Thank You, Jussie!

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In all the recent hubbub over the Jussie Smollett Incident, we have forgotten one important civil duty: to thank him for his public service.

While he has done his job with great aplomb - entertaining the masses - and there has been a great amount of focus placed on his Emergency PR efforts and his Surgical Legal Team, no one has done this one simple act of politeness.

So let me be the first.  Thank you, Jussie, for making complete buffoons out of the elite.

If I were being paid (well) by Jussie to formulate his PR revival, I would have a much different take on things, and one that would likely work if handled properly (as only I can).

To place my disclaimer up front, I want to let Jussie know that I am available for consultation.  My contact information is at the top of this page.  My fees are far more reasonable than his current clueless PR Masseuses, and I am a lot better at it than they apparently are.

You see, Jussie did us all an enormous public service.  He exposed the GeezerMedia bias and the idiocy of the Nattering Celebrity Nay-bobs far better than Trump has done in the past three years, and Jussie did it in one night.

On a winter's night at well below zero in Chicago (a.k.a. the Windy City), Jussie had to have been bundled up like an Eskimo on night watch.  Any part of his flesh exposed to that kind of cold would have been frost bitten before he got to the Subway shop several blocks away, much less on the return trip to his apartment.  If you spit at that temperature, you can hear it crackle as it freezes before it hits the ground.

Furthermore, his sandwich would have been frozen solid within minutes of stepping outside, making it a formidable weapon, not to mention that the "bleach" the assailants carried would have been a solid block of ice, making it a far better assault weapon than naked hands (remember the scratches?) in sub-zero temps.

That anyone would have been waiting around at 2am on a night like that on the off chance that a gay black male would be trundling to the sandwich shop stretches credulity far beyond the breaking point.  That they would have been wearing exposed MAGA hats without an enormous fur-lined hood over them further seals the absurdity of the situation.  That they would say, "This is MAGA country," in Deep Blue Chicago is but the frozen cherry on top.  That they would have been prepared with a rope tied in a noose for just such an occasion is laughably ridiculous.

As if to add that extra touch that turns comedy into sublime satire, Jussie even wrote a check in the precise amount of $3,500 to pay the two men for their star turns as type-cast muggers.  If I were advising Jussie, I would even have put "hate crime services" on the memo line of the check.

The more of these preposterous details one adds up, the more this whole thing sounds like a Buster Keaton skit, or given the number of people involved, perhaps the Three Stooges.

Here at the Grover & Assoc. Spin Doctors and White Wash Specialists, we would have immediately jumped on these details and turned the narrative around.

Jussie, in fact, had set out to spoof the Geezer Media and troll the Nattering Celebrity Nay-bobs.  He had set up a scenario so blazingly farcical that only a gaggle of hypocritical, unthinking drones would fall for it - and they did with great fury!  Jussie's sole purpose was to show how uncritical and reactionary these over-paid, stuffed-shirt waggle-tongues are.

In fact, Jussie had contacted his manager a few weeks before to outline the plan (quick, get the manager on the phone to align the story), though to his credit, the manager said it might go wrong.  Jussie should have listened to him.

Yes, Jussie was trying to send a message to the whole country that the Progressive SJW Busybodies had gone 'round the bend.  They needed to be exposed, and Jussie, with his profound sense of public duty, had concocted a plan to do just that.

Perhaps Jussie went a bit too far with the waterworks on national TeeVee.  Perhaps he should have brought Chicago police in on the spoof a bit earlier.  But Jussie throws himself on the mercy of the Court of Public Opinion, and is willing to suffer any indignity as a Supeme Act of Selflessness for having done such a valuable service to society.

I don't know where Jussie found his PR team, but they aren't worth a frog's fart in a hurricane.  They certainly know nothing about spinning a good story out of bad cloth.  I'm here for you, Jussie, like a Bernays-inspired ambulance chaser!  Not only can I salvage your reputation, but I can make you the victim once again, this time of the Geezer Media with their deep, deep pockets.  Just ask the Covington Teens.

It is a sad statement on the American political environment that a man of highly average intelligence with a fairly average career could and would conjure up such a laughably obnoxious story such as this to earn SJW Brownie Points.

It's even sadder that this perfectly average man of perfectly average intelligence didn't have a back-up plan - so sure was he that this cockamamie story would actually fly.

