Axios are bubbleheads: Memo to you ditzes -- smash and grab partisan reportage didn't save a dead profession.

You obviously do not need a brain cell to write dreck for Axios.

This article is a knee-slapper. I love this passage.

Thought bubble? You need a brain for a thought.

The partisan Left press made a big mistake backing Hillary Clinton. She was not capable of winning an election. Period. Trump would not have run otherwise: he knew her, and assessed his chances. The moment he declared his presidency, the press should have put on their thinking caps, as moth-eaten as they were.

Clinton was a sore loser — when she failed to show up to give a concession speech, the press, if they didn’t put the obvious together them, should have dismissed her. The end. Don’t bother covering her morning after concession. Go home.

But then she kept spewing about how James Comey ruined her chance at victory — which means that she cannot handle internal problems, and the press should have not indulged her.

But when she become vindictive and destructive by blaming Russia, the press fell for it.

And then went on and on and on with that bullshit story. They came off as paranoid cowards, and I am sure Putin laughed so hard he cried at the yokel press.

But by then, journalism was dead. There was some delusions that people were watching MSNBC — but audiences were so minuscule that it didn’t add up to an actual audience.

And they got those slim pickings bleating Clinton propaganda.

This was stupid and showed not just how journalism doesn’t use logic, facts, or see reality, but that they are incapable of thinking about tomorrow: you are placing your future on the Mueller Report, which would absolutely not find a shred of evidence of collusion with the Russians. It is nonsense.

And what happens to your fortunes once Mueller clears the president? You lie to your audience who are there to see someone get thrown to the lions — and there is no show?

Now they are blubbering that even that paranoid segment of society has dumped them. Yeah, that was pretty obvious a mile away.

And if the press thought their audience are marching away, they haven’t seen anything yet.

They are not coming back because you lost credibility with them. You made an empty promise. You failed to deliver the goods. You didn’t predict Trump’s victory, and you falsely called his downfall.

But that smash and grab partisan reportage did not resurrect a dead profession. It can’t. You cannot believe what a sore loser rival says when they want to inflict pain on someone who earned what they thought that they were entitled to have just because they fancy themselves as superior to everyone else…

Fox News is partisan? You don't say, Carl Cameron! Too bad every other outlet is partisan, too.

I love this very late Come to Democrat Jesus headline.

Carl Cameron has been on Fox News for how long? I wrote about him in my 2005 book OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism…that came out in 2005. Count the years, kids. He just realizes this now?

This is nonsense. Of course he knew and was part of that machine. They cuts his checks and now he is trying to reposition himself the way Lara Logan did. Mainstream media outlets are partisan — Left or Right. There is no one here who is right by default.

So why now?

This latest partisan attempt to take on the Drudge Report may have something to do with it.

It is too complicated and busy to be a threat. It represents why the left alienate so many people and fail at any real connect. The Huffington Post was supposed to Drudge on. No dice. So was Buzzflash, which is trying to make a comeback.

The problem with the Left is their sanctimonious and long-winded narratives where they try to present themselves as a superior race out to save the little people from themselves, and no one has to pay for anything because someone has a printing press in their basement.

And their message is a real demoralizing and patronizing downer: people are so incapable and stupid, that they cannot function without government nannying in every aspect of their lives. Let’s infantilize the populace! is a shitty campaign slogan…

And, really, not all that different than Fox News, who always found other people to blame for their audience’s various real and imagined failures: the difference being that even FNC’s riff implied people were capable if other people got out of the way…but it still implied their audience would be helpless without the FNC.

So there is your choice: you are either too stupid to live unless the government puts a diaper on you…or a partisan network tells you how to put one on. Neither narrative is close to the truth — Hollywood made a huge mess of things by convincing Middle Class people that trades and hard work were bad things and that everyone should be a famous and special just for voguing.

There are no correct or productive answers coming from the communications industries: they are antiquated and should be ignored, regardless of their self-serving sway…

Wente takes a Globe buy-out...

She got to stay on even after multiple plagiarism scandals, but now, she is leaving. Aside having a fizzled out feud with Conrad Black, there really isn’t anything here to note.

And that’s interesting. We used to have name columnists who would be discussed. The Internet wiped that perk away, and people come and go without much fanfare at all…

The New Republic's hate-filled propaganda. Nice try. Use some facts.

More strategic anti-Serb hate-speech courtesy of the New Republic, the same people who made Stephen Glass a “name” journalist. Fabulists excel in this rag and so do exploiters, and this piece of garbage is very instructive.

