Author of Don’t Believe It!: How lies become news, OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s war on journalism, and When Journalism was a Thing.
The SNC-Lavalin scandal is water torture, and there is more to come.
As I said before, I doubt this will be the only scandal to hit the federal Grits by October.
Or the only headache.
China used to buy billions in canola from Canada. Now it is zero.
This isn’t going to be one big war, but a thousand little ones.
And that sinks a government faster than anything else…
And the whining from those who thought they found a ride on Easy Street is quite comical. People honestly thought making it legal was going to make the blackmarket go away.
Just how stupid are you?
The blackmarket is way more convenient: they sell to kids, like, no prob. They also sell other yummy hard candy.
And now we have big babies blubber to the prime minister, Make them stop! We can’t compete with the big bullies!
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.
The only people attracted to this legal industry are those with no idea about reality: they are looking for easy markets where they can look competent and successful and not need a strategy or effort. That’s why we have so many politicians get into this business.
Except playing with cutthroats is a lot harder than that.
Duh…
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Making the News is a book that instructs activists how to gain media attention, which I find interesting. How much “news” is actually coordinated and choreographed canned events specifically designed to be on the news. That means that so much of “news”, actually isn’t.
Public relations firms are worse: from celebrities to wars, so much of what is presented to the public as organic events are production numbers. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia had no end of these fake events, and badly acted ones at that.
Nayirah’s “testimony” during the first Gulf War is one of the most successful examples of journalistic theatre.
Journalists were irresponsible and like canned events; so they never let people know that what they are presenting is guerilla theatre. It is not as if they don’t know; it’s just that they want to file a smooth story with a catchy narrative hook.
Many times, there is a phantom behind the story, not unlike Oz’s wizard.
And the man behind the curtain is not just footing the bill for the show, but directs the script.
Sometimes the phantom is obvious. A nation’s leader wants to impress other nations and puts on the show. FARA.org gives lots of hints of those kind of people playing those kinds of games.
Sometimes it isn’t. In my book Don’t Believe It!: How lies become news, I recount one case where one “overnight sensation” violinist was the benefactor of a wealthy man who created a bogus narrative because he had a vested interest in the affair.
Getting attention for anything is difficult. Even “viral” attention is a flash in the pan that doesn’t sustain itself; so when anything “takes off”, you have to question that kind of coordinated planning is going on.
So, for example, we have Olivia Jade Giannulli who was a “social media influencer” since she was a teen. Great, how did she get there? On her looks? Charm? Brains?
Or because her wealthy parents could open doors for her, and pushed her. She has a Luxury Brand Name to her, even if her dad was Target-level. She can be angry at her parents all she wants, but if she was Olivia Jade No Name, no one would give a flying fuck about her lip gloss. They knew that in her narrative of being a glamour puss, she could not get away with not going to college because goodwill would have turned on her for being a lazy brat. The only way to skirt that razor-fine line was to get her worthless ass at university, even if it meant taking a gamble bribing the right people to get in there.
She is a manufactured entity. She was fake news before the scandal. She was just low-rent advertising, and nothing more. If she was any other teenaged girl, people would not have tuned in to see what graft she got to shill because daddy has connections to fashion and mommy has connections to entertainment.
In her case, the parents were the phantoms, and in many cases, nepotism is the key. Who else is going to push you? Who else would even care? Very few people luck out beyond family borders: it is either a parent, grandparent, or spouse who is the puppet master.
And when it is not family ties, there is someone who has political or financial motives to create puppets for show. Whenever someone starts getting serious play, it is a good time to question how did they get there. And in an age of social media where the marketplace has a glut of faces, you absolutely know that someone has gotten a serious push to be noticed for any length of time.
Find the phantom puppet master, and you find the real story — not the feel-good schlock spew to push a narrative for political gain or profit…
Andrew Coyne has a very interesting and must-read column, and may be the only other person in Canada who sees something rotten in giving the dead profession of journalism government money:
Andrew Coyne: It's when you read details of media bailout that the chill sets in
If this goes through, everything will be subsidized: print, broadcast, the works — a whole industry of CBCs. You couldn’t do a better job killing the news business
You don’t say!
Beggars can’t be choosers, and what the beggars got was a chain around their necks. They are now the minions of the government who now will not only call the shots, but can make threats to take away designations on a whim.
The industry should have taken matters into their own hands, creating their own body of governance, and then reinventing themselves with radical empirical changes instead of being passive, arrogant, and whiny paupers looking for a handout.
