While covering and linking up several political stories over the past 15 months, I have primarily been silent as to the candidate of my choice. I will continue to do so, so nothing within this opinion relates to who I actually voted for this year.. Some time honored private matters, to me, are still cherished.
That said, I do not think the election of Donald Trump should be considered a surprise to anyone watching. Social media, the way we chat and chatter online, created this. We created this. WE made Donald Trump …
It also reminds me of using a spirit board.. or conjuring up something from another existence. If you really, really REALLY want to talk to a spirit, one may just talk back. Then you got your wish. In our world, social media use and the quit hits of Twitter and Facebook have allowed us to dumb down political talk .. we have gone from large 10,000 word articles on the events of the day or week down to 100 character or so tweets. We decide on things after only glancing at headlines.. we do not check sources, but instead eat up anything we see on Facebook. So as long as we agree with it.
And that is another problem with modern social media. We do not find things to challenge our thoughts or opinions… we don’t want to be challenged. Instead we are given the ability to follow the places we are fans of on the newsfeed……and you miss valuable contrary information by doing so.
And the news? The news has become a victim, too. There is no ‘news’ anymore.. Today as Itype this there was a 7.8 quake off New Zealand and a tsunami warning. That is news. But it doesn’t sell in America. Instead the airwaves will be filled with indigestable political stories 24/7.
The protests against Trump are being made worse by a media that glorifies them. But when violence occurs, the media shutters back and quickly showcases brief and not-so-serious calls for calm.
Today on Twitter a friend asked me why I think Saturday Night Live was a fan of Hillary. She pointed out that Trump guest hosted the program. My answer was twofold. 1) Ratings. Trump equals ratings. 2) It was pre-extreme and pre-Muslim ban and pre-wall.
Trump used his social media influence in the 2016 election like no other candidate. Elections will not be fought on airwaves anymore.. radio ads don’t matter. TV ads just annoy. YouTube ads? They work… Social media platforms? They work. And sadly, fake clickbait websites work as well as the solid and reliable ones.
The 2008 election was the first time a candidate was able to harnass social media and Facebook to elicit donations and support among the young. In 2016, eight lightspeed fast years later, a candidate did not even bother raising money but instead used the platforms to gain a mass of people who, many of which never voted before, to vote for him.
It was the perfect storm in 2016.. You may not be happy with results. You may be one of those college students in certified ‘weep rooms’ or being told by university staff to form PlayDoh to express emotions (very silly in my thought)… or you are a member of the red state victors now hoping and praying that the president you so hoped for does not become a president you are not proud of.
We just don’t know. We don’t have a clue. A social media candidate is the modern day version of Mr Smith goes to Washington. But even Mr. Smith was forced to give more detailed thoughts on plans. And Mr. Smith was fiction!!!
Fiction is now alive and real in modern day 21st century politics.
A Congress, a Court, and a populace will now have to work and watch a President Donald Trump.
We got to know him (*kinda!*) through social media. And now as president, he says, he will tone it down. Backtrack… keep it less brash and unabashed.
…..perhaps that is the most interesting thing of all. Sure, social media changed everything. It changed how we read politics.. it changed how we vote. But as Donald Trump is now realizing, it does NOT change how to govern…. We will now collectively watch how President Trump governs.
(Through it all, I still cannot stop to think about the Simpsons in 2000 predicting that a president Trump would happen……… wise beyond years)
A long read from my other site I thought you’d enjoy.
The media is loving it! Ratings galore.. First help Trump beat the odds in the primaries…then turn on him during the general. When he actually assumes the mantle of leadership, promote raging anger against him.
ratings ratings ratings… Can’t anyone see through this?
Thousands took to the streets of cities across the United States late Friday and early Saturday as anti-Donald Trump protests saw highways and interstates blocked, numerous arrests – and a shooting at a march in Portland, Oregon
Even President-Elect Trump (*read that a few times*) Tweeted (read that a few times) about the issue, saying “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!” On Friday night, it appears the prestige of the presidency made him reconsider just how much more he wants to Tweet out.. he changed a tune, a bit, saying this:
Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!
