HOW PROPAGANDA WORKS

DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU THINK YOU SEE

I am completely done with the television program 'The Biggest Loser' for good. Another former contestant has come out and spoke on some of the practices that are used on the show, and those practices don't skirt ethics... THEY ARE UNETHICAL. The show claims to be about teaching people how to safely lose weight and improve their health. But a few seasons ago, they started super-sizing their contestants and driving them harder.

In my 'A Friend...' blog, I spoke about my own disillusionment regarding the program and the new program associated with the franchise, 'Losing It' with Jillian Michaels'. All that I know about healthy weight loss and realistic expectations from it, tells me that the show defies reality.

While I will save my fitness and health stuff for the other blog, the way that the show manipulates the viewers is what I am ranting on here. This isn't something that is new, questioning the results of the show. As a cat who competed in a sport where your weight matters, I made a different choice when I would 'grow out' of a weight class. I thought it would be better for me competitively to move to the next higher class and become as fit as I can instead of struggling to maintain a false weight. Seems to me to have been a great choice, cosmetically. Cats that I knew who were smaller than me have ballooned up and are heavier and fatter than I am. I think that is from straining to stay small for so long.

INTO THE LOOKING GLASS AND DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Now I have other things going on in my head that eventually I will get to. Saw some great entertainment on the telly last week, Glen Close and Harry Connick in 'South Pacific'. Then I borrowed some DVD's from the library that I really enjoyed, 'Zombieland', 'Batman Begins' (finally... I know, right?), the gem which was '500 Days of Summer'. They aren't going to be reviews as much as I am going to pick thru and try to superimpose them over related events in my life. This latest controversy about 'TBL' and my recent mutterings about 'the conspiracy' demands that I address it for my own mental stability. And for me, that is a true statement.

I don't know what I am going to do about 'seeing' in-between things when I go to Nebraska... Omaha has its own sets of social issues, some of them that Nebraska and I have hinted around that we will 'agree to disagree' on. Yeah, I claim an open mind but there are a few things that I won't ever budge on, at least as long as I am 'driving the car' that is my own conscious.

Life itself is 'a conspiracy'. Everything has to operate within certain boundaries and involutarily cooperates with other organisms to create the biosphere. I figure that is what 'survival of the fittest' is about. The questions of man's place in the biosphere isn't what I want to debate, but how man operates within HIS own place in the biosphere with and among other men.

Fremont, Nebraska apparently thinks that after Arizona, the is no worse place for illegal immigration. There are a couple of big meat processing plants there and I am going to reach and say that a lot of hispanics find their way to some of the jobs in them.

My thing is this; if the plants were paying wages and providing conditions that would sustain the workforce, then wouldn't more people fill those openings? Maybe with a unemployment rate (I don't know what this means... employment statistics are like marriage/divorce statistics, another tool of media propaganda) of 4.9%, maybe there isn't enough folks who are available to work those jobs?

I don't think that a consequence of not being able to meet the demand would result in higher food prices... the market wouldn't support the added price increases. So the industry has to do something and I wonder if they are paying folks less than median wages to work there. Then there is a question about the working conditions. Before I got to Carolina proper, there was this criminally negligent fire that after being there and seeing the town for myself, that I think that it was people taking advantage of 'the tired and the poor', making them work in horrible conditions for barely enough money to live on.

Now if that is how 'business is done' in the Nebraska meat processing plants, then I wonder if the folks who are pressing for the new immagration laws are aware of what is going on? And if they are meeting all the safety and pay standards that a business should, then is the meat processor plants the ones who 'wink and nod' at the applicants who travel a great distance to work there?

WHEW!!

Prejudice and bias of any kind really irks me. As a fellow human being, I know that I can give you the opportunity not to like you without the illogical and self-defeating addition of any kind of 'ism' to the mix. Like Forrest Momma told him... 'stupid is as stupid does', and most people will prove themselves to be just that if you let them.

Sorry about the folks who legitimately believe in the Tea Bag politcal movement. I don't see their platform being anything more that trumped up racism under the cover of thinly veiled ignorance and misunderstanding. Anywho, I will get back to 'what's what', because THAT is getting confusing as the countdown begins!!