Peeking into the rock

I get the BBC world newsfeed in my livejournal flist.

This is problematic not least for the reason that whatever headline they think is most interesting will run over and over and over as they update it every fifteen minutes.

And so, if they decide something stupid and prejudicial and discredited is the most interesting thing ever they will run that over and over and over.

What is it since yesterdary (or the day before -- another thing this practice does is confuse the passage of time, as it simultaneously seems to rush forward while the same thing seems to happen over and over and to stand stock still as the news remains the same for soimetimes days at a time) --

the allegation that the kid murdered by police was a robbery suspect. It's in every headline from Ferguson "Police confront demonstrators as teen is identified as robbery suspect" "Dead teen identified as robbery suspect."

This is how long after the police chief has already disclaimed this?

Oh wait, it's gone now. I just went back to get the exact wording of the headlines and there are none referring to it anymore, no matter how far back I go,

Completely, utterly gone, even from the past stream.

Took them a while to see that they were doing the wrong thing, but I guess now they're utterly embarrassed by it.

I've been trying to leave the radio on as a way to try to anchor myself to the real world.  I tuned it to Radio Stevenson School, which is a private high school station that runs the BBC feed most of the time.

On a forty-five-minute repeat: intense propaganda to pimp the war on Libya.

edit: on the other hand I finally updated firefox and it does go smoother.

I get news feeds from Reuters and BBC.  They like to repost certain stories over and over without much change in the content, I don't know why: maybe to keep them from falling off the front page.

This weekend they're all for giving free publicity to the latest venomous lies spewing from that heroine of free enterprise Angela Merkel.  Angela Merkel says "we've tried and tried and tried so hard and yet we are completely unable to recognize our fellow humans as humn, because they persist in being different from us.  The German multicultural society has failed."

This is so much bullshit on so many levels.  One: her ilk has not tried at all.  Her ilk is no more interested in multuiculturalism than they are interested in peace and justice.  For some years, back when capitalists still thought markets mattered -- before their weird embrace of a belief in some sort of economic singularity -- they did embrace a kind of shallow inclusivity, because look! cheap labor, and also more people to sell things to!

But some time in the last twenty-thirty years the idiots have decided they don't need workers or consumers anymore, and they can let them all go starve on the streets and they can systematically destroy infrastructure, manufacturing, even the service industries that twenty years ago they said were the next great thing -- hell, they can destrioy the physical world -- so now the only use they have for diversity is as a bogheyman to manipulate people with.  They get lots of benefits out of burgeoning racism.  The chief one is that they convince the most desperate to turn their attention from how we got into this mess and who got us here, to finding people in their neighborhood to hate on and struggle against.  

"Look over there!  Your pharmacist is brown and talks funny!  He is undermining your sacred national values!  Never mind that he was born here, and sponsors the local Little League team.  Down the street!  Thiose guys loitering on the corner by the lumber yard aren't just laborers looking for a day's work to support their families, they're aliens intent on swamping the welfare system (never mind that they don't receive anything like proportional benefits for the taxes they pay, and they do pay them).  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."

Meanwhile, they'll give you brains of sawdust so you will find logic in anything Christine O'Donnel or Sharon Angle or Sarah Palin say: a heart a heart of unrecyclable styrofoam so it will repel the tears of the evicted, the fired, the murdered, and the abandoned: and courage made of the drugs we're supposedly having a war on, but we know how they got on to the street and where the Zetas really got their start.

Why does the BBC think there is merit in broadcasting this headline every couple of hours? From the tone of the article, they're doing what all the mainstream media have been doing lately (and by lately I mean the last decade).  They're not exposing this monster for what she is.  That would be journalism.  Instead, they're depicting her as the voice of a force of nature, a regretable but unstoppable trend which they will by turns admire and abhor as it gathers momentum and lights the world on fire again.

When Roma and Senegalese workers are murdered all over Europe by thugs with swastikas, neither Sarkozy or Merkel will take the blame.  Nor will the BBC.  You know who they'll blame? The Roma and the Senegalese. 

One last note: notice, please that Angela Merkel is saying this because she has to compete with Nicholas Sarkozy, but if the German government rounded up Roma and deported them the historical resonance would be too obvious for even the BBC to miss, and nobody would believe a word of the trumped-up excuses about housing being below code and unpermitted.