Ground Zero with Clyde Lewis was broadcasting live during a particularly hardcore protest in Portland last night.. what was not known at the time during his broadcast: In Portland Oregon, a man was injured in a shooting on the Morrison Bridge during a protest march early Saturday morning. The suspect was believed to be in a vehicle on the bridge when a confrontation unfolded with someone in the crowd, Portland Police said in a news release. The suspect got out of the vehicle and fired multiple shots before fleeing the scene…
I missed this last night and feel awful about it..
Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82, according to a post on his official Facebook page.
“We have lost one of music’s most revered and prolific visionaries,” the post said.
A highly respected artist known for his poetic and lyrical music, Cohen wrote a number of popular songs including the often-covered “Hallelujah.” His 14th studio album, “You Want It Darker,” was released on October 21.
Apart from his successful musical career, Cohen also wrote novels and numerous collections of poetry.
Turin’s new mayor has announced plans to make it a vegetarian city – even introducing a weekly meat-free day. But in an area with a meat-eating and rich culinary culture, the plans are proving divisive for residents..
I’m so secure in my masculinity that I’ll steal a recipe magazine from the dentist office, make the food after my appointment, and bring a helping of it in the next day for women I work with to taste.
Restaurant companies should brace for a challenging period as consumers grapple with the rising costs of rent, prescriptions and car loans and take advantage of cheaper groceries to eat at home more.
That’s the verdict of Moody’s Investors Service, which on Tuesday slashed its operating-profit growth forecast for the restaurant sector and revised its outlook to stable from positive. The ratings agency is now expecting operating profit to grow 2% to 4% in the next 12 to 18 months, down from a previous forecast of growth of 5% to 6%.
“Consumers are wrestling with higher nondiscretionary spending needs, while restaurant companies face higher operating costs, predominantly labor and challenged traffic trends,” Moody’s analyst Bill Fahy wrote in a note.
I can personally attest to the facts and assumptions within this article.. not only have I cut back spending a bit but people I know who run restaurants or work within them also speak of much less customers now than one year ago when both time frames are compared..
Ali Krieger is out at the Washington Spirit.. And my favorite player, Crystal Dunn, is going overseas!
The drive to see the best players may be a lot longer.. and now require a boat or a plane..
The WASHINGTON POST splashed this about three hours ago..
Spirit attacker Crystal Dunn, the 2015 NWSL MVP who scored twice in the championship defeat to the Western New York Flash last month, is apparently seeking to move overseas. Like Krieger, Dunn is under contract with the U.S. Soccer Federation, which underwrites the NWSL by paying the salaries of marquee U.S. player
And the soccer world went wild.. Reactions surely are on your timeline if you follow the usual suspects..
What you see is not what you get. Ayden was Chewbacca for Halloween. I was just dad. We swapped faces and it’s entirely too creepy to stare at. Hope your Halloween was filled with cool ghouls and frightening escapes into the netherworld. And candy as well. Happy Movember. Gobble early and often.
The number of young children and teens hospitalized for overdosing on opioid painkillers have spiked nearly threefold in recent years, a new study finds.
Among children under 10, most of the painkiller poisonings were accidental, with children “eating them like candy,” said lead researcher Julie Gaither, a postdoctoral fellow in biostatistics at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn. Among teens, most were accidental overdoses, although some were suicide attempts.
In both age groups, the increase in cases involving painkillers like OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin was dramatic.
Among children aged 1 to 4 years, the number of poisonings went up 205 percent from 1997 to 2012. For teens 15 to 19, the increase was 176 percent. Overall, the study showed a 165 percent increase in poisonings from opioid painkillers among those 19 and younger.
In addition, poisonings involving the use of heroin among teens increased 161 percent, while poisonings involving methadone went up 950 percent.
Among children aged 10 to 14, the incidence of poisonings from suicide or self-inflicted injury rose 37 percent, while the incidence of accidental poisoning increased 82 percent.
Among teens 15 to 19, poisonings from suicide or self-inflicted injury increased 140 percent, while accidental poisoning increased 300 percent, the researchers found.
In South Florida, Broward County schools prohibited clown costumes for Halloween activities, according to a Sun Sentinel reporter.
