TV News LIES

We nonpartisan, equal-opportunity critics of political office holders, and the cuckoo process by which self-governance is currently practiced in this country, have, around our own meeting table, been chewing on a particular cud, in between beers, for some months:  What to call Republicans that is not as obscene, foul, or belligerent as most everyone would actually like.

Call it a party game that we've been enjoying, somewhat perversely.  Republicans started it, insisting on repeatedly calling their opponents the "Democrat Party," making sure they really leaned, vocally, on the "-rat" at the end.

In between working on crap I got a job at a cable TV company in Los Angeles. The cable industry was still fairly new and there was a huge demand for “product.” If you were an HBO subscriber you could watch Robin Williams in Popeye 27 times in one week. I wanted to work there because the Public Access Division had cameras, editing equipment, and a studio. For Free! All I had to do was figure out what to put in front of the camera.

I’d film commercials in the dead of night and sometimes was paid off in “product” in lieu of cash. How else do you think I got that wonderful portable dishwasher?

It certainly sounded outrageous:  A man was given 30 days in jail for having water on his property.  It certainly sounded like local government had slipped a major cog in its normally dull wheel, shambling off into abuse.

A few minutes later, after an online search and scanning various written pieces, it was far less certain what was really going on.

The initial piece was shrill in its tone.  Worse, it left out key information:  The man had dammed up a creek flow, a tributary to a river, without permission to do so.  He had done that before, and had done it again.  The first time, he received probation from the court; the second time, he drew 30 days in jail, to help get his attention.

The Republicans have trotted out an old talking point that you don't hear them use much with their taxes so low, but they think that you peasants should pay all the taxes. So here goes, "Say I start a business and so does my friend. His business fails and I succeed. Why should I be penalized for my success by paying income taxes, while he pays none?"

This almost sounds reasonable, and the knee jerk reaction is to try to justify taxes for all the good reasons we pay taxes. This is entirely wrong, that's what they want you to waste time on, while the basis of their argument continues to stand.

A lot of the world's misery can be traced to people who lack the wiring for empathy. What can we do to contain the damage they cause?

Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a  psychopath?  These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others, or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.

One of the most significant political developments in recent US history has been the virtually unchallenged rise of the police state. Despite the vast expansion of the police powers of the Executive Branch of government, the extraordinary growth of an entire panoply of repressive agencies, with hundreds of thousands of personnel, and enormous public and secret budgets and the vast scope of police state surveillance, including the acknowledged monitoring of over 40 million US citizens and residents, no mass pro-democracy movement has emerged to confront the powers and prerogatives or even protest the investigations of the police state.