TV News LIES

Newt Gingrich crawled onto Fox last Thursday evening and proclaimed to his boy-toy Sean Hannity that he had lost his fucking mind by saying, "Western civilization is in a war, We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported. Our forces should be used to systematically destroy every Internet based source, and frankly if we can't destroy them through the Internet, we should destroy them with kinetic power using various weapons starting with predators and frankly just killing them.”

Not to be out-crazied, Bill O'Reilly and Donald Trump agreed that it's not just isolated ISIS attacks anymore because “we” are now in a World War.

The saying, What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is the condensed version of:

Every year people go to Las Vegas, and the billions of dollars they lose gambling … stays in Vegas.

The house has a built in advantage on all the games. The gambler who plays long enough … will lose. The Smart Gambler plays the games with the smallest House Edge like Baccarat or Craps. The Idiot Gambler goes straight to Keno or the slot machines. But lowering the odds doesn't mean you are going to win. It just means you might win some of the time, but overall you'll lose more slowly.

For anyone driving through the American countryside before 1963 there was a good chance they'd see a series of six signs spaced along the side of the road written to entertain and promote the sale of Burma Shave “brushless” shaving cream.

Here's one of the last set of signs from 53 years ago:

We don't

Know how

To split an atom

But as to whiskers

Let us at 'em

Burma Shave

The Burma-Vita company's original product was a liniment made of ingredients described as having come from "The Malay Peninsula and Burma." Sales were poor until the company hit upon the road sign advertising gimmick, and at its peak, Burma-Shave was the second-highest-selling brushless shaving cream in the United States. But now those quaint little signs of Americana are as dead as Dodo Birds.

Shock. Sadness. Grief for the families and victims. These are my first reactions to reports of yet another mass shooting in the US. My second reaction is to scan the reports for a particular sentence. And I always find it.

‘The gunman was armed with an assault rifle, an AR-15.’ It’s a phrase that seems to follow mass shootings in the US in recent times. Legally purchased military style assault weapons are widely proliferated throughout the suburbs of many states in America.

47 years ago I bailed out of a Medieval English Literature class just in time and took a Modern Satire class instead. I knew I'd get an easy “A” because how hard could it be? Read a couple of books, answer questions about the books I'd just read, and then I'd maintain a high grade average.

Guys that didn't keep their grades up were destined to become soldiers instead of students. Without a high enough grade point average it could get pretty drafty going to college in those days.

The best book I've read in quite a while is a nonexistent one called Scorched-Earth Realpolitik Cookbook:  Cajun-Style Political Elexting and Black-Eyed Peace for the Rest of Us, by Pfisher Pranx, a renowned, well-respected, award-winning author whom I made up only a few seconds ago, while typing this sentence.

The alternate title of the book, I just now realized, is:  Or: 183,429 Better Ways to Elect a President.

This fictitious book is from Keisterville Publishing, a company which fails to pass the real-company sniff test.