TV News LIES

For anyone who's feeling the all-at-sea aftereffects of celebratory intemperance, and find their orbital re-entry into this new year a heat-shield-melting experience, we promise to go slowly. Apply the forehead ice.  The soggy, greasy scudding along of a serious bout of intestinal crapulence today is instantly understood.

Everyone who wishes those darn butterflies would quit making all that rustling and flapping-around racket outside have our pity, not scorn.  We'll simply wrap our feet in couch cushions -- like enormous Bullwinkle slippers -- and promise to not increase your agony with tuba practice or making you read in all caps.

Today's Over-the-Cliff riddle, brought to you by our mutual sponsors at Brinkmanship-M-Us: What's filled with excrement and does whatever it's told by its owners?

(While we wait for everyone to use their allotted 30 seconds to make a guess, I'll wish you a happy, cross-your-fingers reboot, into another year, and hope this one works out and fires up cleanly this time.)  Ding!

OK, pencils down, everyone.  You'll be quickly forgiven if you said something on the order of "our bought and paid-for, corporately-owned Congress."  (Not to highlight a technicality too vividly, but corporations and absurdly wealthy individuals can both own politicians nowadays.  This is called Progress.)

Preliminary sales figures show a very low growth rate for retailers this Christmas season that is likely to be the lowest since 2008. It's not too hard to figure out why this is so, people are getting lower wages and so have less to spend despite increased consumer debt.

It's not that there isn't enough business activity, corporations are showing record profits and the rich are swimming in cash, they just keep it for themselves. In the old days, when cash hoarding really started to tank the economy, people called this occurrence a 'cash shortage'. Today economists call it a recession when it meets their arbitrary standards of decline.

Well, let's see how far we've come in the national discussion on guns, so far:  You've got NRA cheerleader and CEO Wayne LaPierre shooting off his mouth on talking head shows, saying a ban on high capacity weapons magazines will be done, basically, over his dead body.

If I were an unkind sort, I'd be sorely tempted to say, "Works for me."

Good thing I'm not -- I'm not even one of the grinches "making war" on Christmas, as religious believers usually phrase their accusations.

Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it, a study from the University of Oxford suggests. Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain.

But the effect on the pain experienced varied greatly, they said. The researchers' findings are published in the journal Pain. The Oxford researchers recruited 12 healthy men to take part in their small study.

This is another one of those pieces attempting to reconcile what we know of our culture and country, and still have it make some sense after another round of innocents have been slaughtered.

Just one more voice in the trying-to-be-OK choir and chorale, here, wondering how it is we had another place of learning and laughter turn into a one-sided OK Corral.

Many people are doing the same, to greater and lesser degrees of futility or utility.  Some people are so far past the deep end, they're wheeling out all the things they already hate, plugging in their old lists as legitimate new causes.