”Hey, Ken, how do you get from shampoo to the media?”
    ”Be patient, my Dear Reader, be patient.”
    All my life I have used soap for my hair. I have super thin hair, and yes I know there are products that supposedly fatten hair up. Fatten up what is essentially dead cells. I have had no luck with that one: no matter what conditioner or shampoo I have tried the only thing getting fatter is me.
    Old age is a b….
    I am convinced, like Christmas, shampoo is a gimmick and we as consumers have been sold a bill of goods. BTW, why are we “sold a bill of goods?” Wouldn’t it be “Given a bill for nothing,” or “paying a bill for something useless,” or at least “bought bad goods through false advertising?”
    Maybe shampoo and conditioner are perfectly legit and my 70 year old hair should be falling out: despite being long, because 90% of the time I just use soap. The best, IMO, is Castile, which is coconut soap. Plenty of moisture, but can be washed off completely. Really good if you sweat a lot, which I used to do. Now I hardly sweat at all, but that’s another story.
    BTW, maybe you’ve had good luck with it, but I feel the same way about the Flex Tape and related products offered on those ads. Not ONE has ever worked as advertised for me.
    But this isn’t JUST about Flex Tape or shampoo. We are being conditioned to buy, and buy into, more than just conditioner.
    Some of this by the media: and I don’t just mean ads. Once news media was a service: objective, meant to inform far more than convince. Now it’s a “bill of goods” where our brains get coated, covered and slathered thick with toxicity. We are being conditioned to decide opinion via insult, framing… but I repeat myself. Why should I care if Donald Trump or Joe Biden call each other names? What, we expected compliments?
    Then we have how every election is razor thin close, even when they aren’t at the end.
    It’s all collectively an intentional attempt to distract from issues.
    The analogy here works, whether shampoo v. soap or media… OR politics. I don’t know about you, but if Prell tried to convince me to buy their shampoo by telling us nasty things about Suave I would buy NEITHER. Why is it so easy to “sell a bill of goods” to too many of us?
    Of course the corporate owned media loves it now news departments and entertainment departments are allowed to mix. Ever had someone try to get together with you via insults? Yeah, kind of like that. These days the media’s profit model is often all about toxic divisiveness and hate. Huge corporations can own candidates, parties, many different media sources. The whole thing reminds me of a prison/whore house where we are forced to be the inmates. Too often elections for the general public are like the old drop the soap scenario.
    We’re ALL getting screwed.
    Doesn’t help increasingly our votes are meaningless and the model for “winning” is jury rigging states to win the college, disregarding what citizens want.
    Remember, election time, like the marketing of ANY product, are always filled with at least a little hyperbole. Considering all the money we spend on taxes maybe we should get triple our money back?
    Do you really think, for whatever reason, our politicians or political-based media perform as well as even shampoo? At least shampoo actually makes us FEEL good instead of jack up the hate factor. Unless your only desire is purchasing hate, fear, bullies and a failed state, we are paying for close to the opposite of what we want.
    Meanwhile, we’re being conditioned to want the latest cellphones and stay on them all the time, block out family, friends, husbands, wives, kids, parents. What goes on there more important than watching the kids, crossing the street carefully, answers to questions that hardly matter. And how this ties into the rest is selective media means we don’t have to hear or read what Uncle Buck is saying, the other side on any issue, our pets run amuck, presidents, world leaders, the storm headed our way, THE CAR DRIVING THROUGH THE PARKING LOT OUR 4 YEAR OLD IS ABOUT TO WALK IN FRONT OF. I see people with a hypnotized glaze in their eyes. They’re in the zone, as they say… THEIR ZONE. And no zone that makes them uncomfortable.
    Like with exercise, nothing gets better without at least a littler discomfort.
    As a society we are being conditioned to demand anything BUT what makes us uncomfortable.
    And that kind of condition-er is both dangerous and toxic.

                                           -30-

    “Inspection” is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 50 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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