Truth vs Theory

I am on the cusp of becoming a senior senior.  Right now, I am a junior senior.  I don’t mean to confuse you by using the senior word twice in a row, but I need to explain that I have been a senior for quite some time, but when you turn 75, you become a senior senior.  Being a junior senior though still has its perks, i.e., a monthly Social Security deposit in an undisclosed offshore Swiss bank account that is unknown to all living matter, except for me and a dark, mysterious Italian consiglieri, that I have never met by the name of Vinnie Vino.  He is my social security for my Social Security.  You need to understand, when you end up going the senior senior route, your whole life changes.  There are some changes you plan for and can control, but the vast majority of them end up controlling you and they can be pretty messy.  Hmm, not sure if a mess can be described as pretty.  So what does all of this have to do with politics?  Probably nothing, but I thought I would bring up old age since my subject for today’s lesson boy’s and girl’s is tolerance and in what area should tolerance be used to navigate your way through, besides music and religion?  Yes, of course, politics!

It is said that the older you become, the more you tolerate.  I’m not completely sold on that as I remember a lot of old farts that were intolerable when I was a kid.  When you are a youngin in single digits, the generation before you seemed ancient and the generation before them were fossils.  For me now, old people are in their 80’s, but I’m sure that too, shall change.  As for tolerance, it is difficult at any age.  The times we are living in now have become increasingly more intolerable on a daily basis, i.e., politics and the news media.  It seems as if those two entities have become interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives.  I know I already mentioned that I was totally giving up on Fox News, but it wouldn’t be fair to them given today’s lecture.  I scoped out every media outlet and picked out two articles about the same thing, but different.  The first one was a shoo-in on account of Edward R. Murrow was in the headline.  It seems that NBC Nightly News anchor, Lester Holt, has won the Edward R. Murrow Award for his lifetime achievement in journalism.  Anyone who is mentioned in the same sentence as Edward R. Murrow will automatically receive my admiration.  In his speech, he talked about the difficulty in reporting truth in news given today’s scenario of conspiracy theories and misinformation.  I agree, trying to cut through all that window dressing to get to the basic truth is a chore.  I surely congratulate him on his achievement as it would be something I would aspire to be recognized for in my humorous journalistic diatribes.  Heck, I’d be satisfied with the Alfred E. Neuman Award for Superfluous Script.  The 2nd media outlet was, of course, Fox News and their denigration of this year’s recipient and his left-leaning tendencies.  Okay, let’s cut through that window dressing I was talking about earlier and call it what it is.  First off, NBC and its affiliates are News Outlets.  Fox News is a misnomer, they are designed for entertainment purposes only.  Also from 2009 - 2017, 20 NBC journalists have won Edward R. Morrow awards in that 9 year period.  I googled to get a list of Murrow award recipients for Fox News and this was the result:  “Fox News has never won any award, of any kind, for journalism, at least since Murdoch took over in the late eighties.”  Hmm....there you have it, no contest and case closed, which means we have to continue to tolerate Fox News.  The thing to remember here is, “tolerance for the truth, not theory.”  Stay tuned…..!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The McGrinch That Stole Your Stimulus

I disagreed with my wife just now, something that I never do, since the repercussions are quite disturbing.  Here’s what went down.  She stated that Mitch McConnell can’t stoop any lower into the depravity he wallows in.  I stood tall, took a deep breath, looked her right in the eye and spewed out “Yes he can!”  It was a moment frozen in time and then she smiled.   No systematic repercussions followed.  Whew!  Now, as a politician, he has a certain inalienable right to say one thing and mean another, or to talk out of two sides of his mouth, but Mitcheroo, has the extraneous ability to talk out of two faces.  Unfortunately, those two faces resemble both Scrooge and The Grinch.  Isn’t it easy for someone with a net worth of $22,200,000 to stand at a podium in the hallowed halls of Congress and object to raising the stimulus check amount from $600.00 to $2,000.00?  Then there’s Pat Toomey, R-Pennsylvania, who said there are too many citize...
Read more

Uncommon Failure

Okay, I’ll let you all be the judge and jury of the following statement that I came across that was buried in the dark corners of the internet where I usually find my strange and highly unusual articles of confoundation.  This is a Los Angeles Times letter to the editor ( https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-04-12/huntington-beach-ku-klux-klan ) about the “burb” of Huntington Beach.  Headline: “Common ground with the Ku Klux Klan?  Huntington Beach has a problem.”  The letter starts off with, “As Huntington Beach was preparing for a Ku Klux Klan rally and, in response, a Black Lives Matter counter protest, police department spokesman Lt. Brian Smith said,” now here’s the kicker, “We hope that they can utilize events like this as a means to find the common ground and work together for the common goal.”  ???  I thought I would substitute the usual WTF that usually follows an incredulous statement like that with question marks.  I never pass up the ...
Read more

The New Cult

Past cult leaders the likes of Sun Myung Moon, David Koresh and Jim Jones, exemplary role models for “Moonies”, “Davidians” and “Peoples Templers” are said to have had a charismatic  gift of gab and were able to ensnarl a whole slew of followers into their realm.  They, of course, have since passed into the great beyond.  Moon was 92 when he died of pneumonia, Korish was 33 when he and his zealots died with guns blazing and Jones 47, died with his lemmings from a bad dose of kool-aid.  There was a rumor going around that his last words were, “Hey, did someone spike this stuff!”   Like Stalin, Hitler and Atilla the Hun, these folks had the innate ability to sway the masses.  To this day, I still can’t figure out how.  I was more enamored with garden slugs than those “coots.”  Nowadays, we have a new malady in our midst, an anomaly if you will, who not only doesn’t have a gift of gab, but cannot even enunciate words correctly, uses alternative facts...
Read more