“Notre Dame cancels classes for 2 weeks after Covid-19 spike”

“UNC-Chapel Hill fall semester going online amid COVID-19 outbreaks, one week into classes”

This is what happens when you live in fantasyland. When you’ve got that American optimism, but none of the can-do spirit.

Who’da thunk college kids would get infected? After all, it’s an educational environment where kids go to learn, to attend classes and then stay in their dorm and study. WRONG! College is about partying, getting high, having sex. If it weren’t, I’d have never made it through. I learned much more outside the classroom and so does everybody else. You live apart from Mommy & Daddy…they may check in every day on your smartphone, but they don’t know you stayed up until 4 A.M. and puked over the weekend.

The truth?

The colleges need the money. That’s why they’re open. Despite being bastions of learning, they’ve learned nothing.

And we’ve got this same optimism from our president. If we just ignore it, put our heads down and do what we want, everything will be fine, everything will go away…we’re a nation of OSTRICHES!

And if you say otherwise, if you deflate the balloon, you’re a hater. America can’t handle the truth, it doesn’t want to hear it. About seemingly everything. Upward mobility is higher in Canada and Europe. Life expectancy is down and infant mortality is up. But isn’t this the greatest country in the world! What’s next, a NASCAR driver who says he’s gonna win after his engine blew up?

It’s like America failed the marshmallow test. It can’t sacrifice, not a whit. It wants what it wants and it wants it NOW! And nobody can suffer. And if you do, it can only be for a brief period of time. Imagine telling that to cancer, I was sick and stayed home for a month, now it’s over, forget medication, I’m gonna live my life. Hilarious!

And the big story today is not the Democratic Convention, but the words of our supreme leader, Donald Trump:

“‘It will end up being a rigged election or they will never come out with an outcome,’ Trump told reporters on Tuesday. ‘They’ll have to do it again, and nobody wants that.'”

“Trump floats idea that fraud could lead to re-do of November election”

WRONG! That’s exactly what Trump wants. A tarnished outcome that allows him to continue to rule, despite him doing the tarnishing.

And forget politics, this disavowal of the truth, this disbelief in facts, permeates all sectors and both the left and the right.

SPOTIFY IS THE DEVIL! When the truth is Spotify gives 70% to rights holders and its business model is based on such slim margins that it often loses money.

TICKETMASTER IS THE ANTICHRIST! When the truth is Ticketmaster does nothing the acts don’t tell it to do and the primary profit in concerts is in the ticketing, and the fees don’t all go to Ticketmaster anyway, but are split with the building, the promoter and sometimes even the act!

It just doesn’t feel right!

But science doesn’t run on feel.

Trump said he had a feel for the coronavirus. Like you have a feel for the law. You believe you could argue the case better in court, not understanding there are underlying principles, a structure the attorneys and judges are functioning under. WHEN DID AMERICA GET SO DUMB?

So, we could have been planning how to integrate these college students into society at home. Where they’d live, where they’d get jobs, how much they would pay for online schooling. BUT NO! The institutions refused to come out of their bubbles. They flew on a wing and a prayer. And now that classes are cancelled…if I’m not living in the dorm and I’m not eating the food don’t I deserve a discount? That’s a legitimate question!

And then there are the wankers who believe concerts should start back up. After all, THEY’RE NOT SICK! Thank god the heavyweights in the industry realize this is untenable. But when Marc Geiger said no concerts until 2022 it made national news. As if people could combat the virus by wishing it away.

Now the ski areas are saying they’re gonna open. They’re gonna do social distancing. But they survive on international business, and if they don’t let outsiders in they can’t make their numbers. So, what’s the plan? New Zealand just had a few cases and shut down the ski fields. The odds of skiing before a vaccine? DE MINIMIS!

Don’t plan on doing anything for a long time. Because all indicators say it’s going to get worse. With the cold weather and flu season. But you just won’t believe it, that’s just opinion. Yeah, BY EXPERTS! But expertise has been denigrated.