He couldn't have waited another two months for more temperate climate?  He couldn't have hired two actual white guys wearing actual MAGA hats...better yet - KKK hoods with MAGA scribbled on them with Magic Market?  Hell, if Jussie had engaged us beforehand, we would have at LEAST put the assailants in whiteface to complete the utter insanity.

He couldn't have withdrawn cash over a period of several weeks rather than write a check for the assailants' services?

Given the overwhelming preponderance of goofs, gaffs and giggles in this story, who wouldn't believe that Jussie was staging a send-up to expose America's tender underbelly?  In fact, if Jussie were to hire me as his PR Savior, I would have every MAGA-loving red-stater on his side in about 10 minutes.  He would be assured of fame and fortune.  He'd likely be hired as a Fox News commentator by the end of next week.

Instead, Jussie has doubled, tripled and even quadrupled down on his story, and it's sinking faster than a cement-covered granite block.  It seems that his Ace Legal Team and PR Patchers are so ideologically hide-bound that they too can't find the right angle on this.  Instead, Jussie is paying them to dig him deeper into the morass.

Regardless of how Jussie spins this story, though, or what his ultimate fate will be, we do owe him a debt of gratitude.  He not only made monkeys of the Geezer Media, but he got the Glitterati of Hollywood and the Sour Creme of Washington scrambling to scrub their Tweets and add the word "alleged" to their pitifully limited vocabularies.

This has been one of the finest Circuses of Unintended Consequences ever devised by Mankind, and the tickets were absolutely FREE!

Jussie, I hear ANTIFA is looking for a Poster Child.  License your image and likeness now, before you hit the Gray-Bar Hotel for the next few years.  That way you'll be getting paid while you rot.

I know you are at the end of your rope, Jussie, but hang in there.  Don't beat yourself up over this.  It will all come out in the wash.  Just pick up the phone and we'll make it all go away.

Otherwise, enjoy the rent-controlled room and three free squares.  I hear the exercise yard is lovely this time of year.

Such a deal I have for you!  Operators are standing by!

We Don't Get Fooled Again

Everyone is jumping on the Bash SCL/Cambridge Analytica bandwagon, and especially those whose agenda is to paint the conservative/nationalist movement as being somehow evil and nefarious.

The video linked above is slick and subtle. It first casts the process of demographic analysis as a black art, with ominous background music and an astounded tone. It then goes on to talk only about the Trump and Brexit campaigns, as if these were the only organizations that used such tools.

Now, I'm not saying that SCL/CA and the techniques of mass market manipulation (MMM) aren't evil and nefarious, but they are by no means limited to Trump and Brexit. In fact, they are just the latest iteration of the study and science of Marketing/PR pioneered by Edward Bernays at the beginning of the 20th century. In other words, SCL/CA may have invented better tools for MMM, but the basic formulae and tenets they use are a century old, and more if you include Sigmund Freud (Bernay's uncle).

The idea of polling people voluntarily, using seemingly innocuous questions, and then applying matrices to cross-reference the responses to build a psychological profile have been the mainstay of MMM for decades. These types of analyses have shown up in women's magazines and online since at least the 1950s.

People are offered the perceived benefit of getting to know themselves better, and thus freely hand over all kinds of data about themselves to complete strangers, who then plug the answers into mathematical formulae and derive a complex profile of the individual. The film Blade Runner opens with a scene of an interviewer applying a psychological profile to one of the characters, and that film was released in 1982. The infamous LBJ Daisy ad, released in 1964, used the same techniques and led to the candidate being swept into office.

Every single public figure, organization, political party, corporation, and movement has used these exact same techniques to manipulate mass audiences since before anyone reading this was born. In fact, advertising was created to advance future sales into the present by manipulating the viewer by pursuading him/her that a product is vital and/or bestows status on the owner. Listen to Bill Moyers interviewing Edward Bernays several decades ago, and see if you don't hear the exact same thing that the "documentary" at the top of this article says, and from the mouth of the man who invented it.

What is import to keep in mind as we hear SCL/CA lambasted over the next few weeks is that it is an effort to taint Donald Trump. It is a sophisticated attempt to target an issue that crosses party and political divides. This is not to say that Trump or Brexit are good or bad, but they did garner the majority of votes. In other words, Bernays' techniques were used to win those elections, and are now being used to taint them. It is amazing to watch this if you are aware of what is being done to the mass audience.

In other words, digital privacy is an issue that crosses political affiliations. SCL/CA, and by extension Facebook, is a convenient whipping boy around which the political left is building a narrative that appeals to both sides of the spectrum. Once a sufficient mass indignation and panic has been achieved, the political left will offer themselves as the solution to this problem, even though they are as much to blame as anyone else.

