TV News LIES

There must be a rule somewhere that says everything in life must be stranger and more complicated than it really needs to be.

If there is such an ancient edict handed down through the ages, like an amulet that we can't shed, one that's still mysteriously holding sway over us, then our days suddenly go from inexplicable to predictable.

Sometimes The Curse, or whatever, has a sense of humor.  Other times it is as likely to trip you on the way by as it is to sneer and growl at you, no longer playfully waggling its fingers, its thumb parked on its nose.

A leading human rights group on Friday accused Israel of violating the laws of war when it killed 12 civilians in an airstrike during its recent conflict with Palestinian militants in Gaza. Israel's army countered that Palestinian militants were to blame for hiding in civilian buildings.

Israel launched its air assault on Gaza last month to try to stop frequent rocket barrages at southern Israel. The conflict ended after eight days with an Egyptian-brokered truce.

Makes perfect sense to me: These petty fools have had way too much moonshine.

How else to explain the nation's rapid slide down the sharply-razored bannister, right into a pool of iodine, then sloughed off into a slag heap, Congress able to agree only on one small thing -- banishing one word from all legislation?
Lunatics.

Yes, the House of Representatives yesterday voted 398 to 1 to strike the word from all legislation.  The Senate did the same back in May.  It's an effort to tip one's hat and nod more politely at mental illness -- a noble and politically-correct act.

Located about 45 miles south of Baton Rouge, Assumption Parish carries all the charms and curses of southern Louisiana. Networks of bayous, dotted with trees heavy with Spanish moss, connect with the Mississippi River as it slowly ambles toward the Gulf of Mexico. Fishermen and farmers make their homes there, and so does the oil and gas industry, which has woven its own network of wells, pipelines and processing facilities across the lowland landscape.

The first sign of the oncoming disaster was the mysterious appearance of bubbles in the bayous in the spring of 2012. For months the residents of a rural community in Assumption Parish wondered why the waters seemed to be boiling in certain spots as they navigated the bayous in their fishing boats.

Kari: You've been called the new Rachel Carson and a poet with a knife. In 1962, Carson wrote Silent Spring, which has been credited for helping to spark the modern environmental movement with its warnings of the dangers of pesticides.

Fifty years later, the dangers of toxic chemicals, and particularly their health effects on kids, is still an issue and one that you address in your book, Raising Elijah. Why are there dangerous chemicals still on the market? What is broken and how can we fix it?

My father, a psychiatrist whose practice focused on the severely mentally ill, used to say, "Well, schizophrenia is better than no phrenia," and, "In poker, a paranoid always beats one of a noid." He also pioneered the subspecialty of forensic psychiatry, before it had a name, in that he was often asked as an expert witness to evaluate psychopaths and the competency of criminals to stand trial.

Not all criminals are psychopaths, and certainly not all psychopaths have violated the law. Serious mental illnesses are family tragedies not to be trivialized. But in ruminating about a post-election America, I've been struck by how large portions of the country are mired in schizophrenic distortions of reality and how prominent business leaders and politicians overtly display personality traits common to psychopaths. Vestiges of widespread mental illness abound.

Any quick sprint to round up news is getting tougher all the time -- the media insists on keeping us all tangled up in kudzu, stuffed full of manure, and kept in the dark.  It's nearly enough to make one reach for the Roundup.  (Here, we'll get sidetracked right away,  to help give you an immediate flavor of the razor-sharp focus of the rest to come.)

So, um, why do the Scotts Miracle-Gro people have such a fixation on death?  One look at their website is a cross between promises of horrific, hair-blazing nuclear Armageddon and folksy, trail-blazing, shucks-M'am, old-West wanted posters.

Anti-fracking activists delayed the start of the Boulder County commissioners' Tuesday afternoon meeting on oil and gas regulations for nearly half an hour, chanting their opposition to that drilling technique and demanding the commissioners resign if they won't ban hydraulic fracturing in unincorporated Boulder County.

Among those reading loudly from prepared scripts was a pair of school children, one of whom said, "We are standing up for our future ... Protect us from the dangers of fracking."