect is an Anchor Move to set the stated objective beyond the desired outcome.  This gives you room to negotiate.  The surgical air-strike that was twice the size of the last air-strike (1 year ago) fits the bill nicely.  It establishes that Syria and Russia are powerless to stop an attack,  the world will allow it to happen,  Trump does not need congressional approval, and that Trump will back up his words with force and during the attack.  Trump states that he would like to get along with the players in the region.  Boom. Anyone else want to negotiate?

Having established his alpha make dominance, Trump will now open the door to negotiating with Assad and Putin. Expect peace negotiations in the coming weeks unless further demonstrations of power are needed.

Brent Regan has over 23 years experience in designing and building sophisticated electromechanical devices including electric cars, robots and tele-manipulators, medical devices, airplanes and computers. He has also successfully managed large engineering teams in corporate/government contract efforts.  He owns Regan Designs located in Coeur d' Alene, ID and services clients all over the world. 

  He's counts among his friends well known aerospace engineer Burt Rutan (who now lives in Coeur d' Alene), and flying enthusiast conservative Bill Whittle.

Brent Regan: #‎NeverTrump‬ Explained. Red Pill Warning...

are your thoughts being modified?

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon." Saul Alinsky (Why is this true?)

Warning! I am attempting to modify your thoughts by making you aware of how your thoughts can be modified.

Ridicule, name calling, ad hominem attacks and lies are all well worn progressive tools of control. They have created in people a Pavlovian response to words like bigot, racist, privileged, supremacist and (fill in the blank)-phobe which manifests as an avoidance reaction. Your instinct is to move away, to distance yourself from the unpleasant thing. This is not a rational "adult mind" reaction but rather a subconscious reflexive "child mind" action driven by social proof and reinforced by your conformity bias. It is this very response that progressives use to control us. Remember that to move a herd of sheep you only need to get the few in the front to do your bidding. This progressive conditioning occurs at a subconscious level so you don't even know it is happening unless you know it is happening.

You think you are immune? I can force you to do something even while telling you not to do it.

 Ready? Whatever you do, do NOT think of a unicorn. Gotcha!

The battle for control of your thoughts and actions is being waged in your mind. Understanding how the mind works is essential to resisting being controlled or even influenced by others. As I said, I am attempting to modify your thoughts by making you aware of how your thoughts can be modified.
I believe the NeverTrump movement is a product of progressive conditioning, sort of an inverse charisma, where people don't want to be associated with people who are being called names. You want to distance yourself and by proclaiming NeverTrump you are disavowing all the bad things the progressives accuse you of being.

How much do you really know about Trump that hasn't been filtered or modified in some way by the progressive media? The debates were manipulated by the questions (Do you still beat your wife?). Trump comments were partially reported and then modified with "analysis". He has sent out hundreds (thousands?) of Tweets with only a few making it to the news cycle. 99.9% of what you know about the man has been adulterated in some way so how is it possible to make an assessment of the man with absolute certitude? Even his speeches, like the one on Tuesday, which was great by the way, perhaps his greatest speech ever, was influenced by speech writers. Did you catch what I just did?
The media isn't interested in the truth, they are interested in grabbing eyeballs so they are interested in shock, lies, conflict, blood, sex, scandal and whatever else sells.

The process is simple. For example, Trump says something reasonable about how a person's views and biases are the product of their life experiences. You know, like how Sonia Sotomayor said her "wise Latina" life experiences would cause her to make better decisions than a white man. Only Trump didn't refer to race, he said that a judge of Mexican decent may be biased against him due to Trump's position on Mexican immigration. (Take a moment and think about that last sentence and find where it is unreasonable. No? Neither can I). The progressives immediately shouted "racist!", even though Mexican is a nationality not a race, and demanded everyone stop and renounce the racist Trump. In full Pavlovian progressive conditioning obedience mode Paul Ryan, the Republican establishment and many others did just that.

The progressives have turned the Republicans into zombies and nobody even notices. The progressives made the Republicans create a 100 day plan to stop Trump. If it was a Republican idea wouldn't they first have had a 100 day plan to stop Obama?

Now the adult mind does not like to be a zombie but the emotional child mind is insistent so to satisfy both intellect and emotion the adult mind rationalizes the zombie behavior as "reasoned". Trump therefore must BE a racist because that explanation means you are not a zombie and your conditioned response is the right course of action. It doesn't matter that Trump has never actually made an overt expression or racism or practiced racism. If he had, Jessie Jackson would have been all over him.

The only thing that matters is that you have arrived at the simplest explanation that comforts your adult mind and your child mind. You easily accept other stories of Trump's racism or other shortcomings because your conformity bias dictates that new information that conforms to what you already hold true must also be true.

