© 2007 by Spider Robinson; all rights reserved.
Honest, I don’t know where folks find the time to read this stuff; I can’t even find time to type it. But every so often I come into some information so important I HAVE to drop everything else except respiration and digestion while I tell you about it.
So here is my hot tip of the month, and possibly the year: get ye hence to The Real News.
What will you find there? Something so uncommon these days that some of you younger readers may have trouble grasping the concept. Try and follow this, now—use your imagination:
—news that contains actual true facts—
Journalism without censorship, if you can picture that. Journalism (don’t laugh) with honour...
You know: the kind of stuff Katie Graham’s Washington Post used to do, back in the days of reporters like Woodward and Bernstein, and patriot editors like Ben Bradlee. Uncovering the truth buried in all the bullshit, and reporting it to the American public.
The Real News was founded by people sick of being spoonfed obvious bullshit. It has NO advertising, NO government funding, NO corporate dollars, no strings. It also has a whole lot of volunteers so galvanized by outrage and indignation that they work a hell of a lot longer and harder than the slick smug sold-out suits who bring you CNN and Fox News....and produce a much more credible product.
One of its videos, “The Real Story,” just racked up its 100,000th hit on YouTube. A little further down the queue there, you’ll find another video about the recent study by The Lancet estimating that roughly A MILLION Iraqis have been killed since we started “liberating” them, which the American media all but ignored; here its authors are allowed to explain in detail how they arrived at that figure, and just how “discredited” their statistical methods are.
Lazarus Long said:
What are the facts? Again and again and again - what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of his story" — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
The Real News is one of a dwindling number of sources of facts. Tell everyone you know.
Another source I recommend is the British magazine The Economist. Because it is a solidly pro-capitalist journal, it has no use for hysterical knee-jerk disappointed-Marxist Amerika-bashing.....but at the same time it has no slightest interest in making America look good, either. And simply as a source of reliable current international news it makes Time, Newsweek and any other American magazine I can think of look not just pathetic but shameful. If you want to know, in historical context, what’s going on around the planet this week, in detail, you want The Economist.
Speaking of facts.....did you know that Hillary Clinton’s chief advisor is CEO of the largest public relations firm on the planet, Burston-Marseller? Have you ever seen a movie called WAG THE DOG? Do we really want a president whose advisors’ special area of expertise is conning large numbers of people?
Oh—that’s right, I forgot: we do. We recently elected one to a second term....and still haven’t impeached him. Forget I mentioned it. Carry on.
