TV News LIES

Imagine birthdays, Valentine's Day, special occasions of all kinds without the Post Office's stamp of approval and thumbs-up.  Imagine America without Post Offices in its histories and small towns.

More to the point, imagine playing Post Office with a new, for-profit corporation: Imagine having to kiss up to and keep any new avocational CEO stocked up with vacation homes, wingtips, private jets.

Vote all you want, the flight plan does not change no matter who wins.  We got us a big election coming up and of course the country is dividing itself right down the middle at least in some areas. For most of us out here this coming election means nothing.  The usual arguments over whether we are flying headlong into socialism or, if we are in fact in the throws of fascism seem to have lost their appeal.  Most have realized that whether socialism or fascism the end result is the same; a ruling class and the rest of us servants.  It just depends on which sales pitch appeals to you. For most of us, we have had it with the snake oil politicians and their ever changing sales pitch’s.

Kurt Vonnegut left the planet five years ago today.  If you noticed his absence then, surely you also know by how much the world has not been the same since.

Some things, however, have not changed:  Kurt found the world humorous, hapless, sadly lacking  -- a pratfall away from cheating death or a breath from unimaginable brilliance.  Or both, maybe simultaneously.  He has said, "Human beings might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair."

We primates are flukes of evolutionary whims, stumbling experiments with bigger brainpans, still merely monkeys with car keys and credit cards.  We are not to take ourselves too seriously, nor be depressed or surprised at any of the routinely dumb monkeyshines or monkey business we perform and pull off in this life.

Really now, a realistic view:  Expect nothing of value to occur.  Should anything happen to go well, be pleasantly floored, realizing the usual state of our primitive efforts in any regard usually ends in catastrophe and collapse.

The US stock market fell hard at the opening bell and the corporate pundits were out immediately blaming it on the lower number of jobs created last month. With “only” 200,000 new jobs created they implied that the Obama economic recovery is falling flat.

The first problem with this “news” was that the real numbers don’t come out until Friday, this was just an estimate from a private payroll service company that has become notorious for being wrong.

If no one knows if our security-industrial complex is making us safer, why have we built it? Why are we still building it, at breakneck speed?

Here at home, according to an exhaustive and impressive two-year-long investigation by the Washington Post, the taxpayer-funded Global War on Terror also built enough ultra-high-security office space (Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIF, in bureaucrat-speak) to fill twenty-two US Capitol Buildings: seventeen million square feet of offices in thirty-three handsome and generously funded new complexes powered up twenty-four hours a day, where an army of nearly one million American professionals spies on the world and the homeland. It’s as if we turned the entire working population of Detroit and Milwaukee into high-security-clearance spooks and analysts.