TV News LIES

World Water Day came and went recently, Thursday, the twenty-second.  I saw it lap at my feet for a moment, then, it was gone again, vanished, submerged back into our busy world, three-quarters of it water.

It is difficult to remember, to not take clean water for granted:  We grew up around it, seems like an automatic birthright, it's always been clean, always been here.  Liquid water, a rarity among bodies in space, plenty of it right here:  It nurtures and sustains us, grows our food, helps us exist and be.

Initial jobless claims dropped again last week to a four year low, taking us back to the early days of Bush meltdown. We really can’t begin sing “Happy days are here again” until claims drop from the current 348,000/week to under 300,000, but we are moving in the right direction.

The survey of economists had predicted a sharp rise in claims, but these are the same economists that are almost always wrong. Why do reporters quote them? You would get a better prediction by flipping a coin.

We could buy Real Fireworks for the 4th of July because we lived near the Port Madison Indian Reservation in Washington state. No wimpy sparklers for us. None of that Safe N Sane garbage. These were definitely Unsafe and Insane. We could buy stuff that exploded. As SCTVs Billy Sol Hurock and Big Jim McBob used to say, It blowed up real good.

I was about to set off a rocket slightly smaller than a cruise missile when I noticed a warning on the box, Use under adult supervision.

Here are four quotations that should have sounded off the rooftops since they were first spoken. Just like so many Truths that have been stripped from public awareness.

We were warned. Clearly.

There is a great story about an editor at UPI long ago, back in the 1970s, who inserted advice to journalists in a foreword to that organization's style guide for writers:  A burro is an ass, a burrow is a hole in the ground:  you are expected to know the difference between the two.

What great advice for Republican candidates vying for their party's coronation!  These guys are already phenomenally low in wattage as illumination of any real issue goes, so, that simple advice should be hugely helpful to them, too!

Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people – mostly children – couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."