Torna a casa, Greta

Dic 16, 2019 | The Blog

E ora Greta se ne torna a casa dopo un’improbabile traversata a vela dell’Atlantico (quando hai i venti contrari e due motori da 75CV, cosa fai? Non li usi?) e una stupida polemica con le ferrovie tedesche a causa del treno affollato (la teenager saccente non avrebbe trovato posto in prima classe se non per una parte del viaggio.)

Orrore. Magari la prossima volta i suoi invisibili burattinai prenoteranno per tempo come fanno le persone normali.

Dopo un anno sabbatico in cui Greta ha galvanizzato gli imbecilli e la stampa (lo so, sono sinonimi) e lacerato i nervi alle persone ragionevoli, è arrivato il momento di tornare a casa e tirare le somme dell’avventura ecologista.

Non sarà un bilancio confortante. A parte il furore mediatico, Greta non ha ottenuto nulla di concreto per il futuro del pianeta—ammesso che l’intera montatura avesse quello come scopo.

Il Team Thunberg, però, si è portato a casa il titolo “Persona dell’Anno” conferito a Greta dalla rivista TIME e una serie di riconoscimenti minori. Fonti ben informate dicono che, se vai alla cassa della metropolitana milanese portando tutti quei titoli e due euro in contanti, ti verrà consegnato un biglietto per una corsa.
(E pazienza per il mancato Premio Nobel per la Pace. Anche Obama ha dovuto aspettare i 50 anni per averlo.)

Torna a scuola Greta e prova a vivere da teenager. Tutti abbiamo voluto cambiare il mondo a sedici anni ma solo in seguito abbiamo capito che non è con gli scioperi del venerdì che si ottiene qualcosa.

Target Fixation in Washington, DC

Dic 2, 2019 | The Blog

Any experienced motorcycle rider will tell you that “target fixation” is a major cause of serious accidents.
The rider’s gaze becomes so fixated on the object he wants to avoid that it eventually causes the rider to crash into it.

During the run-up to the last US presidential election, I was not a Trump supporter. I quickly turned into one in July 2016 when Hillary Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee.

The brash and pushy New York billionaire became the obvious choice when compared with the thoroughly corrupt and grossly incompetent former Secretary of State and ex-First Lady.

I did not know at the time that the Democrat smear machine was already working around the clock to make sure Donald J. Trump would not become the 45^th US President.

Yet, the unthinkable happened. In spite of the concerted covert efforts of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Clinton camp, the Obama Administration—steadfastly supported by an overwhelming majority of the mainstream media (MSM)—Trump won in an electoral-college landslide. (Anybody still claiming that Hillary won the ‘popular vote’ should take that to the bank and find out how much it’s worth.)

The moment Trump became the President-elect, the coalition of Never-Trumpers switched gears and began to plot his takedown. Calls for his impeachment were actually heard even before he was elected, and became the rallying cry for the Clintons, the Obama holdovers in key ‘deep state’ positions, the DNC, a number of foreign actors who were counting on (and had even paid for) Hillary’s support, the so-called “creative community” in Hollywood, and even a handful of Republicans who felt the ground shake under their feet.

Once again, the anti-Trump camp could count on massive support from the press, which was 80 percent against the new President. The fourth estate’s big guns included CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Associated Press, and many more. Most European newspapers and press outlets were also clearly against Trump. As were most European leaders, including Italy’s Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni, who reportedly aided and abetted the anti-Trump ‘Resistance’ plotters in ways that are just now being brought to light.

The first all-out attack was the infamous ‘Russiagate’ hoax. Based on a now-debunked dossier paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC, it falsely accused Trump of colluding with the Russians, who had purportedly ‘hacked into’ the electoral process to defeat Hillary Clinton. Based on this uncorroborated information and barely four months into Donald Trump’s presidency, the “Mueller Investigation” was rolled out, which was supposed to expose the new President’s entanglement with the Kremlin—or so the Democrats hoped.

Fast forward two years. In April 2019, the Mueller Report was finally released and, against the Dems’ expectations, turned out to be—in political parlance—a ‘nothingburger.’
Mueller could not prove the President’s purported collusion with the Russian nor his ‘obstruction of justice’, which was the fallback option for the all-Democrat investigative team under Special Counsel Mueller.

Mueller himself was interviewed by the Congress in July 2019 in a much-touted hearing that totally blew up in the Democrats’ face and possibly marked the lowest point in Robert Mueller’s already mottled career.

Around the same time, Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court. The strategic importance of having a fifth conservative judge on the nine-member panel is obvious and the Democrats fought against it with another smear campaign that betrayed their established modus operandi.

A first accuser came forward claiming she had been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh 36 years earlier, in 1982.
Apart from her testimony, which she delivered before Congress, none of the purported witnesses had any recollection of this event. A slew of later accusations of the same nature came from other women, but none was deemed credible. Judge Kavanaugh—who vehemently denied all charges—was confirmed to the Supreme Court and became ‘Justice Kavanaugh’ in October 2018.