Can’t somebody speak English?

We used to rely on musicians, before they all sold out to the man and bitched about their income. But now their reach and credibility are so low that no one’s listening to them anyway. Meanwhile, a bipolar rapper is running for President and everybody watches the reality sideshow with their hands off when the truth is the man is sick and needs medical attention. What happened to our compassion?

It’s bad and it’s gonna get worse. And so far, the system hasn’t saved us. And the chances of it doing so in the future are slim. Trump told hospitals to report Covid cases to his people as opposed to the CDC, now we’ve got no idea what the real numbers are. And local leaders are afraid of their constituents, so they don’t take action either.

Test, trace, vaccine. It’s the only way out of this.

As for business reopening…NO ONE WANTS TO GO!

As for Amazon…why is everybody bitching about Bezos, imagine what life would be like without his service! So, his wealth went up, SHOULDN’T IT? I don’t know about you, but the delivery person is at my house seemingly every day, obviating my need to go to a retail establishment and put my life at risk. We shouldn’t be tearing down Amazon, we should learn from its success and drive MORE E-COMMERCE! Oh, but we’ve got to save Main Street, the department store, when the truth is the public avoids them as soon as they’ve got a cheaper alternative. BUT SHOPPING IS THE AMERICAN WAY! Didn’t George Bush tell us to do shop after 9/11? But the truth is the younger generation is not into shopping. Yes, you hear all about the retail adventures of the Kardashians, but oftentimes today’s kids don’t even get their driver’s license. If Mommy & Daddy won’t take them, there’s Uber. As for goods…THEY WANT VIRTUAL GOODS! Hell, that’s what the war on TikTok is all about, selling within the app, but you believe it’s just about evil Apple. Apple may be evil, but the lesson here is today’s youth are into ethereal purchases if they buy anything at all, it’s about experiences, not physical items.

Of course there are exceptions. If what you write or say isn’t 100% true, if there’s even the slightest inaccuracy, YOU GET EXCORIATED! Our country lives on gotcha, it’s the new American sport.

Meanwhile, Jared Kushner goes on CNN and says the President is doing a great job:

Wolf presses Kushner: 1,000 deaths a day isn’t success, right?

But why are we listening to this nincompoop whose father bought him a seat at Harvard, who made one of the worst real estate deals in New York City history and only got his job through nepotism.

Trump doesn’t divest his holdings. Trump has the military stop at his golf resorts. Trump keeps pushing it and pushing it and constantly gets away with it. But the Democrats keep telling us…they’re going to beat him with the SYSTEM!

Do you believe in the system? Where there is not enough money for school supplies? Where you’ve got no job but can’t get relief? Where you can’t even make ends meet when you have your low-paying service job?

Forget the Trumpers, they’re delusional, getting their info from Fox and a Facebook algorithm that keeps them ill-informed. As for Zuckerberg…he fought America’s corporations and won, a much bigger victory than Bobby Fuller’s. You see Zuckerberg IS the law. And despite the blowback, nothing is changing at Facebook. As for the post office, what about the damage that’s already been done?

This is not a time for celebration, this is time for reality. Now is the time for experts with no financial investment to tell us the truth. What next, you go to the doctor and with a tiny chance of survival they tell you you’re gonna live? A track not on streaming services becoming a hit?

Sling your arrows all you want. And tell me I’m wrong when one thing is not as I predicted it. Who knows, the coronavirus might not come back with a vengeance this winter, but isn’t the Boy Scout motto BE PREPARED? Oh, that was before the organization was controlled by the religious and admitted it was a bastion of predatory behavior. Priests couldn’t be at fault. Trump can’t be at fault. It was inevitable, it was baked-in…WRONG!

Spotify

Pandora

Tune in today, August 18th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

Who controls the narrative?