Parents received phone messages this week that said: “While many of the clown threats in our community and across the nation have proven to be hoaxes, it is still best for us to continue to operate in an abundance of caution.”
Ridiculous, as I have written before and will again next year when the August through fall small town clown romp begins anew..
But for tonight, don’t ARM YOURSELF to deal with clowns.. And …. as the message from the schools in Florida have even admitted, most of these clown ‘threats’ have been hoaxes and fake anyway.
If you want the unbiased unabashed truth on the US economy as we head into the November election, don’t expect to find it..
Just look at these series of stories from Google News just this morning, a collection of links controlled by robots by the way .. The common theory is that the US economy is roaring back. Or … it’s slow. Or it’s anemic. But it’s the best in years. But it’s awful.
More quake madness in central Italy–a location hit hard by tremors over the past six months..
A powerful 6.6-magnitude earthquake rocked central Italy on Sunday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, in the strongest tremor to hit the country in 36 years.
From the CNN report..
A powerful 6.6-magnitude earthquake rocked central Italy on Sunday morning, according to the United States Geological Survey, in the strongest tremor to hit the country in 36 years.
Residents ran onto the streets in a panic as the quake struck at 7:40 a.m. local time (2:40 am ET), and rescuers were seen in the area around crumbling historical buildings soon after the tremor hit, helping evacuate a group of nuns. They worked through aftershocks that hit every 20 minutes or so.
Recall earlier this week that there was a 5.5 and 6.1 .. and in August a major quake that hit and killed 300 people..
This is the latest cover of the NEW YORK POST.. The bombshell of October surprises occurred just as the waning days off the 2016 presidential campaign began.. Hillary Clinton’s email server investigation was closed by James Comey and the FBI back in the summer. Safely paving the way for the nomination of HILL.. it was reopened yesterday .. Anthony Weiner’s computer apparently had emails that would have had, as the POST claimed, enough ‘dirt’ to compel the FBI into reopening the investigation. Reigniting the issue. Restoking the flames. And invigorating the Donald Trump campaign to use it as an issue as the last days of this election cycle now begin…
I BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS ABOUT GETTING BEHEADED..
Guillotines made the act of decapitating someone relatively quick (but not painless), but before the guillotine was invented, using a sword or axe often meant multiple strokes were required. Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, required three strokes when she was executed in 1587. Think that’s bad? According to Tudor History, Margaret Pole, the Eighth Countess of Salisbury, was beheaded by an inexperienced executioner who botched the job and practically shredded her head and neck. made the act of decapitating someone relatively quick (but not painless), but before the guillotine was invented, using a sword or axe often meant multiple strokes were required. Mary, Queen of Scots, for example, required three strokes when she was executed in 1587. Think that’s bad? According to Tudor History, Margaret Pole, the Eighth Countess of Salisbury, was beheaded by an inexperienced executioner who botched the job and practically shredded her head and neck.
This is an image from Seph Lawless–one of my all time favorite photographers and one of the coolest people online today .. he takes footage inside abandoned places. He is best known for his work with malls that are closing or have closed, sneaking in and taking video and footage from inside of malls that once were amazingly busy and popular. He also has been in some very emotionally heavy places..
It is true that I’ve been inside and photographed some of the same abandoned houses that were used by serial killers Anthony Sowell and Michael Madison over the years. Both serial killers acted independently and used abandoned homes to torture, murder and hide the victims bodies in and/or on the property of these abandoned homes. Both men are currently on death row. That being said I’ve seen crazy things inside abandoned places that make no sense at all and at times are truly frightening like a sex chamber set up at an abandoned building in Detroit that I reported to the Detroit PD years ago and never released those images and some that are just creepy like this abandoned home that had a room full of mannequin heads along with old lab equipment and intricate surgery tools oddly out of place.
People ask me all the time if I get scared in locations like this and the answer is undoubtedly yes but not because of ghosts…I’m petrified of humanity.
The WALKING DEAD gone too far!? Fans revolted and repelled at Sunday night’s Torture Porn hour?
Fans are in a nightmare scenario: The Walking Dead may have lost its edge last season, but this year may have actually stooped lower and began the trend of being unwatchable..
