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“The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,

what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.

2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.

Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play.

Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds

1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.

he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”

“The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”

3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.

“There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.

4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”

“If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”

“Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives.

5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.

Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.

6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.

“The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”

: “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

Mr. Bishop said Americans now choose “in their neighborhoods and their churches, to be around others who live like they do and think like they do — and, every four years, vote like they do.”

All this adds up to a kind of political echo chamber, in which like-minded thinkers reinforce one other.

Political clustering is reflected in religious participation and even shopping choices. David Wasserman, of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently calculated that 89 percent of the Whole Foods stores in the United States were in counties carried by Barack Obama in 2008, while 62 percent of Cracker Barrel restaurants were in counties carried by John McCain.

In 1980, Democrats and Republicans attended church at roughly the same rates. But Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard who explores “the God gap” in his book “American Grace,” finds attendance has since gone up markedly for Republicans and declined among Democrats — a sign, he said, that “people are changing their involvement with religion as a function of their politics.”

He tested his thesis with an examination of the shifting geography of presidential politics, beginning in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won the presidency by the slimmest of margins, with 50.1 percent of the vote. That year, 26.8 percent of Americans lived in “landslide counties,” which voted either Democratic or Republican by 20 percentage points or more. By 2000, when Al Gore and George W. Bush split the popular vote, 45.3 percent of Americans lived in landslide counties. In 2008, the figure was 47.6 percent.

“Political activism is much easier when you’re surrounded by like-minded others,” said Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Hearing the Other Side.” “The very kind of environment that might be more likely to increase people’s exposures to different viewpoints and convince them that compromise is necessary is not the kind of environment that encourages them to speak out politically or get involved.”

Marketers, though, offer another explanation. Americans, they say, may profess an interest in compromise, as an abstract goal or principle. But they don’t want to make the trade-offs necessary to cut a deal. Daniel Yankelovich, a market researcher, developed what he called the “mushiness index” to assess whether people truly understand the costs associated with the principles they express.

Today, people can buy all sorts of products — from Converse sneakers to Dell computers — designed exactly as they want them. If Americans don’t want to compromise in buying sneakers, he reasons, why would they make trade-offs in politics?

But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal

Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism.

Powerful business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers led the way, promoting this ideology’s appeal in conferences and P.R. campaigns. Generous funding came from prominent businessmen

In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen.

businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call

The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham.

In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” In the same spirit, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower fulfilled that prediction. With Mr. Graham offering Scripture for Ike’s speeches, the Republican nominee campaigned in what he called a “great crusade for freedom.

Elected in a landslide, Eisenhower told Mr. Graham that he had a mandate for a “spiritual renewal.”

Although Eisenhower relied on Christian libertarian groups in the campaign, he parted ways with their agenda once elected. The movement’s corporate sponsors had seen religious rhetoric as a way to dismantle the New Deal state.

But the newly elected president thought that a fool’s errand. “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,” he noted privately, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

Unlike those who held public spirituality as a means to an end, Eisenhower embraced it as an end unto itself.

Uncoupling the language of “freedom under God” from its Christian libertarian roots, Eisenhower erected a bigger revival tent, welcoming Jews and Catholics alongside Protestants, and Democrats as well as Republicans. Rallying the country, he advanced a revolutionary array of new religious ceremonies and slogans.

The rest of Washington consecrated itself, too. The Pentagon, State Department and other executive agencies quickly instituted prayer services of their own. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. It placed a similar slogan, “In God We Trust,” on postage that year and voted the following year to add it to paper money; in 1956, it became the nation’s official motto.

During these years, Americans were told, time and time again, not just that the country should be a Christian nation, but that it always had been one. They soon came to think of the United States as “one nation under God.” They’ve believed it ever since.

Officially, the Holocene is still running today. You have lived your entire life in the Holocene, and the Holocene has constituted the geological “present” for as long as there have been geologists.But if we now live in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, then the ICS will have to chop the Holocene somewhere. It will have to choose when the Holocene ended, and it will move some amount of time out of the purview of the Holocene working group and into that of the Anthropocene working group.

This is politically difficult. And right now, the Anthropocene working group seems intent on not carving too deep into the Holocene. In a paper published earlier this year in Earth-Science Reviews, the Anthropocene working group’s members strongly imply that they will propose starting the new epoch in the mid-20th century.

Some geologists argue that the Anthropocene started even earlier: perhaps 4,000 or 6,000 years ago, as farmers began to remake the land surface.“Most of the world’s forests that were going to be converted to cropland and agriculture were already cleared well before 1950,” says Bill Ruddiman, a geology professor at the University of Virginia and an advocate of this extremely early Anthropocene.

“Most of the world’s prairies and steppes that were going to be cleared for crops were already gone, by then. How can you argue the Anthropocene started in 1950 when all of the major things that affect Earth’s surface were already over?”Van der Pluijm agreed that the Anthropocene working group was picking 1950 for “not very good reasons.”“Agriculture was the revolution that allowed society to develop,” he said. “That was really when people started to force the land to work for them. That massive land movement—it’s like a landslide, except it’s a humanslide. And it is not, of course, as dramatic as today’s motion of land, but it starts the clock.”

This muddle had to stop. The Holocene comes up constantly in discussions of modern global warming. Geologists and climate scientists did not make their jobs any easier by slicing it in different ways and telling contradictory stories about it.

