A couple of Mount Dora news items, and if you have the time watch #11.....
1/ Matt Taibbi with a great article on how the media have turned the election into a circus on both sides......excellent as always....
Well, it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it's not so much the result that matters – it's the quiet.
What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.
Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected. For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next. And any person who's been subjected to 720 consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to take the news well if he gets the wrong result, whether it's a victory for Obama or for Romney. By that point, the networks have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince him that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep him coming back and watching ads.
2/ Interesting five minute video about Denmark and their energy usage.......the Danes are a very sensible people, and accept high energy taxes as necessary to maintain their society.....the average Danish family with the same standard of living as a US household uses half the energy......
You watch this little film and wonder where the US would be if we had had leadership that wasn't hopelessly corrupted by the energy corporations, with Reagan ripping out the solar panels from the White House roof......all I could visualize when I watched this was angry, stupid old white Tea Party people whining about their taxes.....
3/ What is fascism? The most common definition is Franklin D. Roosevelt's:
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
So where are we now in 2012? This article was written almost 10 years ago, and the author lists 14 characteristics of fascism.....read the list and see where we fall in the scale of being a fascist state. Maybe we're not quite there yet, but give it a few years......much, much quicker under President Romney.....
Political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt recently wrote an article about fascism ("Fascism Anyone?," Free Inquiry, Spring 2003, page 20). Studying the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile), Dr. Britt found they all had 14 elements in common. He calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism. The excerpt is in accordance with the magazine's policy.
The 14 characteristics are:
The 14 characteristics are:
- Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. - Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc. - Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc. - Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
4/ There has to be at least one woman who will be voting for Mitt Romney, and she is Selma Blair......very amusing and quite subtle two minute video.....called "Woman for Romney"....
5/ This country has a choice in November - continue on as we are under the President when things might get a little better for working people, or elect the Mittster when we know for certain they won't. Don't be fooled by Romney's apparent turn to the center - that's just Mitt doing what he has to do to get elected. The real agenda for the Republican party has been set long ago by the owners - less taxes for the wealthy, less regulation for corporations, another war for the military-industrial complex [Iran] and the middle class to pay for it all.....
I used an analogy the other day that I thought was pretty good - if Romney is elected, Sheldon Adelson will own one of his legs, the Koch brothers the other leg, smaller donors would own a finger or two but the point was all of his body parts are owned by billionaires.......just a puppet......
It was tempting to dismiss Mitt Romney's hard-right turn during the GOP primaries as calculated pandering. In the general election – as one of his top advisers famously suggested – Romney would simply shake the old Etch A Sketch and recast himself as the centrist who governed Massachusetts. But with the selection of vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, the shape-shifting Romney has locked into focus – cementing himself as the frontman for the far-right partisans responsible for Washington's gridlock.
There is no longer any ambiguity about the path that Romney would pursue as president, because it's the same trajectory charted by Ryan, the architect of the House GOP's reactionary agenda since the party's takeover in 2010. "Picking Ryan as vice president outlines the future of the next four or eight years of a Romney administration," GOP power broker Grover Norquist exulted in August. "Ryan has outlined a plan that has support in the Republican House and Senate. You have a real sense of where Romney's going." In fact, Norquist told party activists back in February, the true direction of the GOP is being mapped out by congressional hardliners. All the Republicans need to realize their vision, he said, is a president "with enough working digits to handle a pen."
The GOP legislation awaiting Romney's signature isn't simply a return to the era of George W. Bush. From abortion rights and gun laws to tax giveaways and energy policy, it's far worse. Measures that have already sailed through the Republican House would roll back clean-air protections, gut both Medicare and Medicaid, lavish trillions in tax cuts on billionaires while raising taxes on the poor, and slash everything from college aid to veteran benefits. In fact, the tenets of Ryan Republicanism are so extreme that they even offend the pioneers of trickle-down economics. "Ryan takes out the ax and goes after programs for the poor – which is the last thing you ought to cut," says David Stockman, who served as Ronald Reagan's budget director. "It's ideology run amok."
