Even the media are aware of “slow news days,” but it will be a long cold day in the The Bad Place before someone who gets paid to be obsessed with the Latest News understands that there are always slow news DECADES.

When we look back on history slow news years are easy to see. Before the railroad, the bit news was internal canals. You can still those canals with historical markers on them. They were the “internal improvements” Hamilton wanted to hurry onto.

When I was studying the third world, then “underdeveloped countries,” in the fifties and sixties, the big deal was building dams. The reason for this was that a dam was something that could be planned by planners as one giant project.

The PROBLEM with dams was that it could be planned by planners in one giant project. Like everything else planned by Mommy Professors Little Professors coming out from Harvard and Cambridge, they didn’t do anything. If you take a mass of unskilled poverty stricken people in an economy of planned stagnation and build a dam, you get a country that has poverty stricken people with a dam.

Back then, all Mommy Professors talked about Liberation coming to Africa and how the underdeveloped countries were becoming the Developing Countries.

You simply do not hear about Africa today, and the obsession with economic statistics has totally ended. Today, with a price system and exploitation, under developing countries are developing at a rate that would have front page news if it had happened under Mommy Professor’s socialist graduates back then.

Like the end of starvation, you can tell something is happening by the total silence of the media.

Back in the canal days, finished canals were treated the way dams were in socialist tracts. But with the exception of the Erie Canal, they had as much effect on the economy as the dams did. With dams and canals, the news was touted because big interests were tied up in them.

But in the real world, transportation in the early nineteenth century was a slow news time. In 1830 the same transportation system existed that had existed in the Roman Empire, though the roads weren’t as good.

Likewise we are in a slow news time which is filled up by gurgling praise and pictures of wind power and earth-based solar power. It reminds me of the old science fiction stories, where astronauts traveling to Mars sat around and took notes on clipboards.

Fusion power is on its way. It will make this wind and earth-based solar crap as out-of-date as the canals when the railroad hit. Solar power from space is a likely competitor.

I used to enjoy reading back issues of the London Times. When the French Revolution came on, they had a Giant Leap Forward in communications technology. A tower was built on the French side and semaphore signals got the latest news to London in four days.

But very few people are aware of that Great Leap Forward today. Ben Franklin was the one great expert on electricity at the time, and he laughed when people said it might have practical applications someday.

Most people dedicate themselves to what is on the news. Commentators make the news sound as important as they can.

I gave up on the Mantra on Stormfront because everybody wanted to talk about Iraq. I did my programs and quit because whatever was on the news was what they wanted to talk about.

The London Times’ Great Leap Forward is forgotten. No one refers to the Third World today as underdeveloped or developing.

They weren’t wrong. They were worse than wrong. Everything they talked about was totally irrelevant, like those clipboards in space.

But the fact that current news is out of the ballpark has been the case for centuries, and nobody seems to notice.