The DAILY BEAST’s Melissa Leon writes this"
zombie drama aired its all-time most unwatchable hour Sunday night in a mind-numbingly brutal Season 7 opener that finally, after some ballsy meandering, revealed the identity of Negan’s victim, who was clubbed to death with a barbed-wire baseball bat in last season’s much-maligned cliffhanger.
And one of the biggest deals of all, AT&T is taking over the universe so much so that is will NOW OWN BATMAN..
That is a pretty big deal.
This is a mega merger.. Mega mergers as such often frighten me a bit.. And the thought of BATMAN characters and other DC Comics personalities being used for awful phone commercials is equally horrifying … And you know if they can do it they will..
Donald Trump expressed that he would not approve the AT&T and Time Warner merger if elected president. “Deals like this destroy democracy,” said Trump during a rally in Gettysburg, Pa., on Saturday, where he discussed what he would do in the first 100 days of his presidency.
Trump also said he would like to break up the Comcast-NBCUniversal merger. He opened up his speech, claiming the election is “rigged” against him and expressed that members of the media “lie and fabricate stories to make a candidate they don’t like look as bad and dangerous as possible.”
The real problem so often seems to be the consolidation of media power.. the powerless small guys have no shot at making it big. Thankfully the Internet came along and changed things, but with the NET being ceded over to the world government powers instead of the United States, I worry about the consequences of nations who could care less about the freedom of press saying what websites the press can have.. And even if you hate the Trump movement, you need to be aware that it is based off of a frustration deep within the United States over big trade deals, big mergers, factories closing, and bills for utilities going up despite the corporate executives making massive Christmas bonus dollars on top of already highly inflated salaries..
I recall after 9/11, that particular Halloween, how ultra-sensitive and weird things were.. I remember the political ramifications of what you wore–the outfit could put you in the wrong category.. Are you with ‘us’ or against us..?
This year may be about the same. It was strange to watch the Al Smith dinner the other night and see Donald Trump being jeered by the crowd of media elites for his commentary about Hillary–it was not really as much funny as it was biting. Hillary was more routine, more common.. more traditional. But this year the election is not traditional at all. There are friendships dying and marriages drying, all because the people within relationships are choosing different candidates. Facebook has become a hostile battleground of red vs blue acquaintances.. It is all really too much .. over the top.
And this year, at your door step, the next fight might occur .. . Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are going to be there.. not in the forms of ADs or flyers in the mail, but in plastic form. Halloween masks.
x x x
I have been reading my Twitterverse feed as of late about this very topic. There are indications, we are told by prognosticators of all that is political, that the mask sales are indicators of who will WIN the election. Some put about as much stock in that as people who say they see wooly little insects and that means a record setting year for snowfall was going to occur.
According to various reports from around the Halloween stores across America, people are buying up Trump masks over Hillary likenesses about 2 to 1.. Some locations even report a 3 to 1 advantage for the billionaire.. Clinton fans opine that it is not necessarily because the purchasers like Donald Trump .. but instead because recipients of the mask intend on mocking the Republican candidate for president across the fruited plain..
The HUFFINGTON POST just wrote up an article about very scary looking Trump mask production processes in mainland China.. –Maybe an import Trump would stop if he becomes president?
There are so many versions of his profile. And they are being bought up everywhere.
So … the polls. Polls that show Hillary pulling ahead of Trump. Polls that indicate she is going to win the election, maybe not by a landslide but instead a razor close margin with the help of some swing states.
But a cautionary tale for Trump fans who think his mask sales indicate a victory on November 8: Richard Nixon. His face is still a top seller. He is one of the most highly disregarded presidents because of his criminal activity and mental illnesses.. But people wear his face–often even during bank robberies.
Either way get ready. Get the candy warmed up. Donald Trump is about to ask for a hand in a town near you.
Remember a few weeks go when the internet was ceded to the world When Obama said that the United States was done? It was signed over to an international consortium of nations–many of which don’t believe in free speech or true journalism.
Starting early this morning, the East Coast started having trouble surfing the web. The West Coast was hit in the afternoon..
Major sites like Spotify, Amazon, and Twitter were hit with outages..
