Unspinning Official Stories 2010

Growth loving media cover-up decade's top story;
almost another billion humans on Earth already

        1 January 2010: Whether the decade's end was last night or will be next New Year's Eve, it was 10 years ago today or yesterday (I forget which) that, as the last century ended, embedded media tooting their horns about the grre-e-a-a-t stories of the 20th century all piously noted the death of Mother Teresa while every one of them forgot, discounted, or covered up the hands-down biggest story of all - the explosive and ominous growth of the human race past 2 billion, past 3 billion, past 4 billion, past 5 billion, and almost in exact sync with the century's end, past 6 billion in less than 100 years.
        So it's only business as usual that the same news media that have tacitly conspired for 20 years to convince us or themselves that humans virtually stopped reproducing in the early 90's, now that their gigantic lie has been dramatically contradicted, will give us no big story this week about the fact that even the most certainly politically contaminated estimate has added another 800 million people, while more credible estimated world human nose-counts have already nearly reached another billion in only 10 years - in just the first decade of the 21st century.
        At 8:30 p.m. New Year's Day, population clock counts ranged from the US Census Bureau's rapidly growing estimate of 6,793,836,600 to University of North Carolina's somewhat faster growing estimate of 6,973,027,500 . When next year's (mostly estimated) census is in, the highest estimates will certainly put world human population at over 7 billion.
        Take it from me that the highest estimate is only CLOSEST to enough, because, obviously, nobody counts all the poor people in all the shanty towns in the world. The extreme variations between "population clocks" should tell you these are wild estimates, and, since the very same insiders who are most in denial about overpopulation are the ones with most power to edit reality, setting aside community counts which serve different purposes, general population counts are always most likely to be under-counts.
        Meanwhile, wild horses were reported a couple of days ago to be overpopulating Nevada, and a fisherman, apprehended for shooting at a sea lion in the Sacramento River, told authorities "he was tired of watching the protected animals taking his fish." The first story did report that there are 18,500 wild horses in Nevada but not that there are 2 million people in the same state. The second story didn't give the number of sea lions taking the fishermen's fish in the Sacramento River OR the number of fishermen taking the sea lions' fish. But my guess is that the ratio is similar to that of horses to humans in Nevada.
-Glen Roberts

US meddling, people's failure combine to doom revolutions

 21 February 2010: Chile's recent electoral regression (returning their presidency to conservative hands) and, just before that, Honduras's actually inevitable mini-revolutionary failure can both probably be chalked up to the poisonous influence of Washington, but, whatever you think you think, dear readers, and no matter how many of you think it, it's plain to me that "the" people in both places had a lot to do with the torpedoing of their own future.
    At the time of Manuel Zelaya's ouster and first response, my own logical doubts that he had any chance in a country occupied by BOTH the US AND the Honduran people earned me some virulent censure from suddenly fervent bloggers who considered me a traitor to THEIR pro-democracy stance, a religious stance I can't betray since I've never shared it. As a revolutionary for civilization, I'm a communist, because civilization, should it ever be achieved, must be largely defined by strict adherence to an absolutely fair social and economic contract. But, in fact, to any charge that I lack faith in the wisdom of "the" people, I plead guilty. I have NO faith in "the" people's wisdom or in their revolutionary reliability because I am a realist, and in the real world there's not much evidence to justify any such faith.
    In the real world, besides ceremonially resting (without much apparent risk to the rich) in the slippery hands of "the" people, who can almost be counted on to switch back and forth between their own side and the wrong side from one election to another, any hope of wresting actual control from the so-far firmly grasping hands of the rich behind all supposedly (conveniently) democratic scenes, must rest in the hands of frustratingly uncertain revolutionary leaders (who are also, of course, people).
    In several posts starting last July 2 ('09), besides pointing out the true Obama/Clinton agenda, I declared my hope that Zelaya would succeed, join ALBA, and enlist his country into what I hoped was a new quarter-globe socialist revolution. And I think that if the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean presidents had at that time very pointedly joined ALBA, and if ALBA leaders had then decisively withdrawn from the OAS and taken firm steps on Honduras in the name of ALBA, unambiguously declaring that the US must never again be allowed to overthrow Latin American states, Zelaya might have succeeded, Chile's election might not have been lost, and Obama might have been forced to reverse his move into the Republican camp.
     But none of that happened, and now, major western media have disappeared ALBA from the news, a strategy that has worked in the past, as all weaklings submissively jump on the insider band wagon. Maybe not, but Chile is going to be at least four years behind the pace now, and you can bet the CIA is working hard to end the Kirchner era in Argentina. And, though the Venezuelan and Bolivian revolutions are clearly still moving forward (slowly), no dramatic international moves to invigorate any all-Latin America revolutionary move (that I know of) is surfacing as of today, Sunday, February 2l, 2010.
     Maybe my hopes aren't realistic. I think they are. I think that (as always) it's the world outside my head that's not realistic. But my support for ALBA (Latin America's Bolivarian Alternative) is based on my assumption, based in turn on good but not perfect evidence that ALBA and other leftist Latin American leaders, including now maybe irrelevant Michelle Bachelet, recognize the unfairness of competitive economics and that each went into office aiming to eventually achieve social and economic equality in his or her country.
    I do not assume they are all as philosophically sophisticated as they should be, but I have been assuming that each understands or is at least capable and on the verge of understanding that the purpose of a civil state is to provide ALL its participants a good life, and that their undoubtedly varied concepts of an ideal civil state are at least evolving toward an approximation of my own definition of a Civil State.
     Actually, calls for clarification within ALBA several months ago by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa suggested that some or most of the ALBA leaders really are politically, socially and economically on my screen, but I've never read or heard anything clearly indicating that any of them, except possibly Fidel, are as ecologically or philosophically as sophisticated as they ought to be. And this is important because, in reality, the political, social, economic failure of humanity is overshadowed by their ecological and philosophical failure.
     My support for ALBA is academic, of course, since it's clear to me that all political and social crusading is vain in a collapsing, i.e. literally dying ecosphere.
-Glen Roberts

