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Reporticus Americanus: endangered species, seldom seen in the wild
It has become increasingly difficult –in fact, is now almost impossible — to think constructively about events that happen at a distance. It’s bad enough that almost every event has associated with it at least two competing sets of “alternate facts,” we’ve become used to that and can with patience and research sort through it all and triangulate the location of probable truth. But research requires the existence of at least some honest brokers of fact, reporters who will record that was raining that day without calculating whether the fact that it was raining benefits one tribe or the other tribe.
Those honest brokers, and their work product, are dying out. The “wealth managers” who own the newspapers and websites available to us are interested in revenue, not objective reality. If making people angry or afraid gets clicks and sells subscriptions and brings in cash, then who, do you suppose, are they going to hire, the fear mongers or the honest brokers?
“First they came for the journalists,” goes the modern rewrite of Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem, “and I did not speak out because I was not a journalist. We have no idea what happened next.”
I’m not talking here about the sins of commission of the propagandists who spew their spins and lies for their own profits and purposes. I am talking here about the sins of omission of the people who are trusted to inform the citizens of a democratic republic, and thus keep them free. Based on these sins, an awful lot of the journalists now working in the trade are going to hell. Examples:
- NO, the Chinese telecom executive who was arrested in Canada for extradition to the United States was not arrested because her company violated US sanctions against trade with Iran — as virtually every journal and website of the mainstream media reported. After days of yelling at my monitors that that made no sense, I finally learned from Lawfare, a website primarily for lawyers, that the charging documents — available all along — allege bank fraud. Nor was this a Trumpian whim, a federal grand jury indicted her, a federal court issued the warrant for her arrest, and Canadian judges reviewed everything before allowing her detention.
- NO, the United States did NOT, as Bloomberg News and many other outlets reported this month, become a “net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years.” This fiction, and the associated one about the country being near, or even at, energy independence, fly in the face of reality — not to mention common sense — yet are given credence over and over again by so-called journalists. It is true that oil production is up, to around 12 million barrels per day, and consumption is steady at 20.5 million barrels a day. As we have for the past four decades, we burn about twice as much as we find, and that’s as far from energy independence as we have always been. Propagandists come to different positions by tortuously re-defining oil to include, for example, biofuels, counting them as if they were found in the ground and not produced by a laborious, fossil-fuel-intensive process.
- NO, George H.W. Bush was NOT a great president, nor a good man. He was viciously ambitious, and by unleashing his political attack dog Lee Atwater (whose partners were Paul Manafort and Roger Stone) to savage his opponents under a black flag, contributed to the ongoing destruction of the American political system and paved the way for the likes of Donald Trump. The canonization of Bush by American journalists — quite apart from the expected, self-serving tripe from Bush’s tribe — further, and unnecessarily, degraded the idea of American presidents as humble servants of the Republic, under the law.
The true facts of these three cases — and no, “true facts” is not redundant, not since the introduction of “alternative [sic] facts” — are available to anyone who spends some time looking for them. But the degree of difficulty is increasing steeply every day, and one cannot help but fear the impending retirement of the last honest broker of facts, and the falling of night.
The “net exporter” of oil in this context actually means that, for one week, barrels of petroleum product exports were greater than barrels of crude oil imports. USA still imported in that week a few milliion barrels of crude (net) per day
Yes. It depends on what your definition of “oil” is.
In all due respect, sir, “humble servants of the Republic” – where the hell does that come from? Leaders of nations and empires have seldom been such. From Alexander the Great to Herod the Great to Peter the Great, ambition, cunning and dogged determination have been the very meat and potatoes of leadership.
This, I believe, is baked into the cake; to paraphrase Mao, “civilization is not a tea party”.
With all due respect, sir, Abraham Lincoln. Jimmy Carter.
I guess I’m concerned about the word ‘Republic’. Yes, republic would apply to the Lincoln era, troubled though it was, and during the brief Carter administration as well. But republic is a fragile instrument indeed. The ancient Greek democracy was a short-lived experiment, as was the Roman Republic. The modern Weimar government occupied but an augenblick of time. No need to elaborate on the mayhem that followed the vaunted French Revolution.
It seems that a republic is a cumbersome extravagance that crops up under ideal circumstances in certain societies when the goose is fat and the orchards bend with heavy fruit. But when overshoot sets in and times turn sour, there is always an emergent strongman on hand to put things ‘in order’.
Unpleasantness usually follows. I guess that’s where we are today.
You make it sound like humanity’s an utterly lost cause from day one.
