#AmericanIndians #Indigenous #Aboriginal #FirstNations of USA weep.... 97Million American Voters DID NOT VOTE... so suck it up and give outgoing #POTUS some love and give respect and opportunity and hope to your new President-Elect (whom u did not vote to have or not have) #Trump a chance - ya can't have it both ways.... We love our American brothers and sisters... your beautiful brilliant smart and savvy and you invented actual democracy..... so give it a chance..... and please show respect...
EXAMPLE... many of us voted for #Harper who saved our #Canadian arses in 2008 when the elite money lenders ruined our planet's ordinary..... and we stayed with him when #TheMichael truly thought ...since he had the media in his pocket... we, the silent golden voting majority would follow.... WE STAYED WITH #HARPER.....
BUT... last year.... many of us wanted change in our glorious #Canada and decided 'underground' to go with the newbie #Trudeau of the Liberals... and so appreciate #Harper BUT also glad we took the chance on #JustinTrudeauPM.... imho.... and millions and millions of us IGNORE the news crappola... and stick with authentic- ie newspapers and pure news channels who have kept most of their unbias ie... #Euronews #BBC #Aljazeera #Global (imho Canada's best global Canada world news) #CTV (local news) and #CBC for other... #APTN (Canada's Aboriginal) www.ami.ca (Canada's Disability Channel/Radio) and sometimes #Sky.... they still outshine the world.... for hardcore news (we learned following our beloved troops serving in Afghanistan and yours Iraq ) - our world is beautiful.... and it's time for some kindness, love, peace and prosperity and more respect of each other imho...
FROM CANADA BABY...
OPINION: Requiem for a ruling elite that missed its own
failures
Maybe the astounding result in
the 2016 American presidential election, which saw the most improbable of
candidates, Donald Trump, beat the seasoned pro, Hillary Clinton, should not
have been the shock it was.A system that had completely failed tens of millions of people for decades, and especially after 2008, needed a rude awakening. The Democrats even lost the “rust belt” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, long their bastions.
The political elites, had Hillary Clinton won, would over the next few years have allowed the rage to continue building and 2020 would be a lot worse than today.
A really smart ruling class would have allowed Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries, instead of fixing it and crowning her.
Donald Trump “overturned the table” in a fixed game. We are in uncharted waters, for sure, but with Clinton, the establishment seemed oblivious to the charted ones and they were heading straight for the rocks.
“The Democratic Party’s failure to keep Donald Trump out of the White House in 2016 will go down as one of the all-time examples of insular arrogance,” wrote Matt Taibbi on the Rolling Stone magazine website on Nov. 10. It bullied anyone who dared question its campaign strategy by calling them racists, sexists and agents of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
“But the party’s willful blindness symbolized a similar arrogance across the American intellectual elite. Trump’s election was a true rebellion, directed at anyone perceived to be part of ‘the establishment.’ The target group included political leaders, bankers, industrialists, academics, Hollywood actors, and, of course, the media.”
The rage was directed at institutions that people believe have failed them and at an economy that doesn’t work for ordinary workers. Voters saw the aftermath of a financial crisis and Great Recession in which the gap between winners and losers just grew larger and perpetrators escaped punishment.
“What has happened in America should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency,” contended Robert Reich, a former Democratic Secretary of Labour, in the Guardian of London, Nov. 10. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.
“Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.”
When liberal elites are unable to deal with, or even acknowledge, major cultural and economic problems, just calling those who are hurting names, people turn to the extremes.
After 2008, President Obama needed to be a reformer like Franklin Roosevelt, but he wasn’t. He lost touch with his progressive side and, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd noted in her Nov. 13 column, “settled comfortably into being an Ivy League East Coast cerebral elitist who hung out with celebrities, lectured Congress and scorned the art of political persuasion.”
His presidency will end with Democrats in possession of 11 fewer Senate seats, more than 60 fewer House seats, at least 14 fewer governorships and more than 900 fewer seats in state legislatures than when it began.