6/ Absolutely lovely 4 minute video of underwater scenes from Fiji.......enjoy this, because in a few decades all of the world's coral reefs will be gone.....wonderful soundtrack, a piano concerto.....
7/ Gail Collins at her most amusing......sharing the pain of Democrats.......
It’s a tough time to be a Democrat.
When Democrats run into each other in elevators, they exchange glances and sigh. Or make little whimpering sounds.
They read post-Denver bloggers like Andrew Sullivan (“Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion.”) and find themselves spending their evenings watching “House Hunters International.” The real estate market in Cuzco, they note, is sort of intriguing.
Democrats walk around repeating the comeback lines they would have given if they had been debating Mitt Romney in Colorado. (“Maybe you need a new accountant? Yeah, and a new calculator, and a new ...”)
They tell each other that now it’s all up to Joe Biden.
They wander around the neighborhood, buttonholing perfect strangers, demanding the name of one — one! — tax loophole that Mitt Romney has actually said he’d close.
Democrats are going bipolar. Half the time they are grabbing at random bits of hopeful information. (An Esquire/Yahoo poll shows most Americans would rather go on a road trip with Obama!) Half the time they are in total despair. Nothing makes them happy. Show them that cute picture of the lioness befriending the orphan baby antelope that’s gone viral, and they will point out that the only reason the antelope is an orphan is because the lioness ate its mother.
Before falling asleep, they think about how smart Joe Biden is when it comes to foreign affairs.
Everything reminds them of the election. They hear Diane Sawyer talking about people who’ve gotten meningitis from steroid injections and they do not think about alternate therapy for back pain. They start yelling at the TV: “Yeah! Let’s not have overreaching federal regulation of those compounding companies! Let the states do it. The states are great at this stuff!”
Democrats spend all their waking hours thinking about the swing states. If Wisconsin starts looking wobbly, their day is ruined. They leap out of bed in the morning and race to the computer to see where the trend lines are going in Colorado.
Calm down and leave Colorado alone! Also, stop talking about getting into a bus and going door to door in Ohio. Research shows that undecided voters are most likely to be swayed by their friends and neighbors. East Coast Democrats, no one in Zanesville is going to believe you are their neighbor.
Democrats miss Seamus.
8/ Fascinating factoid from Wiki - President Obama was "gished" by Romney last week.....it's debating technique that was perfected by creationists who used it in debates. You overwhelm your opponent with bullshit that he can't refute in the time allotted.....
The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man argumentsthat the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education.
The formal debating jargon term for this is spreading. You can hear some mindboggling examples here. It arose as a way to throw as much rubbish into five minutes as possible. In response, some debate judges now limit number of arguments as well as time. However, in places where debating judges aren't there to call bullshit on the practice, like the internet, such techniques are remarkably common.
9/ What Republicans REALLY think of Mitt Romney....video from the Republican primaries.....four minutes of truthiness.....
10/ Every time the subject of dying comes up, and as you get older it comes up more frequently, almost everyone says there is no way they want "death by hospital".....fascinating story from the Times on death with dignity - in England of course......
Natural death doesn't happen here without a fight if you have insurance, because noone makes money if they allow you to die in peace......
Kind of scary isn't it - our medical system is set up so that practitioners are not rewarded if you are healthy, which is why it is vital for all of us to be informed patients - you cannot, repeat cannot trust the medical system.....
Anyway - good article......
ONE morning last month, Anthony Gilbey awakened from anesthesia in a hospital in the east of England. At his bedside were his daughter and an attending physician.
The surgery had been unsuccessful, the doctor informed him. There was nothing more that could be done.
“So I’m dying?” the patient asked.
The doctor hesitated. “Yes,” he said.
“You’re dying, Dad,” his daughter affirmed.
“So,” the patient mused, “no more whoop-de-doo.”
“On the other side, there’ll be loads,” his daughter — my wife — promised.
The patient laughed. “Yes,” he said. He was dead six days later, a few months shy of his 80th birthday.