Are you watching the Democratic Convention? I’m certainly not. Once upon a time, in the three network world, the conventions happened and they wiped out TV, they were all that was on the tube. Then came the cable era, and you didn’t have to watch if you didn’t want to. And now in the flat screen era…the networks are sideshows, cable news is a biased slugfest and we have options not only on streaming TV, but the entire internet, the whole world has been connected, and we can interact with each other. But being heard? That’s a whole ‘nother animal.

Distribution is king. Never let anybody tell you otherwise. It’s very simple…if you create something, however great, and you can’t get it into the marketplace, if people can’t be made aware of it and be exposed to it…your tree fell in the forest and no one heard it. But in 2020, distribution has been flattened, we all have access, now what?

The key used to be to rig the game. But the public is too experienced now, it’s been burned too many times. So, if you try to manipulate consciousness, if you try to manipulate virality, people realize this and bite back, you’re worse off than if you never attempted to hoodwink them to begin with.

And then there is the low-level art and commerce that is made only for virality, i.e. TikTok and the Kardashians. Would the Kardashians be having all that plastic surgery, would they be playing to the camera if there were no camera? Of course not! What you’ve got is caste of hardly educated bodies speaking to those as empty as themselves, don’t mistake these people for influencers, they’re marketers pure and simple, they can sell products, but they don’t affect minds whatsoever, they’re not influencing anybody to think, to examine the precepts, to question whether their beliefs are accurate.

Now we’ve got this sea of madness, and on top of it a construct we’re told makes sense, that delivers order, when nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, we’ve got two political tribes, but the truth is America, the entire world, has been broken into a zillion jigsaw puzzle pieces, and no one is even attempting to put them together, if anything they’re denying this fracturing.

So, you can be sitting at home wondering if you’re the only one who believes this way. You feel like a party of one. And, if you express your opinions, if you go against groupspeak, you’re shouted down, you’re messing with the system. Meanwhile, that’s the goal of the right, to get us questioning our ideas and our influences to the point we second guess ourselves and give up.

I’ve been following Umair Haque on Twitter for years. I don’t want to follow the big news organizations, I don’t want my feed cluttered, if I want to know what they think, I’ll just go to their sites. You see on Twitter, I’m looking for ideas, analysis, people who can put it all together, who’ve been spending their entire lives in the niche and have analyzed it and are now speaking about it. Of course, there’s the trope that Twitter is just a slice of the public and it does not matter, but the truth is Twitter is a hotbed of intellectualism. If you’re selling, Twitter is the wrong place to be. If you want to connect with the brain dead, go elsewhere. But if you want to argue about the concepts, Twitter is the place, and there you can affect the thoughts of others, and Twitter followers can find out they’re not alone. Oh, they may not be alone on Facebook, where oldsters share stories of their children and their lifestyles, but you’ll feel inadequate looking at photos on Instagram, believing you’re a loser who has been left behind, but on Twitter…money is irrelevant, it’s about who you are, what you think, and if you find someone who is saying what you believe, EUREKA!, you’re now a party of two.

So I was scrolling through my Twitter feed this evening and Umair Haque was live-tweeting the convention. I didn’t even know that was still a thing. But contrary to the media lovefest, Haque was criticizing the bloviators, pointing out how they were missing the point. Haque said we do not need testimony as to the character of Joe Biden, we all know he’s decent. But who was speaking to economic conditions, who was evidencing a plan, who was convincing the young ‘uns to come out and support this ticket? Oh, Haque had positive words for Bernie Sanders, but the only reason he was allowed to speak was to give the imprimatur of wokeness to Biden, to signal his followers to vote for Joe. But the truth is Bernie’s agenda has been thrown overboard, what we now have is consultants playing it up the middle, safe, it’s all about beating Trump, is this a good strategy?