Aside from fellating Bill Clinton in this propaganda piece, it is trying to set up a false narrative that goes against actual research, such as how Serbs were forcibly driven out of Kosovo by the Albanian faction there for decades. Long before the civil war. To dead Western silence. There is high unemployment, no tax base, and that little issue of the Albanian mob ruling the roost through drugs and human trafficking.

Did I mention Serbs over there are being harvested for their organs? Yeah, there is that, too.

And then you have this knee-slapper:

But for Kosovo Albanians, who had faced political repression from Serbia throughout most of the 1990s and had virtually no allies throughout the twentieth century, this was the start of the American infatuation.

Yeah, tell it to the illiterate. Nice try. Just because you do not get everything your own way, it doesn’t mean you are being oppressed. You sucked up to the Clintons, and gave Ms. Albright interesting things for her sold soul. Since that whole Telecom thing did not turn out, she had to settle for a measly statue.

But this is war propaganda, in hopes of setting a narrative so that Serbs can once again be painted as villains.

This is the Internet Age with yokels using old media to do it.

Giving Clinton and fellow war-monger Madeleine Albright statues just goes to show you the level of corruption and overt ego-bribing going on in that bankrupt hellhole. Memo to the appeasers: no one likes the Clintons, anymore.

For a reason.

The US and the rest of the planet dodged a serious bullet when Hillary bungled an easy presidential run.

But the piece tries to anticipate and gaslight: the Serbs are trying to say they have been victimized.

Uh, yeah, they have. Scores of people have gone missing; so don’t try to bury the bodies and blame it on the people who have vanished in the night.

Wicked trash. That’s what the West is puking these days.

The entire subtext of the article is genocidal: just look at the headline.

That is coded language for the Clintons failed to exterminate all of the Serbs so that other people can just grab their land and take their valuables.

No mention of how PR firms painted a demented fairy tale back then. Kids, this is how people get suckered into supporting bad people trying to get things at the expense of others.

Journalists keep trying to go back to the good old days when they told the little who to hate without evidence, and they, like obedient little children, would do it.

Now, it is a different ballgame.

Because if we had real journalists — and we don’t — they would comb through Clinton’s and Albright’s books, seeing just how many millions of bucks they got from this regime and other regimes for their cause — and where, exactly did they get the money to pay for it?

Or did it cost Serbs an arm and a leg? Kidney, perhaps?

Both those trolls should be rotting in the Hague.

Along with every reporter who used a Ruder Finn press release as reality back then…

Ontario students Life Illiterate: where did education here go wrong?

Much needless to-do about the 15-year-old brat fined for scribbling nonsense and alleged “protest” in front of Queen’s Park.

I would double the fine for being politically illiterate.

I seriously doubt most of the student protestors know who is their MPP, or why they are protesting: they are deferring to authority who are exploiting them.

And not teaching them the basics: before you go marching in the streets after the fact, and before you do things that have no relevance to solving a problem, such as writing profanity in chalk in front of a building to no one in particular, how engaged were you in the political process?

Did you write or call your MPP? Did you go see them? Did you write a civilized letter to the Premier after he got elected?

No, you didn’t. You were drooling on your smartphone, snickering at something stupid with buds in your ears hoping some benevolent They would act as your bank machine and maid to do things for you.

Protests are for slackers who wait too long.

Parents are largely responsible for this mess because they cannot make up their minds whether their children are geniuses or morons. They will brag about how brilliant their kid is in arts, music, or science, have them compete in complex tournaments in chess or robotics, but ask them if their children wrote to their MPP, and suddenly that same brat is a dummy who is too young to understand politics.

Seriously? Children should be learning about politics from Kindergarten instead of how to glue pasta to cardboard and then call it “art.”

Uneducated children in times of chaos fight as soldiers and worked full-time, and got through it and prospered; so why can’t educated children in times of peace do anything constructive? Why would they actually think swearing and throwing tantrums in chalk is going to persuade politicians to listen to them?

How would they like it if their teachers or parents wrote incoherent, angry, and profanity-laced messages in chalk in front of their homes or schools? Would they do their homework and chores all of a sudden — or would they think the adults were immature loons who ought to be ignored?

Try a diplomatic, rational, civilized, and factual strategy from the start. If enough students had done so the day the Ford regime won power, there would have been a very different outcome. They would have shown they were literate, engaged, and willing to get off their backsides and would be future voters to court and work with.

So enough of this bad and lazy behaviour.

