When The Moon Hits Your Eye

I've hit the post-election doldrums.

After the head-slapping antics of the past year in the US, nothing seems to rise to that level of hysteria, nor provides enough comic relief to write about.  Trump has been busy filling his Cabinet, with only the occasional tweet to keep us all entertained.  Hillary Clinton has virtually disappeared, and instead has pushed her surrogate Jill Stein to the front.  Not that the recount isn't entertaining - watching it backfire on both Stein and Clinton is rather chuckle-worthy - but it is anti-climactic.

In other news, there's PizzaGate, which if you haven't been following that story, you are missing some good entertainment.  Here is an example of click-bait that will be fly-paper for anyone who steps in it.

See, the pedophile rings at the highest levels of global power is a very real issue.  It is a story that has been around for several decades now, but the Pizza Parlor angle, regardless of whether it was part of the actual operation before, has now been sanitized and is being used to trap Free Press types who don't have the experience and/or sense to smell a trap.

These kinds of operations, at the levels at which they ope
rate, has the ability to sanitize within minutes.  Think of the speakeasys during Prohibition in the 1920s.  Before the cops could get in the door, the liquor shelves flipped, glasses were swapped with soda and the place was completely neutralized.  This, in effect, is PizzaGate.

A trail of breadcrumbs has been left for the less experienced investigators to follow.  This has two purposes: one, it hides the operation and protects the perpetrators, and two, it will be used to ensnare and eventually discredit the "alt media."  All operations of this kind have multi-layered traps, and as fast as one operation is discovered, it is shut down and backup operations are immediately fired up, complete with all new jargon.

This highlights the problem with "alt media," which I now distinguish from the Free Press.  Most of the "alt media" folks are neophytes who have no training, little experience and a fraction of the common sense they were born with.  Real reports and investigators follow their instincts, which were honed over years of hanging around the old gang and getting their feet wet with experienced hands to guide them.

Now-a-days, every numbnut with a smartphone and a YouTube account think they are Billy Batson.  They are dumb enough to think all leads are good leads, and that the bad guys might actually lay traps to disgrace and discredit them.  In a way, that's good.  It weeds out the talentless wanna-bes and keeps the field relatively uncluttered.

A good reporter knows that where there's smoke, it probably someone trying to distract him from the real trail.  Real stories are like lizards.  Just when you catch them, the tail pops off and they get away.  The cub reporter is left with a wriggling piece of meaningless meat that keeps him distracted while the rest of the animal gets away.  A good reporter knows which leads are hot and chases the perps, but a great reporter gets ahead of the game and is waiting when the perps arrive.

I don't intend to smear "alt media."  It is a necessary function, much like Upton Sinclair.  In fact, the idiots populate all forms of reportage, and especially the Corporate Media.  Most of the bobbing heads one sees on the propaganda press are vacuous hair-spray models who got a degree in jounalism, not to be reporters, but to be famous for being on TeeVee (i.e. celebrities).  The same goes for "alt media."  There are those who just want to draw clicks and earn ad bux, like their Big Brothers, and honestly have no business calling themselves reporters.

Real reporters often have highly trained instincts that keep them on the cutting edge.  They are the ones that most people dismiss as wild-eyed loonies.  They are the ones whose stories seem to have little or no relation to trending stories in the rest of the media, but who are proved - weeks, months, even years later - to have been on the right track all along.  They are the ones going against the herd, and by the time the herd turns to follow, they are off on a completely different tangent, leaving the mop-up to the followers.

A great reporter is a true leader, but not in the sense of a politician.  Politicians usually get one thing right in their entire lives and then stick around to milk the praise as long as it lasts.  Real reporters often spend their entire lives being mocked and ridiculed, primarily because by the time everyone accepts the reporter's stories as factual, they've forgotten who got them there in the first place.  Meanwhile, the reporter is already blazing new trails.

So anyway, back to PizzaGate.  You will notice all the wanna-be reporters jumping on this bandwagon in the "alt media."  The perps have already flipped the tables, though, and anyone who clings to this story will get smeared with the Stupid Brush.

The story is genuine.  PizzaGate was a real front for pedophile rings, but getting exposed in John Podesta's email made them jump into action immediately.  They didn't cover it up, that would look to obvious.  Instead, they turned it into a rabbit warren of false leads and self-references to obfuscate the trail, and like a Venus Fly-Trap, it will snap shut and digest anyone who continues down that line of inquiry.

Folks are free to follow whomever they want, as well as free to become whatever they want.  The efforts of the Corporate Media to shut down "alt media" and "fake news" is nothing more than a desperate attempt to save their precious elitist positions and their pampered asses.  Years ago, they made a deal with the devil to stop reporting the news and start making it.

By the same token, there are a lot of "alt media" types who are self-aggrandizing and spreading utter bullshit under the guise of "reporting" news.

It is up to the viewer whom to believe, and it is certainly NOT the job of the Corporate Media and their lapdog Social(ist) Media to tell anyone what to watch, read or believe.  Everyone has the right to be wrong.