So maybe now we may have a “Huey Long” demagogue in the White House. The Democrats asked for it.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
------------------
---------------
SO TOTALLY BRILLIANT AND TRUE- #TrevorNoah #RoyWoodJr @TheDailyShow
MUAH- u slowItDown4Thanksgiving - in my day our families were hardcore #Tories and we kids
(GenXers Millennials) were #Liberal #PierreElliottTrudeau- #love won Saturday night
playing cards at the kitchen table... Sunday Morning Church #FeelTheBern he Daily Show
@TheDailyShow 5h5 hours ago
Trevor and Roy share a special Thanksgiving message. #UNameItChallenge
Trevor and Roy share a special Thanksgiving message. #UNameItChallenge
https://twitter.com/search?q=the%20daily%20show&src=typd
----------------
THE
MODERN TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH... IN NEWS ... Journalists must raise their
game...
This article is so
brilliant.....and so true in way to many ways... by the by... all my personal
(imho) blogs have links.... for u to read if wish and decide.... that's the
whole point of social media impov ....
DAN LEGER: Truth is for chumps in Trump’s U.S.A.
Hey
remember the good old days, back when America was great the first time?
Back
when the United States stood as a pillar of practicality, logic and coherence?
It
seems like a long time ago.
These
days it’s easy to forget that for generations, the United States led the world
in the sciences, industry and the arts. A nation of immigrants, it set a global
example for tolerance and diversity for more than 200 years.
It
was also blighted by the mortal sin of slavery, which taints it to this day.
But Americans fought a bloody war to end it and rebuilt itself as a bastion of
democratic rationality.
Yet
today, American public discourse and politics are distorted by fake news and
phony facts. Uninformed attacks on climate science, immigration, commercial
trade, on racial tolerance and human rights are just some of the issues where
facts are set aside in favour of personal opinion and conjecture.
Too many people think they have an individual entitlement to their own
set of facts.
It’s the modern trouble with truth.
The
current U.S. president-elect embodies this credibility crisis and has brought
it to a head. Donald Trump tells barefaced and easily debunked lies day after
day, reveling in mendacity and falsehood.
In
normal times, such a politician would rightly be rejected as a charlatan. That
Trump will be president shows how far esteem for the truth has fallen.
Truth
is for chumps in Trump’s U.S.A.
It
has become so common that the Oxford Dictionary last week named “post-truth” as
its word of the year for 2016.
Trump’s
lying also normalizes the practice in others, validating the fictions of fringe
websites by repeating them as facts.
But
they aren’t facts. Climate change isn’t a Chinese hoax, hacked emails did not
prove Hillary Clinton was to blame for the Benghazi massacre and Barack Obama
was not behind the Orlando massacre.
Every
one of these “news stories” was a complete pack of lies, invented for political
gain or profit. They often go viral online, amplified by robot software that
spreads the messages even further.
In
the past few months, page views for fake stories far outpaced those for real
news on sites like Facebook.
Online
impresario Paul Horner told the Washington Post he runs 10 fake news sites,
making $10,000 a month posting phony stories, like the one about Clinton’s
campaign bribing anti-Trump protesters or Obama plotting to overturn the
election result.
Facebook
belatedly has decided to deny ad revenue to sites that intentionally distribute
false content.
To be clear, we all have a civil right to our own
opinions and the right to express them. But there’s no right to a personal
version of the truth.
If you’re fixing an airplane, you can’t use just
any old part because that’s what you prefer. Medicine runs on science, not on
Facebook miracle cures. And just try telling your banker it’s your opinion that
you shouldn’t have to make mortgage payments.
So can the truth be saved? Maybe.
Journalists
have to raise their game. We have to be more critical about social media
distortions. We have to win back public confidence by rigorous investigation
and a better factual reporting.
New financial
models for journalism are needed to pay for the rigorous inquiries that can
debunk the propaganda machines of the left and right.
And if we
must suffer “citizen journalists,” then they have to learn to distinguish truth
from fact. You can’t just say you’re a reporter and make it so.
Facebook and
other social media must take some responsibility.
They’re
profiting immensely while killing conventional journalism, without a shred of
the accountability consumers have a right to expect.
And
people have a personal responsibility for the truth by acknowledging that some
“facts” are true and some are lies. We can’t make one become the other by
claiming some kind of new age right to personal truth.
------------
#ComedyCentral @TheDailyShow
#TrevorNoah's Godfather #JonStewart
nails it beautifully... the f**king hypocrisy...