In retrospect, the Kavanaugh Affair was just a sideshow to the main offensive against Donald Trump, but it clearly illustrates the Democrat playbook and the propensity of the MSM to run with any uncorroborated accusation and hoax as long as Trump and the Republican Party are the targets.

The moment the Mueller probe proved to be a dud, the DNC/MSM complex hatched yet another harebrained scheme, which they rolled out in a matter of weeks.

Indeed, you can reliably predict which will be the next concerted attack by the Dems.

How do you do that?

Simple. Pick any potential Democrat scandal and spin it into an accusation leveled at Donald Trump.

The Russiagate was fundamentally a smear campaign orchestrated by the DNC and the Clinton camp with the support of assets in Russia and Ukraine, but the main thrust was to accuse presidential candidate Donald Trump of colluding with Moscow. So, while it was the Dems who colluded with the Russians, they flipped the conspiracy pancake and attempted a takedown of Donald Trump whom they accused of having enlisted Russian help during his 2016 campaign.

(By the way, does anybody remember Barack Obama’s open-mic faux pas when he promised then Russian President Medvedev “more flexibility” after his 2012 reelection? Where was the outrage then?)

The most recent attempt to impeach Trump is the so-called “Ukrainegate.” Trump is now accused of having withheld military aid to Ukraine until the country’s new president officially announced an investigation into ex-VP Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and his suspicious activities for a corrupt Ukrainian company.

Here’s the same pattern again. The Bidens, father and son, were likely involved in a corrupt scheme that reportedly netted them several million dollars. The MSM had shown no particular interest in pursuing the matter, but this still was a potential time bomb for 2020 Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

So the DNC/MSM complex fabricated a whistleblower situation in which a concerned citizen blows the whistle on Trump’s attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to obtain an investigation into the Bidens, which would allegedly benefit his reelection campaign.

Unfortunately for the Dems and their press enablers, the ‘unknown’ whistleblower is a well-known Dem operative with ties to Obama holdovers, and the whole hoax got botched from the word ‘go’ by its perpetrators. In a series of Congressional hearings conducted in a blatantly partisan manner—now that the House is run by Democrats—not a single witness has testified to a quid pro quo by Donald Trump.
Indeed, we have repeatedly heard that the military aid to Kiev was released while no official announcement of an investigation was made by Zelensky. So where was the quid pro quo?

Meanwhile, public support for this ‘impeachment inquiry’ is evaporating fast. The Dems are being accused of diverting an extravagant amount of Congressional time to the pursuit of their orange-complexioned nemesis, and the risk of pushing independent voters into the Trump camp is becoming greater by the day.

The fact that any alleged misconduct by the President is nothing but a transparent pretext was revealed in May 2019 by a Dem congressman’s statement: “If we don’t impeach this president, he will get reelected.”
In other words, we can’t allow the democratic election process to go forward and deliver another mandate for Trump.

Hence this ongoing “soft coup” that began even before Donald J. Trump Took office.

Eager to prove their mettle to a raucous and increasingly left-wing party base, Democrat leaders have developed a lethal form of target fixation. While single-mindedly trying to impeach the 45^th President—and failing at that—they might well end up ensuring his landslide reelection in November 2020 and concurrently causing the Democratic Party to crash and burn.

The Big Lie

Ott 28, 2019 | The Blog

I have been on LinkedIn for well over 10 years and read my fair share of profiles—hundreds if not thousands of them.

Most of them have one thing in common, they’re one-dimensional. They all try to portray the poster as a dedicated worker bee that revels in endless toil and whose sole form of satisfaction lies in delivering the goods.

But are we sure this is what our prospective employer—or the current one, for that matter—is looking for?
Is this how we really see ourselves?

We go out of our way to describe ourselves as relentless, passionate, and dedicated until we’ve squeezed the Thesaurus dry thinking we have done a good job of boosting our employability with ten-dollar words. But have we really?

We “like” and repost highbrow articles in the hope of sharing in the reflected glory of the original post. (Some people even plagiarize entire articles that they pass off as their own seeking to pump up their personal brand. Ha, good luck with that!)

But is that enough?

Don’t we also have a more lighthearted, playful side of ourselves that we’d like to share? In other words, do we have a sense of humor, a streak of self-irony or eccentricity that will appeal to others—possibly even more than our reposting someone else’s erudite pieces?

This is the Big Lie that no one buys.

Are we truly one-dimensional robots who try too hard to get with the program and push the established narrative?

Are we nothing but unsmiling drones who memorize their lines and spout them off at the drop of a hat to secure a job interview or a promotion?

I interviewed well over a thousand people in a previous life and I remember clearly how desperately I was searching for a glimmer of humanity, a twinkle of wit in my candidates—most of the time, for naught.

