Greetings & Salutations

Welcome to Pleading the First.

Before posting anything else, I wanted to set the tone for this blog to echo that of the radio show on WICB for which I once worked. Fear not: There will be no Brittney Spears or Jimmy Fallon here! Celebrity personal lives are irrelevant 99.42% of the time. I'm also trying to be on my best "we have no 5-second delay" behaviour, so ideally we're all mature enough to leave the four-letter words at the door and take the 5 seconds you need to find a far more witty substitute.

International news is a key ingredient of this production, as international media messaging is a reflection of internal political pressures within nations which are in turn reflections of pressures on those nations from the outside, occasionally in the form of US military or espionage. You don't need to know much about history to start picking up on these cues.

Another key ingredient is the talking points of the major parties. Once you know the talking points, you can ignore them and pick out the rest of the message from what's left. The tone of delivery, the urgency of "getting it out", the inability to rationally answer questions from an interviewer. There are many more signs to pick up on, some of which are verbal. As you get used to talking points, you start to be able to see them coming before you read them. Everybody with a press office uses them, even the White House.

Who am I? Gosh, I wish I could tell you in 50 words or less. I have done a lot of things, and I do a lot less than I used to. I've been a writer, a musician, a vegetable-picker, a bean-bagger, a cook, a delivery boy, a dish-washer, an intern, an office boy, a gardener, a construction worker, an accountant, a block-cutter, a lover, a dreamer, a business owner, a defendant, an interrogator, a socialist, a libertarian, a pantheist, an atheist, a pagan, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a scientist, an engineer, a representative, a protestor, an oppressor, a voice, an ear. I wish I could tell you that I was good at any of them, but I've had mixed success in places.

I have gotten compliments on my writing before, and I've been thinking about starting a blog for a long time. A lot of people continue to share their life stories with me. I know there are things all of us can do to work for a peaceful future in which every person's needs are met. Pretty much every day for the last month has been at least one news story I've read that deserved deconstruction. So the fire under my fanny is now lit, again.

The world today is at war. There are famines, strikes, ethnic cleansing, police actions, fracturous civil wars, tense calms before many brooding storms, espionage, intimidation, murders and house arrest of journalists and politicians, corruption, weapons of mass destruction all around us. We make them with our unconscious money and unconscious thoughts. Today's commercial media are designed to keep the wealth flowing toward the war while keeping our minds in ignorance of the war.

Even the cable news channels and especially talk radio shows are designed for ignorance rather than information. That is why they mock up pharmaceutical advertising to sound like news stories in the newscast. This is why over 50% of commercial newscasts in any nation are fluff. If entire TV networks are dedicated to celebrity news, we get duped into giving up our money to the war machine while we tune out the war.

Consider this blog f1rst and foremost to be about tuning in....