==========
Seriously USA we love you bright, breautiful brilliant folks BUT u had two "American Pure" candidates.... #BernieSanders and #MarcoRubio .... the democrat #DMC hijacked #FeelTheBern for #Hillary and the creepy #media hijacked every candidate but #Trump.... WTF?? .... and 93-97 MILLION NOT VOTING HAS TO TELL USA and the world something about #elites flagrantly cheating the global ordinary... come on.. imho ... and who doesn't check their news sources (we learnt that back defending our troops from our homelands... whilst mainstream media were crawling in caves with the f**king taliban and rest of let's kill our own muslim brothers and sisters today...)
------------------
GLOBAL TRUTH-
Locally-owned newspapers are still the best source of local news
OPINION: Don't stop the press
Mark
Lever is President and CEO of The Chronicle Herald.
The
following is the text of a presentation prepared for delivery Thursday to the
House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, which is examining
the state of Canada’s news media:
It’s
a privilege to join you today. I’m pleased to be here on behalf of The
Chronicle Herald and to bring the perspective of challenges facing daily
newspapers like ours across the country.
The
Chronicle Herald was incorporated in 1875, but our roots can be traced back to
1824. We are the last remaining independent daily newspaper in the country.
We’ve
been telling the news of the day and shaping the narrative of the province of
Nova Scotia since before Confederation. In our nearly two-century history, we
have borne witness to the birth of this nation, to the world wars of the 20th
century, to tragedy and to jubilation. We are the one cultural institution
whose history is so entwined with the province’s that the two could hardly be separated.
We’ve
made it through battles, disasters and crises. My predecessors removed glass
and debris from presses damaged in the 1917 Halifax Explosion so that our
newspaper could support a community ravaged by devastation to find help, solace
and, in some cases, to find their loved ones.
Sadly,
the fight today is for our own survival.
Changes
in media consumption habits, coupled with the introduction of disruptive
competitors without adjacent legacy costs – and here I could name the obvious
new media entrants like Facebook and Google, but I would also add Canadian
disruptors like the government-funded CBC (more on that later) – have
substantially fragmented audiences and stripped advertising revenues.
But
the proliferation of media today hasn’t changed the basic journalistic mandate,
which is to report on those in power to provide citizens with the information
they need to make their own judgment, to report on the needs of our communities
and to provide support to us all by shedding light on critical events.
Joseph
Howe, a founding father of Canada’s free press, and the publisher of The Nova
Scotian, a direct precursor to The Chronicle Herald, famously commented about
the role of the journalist: “When I sit down in solitude to the labours of my
profession, the only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just?
What is for the public good?”
The
sentiment is clear. Journalism’s role in our democracy remains pivotal. It is
fundamental.
A
colleague of mine once said that political reporting happens at school board
meetings as much as in the legislature. His contention was that our democratic
institutions are deeply rooted in our communities and exist broadly across this
country. I couldn’t agree more.
We
are a rich and vibrant country, made up of thousands upon thousands of
communities. It is journalism at the grass roots that binds us together and
helps to weave a coherent story of our nation.
And
here lies the rub. Without the storytellers, weaving together communities
throughout this nation, we become either atomized individuals or nameless and
faceless masses without coherent connection.
Social
media platforms aren’t focused on the kind of content that is important to a
free and democratic society; they’re concerned about volume of content and filling
“data” feeds with entertainment, click bait and low-quality commentary.
Just
yesterday, Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year — “post-truth” —
defining it as an adjective “relating or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to
emotion and personal belief.”
The
Brexit and Trump votes are two events in the past year, driven by this
phenomenon, that have rocked the world.
Newspapers,
with reporters in communities throughout Canada, are the food supply of our
democracy.
But
this food supply is in serious risk of running out. The media business model is
changing. Worldwide, only about nine per cent of people pay for content. The
subscription model, while still critically important to support the work of
journalists, has never been relied on to shoulder the entirety of the burden.
Advertising, once the revenue lifeblood of newspapers, historically accounting
for two-thirds of total revenue, has been reduced to programmatic purchases of
audience segments and affinity groups.
Further,
we have experienced dramatic changes in spends from our government partners. At
a rate greater than industry, our provincial and federal governments have
reduced their ad spends in our products, presumably with an increased emphasis
on advertising with foreign corporations such as Google and Facebook, with
neither ties to our communities nor any investment in producing the journalism
we rely upon.