And the older ones are just as vapid, whining about OSAP funding. The same applies to them, too, and they have no excuse for it.

Besides, what did they do to secure their own funding? Finding scholarships and grants is essential, and there are many, many dormant scholarships out there because students are too ignorant and lazy to apply.

What we are seeing is a passive and self-entitled generation who are not thinking or active. They do not plan: they memorize by rote, and when the rules change, they are not resourceful enough or insightful enough to put Plan B or Plan C into action.

That speaks very poorly of the educational system in this province that never taught students how to survive, be critical, and self-sufficient.

It is the reason why education should be privatized: you need teachers who also have no safety net in order to have a productive mindset. If your job has too many guarantees, you lose that instinct, and your teaching reflects a structure that does not exist outside that manufactured ecosystem.

You have a generation unable to functionally look after themselves and survive, let alone prosper and improve their lot. That is completely unacceptable. They think there are infinite resources to appease every want and need — and there isn’t.

The reality is that students need to be introduced to reality, and that there isn’t enough resources to make life work-free. You need to struggle, fail, cut your losses, try again, change your strategy, and contribute productively.

Whining to a newspaper that begged the federal regime for money or scribbling on the sidewalk in chalk won’t solve your problems: what are you doing?

The answers are troubling, and that’s a serious problem in itself…

CBC's Ford delusions continue.

The CBC are a bunch of odd ducks.

Take this childish article, for instance.

This “analysis” is bizarre. When you are running a province, there is no end to the problems. The CBC has problems, and their puerile posturing has yet to solve a single one of them.

So what’s your point?

This is Middle Class thinking: there must be some magical solution that will wipe away all the problems!

Yeah. Grow up, please.

And really, Ford’s problems are minor. Trump had it a lot worse, and he has managed to easily weather them. Ford has been in the chair for a year. No one will remember anything by the election.

Sometimes I think the CBC is actually written by sheltered 15 year olds who came by time machine from the 1980s and actually believe those melodramatic narratives of ABC Afterschool Specials.

Ford is not in the same position as Justin Trudeau who made far more serious gaffes and now actually has to work trying to do the photo ops that will undo the damage his nincompoopity brought him — worse, it didn’t come in the first year of his tenure, but within the final year of it — and yet CBC is all happy to present that as positive.

Timing is everything. Go in with them hating you, and they will change their minds. Unfortunately, the reverse of that is true, too.

CBC’s political coverage has always been goofy, but that has been upped to the point of farce…

The Curse of Marat, and the death of journalism.

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That painting up there, for the historically illiterate, is a piece of political propaganda that came from the French Revolution. The painting The Death of Marat, depicted with hilarity the murder of French journalist/Revolution leader/physician/propagandist Jean-Paul Marat.

As a journalist, Marat had blood on his hands. He was a minion of Maximilien Robespierre, writing hatchet pieces about Robespierre’s targets for liquidation, justifying their politically-sanctioned murders. The purging was the end goal, and Marat knew it and killed people with his fake news.

He was a propagandist and mouthpiece, and he was murdered by Charlotte Corday, who was depicted as a heroine by another painter.

Needless to say, she was executed for it, but Marat was presented as a hero in the first painting by another propagandist, Jacques-Louis David.

That painting had dainty blood, a journalist with a quill and paper at his dying breath, and a halo of white light coming from above. It is over-wrought and pure propagandistic melodrama.

And shows that the profession has not changed in centuries.

The power to destroy others through words was too alluring, and journalism never bothered to address it because it made them useful to the power elite. It was always easy to hide this reality because there is always a power struggle, and the confirmation bias ensures that going after one overlord makes it seem as if the profession holds power accountable, even if they are doing it on the behest of another.

The Internet made them obsolete. One overlord used Twitter, and the rest is histrionics. The profession keeps having meltdowns because no matter how they go after Trump, they can’t touch him. They couldn’t pull a Watergate. They couldn’t stop his victory, and then they couldn’t vindicate themselves and prove they are a power because they are not.

So in Canada, reporters all marched lockstep to become Marat, whoring themselves for taxpayer money the way Marat whored himself to Robespierre.

In the meantime, there is a void in real information-gathering. The staged and choreographed self-aggrandizing propaganda is fading away with no benefits to speak of and now that Robert Mueller blew the Beltway popsicle stand, the ratings and circulation are plummeting even more. They became their own David, trying to put a halo on Marat.

Marat was no guardian. Neither are journalists. They are mercenaries for hire, nothing more.

