April 3
Pundita: You know, I'm still reeling from the shock of the terror bombing in Tal Afar. The town had been a showcase for peaceful coexistence between the Sunnis and Shiites until the attack. Then today I saw a photo of a sobbing Burmese child fleeing violence and a photo of two sobbing Iraqi schoolgirls bloodied by a terror attack. Then I went to Bill Roggio's site and read about the further inroads the Taliban are making in Pakistan.[1] I don't know why it was the final straw but it was. I can't do this blog anymore because I can't take in any more bad news.
Michael Wright: Do what you have to do. I think you've taken in millions of news stories since 9/11 about every troubled region in the world. So before taking an extreme step, why not just lay off the news for a week, then see how you feel?
Pundita: But then I'll miss so much.
Michael Wright: Oh I see! You don't want the additional work of catching up!
Pundita: I tuned out of the news for a few years before 9/11 --
Michael Wright: Do you think the terrorists will attack the US again if you stop doing news penance?
Pundita: Don't make fun of me. I'm suffering from bad news fatigue.
Michael Wright: But there are Americans wounded and dying in Iraq, so you have to take on conscious suffering as a gesture of solidarity. I understand.
Pundita: No you don't. I don't have John Batchelor's show to keep me grounded. With Batchelor's format, along with all the bad news you took in news on space exploration, the arts, technological breakthroughs and ancient history and so on. Left completely to my own devices, I just go for the bad news. To give myself some relief I started watching cooking shows and the fluffiest reality shows I can find. I sit there and watch reruns of Top Design and The Real Housewives of Orange County. I'm turning into the world's best-informed fluff head.
Michael Wright: [laughing] We'll have to yank your cable subscription and get you a hobby.
Pundita: Or bring John Batchelor back. It's not only the format I miss; I didn't notice the loss at first because I was so busy at the time, but I realized a few months ago how much I miss not only John's commentaries but also his regular guests -- even the ones I don't like. Under John's leadership they created an atmosphere that balanced out the bad news. The world is full of stupid bad people and wrong actions, but listening to John's show over a period of time reminded you that the world is also full of good people of intelligence and right action.
Michael Wright: Batchelor had his negative moods on that show.
Pundita: He could be very dark. I called it the Welsh side of his family breaking out. But hearing his gloom always produced the opposite effect on me. I'd say, "It's not that bad," and remember many triumphs humanity is having in this era.
Michael Wright: There is the globalization of news -- 24/7 from countless sources highlighting the countless ways people screw up and do harm. Since 9/11 we finally entered the post-Cold War period in news.
Pundita: We're not out of that woods yet. I'll tell you what's really eating at me. Last week I was near Farragut North [subway stop in Washington, DC] and a LaRouchie handed me a free copy of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review.
The issue highlighted LaRouche's war against Al Gore and the carbon emissions trading scheme. There was also the typical LaRouche rant about the Anglo-Dutch financiers taking over the world. I almost threw the rag in the trash. Then I came to three reports: The French presidential campaign, Bush's trip to Colombia, and the crisis in Syria caused by Iraqi refugees[2] --
Michael Wright: I didn't know there was a crisis.
Pundita: Yeah, and I'll bet you didn't know that President Uribe offered the United States 60,000 square kilometers of Colombian soil to cultivate sugar cane for ethanol while Bush was visiting. But the biggest shocker was EIR's report on Francois Bayrou.
Michael Wright: The moderate in the French race.
Pundita: Bayrou is not a moderate, for all his man-of-the-people routine. According to EIR they were the first news source to point out that Bayrou's economic prescription for France is lifted from financier Michel Pebereau's 2005 debt report for the economics and finance minister. Pebereau's austerity plan makes Margaret Thatcher's revolution look communist.
[According to EIR]the debt report says that one of the main reasons for the huge French debt is that there are too many elected officials and too many elections, creating pressure on officials to spend money.
Michael Wright: Bring back fascism, solve France's debt problem!
Pundita: Exactly.
Michael Wright: The problem is LaRouche is batty.
Pundita: He's not batty, he's dotty, and there is a difference.
Michael Wright: This I have to hear.
Pundita: A genius connects more dots than the rest of us, but then there's some who see so many dots to connect that they're dotty. You can't talk with these people on any subject without them bringing up so many connections that you get dizzy listening. What is the connection between Maurice Strong, Aristotle, Dr. Spock, and British financiers? Lyndon LaRouche sees the connection, and he can't talk about any world situation without hauling in all his connected dots and hurling them at you. He's dotty. In the end, it's all connected, but there has to be a limit on the number of dots you connect or else --
Michael Wright: Or else you go batty.
