Eyes Wide Open, - A New Media Paradigm For The Age Of Disinformation? Plus An Innovative Approach To Town Planning.
Now is the time to think outside the box.
Yesterday I published, on Newsbreak, Boothbay's Unfunded Fifty Million Dollar School & The LePage Administration's Industrial Partnerships. It tells a history, documented in publicly accessible records, about the statutory framework of the public-private state, which for quite some time, has been incrementally transforming the purpose of public education into publicly-financed private industrial workforce training, benefitting special interests (the winners), chosen by the state.
As embedded in federal and state statutes, if not their Constitutions, publicly funded workforce training begins at the secondary school level. Further embedded into the statutes is a system of public-private profiteering that targets the acquisition of intellectual property ownership by the state and its private partners, based on public-private ownership of the means of production.
No one talks about it, let alone questions, the transformation of public education into private workforce training, least of all Paul Lepage, who signed off on major legislation to that effect. Even less is there talk about the statutory laws written to grant the public-private owners of the means of production, the rights to ownership of intellectual property, based on their ownership of the means of production, made easier with public funding, written into the statutes by the authority of one half of the public-private relationship. The general absence of discussion or acknowledgment makes my latest story another radical Newsbreak story by local standards, and actually by any standard.
Some of the documentary records substantiating this story and these claims are from the media and others are from searching the Maine statutes and bills, where fiscal information is found about how a new program is funded. In this story, you will find some such information that is clearly documented but I have never seen or heard it spoken about. That is one of the aspects of this story that makes it quite radical.
Boothbay's Unfunded Fifty Million Dollar School & The LePage Administration's Industrial Partnerships was given a CV rating of 9 (out of 10) by Newsbreak. I have heard it said that no one ever gets a 10 but I will keep on trying!
Once again the stats display a one-to-one ratio between impressions and views, as I suspected that they would, as an occurrence often associated with radical posts.
It would be nice to see the public stats since this is the second story where I chose Portland, instead of Boothbay as my location, The result of the first Portland-based story was a significant increase in both impressions and reads. I won’t be able to know the public stats with this post. I am assuming that they exist somewhere, The one-to-one ratio indicates a different sort of interest is at play, which is also important to know.
The one-to-one ratio always begins at 5 impressions and 5 views. There are 5 Newsbreak investors. Coincidence? Then it goes up about from there, relatively quickly but not to mass proportions. (the last check is 11). Then the numbers reach a plateau where they sit until they increase in small increments as I publish other stories- but not every time I publish a story.
The last story with a one-to-one ratio was “Did I Fall Down The Rabbit Hole Into A Dystopian World Or Is This Really Real?”, also radical. On the morning of the day I published my most recent story, Rabbit Hole had reached 19 impressions and 19 views and rose to 20 by nightfall. This is not a lot by normal standards but I do not know what measure I am looking at here.
This is reasonably interpreted as interest at the top. Within the current cultural context of rampant false narratives, I am telling a unique narrative that is fact-checked and well documented. Ironically, the source of my fact-checks being bills, statutes, and the Maine Legislative library, my sources are deemed “not reliable sources” by the Maine Team at Wikipedia, but the elite team at Newsbreak appears to see it differently.
I call it an elite team- because, by definition, an elite group is small in number, and the one-to-one stats I am seeing are showing my story being distributed to a group that is small in number.
I do not think I will learn anything about why some stories have a one-to-one ratio until I reach 200 followers and apply for monetization. When dealing with a large media company, one needs to establish that one can garner a following, and as far as social media goes, 200 followers is a low bar. If I cannot do that, I should not be a candidate for monetization.
The preferred way to garner followers is organic, by publishing. That is why I am really interested in seeing the public stats so I can know what sort of distribution my story is receiving, but at the same time the one-to-one stats tell me that I am in a unique category, and it is important to see that it continues to be the case, and most interesting that my most radical truth-telling stories are the stories that most interest the elite group. To me that says that Newsbreak is trying to be something very different within this world of disinformation. I am a non-institutional citizen-researcher, who always asks for sources of information. I instantly recognize whether the information is sourced or not, be it on social media or in a political speech. Perhaps this plays into the interest that I am receiving from “anonymous”.
If you support this concept, please, click the Newsbreak link on your mobile app and follow me since it counts for nothing if you follow me on a PC. It’s easy as pie- Just download the Newsbreak app in one nanosecond. Then search “Mackenzie Andersen” my profile comes up with the following link. Click “Follow”. Done! Easy pisey!
