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Life Arts    H4'ed 12/28/12

The case of the hollow threat

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Do medical marijuana dispensaries also sell lava lamps?

The woman who said "I don't pay taxes; the little people do" may have inadvertently undercut the level of seriousness that some people will give to the looming prospect of a theoretically higher tax rate for the one percenters in return for giving them a chance to see how people addicted to consumerism handle austerity.   A thirty-nine percent tax rate that won't be paid does sound more devastating than an irrelevant thirty-five percent tax rate, doesn't it?  

Wasn't it established that Mitt Romney only pays about 15% in income tax?   If so, how serious of a threat would it be to tell him that if the USA goes off the financial cliff the theoretical rate he should be paying will be increased and life will get grim for the people who get government benefits.   Didn't he dub them the 47 percenters?

Wealthy folks (like Mitt), after the first of the year, will be able to turn on the evening news, tune in to the nightly images of misery and drop out of the ranks of caring Christians.   Those with cash register hearts will see going off the financial cliff as the starting gun for a race to exploit the rest of society in a time of hardship and suffering.   Wasn't there a Country song about chilling beers by holding it next to a cad's heart?   Did he get a job as a CBS TV reporter?  

Looking forward to an apocalyptic event that coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar because it would provide excellent material for use in a column may have been just a tad immature and illogical and now that it hasn't happened writing about how CBS Evening News has morphed from a televised version of the World News Roundup into a contest to see which reporter can be the first to get an interviewee to cry on camera seems a bit anticlimactic and mundane.   If you had a buck for every time a person cried on camera this week and next on the Evening News, would you have a fistful of dollars or not?

After walking away unscathed from a rendezvous with certain death, it seems concomitant upon this columnist to inject a high level of joie d'vivre into our attempts to ridicule the arena of politics and perhaps in an year when not even Congressional representatives have to face the rigors of reelection to just focus on the other aspects of contemporary pop culture that are fun to observe.

Isn't the yell that Wile E. Coyote gives when he goes sailing into the void a trademarked item that can't be used without getting permission from a movie studio's legal department?

When the fiscal cliff chapter of the political history of the USA started to unfold, didn't Nancy Pelosi reassured Americans that she would bring up a measure in the House that had passed in the Senate last summer and thus avert a crisis?   Did she forget her solution to the problem?   Do the mainstream media journalists consider it rude to remind her of her promise?  

How many skeptical commentators asked about how many Trevon Martin type incidents would occur in the schools if armed people are put in every school?   Is it realistic to expect that the armed guards will provide the law enforcement example of baseball's unassisted triple play with a Rambo reaction to a school shooter?  

If Fox News reported that its viewers were exceptionally well informed and that the concept of "the dumbing down of America" was part of a bogus Liberal conspiracy theory, and their viewers believed them; would that be an example of the Epimenides paradox?   Why is it that every time we hear the expression "I saw it on Fox News," we think of the title of Ross Thomas' mystery novel "The Fools in Town are on our side"?

Traditionally Ann Coulter used to use crazy talk to divert attention away from George W. Bush when the liberal criticism of him was getting intense.   Apparently the Republicans asked Wayne Lapierre to substitute for her recently when they wanted to turn a discussion on gun control into ideological gridlock.

When we heard of the investigation into the incident on TV that involved David Gregory holding up an extra capacity ammo clip, we were reminded of the time back in the Sixties when a New York City local news anchorman (Jeraldo Rivera?) was arrested on camera by someone dressed like a NYPD cop for holding up a roach (ie a marijuana cigarette) while he was on the air.   Who was that journalist?   What happened to that case?   Maybe if that on air personality is still serving time for that stunt, he can truly report that (for him) the Sixties still have consequences and aren't over yet.

On one episode of the popular Sixties TV series Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise was told that when the 21st century arrived massive land wars would be obsolete and that wars would be limited local struggles called Bush Wars.   Is that sound byte on Youtube?   If so we could write a column about that sometime during 2013.

If the World's Laziest Journalist is going to relegate politics in the USA to the back burner, we could concentrate on other topics.   We might even shift our tendency to post on early Friday morning (PST in the USA) to a different day and time.   Maybe that would permit more readers an opportunity to skim our offerings?  

Some cynics might suspect that a shift in emphasis away from politics to more of the "let the good times roll" reports might just be an excuse for this columnist to make the task of writing the columns more like an excuse to go out and have fun.   Watching a lava lamp and being inspired to write heavy philosophical think pieces might have been appropriate before the arrival of the last day on the Mayan Calendar, but now that we have cheated death isn't every sandwich going to be a treat?   Didn't a famous musician, after he learned he had a very serious health problem, advise people to "enjoy every sandwich!"?  

Perhaps we should write a column about the old movie serials where a Hero (such as The Shadow as played by Victor Jory in the 1940 serial series) shrugs off a brush with certain death and plunges ahead with life in next week's installment.   Will the saga of the post economic cliff America be a similar story line?

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BP graduated from college in the mid sixties (at the bottom of the class?) He told his draft board that Vietnam could be won without his participation. He is still appologizing for that mistake. He received his fist photo lesson from a future (more...)
 

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