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A stunning Georgian townhouse, once used to film a 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Persuasion, is now on the market for £4.5 million. The Grade II listed property in Bath was used in the 1995 BBC recreation of the infamous period author's novel, starring Ciaran Hinds and Amanda Root. It flaunts its own ballroom, library and ornate dining room, perfect for entertaining guests with Regency-era grandeur.

I love my digital devices, but people keep telling me to worry more about my privacy. "Encrypt your emails!" "Drop Google and use search engines like DuckDuckGo that don't track us!" I probably should. But I don't. I'm lazy, and I like that web companies know me and show me things I'm interested in. I like that they display "restaurants near me." "You do not understand the way that that system is being used against you," says whistleblower Edward Snowden in my new video. Snowden is in exile in Russia because he revealed how the NSA spied on us and...

What Happened: The US Federal government in collaboration with Yale University held clinical trials to determine what the best messaging would be to persuade Americans to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it is ready. The news of this study does show an interest in finding the best way to persuade people into an ideal decision for the Federal government, and likely vaccine makers, and it also shows that a mandatory vaccine campaign may still be the plan B down the road, as opposed to plan A. The official title of the trial is, “Persuasive Messages for COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: a...

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force.. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical...

The Charlottesville Fake News Was the Best Persuasion Play of the Past Year Posted February 14, 2018

I see a consensus forming that Russia attempted to influence our election with fake news and other social media shenanigans. But why? If you start with the assumption that Russia is an enemy of the United States, you probably assume they do bad things to us simply to weaken our power and effectiveness. For example, this article hypothesizes that Russia’s intention was to breed distrust between whoever became president and our intelligence services. I guess that hypothesis sort-of-almost makes sense. But I wouldn’t say it passes my personal sniff test. Then there’s the more popular theory that the Russians were...

Axios is reporting that President Trump suggested putting solar panels on the new Wall with Mexico. The article wonders where the idea came from: Where this idea might come from: A proposal to cover the wall with solar panels was among those submitted when the U.S. requested designs earlier this year, according to the AP. Companies winning contracts and asked to build prototypes may be announced this month. That’s one place it might have come from. But I consider it an obvious idea, which means the President might have come up with it himself. And when I say “obvious,” I...

What do Bernie Sanders’ hair and CNN have in common today? They are both saying, “Comey” every time you look at them. The news coverage of Comey’s firing has become excellent entertainment. This is the biggest cognitive dissonance cluster bomb we’ve seen since election night. This one has everything. For starters, the topic is too complicated for the public, and even the pundits. That creates a situation in which we’ll all invent our own version of the movie in our heads. Where there is confusion, complexity, and emotion there is usually lots of cognitive dissonance. We got all of that....

Using Persuasion to Create Assets Out of Nothing Posted May 2nd, 2017 @ 9:18am in #Trump #negotiating Yesterday President Trump unexpectedly said he would be “honored” to meet North Korea’s Kim Jung-un. And that’s how a Master Persuader creates an asset out of nothing. I’ll explain. By holding out the possibility of meeting with Kim Jung-un, President Trump has conjured out of thin air a virtual “asset” that he can use for negotiating with North Korea. I’m sure the North Korean leader would like the international respect and recognition that such a meeting would confer. Best of all, Jung-un could...

Yesterday President Trump unexpectedly said he would be “honored” to meet North Korea’s Kim Jung-un. And that’s how a Master Persuader creates an asset out of nothing. I’ll explain. By holding out the possibility of meeting with Kim Jung-un, President Trump has conjured out of thin air a virtual “asset” that he can use for negotiating with North Korea. I’m sure the North Korean leader would like the international respect and recognition that such a meeting would confer. Best of all, Jung-un could use that future meeting as evidence for his citizens that he stared-down America and negotiated a great...