It became a big deal as time went on.. The biggest websites seemed to be hit with a DDOS attack..
There are reports as I write this post that the US Department of Homeland Security is on the case, investigating the now major disruption of the world wide web across the United States.
Three weeks from election. From winter.. And without much media attention except for a passing glance.
The outages appear to have resulted from a “distributed denial of services” attack on web hosting firm Dyn. Firms such as Dyn “act as the internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the (domain name server) provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter,” explains Gizmodo.
The outages were primarily across the United States. It was purposely done.. This map from DownDetector.com proving the denial of service hit..
THE NEW YORK TIMES is reporting this troubling detail:
The company, Dyn, whose servers monitor and reroute internet traffic, said it began experiencing what security experts called a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. Reports that many sites were inaccessible started on the East Coast, but spread westward in three waves as the day wore on and into the evening.
And in a troubling development, the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.
The FBI said late today that it was looking into this as a criminal activity issue or a nation state attack.. Only weeks from an election…. As the Russia/Wikileaks/Trump accusations wildly flew at the latest debate.. Strange times to live in.
There is wild speculation around the global WEB tonight that the hit today was just a practice run.. just a dry run.. just an attempt to see how things played out. The real breach may be election day, we are told.. This is just a warm up, some fear.. From the DAILY MAIL:
A massive co-ordinated series of cyber attacks has forced hundreds of major websites from Amazon to Twitter offline across the globe – and WikiLeaks believes its supporters were responsible.
It urged its backers to ‘stop taking down the US internet’, saying ‘Mr Assange is still alive and WikiLeaks is still publishing’.
It then tweeted: ‘The Obama administration should not have attempted to misuse its instruments of state to stop criticism of its ruling party candidate.’
The Ecuadorian government switched off Assange’s internet service Sunday after he released another tranche of emails showing the contents of a speech given by Hillary Clinton to Goldman Sachs.
A WILD DAY ON THE PLANET EARTH!
I said to a friend today during the NET blackout: Imagine if we would have talked about this 20 years.. imagine if we would have said a few “websites” would have gone down! Laughable we would say..! Ridiculous we’d conjecture.. but real it is..
real indeed.. Very real when big sites that we rely on go down.. Or……major servers on an election day where voters rely on technology to record their decisions.
JFK may have had his own checkered medical history, but his predecessor’s health proved far more precarious for the country.
This is a fascinating read.. the President, who ate a burger and onions, ended up with a heart attack.. the nation ended up learning about his daily regiment including bowel movements…. and he won a second term despite a mild stroke and speech problem.
The UK GUARDIAN has a good article concerning all of these clown sightings.. and (as they refer to it) patient zero and the first person this year to start the frenzy.. From the article:
The first person to spot a clown, the patient zero in the current epidemic of threatening clowns sightings spreading across the US, was a little boy at a low-income apartment complex in Greenville, South Carolina.
He ran to his mother, Donna Arnold, and told her what he had seen: two clowns in the woods, both brightly dressed and made up. One with a red fright wig and the other with a black star painted on his face. They whispered something to the boy.
“They were trying to lure him to the house,” his mother told me, pointing toward the woods.
A path into the woods led down into a shaded hollow, at the bottom of which was a small pond. Beside it sat a house that seemed abandoned. Someone had boarded up the windows, and the balcony sagged. New bags of potting soil sat near the basement door, though.
A friend of mine said to me last night that her daughter is frightened to go trick or treating this year for Halloween.. that the school bus is buzzing with rumors and speculation from older kids about clowns.. that the clowns are supernatural and they could kill or at the very minimum steal a child away from safety..
And a modern day urban legend is born!
Exciting times to be living through such a rash of clown sightings..
The problem is, most of these ‘sightings’ most likely aren’t real. As you can read if you go back through my archive dump of 'creepy clown’ news (click the tag below this article) , I don’t think even half of them are actual real..
Some may be. Others could be copycats.. and lots, a big number I bet, is mass paranoia and hysteria.. seeing shadows and thinking they are clowns behind shrubs.
The modern tale of horror as we inch closer to Halloween is the pale face under a full moon … it is frightening, these clowns. Even if they are not really there.
