If you are a guy who is out looking for a bride who you would want to spend the rest of your life with, what qualities would you look for in a perspective life’s companion? Compatibility? Sunny disposition? Common interests? Kind heart? Brains? Earning capacity? What? Remember that we’re talking about selecting a wife who you will have to hold conversations with for approximately two hours a day over the course of the next 60-odd years (that’s 43,800 hours) — and even wake up next to each morning approximately 21,900 times.
All too many American males these days seem to pick their future life’s companion based solely on her mammary gland size. Good luck with that one! 60 years from now, your wife’s mammary glands will be a moot question, but you will still have to talk to her — and you’d probably be bored out of your mind by that time if you have selected her for her breast size alone (or, conversely, if she had married you solely based on the look of your sexy six-pack package, she might be bored out of her mind by that time too!)
So here’s some good advice, gentlemen (and ladies as well): Pick your future spouses based on the size of their minds and their hearts, not on the size of their implants!
And I wouldn’t recommend Phil Robertson’s method of picking wives either — which just might land you on a sex-offender registry for the next 60 years. http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/12/29/phil-robertson-marriage-advice/ But then apparently Robertson and his duckie friends used to be just one more bunch of yuppie fraternity boys trying to break into “The Hills” until they discovered they could make more money by representing southerners as ignorant unwashed bigots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW343K1-upo&sns=fb
And this same rule — of seriously examining long-term consequences before making important decisions — also needs to be applied to how we pick our politicians as well.
Selecting a congressional representative or president or governor or even local dog-catcher based solely on information you have gleaned from the Koch brothers, Citizens United and Fox News may make you feel good at the time — but 60 years down the road when the planet has been destroyed by pollution, radiation, Endless War and climate change and you are poor as a church-mouse because there are no more unions or Social Security to protect you and your children are uneducated and starving on sweatshop wages, you will definitely look back on those elections and say, “What was I thinking!”
And also do try to apply this “Mind and Heart” rule to how we select our healthcare as well. Let’s try to be more aware of what happens next, cause and effect, in this respect too, before we fall for all those pretty ads that tell us that Sutter or Humana or Blue Cross is “On Our Side” — while behind closed doors these guys are happily screwing America’s doctors, nurses and patients, people like us, for every penny of ours that they can get their hands on. http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/
Approximately 1,800 Americans die from lack of healthcare per day http://www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/facts/sicko. In the next 3,650 days, we will needlessly lose approximately 6,570,000 Americans — stone cold dead so that CEOs of health insurance companies can own yachts. Where is the long-distance thinking here? Where is the outrage? http://www.tv.com/shows/greys-anatomy/transplant-wasteland-2676177/
When you look at the long run, only single-payer healthcare makes sense.
Bottom line: It’s time to start seriously keeping abreast of our long-term hopes, goals and aspirations here in America, or else we’re never gonna find any long-term happiness here either — just an empty handful of public-relations-generated illusions and a whole big bunch of “Coulda shoulda woulda….”
PS: Another way that Americans are constantly being fooled is by having our strong sense of justice, honesty and morality turned inside-out and then used against us. If someone on TV keeps telling Americans over and over again that acts of murder, theft, lying, bigotry and greed committed in our name are actually just good Christian values, Americans naively tend to believe this. http://www.alternet.org/story/19811/a_man_of_his_words
As a whole, Americans are kind, generous and moral people who always want to do the Right Thing. But what is the right thing? Bankers who steal from both our government and their clients? Corporations who deliberately sell us junk that will kill us and happily poison our air if it saves them a buck? War profiteers who send our sons and daughters overseas to act as their personal goon-squad thugs and then send our same sons and daughters back home in a box when their usefulness is over? And racists and bigots who thump the Bible in order to justify their own evil ways?
Justice? The Ten Commandments? Freedom and patriotism and the First and Second Amendments? Most Americans believe in these things — and so these very beliefs, the solidly-felt beliefs of good people, are constantly being used against us by Bad Guys in order to pillage and lie and steal in the name of God, apple pie and the Flag.
It’s time for Americans to start keeping abreast of what is really happening to them — not what is only supposed to be happening. And it’s time for our leaders in sheep’s clothing who are always talking the talk to actually start walking the walk as well — of justice and fairness and morality — or else go off to jail where they belong. “Thou shalt not murder, steal or bear false witness…” must apply to us all.
