The Media Circus and Us Watching Clowns | Eastern North Carolina Now

    We seem to be like little kids these days obsessing over entertainment more than understanding. This article states is well from all sides with plenty of links to prove their point:

    The author takes on both sides of the political equation in adjoining paragraphs:

    The downside of storified self-government, and of experiencing pretty much everything else as entertainment, too, is that we relinquish our grip on reality. In a series of 36 tweets (the perfect vehicle for such an argument), Grist.org columnist David Roberts, writing about the Supreme Court's decision to hear a potentially fatal challenge to the Affordable Care Act – a case whose only conceivable basis is a typographical error in the law – calls this "postmodern conservatism." The right's "nihilistic oppositionalism," he says, makes its own reality. They have "realized that if you just brazen it out, there's no... ref to make the call. In this way, every dispute, even over matters of fact, becomes a contest of power – loudest, best funded, most persistent voices win.... Epistemology becomes competing tantrums.... So there will only be increasing impetus for [conservatives] to retreat into fantasy, into simple morality tales... [which] always yield more motivated, organized constituencies than 'it's complicated' ever will."

    Conservatives, of course, accuse the left of worse than fantasy. The title of a book by James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican about to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, depicts it as deceit: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. But all he's really doing is reframing the left's strategy – to inform voters about scientific data – as the plot of an airport thriller. . .

    It might just be a good time to see what idiots we can make of ourselves over constant "Tempests in a Teapot." It keeps us from asking questions about what is being spent of our tax money on war / why we let a bunch of over-paid and over-staffed Congress people get wined and dined by the rich and powerful

    and retire to a better benefit package than any of us taxpayers could ever imagine! Unlike the real world, they get rich DOING NOTHING BUT PRETENDING!

    I think it was State Senator Bill Cook who admitted the camera footage from our NC Legislature shows the battle of debates, yet never shows how the Legislative Hill folks walk arm-in-arm to enjoy a good dinner together at some expensive Restaurant. Wise citizens would be far more observant of things NC than things DC, in my view.

    Would that the Beaufort County Commissioners might do the same! The hate and difference of opinions I have observed seems unrelenting to me! I suggest these new Commission Members do 3 things immediately during and after their next meeting:

    1. Let the people we hire to study matters like the Jail/Law Enforcement Center do their job to bring back specifics on which they CAN act.

    2. Go spend a few nights in the current jail and see if it's as dangerous as I know it to be. If those heart pine timbers over the inmates caught fire, it would not be put out as prisoners screamed in agony of roasting and drowned in the basement as water put on it rises to drown any who survive the cooking.

    3. It is something we must pay to correct so let us vote on the matter ASAP!

    The people of Beaufort County are not people who enjoy prisoners in a bad place or a Law Enforcement Center in a remote corner of a big county. If the Chocowinity Industrial Park is the best location, then be prepared to build a place for the Sheriff's Office to easily reach Belhaven and the other end of the county as well!

    All problems can be solved when people of good will think and discuss them with wisdom. I am more than tired of the big show going on at each meeting. The times I view it when visiting my daughter in Washington and on the local government channel

    I want to puke and refuse to pay ANY property taxes over the wasted time and money of this local "Cartoon Network."