They are not detectives or scientists. They never were empirical or ever bothered to question what they were doing, how they were doing it, or why….

The Smollett hoax is far from over...

With a prosecutor assigned to investigate the original probe…

Pre-election propaganda continues...

The federal Liberals reminds me of the grade school lazy bad boy who screws up nine months of the year, and then for the final month, sits up in the chair, keeps his mouth shut, and does something that resembles work so that the teacher passes him, hoping the previous nine months are forgotten.

The gambit often works, but when I got those students in college, it did not. Previous bad acts (i.e. marks) dragged down the brat who would fail anyway, and I couldn’t be swayed to make the previous bad stuff disappear (and as a professor, you can do that).

The feint was to charm in the beginning, get away with being a swine, and then end with wearing a halo. It was a power play, nothing more. Those who never grew up never passed my course. You didn’t master the previous material, and you are not smart enough to catch up and then just present something good. There are too many holes in your foundation.

Journalism is a provincial, folksy, and non-empirical dead beast. It is like the oblivious teacher who would pass an idiot because of a deceptive façade. Justin Trudeau massively fucked up, and now the pre-election propaganda begins.

This is the thinking of a stupid person. Do you honestly imagine a photo-op is all it takes?

Do you not understand basics of reality?

Obviously not. What concessions did Trudeau have to make to get that photo-op?

That was the entire point of isolating Canada: to break it, and then get a coward to capitulate to something no sane person would do.

That is the question an intelligent reporter would ask, but Canada doesn’t have any.

At what price? is one of the most important questions to ask, but when your sugardaddy is going to lose an election, then you have to spin some propaganda to bolster his chances.

The problem is schools are enclosed and teachers can pass students without prying eyes.

In the public, doing that has the opposite effect. People who worked hard and had to earn their keep make it a point to vote the bums out, which is a fine Canadian tradition.

But the clean-up detail has begun, and at a furious pace, but social media makes attention spans short, and all it takes is one stealth move to have all of it implode…

Doug Ford brings corporate strategy into politics: journalists cannot compute what I already said would happen. Go me!

Doug Ford has done a major cabinet shuffle. He demoted three major players, including his once rival Caroline Mulroney.

The ditzes at the Toronto Star don’t get basics of business, which explains why they are now corporate welfare sugarbabies.

There is no “scrambling”: just scrambled brains at the Star.

This is typical corporate takeover strategy: you make your most unpopular moves at the beginning of your tenure, have your middle managers do the dirty work, and then get rid of them as you bring in fresh meat. The end.

Ford did all of that: he made the big cuts in Year One. Note that. He had three ministers take the heat — the three who got demoted. Note that as well.

The excuse is the polling numbers, but people will not remember it comes the next election. That’s why Ford did not waste one second after he got elected to clean up house, and get rid of all the rigs and resources from the Left. This is not scrambling: it’s shrewd.

He weakens possible contenders to replace him within his own party as he gets the rest in line. He also took away the resources of the Left. By next year, no one will remember it. By election, he puts it behind him and has a new narrative to offer voters.

He didn’t waste a second and he did the renovating of the House right away. No one will remember what the old House looked like.

This is corporate strategy, and it is highly effective. Let the middle managers take the heat, and then when you remove them, you give the appearance of being the good guy who put a “stop” to it. Anyone who whines about this for more than a year looks like a bitter loser who is incapable of landing on their feet.

Christine Elliott is the only one of the original leadership contenders still in the game unscathed, but that could change at any time, and the cuts announced could come into play.

I already said all of this would happen. I am familiar with the tactic, for many reasons, but it is an obvious one. The Left always spin some sort of cultish doomsday narrative that never comes true, but that journalists — who are supposed to see the world around them — have no clue about the obvious is pathetic…

The Hamilton Spectator's side job columnist gets in hot water...

He is actually a social worker who is in trouble in his day job, losing a column as a result.

I had a relationships column in that paper long before Gary Direnfeld did — in the Ego section for the under-30 crowd, while I was getting my M.A. from Western University. I had it for a year, long enough to know the Spec was a dead-end place, and very shortly after I left, the section itself folded.

Not surprising that something like this would happen, but it does more often than you think…

New York Times' attacks on people they do not like is stupid and dangerous: if you can't take the heat you created, get out of the kitchen.

The New York Times is mad at the president for not kissing up to them, and after going after him, his family, his mental state, and publishing fiction calling for his assassination, have the nerve to provoke him with sick things, and then say his response is stupid and dangerous.

Really?