The problem here is not SCL/CA, it is the entire MMM industry itself. Consumers are so woefully ignorant of how these things function that they fall prey to them repeatedly and are never even aware of it. This is not a left/right, globalist/nationist, nor racist/diversity issue. It is one that pervades every single aspect of modern life. We are ALL targets from ALL directions using the same time-tested tools and techniques that have worked so well for the past 100 years. Cambridge Analytica is just one single organization in a vast sea of similar companies, all offering the same "benefit" of manipulating mass markets, and each with their signature matrices and algorithms.

If universities stopped devoting so much class time to gender and racial diversity studies, and more time to the PR/MMM industry and its methods, we would all be much better off - at least less likely to fall for these manipulations.

But then, students would suddenly realize how they've been manipulated and the entire advertising and PR industry would collapse and governments would lose the ability to steer entire populations.

Can't have that, can we?

We Don't Get Fooled Again

Edward Bernays

Those mean, nasty, horrible white men who formed the basis of the The Enlightenment should be disavoiwed immediately.  It was they who concluded that everyone has the right to express their ideas and opinions.  It was they who decided that all humans were equal in basic humanity.  It was they who dared to posit that no human may own another.  It was they who committed heresy by stating that government was evil and must be severely restricted.

What terrible, evil white men they were.

The American Civil War was not about slavery.  That issue was decided a long time before and the practice was being phased out even at the time of the war.  The Civil War was about the right of people to do away with government when it no longer served the people - an idea set out in the Declaration of Independence written by that nasty, filthy, horrid white man, Thomas Jefferson.

In fact, Abraham Lincoln was a terrible racist.  He despised black people and didn't want them in his pearly-white nation.  If you don't believe me, listen to his own words on the topic.  His plan was to ship all Africans back to Africa, and the nation of Liberia in Northwest Africa exists today because of Lincoln's efforts.  Furthermore, slavery still existed in the northern States long after the slaves were freed by fiat in the Confederacy.

The delicious irony here is that the violent, radical Progressives in the United States worship the evil, nasty white man Lincoln, while a man like Donald Trump, who has said nothing racist that I can find in the public record, is reviled and the embodiment of darkest evil.

If I have a point, which admittedly is rare in these rants, it is that of all the races on Earth and throughout time, it is the white race which established the philosophical foundation of human rights, and it is the Progressive Left that seems to selectively chose their facts in support of the House of Jell-O they call an argument.

Now, if you've been reading my posts over the past year, you know I am no fan of Donald Trump.  I think he's nothing more than a reincarnation of P. T. Barnum.  He's a showman and a marketeer [sic].  I firmly believe his mental pool is hardly deep enough to wade in, much less dive.  However, I will say that his comments regarding the Charlottesville riots, not the GeezerMedia comments on his comments, are reasonable and likely true.  From my perch 10,000 miles away, it looks to me as if there were dirty hands on both sides, and that the "authorities" acted and reacted with a clear agenda of supporting the violence and spinning the outcome against Trump.

Honestly, I don't think Trump sees skin color.  To him, all people are green, as in dollars.  He does nothing that isn't first calculated to enrich himself and his family.  His scale for weighing the value of a human being is the size of their bank account and his ability to empty it into his own.  While being prejudiced on economic grounds, I do not believe he is racist.

What I do see in the wake of Charlottesville is a carefully calculated and crafted narrative that was set in place well before the events in that city last weekend.  The chorus is too well rehearsed and the words too well polished to be spontaneous.  The weeping TeeVee mouthpieces, the feigned shock, the carefully scripted monologues are all far to clean to be honest emotional reactions.

The chorus began its shrill keening before the events had even ceased that night last week.  They ignored the facts that "authorities" backed off, the right-wing protesters had permits and the left didn't, and the herding of the right-wingers through a gauntlet of violent anti-speech activists was a set up to encourage a clash.

I do not believe the man who drove his car into the crowd was a right-wingnut.  He was a carefully crafted plant, whether knowingly or not, activated specifically to make sensational headlines.  And the ANTIFA group has a well-established history of violence across the country wherever conservative groups gather.  The fact that ANTIFA is supported by Barack Obama and George Soros is the subject of an entirely seperate argument.

There is no doubt that at least some of the organizers of the right-wingnuts wanted to draw a vocal crowd of anti-protesters to attract media.  The protest certainly would not have gotten the attention of the entire hierarchy of Washington and the GeezerMedia without some kind of tension.  A peaceful protest draws no flies.

