"Bliss Babe" is a very slick local hómàge to Vogue and Vanity Fair.

Self-positioned as 'the premier women's lifestyle magazine for Nevada and California," BB is available at upscale public accommodations not frequented by the likes of me.

The current edition's cover story promotes "Beauty, Body and Bliss" complete with naked local ladies demonstrating what readers can become with proper diet, exercise and visualization. It's 14 pages of artsy black-and-white entitled "Function, Form and Bliss Body Positive."

Zounds. Another outbreak of the power of positive thinking.

Writer Meghan Ochs is one of 10, aged 29 to 49, who bare almost all in illustrating appealing paeans to empowerment. (Several recount a life-altering event.)

Ms. Ochs captions each photo with new-agey buzz. The magic word "positive" pops up like sugary sprinkles on doughnuts.

All the comely participants are slim and trim. If this is supposed to be empowerment and they are so courageous, why not go all the way? What's so repulsive about nipples and wisps of secret hair? Must everything tangential to babies remain taboo? Several women to whom I've shown BB consider the article egregious.

There's nothing wrong with positive thinking as suggestion, but not obsession.

Positive thinking was pioneered in the 19th Century by the founders of Christian Science, the faith-healing religion. It boils down to "wishing will make it so."

It has become the mantra of conservative corporate America. If you get sick, lose your job or go broke, it's all your fault because your mind ain't right, so change your negative attitude.

"Positive thinking has made us a blame-the-victim nation, perfect for the likes of morally obtuse presidents," I wrote last year. "Bush the Lesser banned bad news from security briefings, according to former National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice." (Barbwire 3-7-2017)

So reported Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich in "Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America." She wrote her bestseller by surviving both breast cancer and think-yourself-well pinkness. She suggests critical thinking instead.

Her 2009 masterpiece details how psychobabble groupthink greased the skids for recession. Ask anybody on Wall Street. Stocks never go down.

Bliss Babe asserts that with proper diet, exercise (and perhaps a little elective surgery), you too can look like Danyelle Sargent Musselman, 40, wife of UNR's basketball coach.

Megan Spodobalski, 48, runs a fitness gym and was one of seven finalists for Reno Gazette-Journal Citizen of the Year. (She lost to Sparks' answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mayor Geno Martini.)

Ironically, BB ignored perhaps the most important part of Ms. Spodobalski's impressive resumé: the Breast Cancer 2 Bikini program, "designed to build both fitness and confidence levels in breast cancer survivors," the RGJ noted.

The six-month regimen became a 2016 documentary featuring buff bikini-clad survivors presented by KTVN TV-2 news anchor Kristen Remington, a body builder like Ms. Spodobalski.

The bikini show participants share a common trait with the Bliss Babes: Barbiesqueness.

BB publisher Leslie McCarroll praises her subjects as courageous just because they "bared their soul and allowed themselves to be vulnerable in order to tell their story and empower women and men to love their bodies."

So why cover up their family parts? Why not bravely go full-commando without the cammo?

Where are non-Barbiesque survivors? A smaller article in the same edition depicts red-dressed ladies of much broader ages, shapes and sizes commemorating Heart Health Awareness Month.

What about young girls propagandized to perversely pursue skinny supermodel silhouettes? That's the gateway to anorexia.

McCarroll should drop Vogue and read Ms. which has accepted no advertising since major cosmetic companies cancelled when the magazine featured Russian women doctors displaying the wrong type of nudity: no makeup.

The slightly-clad Bliss Babes enjoyed the services of professional cosmeticians before demurely disrobing.

START THE CURE. I attended the 2014 memorial service of 24 year-old anorexia victim Callie Hutson who could not find adequate care in northern Nevada. By the time her family sent her to Denver, it was too late.

I mentioned her to retired Reno top-gun lawyer Robert Hager who recently produced an hourlong documentary about the daughter he lost to self-starvation, "Love, Chantal."

Perhaps we can use it to kick-start a Nevada advocacy organization to demand better care for victims of the Barbie affliction.

Perhaps Bliss Babe and Channel 2 will run stories.

Web Extras —> The Building and Construction Trades Council of Northern Nevada/AFL-CIO will roast Sparks labor leader Todd Koch into retirement at ToddBQ '18 on February 24. I'm editing the commemorative program and need choice insults about the man I first met many years ago when he was young, handsome and promising. Alas, Todd today stands 0-for-3. Send entries to me. Hurry. Time is tight.

César Chávez XVI happens on the great man's 91st birthday on March 31. Ticket/table/sponsor info for César XVI may be accessed via the Barbwire expanded web edition at Barbwire.US/ —> Hurry.

Smoking Guns—>
Mississippi West 2018: Sexy moral depravity abides
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-31-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications
Awards season: bad bids, bad hits and bad attitudes
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-24-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications
Terrorism in the Nevada outback
Bizarro R Us: Win bar bets predicting the 51st state
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-17-2018 Sparks Tribune and affiliated publications
The spirits of MLK and Bull Connor live right here
Barbwire by Andrew Barbáno / Expanded from the 1-10-2018 Sparks Tribune
Lyon/Yerington Racism Archive. Unjoy.

ANTE INTO THE GAME: Support the new season of Barbwire.TV by putting your money where my mouth is.

  A thousand thanks to those who keep sending show suggestions.

  Stay tuned.

  I encourage you to donate to the cause at Barbwire.TV/ The medium that shapes public opinion needs at least one refuge where it is not filtered through the distorted green eye shades of prissy corporate accountants for whom profit is the only priority; where self-censorship is the journalist's normal work environment and where all sins of omission are tacitly encouraged and forgiven with the wave of a balance sheet.

  This is important. We've got a lot of work to do.

END OF TIMES SURVIVAL KIT. Defend yourself with humorous or humorless but always-peerless pontification by subscribing to the Barbwire Confidential News Service. Scandalous bonuses for new subscribers.

Hush Hush!

Last year's dark foreshadowings unfortunately became reality. I thus suggest inoculation by signing onto the HushHush! list at BallotBoxing.US/ It's cheap as well as enlightening entertainment. I suggest coming aboard now. Subscription prices go up soon. Thank you kindly for your support.

Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno. (Pardon my Spanglish.)