24 Hour Bad News

I'd like to think I'm not that old but I remember when the news was only on at either 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock. And that was all. Before the news came on, you watched something else. Anything else.

Then in 1980 CNN went on the air as a 24 hour "News" broadcast cable station and now everywhere you look there's "News".

And it's not good news and these days we don't know which of it actually happened or whether most of it is true. Sure, storms really happen. Planes really crash but the other stuff, the subjective stuff, the things that happen in other places, we don't know the half of it and the only word of it we get is through the 24/7/365, never ending news channels.

And we already know they're all full of SHIT.

The local outlets are the worst at trying to fill up their massively expanded schedules. With their vans driving up and down the highways hoping something bad will happen because we all know this "news" has to be BAD.

Bad news is important to the TV executives and it's important to advertisers. The term "If it bleeds, it leads" is now spread across the entire day. If a plane skids off the runway in Singapore or a car hits a tree in Dallas, it's on our local Boston "news", why?

Probably because they have an "insert car crash here every day in this time slot" mandate and if nobody local crashes, they get footage off the wire to fill the spot. I don't really know but I always wonder why I'm hearing about something that happened in California like a car chase or a house fire when they happen on the East coast too but just not that day. There's a lot of time to fill up now so they have to keep the bad "news" coming.

I remember Fox news used to love to broadcast California car chases. That's "news" as entertainment, watching a car chase. Here in New England, car chases suck because there are too many trees to block the camera crew. Car chases happen in Andover, Massachusetts I'm sure, you'll just never see one on television.

Bad News Over and Over

But with all the satellite feeds, the global networks, the broadcasting vans looking for cats caught in the trees, these stations still run out of bad news to hit us over the head with. So what do they do? They REPEAT it over and over, sometimes for three days.

In the Internet world, three days is an eternity to hear the same thing over again. Bad enough you hear it again in an hour but, just in case you somehow missed it, here it is again today. Damn it makes it hard to turn on the radio, I've long ago stopped watching television.

Casting a Pall

What this does, all this bad 'news", is cast bad feelings among the populace. People actually feel the world is going to Hell. The world is not going to Hell. The world is the same as it's ever been. It's always been turning, always there is turmoil somewhere. Just not the same place all the time if you don't count the Middle East. That's a world constant.

But there's always a bad law about to be passed, always a "crisis" to be averted and always someone trying to convince you that unless you go jump through some HOOP, the worst possible outcome will be made real.

But the 24 hour "news" cycle causes preoccupation with what's going on, or at least, what we THINK is going on. I wonder sometimes how information got around back in colonial times. Information traveled slowly and I'm sure was subject to miscommunication and modification.

So the only thing that's changed is the speed of miscommunication and modification.

Why Television Exists

Is it to inform you? It can do that. Is it to educate you? It can do that too. It certainly can entertain you. But the reason it's here is to sell you things.

Beyond all the advertisements, the people who control the media and it's portals want to show you what they want you to see and only what they want you to see. And it's all pretty dumb and contrived. Most of the time, since television was developed, the government and the media were on the same page as to The Message they wanted to send the public. Right now there is a schism and the two are currently split.

Mostly these days the media is selling fear, angst, worry and remorse. Fear of the outside, angst about your well-being and remorse over parts of our history you or your family was never a part of.

It's about "helping" you form ideas and opinions that are of a certain perspective, their perspective. You're told either the truth when if fits, half-truths when it doesn't and outright lies when it suits them. And you have no idea which one you're getting.

Yet people believe it just the same.

Swallowing the Elephant

I never get people who, even though they know that they've been lied to, believe the next thing that the liar says! If someone lies to me once, I tend to have a doubt about the truthfulness of anything they say after that. But that's just me. It's more about how people are inclined to believe "facts" that fit their own opinion about a subject no matter what the source.

We catch a "news" station deliberately distorting the facts and the next day someone says, "Hey, did you hear what's on _____?" Same station. I mean, they're not going to stop broadcasting just because they were caught in a lie.

I don't know if anyone remembers back to 1993 when NBC News, not having success confirming the rumor that the pickup truck GM was making at the time had a problem catching fire in a roll-over accident, actually put a LIGHTED FLAIR on the gas tank and re-did their roll-over test. That worked! The truck finally caught fire.