Why think of the cause of humanity at all? Why assign a level of value to a phenomenon which may for all we know vanish from existence altogether? Men generally take themselves too seriously. Think of mankind metaphorically; like the effects of a pebble tossed onto the surface of a lake. We are the ripples that appear, fade and disappear.
Tom – I read your stuff and like it. Long ago as a lawyer I learned the hard way that the facts tell you like it is.
We’re ready for impact whenever it comes. Russ
If there’s a God, he did a very poor job.
He should have given everyone of us the powers of the Blue Fairy, so that any lie anyone ever told anyone else would instantly become as plain as day. All sociopaths — those bloody central bankers above all — would instantly be put out of business, and there’s no telling how much human evil would cease to exist.
Ah, well, at least no one can lie about the workings of the laws of arithmetic, according to which infinite exponential growth of any kind is just pure madness. I doubt TPTB can go so far as to bribe theoretical physicists into telling us that one plus one doesn’t equal two after all.
When we lived in tribes or small villages it was relatively easy to spot the sociopath and exclude them. Once we started breeding like bacteria it all fell apart.
Here’s a true fact for ya, 9/11 was an inside job.
Think about what that means. Dostoevsky wrote,” Without God, everything is permissible.” The same principle applies to the media and 9/11.
If the media can sell us the official narrative of 9/11, based almost entirely on the premise that on any given day, the Laws of Physics and Reality can be suspended and replaced by an endless string of miracles and supernatural events, then they must have supreme confidence they can sell us anything.
17 years after 9/11, all lies are now permissible.
I, too, have rejected the official narrative because: physics. However, I haven’t replaced it with a conspiracy theory or concluded it was an inside job. Drop it with a bunch of other things in the “no clear answers forthcoming” file. My lack of certainty extends to quite a lot of topics these days, which I suppose is the earnest desire of those offering false narratives if indeed I can’t be wholly convinced of the sell job.
9/11 was inside job, of that I am certain.
Who the actors were, and what exact roles did they perform, how can we know at this point? I have my inclinations, but that’s what they are, inclinations.
For example, based on studying his body language and reactions to plane strike updates, all while reading My Pet Goat to the little Florida kids (and many other things), I am convinced that George Bush Jr. was not in the loop, and was informed only later on Air Force One what was to be required of him.
What value does my opinion on this matter have? Even to Truthers, not much, again at this point, who did what and when – and with whom! – is just a parlor game.
Yet these parlor game vagaries, as they relate to the “Big Picture,” do not matter in the slightest. Whether Georg Bush Jr. had a prior knowledge or not, I know he committed treason, because I know that the official narrative of 9/11 is a total fabrication – and so does Junior.
In my opinion, rejecting the official narrative should bring you at least two thing things, if you want it to, and if you let it. One, an excruciating psychic pain that will mostly pass but never entirely. Two, an intellectual clarity you never thought possible.
@ Mr Dullnig ~
If that is your stand, absolutely anything goes and nothing matters anymore, so you have no reason to voice any objections of any nature to anything Mr Lewis posts. Presumably that’s how you’d like others to view your posts here at The Daily Impact — as the effects of a pebble tossed onto the surface of a lake; full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
Someone: I don’t know about the sound and fury part, but signifying nothing is as good a philosophy as any offered here or anywhere. My point is, we tend to assign an importance to ourselves that is not necessarily based upon anything at all above wishful thinking.
My posting of essentially nihilistic commentary is my attempt at sharing what has been for me an awakening; a relaxation of the spirit; an acceptance of a destiny that seems to me apparent. Consequently, my stress level has dropped like a rock. I can truly enjoy the time that remains.
If I was to assign any collective motive to the human activity happening all about me, my best guess would be a death wish. Unsurprising to me is the accelerating rate of individual suicide. Maybe there is a correlation.
Don’t worry about Tom. He can take care of himself. If he was afraid of criticism, he would not be writing this blog.
Well said Darrell, and I agree; humanity is on a suicidal path, and I believe on some level every thinking human being is now aware.
This awareness is going to be increasingly reflected in the statistics (even the official ones). Put it this way, if Vegas made a line on world-wide suicides* over the next ten years, and set it at 1 billion, I would take the over in a heartbeat.
*Clearly an impossible task. How do you define suicide, precisely, on a planet were the options left to billions of people in the coming decades will be, die were you stand, or die on a trek leading nowhere.
Excellent journalism. All I can say about the reactions and comments is “interesting…”
Natural forces have always determined what happens in the use of natural resources in the Real world and always will. Organisms, including humanities, only make decisions, good and bad, about irreversible operations using up many of these natural resources. But societies do not understand this reality. They currently live in the transient Myopia that is the doomed industrialized civilization.