So last night Jason Hirschhorn sent me a link. This is not a regular occurrence. Especially on a Sunday night. Obviously, it was important. Do you have sources whose links you’ll click? The truth is we all do, and they’re very few, most of what is sent/forwarded is ignored, because readers have been burned too many times, and most people are incapable of writing, especially so-called authorities like college professors. And when I clicked through I found this article by Umair Haque entitled:

“Americans Don’t Get How to Fight Authoritarianism – And Time’s Running Out – Americans Are Out of Their Depth. Trump is Already Stealing the Election and Getting Away With It.”

What hooked me were these lines:

“The Democrats have – prepare to stifle a giggle, or maybe spit out your coffee…THREATENED TO HOLD HEARINGS.

Oh no, I’m sure the authoritarians are quaking in their boots. Hearings! Wow!”

Wow, indeed. I felt alone all weekend. Pelosi was reconvening Congress for hearings about the USPS? When did that ever result in progress, when did that ever make a difference. Bill Barr just testified, no change. Even Mueller before him. So, everybody will feel good that they did something and…nothing will change.

So, what does Haque propose?

MASS PROTESTS! Like Belarus. In front of the White House. Insisting Trump RESIGN!

Are you paying attention to Belarus? Change is fomenting. But it’s better to protest BEFORE the election.

So now I’m hooked. You know how exciting it is to find someone on your own page? YOU WANT MORE!

So I click to last week’s article:

“Can Kamala Harris and Joe Biden Defeat Trump? – Some Boring and Annoying Thoughts About Kamala, Joe, and Donald”

And I’m positively stunned. For a week now, we’ve been subjected to endless press coronating Kamala Harris, how the choice of her to be V.P. was positively genius. BUT NOT UMAIR HAQUE!

Umair drills down, dispassionately. Does Kamala add to the ticket. WILL KAMALA BRING OUT THE YOUTH VOTE?

Yes, the youth not reading “The New York Times,” the youth not watching this convention, the youth who are riding in the back seat if they’re in the car at all, the youth aligned with Bernie who didn’t bother to vote for him in the primaries! Yes, that’s what this election depends on, getting out the vote. Not so much your friends who talk politics, but the downtrodden who believe they’re screwed and the government isn’t doing anything for them…what are the Democrats promising them, who is speaking to them, can Kamala do this?

I’ll let you read the analysis.

But now, like Jason Hirshhorn, I’m forwarding Haque’s articles. I’m a personal marketer, I want to expose his ideas to others, I’m texting even though it’s two in the morning, if my recipients didn’t turn off the ringer, they deserve to be woken up!

And then, before he live tweets the convention, Haque writes again.

If you’re a fan, what you’re dying for is more content, you eat it up. Creators should play to their hard core, it’s the only way to blow up, when you appeal to the faceless masses your message falls flat, but if you seed your fans…they just might spread the word.

So, today’s article is entitled:

“Yes, Trump Really is Stealing the Election. And It’s Almost Too Late. The Cycle of American Idiocy That’s Letting Trump Steal the Election – in Broad Daylight”

Yes, Haque does employ this tone. He doesn’t care who he offends, it’s all about the MESSAGE! Everybody’s so busy pussyfooting, afraid of stepping on toes, that their watered-down message has no impact.

So, Haque’s main point is Americans don’t understand authoritarianism, fascism…BECAUSE THEY’VE NEVER EXPERIENCED IT! But, there are untold people on this planet who have, like Haque himself…HOW COME THEY WON’T LISTEN TO THEM!

Haque skewers left wing sacred cows. Like Boy Wonder Chris Hayes. Hayes tells you what you want to hear, makes you feel good, but it makes no difference, because the truth is Hayes is uninformed, he knows nothing about authoritarianism, AND THAT’S WHAT THIS ELECTION IS ALL ABOUT!

This screed is a marketing message. I don’t even care if you agree with me or Umair. I’m talking about how you get your message heard, how it spreads in 2020.