It is clear to me, though, that as soon as the right-wingnuts pulled a permit for their protest, the wheels of dissent sprung into action.  Seeing an opportunity, the puppeteers organized an anti-protest, paid the participants and activated the driver drone.  The entire event was orchestrated for the sole purpose of damaging Trump, even to the point of sacrificing lives in a black magic ritual to give it extra power.

That the GeezerMedia flat refuses to actually quote Trump, and instead is hell-bent on putting their own narrative on the event in a synchronized symphony of hate is quite enough proof to me that I am right.  This kind of thing is precisely why I walked away from a fairly successful career in media.  It happens, and has happened many times since the Second World War.

The best rule of thumb to protect ones self from this kind of media mind control is to notice that all the outlets are speaking with one voice.  When you see that, you should know immediately that something is up.  They all have the same script from on high.

We will likely never know the entire truth behind this, or any other related events, but I guarantee with every ounce of my professional knowledge and instincts that the story you are seeing is completely fabricated.  Hell, even the foreign media is harping from the same song book, which is not really surprising since global ownership of media mirrors US ownership.  Perhaps Russia Today and Xinhua are a bit more moderate, since they see the obvious control mechanisms at work.

If you side with either the Left or the Right, you are probably not reading this rant.  Most of the folks who come here are liberals in the truest and oldest sense of the word.  But if you are one who identifies with the manufactured Left-Right spectrum, then take a moment to open your mind just a tad and consider that you may be a victim of highly sophisticated propaganda.  If you can do that, then quickly dash over to this link and read Edward Bernays' book Propaganda.  Do it quickly before the programming overtakes reason again.

Though I have no truck with Trump, I cannot sit idly and watch this fiasco.  I must attempt to reach those who believe the hogwash coming out of their home "entertainment" centers.  It is a rare opportunity when the brainwashing is so obvious and open.

Hey, if you really hate white men, then at least don't be fooled by one of the most pernicious men who ever lived: Edward Bernays, a nephew twice over of Sigmund Freud.

We Control The Horizontal And The Vertical

I'm going to tell you something, and I'm going to try and be delicate.  I don't want to bruise delicate psyches or shock anyone unduly.

But first, think about this...in fact, check yourself regularly as you go about your business every day.  When you walk into a room with a TeeVee, do you automatically look at it?  When you are talking with someone and there is a TeeVee in the room, do you find your eyes wandering over to the screen...usually when the transition graphics are running?

I want you to think about this long and hard, and concentrate on it for at least a week.  The reason is that you are mind controlled.

I told you it wasn't going to be easy.  No one wants to admit they are mind controlled.  Perhaps a kinder, gentler term would help...hypnotized.  Maybe that will help you feel like you can snap out of it if you really try.  And try you must.  Now that I have implanted the thought in your mind, you will at least think about it on occasion, perhaps catch yourself being drawn to the TeeVee.

Not to discourage you, but it took me many years to snap out of it.  Many of those years were spent studying and creating media content that helped hypnotize people.  I was pretty good at it.  I got paid well and won awards for it.  Even though I was trained and conscious of what was happening, I was still a victim, because the power of the medium is almost overwhelming.

TeeVee, and movies too, rely on a physiological phenomenon that has been burned into our brains over millennia of development as a species.  Our eyes/brain automatically react to movement and flashing light.  It's an automatic response.  Things that move and flash might be food, or water, or perhaps a predator.  Whatever the reason for it, it is very hard to control

TeeVee specifically uses lots of colorful rotating graphics and loud, splashy music that usually begin with a strong beat to make us look.  Once our gaze is locked by spinning logos and swooshing meaningless elements and blaring music, we are primed to have suggestions pumped into our minds.

Notice that the swooshing stuff is immediately followed by a single strong statement, called a "lead".  The lead has been chosen as the message of the moment that will kick off every segment and fill the lower-third title crawl.  Whenever you get bored by the pictures, your eyes are automatically drawn to the words incessantly scrolling across the screen, when the message is pounded into your brain over and over again.

Suppose you and I meet at our favorite cafe (where a TeeVee or two are streaming messages at us) and I say, "Trump."

Two years ago, you would probably think of Bridge, Hearts or Spades, or at least the expression "trump card."  Now, your head is full of images of a fat, grey-haired loudmouth, and your mind is full of one of two narratives, depending on whether you watch "left" or "right" media.