When they told my father-in-law the hospital had done all it could, that was not, in the strictest sense, true. There was nothing the doctors could do about the large, inoperable tumor colonizing his insides. But they could have maintained his failing kidneys by putting him on dialysis. They could have continued pumping insulin to control his diabetes. He wore a pacemaker that kept his heart beating regardless of what else was happening to him, so with aggressive treatment they could — and many hospitals would — have sustained a kind of life for a while.
But the hospital that treated him offers a protocol called the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient, which was conceived in the 90s at a Liverpool cancer facility as a more humane alternative to the frantic end-of-life assault of desperate measures. “The Hippocratic oath just drives clinicians toward constantly treating the patient, right until the moment they die,” said Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett, who was until recently the chief executive of the center where the protocol was designed. English doctors, he said, tell a joke about this imperative: “Why in Ireland do they put screws in coffins? To keep the doctors out.”
The Liverpool Pathway brings many of the practices of hospice care into a hospital setting, where it can reach many more patients approaching death. “It’s not about hastening death,” Sir Thomas told me. “It’s about recognizing that someone is dying, and giving them choices. Do you want an oxygen mask over your face? Or would you like to kiss your wife?”
Anthony Gilbey’s doctors concluded that it was pointless to prolong a life that was very near the end, and that had been increasingly consumed by pain, immobility, incontinence, depression and creeping dementia. The patient and his family concurred.
And so the hospital unplugged his insulin and antibiotics, disconnected his intravenous nourishment and hydration, leaving only a drip to keep pain and nausea at bay. The earlier bustle of oxygen masks and thermometers and blood-pressure sleeves and pulse-taking ceased. Nurses wheeled him away from the wheezing, beeping machinery of intensive care to a quiet room to await his move to “the other side.”
Here in the United States, nothing bedevils our discussion of health care like the question of when and how to withhold it.
11/ "Action" is a TV series that aired on Fox in 1999, was cancelled after 13 episodes and there has never been anything like it since. It was waaaaaay too advanced for it's time, incredibly raunchy and clever, clever, clever......
The premise is that it follows a movie producer called Peter Dragon [Jay Mohr] who is a loud, aggressive Hollywood type. I am attaching the Pilot - it's 22 minutes of some of the funniest moments that have ever been on TV....
And remember the opening scene, and the Cobb salad.....
Because I know some of you will like this......you can get the complete series for $5!
12/ The stunningly beautiful Taylor Swift with something new - a fun video titled "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together". She dances, she wears glasses, a short skirt and there is a goofy band in the background. A pretty good song......very nice indeed.......
13/ Mount Dorans
A couple of things......the first is that the Farmers Market on Sunday mornings at Eden Park [near the lawn bowling, Lakeside Inn]] is pretty good, with some good vendors offering home grown and organic foods as well as jewellery and chotchkies. There is even a guy with fresh seafood [in his boat]......and a couple of stalls with homemade cheeses.....
We have been a few times and it's getting better and better. We all have choices - we can shop exclusively at Publix and enrich a large corporation, or support local vendors and farmers and get a bonus as well - their stuff is fresher and healthier.
Sunday mornings, 9am to 1pm.......parking is easy......
The second is we tried Vitality Bistro the other evening - this is the vegetarian restaurant at Baker and Third that serves vegan, organic and healthy food. This is a new cuisine for Mary and I, so we aren't qualified to say if it's really good or not but one thing I can say definitively is that it's like no other food you've ever tasted. It's interestingly presented and very filling.
Most unusual dishes......a little more expensive than normal for Mount Dora [$12-$15 entrees], but the materials are fresh and organics do cost a little more. Nice decor, quite elegant.
We may have an Orlando class restaurant here......I'd be interested in feedback from anyone who has been there, and/or any vegans out there.....
Worth a visit........open for lunch as well.....