John Honderich was hellbent on getting free government money, and if anyone in the business had an ounce of sense or survial instinct, they would have shown him the door, forget those self-aggrandizing “J-talks” and gotten down to serious work.
Now, you are all little propagandists shilling lies for the government — and you motherfuckers better do a good job of it, too. Look what happened to Jody Wilson-Raybould when she tried to follow the “Rule of Law” and not His Majesty’s Sketchy Decrees.
I cannot stress how needless the collapse of journalism was. I wrote books outlining the problems — and then offering very workable solutions.
When Journalism was a Thing was a book that showed where the problems were, and even then, how to break the shackles, but because I am Writing While Female and am not a Luxury Brand Name, not only do I get ignored, but people try to rip me off.
There is already a publisher who I found out is trying to pull off such a gambit, and it is the reason I put my book proposal up on Amazon. You will notice Amazon was kind enough to remove the “Look Inside the Book” function — something they don’t usually do, but they understood my plight and cooperated with me.
That’s the blueprint of the solution. That would be how to reinvent and resurrect that kind of profession.
The actual workings and details are not in there for a reason as well. Just the blueprints. I am not some deluded loon or some victim you can feast on at my expense. Fuck you. My entire adult life was researching this to the very last detail.
The profession had a choice: they could have listened to me, and give me credit and the outlet for me to do what I do best, or fellate the Jive Turkey so he can turn them into his worthless minions.
And guess what they chose?
But I knew they would…
They tried to razzle-dazzle with a budget, and then Jane Philpott reminds everyone that this little scandal has more to it than that. Prime Minister Jive Turkey denies the obvious, only looking more shady than before.
But the federal Liberal strategy is all about denying the obvious. Rich man Bill Morneau denies there is a recession, but never ask a rich man if there is a recession because for the rich, there never is one.
Canada doesn’t have a government. It has a royal inbred court.
And one that thinks it can do whatever it pleases and issue smug denials.
It is an abusive regime, at best, but you cannot expect anything else with a populace that takes it as they tremble themselves to death in a democracy…
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If you want to see the blueprint for F.R.E.E.D., I placed it right here.
So that we have no confusion about who created what.
But that’s just the beginning of that work.
That’s because Alexandra Kitty has courage, and that’s not a common trait in Western culture. One gripe on social media, and companies throw everyone under a bus.
Which makes me boycott them because I do not like people who don’t stand behind free speech.
I also do not like big pretenders who have delusions of courage and then try to dine on it.
The “fight for truth”? You?
Don’t make me laugh, motherfuckers.
Journalism isn’t about any fighting about truth. It is about cribbing from press releases, acting as stenographers, and then telling the little people what to think as they try to bully and intimidate them.
You don’t make people afraid. You make them brave. That’s what journalism never learned to do, and the reason it has made such a mess of its own profession.
It is a cowardly profession. It hides behind veils as it demands everyone else to take theirs off.
Yeah, lead by example by taking off your veils. Stop your chest-thumping. It’s just another lie you spew.
Because cowards use lies as shields and fortresses, thinking they rig the board to their advantage as they weaken opponents and strengthen their own position.
Except when you have an antagonistic relationship with the people you are supposed to be informing, your motives come into question.
People are attacked for speaking their minds and from the heart. Truth is all about facing the reality of that and not trying to kill free speech.
But that’s what journalism is trying to do: prevent other people from offering divergent points of view in alternative venues using alternative methods.
I am moving around some of the Chaser Arcs, and Arc II will be coming in a couple of weeks. It will be about war propaganda — and showing how outlets malign contrary voices even if the evidence from experts contradicts their labels. I will question and challenge assumptions using two different wars as a comparison.
Unlike the first one, I will have an interview or two. This Arc, however, will be a meta-article: I will show the construction of a news article with annotated notes. I may use a PDF file to do it because this web site doesn’t give me the freedom to do what I want.
So as I begin to merge Chaser and F.R.E.E.D., I will provide an alternative way of interpreting information — not using fear-mongering, but bravery-inspiring.
Because the industry has become pathetic with its self-aggrandizing psychopathy — worse, universities refuse to acknowledge the problem, enabling those delusions.
There can be no truth if you are afraid. Cowardice attracts lies.
