TV News LIES

Nov. 25 marks the 65th anniversary of the inception of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, when studio chiefs and the head of the Motion Picture Association of America gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York and decreed an employment ban on the 10 members of the film industry who'd chosen not to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had launched an investigation into the supposed communist infiltration of the business.

These days, when the phrase "black list" isn't mistaken (especially among younger members of the industry) for Franklin Leonard's highly anticipated annual survey of best unproduced screenplays, it's reduced to catchall history-class terms like "the Red Scare" and "McCarthyism." But it's alive in vivid detail among the dwindling number of surviving victims of the period.

For drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the 17-page article in the New England Journal of Medicine represented a coup. The 2006 report described a trial that compared three diabetes drugs and concluded that Avandia, the company’s new drug, performed best.

“We now have clear evidence from a large international study that the initial use of [Avandia] is more effective than standard therapies,” a senior vice president of GlaxoSmithKline, Lawson Macartney, said in a news release.

The only problem with thinking critically, and having any hope, is that doing so within range of any other illogical humans instantly provides no shortage of subject matter able to receive profoundly heavy, unyielding criticism.

One supposes that the added problems of searing, splitting headaches and becoming radically entrenched in depression about the plight of the species are no picnics, either.

Unless one wins the lottery or is born a Dubya or Mitt, one must take the bad with the good in this life, we all learn quickly enough, and to greater and lesser degrees of satisfaction about this arbitrary arrangement of things.

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

This year, Aiman Youssef is thankful to be alive.

The 42-year-old Staten Island man said he used to have a $300,000 house he could be thankful for, and a car, and two vans full of things he was going to sell on EBay. Then Superstorm Sandy ruined all that and the rest of his neighborhood too, so just being alive is the best he can ask for right now.

"It's survival — that's what it is now," said Youssef, who sleeps in a tent, where it gets cold early in the morning, around 3 or 4 a.m. especially.

But that tent is no ordinary tent; it's a full-blown Sandy relief hub, bustling with supplies and volunteers "like 24-hours-seven here," as Youssef put it in a phone interview. And on Thursday, Youssef's temporary home was just one of the many locations around the Northeast that stayed busy over Thanksgiving nourishing the thousands of Sandy survivors and volunteers whose lingering struggles know no holiday.

There are now legal medical cannabis programs in 18 states plus Washington, DC, with pot fully legal for adults in two other states. Ironically, however, the actual healing power of the plant has barely been tapped. Smoking marijuana with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), or better, vaporizing it (using a device to bake the plant material and inhale the active ingredients), has an indisputably palliative effect and can be medically useful for pain relief, calming and appetite stimulation.

It already has confirmed benefits against glaucoma, epilepsy and other specific diseases and disorders. It also gets people high. THC triggers cannabinoid receptors in the brain and this produces the sensation of being stoned. These receptors are found in the parts of the brain linked to pleasure, memory, concentration, and time perception.

"This year I wasn't about to kill people."

That's a pretty good attitude to take in general.  It seems even more fitting when talking about a squabble over a Tinker Bell sofa with another Black Friday shopper, as Elizabeth Garcia had done, at a Toys-R-Us site in Times Square last year.

Even without the Body-and-Door-Crushing Super Savings Specials, and shoppers brandishing pistols and other weapons high overhead, trying to get other shoppers to back off from a prized shopping bargain, many people would call today Black Friday anyway.

We're here to ask him about something he doesn't like to talk about: a job he did 30 years ago, when he owned a trucking company. He got a contract with a local industrial plant called Asian Rare Earth, co-owned by Mitsubishi Chemical, that supplied special minerals to the personal electronics industry.

Esso Man couldn't believe his luck. He wasn't a rich man back then, and Asian Rare Earth offered three times as much as his usual gigs, just for trucking waste away from the plant. They didn't say where or how to dump the waste, and he and his three drivers were paid by the load—the quicker the trip, the more money they earned.