Suicide by Stupidity

SUBHEAD: The United States and its news media look like they want this country to commit suicide.

By James Kunstler on 7 July 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/suicide-by-stupidity/)


Image above: In 2012 World Wrestling Federation star Hulk Hogan considered running for President. From (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1399118-election-2012-hulk-hogan-for-president-it-almost-happened).

But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.

—The New York Times

America wakes up to astonishing bullshit from its so-called Newspaper of Record in this lead front-page propaganda dump du jour. Granted, American education has succeeded in destroying the critical faculties of at least three generations so that the public drowns in a soup of unreality every day. In the news business now, as in the national life generally, anything goes and nothing matters.

One has to wonder, though, about the editors who serve up this baloney. Are they mere servelings of the Rand Corporation, Raytheon, and other parties with an interest in the war business, or can they possibly believe their own extrusions of fabricated agit-prop?

For instance, the imputed Russian “annexation of Crimea,” as if the place was some kind of nostalgic, sore-beset Ruritania of independent princes, colorful peasants, and earnest postal clerks cruelly enslaved by bloodthirsty Cossacks. No, Crimea had been officially a province of Russia since exactly 1783 — which was, by the way, the same year that the American Revolution officially ended via the Treaty of Paris.

After the Russian Revolution (1917) the Crimean peninsula became an autonomous province of the Soviet Union, meaning it remained a part of what was then Russia. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev turned the administrative duties over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was then also a province of the greater USSR, i.e. Russia.

Through the entire modern era, Crimea has been the site of the USSR’s, and now Russia’s, only warm-water naval bases. Ask the average American college student why that is, and you will surely receive a blank stare.

Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea. Hence Crimea’s strategic value. For a few short years in the 21^st century, following the breakup of the USSR, the now-independent Ukraine had possession of Crimea and essentially rented the existing naval bases to Russia.

That provided a much needed revenue stream for the struggling country, which was also utterly dependent on imported Russian natural gas supplies, which Ukraine had to pay for.

When the elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was overthrown in 2014, with the help of the US State Department and CIA, Russia was obliged to secure its naval bases in Crimea — where the overwhelming majority of citizens were culturally and linguistically Russian anyway.

A referendum ratified the transfer of Crimea back to Russia. Apart from these procedural details, it must be obvious that Russia would never have ceded its strategic naval bases on the Black Sea to Ukraine, especially when that beleaguered country was being manipulated by the USA and NATO into becoming an adversarial presence on Russia’s border.

At the same time, the US and NATO have been running war games near Russia’s border in the Baltic region and American soldiers have been deployed into Lithuania. What war are they preparing for exactly? What is supposedly at issue (besides America’s apparent lust for war)?

That last question applies equally to the incessantly repeated trope that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election. What is supposedly at issue? The New York Times has been making this empty allegation for a year now, without ever specifying exactly how Russia might have “interfered.”

In the process, the newspaper has squandered its credibility on what looks exactly like a witch hunt — a campaign against dark and mysterious supernatural forces. It is doing great harm to an already badly-educated, misinformed, economically distressed, drug-addled American public. It also looks like plain old war-mongering.

Coverage of the Trump-Putin meeting during the G-20 conference this week is being played like a World Wrestling Federation championship bout. Which president is weak or strong? Which one will be a loser of a winner?

This is no way to cover geopolitical relations. The United States and its news media look like they want this country to commit suicide by stupidity.

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No Substiute for Newspapers

SUBHEAD: We burn our bridges, and raise generations who forgot that those bridges ever existed.

By Brian Kaller on 5 May 2016 for Restoring Mayberry -
(http://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/2016/05/no-substitute-for-newspapers.html)


Image above: Archive room of the National Newspaper Building storing 60 million newspapers spanning three centuries. From (http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2015/01/national-newspaper-building-60-million-newspapers-spanning-three-centuries/#5).

