Oh goody! Dr. Watts is in the new article about trump chaos/Surkov playbook, Vanity Fair, April '17
...Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who has studied Russian propaganda for years, sees major similarities between Putin’s and Trump’s approaches. “Create chaos in the system, such that you don’t know what is the truth or not the truth,” he says. The Kremlin does this by flooding television and digital media with biased coverage and wanton spin. The Trump administration has discovered something equally effective: lying to reporters and publicly attacking critics are like tossing grenades into the media eco-system. The press is constantly scrambling to respond to a never-ending river of slime, and the system is gradually overwhelmed...
much more at
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/is-trumps-chaos-a-move-from-the-kremlins-playbook
= new reply since forum marked as read
Fortunately, I remembered that I have a decade of experience in asking myself "What's really going on here?" about all kinds of stuff. That helps me retain some perspective,
A word of warning about that question, though - it can lead you down some very deep rabbit holes. What I discovered during my search for answers convinced me that global industrial civilization is on the brink of collapse (within a very few decades...) Don't ask questions if you're not prepared for the answers. 
Trimming trees sounds like a good way to expend some energy.
Given my other interests and conclusions, I wonder sometimes why I'm drawn so irresistibly to this crisis. If I'm right, it won't really make a hill of beans' worth of difference to the final outcome. But the part of me that's not a dispassionate Martian anthropologist rebels at the presence of evil, just as if I was a normal human. That reaction, combined with the complexity of the dot-connecting in this situation turns it into mind-candy.