Of course, the flair showed up rather prominently when General Motors ran the footage in slow-motion.

Oops!

Politics, Politics, Politics

Politics was never far from "news" since the beginning of time. The way certain information is going to be perceived by the Public is always worrisome to those with something to lose.

All news today is political. Why the car crashed, why the storm tore your roof off your house, why your wife left you and why your young kids come home from school and tell you that the number one priority of their lives will be to save the planet.

And whether you think you're a Progressive or a Conservative, you just have to know you're not getting the whole story. The bubble you've built for yourself by only watching certain stations or reading certain publications that back up your thinking to the point where people who risked their very lives to bring you a different sort of news and put it out of reach of the people who don't want you to see it, are ignored.

If the truth should suddenly hit you in the face, would you even know it?

Believe it, don't believe it, that's not the point. The point is that you should have access to it and know it exists.

Something to believe in. 

Oil: The Ball Bearing of Industry

Nothing moves without it and without it nothing will move. 

All the solar and wind power in the world isn't going heat your house or keep your air conditioner going all day, all week, all month or all year.  Oil is still the biggest bang for the buck and the world is awash in oil. It's cleaner to store, is transportable and if we need more, it's just right under foot.

Petroleum products are in everything. They grease the gears in wind turbines, they are what electric cars ride on in the form of roads and rubber tires, coat the wires that carry the current, insulate the power supplies and make up the hoses that the coolant passes through from the engine to the radiator. Oil is what makes everything go and to deny this fact is to merely delude yourself. While it's good to save money and to become more efficient, to waste resources on less efficient means of energy production and passing the higher costs onto the consumer weakens the nation and hurts those less able to afford to pay.

This is why rather than sink all this government money into subsidizing alternate forms of energy, taxpayer money I might add, the nation could just as well have put that money into making engines that run on gasoline and diesel more efficient. Since what was the point of alternative energy? It was supposed to help us burn less oil and have less emissions. So if there was an engine, say, that could run 100 miles on a gallon of gasoline instead of it's current 34 miles per gallon, would that not do the same thing? By making oil more efficient would we not require less of it? 

But that doesn't fit into the current blind hate narrative. We HATE oil even though it's in everything and along with it's immature cousin, Coal, is actually what makes the world go around. We would rather have more costly and less reliable wind and solar power and store that power in expensive and massive acid-based batteries for when the wind either doesn't blow or blows too much or when the sun doesn't come out for days. We just want to get rid of fossil fuels!

But it's not going to happen no matter how good this pipe dream makes you feel. It's not making the world any cleaner, safer or more secure. 

Feel good about your electric car? Where does that electricity come from? Hint: Not from a wind turbine! With the more electricity an electric car needs, some guy in a power plant up the road is only going to throw another shovel full of coal into the furnace that runs the turbines. What did you think, that electricity came from an electric-powered power plant?

We've wasted a great opportunity to put the resources into oil efficiency. With all the dough we've already wasted with so little to show for it, we could have funded an oil based Manhattan Project. Who knows what that could have achieved?  But because of politics, this did not/will not happen. Making oil more efficient doesn't even come up in environmental conversation. 

But Oil isn't really the target in all of this nonsense now is it? 

It is industry and the Capitalist mentality that drives industry that is the real target. The environmental movement, Socialist in nature, hopes to control the means of production by regulating what type of power that drives it. The political wing of environmentalism wishes to tell you what power to use, what kind of car you can drive and what kind of power you'll use to drive your business. 

If a manufacturer came out tomorrow and said they could make a production gasoline engine that could get 200 miles per gallon of gasoline, how would you think the environmental movement would react? or perhaps a generator that could power your house all day on just a gallon of diesel? 

Would the environmentalists embrace such dramatic monumental discoveries? 

I'll put my money on an emphatic "no" since it would set back the environmental "movement" if you want to call it that, back a half century.  I think they would attempt to suppress it and claim that it was a concerted effort by Capitalists to discredit their work to "Save the Planet" and that they should still be allowed to continue to explore alternate energies and keep their government funding. Oil and gasoline will still continue to be evil. 

We have yet to wring nearly as much energy out of an oil molecule as lies within it. It would be money better spent to get more out of the most reliable source of energy that we have. 

But that would make sense.  