I try to infuse a tiny bit of irony in my LinkedIn articles and reveal aspects of my personal life that will complete my profile without overshadowing, or interfering with, my professional achievements. For example, the fact that I’m an avid motorcycle rider, or that I enjoy tasting local wines wherever I travel.

The funny thing is, I do it out of habit. I’m emphatically not looking for a job—I haven’t been for the past ten years, since I started working for myself.

Squola di giornalismo

Set 13, 2019 | The Blog

Il titolo, si sa, è la parte più importante dell’articolo.
Serve a riassumere il contenuto e ad attirare l’attenzione del potenziale lettore.
Nell’era in cui i ‘click’ contano, il ruolo del titolo è fondamentale.

Evidentemente, il titolista dell’ANSA ha bigiato la lezione sui titoli alla squola di giornalismo che ha frequentato. O magari è consanguineo di un potente (politico, prete, faccendiere) ed è arrivato a scrivere titoli (male) senza passare dal VIA.

Vi propongo un paio di esempi rivelatori, Il primo è un titolo particolarmente stupido.

Non c’è bisogno di essere vincitori del Pulitzer per capire che sarebbe bastato scrivere “Fermato il marito della donna uccisa a Milano” per produrre un titolo dignitoso e chiaro.

(E magari anche un ritocco alla frase ‘”è stata trovata con alcune coltellate” ci sarebbe voluto.). Bastava aggiungere uccisa.

Ma non finisce qui.

Il dramma interno dell’incapace si rivela nel corso di due edizioni successive dell’ANSA, in cui il titolo della notizia passata inizialmente suonava strano.

Chiaramente questo titolo presenta dei problemi. Siamo al cospetto di un cosiddetto ‘participio sconnesso’.
“Colpito da cassonetto” non ha alcun legame con il soggetto della frase (“il minore”).
Dal titolo si capisce che, dopo essere stato colpito da un cassonetto, un minore è stato accusato di tentato omicidio.
Direi che ci sono tutti gli ingredienti per una giornata nera.

La realtà—come avrete capito—è un’altra.

Il titolista dell’ANSA, terminata la pulizia delle unghie e completata l’esplorazione delle narici con un dito, si rende conto di aver sbagliato qualcosa nel titolo.
Complimenti! Meglio tardi che mai.

Oppure è stato redarguito dal commissario politico di turno che lo informa che il titolo va riscritto perché poco chiaro. (Propendo per questa versione).

Untuoso con i potenti, il titolista si accinge a riscrivere il titolo per un ‘update’ della notizia qualche ora dopo.
Ed è qui, signore e signori, che la brillantezza di questa agenzia scalcinata viene fuori con prepotenza.
Il nuovo titolo aggiunge uno sviluppo alla vicenda ma non risolve il problema di fondo.

Ecco qui che il participio sconnesso rimane, ma spunta il fatto nuovo della confessione.

Il lettore attento al rispetto dei diritti umani e convinto della presunta innocenza di chiunque fino a dimostrazione della sua colpevolezza potrà a buon diritto domandarsi se la confessione del
diciassettenne sia avvenuta a seguito di inaudita violenza.
Colpire un sospettato con un cassonetto non è notoriamente una tecnica di interrogatorio consentita.

Neuromarketing “fai da te”

Ago 21, 2019 | The Blog

Quanto il linguaggio influenzi il pensiero è stato per decenni oggetto di teorie contrastanti (p.es. la cosiddetta Ipotesi di Sapir-Whorf poi contraddetta dalla Grammatica Universale di Chomsky) ma non ho intenzione di discuterne alcuna. Scendendo dai massimi sistemi alla realtà quotidiana, vorrei però brevemente ricordare che il nostro linguaggio non può non avere effetto sul pensiero di chi ci ascolta. E nel contempo rivelare la nostra opinione personale.

In mesi recenti si sono svolte davanti ai nostri occhi le vicende della nave Sea Watch 3, del panfilo Alex e di Open Arms nelle acque prospicienti l’isola di Lampedusa. La stampa non ha mai mancato di fornire aggiornamenti e approfondimenti su queste storie, ma lo ha fatto in maniera confusa, sensazionalista e/o di parte.

Non intendo prendere posizione in un verso o nell’altro—e non perché non abbia una mia chiara visione—ma perché, proprio in virtù dell’effetto che le parole hanno sul pensiero, non mi pongo l’obiettivo di convincere nessuno.

Quello che farò è riproporre delle frasi più volte udite in questi giorni e invitare chi mi legge a riflettere se queste frasi (apparentemente neutre e innocue) non tendano già a colorare quanto si dice e conseguentemente a sposare e sostenere una particolare narrazione.

Partiamo.

• Nave umanitaria oppure Nave di ONG?
• Rifugiato oppure Migrante economico?
• Profugo oppure Naufrago (specialmente se la prova di un avvenuto naufragio non c’è)?
• Migranti trasbordati oppure Migranti salvati?

Buona riflessione.