STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Journo Walks Around the World While Promoting Elite Memes
By Staff News & Analysis - January 14, 2013

Paul Salopek: Going for a seven-year walk … US journalist Paul Salopek is going to spend the next seven years walking from Ethiopia to the tip of South America, retracing the journey of early humans out of Africa and around the world. Along the way he will be writing articles, shooting video and tweeting. Salopek will take some 30 million footsteps during this journey, which he calls "the long walk into our becoming". So there is a lot of potential for blisters. But he insists he is not doing this as some kind of extreme sport – he will be thinking hard, en route, about human evolution. The starting point for the trek is Herto Bouri, a site in north-eastern Ethiopia populated by early humans in the Middle Stone Age. "Paleoanthropologists have found an extremely old Homo sapiens fossil there, which might be as much as 160,000 years old," says Salopek. – BBC

Dominant Social Theme: This is going to be a great reporting opportunity, and one that will reaffirm basic science.

Free-Market Analysis: We wish Paul Salopek well. This is a great opportunity to write and stay physically fit at the same time. National Geographic is going to spend a lot of money sponsoring him as he walks around the world.

Salopek is an award-winning journalist and we can expect, no doubt, many well-written and heartfelt observations from him. As he points out, "This was how we were designed to absorb information, at 5km an hour (3mph)."

But the article left us with questions as well as answers. Like so much of the rest of the mainstream media, National Geographic has been converted into a kind of promotional machine for elite memes. The power elite that wants to run the world and uses central banking as its war chest seems to control major centers of influence around the world: politics, education, military operations and, of course, the media. The only entity of influence they don't entirely control is the Internet.

And it is the Internet Reformation, as we call it, that we can use to critique publications like the National Geographic. The magazine used to be about unearthing interesting facts about the past and fascinating, out-of-the-way places. But these days it's mostly a kind of green, meme machine.

The power elite uses it – and it is a powerful franchise – to spread scarcity propaganda that in turn pushes middle classes into turning over wealth and power to elite globalist solutions. The article itself reaffirms bedrock dominant and subdominant social themes.

For instance, the article makes it clear that "[i]Initial human colonisation of North America occurred between 18,000 and 12,000 years ago." But, of course, this is untrue. There is significant evidence that both North and South America were colonized before the Homo sapiens migration over the land-bridge to what is now Alaska. Colonization of the Americas may have occurred from the sea, from both the Pacific and Atlantic, and perhaps in other ways as well.

Salopek, a courageous journalist who was once imprisoned in the Sudan, has no such doubts. "I shall be retracing the pathways of the first human diaspora out of Africa, which occurred about 50 to 70,000 years ago, as authentically as possible, on foot," he says. And the article adds that he believes "this form of journalism could even be more important than reacting to such epoch-making crises as 9/11."

"Had there been more people paying close and scrupulous attention to what was happening in refugee camps on the Afghan-Pakistan border… if we had actually taken the time to not do drive-by journalism, where we only react to crises, then we might actually have had fewer crises to report on," he says.

This is an amazing statement. There is no real evidence that 9/11 was orchestrated out of caves in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden even denied his involvement, though that has not been generally reported. So even in this little interview there are two provably false statements. Salopek is surely making assumptions in line with what his employer wishes to purvey. The journalist's lot is ever thus.

This is how power elite media works. It creates authentic-seeming opportunities for commenting and reporting – and then it organizes this sincere commentary around a core of untruths – promotional memes that reinforce … globalization.

One of the conclusions that Salopek will surely reach is the cliché that, as we are all one species despite our differences, geography ought not to divide us. It will be an argument for one world, in other words. As the elites in one way or another are paying for it, they will expect their money's worth.

After Thoughts

We don't mean to pick on Salopek who seems like a brilliant writer. But multiply his assumptions and intentions by millions and you begin to see how pervasive arguments for globalism really are, and how it is purveyed.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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