That may be how the timid classes roll, but not all of us are of that ilk, and we won’t go away, no matter how afraid of the truth others become…
If you read this website regularly, you know that in 2018, I had ovarian cancer at the same time my mother had colorectal cancer. You also know that prior to that, my grandmother Stanka was dropped by Hamilton paramedics and they caused her amputated leg to burst open, broke her teeth, broke her arm in two places that never healed, and gave her a brain bleed.
Read MoreThe federal Liberal regime will us the budget tomorrow to bribe Canadian media into silence, which is silly because journalism here collapsed.
Because had it been strong, the Grits would have been in much bigger trouble with more resignations. Don’t kid yourself.
They will be bribing Millennials who always want more; so that will misfire.
Besides, the bribing comes too far away to make any impact. Kathleen Wynne tried that gambit and lost power.
They are trying to prevent Google from exposing their corruption. They have lawyered up.
Michael Wernick fell on his sword.
And the Grits are shutting down any inquiry.
Normally, this heavy clean-up detail would be enough to satisfy the cowardly sheeple into forgetting all the bad things, but this isn’t a normal or domestic assault.
This game is something beyond the Liberals’ ability to contain.
Because things have been getting progressively worse. It began with minor insults and now it is about corruption.
This isn’t a domestic attack because neither the Tories nor the NDP would have chosen the man-child leaders that they did had they had the capability.
And neither do the Grits. That they lost Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott isn’t strategically devastating in that they are both rookie MPs. The loss of Gerald Butts is a little more distressing, but he isn’t a genuine brilliant strategist: he is a hanger-on who knows the trick of latching on to someone in power and then failing upward. This can be embarrassing and a blow to morale, but it isn’t fatal.
What is more troublesome is Wernick’s departure. He has been in the game for almost four decades, regardless of regime. That he couldn’t handle it tells you just how serious this game happens to be.
You lose too many promoted pawns and you are set further back. People get jittery and they aren’t going to stick their necks out for you. The Grits have suffered far bigger losses than what their trying to do will repair.
And this game is far from over. No one is going to keep going after you and then just let go after they seriously weakened you. There are too many skeletons in this regime’s closet because they saw how weak the domestic opposition was and how fawning the press were and thought they could do anything with impunity and considering how many rookies are in this regime, you can imagine all the frat house antics that have been going on.
Except someone else has been keeping score and is slowing dripping problems one by one until there is enough to cause a flood. People are being primed and conditioned to go against the previous narrative about the Prime Minister, and so far, it is working perfectly. His credibility has been seriously damaged, and one or two more strategic airings of reality can make him seem as honest as Olivia Jade…
Read MoreCiao, babies!
Warner Bros.’ Kevin Tsujihara is kicked to the curb. Privy Council clerk Michael Wernick must ensure he doesn’t hit the door on his way out, too.
Don’t kid yourself. The wealthier and more famous and/or powerful the person, the more expendable they are. There are no shortage of replacements out there…
I love this propaganda piece:
New Zealand’s Loss of Innocence
You mean New Zealand’s self-aggrandizing delusions proven to be a sham.
Because people are people.
Here is another piece from the Atlantic:
France’s Yellow Vests Are Rebels Without a Cause
French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to figure out what they want. It’s not an easy task.
No, they have cause. They were promised a bill of goods and the promiser failed to deliver. They are angry for a reason.
Just as Ontario teachers are angry because the new regime isn’t doing things they way they want, but in this case, here is one Establishment group fuming that one higher up the food chain is telling them to tighten their belts:
In protest, classroom teachers began an online campaign over the weekend encouraging each other to wear black on Monday as a symbolic form of resistence.
Resistance?
What are you resisting? Reality? You work in the public sector, you are the ones people resist against.
And really, slacktivism in the form of “wearing black”? I wear black all the time. It doesn’t take effort, except that I have pet hair I perpetually have to clean with a lint roller.
But in an Age of Propaganda, everyone tries to look like the underdog. Even the rich. Even those work work for the government. Anyone who is an underdog who resists is painted as the aggressor and the tyrant.
It doesn’t actually work, however.
It’s a shell game where narrative never quite aligns with reality, but people confuse having a beef with being oppressed.
Here is the memo: Life is hard.
Sometimes you just don’t get your own way.
Next up: dictators whining they are being oppressed by those citizens they are barrelling over with tanks. Get out the hankies…
Paris is still pissed.
The news media still keep secrets, they still wonder if they should give facts in their stories, and are still losing jobs like crazy.
And shootings in Hamilton have tripled.
