Podcast 546

Podcast 546-What Is Next? Almost all media these days is advocacy journalism. It used to be called ‘yellow journalism’. Back in the day yellow journalism was characterized by newspaper publishers like William Randolph Hearst who, when an artist he’d sent to Cuba cabled Hearst the fact that the USS Maine had blown up because of an accident, famously replied, “You supply the pictures, I’ll supply the war!” Everywhere we turn these days we are bombarded with the surface arguments. The personalities, the propaganda, the arguing back and forth. It goes far beyond media bias. It has become media advocacy. Telling you and I who to vote for and why. Telling us what we are to believe in and what our country stands for, and why. It’s a fact of life on both sides of the fence. We end up going back and forth about nonsense, most of the time. For me to add to this noise, seems to be a waste of time. Of course I have my own point of view about politics these days, and I’ll try and save most of those observations for podcasts detailing state by state polls, or addressing specific issues when they need to be addressed. How you vote, who you vote for and why you vote the way you do is your business. The easy thing to do these days is turn on the microphone and bloviate about what happened on the campaign trail today. It is much harder to find something to discuss that goes beyond. Hence Podcast 546-What Is Next? How can we move to the next step in the country and the world. Not what happens after election day 2016, or Inauguration Day 2017. This question deals with what happens down the line. If we spent a fraction of our time actually trying to inform ourselves about issues we can know about, rather than consuming propaganda, we would be better citizens and better stewards of the future for the country. The answers to the things we can know about, aren’t in social media or even necessarily searchable. The answers are in libraries. We can’t be fully informed about an issue if we don’t even know what questions to search. So let’s get started answering the question, What’s Next? Sponsored by Ryan Plumbing and Heating of Saint Paul and Hydrus Performance.

Podcast 406

Full Moon Podcast. Here we are, another full moon in one month. Live from the front yard, well after midnight, with wires and lights strung outside the Mobile Podcast Command Unit. Every now and then I have to do these ‘consolidation’ podcasts. I ‘consolidate’ some of the points made in earlier podcasts. It still feels like ‘back to school’, hard to get back into the news after a news cleanse, especially when there are so many weird and horrifying things happening, and when the political battleground seems so silly. But, there it is. As we head into the first weekend of the Minnesota State Fair, and the month ahead in September, there’s a lot going on. First of all there are two eclipses in September, and one of them is the scary ‘Blood Moon’, which the evangelists have been warning about. Is it something you should be worried about? Some of us still feel like ‘something’ is about to happen that will spin things around in another direction. In this podcast more thoughts about how to recognize what it might be. Then again, nothing may happen and then we’ll be stuck with the political situation that seems manipulated — like one of Donald Trump’s TV Shows — with people running who are either retreads, plumb crazy, or boring as hell. I’m not sure which is better, but right now I am betting on the crazies. As I have been talking about this, people have corresponded that they feel the same way, and it’s weird. I invite people to send me emails or message me, or comment through the Bob Davis Podcasts regarding why you might feel that there’s ‘something’ out there that might be a pretty big event. You don’t have to detail what you think it is so much as I would love to hear why you feel the way you do. Is it intuition? Or are there some solid reasons for what your ‘gut’ may be telling you. Meanwhile there is the state fair, and these perfect final days of summer. (Editor’s Note: Hurricane Season has started, but at the time of this writing there’s not much going on. However, if a big enough storm blows up, I may make a quick run south, but I have to be back for AgoraFest, on September 25th or so. Stay tuned for some great podcasts from a great Minnesota get together.) Sponsored by Baklund Research and Development