ADMITTEDLY I'M FLOUNDERING. I'm trying to find a format and a publication schedule that makes Dispatches
useful to the greatest number of people, primarily as a one-stop source
for the preceding week's most significant alternative-media stories.
And I will continue toward that objective -- selecting Dispatches' content primarily for readers who are doing their best to stay genuinely informed in these frightful times but are too busy struggling for survival to hunt down the separate stories themselves.
The longest-ever Dispatches, for 31 May 2018,
contained 9,120 words, though a bit more than two thirds of that --
6,276 words -- was the 26-link Memorial Day eulogy to the 10 men and
three women slain by our Capitalist overlords as U.S. Capitalism began
the boiled-frog-slow exposure of its terminal malevolence.
All the rest of that unusually long edition's content was Dispatches' usual anthology of news and commentary, 35 such links on 31 May. As always these were links to what I reckoned the week's most important news stories -- their importance often measured not just by their historical context but also by the extent to which they were downplayed or suppressed completely by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. (Which -- let us not forget -- is the de facto Fourth Reich's privately owned, for-maximum-profit facsimile of Josef Goebbels' Third Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)
Perhaps too I should explain I edit Dispatches
from one perspective -- two if you count my 55-plus years of
experience as an editor and writer and nearly 66 years experience as a
photographer. The other perspective is my impassioned belief we the
people cannot triumph until we fully (intellectually and emotionally)
acknowledge our enemies' bottomless malevolence -- and by so
acknowledging, finally evolve from within ourselves the vision and
methodology essential to bring about their defeat and our survival as a
species and a planet.
This second perspective has two subsets: firstly, that our species' abject surrender to the near certainty of environmental and thermonuclear apocalypses is the byproduct of a deliberately conditioned, ultimately suicidal (and therefore genuinely eerie) reflex of denial that has uniquely deprived us of the ability to acknowledge (and thereby overcome) the horrors that threaten us and our Mother Earth with extinction in what is thus the darkest epoch ever in our species' 200,000-year history; secondly, that our recent outbursts of rebelliousness -- Occupy, $15 Now, Black Lives Matter, increasing Working Class militance as manifest in the growing number of strikes, Me Too etc. -- are in reality the tremors of an irritably awakening giant; and that they therefore prove we are at least capable of awakening, which tells me as a journalist I should focus editorially on incidents and analyses that acknowledge either implicitly or explicitly the depths of the darkness that assails us; that these final days weeks months and perhaps years of my life should express, with abandon and without abandonment, my heartfelt conviction such reportage can only help us break more conclusively away from our malevolently conditioned paralytic numbness.
Apropos which, I welcome reader input whether negative or positive. Indeed I regard Dispatches almost as if it were your property, not mine, and I were here only to refine it into an ever-more-appropriate response to your own individual and collective consciousness.
My apology for any inconvenience these changes might impose.
And as always, I thank you for your readership.
Loren Bliss
14 June 2018
(To read more, go here.)
And I will continue toward that objective -- selecting Dispatches' content primarily for readers who are doing their best to stay genuinely informed in these frightful times but are too busy struggling for survival to hunt down the separate stories themselves.
Again asking myself the pivotal question -- who are you my readers -- I suspect some editions of Dispatches may have been intimidating merely because of their numbers of news items.
All the rest of that unusually long edition's content was Dispatches' usual anthology of news and commentary, 35 such links on 31 May. As always these were links to what I reckoned the week's most important news stories -- their importance often measured not just by their historical context but also by the extent to which they were downplayed or suppressed completely by the Mainstream Media propaganda machine. (Which -- let us not forget -- is the de facto Fourth Reich's privately owned, for-maximum-profit facsimile of Josef Goebbels' Third Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.)
In
the future I will try to stay within a 35-URL limit for links to
breaking news and relevant analysis or documentation, and effective
immediately I will go back to a once-per-week publication schedule, with
postings late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. I may also
experiment with publishing my lengthier commentaries in a Dispatches supplement produced at random intervals and therefore obviously separate from the news summaries that are Dispatches' defining characteristic.
This second perspective has two subsets: firstly, that our species' abject surrender to the near certainty of environmental and thermonuclear apocalypses is the byproduct of a deliberately conditioned, ultimately suicidal (and therefore genuinely eerie) reflex of denial that has uniquely deprived us of the ability to acknowledge (and thereby overcome) the horrors that threaten us and our Mother Earth with extinction in what is thus the darkest epoch ever in our species' 200,000-year history; secondly, that our recent outbursts of rebelliousness -- Occupy, $15 Now, Black Lives Matter, increasing Working Class militance as manifest in the growing number of strikes, Me Too etc. -- are in reality the tremors of an irritably awakening giant; and that they therefore prove we are at least capable of awakening, which tells me as a journalist I should focus editorially on incidents and analyses that acknowledge either implicitly or explicitly the depths of the darkness that assails us; that these final days weeks months and perhaps years of my life should express, with abandon and without abandonment, my heartfelt conviction such reportage can only help us break more conclusively away from our malevolently conditioned paralytic numbness.
Apropos which, I welcome reader input whether negative or positive. Indeed I regard Dispatches almost as if it were your property, not mine, and I were here only to refine it into an ever-more-appropriate response to your own individual and collective consciousness.
My apology for any inconvenience these changes might impose.
And as always, I thank you for your readership.
Loren Bliss
14 June 2018
(To read more, go here.)
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