I’m
disheartened to tell you that my newspaper has experienced a 54 per cent drop
in the combined provincial and federal government ad spend over the past three
years – from $601,000 in 2013 to just $279,000 this year.
Just
like every other newspaper in Canada, The Chronicle Herald is grappling with
changes in consumption trends and advertising changes. People are often
surprised to learn that, despite years of decline in paid circulation, our
reach is larger today than it has ever been. People are consuming more content
and the need for local, fact-based journalism is so vitally important.
It’s
not that Canada has stopped supporting journalism. The CBC receives nearly $700
million a year in federal funding. But, as always, the heavy lifting of
journalism has fallen to those in the trenches, those in the communities. And
that means to newspapers.
We
have to think how we can support the needs of newspapers, without whose efforts
there would be precious little journalistic content on social media sites or
even on large broadcasters.
TV
host John Oliver said it well: “The media is a food chain which would fall apart
without local newspapers.”
Social
media sites like Facebook and Google, and largely even “news” sites like the
Huffington Post, are really just repackaging the work of newspapers.
Digital
media is a terrific tool to connect audiences, but fundamentally relies on the
work of others – frequently newspapers – to provide the journalistic content.
It
is staggering to note that (according to the global analytics company Comscore)
more than 88 per cent of all Canadian digital advertising revenues are now stripped
away by the large social media and search sites, such as Google and Facebook.
This means that, despite an ever larger need for advertising revenues to
support journalism at the grassroots in the country, less than 12 per cent of
Canadian digital ad revenues actually stay in Canada.
Disruption
is part of business. And newspapers must address the business changes brought
by their disrupters. But we cannot ignore the importance of this Canadian
cultural industry and we must not pretend that other media can pick up the
slack when newspapers are no longer able to carry the torch.
We
are making the challenging, sometimes gut-wrenching changes that are needed to
grapple with disruption. Efficiency improvements are the biggest reason The
Chronicle Herald remains in a protracted dispute with members of the Halifax
Typographical Union, who represent many of our newsroom workers. But reducing
costs and increasing efficiencies are only a part of the story.
There
is a need and a capacity at the federal level to address the immediate
challenges faced by Canadian newspapers. I would like to suggest three ways:
1)
Canadian government advertising dollars should be spent where the money
contributes to Canadian journalism and to Canadian content. Google and
Facebook, which frequently appropriate content produced by Canadian newspapers,
ought not to add insult to injury by also appropriating government spending.
In
other words, federal tax dollars allocated toward advertising should be spent
with companies who are doing the heavy lifting of critical journalism and of
producing Canadian content.
2)
Heritage Canada funding, such as the Canada Periodical Fund, should be
broadened to incorporate daily, subscription-based newspapers to enable them to
overcome market disadvantages and continue to provide Canadian readers with the
content they choose to read.
Other
Canadian funding arms could be used also, including the Canada Media Fund,
whose mandate could be broadened to foster, promote, develop and finance the
production of Canadian content and relevant applications for all media
platforms.
3)
Create national endowments for investigative journalism, where each endowment
would subsidize investigations on a mathematical formula, based on the number
of citizens who actually read their reports on news sites.
Other
options we must explore include: charging for access, advertising, sponsorship,
charitable grants and crowdfunding; amongst others.
To
paraphrase the work of Victor Prickard, Josh Stearns and Craig Aaron in Saving
the News: Toward a National Journalism Strategy:
Journalism
is a public good. As a society, we all benefit from quality news and
information. But like many public goods, journalism has always been heavily
subsidized. The subsidy model that prevailed for the past century —
advertising-supported journalism — appears to be dying. If current trends
continue, we could soon embark on an unprecedented social experiment by
allowing an advanced democracy to leave wide sectors of society and entire
geographic regions without a fully functional, professional press.
Journalism
is vital to our democracy. It is the foundation of rational public discourse.
And it begins in each and every community in our country.
CBC
is a tremendous public institution, and one in which every Canadian should take
justifiable pride. But CBC alone is no more capable of weaving together the
stories of our nation, from Cape Spear to Vancouver Island to Ellesmere Island,
than Facebook is capable of reporting on the needs of Canadians or breaking the
news to provide citizens with the information they need to exercise their
franchise.