The Times never had rationality or objectivity. They just vogued and preened as they got off telling the little people how to think, and now, they are absolutely desperate, especially after three years, people still have MAGA bumper stickers and hats.

You cannot get lockstep agreement. Stop acting like rich divas. It’s not working anymore…

Working on my Kintsugi book...

A femme fatale with a straw instead of a cigarette…

Buyout, Round Four at the Globe and Mail

They keep cutting, and there have been takers.

Will a federal bailout stop the bleed? Nope. That era is over.

The profession still keeps doing the same thing, and expecting a different outcome…

The Rebel is not a Role: How Pseudo-rebels confuse their sanctioned role with outsiderism.

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Spy magazine had a very good article in the 90s called Everybody’s a Rebel by Paul Rudnick. It was all about the faux rebellion of Hollywood, and how we had actors and singers proclaim to be “rebels” even though they were the Establishment, and living it up in mansions.

There are fake rebels, but they are not rebels: they have a role in society that prevents actual rebellion. They placate people — allow them to release and live vicariously through these stand-ins: you can pretend you are standing up to the Man and be rich and famous — and mainstream. It is a safe Zero Risk fantasy.

There are many roles in society, but the the fake rebel looks somewhat different than the cornfed ones, and it is easy for the fake rebel to think they are rebels, which they are not. They are the psychic equivalent of the Amish’s rumspringa: it is pretending to allow the naive and life inexperienced youth into thinking they are “running loose”, but not really. The kids don’t know the difference, and stay within the in-group and abide by the rules.

Rock music is Western society’s version of rumspringa. It runs on the same principles, and also has the same misconceptions about it.

For decades, the mainstream music industry could keep this reality well-hidden because the gate-keepers could hide it. You had people such as Madonna reap the bountiful benefits of seeming like rebels because they were the vent built into the Machine. Hollywood also used the same logic with “bad boys” and “bad girls” becoming famous on the false pretence of being “rebels.”

That’s not being a rebel. That is playing a role.

Rebels shun a system. They are outsiders who do not get lucrative contracts or endorsement deals. Industry is about making money, not losing money. You have a certain overhead, and a break even point, and that requires a precise number of people paying for your product or service.

The point of profit means more people are buying it than the break-even point. The more profitable it is, the more people see it as a need, and/or want. Need trumps want, and want profits come from disposable income.

Big hits can come only from (a) pandering to the wealthy who are willing to overpay for it for status and prestige, or (b) pandering to the middle class who don’t have the same amount of money, but have the numbers for an item or service to be profitable. To pander to a mainstream audience is where most people in entertainment and communications (such as journalism) can make a decent living.

But there is a catch: the mainstream are Middle Class, and that means what they seek is Zero Risk. The rich take eccentric and Avant-garde risks all the time. They can like the obscure indulgences, and set trends — or keep them out of the hands of the plebs. The Middle Class follow rules and trends, not make them.

Cutting edge talent either play to the rich — or the poor. They either have a rich patron and do well — or they forever toil because the poor don’t have the disposable income to support those players. To be an ideological rebel is to be a true outsider who is beholden to no one.

To be seen as a rebel to the Middle Class is a different matter. It is all shallow things that do not actually threaten the structure of patriarchy. They can tweak its nose, but as it is the patriarchy that created the untrained audience and cuts the pay checks, they butter your bread, and you don’t get to go on stage unless you sing their tune.

But the fake rebel can never be acknowledged as a false one: there are pretences to keep up. The fake rebel is, in fact, the lynchpin, to keep a patriarchal system in place: if people discover that any true rebellion is punished, they will become afraid and upset. If they think that sometimes rebels can “win” and succeed, then they believe they have freedom and freedom of choice.

That’s why music and movies heavily hype fake rebels so much.

It is an escapist outlet.

But then the Internet came along, and as it blew into town, tore down the façade, and now the fake rebels are having a meltdown.

IV

Fake rebels are a valve or a vent to keep the machine from over-heating. In a machine, there are different parts that look different from each other. The different appearance is irrelevant: it is all part of the same machine that is used for the same function.

Madonna is having public tantrums because of it. She buys her own hype that she “unconventional” (not at all), and a “maverick” (keep on dreaming, fairy princess).

She is not a rebel. She was the Establishment’s vent to keep its machine running.

It’s like the Spice Girls: each had a different role to play, but none were the black sheep: Baby Spice was not the rebel. She was part of the band. Scary Spice was not the rebel, either. Neither was Ginger, Posh, or Sporty Spice. They were a package deal, and one Spice’s differences were cosmetic: they all wore costumes, danced and sang on cue, and worked on the same product.

