For all of us braced to see some gag-inducing GoPro video of Donald Trump struggling out of his gold lame thong for a little sexy time, the Stormy Daniels interview was kind of anti-climactic. Note to Daniel’s pitbull attorney: Next time, don’t let the hype get so far out ahead of the available facts.

On other fronts though, the demise of The Donald is continuing on pace, perhaps even speeding up. I’ve been telling people for a while now that sometime late spring to mid-summer the sleazy farce we think of as The Trump Epoch will shift into a whole new, batshit gear. I base that on both the pace and qualities of the indictments Robert Mueller has produced to date, which leads anyone watching this dumpster fire to expect indictments of Americans connected either to Trump’s career-long money laundering for Russian gangsters and/or the weaponizing of voter data in the 2016 election.

If one of those indicted is a principal in the Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon or Robert Mercer camp the [bleep] will not only hit the fans, it’ll be a finely pureed mist.

For your betting records, I’m also adding at this point my wager that the best, most damning direct link to collusion will come through the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal churning right now.

Here the primary American players — Kushner, Bannon, Mercer and we have to assume Donald Jr. and Manafort — all converge, lacking only the link to some specific Russian player, and people … with thirty or forty Rooskie thugs/spies floating around in the conversation, it may only be a matter of drawing a name from a hat.

For what it’s worth, I also expect that given a new round of indictments rolling in those with whom Trump shares actual DNA, (instead of, you know, just exchanging it in glitzy hotels), Trump will snap and fire Mueller, or at least attempt to can him by firing Jeff Sessions and replacing Sessions with a completely conscience-less hit man like Scott Pruitt or Mick Mulvaney. (That move would require Senate confirmation, which would create a proxy fight over the whole investigation, in which Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would continue to genuflect before The Altar of Craven Expediency. But the point is that at that point, with a Don Jr. or Kushner indictment, Trump will be so desperate and have so few other choices he’ll try anything and hope Sean Hannity can rally the goobers in his defense.)

But on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, which is fascinating on so many levels, let me toss out something I came across preparing for a class and panel discussion on “fake news” up in Grand Rapids last week.

An early, mostly innocent character in the scandal is a guy named Michal Kosinski, currently teaching at Stanford. His (apparently genuine) scientific interest in working with freely (i.e. way too loosely) available Facebook data is what eventually lead to the very precise “psychographic profiles” of individual voters in the 2016 election by the Mercer/Bannon/Kushner-funded/directed Cambridge Analytica scheme.

Many of us, not just average schmoes like you and me, but bona fide tech heads have been gobsmacked by not only how much data about individual Americans was harvested via Facebook, but how astonishingly specific it was, down to names, faces, street addresses and very personal misapprehensions and prejudices.

From a 2015 article in the Swiss periodical Das Magazin (a sort of poor European’s New Yorker) that was only translated into English and re-published 14 months ago, and has now been contextualized by Vice, we learn this:

Psychometrics, sometimes also called psychographics, focuses on measuring psychological traits, such as personality. In the 1980s, two teams of psychologists developed a model that sought to assess human beings based on five personality traits, known as the “Big Five.” These are: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?) and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). Based on these dimensions—they are also known as OCEAN, an acronym for openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—we can make a relatively accurate assessment of the kind of person in front of us. This includes their needs and fears, and how they are likely to behave. The “Big Five” has become the standard technique of psychometrics. But for a long time, the problem with this approach was data collection, because it involved filling out a complicated, highly personal questionnaire. Then came the Internet. And Facebook. And Kosinski.

And …

Remarkably reliable deductions could be drawn from simple online actions. For example, men who “liked” the cosmetics brand MAC were slightly more likely to be gay; one of the best indicators for heterosexuality was “liking” Wu-Tang Clan. Followers of Lady Gaga were most probably extroverts, while those who “liked” philosophy tended to be introverts. While each piece of such information is too weak to produce a reliable prediction, when tens, hundreds, or thousands of individual data points are combined, the resulting predictions become really accurate.

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook “likes” by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn’t stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone’s parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject’s answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook “likes.” Seventy “likes” were enough to outdo what a person’s friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 “likes” what their partner knew. More “likes” could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.

Here is a link to Kosinki’s scholastic work:

And here is another.

And, if you’re so creeped-out ny what Facebook knows about you and exploits to add to its fantastic fortune, read this.