A rare glimpse of realism in the Middle East

  3 March 2010: Al Jazeera posted an interview this morning with two Iraqi politicians, actually two front men for the US, who were actually asked a question about the future of secularism in Iraq. It was the question that put the word in THEIR mouths, but it didn't fit very well.
     Maybe it's positive that there is even half hearted talk of a secular state in the middle east, even if the idea is wedged into the discussion with a reporter's shoe horn. But the response reported in this article WAS half hearted and, more important, pre-electoral, i.e. campaign rhetoric,
     Every note I've tried to post on Al Jazeera recommending an end to religious government in the middle east has disappeared down a hole, So I was startled to see the subject poke its nose above the nap this morning. But, no problem, it vanished quickly enough, and I don't expect to see it poke up again soon.
     The otherwise pointless blather quickly devolved to talk about politics, a non-subject the interviewees were more comfortable with. And then the reporter disgraced himself by bringing up what he apparently considered somebody's hope for more nationalism - another kind of religion. They were all over that, of course.
     Why do the politicians in countries the US is "building" look and talk so much like US politicians?
     The proper business of a would-be civilized state and its leaders should be the welfare of its people and procedures for providing them a good life, including economic and social equality, i.e. civilization.
-Glen Roberts

Whatever's up down south needs clearer focus

   4 March 2010: Too slow. Too slow. Maybe so long overdue that being too late doesn't really matter anymore, but too slow, anyway. Something IS happening in Latin America. But so like the movement of rheumatoid old men is the happening that to tell WHAT is happening is even harder than spotting that it IS happening.
     OK, YES. It's faster than the coming of "change" under Obama in the US, but "hope" for the US started wilting when Tom Jefferson retired. I'm talking about more progressive places.
    Two days after I wrote two weeks ago that I saw no sign that day of any dramatic moves to revitalize the new Latin American socialist revolution, 32 countries meeting at a Latin American president's summit in Cancun talked about too many other things but, in the midst (maybe at the top) of the agenda, they talked for sure about a new Latin American organization to replace the OAS (or so Hugo Chavez suggested), leaving the US out. Wow! Reading this in Al Jazeera I thought, maybe I spoke to soon.
    But BBC only reported some anti-UK discussion of the Falklands at a meeting of some sort in Cancun. US papers eventually reported some such meeting as if it were a peon labor union workshop acknowledged and OK'd by the boss. They made a much bigger, disgracefully one-sided story of a Cuban convict who starved himself to death, without bothering to compare the singular event with the thousands of similar deaths that take place annually in US prisons.
     Mexican newspapers featured pictures of Raul Castro and Hugo Chaves clasping hands over their heads in Cancun and reported some anger directed at right-wing presidents Alan Garcia of Peru, Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, and the newly elected but not yet right-wing president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, for urging inclusion of the US.
     The worst of it was that the discussion was continued until the presidential summiteers meet again in Caracas next year. Next YEAR? OK. I'm going to hope, without much clarification coming from anywhere, that the new international group proposed is intended only as an umbrella for several already US free regional Latin American groups that already exist, including ALBA, which have lots of international activities already underway, like the project to help Haiti set up a health care system, to be led by Cuba. International mutual assistance is a Cuban specialty, and Raul's much heralded participation in the Cancun meeting signals Cuba's intention to be deeply involved with any new organization to be founded. That's the best of it.