Castro's Revolution a Failure

The largest export of Cuba is Cubans. 

This has been the end result of the glorious Communist vision of Fidel Castro. The people who are left on the island are glad to see the others go not because they view them as traitors to the Revolution but that by leaving their backward, impoverished island nation they know there will be fewer people to compete for the limited resources they need to sustain themselves.

After all this time, the only thing Fidel Castro and his Revolutionaries have to trumpet about is the glories of an empty island in the sun that doesn’t look like it’s progressed a day beyond that first day of January 1959 when Castro and his merry band of brothers road into Havana and time, for the Cuban people at least, stopped.

Yes, the Cuban revolution managed to throw out American business interests. And THEN what happened? Nothing! Such is the extent of the success of the revolution.Oh, they tried to get Russia interested in a missile base and they managed to train some decent boxers but that's about it. 

Although it hasn't been good to anyone else in particular, the revolution has been good to the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul. They get to rule over a fiefdom that never ever actually accomplished anything but throw out the American Capitalists. For the time being anyway. And then there is that thing about the mass exodus of it's people from the workers paradise.  

Never having anything to offer people born with ambition, for we are all born with ambition, the hardly educated Castro just let them go so he could go on being the Dictator rather than actually attempt to build a culture, educate the people, build a shining city or even a road for that matter. 

After all, being King was all he was ever good at. A fighter can lead a revolt but they can never lead a peace. Mao couldn’t do it, Stalin couldn’t do it and although Castro’s death counts hasn’t noticeably come near that of those two, he has killed his share. He knows no other way to hold onto power. A killer can never be anything else.

But soon El Captain will shed his mortal coil and although Raul, part of the Communist youth movement at a spry 85 years old and the rest of the now geriatric placeholders will try to keep Castro’s “Vision” alive, not knowing what that ever was and the hands of time will once again hand over Cuba to people who actually want a quality life and who want to own stuff.

And to think that there are people, mostly privileged people who have been allowed to travel to Cuba despite the U.S. ban, who think opening up the country to trade will somehow RUIN the country and its people. Can you believe it? How backward can you get? They are already ruined, now they must be resurrected. 

How would YOU like to live everyday like its 1959? And I’m not talking about Soc Hops, souped up hot rods, chics in poodle skirts and Buddy Holly on the jukebox at the soda shop kind of 1959. No no, Cuba today is the 1959 where X-Rays were just coming into fashion, a time where there was no such thing as a pacemaker, high blood pressure medicine, blood thinners or coronary bypass surgery. All gasoline sold had LEAD as an octane boosting additive, automobiles didn't have either seat belts or head rests never mind airbags and "Smoking isn't bad for you at all." said your doctor while puffing on an unfiltered Camel cigarette in the examination room! 

Some phones still had a crank on them and "party lines", where the whole community was on the same phone line, still were prevalent outside of the big cities IF the phone company decided to run a wire to your town at all. Most of the TVs were still black & white and there actually WERE roads like Mayberry RFD (for Rural Farm Drive) and nothing was open on Sunday EVER. Plus you could go to jail for a year for possession of one joint in many states. Yes, THAT 1959. 

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t know what you were missing but guess what? You DO know what you’re missing. And so do the Cuban people. People are people everywhere in that they want to enjoy the fruits of their own labor and to provide for their families. They want a goal to work towards and to achieve things in their working lives. They may not all get to where they want to go but it’s in the chance to achieve these things that the Castro Regime has kept from them. Look at the way Castro’s “Children of the Revolution” are living. Then look at the masses that have risked everything to get the hell out of there. Let’s face it, it is a total act of desperation to get on an old car tire inner tube and try to paddle your ass to Florida. But that’s just what these people are doing.There are many Cubans on the bottom of the Florida Straits. 

Castro won the revolution alright but he will leave his nation worse off than when he “saved” it and in reality he didn't save it from anybody, he only saved it for himself. Cuba is a land that time has left behind and like North Korea, will have a huge learning curve when civilization finally catches up to them. And it will. It always does.

Now in his twilight, we can look at Castro's reign over Cuba with clarity and so with clarity can declare that he has failed Cuba. Castro failed Cuba and its long suffering people with his selfish small thinking. He never had a plan after victory. He never accomplished a thing beyond the revolution. A revolution he relived in his mind everyday and never stopped talking about. But what he always spoke so fervently about was in the past. And now it's the distant past. 