<p>In August 2015 viewers of the first Republican primary debate could be forgiven for thinking that Donald Trump was finished. “You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,” the moderator, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, said to him. “You once told a ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Trump didn’t act contrite, or statesmanlike, as conventional candidates might have done. Instead, he interrupted Kelly with another nasty dig, about Rosie O’Donnell, and volunteered that he’d probably insulted others, too. Many pundits proclaimed that the response cemented Trump’s unelectability.</p>

If I ever get captured and threatened with torture it will take about five seconds for me to give up every secret I have. That’s because I know I would break eventually, so why put up with unnecessary torture? I assume the same is true for the lightly-trained ISIS fighters. Some are just teenagers. Once the bravery-inducing drugs in their system wear off, I have to assume that at least some of them – if not most – would become quite flexible under the threat of torture, not to mention the torture itself. But won’t they lie? Well, in many...

I made the mistake of turning on CNN yesterday and saw all the hypnotized pundits trying to work the secret persuasion word “chaos” into every comment about President Trump. That’s your tell that none of the pundits are offering independent opinions. They are part of the hive mind led by some uncredited persuader on their side. Someone told them to say “chaos” a lot, and so they do. This might signal the return of Godzilla. Reminds me of “dark,” their hive-mind word for the summer of 2016. It appears that Trump’s counter-persuasion for “chaos” involves framing his administration as “disruptive.”...

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, knows the answer and has known it for years. So I called him and asked. I needed to know. He told me how Trump won. And he told me how anyone can use these persuasion techniques to improve their lives. What if you can get people to do whatever you want just by using the right words and subtly hypnotizing everyone you meet? It sounds like a science fiction novel. But it’s true. It’s what happened, and it happens every day. Who are the victims? You’re the victim. Scott Adams predicted in September 2015(!)...

The Master Persuader filter says Trump didn’t identify and match the preferences of the people so much as cause them to think the way they are thinking. My filter on the election says that Trump’s skill for persuasion could have given him the victory with DIFFERENT policies... If Trump didn’t win because of his persuasion skills, which other Republican candidate can you imagine beating Clinton?... I also have a hard time imagining any other candidate going after Bill Clinton so hard that it took him out of the game. Was Jeb going to do that?... If you believe Trump’s skill...

If you haven’t read the latest book on Pre-suasion by professor Robert Cialdini, a persuasion expert, let me detail below how the mainstream media is actively deploying pre-suasion tricks in order to secure a Clinton “win”. Or rather, how they intend to make the American people comply with a rigged election. Dilbert creator Scott Adams, himself a persuasion expert, also believes professor Cialdini has been helping the Clinton campaign. Besides, as Cialdini writes, something of this scale has been done before. In order to win the people’s support for continued wars in the Middle East, the establishment media decided to...

WHO is Psychologist Robert Cialdini, and what is he working on for the Clinton Campaign?? Apparently this guy is an expert on MASS PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATION, and has written several books on the subject, including "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". Frankly, I'd never heard of this guy until last night, but other places on the Internet are saying that this is the guy who came up with the "All Criticism of Obama is based in RACISM!" and several other memes used against McCain and Romney for the Obama campaign. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini

Youtube Video, pretty good about Trump's persuasion skills

Austen’s novel illuminates this proverbial saying: “If something is truly meant and intended for you, it will come your way another time.” Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth were in love and engaged, but her aristocratic father, Sir Walter Elliot, and a respected family friend, Lady Russell, disapproved the match and persuaded Anne to terminate the engagement. As a naval officer, “a stranger without alliance or fortune,” Wentworth “had no hopes of attaining affluence … and no connexions to secure even his farther rise in that profession.” Seven years have passed, and Anne is now 26. During the interim she...

The Republican Party has been clobbered in recent elections by a mythical “war on women” largely driven by abortion. Hysteria about a war on women was fueled by a Republican proposal in Virginia’s General Assembly about trans-vaginal ultrasounds before abortions. Conservatives who think people should pay for their own birth control were misrepresented as woman haters. Rush Limbaugh’s inflammatory attack on flaky Sandra Fluke upset superficial people. Somewhere in the last ten to fifteen years, the Pro-Life movement took a massive detour – for the worse. Pro-Lifers stopped trying to educate the public and persuade people of the very obvious...