Anything look remotely solvable these days?
They are, but there is a catch.
Drop the propaganda, face reality, and these messes get cleaned up…
Sometimes I seriously wonder if I am the last grown up on the planet.
Longreads has a well, golly! piece that is so naive that it truly stuns me.
Some government is manipulating social media!
Motherfucker, here is the memo: every motherfucking government on this motherfucking planet is manipulating motherfucking social media and the motherfucking traditional media, too.
Just how motherfucking stupid are you?
Do you honestly believe any government wouldn’t take advantage of the mental laziness of the jittery middle class who buy into any self-aggrandizing patriarchal bullshit story?
Do you children know anything about reality?
No, of course not. You live in a bubble like the other journalists; so don’t pretend you know reality. You don’t.
Like the pauper journalists in Canada wanting to be sugardaddied and manipulated by their government because of their gross incompetency.
We have propagandists in the press who shame people who do not buy into their government’s lies.
And never question the lies the spread on behest of other governments.
And Al Jazeera should be ashamed of itself. The Christchurch gunman wasn’t influenced by Serbs or the Serbian government — and in comparison, is irrelevant.
On the other hand, did Al Jazeera ever condemn how their own nation’s citizens up and went to slaughter Serbs — strangers from a foreign country who never did them a thing to harm them?
No.
Did you ever mention that Osama bin Laden cut his teeth murdering Serbs?
Did you ever mention how the Mujahideen videotaped the torture and slaughter of Serbs — videos that I have personally seen?
In the whole scheme of things, a song is nothing. Taking a plane to a foreign country to roast people on a spit is vile. Shame on you for your own propagandistic temper tantrum and anti-Serb bigotry.
Because that hatred killed a lot more people in New York City than it ever did in Christchurch.
There are no good guys. There is no hack or TORTEE that gives you any wiggle room. You have corrupt regimes instil fear and hatred in their own people and in people in other countries, and then that triggers wars.
And journalists, who were always narcissistic thieves and cribbers, nod their fat heads as they spew that hate without question, and then are shocked, shocked, shocked when some mentally unstable person buys the bullshit story and explodes with a weapon.
People, grow up.
Grow up.
And to answer the Guardian’s stupid question:
What do we know about the Christchurch attack suspect?
The answer is fuck all.
You are too busy morally masturbating in public to know what some jittery middle class loser with a gun was all about.
We live in an Age of Propaganda. Period. Lying and prejudice is glorified for money. Cowards get manipulated by their loser regimes, and never question why they believe fairytales without question.
Enough. Grow up. Find some courage and stop looking for other assholes to do your thinking for you…
The Thought Thieves are everything, cribbing phrases, ideas, and even whole works as their own.
Saturday Night Live is in trouble for doing so.
This sin is up there with parents bribing and cheating for their children to get into university. It is intellectual fraud.
Speaking of which, today was the first time I had to threaten legal action because someone has an idea in their head what they think they can take from me. I had to warn them what they were telling me has already been published in two of my books — and elsewhere I have written, including here and my Dangerous Woman eBooks, and considering my unique skill set, experience, and research, there is no way of any coincidence, and I will sue.
And if you know anything about me, you know I am good on my word. I have prototypes of what I am doing that go back decades. I can establish provenance, and because I went in the profession knowing full well that stealing and cheating was accepted, I did things in such a way that there is no question of proving things.
So no cutesy, perky mind games with Alexandra Kitty. I do not make empty promises, and I do not appreciate people trying to cash in on my labour. Period.
So shame on SNL for keeping their eyes on someone else’s paper…
And when you go kill 50 innocent people while praying, you are a coward.
Countries that preen how tolerant they are need a reality check, too. No, you’re not. If your country has people in it, your people are just like any other people. No better, no worse.
It’s made up of people.
The livestreaming on social media, however, merely forced people to be forced to look at the reality of hate.
This is a coward’s attack, and should be properly labelled. A terrorist tries to create the same fear in his targets in order to justify his own.
Watch the middle class demand for gun control so they do not have to confront the bigger issue of vile hate embedded in their own societies.
There has been some very vile propagandistic anti-Serb ramblings about this killing, however, because the killer misapplied Serbian history. Serbs were abused in the Ottoman Empire. The equivalent is of the same ilk as slavery in the US. That’s true. If you are going to condemn Serbs for that, then you have to do the same to African-Americans who are upset at the ancestors being slaves to whites.
