Carnival

While the press regularly drags most celebrities about how they look without makeup, they have been surprisingly kind to Madonna about her unmade up photos.

I'm not personally aware of Madonna putting out workout videos like Cher or books about her diet. She did once say in some interview or in one of her self documentary movies she are mostly vegetables.

Can you implicitly trust absolutely EVERYTHING she says? No, of course not. No one is 100 percent honest 100 percent of the time and fame makes it more challenging to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in life instead of in court without that being some kind of train wreck waiting to happen.

But when Madonna plays the part the world expects all women to play of looking a certain way, it's not a straight up LIE. It's not a fabrication. It's not a situation where if you ran into her without her stage makeup and stage costume, and stood next to her in line at the grocery store, you couldn't possibly recognize her.

Most female stars are effectively LYING to you in every single publicity photo. They don't really look like that and they have sold their soul to look like that for five minutes or an hour in order to be perceived as beautiful by the world in part because it lines their pockets to rampantly LIE to you FOOLS.

I always speak frankly...I hate people who say can we speak frankly. It means they're BULLSHITTING me the rest of the time.

I would guess Madonna is probably more honest and ethical than average. She's also a self-made millionaire woman in a man's world, so she's probably not some Mother Theresa type and you should perhaps count your fingers after shaking hands with her because she swims with sharks and is still around.

Women making their money by promoting global beauty standards they can't really meet and beauty products likely to poison you aren't role models for how to live your best life. If you want to look beautiful without cosmetic surgery etc, Madonna probably still works out for up to 90 minutes a day. 

If you can fit that into your schedule, go you. But I wouldn't believe anything Kim Kardashian says.

Angelina Jolie probably wears wigs and these days she looks like a walking cadaver with a layer of makeup trying to cover it. As my mother once said post mastectomy without reconstructive surgery about a family friend who had liposuction and other cosmetic surgeries and was covered in scars because of it "So she only looks good in clothes. I still look good in clothes, too."

While relaxing at Jimmy Wah's, Cronauer is ushered outside by Tuan, saying that Trinh wants to see him. Moments later, the building explodes...

In Saigon, Tuan learns of the trip after Cronauer fails to show up for English class, and steals a van to go after them. After he finds them... Back at the base, Dickerson reveals to Cronauer that Tuan is a VC operative and the one responsible for the bombing...

That's from the Wikipedia article about the movie Good Morning, Vietnam. It doesn't mention the scene I've been looking for and can't find where Cronauer realizes on his own Tuan has to be a fairly high ranking VC operative because he's just driven Cronauer through multiple check points safely during an extremely dangerous time and in especially dangerous circumstances for a war that was a bad war compared to World War II.

Vietnam was so awful, a lot of guys were hardcore addicts while in Vietnam and stopped cold turkey on the flight back and never touched the stuff again without ever going through rehab. They just didn't need the drugs anymore, having left hell on Earth.

That's the essence of what I do. I look at what's happening and draw my own conclusions about people and what's really going on. Tuan was nominally a poor harmless kid and it didn't fit the stuff he pulled off repeatedly and consistently.

I was suspicious of him from the moment the bomb went off "coincidentally" right after he walked Cronauer out of the bar where it went off. I'm not a big believer in wild coincidence, though I'm fond of stories that seem to be about exactly that.

Supposedly, some building blew up because of a defective boiler or something and it should have killed a bunch of people but coincidentally everyone was late for the meeting for some reason. I look at that and wonder if people smelled something or whatever and all lollygagged for reasons they weren't consciously aware of, though the law of large numbers says you will inevitably see statistical outliers occasionally.

I am genuinely baffled by the world buying the bullshit of so many people, such as female stars who aren't actually especially pretty and it's all an illusion while a lot of women make themselves miserable trying to look like the images in movies and magazines.

During my divorce, inexperienced men compared me to movies and magazines and found me lacking. Experienced men compared me to women they had been with in the flesh and felt I compared favorably to most women.

But I'm not viewed as a role model and cannot get traction for my work because unlike Madonna, I can't play the game and put on the makeup etc. on top of what I look like without it.

Because I have a genetic disorder. And I value my health.

Have I been blind, have I been lost inside

Myself and my own mind?

Hypnotized, mesmerized

By what my eyes have seen?

And most people seem disinterested in waking up from it.

My father was a high school drop out who taught ROTC at a college for a time because he was the only guy in the battalion with all the military schools they wanted. He was extremely cynical about college education and didn't see military schools in the same way, I guess.

He used to say "He's got a BS. You know what that stands for. And MS means More of the Same. PhD means Piled Higher and Deeper."

I don't know how to make my life work in a world that seems so disinterested in dealing with reality. And I fear the mirage so many people chase so enthusiastically is killing this world.

Because we know how to fix a lot of issues, such as human caused climate change. We just aren't doing it.