This process started almost 10 years ago. For this reason, Zalasiewicz, the chair of the Anthropocene working group, said he wasn’t blindsided by the new subdivisions at all. In fact, he voted to adopt them as a member of the Quaternary working group.“Whether the Anthropocene works with a unified Holocene or one that’s in three parts makes for very little difference,” he told me.In fact, it had made the Anthropocene group’s work easier. “It has been useful to compare the scale of the two climate events that mark the new boundaries [within the Holocene] with the kind of changes that we’re assessing in the Anthropocene. It has been quite useful to have the compare and contrast,” he said. “Our view is that some of the changes in the Anthropocene are rather bigger.”

Zalasiewicz said that he and his colleagues were going as fast as they could. When the working group group began its work in 2009, it was “really starting from scratch,” he told me.While other working groups have a large body of stratigraphic research to consider, the Anthropocene working group had nothing. “We had to spend a fair bit of time deciding whether the Anthropocene was geology at all,” he said. Then they had to decide where its signal could show up. Now, they’re looking for evidence that shows it.

This cycle of “glacials” and “interglacials” has played out about 50 times over the last several million years. When the Holocene began, it was only another interglacial—albeit the one we live in. Until recently, glaciers were still on schedule to descend in another 30,000 years or so.Yet geologists still call the Holocene an epoch, even though they do not bestow this term on any of the previous 49 interglacials. It get special treatment because we live in it.

Much of this science is now moot. Humanity’s vast emissions of greenhouse gas have now so warmed the climate that they have offset the next glaciation. They may even knock us out of the ongoing cycle of Ice Ages, sending the Earth hurtling back toward a “greenhouse” climate after the more amenable “icehouse” climate during which humans evolved.For this reason, van der Pluijm wants the Anthropocene to supplant the Holocene entirely. Humans made their first great change to the environment at the close of the last glaciation, when they seem to have hunted the world’s largest mammals—the wooly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger—to extinction. Why not start the Anthropocene then?He would even rename the pre-1800 period “the Holocene Age” as a consolation prize:

Zalasiewicz said he would not start the Anthropocene too early in time, as it would be too work-intensive for the field to rename such a vast swath of time. “The early-Anthropocene idea would crosscut against the Holocene as it’s seen by Holocene workers,” he said. If other academics didn’t like this, they could create their own timescales and start the Anthropocene Epoch where they choose. “We have no jurisdiction over the word Anthropocene,” he said.

Ruddiman, the University of Virginia professor who first argued for a very early Anthropocene, now makes an even broader case. He’s not sure it makes sense to formally define the Anthropocene at all. In a paper published this week, he objects to designating the Anthropocene as starting in the 1950s—and then he objects to delineating the Anthropocene, or indeed any new geological epoch, by name. “Keep the use of the term informal,” he told me. “Don’t make it rigid. Keep it informal so people can say the early-agricultural Anthropocene, or the industrial-era Anthropocene.”

“This is the age of geochemical dating,” he said. Geologists have stopped looking to the ICS to place each rock sample into the rock sequence. Instead, field geologists use laboratory techniques to get a precise year or century of origin for each rock sample. “The community just doesn’t care about these definitions,” he said.

As violence continues to escalate, so too do fears that armed groups who oppose the military coup are positioning themselves to join the fray.

In a statement on Twitter, the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Thomas L. Vajda, denounced what he described as "horrifying" bloodshed and called for "an immediate end to the violence and the restoration of the democratically elected government." "These are not the actions of a professional military or police force," Vajda said. "Myanmar's people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule."

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour," wrote the bloc's delegation to the country.

"A failed state in Myanmar has the potential to draw in all the big powers - including the US, China, India, Russia, and Japan - in a way that could lead to a serious international crisis," he wrote on Twitter.

The communications chief also said the quake had damaged four of Mamuju's largest hospitals.

Another difficulty was the lack of communication among rescue teams, as local telephone networks were down following the quake, he said, adding that there were eight locations where people were in urgent need of rescue.

The earthquake also triggered a power outage and caused three landslides along the main road connecting Majene and Mamuju.

"The degree to which it becomes corrosive is in direct proportion to the number of people who say it."

Trump has continued to claim falsely that the election was stolen and rigged, repeating that message to tens of millions of his followers. That was amplified by conservative media in the lead-up to the violence Jan. 6

Almost all Democrats (92%) trust the results, as do a majority of independents (56%). But just 1 in 5 (20%) of Republicans do; a whopping 78% do not.

By a 50%-43% margin, Americans do not think social media companies should continue to restrict Trump's use of their platforms beyond his term as president.

He said more than 200 people were receiving treatment at the Bhayangkara police hospital and several others in Mamuju alone. Another 630 were injured in Majene.

The quake set off landslides in three locations and blocked a main road connecting Mamuju to Majene. Power and phone lines were down in many areas.

A governor office building was almost flattened by the quake and a shopping mall was reduced to a crumpled hulk.

Two ships headed to the devastated areas from the nearby cities of Makassar and Balikpapan with rescuers and equipment, including excavators.

The pope was praying for “the repose of the deceased, the healing of the injured and the consolation of all who grieve.” Francis also offered encouragement to those continuing search and rescue effects, and he invoked “the divine blessings of strength and hope.”

Indonesia, home to more than 260 million people, is frequently hit by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin.