So here we are at a point in history where more Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered by the U.S. than by the best efforts of wicked old Saddam Hussein, and where the U.S. has managed to kill more of its own citizens (by putting them in uniform and sending them to Iraq) than the 9/11 attackers managed to eradicate. Is it just me, or is something wrong with this picture?

Marc Madow asked himself a similar question when, back in 2004, two Presidential candidates were not only barred from the debates, but arrested, handcuffed, and physically assaulted. Madow heard about this on talk radio while driving to a gathering, and when he told others about it they said "That can't happen in this country." If they were waiting for headlines in the major newspapers or announcements from the TV news to corroborate this information, they waited in vain. It was the biggest non-story of the year.

"I want to know about it when they arrest presidential candidates," was Madow's feeling, one that he presumed others might share. So he started Earthblog.net, as a way to give an extra emphasis and a bit more exposure to under-illuminated stories, and especially to stories which, though reported, have implications that might not be fully grasped before the next bit of news comes down the pipe. The first two original pieces to appear here were accounts from both those Presidential candidates, Michael Badnarik and David Cobb, of their astonishing encounter with the police.

The good news is, as of January 19, 2007, Earthblog.net has been on the map for two years now. The bad news, of course, is that there is never a shortage of alarming, if not downright disgusting, news items to point at.

It's been a little over a year since I joined up with this outfit (see Why I Said No to Earthblog and Ended Up Saying Yes Anyway), and I've kind of gotten a handle on it. Basically, the idea is to pick out interesting things from the overwhelming flood of information of varying factuality known as the news. Interesting to whom? To the people who turn to Earthblog, of course.

But let's back up for a moment. Aren't there plenty of websites already that gather together and categorize pieces of news? Aren't they already huge, and don't they contain millions of links? Yes, and that's part of the problem. The bigger a news link site becomes, the less useful it is. After all, we have the whole Web at our disposal, and what could be more comprehensive than that?

E. B. White noted the slanting and distortions any free press is prone to, but that was where he saw the beauty in it. He said in order to make sense of all the conflicting special interests, "the reader must sift and sort and check and countercheck….." With all due respect, White was overly optimistic. Most people don't seem to do a whole lot of counterchecking, they just pick a news source and make do with it.

There's a myth that it's important to know what everybody's talking about. Actually, it's much more important to notice what they're not talking about. Ideally, the intelligent American wants news items that resonate with his or her unique interests. If you partake of a certain mindset, and only have time to check one anthology website, you could do a whole lot worse than Earthblog.net as your news filter. It ranges widely amongst the massive flow of information, and brings back meaningful stories at risk of being swept too quickly into the past, while avoiding further emphasis on any story that the mainstream press is all over like flies on whatever it is that flies get all over.

Without Americo-centric bias, Earthblog gathers from worldwide sources and alternative media the neglected items and under-reported stories. It highlights absurd examples of government double-think, nauseatingly stupid displays of bureaucratic wrong-headedness, and what I call WTF??? stories, the type that at first glance can be mistaken for satire but, sadly, are not. Earthblog favors items that deserve a close look and a lot of thought. It's based on the same general idea pioneered in print by the Utne Reader. There's a lot of news out there that most people don't come into contact with. Obviously it's not totally unavailable news, or the Utnes and Earthblogs wouldn't know about it either. It is news that's routinely shunted aside, or treated as filler or comic relief by the corporate media.

Conservatives are said to see the world in black and white, while liberals see shades of gray. Earthblog sees the world in living color, and also believes that there are few things less useful than a label. Especially when the label is spurious, like those of the alleged Democrats and alleged Republicans, who are no more different than Mary Kate and Ashley.

There's a thing called "authentic journalism," which is said to be endangered, and indeed on some fronts, it is. Accurate reportage from the field is tremendously important, and is a miracle when it happens. Without the journalists who go out there and get the facts, there would be no raw material for the rest of us to opinionate about.

It's been said that an opinion is like a particular orifice, in that everybody has one; and indeed many opinion pieces are as simplistic as "I like it" or "I hate it." But there's a whole genre of work by commentators who don't only want to say "I think this-or-that," but who insist on asking questions like, "Why aren't we paying more attention to this?" or "Why do we take that for granted?"

I propose that the ranks of authentic journalists include the writers who reflect on the facts and ask questions that might lead to eventually figuring out what it all means. Earthblog supports and endorses authentic journalism wherever it is found.

It's been said of the Soviet communist system that there was an appearance of accountability, because individual apparatchniks who screwed up could be criticized in the media and by the people - but the system itself could never be called into question. Not so at Earthblog, where the system is not off limits.

Earthblog questions the system, not as it was set up by the Founders and pretty successfully operated for quite some time, but as the ugly mess it has morphed into. It's a system where conspiracy theories that were once scorned as tinfoil-hat paranoid fantasies turn out to be all too true, one after another, in dismal succession.

We have a society where the very top percentile of wealthiest Americans own just about everything. Earthblog sees something wrong with this picture. We have a system where differences of opinion are seen as disloyalty and even treason. Those in power, as well as far too many people who ought to know better, have done what Adlai Stevenson warned against, and "turned political criticism into an un-American activity instead of democracy's greatest safeguard."

Another thing about Earthblog is, it has strong reservations about the credibility of statistics. No matter what anyone says, most things can be measured only in a general and approximate way, and numbers can be made to do obscene tricks. Statistics can even be used for fun, as in the facetious proposition that United States foreign policy is based on 50% oil, 50% drugs, and 50% Israel.

Without recourse to exact numbers, it does appear that in 1980, a CEO made about 40 times as much as a worker in the same company. Picture the boss counting it out on payday: "One for you; forty for me; one for you; forty for me……."

Demonstrated in those terms, your average workingman would catch on pretty quick, which is why pay envelopes were invented. The boss wasn't going anywhere near that scene.

Each one of those workers from the '80s made only $1 for each $40 the head of the company made. Today, now, in the U.S. of A., the boss makes as much as 10 of those workers from the '80s. That's right, today's CEO makes about 400 times as much as a worker in the same company.

So, imagine that you are employed by a large corporation today. Picture the Big Boss, the one whose picture is always in the society pages, standing in the lobby at quitting time on Friday afternoon, doling out the pay packets. "One for you; four hundred for me; one for you; four hundred for me….."

And that only takes into account what they do legally. The Bureau of National Affairs figures that corporate crime costs us more than ten times as much as all the burglary, larceny, robbery and general thievery committed by regular people. We have a system where the citizens are exploited, and this is the kind of system that Earthblog doesn't like. It wants a system that does not violate its own laws, for alleged security reasons or any other reasons.

Those people in Washington work for us, and they've gotten out of hand. The great majority of them are in fact mad dogs who need their leashes yanked hard.

Any parent, any teacher knows that the best way to shape a child's mind is to set a good example. Earthblog believes that the U.S. sets an atrocious example, and then turns around and acts all offended when other countries do awful things they learned from Uncle Sam. Earthblog is against the two-facedness of selling armaments all over the earth and then being surprised when the buyers use them, and against the hypocrisy that encourages nuclear weapons in one country and takes action against another for the same behavior - the kind of hypocrisy that countenances Pakistan's support of the Afghan heroin trade, and discounts the efforts made by Iran to contain it.

Earthblog is pretty certain there are special categories of news that government agencies hold onto, until something large and attention-stealing comes along to take the curse off it. For instance, on September 11, 2001, it was announced that a four-story, $70 million building the local school district was buying from California's Department of Water and Power, for use as a high school, was full of toxic mold. But potentially irate taxpayers had other things on their minds. I suspect that only four or five people in the state even noticed the press release that should have alerted them to this enormous folly.

Earthblog thinks it's okay if people speak other languages than English, especially in their own countries. You'd be surprised how many Americans don't grasp that simple principle. It subscribes to the startling notion that the U.S. is not the only nation with needs and aspirations that should be taken into account. Americans lack a sense of proportion. Parents get hysterical with concern that a kid might fall off a skateboard, while in other places, parents are worried about their kids being vaporized by land mines.

Earthblog is against pigment-think, but does reserve the right to point out bozos and creeps no matter what color they are. While Earthblog is deeply compassionate, it also believes that professional victim is not a worthy career goal for any American. Mainly, it wants a society where nobody is marginal; a world that works because, and only if, it works for everyone.

It's been said enough times that we live in an attention economy. The hope here is that by shining the light of attention on some of the things to which attention must surely be paid, a difference can be made. Earthblog.net believes, against all odds, that it can.

- - - - - - -
Here's a collection of some of the coolest things ever said about the system under which we live, quoted from people I like to think of as sharing the Earthblog.net attitude.

Pat Hartman published 25 issues of the zine Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics and currently is webslave at Virtual Venice.