Magazines and Mom - a duty and a pleasure to stay informed

Today is Thrsday, August 4th, 2022, and the opening headline on all my uninvited electronic newsfeeds, by which I mean my yahoo e-mail account, and my cell phone, was Alex Jones and his many attempts through INFO-WARS to wriggle out of responsibilty for his actions as a spreader of scurrilus lies and the force that sent a tide of crazed fans to torment the grieving parents of the chidren saughtered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

On that date, 20 year old Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children aged 6 and 7 years old and six teachers at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. That tragedy was followed by an attack by Alex Jones via his filth spewing internet program, Info Wars, claiming that the shooting was a hoax, the parents were "crisis actors" and the whole thing was a plot to deprive Americans of their guns by inflaming the public. His legion of ill-informed and obviously disturbed fans bought into the lies he spread and several of them stalked, harrasssed, and threatened the grieving parents of the slain children.

Finally, several of the sets of parents took to the courts to stop Alex Jones from continuing his spew of deluded lies by suing him for slander and defamation. Jones immediately began to seek out ways to declare bankruptcy so he wouldn't have to pay the fines levied against him by the courts. The courts are now in the process of assigning the monetary damages.

First Jones tried to say he didn't say any of those lies, but evidence in the form of videos and recordings and text messages were produced that showed he knew he was lying and he did it to use the hysteria of his fans to promote his various 'snake oil' products which have so far made him millions in profits while it sickens his already sick fans. Along with his 'tonics' he sells survivalist gear, and military type protective armor.

Sadly, I have a relative who actually listens to him and believes him and dosed himself with some 'colloidal silver' concoction he bought until we had a family intervention and brought it to his attention that the skin of his face was turning purple and his nails were turing black. The Food and Drug Administration ordered Jones to stop selling these fake products and his array of products to kill the coronavirus (a blue toothpaste) none of which had any useful properties and many of which were also harmful

My nephew fell down the rabbit hole of Alex Jones conspiracy theory horror world and took his daughter with him. They both believe all the crap he spews, including his repetitive attack on all his detractors which consists of accusing them of being paedophiles and human traffickers. He was one of the instigators of the Pizza Gate idiocy that accused Hillary Clinton of running a child trafficking ring from a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. which eventuated in a gunman attacking and shooting up the place.

All through my childhood, our home had incoming magazines of many kinds: Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, National Geographic, House and Garden, Family Circle, Newsweek, and the daily Inquirer newspaper. My mother subsribed to all of these and I devoured them. We were well informed from a variety of sources - the newspaper, the magazines and the television news on the big three channels ABC, NBC, and CBS. Later, of course, we added PBS. My parents, both raised during the Depression, had gone to work in their teens and were not able to graduate from high school, nonetheless, they stayed well informed and they were self-educated.

So many working class and lower income homes today have no such investment in learning and they seem to slide into the warm and easy groove of getting all their information from facebook, on their cell phones, or internet sites. And even if they do get tv news, they tend to stick with the easy and scandal mongering FOX, owned by Rupert Murdoch, the pollution behind our own fouled information waters as well the the Fall of Britain into Brexit via Murdoch's take-over of their tabloid news media. He has been a mega-toxic pollutant in our time.

We are no longer an informed population, or rather I should say, too many are informed by one source and it isn't unbiased or in any way committed to the common good, but to the interests of oligarchs in our Capitalist society who use it to buy off the ignorant public, like the evil Donald Trump.

I have to honor my mother here for subscribing to those magazines and for supplying so many of the cultural tools that informed my youth and our whole family. She bought us book and both she and my father read the Readers Digest on subscription.

I have had to cut back on some of my subscriptions because unread magazines began to pile up in a basket by the sofa. I couldn't keep up. I had to let go of the SUnday New York Times as well because the print is too small for my diminishing eyesight. I have had to let go of Atlantic, Harpers, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, but I am keeping The Week (an international news magazine), Discover (science), Early American Life, and Archaeology. This, I think, is a well rounded set of reading materials that I may have a better chance of keeping up with.

Adding to this array, I also read some online bulletins from The Society of Friends, of which I am a member: Friends Journal on-line, and the Salem Quarterly e-bulletin, to which I also contribute book reviews and other items usually regarding environmental issues.

What's on your coffee table? Happy Trails, my friends

Jo Ann