The fact that there are only two narratives to choose from, left or right, and not three, ten or a hundred, is that the information you are fed is pre-arranged in diametrically opposed packages.

Depending on which one your are conditioned to subscribe to, your reaction to "Trump" will be pleasurable or painful.  Both of us are probably unable to create a third narrative, since we have not thought that way and don't have the vocabulary ready to express it.  If we stick to the two controlled narratives, we most likely have an hour or more of conversation ahead parroting all the messages we have heard.

I do not watch TeeVee, nor listen to the radio.  Haven't for more than a decade.  I subscribe to a very narrow selection of YouTube channels that I believe are free thinkers, or just purely mind candy for times when I want to relax.  For that reason, I am forced to formulate my own narratives, which regular readers here know do not conform to most "mainstream" ideologies.

I also read a lot.  And write a lot.  I teach English and have been paid to write on many occasions, sometimes winning awards for it.  The books I read generally went out of print a century ago or more, though my collection of over 3,000 books (last time I bothered to count) spans the last 3,000 years.

I only listen to recorded music and use an ad blocker on all my browsers.  I avoid every possible contact with advertising.  When I accidentally see one, it usually makes me laugh because they are so wildly manipulative, appealing to our basest emotions and desires.  In fact, I spend a lot of time on my Twitter feed ridiculing and satirizing the media, because it is an effective way to break the spell.

The reason I mention all this is to demonstrate the amount of effort necessary to break the habit and get out of the conditioning.  The mind is like a muscle - it must be exercised regularly or it will atrophy.  Trust me, TeeVee and the other media depend on us being lazy and unwilling to exercise our minds.

Here's another little experiment.  Next time you get together with friends and actually talk (as opposed to using devices or absorbing media), be aware of what is being discussed.  Chances are, nearly all of the conversation will revolve around the media - what someone saw, heard or read.  Very little will have to do with personal experiences and anecdotes.

If you feel particularly daring, go prepared with a story or topic that is far from the beaten path (say medieval architecture or unusual political view) and notice how everyone reacts.  I will bet dimes to donuts the conversation shuts down for a few seconds before going back to the media.

Finally, and I know this doesn't apply to readers here because they would be basket cases before finishing one column, if a loved one is "triggered" by certain topics, words or ideas, then they are most certainly mind-controlled.

"Triggering" is a concept from the Bernays school of public relations and propaganda.  It was developed out of Freudian and Jungian hierarchies and archetypes.  The triggers are basically weaponized fears and desires that are used to control our behavior.

There are fears of being excluded from the group, or desires to lead the group.  They are herd instincts that have been deeply researched and particular sounds and pictures have been associated with them.  They can be triggered without us knowing it, and our responses have been programmed into us so that we react in predictable and controllable ways.

One example that is very powerful is "for the children".  We will do anything, buy any product, try any technique, and rally the troops "for the children".  This is one of our most basic instincts and it is one of the most weaponized.

Any number of crimes have been perpetrated by nothing more than saying "for the children".  Just look at vaccines.  Politicians, social workers and advertisers use "for the children" all the time.  "Amber Alerts" and "No Child Left Behind" are all examples of "for the children".  Child 'protective' Services justifies all the horrors they wreak in the name of "for the children".  You can completely shut down someone's defensive reactions by sayiing, "It's for the children."

Yes, sadly, we are all mind controlled.  The media is so pervasive now that we can hardly extract ourselves from it.  We feel embarrassed if we can't discuss last night's game or the lastest episode of Game of Thrones or Orange Is The New Black.

Have you ever felt ashamed or left out because you don't watch or missed an episode of the current craze?  You are mind-controlled.  Are you angry that Tim Allen's Last Man Standing got cancelled?  You are controlled by the "right" narrative.  Are you ecstatic that it got cancelled?  You are controlled by the "left" narrative.

The proper response from a clear-thinking mind is, "Who gives a shit?"

As an aside, I usually return FOLLOWS on Twitter as a courtesy.  I often get very nice messages thanking me for the follow, though I admit I am sadly lacking in that department.  The other day I got a response that read, "Hi! Thanks for following us. How do you use social media? For Business or Pleasure?"

I responded, "I use social media to ridicule and satirize the enemies of Truth, though just as often I point out the absurdities of using social media."

I have yet to get a reply.  They may even have UNFOLLOWed me.  Que sera!

You can follow the fun @RadioFarSide.  I'll most likely FOLLOW you back, if you stick around long enough.