Todays video - a classic Johnny Carson skit that's certainly appropriate this month - the Political Lie Detector Test
Todays farming joke
"A farmer had 5 female pigs. Times were hard, so he decided to take them to the county fair and sell them. At the fair, he met another farmer who owned five male pigs. After talking a bit, they decided to mate the pigs and split everything 50/50. The farmers lived sixty miles apart, so they agreed to drive thirty miles each and find a field in which to let the pigs mate.
The first morning, the farmer with the female pigs got up at 5 A.M., loaded the pigs into the family station wagon, (which was the only vehicle he had) and drove the thirty miles.
While the pigs were mating, he asked the other farmer, "How will I know if they are pregnant?" The other farmer replied, "If they're lying in the grass tomorrow morning, They're pregnant. If they're in the mud, they're not."
The next morning the pigs were rolling in the mud, so he hosed them off, loaded them into the family station wagon again and proceeded to try again. This continued each morning for more than a week and both farmers were worn out.
The next morning he was too tired to get out of bed. He called to his wife, "Honey, please look outside and tell me whether the pigs are in the mud or in the grass."
"Neither," yelled his wife, "they're in the station wagon and one of them is honking the horn.""
The first morning, the farmer with the female pigs got up at 5 A.M., loaded the pigs into the family station wagon, (which was the only vehicle he had) and drove the thirty miles.
While the pigs were mating, he asked the other farmer, "How will I know if they are pregnant?" The other farmer replied, "If they're lying in the grass tomorrow morning, They're pregnant. If they're in the mud, they're not."
The next morning the pigs were rolling in the mud, so he hosed them off, loaded them into the family station wagon again and proceeded to try again. This continued each morning for more than a week and both farmers were worn out.
The next morning he was too tired to get out of bed. He called to his wife, "Honey, please look outside and tell me whether the pigs are in the mud or in the grass."
"Neither," yelled his wife, "they're in the station wagon and one of them is honking the horn.""
Todays Irish joke
Murphy, a furniture dealer from Dublin, decided to expand the line of furniture in his store, so he decided to go to Paris to see what he could find.
After arriving in Paris , he visited with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home. To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine.
After arriving in Paris , he visited with some manufacturers and selected a line that he thought would sell well back home. To celebrate the new acquisition, he decided to visit a small bistro and have a glass of wine.
As he sat enjoying his wine, he noticed that the small place was quite crowded, and that the other chair at his table was the only vacant seat in the house.
Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian girl came to his table, asked him something in French (which Murphy could not understand), so he motioned to the vacant chair and invited her to sit down.
Before long, a very beautiful young Parisian girl came to his table, asked him something in French (which Murphy could not understand), so he motioned to the vacant chair and invited her to sit down.
He tried to speak to her in English, but she did not speak his language. After a couple of minutes of trying to communicate with her, he took a napkin and drew a picture of a wine glass and showed it to her. She nodded, so he ordered a glass of wine for her.
After sitting together at the table for a while, he took another napkin, and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music.
After sitting together at the table for a while, he took another napkin, and drew a picture of a plate with food on it, and she nodded. They left the bistro and found a quiet cafe that featured a small group playing romantic music.
They ordered dinner, after which he took another napkin and drew
a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up to dance. They danced until the cafe closed and the band was packing up.
Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. To this day, Murphy has no idea how she figured out he was in the furniture business.
a picture of a couple dancing. She nodded, and they got up to dance. They danced until the cafe closed and the band was packing up.
Back at their table, the young lady took a napkin and drew a picture of a four-poster bed. To this day, Murphy has no idea how she figured out he was in the furniture business.
Todays Indian joke
She climbed up behind him on the horse and they rode off. The ride was uneventful, except that every few minutes the Indian would let out a Ye-e-e-e-h-a-a-a-a' so loud that it echoed from the surrounding hills..
When they arrived in town, he let her off at the local service station, yelled one final 'Ye-e-e-e-h-a-a-a-a!' and rode off.
"What did you do to get that Indian so excited?" asked the service-station attendant.
"Nothing," the woman answered "I merely sat behind him on the horse, put my arms around his waist, and held onto the saddle horn so I wouldn't fall off."
"Lady," the attendant said, "Indians don't use saddles."
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