Is a major story being ignored on purpose?

As of its update at 1:10 AM Eastern Time, the New York Times appears to be ignoring a major story released by the Associated Press about nine hours before that.

Christopher Field, speaking officially, has told a conference in Chicago that the effects of global warming are increasing dramatically and in such a way that they must be addressed this year. “Feedback” effects, including the addition of carbon to the atmosphere by loss of permafrost, are stronger than expected.

The New York Times is apparently ignoring the story although it broke in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune is also ignoring this story.

However, it was this morning the lead story on the BBC World Service.

Since I get my “daily briefing” from the BBC, have a paid subscription to the online New York Times, and I daily read the International Herald Tribune, I have noticed an increasing lack of “fit” between frameworks and what’s considered a story between US media and world media. Although the BBC refused to carry an appeal for the people of Gaza, its coverage has been balanced, showing consistently a difference between the rocket attacks on Israel and the massive attacks on Gaza.

To the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, Chris Field is “just” a science nerd who is running his mouth, giving his opinion. Their journalists have no ability to make a simple distinction between an official statement of a scientific body, a scientist speaking officially at some risk, and ordinary language, and they justify this laziness by claiming a tolerance that they do not exhibit at all when it comes to the question of what’s news.

I am familiar with the used of the dismissive category of the “nerd” in a variety of different fields, where the people who do their homework, whether as climate scientists or mere computer programmers, are made to appear to the man in the street as naively retrograde by a debased Hollywood-media elite.

Again: the Platonism of higher education, its bias in favor of the uninstantiated Idea, has created a generation of people who actually believe that Ideas can be manipulated at a grand high “executive” level, which “doesn’t mistake the forest for the tree” while sweeping on to the grand fallacy and the death of the tree.

It operates as a “structuralism”: this is to say that the language game operates at any differential of perceived power. Relative to the editors of the Tribune, the climate scientists meeting in Chicago were perceived as a bunch of nerds doing their thang, so a low-wattage science nerd, herself scared witless for her job, was sent to the meeting.

It is of course a Hollywood fantasy that she’d come back to the newsroom, and say, “stop the presses”. The dream factory, in Adorno’s words, produces dreams that do not dream. The cinematic dream, of living in dark times and making a dramatic difference, is reified into a commodity thereby producing its very own antibodies: in the vortex, “a crowd of people turned away”, alienated from alienation but still, well, alienated.

Instead of the Field story, we read on the New York Times site that a rise in jobless is a threat to the United States.

What the hell is this framework?

A rise in misery is an absolute evil which we do something about because it’s the right thing to do: yet to the Baby Boomer nomenklatura, people more like Hilary and less like Barack (who want Barack to be one of them), we should only worry about what affects us.

As an expatriate, I am familiar with another class of expats. They are very strange people for, having money, they fly all over the world…without knowing any geography, and without learning any either. I was on a flight from Chicago to China a few years ago: we went due north from O’Hare and although this was clear on a display nobody knew or seemed to care why we would do so, since my immediate neighbors, high-level corporate types, don’t “do” maps.

There are many things about which I am ignorant. For one, I have never been comfortable or satisfactory in using a foreign language, even French, with any facility.

But I have never learned that it’s a Good Thing to tune out. As an art student, I agreed with Mies: God is in the details. But the New York Times and Tribune are putting their readers, I think, in a coma.

Well, I’m gonna Do Something about global warming. I already observe a Buy Nothing day every week.

Furthermore, given the danger to the environment, we need to ask ourselves if the depression is a bad thing or the mercy of God. If we could provide a safety net for the truly needy and have a socialistic depression in which the rich “suffered” the most, this might save the Earth!

Be sure you have enough to live on for six months without a job and try to keep at least 500.00 in accessible cash. Don’t stockpile, because stockpiles run out and provide targets for theives. Instead, plan on cooperating with your neighbors. Sure, learn how to use a gun, but only in societies where gun ownership is widespread and your gun is legal.