Pundita: Mike, LaRouche has one of the best nongovernment news-gathering organizations in the world.
Michael Wright: So you want to pay 500 bucks to glean a couple news stories a week that you can't find in the mainstream media or blogosphere?
Pundita: 360 dollars for a yearly subscription; $446 for one year of the rag plus acess to breaking news at the online site.
Michael Wright: Isn't that going against your vow after 9/11 not to use news sources that aren't available for free to the American public?
Pundita: Yes, but you know I've cheated sometimes.[3] But here's what has me so upset: it's not just bad news fatigue; it's all the bad and incomplete data piled on top of all the bad news I'm taking in.
You get a completely different view of the French presidential elections, the situation in Syria, and Bush's trip to Latin America when you read the reports in EIR. It's like stepping into an alternate universe of news.
When I think of the fluff I've seen churned out about the French election by The Economist and every other major rag generally available in the US -- how in the hell can I analyze fluff? So I might as well watch how Jo's romance is going with Slade, or whatever his name, on Housewives of Orange County!
We have a news profession in this country that is crap. So tell me what has changed about news reporting since the Cold War? Do you know that the trend is that newspapers are scaling back or shutting down their foreign news bureaus? No great loss, since it seems most foreign staff writers get their news from the BBC. But news gathering has not significantly improved since the end of the Cold War.
Michael Wright: The Internet has improved; the fact that you can see so much of what's wrong with US news reporting means that you have a more complete picture of what's going on.
Pundita: Not complete enough, and things happen so fast, Mike, because of instant communications platforms.
Michael Wright: The speed of information exchange influences events; the players in world events are increasingly reflexive.
Pundita: So why doesn't that apply to the US Department of State? They seem behind the curve in so many areas that they might as well be on the moon.
Michael Wright: State is getting much better at keeping up with the daily news.
Pundita: My dream of a well-informed populace influencing State's policies is slipping from me.
Michael Wright: I think you're more interested in influencing policy at the World Bank, if you don't mind the observation.
Look, these numbers are arbitrary but maybe LaRouche connects 500 dots; a genius stays maybe in the 200 dots range. Highly informed specialists hover around connecting 50 dots on a particular issue, and policymakers stick closer to connecting 10 situations. That's just about where the mainstream media is with connecting dots. The policymakers tend to drive the level and type of news gathering you find in major newspapers that influence other reporting media, such as TV.
Pundita: So you're saying that the people in place to deal with a crisis, and the people who generate crisis, are at roughly the same level of understanding of the implications about a situation as the mainstream media?
Michael Wright: Something like that. You saw an important connection between 9/11 and development issues in the Third World, and you applied that understanding to the Bush Democracy Doctrine. You said, "Hey, how you go about bringing in democracy in a developing country depends greatly on development policy."
You had a lot to say, and it came pouring out of you during the first year of your blog, but you told me that often you felt like you were yelling in a soundproof room. Then several people started to get your point, and then it became more accepted. You were able to connect more dots about a certain situation than people who didn't have their attention highly focused on both development trends and the war on terror --
Pundita: A lot of people in development circles tried to ignore the war --
Michael Wright: My point is that you're feeling frustrated because you don't have depth of knowledge about say, the political situation in France, and yet you believe it to be very important. So you want to beat up American journalists for not doing a better job of bringing you good data to analyze.
Pundita: You're saying I can't expect the same success at analysis about every situation and that I should stop trying?
Michael Wright: Not that you shouldn't try, but you should put a limit on how much you put into trying, and you shouldn't get frustrated when you don't feel you hit the mark.
Most people who follow the news closely, which includes officials, are pretty much in the same boat when it comes to how much data they take in and process, which means world events flow according to the number of dots they process, not the number that Lyndon LaRouche processes.
Pundita: LaRouche put the dots together in 2000 about Britain's capitulation to the terrorists --
Michael Wright: And he couldn't do a damn thing to stop 9/11 or the London and Madrid bombings -- any more than he could stop the Iraq invasion. No matter how far we see, most of the time we have to wait for macro events to reveal the microcosm of many connected dots.
2) Pakistan's Civil War, March 31
Talibanistan expands in the NWFP, April 3
2) From the March 30 EIR issue: Iraq's other tragedy: 2 million refugees. These EIR two reports from EIR are not availabe online: The French Election: How the Financiers Rigged the Game and Of Bushes and Ethanol Madness in Colombia
3) Since starting the blog I've stuck with discussing news reports that can be verified through free sources found on the Internet; the few exceptions are reports from John Batchelor's roster of intelligence specialists.
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