BREAKING: Things you never hear about!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 20, 2018

Dumbest culture ever:
Basically, it's against the law for upper-end journalists to report basic information.

Especially on "cable news," they'd rather spend each waking minute engaged in pointless discussion about whatever Donald J. Trump said ten seconds ago. Or speculating, for hours on end, about aspects of the Mueller probe they can't possibly know about.

Basically, our upper-end journalism, especially on cable, is conducted as if we were all subhuman. Yesterday, we listed a few of the basic statistics you never hear discussed, given this subhuman culture.

We forgot to include the basic facts about the decline in crime. Today, Kevin Drum notes one result of this subhuman corporate behavior.

"Crime Is Down But Most People Don’t Know It," Drum's headline says. Actually, we'll make a correction:
Crime is actually way, way down, but most people don't know it.
Drum offers some of the reasons for this public ignorance. Most of it takes us back to the behaviors of the national and local press.

People haven't been told that test scores are up. People haven't been told that crime rates are down. People don't know that they're getting massively looted through the astonishing costs of American health care.

(Do people know about incarceration rates? When Patrisse Khan-Cullors published her Black Lives Matter memoir early this year, did you see her on the cable shows of our favorite corporate stars? Of course you didn't! The people who have been locked up are the people our mugging and clowning cable stars persistently disregard.)

People don't know that crime rates are down! But if you watched Rachel last Wednesday night, you possess eighteen minutes of useless knowledge about Herb Kalmbach, Nixon's personal lawyer. This pleasing but pointless tribal porridge was served to you under liberal cable's Retro Schadenfreude Rules!

We've asked you many, many times if our journalists are actually human. Sometimes, people think we're joking or engaged in hyperbole.

For the record, we've never been sure that we are. We wouldn't bet that they're nonhuman, but we wouldn't be shocked by that news.

They should talk about Yemen, Seymour Hersh said. Maybe they could even talk about basic matters at home!

There Went the Sun: "Here Comes the Sun," George Harrison said.

Regarding American social pathologies, the sun has pretty much come and gone. Remarkably, no one was told!

26 comments:

  1. Well, Bob, they have their 'narratives' to pursue. Politically correct and establishment-approved. That's the genre.

    You go to the opera, you expect to listen to opera, to jazz concert to listen to jazz. If you tune into an AM talk radio station, you'll get that thing.

    Similarly, the "cable news". It is what it is. What's so surprising about that?

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    2. Mao just needs to get his heart in the right place and then his insults and castigations of the blog owner and fellow commenters would be as pure and righteous as your own.

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    3. Belvoir's correct. You're not.

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  2. Ive seen the lower crime rate widely reported and credited to factors ranging from an older population to higher incarceration rates, depending upon the politics of the source.

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    1. You mean Drum and Somerby are wrong? Heaven forfend.

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  3. Rachel was also wrong about Kalmbach.

    She used him as an example of a repentful soul from the past, but (unlike Haldeman, Erlichmann, Dean, Howard Hunt, etc) he immediately rallied to Nixon's side after he got out of jail. He even helped run the Nixon Foundation for years, too.

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  4. So conjure up images of Syria, Mediterranean shores teeming with millions of the dispossed, European capitals litters with garbage left by tens of thousands of homeless squatters. Black and Brown young men peddling junk to tourists.
    Then hear Donald Trump say it’s terrible. Migrants swarming like animals. It won’t happen in America. Not on my watch. Who ya gonna call? Who ya gonna vote for?

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    1. We have homeless people like that in Los Angeles but they are not immigrants. Our immigrants are working and living with relatives. Our homeless are addicts, mentally ill, veterans, and people afflicted by disability and economic catastrophe. They are white and black, not brown. They panhandle everywhere.

      Colorado figured out that the cure to homelessness is to give people homes.

      I've been to Europe and it didn't look like your description. People have always peddled junk to tourists, every where. I saw more falafel shops and internet phone businesses and McDonalds was full of young families. That reminded me of home.

      Trump voters are fearful people who have never been anywhere. They don't know what is happening in America. People should be required to travel before they can vote. I support things like student exchange programs, gap years and Hostelling International. It why today's young people are less bigoted than their elders.

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  5. And if you follow Bob Somerby you'll hear the same topics and people whined about repetitively for decades.

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    1. Then why in heaven’s name do you continue to follow what Bob writes? I’ve read this blog for many years and never seen one sentence I’d call “whining.” But if it strikes you that way, why on earth would you keep reading? Why not seek help—or at least something that strikes you as more valuable—instead? There’s a rumor that the internet is a pretty big place.

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    2. Not Anonymous at 4:36 PMJune 20, 2018 at 11:19 PM

      I think I will take your suggestion and look around for another media blog. It's been an interesting 20-year run with the Howler.

      Thanks for the suggestion, Eric.

      Delete
    3. 4:36,
      Dean Baker and Driftglass do a much better job as media critics than Somerby. Plus, they don't repeat Right-wing memes about liberals.

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    4. I used to like Dean Baker, but recently he's been afflicted by TDS. Half-zombie already, or worse.

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    5. There was time when Republicans loved George W. Bush too, but you can't find one without BDS nowadays.
      Republicans will get TDS too. Just wait.

      Delete
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    ReplyDelete
  7. Crime is down ever since porn became free and ubiquitous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That’s actually a very interesting insight.

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    2. Now, legalise pot and find a way to make it free and locksmiths and police will become a thing of the past.

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  8. Why the hate for Maddow? Is it her humanity? Her income? Harvard education did not come with some 100% guarantee of great success in life.

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    1. I like and admire Rachel Maddow. Bob is a jealous crackpot, but his critiques of her -hyperbolic and straw-man as they are- are sometimes astute and refreshing to read. Yes, she really does clown around and burn off airtime taking forever to get to her point. Sometimes it's twelve or thirteen minutes into her show and I am still wondering what she's rambling on about. And as i said, I like her! But yeah, she pads her show out with lots of filler and nonsense. She really has been sort of diva-ish, complaining with a ha-ha about how breaking news has ruined the show she (her staff) had written and planned. No other newscaster does that; we the viewers don't care. Her fake laugh when handing in/handing off from and to Chris and Lawrence is unbearably forced frivolity. She takes lots of vacation days. But she's a very well rated cable news star, she gets to do that I suppose. She's very good, and though Bob here seems to hate women and is a crank who wouldn't dream of critiquing Fox News, sometimes he has a point.

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    2. I don't know if ad hominem hurts or helps, but it is certainly the order of the day here, and with more sadness than rancor, it is impossible to escape the fact Bob Somerby is an idiot.

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    3. Very true, Belvoir. Even a jealous misogynistic doddering failure of a blogger with a skewered perspective and unacceptable point of focus can occasionally be right.

      I suppose that acknowledgement is what differentiates you from being a fake and a phony from the trolling trolls who are here because they like the guy.

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    4. I suppose it is.

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  9. i actually agree with most of these points about her to some degree, she clowns around too much and makes too much of the show about her own reactions. OTOH, I felt that her reaction the other night about "tender age" was genuine and moving. So her personalization of the show does "work" both ways at times.

    Her rambling historical narratives can either charm you if you're interested or bore you if you're not, even Michelle Wolf that "unformed" woman made a joke about it during the WH corresondents dinner.

    But again Bob just has a giant ax to grind against her for years and years.

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    ReplyDelete