Ironically my followers on Medium are growing at a faster rate than ever, now that I stopped trying to write articles for Medium, feeling uninspired by the constant stream of articles about making money on Medium and going viral, that the mindless algorithm was serving up on a daily basis, and establishing, beyond a doubt that algorithms are clueless when it comes to understanding humans.
I should not say that I have completely stopped writing articles for Medium, but I joined the crowd and use Medium as a place where I can write about my experience with Newsbreak. I publish my NewsBreak and sometimes Substack articles on Medium but the stories that get the most reads are stories with “Medium” Or Newsbreak” in the title.
Perhaps that is why Medium recently added the ability to save stories on one’s profile in categories of lists. Medium even started a thread asking us humans what our favorite read was. I voted for Meet Your New Feudal Overlords by Marlon Meems. It is a story about how large investment interests are buying up real estate everywhere, not a feel-good story but a pertinent one. Scary, indeed, What is going on in this world? Can we bring our home planet back to a better distribution of wealth?
On that note, there is a story in the Boothbay Register about the selectmen of Boothbay Harbor contracting with Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission for an ordinance review and socioeconomic evaluation relating mainly to housing.
The two parties discussed a reorganization of priorities LCRPC to spearhead Boothbay Harbor housing, ordinance review Boothbau Register by JOSEPH CHARPENTIER 07/25/2021
Similar to the algorithm that is supposed to understand what humans want to read, the alliance of local superpowers is assumed to have greater authority or knowledge than those with a living experience of the community. The people will be told what the overlords decide. They will be told this is your choice, the one option on the table- vote on it -yes or no-, without other options given an equal chance.
If Boothbay Harbor had a town charter, it could, optionally. limit the planning board to residents- or if the planning board wanted to hire outside consultants, the entire town would have to approve it with a public referendum.
The new consultants are hired by the Boothbay Harbor selectmen headed by the unopposed candidate who so surprisingly won the office. Kenneth Rayle was a member of the former JECD group. the public-private organization that contracted with New York consulting firm, Camoin Associates, to develop a plan for the entire region at an even greater distance and at a considerably higher cost than the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission. Now the Lincoln County Planning Commission is going to review the plan that Camoin Associates did. Is there something in it that the JECD group does not like? Estimated costs for the regional consulting group to act as unelected proxies for local residents are $9,130 with work billed at $55 an hour and $55.04 additional for travel. The public voice is overridden once at a far lesser cost to the taxpayers than it was by the former consultants that the JECD group hired. Should we celebrate?
It feels to me that the JECD group, which I consider to be still existing as a political faction, does not know how to do anything themselves. The organization‘s solution to everything is to hire a consultant at the expense of the taxpayers. In a symbiotic relationship with developer Paul Coulombe, the hired consultants are referred to as “the experts”. Sometimes experts are appropriate, such as legal experts, and infrastructure experts, and in some cases engineers, and so on, but external consultants from outside the community determining the “reorganization of ordinance priorities” is not such a case.
If a regional group is contracted it should be for regional purposes- such as where is the best location in the region to locate a fifty million dollar school? Instead Boothbay Harbor contracts with a regional organization to “reorganize the priorities” of Boothbay Harbor ordinances. It is highly suspect, given the initiators, that the “reorganization of ordinance priorities “ will be based on the assumption of a fifty million dollar school being located on the peninsula.
Other groups could be formed to raise money for counter studies. There could be a counter study on the ordinances sourced in research centered within the local community- or there could be a statewide study for the need for advanced educational facilities across the whole state- not just in wealthy communities with wealthy fundraisers- one of the problems with having education funded by fundraisers. Where ever there is one group hiring consultants to create a plan to be used as an “appeal to authority”, there should be other groups presenting alternative plans, whether created by consultants or as a mutually reciprocal community project.
The extravagantly expensive Camoin report was filled with information found on government websites and made use of Ersi Data compilation software for much of the rest. At a considerably smaller expense, the town could have purchased the software which is available at all levels for teams and individuals. See Ersi online pricing. The app could be a community resource accessible to the entire community, and that would engage a genuine cross-section of community involvement in planning our communities by the people who actually live in them. Perhaps such a project would even get the various opposing factions with the community talking to each other, and such a process would arrive at a plan uniquely suited to a place.