Castro never took a step beyond that one victory, 57 years ago, to develop a country that could exemplify that his way was the better way. He could never show that to the world because he couldn't do it. In this Castro failed like the other despots before him who espoused a Communist ideal that they could never conjure and despite all his grand talk of freedom for the working people, he was just another short-sighted man who could only lead with a gun. 

The sooner history forgets him, the better. 

Left Wing Nuts Come Out for Thanksgiving

Yes, I get it, Columbus was a killer. The difference between him and a thousand or so other people who landed on the north American continent back in the day was that Columbus made the new world pay. He found the gold and he found the slave trade. Ok, so now what?

This is the time of year where, perhaps emboldened by another four years of an Obama administration that is all for the tearing down long standing “White European” traditions, whatever they are, where everybody and their immigrant uncle rails against Thanksgiving and Christmas. While they’re at it they should unearth the truth about Plymouth Rock, the Liberty Bell and the Tooth Fairy.

I’ll have to say that 1492 was a long time ago yet I can’t get enough of hearing about how ruthless post Renaissance “Euro-Whitey” came over and exploited, deceived and murdered millions of peaceful, communal and environmentally friendly indigenous peoples of both South and North America.

Now I realize that one cannot discover a new land when there are already people living on it. It seems to me that the people living there must have discovered it first but I’m just plain tired of hearing about it over and over again every year. It’s really just annoying and it’s HISTORY.

My ancestors, the CELTS, were murdered, enslaved and walled off by the Romans. The Irish had the crap kicked out of them by the VIKINGS and were starved by the ENGLISH not half as long ago as when Columbus did his dirty work for crying out loud. When do we stop carping about the past and move on with our lives and our civilization?  

One of the statistics of the “New World” was that 90% of the indigenous population did not die from a bullet. Most of the Indians died of disease. Smallpox, a former scourge of human existence everywhere from the beginning of human history and which was finally eradicated from the world only in 1978, killed 1/3 of the population of Boston in 1730 and again in 1740. It generally killed one out of three Europeans it infected.  Do you hazard a guess as to the percentage of Indians it killed? Smallpox killed 98% of infected Indians. Sometimes it killed 100%. Disease killed entire villages, some who never even had a chance to lay their eyes on a white man, their bones littering the ground because there was no one left alive to bury them.

The difference was that the Europeans were living in the filth of their pack animals. They slept with them for warmth and caught their bovine and swine flus and the survivors built up immunities. The Indians of the Americas had no such animals and no such immunities. I don’t know what could have changed this fact.

If it wasn't Columbus who came over and went “Achoo!” then it would have been someone else. 
Perhaps an African, they got around in those days too. But it was inevitable that it was going to happen and I suppose it would be somebody else’s name these people would be cursing. Perhaps it would've been a guy named “Clarence”, “Clarence the Killer!”

And the idea of the “Noble Savage” is a bigger myth than that big “Euro-Whitey” Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox. The tribes were in a state of almost constant warfare with each other and the local indian tribe, the Wampanoag, originally embraced the Pilgrims in the hopes that they would help them in their efforts to repel the aggressive Narragansett of the Rhode Island territory.

The Incas and Aztecs were cannibals who practiced in ritual human sacrifice. There is also archeological evidence that the Native Americans of Arizona and New Mexico also ate human flesh.

In his 1586 memoir, "The True History of the Conquest of Mexico", published in 1632, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a man who actaully marched with  Cortez during the 1520 Spanish conquest of Mexico, describes scenes of ritual sacrifice that are astounding in their scope and savagery. It is one of the world’s great works and everyone should read it.

This is history warts and all and the history of America, like the hisotries of most countries, is the history of conquest. What land has not been taken from another? And the conquerors will not hold it forever either since someone else will surely come along and lay claim to what is under our feet.

But stop whining about it. It isn’t going to change. If you’re looking for a handout, perhaps you’ll get one but if you aren’t, just let it go already and move on.

Everybody knows what happened and its all water under the bridge. Nobody living in the U.S. now has ever owned a slave or oppressed an Indian. People like having a day of Thanksgiving and don't give a rat's patoot what the real origin of the day is.

This act is growing tiresome. Get a job!