News

I consider the television news as trash dumped into your living room every night.  The garbage of the many countries conglomerated and reduced to a neat little package of shit dumped right in front of your dinner to discourge and delate you... to rile you to actions you cannot take, to anger that deminishes you...reduces your ability to see the good in anyone.  A prejudiced bunch of trash that smells of the worst sort of corporate self serving propaganda.  Head the list with the many little picture slogans on Facebook.  We are sheep.

And it doesn't matter which side we are on. We have choices between those who spew hate to the left, and those who spit the same animosity back to the right. They don't report news, they put on staged performances - it's all about the advertisers and the ratings.

10/23/2013

                          ...... .......Cheers..Joe..

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
— Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

Do you wake on Sunday mornings feeling bright and cheerful before you step out to buy your favourite Sunday newspapers, and spend the next four hours reading the print off the page? Does this weekly ritual result in a change of temperament – signs of irritability, aggressiveness and a distinctly argumentative frame of mind? I do. To be more accurate, I did. Everyone around me suffered from my inability to avoid the very thing that caused the Jekyll and Hyde mood swings. The news items didn’t affect me much, but the journalists with a point to make were my Achilles’ heel. To a man and a woman, I disagreed with all of them. We were as black and white to each other as the printed page before me. There was no grey area, no common ground and no compromise.

How could there be compromise in a situation where they wrote and I read? In order to see one another’s point of view, I would need to explain mine. To inflict regularly my own half-baked ideas on my family would have been unfair, and yet they probably suffered more from my silent fuming than they did if I succumbed to soap box outbursts.

The more thoughts I kept to myself, the greater the irritation, but at least I did eventually begin to recognise all the symptoms of Sunday paperitis.

The Power of Persuasion Chapter One: Persuasion by Shelagh Watkins © 2008

I get my news by reading the magazines in the doctor's office. I was there today. Did you know that Nixon resigned?

 

See how smart you all are?  Shelagh, if I never told you before, you have a beutiful mind. 

Al, Nixon resigned?  I found a Texas Blue Bonnet growing in one of the hydro stacks today.  It must have been 5 years or more since I planted those seeds.  It shows the perseverance of the Democratic flowers.   God bless Texas> 
Love,
Betty

Here's a whole field to share with everyone.

10/23/2013

                       Al...

                              I have never laughed so hard in my life ! Nixon really resigned ?
                              Oh yes I was in my Dr.'s office yesterday and all they had was
                              baby books on pregnancy and new babies, I told the secretary
                              seniors aren't interested in baby stuff , get some magazines
                              for us seniors....

                                                           Cheers..Joe.. 

                                                   Cheers..Joe...

alj wrote:

Here's a whole field to share with everyone.

Gorgeous!

You can tell by the magazines the patients they prefer or their interests.  Al, I had a pretty rough day - you made me laugh.  Thank you.

Al Stevens wrote:

I get my news by reading the magazines in the doctor's office. I was there today. Did you know that Nixon resigned?

  Love it!

What next?

First  they swear up and down that Obama care is ruining the country, then after shutting
down the country and costing us 24 billion dollars, they moan and groan because the website does not sign people up fast enough.

Hard to figure.

I have given up.

I listen to Rush Limbaugh and a couple others when I am driving the car.  The conspiratorial way they talk - like it's to only their simpatico best friends - is quite a talent.  Their use of every breath to turn it into a damning against everyone that is not ultra conservative as they define it is also talented. As a political science major in college, I know 90% of what they say about the "founding fathers" intentions and the constitution are malarkey.  But who believes those who study the past when they have their friend, "Rush" telling them the "real truth." 

Then I remember what I read that one of them said in an interview several years ago - that they did not live their personal lives according to what they preached on the radio - that they were actors with an audience that kept their ratings high and their advertising income high - so this was their job - not who they are.  Just as Richard Gere is not all the characters he plays.  Yet, from his acting, we get a feeling like we know him.  A friend of mine does.  He is an ordinary person living as quiet and common life as possible, just like any of us.

Unfortunately, there is a major difference.  We know Richard Gere is an actor.  The people who listen to the radio commentators do not seem to understand that these radio commentators are also actors, with a special talent to take their listeners into their web of "secrets" and special knowledge that is mostly without a foundation - just a running commentary that they put together with whatever fuel they can grasp and whatever is fed to them by their producers to get an emotional response from a gullible audience.

That's why they can change the tune and adjust to whatever gives them fodder to damn.  Listeners do not challenge them.  When they do, they stop the callers quickly and move on to the supportive ones.  The things these commentators say are mean-spirited and designed to create the same in their following, their audience, their bread and butter.  Allowing a steady stream of half-truths on the radio and out of context material is a new situation.  I was in radio.  At the time when radio stations competed, there were standards regarding what was said.  Now that all stations are owned by a few media tycoons, it seems they can say anything any time.

I remember when swearing on the radio was the end of a career.  Now they swear all the time, Rush particularly likes "damn." 

Enuf. It is what it is.

It's similar to the radio and television evangelists to whom elderly and desperate people sent their last dime to receive grace while the preachers lived in ostentatious excess and many with questionable morals because they could hide their behaviors but had the talent to sound spiritual.  There's not so much of that anymore thanks to mass communication on the Internet that pretty much "outed" the real thieves.