     But I'm not happy with an organization that might indiscriminately include 32 countries, some of which will certainly act as proxies for the US, balk at key moves toward socialism, and clog the works. I'm not happy with the emergence of yet another organization - with the further alphabet-soupization of Latin American progressivism. This proliferation of organizations confuses and minimizes the point, which would be better served if all the existing regional groups attempting to make Latin American business Latin America's business all joined ALBA, which began with a Cuba/Venezuela alliance, which made most sense most emphatically.
-Glen Roberts

Americans still don't understand their own laws

   30 April 2010:  Americans still don't understand their own laws: Just as in the case of Proposition 8 in Calfornia, all coverage of Arizona's new anti Mexican-American law studiously shuns any reference to the obviously relevant 14th Amendment equal protection clause.
    The John Waynes keep talking as if there was no issue except illegal immigrants, and the protester against the law seem incapable of clearly declaring, "Hey! We're not objecting to your barbaric treatment of immigrants. We're objecting to the way you're obviously intending to treat American citizens, depriving them of their right to equal protection under the law if they happen to LOOK like immigrants to a cop."
     And the newspapers and politicians are no better. Why is the Obama administration blathering about "unlawful preemption of the Federal Government's role in securing the country's borders," when that is NOT what the issue is, and it's a stupid issue to bring up considering that the Federal approach to border security is just as ugly as Arizona's. Obviously, they want to appeal to the stupid right by making it a right wing emotional issue and by avoiding logic. Meanwhile if there is a glimmer of awareness by the media that it is the 14th Amendment being violated, why does the Times muddle the point with reference to a "civil rights challenge asserting that the law encourages racial profiling?" Are they trying to sound politically correct?
     I think they are trying to avoid a clearly logical and legal approach, because letting the public go on thinking law is like calling for an emotional show of hands on the Jerry Springer show allows for the further dismantling of existing progressive law on emotional and religious grounds that the people will stupidly support. And very relevant to that thought, they fear a clear 14th amendment victory would collaterally knock over Proposition 8 in California and derail hopes for an equally stupid anti-abortion law which is certainly coming up next.
     For a better understanding of the logical role of a civilized state and of why the few rational law makers in US history have enacted laws limiting government authority over participating citizens, see Civil State on this website.
-Glen Roberts

Eco-panic 60 years late

  30 April 2010:  Words like frantic and ecological crisis in reference to an actual ecological crisis are strangers on the front page of the LA Times, but don't worry.
        With the Mississippi delta and all nearby game refuges and the Gulf of Mexico undeniably threatened by an underwater rupture freely spewing out oil south of New Orleans, it's hard to do, but they're still trying to convince readers this is a one-time local EVENT.
        The Exxon Valdez has to be mentioned because the public DOES know something like this has happened before. But they keep calling it a spill, just as if it were no worse than a leaking ship and NOT a torrent that could empty a subterranean oil bubble vastly bigger than the holds of a fleet of tankers into the gulf.
        The president's panic reaction, suddenly reversing his call for an offshore drilling drive, is extreme, but I assure you Obama hasn't realized that greedy capitalism's onslaught against the natural world has gone too far and has got to stop. He's just worried about his image. With luck, Sarah Palin will be worried enough about her image to shut up briefly.
        But, exept for the rare use for a few days of some usually omitted words, the reaction isn't likely to get really real real soon, or if it does it will only be because Mother Nature stages a horrendous disaster - which, of course, she will.
-Glen Roberts

