Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine.

Virtual reality isn't something that's coming. It's here. It's been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality.

There's a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia.

What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses after it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world.

The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in their social media bubble, except a few crazy uncles agreed with them. All the celebrities were on board.  And then the holodeck got switched off.

It wasn't a unique experience. Most Nazis didn't understand what was happening when the tanks broke through to Berlin. The average Russian wasn't prepared for the fall of the USSR.

Cheer up, American Millennials!

I mean, seriously, CHEER UP!

Oh, I know you’ve had a rough week ever since Donald Trump won the election.

Now it’s time to get a grip.

STOP crying.

STOP taking personal days off work to ‘process’ what happened.

STOP huddling with your equally distraught buddies in Starbucks over your Venti Iced White Chocolate Mocha.

STOP howling away on social media about how unfair life is and how it’s the end of the planet as we know it.

STOP retweeting all your favorite celebrities’ own outbursts of pique, rage and anguish.

STOP demanding the Electoral College reverse the decision in December.

In short, STOP being such a faux-tormented bunch of absolutely deluded cretins.

Want to know why Trump is going to be your next president?  It’s because he is what’s called a ‘winner’.

The soaring US dollar is causing mounting strains for the global financial system and ultimately threatens to set off a full-blown banking crisis in emerging markets, the world’s top’s economic watchdog has warned.

“We have all the symptoms of a dollar shortage,” said Hyun Song Shin, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

The warning came as the closely-watched dollar index (DXY) appeared close to breaking through key resistance levels to a 14-year high, a move likely to trigger a stampede into the US currency as hedge funds and momentum traders join the chase.

The danger is that the powerful and immediate effects of financial tightening will “swamp” any trade benefits for the rest of the world from Donald Trump’s stimulus plans and a stronger dollar, even for countries that export heavily to the US. “It may not be very good news for anyone,” Mr. Shin told a specialist forum at the London School of Economics.

The BIS estimates that dollar debt outside US jurisdiction - and therefore lacking a direct lender of last resort - has risen five-fold to $10 trillion over the past 15 years.  The great unknown is what will happen to China, where corporate debt has mushroomed to 145% of GDP.

Gosh, do I wish I’d taken my own advice and gone long on fossil fuels, short on renewables in the run up to the U.S. presidential election. I would have even bigger a reason to celebrate the Donald Trump victory than I do already.

Make no mistake, the Donald Trump presidency represents the biggest blow yet to the Great Global Warming Swindle.

Climategate was merely an amuse-gueule. This is the main event because it won’t just involve cross words in the blogosphere but actual deeds.

Specifically, those deeds will involve:

*the U.S. withdrawing from the COP21 climate agreement (aka “Clexit”);

*the effective dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency by the able and sensible Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute;

*much laxer federal regulations on matters like fracking, oil pipelines, and fossil fuels generally;

*an end to the massive subsidies paid to renewables such as the bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes which the President-elect is so right to hate.

For the Greenies, all this must seem like Armageddon come early.  But wait, there’s more!