For
Canadian stories to continue to be told from coast to coast to coast, we will
have to look toward other models. Governmental partners can (and must) play a
role in this transition.
------------
lol
Russell Wangersky: A day in the life of the media elites
6:40 a.m. — Wake up. It’s still dark out. Shave. Sink drain still slow.
Shower. Stand in hot water, trying to figure out what to write a column and
editorial about.
7:06 a.m. — Make lunch. Use plastic bag apples came
home from store in as sandwich bag. Have saved the cost of one whole sandwich
bag. Check weather on phone – promise myself yet again that I will not look at
email until I’m at work. Look at email. First email calls me hopelessly
incompetent, but manages to misspell both my first and last names. Cat has
thrown up.
7:21 a.m. — Walk to work, hoping the rain will hold off. Best rain jacket I own is a promotional jacket from my employer. Downside: newspaper’s name is writ large on the back. Sometimes engenders spirited commentary from passing motorists.
8 a.m. — Arrive at work only slightly damp. Read through front page of websites for National Post, Globe and Mail. Open email: read through headlines package and interesting stories from New York Times and Washington Post. Use Google News to read trending stories. Check email. Decide not to reply to email that uses the word “Leftard” six times. Close email. Feel it’s time for a glimpse into the 9th and 10th Bolgia of the bitter Maleboge ditches of the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Open comments moderation.
9:30 a.m. — Decide never to write anything again.
9:35 a.m. — Use CANLII legal information website to read newly posted criminal and civil verdicts in provincial and Supreme Courts from across the country. Review the Supreme Court of Canada’s agenda for the week. Wonder about man’s inhumanity to man. Stockpile cases for in-depth reading for future editorials and columns.
10 a.m. — Locate topic for editorial. Begin research. Computer pings that there is an incoming comment on an earlier column. Don’t look, don’t look … look. “Only silly idealistic elitists who don’t actually have to practice what they preach when it comes to all this boundless tolerance that they like to wax on about would be against screening. … Anyway, have fun patting yourself on the back.” (See 9:30 a.m.)
11:30 a.m. — Finish editorial. Research has included analysis of provincial budget estimates and calculation of increase in costs in four programs over three fiscal years, a dig-down into spending by other provinces, reading of six stories from three sources. Willing to bet at least one reader will call me an idiot.
Noon — Lunch at desk. Package of instant curry noodles. Had a sandwich, but ate it at 9. It’s a new buzzword, the media elites, as if working to find factual information and deliver it to readers is somehow secondary to a master plan of over-weaning righteousness. “Elites” alone makes it sound as if people working in the media believe themselves to be somehow better than their readers or viewers. Hardly.
12:10 p.m. — Start column. Research. Want to have an engaging, new take that will bring readers into the column quickly. Try four different beginnings. Settle into writing – brightest spot of whole day.
3:10 p.m. — Send column for editing. Check email. Nope, still no email with marching orders from “Supreme Commander, Left-Wing Media Conspiracy Headquarters.” Feeling forgotten in this outpost. Read interesting B.C. court case about propriety of police search of cocaine-laden suitcase on flight destined for St. John’s. Open comment moderation. Close comment moderation.
4:30 p.m. — Walk home. Look at salmon in grocery store. Too expensive. Look at beef. Ha-ha-ha. Pork chops it is. Remember that government communications salaries are half again what I make. But I’m an elite, right?
7 p.m. — Writing community volunteer work in upstairs office. Moderate comments at home. Plan about off-hours gratis university presentation.
11 p.m. — Bed.
Maybe my boss is this elite they are all talking about. No, he’s still driving a car that was new in 2006. Tomorrow? Wash, rinse, repeat.
Russell Wangersky is TC Media’s Atlantic regional columnist. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@tc.tc — Twitter: @Wangersky.
7:21 a.m. — Walk to work, hoping the rain will hold off. Best rain jacket I own is a promotional jacket from my employer. Downside: newspaper’s name is writ large on the back. Sometimes engenders spirited commentary from passing motorists.
8 a.m. — Arrive at work only slightly damp. Read through front page of websites for National Post, Globe and Mail. Open email: read through headlines package and interesting stories from New York Times and Washington Post. Use Google News to read trending stories. Check email. Decide not to reply to email that uses the word “Leftard” six times. Close email. Feel it’s time for a glimpse into the 9th and 10th Bolgia of the bitter Maleboge ditches of the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno. Open comments moderation.