I received a circular from my son’s school today the clowns are banned!!
The Halloween parade coming up for his kindergarten has been marred by the small town clown scare of 2016.. The clowns, the mailing to parents said, will not be permitted.
No outfits with white paint. No red wigs.. nothing…Clowns are barred from appearing.
It is getting a bit silly, isn’t IT?
A ban on clowns, but not on vampires..? Not on ghosts..? Not on ghouls of any sorts.
No, clowns. They are an emblem of death but … maybe they are being banned because of a fear of death and not the fear of clowns!
Maybe we are not afraid of the teenagers hiding in the woods with white paint? Maybe we are not too affected by those meandering around under street lights with wigs and red noses.. No, instead, maybe we are frightened by what these symbols of the underworld represent.. maybe we are freaked by our own demise?
Regardless of what they represent or why we are afraid, schools and entire towns banning clowns for Halloween seems a little big ludicrous..
Target is affected, too..
Target Removes Clown Masks From Stores After Recent Scares » It is a world a silly. Insane. CLOWN. Can’t wait for November when the clown crisis clears up… Until then it’s cloudy with a Chance of mild hysteria
And along with stores banning them, ENTIRE TOWNS are also saying they can’t appear during Halloween trick or treating. School across America, not just my son’s nestled in the coal region of Pennsylvania, is calling quits on white paint.
It is all silly. It is all ridiculous.. it is all too much.
Let the small town clown nonsense of 2016 just end.
14713626_1131997120224282_8205162091607312095_n
Share this: Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)1Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)1Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) Related
The Kemper County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance during its regular meeting on Monday that makes it unlawful for any person of any age to appear in public in Kemper County in a clown costume, clown mask or clown makeup. The ordinance was signed into effect by Kemper County Board President Johnny Whitsett at 11:28 a.m. on Monday and expires the day after Halloween.
This sort of thing is getting little old.. A little stale.. The small town clown scare is getting a bit out of control..
Actually.. this is pretty fascinating.. The more Podesta emails that come out the more weird and bizarre it gets. I have no doubt that John is a Coast insider and also listened to Art Bell back in the 90s..
That being said.. Wayne Madsen reported a few days ago a theory.. he did not believe that Russians hacked into US systems but instead a behind the scenes cladestine mission took place among hackers within the UFO community.. and that they spilled the beans to Wikileaks..
That is getting hard to dispute when you see Tom Delonge and George Knapp show up in emails, along with Astronaut Mitchell ..
There indeed is a thick plot that rivals one of the best and most watched X-FILES shows..
It has been nine years to date since this photo was taken. In it, you can clearly see my wife over-zealously pushing cake into my face. It set up for a great photo! Amazing image of pumpkins and a fall-themed cake, along with my beautiful wife’s amazing dress.. And my handsome looks. Well, the back of my head.
It has been nine years since we ‘tied the knot.’ And actually about 15 or so years since we first met and become friends..
With all the trouble in your world, you may not be too interested in a ‘love story that worked.’ But we did. In our own way..
There are times we don’t work as well as other days. Arguments ensue.. Busy weeks and weekends with a child in school who is now getting interested in after-class art groups and basketball and soccer.. It’s been a busy times. There are nights now where by 8pm we realize we forgot to eat.. This is parenting and marriage.
One day when the busy becomes calm, we will miss these times.. These moments of our ninth year.
Tara and I had an amazing wedding day. At that moment in time her mother was still alive.. Our families came together for a church service that my sister played the organ at and an after party that went into the night. I danced on a bar — a little embarrassed by that – but it was just that kind of night..
Time goes on. Days dry up and turn into night.. But the spring time of morning is born again every day. And for 9 years and going, our lives have been reborn each morning to ‘do it all again.’
There are trials and tribulations in life. My best advice, find someone who can help you through it and who equally can use your assistance for them. And make sure you love them. If you have that, you’re lucky. I have that. I am lucky.
*PS, I am tweeting this to Ali Krieger. She is my wife’s and son’s favorite soccer player and it sure would be nice to have Ali send my wife a happy anniversary note. I think I’d be excused for wedding gifts for the rest of my life!