[IB Publisher's note: For fifteen years we subscribed to the Garden Island News. After they were bought by an off-island Oahu business and the presses were sold and removed to Canada we cut our subscription. It was hardly a newspaper by then anyway. All the classified ads had drifted to CraigsList and the news was anything but - puff pieces, corporate promos, public relations announcements, etc. Real news and opinion had retreated to the internet - if you could find a reliable source. Just to let you know, when the internet server farms go down because Google FaceBook can't make any money we are prepared. We've invested in a mimeograph machine and a couple of manual typewriters and several reams of paper for future paper editions of Island Breath.]

One of the few web sites I read religiously is the Archdruid Report, by John Michael Greer, celebrating its 10th anniversary this week. Some months ago he wrote a piece about newspapers, and I wrote back this comment:

This piece hits home for me, as I boarded that sinking ship of newspaper journalism in the 1990s, even as newspapers were shrinking their articles and redesigning their pages to look more like web sites.

Before my time, newspapers carried a vast range of information. Many had labour sections written for the majority of people who work for a paycheque, and not just a business section for investors. Some ran synopses of the Sunday sermons of their area’s most prominent religious leaders – important not just for piety, but for politics, as the local preachers and bishops had, and still have, enormous influence. Many came out twice a day, so people could read the news more often than most of us check web sites now.

Our modern culture tells us that we have more information today than anyone in history, because of the internet – but that assumes that data that could theoretically appear on a screen has the same value as words read from paper. In truth, few web sites will cover the library board meeting or the public works department, and if they do they are likely to be a blog by a single unpaid individual. Yet these ordinary entities shape our children's minds and our present health, and as such are infinitely more important than any celebrity gossip -- possibly more important then presidential campaigns.

Even if a blogger were to cover the library board or water board, no editors would exist to review the material for quality or readability, and the writer would be under no social, financial or legal pressure to be accurate or professional, or to publish consistently, or to pass on their duties to another once they resign. Transcripts of church sermons are even harder to find online, so some of the most important shapers of public opinion go unknown by anyone outside their circles.

I’ve worked on a number of issues with community activists in the USA, some left-wing and some right-wing, but no one wanted to associate with a church unless they belonged to one, and then only with their own. When I suggested to one auditorium of activists (left-wing, in this case) that they go to various churches and learn about them, I was actually shouted down; animal sacrifice, I think, would have earned less outrage.

Of course, as people readily point out to me, you can surf the internet and do your own research, but you must work diligently to winnow the accurate material from the dubious claims – anyone can create a web site that says anything. Moreover, most people are not going to do all that trouble themselves – we have lives, after all – and you shouldn’t have to. We used to have people who did that for us, and they were called reporters.

When I talk about newspapers this way, people often respond that we have made progress, for we no longer destroy forests. Of course some people used to harvest trees for newspaper and not replant them, but it doesn’t have to be that way – you could plant willow and get ten tonnes of wood to the hectare per year in this climate, and never fell another ancient forest of giant trees.

Contrast that with the mountains of coal we have to burn to feed server farms, the rare-earth-metal mining, the semiconductor factories and the global shipping that we need to employ just to create a mammoth server farm and global telecommunications network, all to do what we did with a piece of paper.

Once a newspaper was read, moreover, it had only begun its useful life – then it would be used to wrap gifts or groceries, then to line insulation or chicken coops, then as tinder for the fire, and the resulting ashes could then make soap or fertiliser. Once an electronic device has a single minor problem, however, it tends to go into a dump, with all its heavy metals and plastics, perhaps to contaminate the soil for thousands of years to come.

Computers are useful for some things, of course – I’m writing this on one, and you’re all reading this on another one. What I don't like is that we have come to depend on them entirely for everything else in our lives -- reading, organising, music, storytelling, faith, and general human interaction.

Moreover, when everyone is doing this, we no longer feel the need to maintain paper records or photos, and even if we wanted to look at card catalogs or the telephone book, no such things exist anymore. We burn our bridges, and raise generations who forgot that bridges ever existed to anywhere else.
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