even as i mourn, i know roberts has done the right thing

[click image, thanks to Doug for the links and Agent BB2 for the image]

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I sure wish RT would stop hiring Valley Girls for their anchor desks. It would help if someone a little less flippant were interviewing him. He certainly commands the respect. The girl in this one is better.

But they can't dim the truth of what Paul Craig Roberts says... I hope you agree. Even as I will miss his trenchant input online, he is doing the right thing. He isn't continuing to grind out piece after piece after USELESS piece, doing naught but garnering fans, when EFFECTIVENESS must be our only aim, when ACTION is mandatory to positive manifestation. I know this shit comes with a built-in excuse—the-pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword shtick—but that, clearly, isn't so... or not in our current circumstances, anyway. Roberts even says it in his Good-Bye piece.

I wonder how many in the mobs of pen-brandishers who have adored him will HEED him.

Another reminder:

In fact, the world is an abode of truth
for one who is truthful with it
and an abode of well-being
for one who understands it.
It is an abode of riches
for one who learns from it
and an abode of counsel
for one who takes the warning from it.

...

It started out with well-being
and created misfortune,
awakening desires and fears,
causing alarm and alert.
So some people revile it
on a morning of remorse,
while others will praise it
on the day of resurrection,
for the world reminded them
and they bore it in mind,
and it spoke to them
and they verified what it said,
and it cautioned them
and they took the warning.

The world is a transitory abode,
not a permanent abode.
And the people in it
are of two sorts:
one who sells his soul
and ruins it,
and one who ransoms his soul
and frees it.

—Counsels of Ḥaḍrat 'Alī
[translated by Thomas Cleary]

Those who have chosen to keep grinding away at their opinions, their scholarship, their erudition, their righteous invective against the perfidies upon perfidies abounding, putting more energy into the complete assimilation of the nuances of their blog ratings than they ever would into the nuances of taking the warning, are selling their souls and ruining them.

This is exactly why I have to really screw up my generosity to link to Chris Floyd when everything he ever says or does would in other circumstances tend to make me wish he were my husband. This is why I can't go to places like Chris' blog very often, can't hang on Robert Parry's or Ray McGovern's or blankety-blank's every word. If it isn't as to-the-bone truthy as Roberts' stuff—if it's packed with cleverisms, the braggadocio of literary excellence, the fervent straw grasping, the ceaseless and sickening efforts to sound "balanced" and "reasonable" and "non-conspiratorial" while painting their air beings as humane and praiseworthy and adorable, the elevation of virtually meaningless "journalistic" bits to the status of stink bombs to lob at the other side of the culture wars, that sort of thing—what the fuck do we want with it?

At best it is a bunch of otherwise-decent humanity trying to whistle past a graveyard—except the graveyard is our planet—except you can't whistle past the apocalypse.

So bless Paul Craig Roberts for throwing that Seventh Samurai sword on his way out.
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