That above photo is evidence of a hate crime committed against the Serbs by the Turks. Go to Niš and have an up-close look at Skull Tower yourself if you need to see evidence of the kind of hate crimes going on in 1809.
And there is no expiration date on hate crimes.
There is a big misconception that one group or religion is immune to hate crimes. No, they aren’t. Hate crimes can be committed against Christians by Muslims, and then have them committed against Muslims by Christians.
There is no label you can stick upon yourself that makes you immune to committing them. Nice try.
If you are not a Serb, do not use the history of the torture against the Serbian people as an excuse to go out and kill people. Don’t do it even if you are a Serb. We were abused in the Ottoman Empire. We were decimated by a third in the First World War. We were abused by the fascist Nazis and Ustashe in the Second World War. We were maligned and villainized by US public relations firms during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia with a corrupt president who called for our bombing to deflect attention away from his own low-class philandering/sexual harassment scandals. Enough is enough.
You need a villain to blame? Go look in the mirror.
This man was not raised in Serbian culture. He was raised in a Western culture, and it is that culture that has committed its share of sins and enable hate with their narratives, and always in denial that they do. Do not try to deflect your internal sickness on some old propagandistic tropes that were manufactured by Washington, DC-based PR firms. Go look on FARA.org because they keep registration records for public perusal.
But don’t take too long. You have citizens going about killing each other every day, and then some go out and kill 49 people in one shot. That’s on your society.
When the world stops hiding behind their own "identity” labels and start realizing that those labels are made-up excuses to create false pecking orders to pretend to be superior to other groups, then maybe then we can finally get to the root of the cowardice of masks that help infect the seeds of hate that compel people to murder others for no reason at all…
My hometown is out of control…
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Never be married to your job because it is until scandal do you part, and you don’t even get any alimony out of it.
Lori Loughlin is learning that lesson the hard way as Hallmark dropped her really, really fast.
But they really clinically saddened by it.
Sephora dropped her kid really, really fast, too. So did TRESemmé. This is a made-up pseudo celebrity with followers, but most likely the imaginary friend kind. Just like her academic creds.
Seriously, that it is 2019 and people still buy into these bullshit stories is pathetic. These people are not as rich or successful as they are made out to be. Middle class gullibility is alive and well, and it takes really absolutely no brains to fool bunches of them at once.
And it is getting tiresome.
The fantasyland delusions have no place in modern discourse. I thought we were pretending to be woke or something, and here we have educated people with white collar careers behaving like bored trophy housewives. Fuck that shit, grow up once already.
People get offended over stupid trivial stuff, and never question that things that actually matter: as in, are there people bribing people in universities to get their intellectually garbage brats in there?
And then we are shocked, shocked, shocked that the worthless motherfuckers are building airplanes that crash.
Fuck you and your fairy princess bullshit filters.
Enough with the dawdling…let us get back to reality, please…
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Here is an interesting piece from Showbiz 411, lamenting the cuts and losses of several glossies. New York magazine, Vanity Fair, People, and the mention of the woes of Vanity Fair’s sister publication Vogue.
That list is interesting. The New York Daily News is bleeding as well, but New York isn’t just any city in the US: it is the publishing mecca, and it set the trend for many things over the decades, and now its power is rapidly eroding.
It is losing its patriarchal grip on communications, meaning everything is up for grabs. New York determined what is considered cool, good writing, witty, engaging, important, chic, sophisticated, and set the narrative on what we think about, who we think about, and what we think about them.
It is no longer the case, and that means consolidating a power base becomes that much harder. There is a whiff of defeatism already, and it can no longer just ride on the coattails of its zip code. It should be no surprise that the new generation there are already waving the flag, demanding pensions at 30 in an indirect way — it is a mere reflection of the aging and faded clout of a once invincible city, and what happens next will be interesting to see…
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Gracious, an outbreak of sophistry at the CBC.
Take a look at this silly piece of dreck:
Maybe it's really time to break up the post-industrial monopolies: Don Pittis
Anti-Google statement by News Corp proves it is no longer just a project of the left
No longer?
It never was “just a project of the left.”.
News Corps. CEO Robert Thomson has been whining about this for a long time.
Remember MySpace? That’s what the company banked on being dominant when they outright bought it.
This is all about Establishments wanting control of something that has nullified much of their power. Since they can’t put the genie back into the bottle, they want to capture the genie another way.
This column’s Well golly! preciousness strains all credulity…