PPS: And speaking of breasts, apparently we ladies should also be keeping our breasts away from the Pacific ocean forevermore — if we don’t want to get cancer. Why? Toxic radiation.
Here’s a video of some guy with a Geiger counter walking along a beach near San Francisco. Just watch his Geiger counter jump up from a normal reading of 34 to an outrageously-high and dangerous reading of 156 as he approaches the Pacific ocean. Please Please Please let this video be a fake! Otherwise we females here on the West Coast are clearly in big trouble. http://topinfopost.com/2013/12/26/fukushima-radiation-hits-san-francisco.
However, somebody else just wrote to tell me that I should stop worrying about radiation drifting over here from Fukushima. “Why worry about Fukushima when 47,500 55-gallon steel drums containing nuclear waste had already been dumped out near the Farallon Islands between 1960 and 1970, and there’s a fair chance that those barrels might be now starting to corrode and open. So why would anyone be surprised by high levels of radiation at a beach near San Francisco? And why assume that it’s coming all the way from Fukushima, more than 5000 miles away — when so much was dumped here, just 30 miles away?” Why indeed.
We shoulda looked more closely at who we voted for 60 years ago!
And vice-versa. The primary thing in politics is to maintain your skepticism and pragmatism. The current version of the Republican Party have abandoned both, when they are being fed what they want to hear, and cling to ideas both woefully archaic and provably tattered with failure. Presently, they seem to believe that if they build a high enough pile of manure, a pony will magically appear. That kind of thinking inevitably leads to defeat and extinction. Ironically, many Republicans who call hemselves Christians eagerly embrace the philosophy of Ayn Rand, an avowed atheist. Of course, the GOP Elite are not Christians, they are well-heeled grifters picking the pockets of the sheep and hewing to Randian ‘principled selfishness’ as a self-serving convenience to make themselves wealthier.
“Get the card!”
“Smoke,” by Hollywood actress Meili Cady, tells the story of a young lady who had some success in Hollywood as an actress and subsequentially got accused of smuggling seven tons of pot into the USA. This new book came to our attention right after we viewed “The Big High” 1968 episode of Dragnet and a colorized version of “Reefer Madness.” On Thursday May 28, we heard one of the Getty and Armstrong (which one is Costello, which one is Laurel?) duo did a segment which urged American military veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to “get the card,” which is to say they should do the paper work that would give them access to medical marijuana rather than seek relief via consuming alcoholic drinks. We knew that it was time to do another column on a topic that permits us to use the old cliché: “we don’t have a dog in that fight.” Th
e World’s Laziest Journalist doss not care if Pot is classified as a capital offense or if it becomes a product available in (irony alert!) drug stores and/or is sold at the corner news stand (do they still exist?).
Doing fact checking to see why the boys at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory voted the rumors surrounding the reason why pot was original classified as a dangerous narcotic as an explanation of why pot was voted into the Conspiracy Theory Hall of Fame (located on the super-secret campus somewhere in the Sierra foothills, near Berkeley) was a myth of Sisyphus assignment.
Back when “Reefer Madness” was a sensationalistic new movie it helped (propaganda alert?) convince the public that one puff for pleasure could lead, inexorably, to a life as a demented dope fiend. The 1968“Big High” episode of Dragnet (it’s available for viewing on Youtube), seconded the motion.
Could it be that capitalists, allegedly from both the booze and paper industries, as a way of diminishing a threat of competition, somehow (bribe alert?) convinced politicians to overreact and blacklisted a product with medicinal effects that would be very therapeutic for G. I.’s with battle fatigue? If so, why then would altruistic minded Republican politicians continue their misguided efforts after the doctors presented them with documentation that strongly endorsed the controversial PTSD treatment?
We considered doing a column detailing how, today, the voters in the USA seem to be as much the victims of lies, distortion, and propaganda as were the citizens of Germany, in the Thirties. Ein Volk got all their news only from officially sanction sources of information such as the Volkisher Brobachter newspaper. Is Fox News following in that tradition?
Denny Hastert did something and made mistakes in withdrawing the hush money from his bank account. Republicans want to go on record as saying the persecution of Hastert is an example of government overreach and not worth the effort and concomitant media circus. When Bill Clinton got a blowjob from a consenting adult woman, it was a basis for a group with lynch mob mentality to urge that impeachment proceedings should begin immediately. What’s not to love about strong, opposing partisanship reactions to the two stories?
