News and Headline tidbits. . . or not

I was going to do a headlines post today, but ya know, the headlines are nothing but a tangled mass of human waste. Maybe it’s just my ADD, but it seems to me that there is just an overwhelming amount of bullshit going on in the world with nothing of any significance occurring. Henry David Thoreau said that once you’ve read one headline, seen one train wreck or one ship wreck, you’ve seen them all and there’s no sense in wasting your time watching. Consider for just a minute that he may have been right back there in 1859 when he was penning the monumental work “Walden.” Do we really need this nonstop barrage of headlines and exclamatory video streaming into our houses telling us of the latest disaster and what we should all be afraid of next? Could it be that we are being scammed?

Let’s look at reality. In Utah, a mine collapsed killing six miners (I know, they’re still trying to get them out alive, but we’re being realistic here). Then, three more were killed yesterday trying to rescue the first six who were already dead. Sounds like somebody fucked up to me. So what? There is nothing I or any other of the 100 million households in the USA who have the live streaming video piped into their houses on a continuous basis from five full time cable news networks can do about it. Are we supposed to sit in front of our televisions and watch with out fists clamped and sweaty brows in one big nationwide prayer meeting? Will that bring them all back alive and resurrect the dead?

How about this NASA Shuttle drama? Will the gouge in the heat shield keep out the hot plasma that envelops every object tearing its way into and through the Earths atmosphere? The NASA engineers (well, some of them at least) say “yes, we don’t need to fix it.” It took them days to come to that conclusion and there are a number of engineers who say they do need to fix it. With that kind of doubt, why not fix it? The reason they give is that space walking is too dangerous. Listen up, astronauts and cosmonauts have been walking in space for over 40 years now. Alexi Leonev was the first, followed by a fellow named Ed White, then Eugene Cernan, then Buzz Aldrin then. probably a hundred or so others from Gemini till now. There ought to be a fairly good knowledge base of how to do work in space. Is it really THAT big a deal?
This past week NASA cut short a space walk because one of the astros noticed a small tear in the outer covering of his glove. WTF?! Gene Cernan had a big hole in the back of his space suit on Gemini 9. He sure didn’t cut short his time outside the space craft even though he was pioneering the procedure, was physically exhausted and overheated with his heart pounding out of his chest in stroke conditions with a face plate totally fogged over. Who are these wimpy little astronauts they’re sending up today?
But back to the real story. . . will the shuttle come apart due to leaks in the heat shield because NASA decided NOT to fix it while in orbit? Probably not, but excuse me if I pass on watching the reentry on TV. You see, I’ve seen one shuttle explode and another come apart during reentry because some group of engineers at NAA decided everything was A-OK and I really don’t want to witness another horrendous tragedy. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch a replay later in the day of a successful landing a the Cape, but just in case these 21st Century NASA engineers are wrong I think I’ll pass.

How bout the latest economic outlook? If that aint enough to make you want to pack away a years worth of groceries from your local LDS supplier, dig a big hole in the back of the cellar, start laying up a concrete perimeter and store a few thousand rounds of high powered rifle ammunition, I don’t know what is. Our economy is being held up by a few tiny golden threads and one of the more important of them is being held by the Chinese which led one cable news talking head to proclaim that China is our best economic friend and they need to send us toys spiked with lead and food that is poisoned. Their economy depends upon it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to keep buying our debt. So the next time your kid is playing with some Mattel toy made in China, you stick a brush full of Chinese toothpaste in your mouth or your dog is eating food with fillers from China, think about how they are our friend and we need to support their economy by ingesting and exposing our children to their poison products.

Have I digressed? Did I miss the mark of my original intent. Oh well, that’s about par for the course in my world. I get distracted easily.
Here, let me try and rescue myself from my distraction and get back to the original intent of my post:
The endless stream of news you sit and watch on CNN, MSNBC, Faux. . . I mean FoxNews or my favorite, CNBC (Cable News Babe Channel) is all a bunch of BULLSHIT.
There. Everybody understand now?

Y’all have a great weekend. Start by not bothering yourself with watching “the news.”