Smart people will have the hardest time absorbing what I have just revealed because their adult mind has constructed a more detailed and elaborate justification OR it has referenced a fixed set of "beliefs" that do not require additional rationalization. Your mind works very hard at being lazy.
What is really disturbing is that from now on, every time you see NeverTrump you will be reminded that you're being manipulated. Of course, I could be completely wrong about everything.


Brent Regan is a force to be reckoned with in North Idaho.  Well versed in local politics he has long held the reputation for clear thinking.
Mr. Regan is an engineer who engineers stuff that I don't even understand for the aviation and aerospace industries.  He's counts among his friends well known aerospace engineer Burt Rutan (who now lives in Coeur d' Alene), and flying enthusiast conservative Bill Whittle.
Even with his very busy life, he has managed to devote thousands of hours to local issues from zoning, land use, and has even served on our local school board.

Thoughts about Trump...

from one of our most conservative activists in North Idaho.

Brent Regan is a force to be reckoned with in North Idaho.  Well versed in local politics he has long held the reputation for clear thinking.

Mr. Regan is an engineer who engineers stuff that I don't even understand for the aviation and aerospace industries.  He's counts among his friends well known aerospace engineer Burt Rutan (who now lives in Coeur d' Alene), and flying enthusiast conservative Bill Whittle.

Even with his very busy life, he has managed to devote thousands of hours to local issues from zoning, land use, and has even served on our local school board.

He posted the following on his Facebook page and has graciously allowed me to re-post it here - and we thank him.

From Brent Regan:

Friends keep asking my thoughts about Trump. Here they are.

I like Ted Cruz, and I also like Trump, but for completely different reasons. In my experience as a manager I have found that if you look for a person’s talents and then find a way to apply them then success will be close at hand. Cruz and Trump have completely different skill sets but they are both very good at what they do.

I had arrived at the conclusion that Trump would win the nomination back in December because I could see Trump’s skill set and how he was applying is to the task. My experience in business allowed me to recognize Trumps marketing and negotiation techniques which caused me to read “The Art of the Deal” and conclude that Trump was approaching the problem in a way that is never (rarely) done in politics. As a consequence his opponents have no effective defense. His victory was assured before the battle was fought, very Sun Tzu.

I told my close friends that Cruz was who I wanted to win but Trump was who I thought would win based on a reasoned analysis of the situation. First you must understand, as Scott Adams points out, that reason is what we think we use to make decisions but emotion is what we actually use most of the time.

Brent Regan

Now, here is where I make some people angry. If you are in the “never Trump” camp you have made that decision based on emotion and not reason. You may wrap it in “reason” and call it “principled” but what you are saying is that your mind is made up and there is NOTHING, no new information, that would cause you to reconsider. This is by definition irrational, the inability to make a rational choice based on all information. It is especially egregious when you consider that the information you DO have is deeply flawed and incomplete; carefully filtered by the media for optimal shock value.

If you watched a modern interpretative dance without music or sound you may well conclude the dancer was having some kind of seizure and perhaps suffering some pain or disease to cause such unnatural motions. The truth would be hidden because you lacked all the information. Because Trump was being viewed through a distorted political “lens” HIS actions were equally incomprehensible. In the struggle to explain the situation, many offered ridiculous comparisons; He is Hitler, he is working for Hillary, he’s a bigot, and he hates women, on and on. This was fueled by the media that feeds on controversy while Trump used this need to serve his purposes. He OWNED Fox news. Even Meghan Kelly got a Trump haircut.

Hillary doesn’t stand a chance against Trump because Trump will hollow out all the moderate democrats and men. It isn’t going to be pretty to us conservatives but there is a big blue pile of democrat electoral votes and Trump is going after them so gird your loins, it’s going to be a tough ride.

The good news is that Trump is the asteroid that we needed to kill the political dinosaurs and the smart, successful, productive conservatives will be able to fill the void. It is a long game but it has a happy ending.

A Cruz victory would be a happy beginning but the consequences of 8 years of BO would ultimately come crashing down on “THE CONSERVATIVE”, forever stigmatizing conservativism as the thing we were doing when the crash happened. I cannot imagine the media, the liberals and the establishment not scapegoating conservatives. Better to have Trump in the breach when the wave hits.

Will Trump make a good president? It’s impossible to say with certainty. I do think it is highly likely that a Hillary or Bernie presidency would be VERY bad for our prosperity. Therefore I’ll take my chances with the successful billionaire who is the product of using persuasion in the free market rather that a socialist who uses the lethal force of government and the power of the mob to coerce the people.

Finally, stop heaping all your expectations in one spot. Government is the product of our culture, not the other way around. A president can’t change the morality of a nation, nor should he. Our Republican government requires a moral people and THAT starts with me and you. We don’t get to offload that responsibility to some guy living in a white house.

Of course I could be wrong and, with new information I could change my views.

Brent