Last December, when some of the citizens staged some “Black Lives Matter” protests in Berkeley, a low-flying single engine airplane was pointed out to us and the assertion was made that it was intercepting and monitoring cell phone calls being made below them as a way to do crowd control. During this past week, Newsweek provided confirmation of those rumors. Do a Google News search for “Operation Stingray.”
We were also tipped to the assertion that a rich pair of brothers bankrolled an effort to discredit the “Black Lives Matter” political protests by paying thugs to commit vandalism and to incite violence. Then when it was time for the hooligans to collect the promised cash, they were stiffed. That allegedly precipitated new riots with a more pragmatic rationale. That topic was accessible via a Google News search, but perhaps all traces of that story have been scrubbed off the Internet by now.
If true, this hypothesis has some very disconcerting implications. If hoodlums were paid to add vandalism and violence to a legitimate free speech protest, then one must make one of two conclusions. If the American Homeland Security agency was fully informed and complicit with what was happening, then fascism and Gestapo tactics have become an ingredient in American life. If, on the other hand, the Homeland Security did not know ahead of time about the payments to aggravate the situation, then their reasons for surveillance of all American citizens is a farce. They were either complicit or derelict in their mission if some of the protesters were paid agent provocateurs. With that ominous binary choice, it becomes evident why management of the news might be an integral part of the charade.
These days all the news seems to have a conspiracy theory aspect to it. Have you heard the assertion that B. B. King might have been the victim of foul play?
The latest hacking scandal causes us to ask again: “Why didn’t the system that was hacked use the security program that makes the electronic voting machines immune from all attempts to get hacked?
The hot rumor making the rounds this week on the digital counter-culture websites is that the John Kerry broken leg story was not a bike accident but was a fib designed to draw attention away from an assassination attempt by Isis.
Does the slump in confidence in American Journalism imply a concomitant spike in credibility for various and sundry Conspiracy Theories?
Speaking of de facto censorship, is it true that the website RevolutionbooksNYC dot org is promoting the use of a graphic symbol illustrating the concept that citizens should fear the police assigned to protect and serve them? Will media owned by conservative millionaires permit the staff to give any publicity to that concept?
The World’s Laziest Journalist will skip this week’s transvestite story. (Is that story that most folks, even those in the liberal San Francisco Bay Area, find boring and thus want it banished from the airwaves, an example of managed news?) Are any American pundits asking if the failure of the TSA screenings indicates that the actual purpose of the hassle is to wean Americans on to fascism?
Since Saturday June 6 will be the 71st anniversary of D-Day, we need to ask a question: “If the soldiers who were killed in WWII were fighting for The Four Freedoms, does it show disrespect for their sacrifices if Sen. Lindsey Graham rolls his eyes when the concept of fighting for America’s liberties, is mentioned?”
[Note from the photo editor: Pot, pizza and psychedelic tie-die t-shirts can always be lumped together in the San Francisco Bay Area and hence legitimize this week’s photo illustration.]
Some analysts are baffled by the fact that Republicans, who were very enthusiastic about invading Iraq and Afghanistan, seem willing to renege on their promise to take care of wounded veterans by denying them access to medical marijuana to treat PTSD.
Since many pundits ignore the controversy over the use of pot treatment, any suggestion which attempts to explain why the Republicans continue to endorse the restrictions on the use of cannabis sativa rather than approve its use, we will (speculation alert!) offer our unique explanation.
The fable of the scorpion and the frog was used in two movies. It was told in Orson Welles’ “Mr. Arkadin,” and also in “The Crying Game.”
A scorpion wanted to cross a river. He asked a frog if he could hitch a ride. The frog vehemently objected saying: “When we get in the middle of the river, you will sting me and we will both drown.” The scorpion used his highly developed debating skill to convince the frog to ignore his objections to the proposal. The scorpion hopped on the frog’s back and they began to cross the river. When they got to the middle of the river, sure enough, the scorpion stung the frog. The perplexed frog asked the scorpion why he had broken his promise and thereby signed both of their death warrants. The scorpion’s response possibly explains the Republicans’ attitude and provides us with the column’s closing quote: “Because it’s in my nature!”
Now the disk jockey will play the Platters 1958 hit “Smoke gets in your eyes,” “Puff the magic dragon,” and Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson’s new song “It’s all going to pot.” We have to go see if the film rights to the “Smoke” book have been sold. Have a “Go Warriors!” type of week.