9:30 a.m. — Decide never to write anything again.
9:35 a.m. — Use CANLII legal information website to read newly posted criminal and civil verdicts in provincial and Supreme Courts from across the country. Review the Supreme Court of Canada’s agenda for the week. Wonder about man’s inhumanity to man. Stockpile cases for in-depth reading for future editorials and columns.
10 a.m. — Locate topic for editorial. Begin research. Computer pings that there is an incoming comment on an earlier column. Don’t look, don’t look … look. “Only silly idealistic elitists who don’t actually have to practice what they preach when it comes to all this boundless tolerance that they like to wax on about would be against screening. … Anyway, have fun patting yourself on the back.” (See 9:30 a.m.)
11:30 a.m. — Finish editorial. Research has included analysis of provincial budget estimates and calculation of increase in costs in four programs over three fiscal years, a dig-down into spending by other provinces, reading of six stories from three sources. Willing to bet at least one reader will call me an idiot.
Noon — Lunch at desk. Package of instant curry noodles. Had a sandwich, but ate it at 9. It’s a new buzzword, the media elites, as if working to find factual information and deliver it to readers is somehow secondary to a master plan of over-weaning righteousness. “Elites” alone makes it sound as if people working in the media believe themselves to be somehow better than their readers or viewers. Hardly.
12:10 p.m. — Start column. Research. Want to have an engaging, new take that will bring readers into the column quickly. Try four different beginnings. Settle into writing – brightest spot of whole day.
3:10 p.m. — Send column for editing. Check email. Nope, still no email with marching orders from “Supreme Commander, Left-Wing Media Conspiracy Headquarters.” Feeling forgotten in this outpost. Read interesting B.C. court case about propriety of police search of cocaine-laden suitcase on flight destined for St. John’s. Open comment moderation. Close comment moderation.
4:30 p.m. — Walk home. Look at salmon in grocery store. Too expensive. Look at beef. Ha-ha-ha. Pork chops it is. Remember that government communications salaries are half again what I make. But I’m an elite, right?
7 p.m. — Writing community volunteer work in upstairs office. Moderate comments at home. Plan about off-hours gratis university presentation.
11 p.m. — Bed.
Maybe my boss is this elite they are all talking about. No, he’s still driving a car that was new in 2006. Tomorrow? Wash, rinse, repeat.
Russell Wangersky is TC Media’s Atlantic regional columnist. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@tc.tc — Twitter: @Wangersky.
-----
JIM MEEK: Trump captured lots of shy
voters
JIM MEEK
In the late 1990s, when I lolled about Boston for a year,
the legendary newspaperman Bill Kovach told his charges at Harvard University
that two factors were undermining the journalism business.
One was the wealth and power of network anchors in New
York. Kovach, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, figured you couldn’t take a
limo to the studio every morning and stay in touch with workaday Americans.
Today, a new batch of limousine journalists gets
chauffeured to the cable news stations — where many of them just spent two
straight years in the studio, telling us Donald R. Trump couldn’t possibly win
the presidency.
In fact, they couldn’t seem to talk about anything but
Trump, which takes me to Kovach’s second concern — the blanket coverage of a
single celebrity story to the exclusion of darn near everything else.
Kovach, who ran the university’s Nieman fellowship program
for journalists, tracked this tendency back to the O.J. Simpson car chase in
1994 and traced it forward to non-stop coverage of the death of Princess Di in
1997.
Today, the cable news major-domos — from Wolf Blitzer on
down — are wringing their hands over Trump’s victory, which they helped enable
in the first place by covering The Donald but not the country. (Good for
ratings, bad for the nation.)
If the cable news stars had actually started talking to
people in the boonies, they might have figured out what Trump already knew.
Namely, that the white working class ‘demo’ which
journalists didn’t think mattered were in revolt against the elites, including
journalists.
Was this a mystery trend?
Hardly. Author George Packer told the story in his 2013
book The Great Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.
In a New Yorker article published last May, Packer pushed
the theme further, noting that Trump “thrashed his way” to the Republican
nomination by “understanding what many intelligent people utterly failed to
see: the decline of American institutions and mores, from Wall Street and the
Senate to cable news and the twitterverse.”