Sure, there would be egos and arguments, but the product was the united front.

When you are in the mainstream entertainment industry, you are not an outsider. You are an insider. You may not get along with your co-stars, but that doesn’t make you an outsider. That makes you an asshole.

The Machine tries to get attention of people, turn them on, and then get them to buy their product for survival.

But getting attention in a Tower of Babel is extremely difficult. That’s why old country media, when they had control of the information stream, could have monster acts sell millions of records: the pickings were slim, and they could attract different sects within the Tower by appealing to different roles.

And there were those who wanted a safe rebel, and acts like Madonna directly appealed to them.

But when the Internet came, this system became hobbled because the old rigs were blown away. People didn’t need a stand-in: they could present themselves in that role, but then, as the old role-keepers faded and stop reinforcing the old sanctioned parts, people adopted new roles in order to fit in with their fantasies, confines, and strengths.

Suddenly, we had real racial diversity — and Hollywood’s Oscars were not seen as about talent, but its obnoxious whiteness.

Anorexic models were not seen as an ideal, but as a way to keep women confined — and then the girth of new players increased sharply.

The Internet is global, but it turned into thousands of ideologically=driven villages: the scale is smaller with no room for the monster acts anymore.

The Babel part took over the Tower, and the chattering no longer was in sync.

And acts like Madonna became antiquated with modern sensibilities. She is incongruent with the zeitgeist. She wants to be a big act, but even if she were half her age, she wouldn’t be any more popular. She was a product of a more restricted time, and could never be as successful under any other circumstance.

She was just fortunate that the elements of that era aligned to her benefit. Those old tricks do not work in 2019.

True rebels, on the other hand, will always be outsiders, regardless if the focus is the Tower or the Babel.

There is no sect where they fit. There is no whole where they have a place.

That is why they are rebels. They are feral futurists whose instincts show them a path not yet paved.

And they break away from those towers to build new worlds without anyone’s permission or approval…

The Ontario 2018 Election Campaign finds its way in the 2019 Canadian Federal Election.

Kathleen Wynne made a huge tactical error in 2018: she radicalized the Left, splintering it, and gave Ford his majority, despite not winning most of the large city votes.

The electorate here are bribable and don’t think too far ahead. They take things at face value, and never question anything that plays up on their own fantasy-narrative.

Wynne forgot that the Liberals are centrist. You pander to the illusion of the Middle Class. Stick to the narrative, and never radicalize your opponents. She never had a feel for the middle ground because she naturally aligns to the more distant left. The nuances always eluded her.

What she ended up doing was energizing the NDP base — a turf they knew better than she did. Wynne made a promise to the far-end of the scale, all the NDP had to do was up the ante, and that’s why the NDP became official opposition why the Grits no longer hold official party status.

Know your audience. When I taught public speaking to advertising students, that was lesson #1. You found a base and a niche, and you have to speak to them.

You have to know their motives, nuances, language, experiences, needs, wants, and Shibboleths. You have to know the ortgeist and the zeitgeist. You ride on the wavelength, and immerse yourself, and when you come out, you are prepared to address those people in a way they will understand.

In-group and out-group dynamics are essential to understand, and Wynne, to her detriment, did not.

She took the Left as one giant entity, and it is not. You energize your core, offer sweeteners to those on the fringe of your domain, and do not frighten rivals to the point that they all go marching to the polling stations to prevent your victory.

Wynne overplayed her hand, and energized Andrea Horwath’s clique while alarming Doug Ford’s. She veered too far from the base, who then either stayed home on election day, or went with one of the other two parties. This is not the breakfast of champions.

Justin Trudeau is of the same ilk: he tries to co-opt the base of other parties, but is merely radicalizing them. The Greens can take seats with a superior environmental platform — and they don’t need to take a lot of seats, just enough.

And now the NDP have been awakened.

The Grits’ Pharamcare gambit has now been upped by the NDP. That policy is their domain. The idea of universal healthcare came from their political forerunner, the CCF.

And they are expanding it to more than just Pharmacare — and their Pharmacare is more ambitious than the watered-down Liberal version.

The Grits are in snits now, with them trying to change the narrative to say the NDP version is “unrealistic”: well, so is yours, and it doesn’t stop you from puking it out.

You opened the door to it, now face the consequences of the awakened rival.

And memo to the Liberals: voters do not look for realistic promises. They look for politicians who promise to instantly solve their problems.