When slicks gush and goats are scaped

  2 May 2010:  Torn between their duty as corporate bards to sedate the suckers and their suppressed carny barker urge to shock them, the media headline a comfortably familiar slick spreading from a spill, but halfway to a near secret subparagraph revelation that a torrent of oil is pouring from a rupture in the ocean floor (about what I guessed night before last - see below), they let slip this chimeric (Freudian?) image: "...crews struggled to contain the slick which is gushing ..." Hey! Slicks don't gush. They spread. What's gushing is a volcanic oil blow-out way way down deep under water where no amount of struggling will stop it until it empties the reservoir feeding it.
        They then more slickly scapegoat one corporation to go on hiding the general human guilt and the bigger, more alarming story. The world's not facing one company's one local mistake. This oil eruption is connected to global warming, disappearing species and rain forests and coral reefs and water tables, acid rain, dying lakes and oceans and etc. etc. The problem's not BP and one coastline. It's more and more people everywhere needing more and more resources and a greedy careless uncontrolled growth and profit driven monster system of capitalism that lives on only by destroying the eco-world to keep filling its market's evergrowing belly.
-Glen Roberts

The next worst disaster

  11 June 2010:  Each time you read that "this is the worst eco-disaster in US history," remember that in any developing situation records are made to be broken. There will be another "worst eco-disaster" and another and another and, while the scape-goat for the gulf oil blow-out is a British corporation, the scape-goat for the next one may be an American corporation, and while the pay-off for this one will come from the pockets of British pensioners, whose paychecks depend on investments in large corporations including British Petroleum, the next one may result in a blow-out of pension funds for Americans.
-Glen Roberts

What's wrong with humanity? How do they stay so dumb?

  14 July 2010:  I'm not asking what's wrong with the media, because, even if they are both ethically and intellectually wrong, I don't think they're making a mistake. I don't think they necessarily know what they're doing, either. But whether instinctively or cunningly, by keeping the public confused, they're assisting and obscuring the crimes of the system they're part of. Better to ask what's wrong with me. Why do I go on hopelessly explaining and re-explaining to a stubbornly deaf race the lies they're being told, the tricks being played on them?

     But the best question is "WHAT - IS - WRONG - WITH - HUMANITY!?!?"