Trump knew how to leverage all that distrust, while the
pundits concluded those disgruntled whites were a smallish demo of “rednecks”.
Number me among the dumbfounded who didn’t see his victory
coming.
In fact, only one person in my focus group of political
junkies insisted first that Trump could win and finally that he would win the
presidency.
His final piece of evidence was the answer to a peculiar
and insightful polling question — not “Which candidate do you support?” but
“Which candidate do you expect most of your neighbours to support?”
According to Robert Cahaly, his Trafalgar Group found the
numbers were better for Trump in response to the neighbour question — in every
battleground state in the nation.
As Cahaly later explained to Politico magazine, Hillary’s
backing fell and Trump’s rose in the neighbour question (compared to the
standard ballot test question) “across every demographic” — including women and
minorities.
Cahaly concluded Trump would capture a strong “shy vote”.
Rumours of a shy vote for Hillary were nonsense. His firm, not surprisingly,
predicted The Donald’s victory.
What the Trafalgar Group really figured out was a better
way to talk to real people and get at the truth.
Of course, my man Kovach would tell journalists that’s the
secret to good reporting too.
Not that I expect the Court of the Roundtable entertainers
— at CNN and elsewhere — to heed that advice, get off their butts, and get out
of their studios.
Instead, we are all left to contemplate Trump’s last
campaign rally, held before thousands of people after midnight in a dirty, dark
field in Michigan.
Watching highlights of the event the next morning on the
cable news shows, I figured and I hoped I was taking a last look at a deranged
Lear on the heath.
Turned out I was really watching a triumphant Caesar in the
field.
The nerve of the guy!
-----------------
Billy Currington – GOD IS GREAT- Beer Is Good And People Are Crazy
-------
Hey it’s
okay to talk about dying....
N.S. Death Cafes — talking about the inevitable in comfort
Deborah
Luscomb started the Halifax death cafe in 2015 after visiting her ill sister in
Colorado. (Contributed)
Everybody dies and it’s OK to talk about it.
That’s the idea behind Deborah Luscomb’s Halifax
Death Cafe.
“Our goal is to start approaching dying like it’s not
a secret, it’s not abnormal, it’s not a failure,” she said. “We can honour it,
and make it much more pleasant and less fearful for ourselves and our friends
and family.”
Death Cafes began in England in September 2011 and
are run on a strictly non-profit and volunteer basis. The model was developed
by Jon Underwood and Sue Barsky Reid from the ideas of Bernand Crettaz. Death
Cafes have been offered in more than 40 countries worldwide including Canada,
the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and more.
“It’s really important to me that people understand
that there are options and that, like everything else, nothing has to be done
the way we think it has always been done,” said Luscomb, who started the
Halifax branch of the Death Cafe.
While visiting her ill sister in Boulder, Colo. in
2014, she had her first experience at a Death Cafe.
“When I got back home I noticed there was no Death
Cafe and, as far as I could tell, there was no conversation of death at all,”
she said. “From what I could see, death was still a secret.”
She started Halifax’s first Death Cafe in 2015 at
Trident Booksellers & Cafe, and in June the group outgrew the space and
moved to Just Us! Coffee & Tea House on Spring Garden Road, who donates the
space to the group free of charge.
The group, usually with 15-25 participants, meets on
the first Thursday of every month at noon.
“I find that, as the facilitator, I never have to
start the conversation; there’s always someone there who has something they
want to say,” said Luscomb. “Whether it’s a near-death experience that their
son had, or living with Alzheimer’s with a loved one, or hospices, or what’s
palliative care. Or people just tell stories of grief.”
Luscomb’s Death Cafe isn’t the only one in Nova
Scotia.
“There was one man who was coming to the event in
Halifax and started one in Dartmouth,” she said. “They keep popping up; it’s
happening more and more. It’s great that people are now talking about death.”
http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1414537-n.s.-death-cafes-%E2%80%94-talking-about-the-inevitable-in-comfort
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Dirty old rascal and one of my old heroes.... I have prints of two of his artworks from 1973 framed in #MacAskills on Spring Garden Road..... signed by Earle and his brother Don.... we loved them.. and they loved us...