It all comes down to content. You’ve got to create endlessly, improve your chops, to the point where you may touch someone who will do the marketing work for you.

Yet today anybody who wants to rise above starts with marketing, they think that’s the key, when the truth is your only option today, the only way you can make it is via your content.

This is scary, people don’t want to hear it, they’d rather complain that they’re overlooked, broke, not part of the system that would blow them up if they could just get a slot… WRONG!

On the other hand, your message will spread very slowly, no matter how great you are. It’s not like Umair Haque started yesterday, or even in this election cycle, he’s been doing this for YEARS! But now the time is right, now his voice is needed, now his message resonates, now I’m spreading the word.

Forget those young ‘uns… If I get one more song from the child of a reader I’ll puke. They’re TEN, THEY’VE GOT NOTHING TO SAY! We’re so caught up in fame and money that the message has been lost in the process. Maybe you sing well, maybe you can even play…BUT WHAT IS THE MESSAGE!

All day long artists complain they’re not getting paid, it’s everybody’s fault but their own. But the truth is their message is not resonating. Do you expect a brand of potato chips people don’t buy to stay on the shelf? If you’ve got no hard core fans, if the word is not spreading on your work, the problem is YOU! You’ve got to work harder, hone your message, maybe even pivot. But people don’t want to hear that, they’d rather rage at the system…BUT THERE IS NO SYSTEM! That’s been completely broken in the last decade. There are tools you can employ to help you create, to distribute, but that’s about all you’ve got.

America is too somnambulant, too caught up in its exceptionalism to realize it can happen here. It’s not only Covid-19, the rest of the world is scratching its head, how can we be so ignorant as Trump consolidates power right under our noses and steals the next election.

Oh, I know…Trump will win and you’ll cry in your beer. Why not get started now?

The truth is it comes down to message and expression. You can knock on all the doors you want, people won’t vote unless your message is convincing. We’ve got so much useless work in America today…people think if they’re busy it makes a difference, when it does not.

Work smart.

But first know what you’re working for.

Every individual has power. But they’re squandering it, oftentimes in defeat. Concentrate on what’s in front of you, not some distant nirvana that doesn’t even exist. Theoretically you can reach everybody, but the truth is you’re lucky if you can reach anybody. Skill, message, passion…simple concepts, but too often ignored by creators today. But they’re necessary to success, there’s no easy way to the top anymore.

Harry Styles

Is he the biggest rock star in the world today?

YES!

Wait a second, how could this happen? Aren’t boy bands supposed to be a flash in the pan, purveying mindless drivel for prepubescent girls who promptly abandon their crush when they go through puberty, only to show up decades later for the reunion show?

Welcome to music in 2020. Where we’re completely divorced from what came before, the pre-internet era, and there’s no cohesive scene, despite the labels and the media telling us there is.

Today it’s all about longevity. Not the first week numbers, but whether you can last, whether you can sustain, and the irony is so many of the touted number ones don’t. Oh, you’ll see it in their bios, on their Wikipedia pages, it’s almost as worthless as a Grammy, anybody can debut at number one, but can they stay there?

Harry Styles does not have the best voice, not even in One Direction, but he knows the rule of rock and roll, that conception is more important than execution, that the talent is in the idea, not the raw skills, otherwise music would be dominated by the melisma monsters of “The Voice.”

They’ve even got the 808 in country now. If you were frozen in the seventies and defrosted today, you’d believe that melody was a lost art, that the beat was everything, and that a canned sound from the eighties is the only way to gain success, but Harry Styles proves this is patently untrue. I’m not saying that “Watermelon Sugar” has the lyrical complexity and underlying gravitas of anything on Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” but it is a hell of a lot more listenable, it puts you in that late summer mood, where you lament the passing of those days in the sun, but you’ve still got the fumes of the feeling, which you want to maintain.