The Grits are sticking to platforms other parties can do better. They got into power with the promise of legal pot, which was something no other party had any dibs on before. They have no encore.

Worse, what they did do in power was cringeworthy and incompetent: they cannot claim to be moral because of that whole SNC Lavalin thing. They can’t pretend to be allies with China or the US because they screwed that up royally.

So they are stuck. They have checkmated themselves way too early in the game.

All Scheer has to do is come out with a sensible economic platform and be reasonable with foreign policy, showing that he will not humiliate the nation. A few promises of helping Canadians get out of credit card debt would give him a walk into the top spot with a majority.

And the Tories can do this without a genius guiding the ship. The Grits need a roomful of virtuosos to eke out a minority.

Trudeau learned nothing from Wynne — and it shows. Pharmacare was the magic word that gave the NDP new life — and it’s all downhill for the Grits from here…

The whole art and science of Method Research: learning to read the signs empirically and with street smarts.

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Madonna may be calling, but the Patriarchy’s favourite female monster act keeps getting the wrong number. She doesn’t get that she is not a rebel. She is The Man.

I found this article to be a good indication of how unself-aware she is — and unaware of modern society.

Madonna never became a somebody: she picked the wrong profession.

She became an anybody and an everybody.

She was a fantasy stand-in: she would sing on stage, and her fans would imagine themselves on that stage singing those songs and gyrating — only they imagined they were more famous and iconic.

Once social media allowed anybody and everybody to make fishy pouts on selfies and post it to Instagram, she was redundant. Fans didn’t need her anymore because they could have a new fantasy of being “discovered” with their own selves instead of her — they didn’t need hours of rehearsals — they just had to film themselves and put it on Facebook and watch the likes coming in.

Those fans aren’t “slaves”: they just went out on their own, hoping to either strike it big, or whine for socialism when the whole famous thing didn’t pan out.

Madonna has no clue about the modern age. Of course she pines for the good old days when the gate-keeping Patriarchy told the little people that she was hip, cool, and edgy. They had slim pickings. She is a product of a bygone era, but still tries to play the role of a maverick that she never truly was.

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But Madonna has something in common with journalism: they never got it because they were not empirical, but had the benefit of a benevolent Patriarchy who shielded them from their own obliviousness with those fabled gates.

Trump figured it out, however. He saw it. He is a lot hipper than Madonna and more savvy. He saw Twitter was where all the cool kids were going, and so, he won his presidency with it.

Just to be clear: he didn’t merely just post on Twitter: he figured out its rigs and system, and did something unprecedented with it: win the highest public office in the world on his first try.

Journalists and Madonna fumed with jealousy, and the press is trying to make up a narrative about how there is a recession in the US, but it isn’t.

Because the press has another void in their brains: they cannot read any of the signs.

They don’t have Method Research. They don’t have F.R.E.E.D.

I do, however. It is the system that took me the majority of my life to create.

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What is happening to the US economy isn’t a recession: it is a transition. The dinosaurs of the economy are becoming extinct, while the fittest new animals are thriving. Journalism collapsed. Hollywood is crumbling. Bricks and mortar retail is struggling.

What they all have in common is an inability to learn and adapt because the old rigs gave them real power and control. They lost the rigs, which were always their crutch, not magic wand, and they don’t want to confront the reality of their true mundaneness. They are Madonna, fuming that the illusion of being a Chosen One came with an expiration date, instead of shifting. Madonna’s ignorance is a real knee-slapper: for all the talk how she “re-invents” herself, she has never re-invented her structure. She is static.

Just like journalism. Just like Hollywood. Just like bricks and mortar retail.

The mindset of the world is shifting and rapidly so. It is something I have noticed and chronicled for years.

And I took it all into my equations.

I do not need to appeal to authority to tell me what will happen because I have devised a superior method that is faster and more accurate than employment statistics.

You look for the unintended consequences. You look for subtle shifts.

Because people lie. They keep the most critical detail away because to reveal it would expose a vulnerability that explains a seemingly baffling situation.

They will tell you everything is wonderful when it is horrific, for instance. Or, if they are doing well, they will claim poverty in order to get pity and gain something from someone who has something that they want.

When I worked as a journalist, this kind of thing would happen all of the time. There was not a single story where there wasn’t at least one crucial holdback that I had to find to explain what was really going on.

It didn’t matter how benign the story, it was always something. It could be minor or major, but it altered the essence of the story, in every single case. I never played up on it in my reports because it was my job to tell people about the reality of a situation, not present a narrative of me being some sort of great detective.