For Love of the Arts: Paintings by Lunenburg artist Earl Bailly up for grabs at auction
An exciting live art auction this month could put you in an exclusive club with members like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Britain’s Royal Family.
They all own paintings by acclaimed Lunenburg artist Earl Bailly, and you could snag your own at For Love of the Arts -- a fundraiser in support of the Lunenburg Foundation for the Arts on September 17.
Bailly’s niece, Suzanne, says there was a polio epidemic in Lunenburg when her uncle was two years old. Although his brother, George, also contracted the disease, it was Earl who had it the worst of anyone in town.
“He was barely a toddler and he was paralyzed from the neck down. He wasn’t expected to live for very long,” says Suzanne. “But out of all of the folks in town who had it, he lived the longest.”
Earl learned to hold a pencil in his mouth to write, and that led to experimenting with ink sketches, watercolours and oils. Suzanne grew up living on the top level of her grandparents’ house, with Earl living downstairs. Looking after Earl was something that was simply a part of her life. He had a studio and gallery where tourists would come in to look at his work, and she remembers his paintings being in every nook and cranny of the house.
Before he got an electric wheelchair and custom motorized easel, it was Suzanne and her brother who wheeled him up to his canvases — and then back again, when he needed to see them from a distance.
Suzanne says she’s always credited exceptional care for her uncle’s long, rich life. Her father, Donald, was born 10 years after Earl and grew up caring for his younger brother. As soon as he started walking, he would pick up items his brother dropped and bring him what he needed. Donald went on to become Earl’s chief caregiver and helped him do everything he wanted to do.
“He left school at 15, lied about his age, got his license, and took Earl to Florida in an old car,” says Suzanne. “Earl was always the brains and Dad was the brawn. Earl wanted to see everything and he loved the feeling of the wind in his face.”
She remembers watching her father stand up in a rowboat with Earl in his arms, stepping carefully into a speedboat to take him on a joyride.
“My dad made sure Earl had all of the adventures he wanted to have,” says Suzanne. “Everyone — his brothers, my grandparents — made sure he had a real life.”
She speaks fondly of a man who read voraciously, listened to opera on CBC Radio 2 and had a lovely singing voice. He never painted during the summer months because he preferred to be zooming around in his convertible, and maintained a strict schedule of painting only between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. during the rest of the year.
Suzanne and her brother donated one of their uncle’s paintings to the auction because the funds raised will be going towards curating a permanent display of Earl’s paintings in the old Lunenburg Academy — which the Lunenburg Foundation for the Arts plans to open before the end of the year.
She says the Bailly family is grateful her uncle’s work will be treasured for years to come in the collection.
Lunenburg Art Auction.
“It was always my father’s dream that Earl’s name would not be forgotten,” says Suzanne.Trish Topshee is helping to organize the auction and says the committee hopes to raise $20,000 to fund the Earl Bailly Centre. More than 30 artists have offered up pieces to be auctioned off for the cause.
“We’re pleased to have pieces from so many well-known Maritime artists,” says Topshee. “The committee is working hard to make sure it’s a fun and successful event, and there are great pieces to be auctioned off.”
Along with pieces by Earl Bailly, guests can purchase works by Jeanne Aisthorpe-Smith, Hangama Amiri, Alan Bateman, Wayne Boucher, Holly Carr, Kate Church, Rosemary Clarke Young, Richard Crowe, Ruth Flower, Doretta Groenendyk, Brad Hall, Tony Hughes, Sandi Komst, Ron Kuwahara, F. Scott MacLeod, Shelley Mitchell, Bradford Naugler, Susan Paterson, Harold Pearse, Don Pentz, Ed Porter, Joseph Purcell, Peter Redden, Patricia Rhinelander, William Rogers, Alan Syliboy, Anna Syperek, Brenda Thebeau and Brad Wiseman.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: For Love of the Arts: an art auction fundraiser in support of the Lunenburg Foundation for the Arts
WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 17 from 4 p.m to 7 p.m.
WHERE: Lunenburg Opera House (290 Lincoln St.)TICKETS: $35 (includes wine and hors d’oeuvres) available at eventbrite.ca or Shop on the Corner (263 Lincoln St. in Lunenburg)
MORE INFO: www.lunenburgartsfoundation.ca
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