Harry Styles has been on a musical hejira, trying to find his identity, who he wants to be. Rather than just replicating what is on the chart, he pursued his own cobbled-together vision, a combination of SoCal seventies along with a modern pop sensibility, to the point where he’s making the most palatable music on the scene.

This should not be. We should all be listening to Jason Isbell, we should be hanging on every word of Drake and the Weeknd, not that they are not big in their own verticals, but Harry Styles seems to have transcended genre, he’s king of all the charts, everything but rock, because the wankers who control that format don’t want to admit this good-looking young ‘un beat the regulars at their own game.

In a world where you’re supposed to emerge fully-formed, Harry Styles has developed. Isn’t this the way it used to be, isn’t that why Warner Brothers stuck with you for five albums, because they believed you’d grow and find your groove? Styles’s solo debut, the eponymous “Harry Styles,” got all the publicity, but it’s the second LP, “Fine Line” which has burned its way into the public consciousness. And at this point, “Watermelon Sugar” is the fourth hit single from the LP. Anyone can come up with one hit, but to deliver four is nearly unheard of, and in the modern world these four hits have all hit the chart in less than a year, unlike the seventies and eighties when labels took two and a half years to dribble the hits out, if they could make the album last that long.

But it’s all image, right? Girls just want to look at and fantasize about Harry?

Wrong.

The official “Watermelon Sugar” video has 87+ million views on YouTube. And, then there’s another lyric version that has 52+ million views. Yet, the song has has 565+ million streams on Spotify, never mind competing services. So, all this crap about YouTube ripping off creators…it appears all active listeners are on dedicated music streaming services, and the fact that Harry is a hunk is irrelevant.

Repeatability. That’s the essence of a hit. Something you hear once and want to hear again. And the more you listen to it, the more you get into it, you’re entranced, that’s “Watermelon Sugar,” and it’s not even the best track on “Fine Line”…”Adore You,” which has 520+ million streams on Spotify, holds that title.

“Fine Line” is “Silk Degrees,” made by a more likable artist who has already had more sustained success than Boz Scaggs.

“Fine Line” is a Fleetwood Mac album, obviously hanging with Stevie Nicks has rubbed off on Harry.

It took years for people to acknowledge how great Michael Jackson’s
“Off the Wall” was. He was supposed to be a mindless boy band singer, but that album ultimately penetrated the culture, from blacks to whites, to the point where when “Thriller” was released, it dominated the culture, albeit helped by videos on MTV.

Every week there are new releases. You don’t know what to pay attention to. Maybe the work of old favorites, but after that? Furthermore, it takes so much effort to get into music, but it takes no effort to get into “Fine Line,” you get into it immediately.

The boomers, who are nearly irrelevant, who don’t count despite them telling us they do ad infinitum, would be positively stunned by “Fine Line.” Come on, just play it at a dinner party, everybody will immediately ask…”What is that”

Youngsters know Harry. But his lack of dominance has to do with the culture as opposed to his work. We live in a Tower of Babel society. It’s nearly impossible to take the temperature of not only the musical scene, not only the political scene, but any scene. So, something hiding in plain sight can be positively gigantic and you don’t know, you can’t feel it. But when you listen to “Fine Line” you do.

You may think I’m overstating the case. But the truth is Harry Styles is the little engine that could. Someone who everybody is aware of who has been dismissed out of the box, because the story is not sexy, despite his attractiveness he does not dominate TMZ, it’s not about the antics, but the music. No one is shooting him. He’s not making it by being featured on others’ music, nor importing rappers on his tracks to make them hits.

I’m not saying Harry’s team, both in the studio and at the label, don’t deserve credit for his success, but you need someone to guide you, to lead the team. It’s not like Harry worked with the producer du jour and employed their sound to dominate the chart, he did it his way, albeit with help, but almost no one can do it alone.

So, Harry Styles is this big. He may not be running for president, he may not be in the news every damn day, but he’s a part of 2020 culture. And if you don’t know, if you didn’t get the memo, you have now!