     Why do humans never get any smarter? Why, after thousands of years of scientific progress, do they keep believing in ghosts? Why do they never stop letting themselves be sent out to fight and kill each other? How can they be so easily taught to demonize the poor and idolize the rich? Why, no matter how much they suffer for it, do they keep falling for every scam their rich oppressors and their oppressors' media pull on them? Why do they never learn their language well enough to figure things out? And why do they keep reproducing and inflicting all their stupidity and its consequences on more and more victims while stupidly denying the limitations of space? What's wrong with them?
    Well, for one thing, they're not philosophically very sharp, are they? Even though they HAVE separate brains, functional to a point, as philosophizing mechanisms, their brains either don't work or aren't under their own control. There's no use calling that unbelievable, by the way. It's a fact.
    Thousands of years after the development of writing catalyzed a leap forward in the accumulation and supposed sharing of knowledge, hundreds of years after the invention of printing jump-started the worldwide spread of available knowledge, and in the midst of a computer revolution, which is expanding access to every facet of knowledge, while people have evolved technologically, and to varying degrees economically and even socially, and in some quarters politically, it IS an indisputable fact that over 99% of humanity have STILL not even slightly evolved philosophically.
     Philosophy itself has evolved. To write the documents on this site, I've got to have come a long way past Epicurus. But not only have not even 1% of humans come with me, almost 100% of the human race remain philosophically between cave men and the ancient Egyptians.
     People who wear clothes, drive cars, take high tech pills, do complex math problems, and can put on a show of moving printed words off a page, through their eyes, presumably through their brains, and out their mouths as real words - STILL - seldom speak their own languages coherently and, confronted by realistic discourse about any of the to-them most important ancient human delusions, apparently either can not or will not understand either what they read or what is said to them.
     Their entire pseudo understanding of the world they've lived in for a million years without ever paying any sustained coherent philosophical attention to it is faked by aping endlessly rehearsed expressions and reciting memorized slogans. But, you may say (if there IS a you out there who can read these sentences), they certainly act as if they had passionate convictions. Sure they do, but it's an act, and even the act of acting is merely copied.
     Here and there there's an inventor, one human in a thousand (you, my reader, I hope), whose brain always functions on its own and who can articulate his own ideas or analyze and corroborate the ideas of others - and, maybe, now and then there's a minute at a time when maybe even one out of three humans can manage a spontaneous series of coherent thoughts about something besides simple business, cars, sports, sex, cosmetics and celebrities - but, for the most part, humanity's too numerous heads are, like the Scarecrow's, stuffed with shredded newspapers and TV scripts. No wonder they're easily brain washed. If it wasn't for brain washing, they'd have no political, social, economic, ecological, or philosophical thoughts at all.
     The insidious media teach humanity that brainwashing is something weird done by the enemy to their foreign subjects, but brainwashing isn't foreign or exceptional; it's the rule everywhere. Human thought, including all appearances of serious conviction, is NORMALLY the product of brainwashing. What looks and sounds or reads like conviction is all around, as blatant as commercial packaging. But it only looks and sounds or reads like conviction. In fact, it's not. The woman on the screen who tells you the best thing to buy for your family is acting. The party hack who tells you YOUR candidate will END the scams and CHANGE the system is acting. The Secretary of State who tells you Cuba must "get its act together" is acting.
     Logically, conviction should result from hard brain work - energetic fact gathering, analysis and synthesis that prove a particular conclusion is certainly or very close to certainly true. So, finding myself surrounded by apparently passionate conviction, I ought to be able to assume that - wow! - there's a whole lot of thinking going on.
     But there's not. In fact, in the world of human thought trading (the well-named market-place of ideas), even passionate conviction is sold and bought in the ready-to-wear department. And like any other commercially packaged product, it is sold by repetitive sloganeering, not by compelling argument.
     The NORM is brainwashing. Brainwashing is the NORM. I said that twice so you'd get it, the same way normal humans get almost all their convictions. Apparently honest and earnest convictions NORMALLY get from the shelf into human heads by being routinely, relentlessly and conspicuously repeated - by the media, of course.
     So when I tell you that every time a normal human "decides" to vote for X because Y isn't "experienced" or "tough," he's parroting the media, I'm not talking about an aberration. I'm talking about something normal, and, since it's normal, examples abound.
     If you think it's outrageous that I should claim to be right about this and everybody else wrong, by the way, you're wrong. Why is it outrageous? The everybody else referred to believes in gods, patriotism, democracy, freedom, family values, evil, the magical effect of buried gold on the value of money, the impossibility of stopping what's idiotically called progress, etc. etc. It's not a stunt; it's EASY to be right and everybody else wrong if your brain works. After all, I DID my real brain work. I DID think out my conclusions. And almost any logically right conclusion arising from actual thought almost always contradicts majority opinion, because majority opinions NORMALLY result not from careful thought but from brainwashing. And examples are so numerous and obvious, I don't NEED to name them.
     If I were pointing out something UNUSUAL - if I were claiming a THINKING people known for THINKING things over had somehow been fooled about ONE THING, for instance how and why they're going to vote on this or that, it might be outrageous, but I'm not.
     I'm pointing out that a people whose every apparently earnest conviction is actually a religious belief (and religion itself is the first elephant-sized example) are OF COURSE parroting their high priests, mass media and each other when they blabber phrases like "sustainable development," "property rights," "our brave men and women in uniform," "the American way," "choice of physicians," "our precious freedom," "hardworking Americans," "political experience," etc.etc.; and I'm pointing out (not claiming - pointing out) that they always conscientiously vote as they're told they'll vote and piously buy "green" products and knowingly sneer at North Korea because they're well brainwashed by the media, which NORMALLY write, produce, direct, and stage almost the entire dumb show called human thought.
-Glen Roberts

Did big shots stop the oil, or did the oil just stop?