TV News LIES

Roughly 77 years ago, a move was made to help all Americans -- help especially to those who were older, unlucky, unfortunate, and underage, find a little optimism in their thin soup.

August 14, 1935:  President Franklin Roosevelt signed Social Security into law.  It has become one of the country's most successful insurance and retirement programs.

No matter what Republicans might say, these are not entitlements because people have paid premiums into the system, just as they would any other insurance or retirement program.

Willard Romney can't seem to make up his mind about which foot it is he prefers in his mouth, constantly trying one, then the other.

Running mate Paul Ryan can't stop shooting from the hip, shooting off his lip, fatally winging any chance he ever had to be taken seriously by any sane adult whose brains still work somewhat close to spec.

Between one man's random ricochets off mistruths, and the other's routine taste-testing of his own feet, this is one heckuva team, Brownie. It's just a matter of time before one of them panics, accidentally speaking truth, while the other finally accepts his limitations and hires out for more feet.

Why didn't I want one of those jazzy new pieces of technology that are so wonderful for everyone? Once I began to do research, I was horrified by what I found. Utility companies and TDSPs nationwide continue to insist those meters are safe. Utility companies and TDSPs nationwide have billions of dollars at stake here. Below are but a drop in the bucket for the more than 2,000 peer reviewed papers and writings by the best experts in the field worldwide.

Reality makes rubble of fiction.

Our implausible world can take almost any topic or subject, skewer it, spin it around in its rotisserie barbecue:  give it a few and, voila!  Everything goes out a nice, golden brown.

Just like Meals, Ready to Eat, or MREs -- field rations for military members in the familiar brown plastic packets, for example. The meals are popular with survivalists, campers, hunters, and others away from their ranges-in-home, let alone from antelope playing near the 'fridge.

Wiki tells us the U.S. government requires the following information be printed on each MRE case:  U.S. Government Property, Commercial Resale is Unlawful.

So, what's the implausibility here?  It's not true.

Sometimes, everything really IS rocket science. Even for NASA, nothing in life is a given, no matter how many successes, and no matter how high the zenith or how far the apogee.

Witness the crash of a moon lander in a recent test, an embarassing oops! after so many wins, the most recent -- and perhaps most extraordinary in some time -- the safe landing of the one-ton rover Curiosity on Mars.

For cosmic tire-kickers, NASA's Mars rovers were always special.  Then, Curiosity came along:  twice as long and five times heavier.  The mission was like shot-putting a Mini Cooper 352 million miles, then perfectly hitting an entry window to the planet -- a zone measuring about 3 by 19 kilometers, a microscopic target after that long a distance.

You hit the thin atmosphere at 13,200 miles an hour -- 3-point-7 miles per second -- a real need to slow down, fast:  enter friction and deployed heat shield, then 'chute, slowing from 900 miles an hour to 180 in just two minutes, then sky crane, to surface.