Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE

Google, the world’s most used search engine site, has plans to reorganize its algorithm for online searches to give prominence to the most fact-based articles. The new leaders of this world will have goofy names like Snopes and PolitiFact.

credit: Llyn Hunter

While this sounds appealing to many Americans who are tired of getting Bill O’Reilly and Rachel Maddow news reports that are more popular in their Google results than more mentally nutritious material, we should be leery about Google’s outline for a fact-based world.

We should be leery in the first place about how information is highlighted, emphasized, and found on the Internet.

We should realize certain information is pushed to the fringes, outside of the main search results, and it takes a real detective these days to sift through the central core of webpages to reassess what has been deemed unworthy, or discarded.

Never before has one organization had so much control over the world’s access to information.

Every time my great aunt hears something new, she asks, almost breathlessly, “Is that a fact?” Like it’s the most interesting bit of information she’s ever heard.

It could be as simple as telling her there were no horses on the North American continent before the first European explorers brought them over, and a few broke away — wild horse colonies sprung up shortly after and spread far and wide.

“Is that a fact?” she would ask.

“Well, if you don’t count the prehistoric horses that died out, then yes,” I would say. “I guess so. Why not?”

I know someone with more wisdom and knowledge than anybody else I’ve ever met. His name is Hubert Humdinger, and he doesn’t even know his birth date. Not because he’s an imbecile, but because he doesn’t care enough to carry trivial dates with him through his life as much as most of us wouldn’t want to lug an old plastic milk jug everywhere we go.

But you won’t find Humdinger’s works prominently displayed on Google’s search engines. Hundreds of books written by the exiled old philosopher that would change your life have disappeared.

Where did they go?

The US State Department burned them in the late 70s to little fanfare or protest from the general public.

The lack of protest is said to be the effect of fluoride in the water. The upside is that it prevents cavities.

Is that a fact?

Well, maybe. I don’t have any cavities, and I’m in my third decade already. What about you?

Others, with cavities, most of them, say fluoride was a dangerous byproduct of aluminum production, and the companies looking to ditch the chemical convinced lawmakers that it was good for prevention of cavities in children under eight. The lawmakers, who had better things to do than research sodium fluoride, human teeth, and the ideas of rich men who also happened to fund their campaigns, passed the bill.

The American water system was fluoridated. Was it best for us?

Let Google figure it out. I’ll check back when they create their facts-based algorithm. You’ll see Dear Dirty America drop off the list when they do. That’s OK. We were never high up on the list anyway. We deal with bursts of ideas, what-ifs, and the notion that the leaders and prominent peoples of the world really do have our best interests at heart.

We avoid the so-called facts that say otherwise.

Which is why Hubert Humdinger has such a hard time breaking into a facts-only environment. His facts are for the year 2100. Facts that haven’t been established yet. Facts too potent to be understood by the limited version of facts we have so far.

“If some of the facts in a string of facts that are used to build a public institution, which is then perceived as an apparatus of Fact, start to fall, then, in fact, many of the subsequent facts become non-facts, but it’s too late by that time to recreate the factual record,” Humdinger said from his undisclosed home in Northern Europe. “Don’t worry, that’ll be built into the Google algorithm, though,” he assures us.

“Just like the American Medical Association knows all things about health,” Humdinger continues. “If it’s healthy, the AMA knows about it. Just like the Food and Drug Administration knows when to accept the safety tests conducted by the corporations wanting to sell their new drug, food, or combination of the two to the general public. If it’s safe, the FDA knows it.

“These institutions control the facts in their field. They create the meta-theory by which all other theories in their field of study are tested. It’ll be too much work to fully critique the whole system at this point.”

Maybe Hubert Humdinger is a little disgruntled. He wasn’t in the cast of players that kept popping up in the early creations of most of today’s monopolies, government organizations, and committees. Among the ranks of Rockefellers, Roschilds, Warburgs, and Morgans, we don’t see any Humdingers hanging around in prominent circles.

If they had, the unflappable philosopher insists the facts of today would be different.

The old philosopher couldn’t make it into the good ole’ boy club, even when he tried. But you still might. You’ll know it when you do.

You’ll find yourself, like Bill Clinton has and does, on the Jeffrey Epstein pedophile plane. Cruising in a gaudy tin can at 38,000 feet is where all the real policy work gets hammered out. With a handle of the world’s most expensive whiskey being poured into a tumbler by underage girls plucked like rare fruits from one of the world’s poorest countries.

Above the land, above the laws, in the sanctity of international airspace.

Or, kind of above the law. Alan Dershowitz can’t be adamant enough in explaining that he finds sex with minors uncouth like the rest of us. His time on Epstein’s pedoplane was simply time to decompress.

Dershowitz was Epstein’s lawyer, of course, so free flights on the Zoo Plane were complimentary, and even breakfast was served. But nobody can say for certain that the underage girls were let out of their cages to play while the Harvard professor was on board.

Is that a fact?

Some say so. It’s mainstream news, if you care to put it together. But how long will it last when Google gets its new algorithm in place? We assume mainstream news mostly relies on facts. Two sources for every story. Or one anonymous government source for bombshell news or sensational stories that need a shaped narrative, and quickly.

So now, when I tell my great aunt that September 11, 2001 was a spectacular event in that 3 towers were knocked down by 2 planes, that the towers crumbled and fell flat into their own footprints, I won’t allow her to get away with asking, Is that a fact?

“Well, Google it, damn it!” I’ll say. “I’m not an expert in everything.”

The downside is that my great aunt doesn’t know how to use the Internet.

I sit her down at the computer, open Google, and tell her to knock herself out. I stand behind her frail form, bent forward in the chair. She squints at the keyboard, then the screen and the cartoon letters g o o g l e.

It is clear she isn’t going to do anything. I type into the search bar, “What is a fact?”

A box with the definition of a fact pops up. I scroll through the rows of dictionary definitions below for her to see the options of the search.

Too boring. I type in “Duke of York on the Lolita Express.”

While I read an excerpt about the confusion over the allegations that Prince Andrew had spent time on Epstein’s plane with underage ‘massage’ girls, Buckingham Palace seemed to be asking, “What’s wrong with that? Isn’t this what the elite are supposed to do? You mean the peasants didn’t know?”

Finally, just as I’ve forgotten my great aunt is even there, gestures toward the computer and asks, “Is this what they call progress?”

[private jet photo from JetRequest.com; Google lunar base graphic from K Dean Stephens]