But I saw the shifts as I saw the subtle inconsistencies of what people told me. I could look for signs and test various theories as I continued to research.

And then I could build up on it through Method Research, the process of studying something by walking among those who you are studying by becoming one of their number.

Madonna’s still in the dark about why she isn’t a monster act any more. It has much to do with her age, but also because the times shun people who want to be seen as larger than life. She wants to be an event and an icon. People would rather place themselves in that position on a smaller scale. The way she puts out albums is old school. She should have gotten out of the music business a decade ago, and do something else. Trump did. He decided to try politics. He succeeded.

Madonna just wants attention. She still wants to be somebody, but music is disposable entertainment, and that hamster wheel is broken. She wants to tell the little people how to think, hoping to convince them to pay attention to her again by properly grooming and instructing them to fall for the correct mindset. Not happening. People prefer their own mindset, thank you very much.

Journalists are also stuck in that stupid loop. They keep trying to tell people how to think instead of understanding how thinking has changed in the last twenty years.

And it is their job to feel those changes, not work against them or ignore them. Method Research is the very art and science of honing instincts: you can have data to back up your deductions, but your senses are more in tune and accurate than those snail’s pace offerings.

For people who follow scripts and rules, Method Research terrifies them. They are passive by nature and want to parrot authority in order to sound smart without having to do the legwork.

But for those who are truly critical and active thinkers, they can glide on any wavelength to see reality in order to find the truth, regardless of the time or place to see the light…

When liars figure: how well is your economy doing? Depends if your media outlets politically align with your fearless leader or not.

When Donald Trump got elected, he knew the way to win was to promise jobs. It’s the economy, stupid. It is not the environment. It is not foreign policy. It is the Benjamins. He won on that platform. The end.

Now the Left are forever trying to unseat him with various narratives about a recession and how it’s here — but every time they cry wolf, something ruins their attempts. You have a press wishing ill on their own country, and that’s pretty sick.

When the press and power are misaligned, it is always doom and gloom.

But when they are aligned, the opposite happens: no matter how obviously bad things are, they paint a rosy picture that there is no recession. In Canada, we are in one, and when you have record debt, what you have is poor people masking their poverty.

When you have no empirical methods, but an agenda and a narrative, you can spin a depression into economic health.

In other words, you cannot trust any media sources when it comes to a nation’s true health or sickness.

There are always ups and downs, and when you have narrative, but cherry-pick one and hide the other.

That means if the press likes the leader, everything has to be dismissed if it is rosy. If they don’t, it has to be dismissed because it is gloomy. If we stuck to a few salient facts without the meddlesome manipulations, it would be one thing, but as it doesn’t, the news is trash that doesn’t inform, but play games…

The circus is in Kosovo...

And professional clowns Bill and Hillary Clinton are there to celebrate their psychopathic choices in bombing Serbs.

Kosovo, the place where doctors were involved in illegal trafficking of organs.

Or didn’t the Clintons tell you that?

The Clintons have seen their fortunes fall as incompetent nerd Hillary couldn’t win an easy and fixed presidential election. She blamed the Russians because she thought it was payback for all the sick and twisted things her and her husband did over there in order to secure their power, including pretending their fake news was real.

Speaking of which, Le Monde Diplomatique has an interesting article (English version here) about all those lies during that civil war waged against the Serbs during the West’s propaganda campaign, with this piece of war propaganda that is too stupid for words:

[Serbs] play football with severed heads, depose corpses, tear off fetuses of pregnant women killed and grill them,” said the German defense minister, the Social Democrat Rudolf Scharping, whose words were repeated by the media…

And yet the deceptive press ran with that canard.

Yes, the press and politicians are worthless scum who try to tell you what to think without facts, logic, or perspective.

They are nothing but clowns, and yet they decree that they deserve respect.

Not happening…

A day late and a dollar short...online "news" outlets think a union will save a dead profession.

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Vox and BuzzFeed think getting unionized will change their fortunes. Unions are antiquated and haven’t kept up with their strategies. Journalism is still dead.

Unions cannot avenge this death. It was self-inflicted.

And their structure is ill-equipped to handle changes. The entire profession walked lockstep…and nothing. That’s not just a US problem, but a Canadian and UK one as well.

Easy, bandaid solutions have been unsuccessful for the profession in the past, and their current self-righteous narrative isn’t getting them anywhere, either.

If their own owners lobby groups have struck out, their little unions aren’t going to far any better…