MINOR ERRORS BY STAFF CAN COST A LOT

A data entry person, a Webmaster, a too harried or speedy executive...who knows? The error could be data entry, webmaster, executive slip. any number of levels of employee. Someone in Atlanta, GA, put out a price to allow guests to sleep in a Venetian Luxury Hotel for one cent a night.

The error is expected to cost Crowne Plaza seventy seven thousand pounds.

GET ENTERTAINMENT RATINGS OUT OF THE NEWS SHOWS

We have Oscars and Emmys and lots of other awards for the best of a category. Perhaps someone should set up a new contest to incorporate the news media since it has now fully slipped into an entertainment category.

As long as we now have Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Palin, Malkin, and I could just go on and on, we have the greatest lot of prevaricators as to what is going on in the world. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are the only two who admit they are comedians though many of us get a far better picture of reality from them than the aforementioned.

It is pitiful that our news media has allowed itself to be in bondage to ratings rather than truth. If you need to find out whether you are a good judge of ethics, morality, veracity, admirable modeling...know that you are not a good judge if you enjoy any of those listed above. It is unlikely that you will agree with me if you see that this is truthful about you, but it doesn't make it less applicable whether you agree or not.

We need to resurrect the old newsroom cast, with crushed felt hats, cigars or cigarettes hanging from the mouth, and the guts to print the truth.

Sarah Palin, who is not openly running for office and yet has never stopped campaigning as though she were, is talking as though she expects people to believe her.

AT LAST, SOMEONE COMMENTING ON HUMAN COST OTHER THAN PHYSICAL HEALTH

It is rare to have publishers ask that their stories be forwarded. This one is worthy of doing just that. First, the letter received from AlterNet.

"Dear Reader,

Over the course of four years as an AlterNet editor, I've never felt the need to reach out and urge our audience to read and forward an individual article.

Until today.

That's because today, we're publishing the first of a three-part series by Penny Coleman. Penny argues that in the aftermath of every war that America has fought in the last century - not just this war, or that war, the bad ones or the so-called "good" ones -- the psychiatric casualties (which far outnumber the physical) have disappeared from official histories and public awareness.

Where did they go? We gave Penny an opportunity to find out and she interviewed generations of veterans, advocates and policy makers, dug through archives and musty files and looked hard at what the military had to say about this question.

What she found is that traumatized veterans are systematically disappeared - into prisons and mental institutions, into cardboard boxes on our streets or pine ones when they die young from overdoses, accidents or suicide.

It's a vitally important dynamic because our veterans are the human evidence of what war really costs. With that evidence invisible and silenced, nothing gets interrogated, and the system gets off free.

What frequently happens to these vets is another kind of "blow-back" from American Empire - one rarely discussed, but just as harmful for society as anti-American sentiment or terrorism from abroad.

I hope you'll read, and forward today's first article. It shows how the criminal justice system has been manipulated to hide the astonishing numbers of injured veterans in our prisons and jails. In the coming weeks, Penny will look hard at other aspects of this important story, so keep an eye out for the whole series.
Joshua Holland Senior Editor, AlterNet.org"

The first article, well worth reading can be found here.

PAYING BILLS USED TO BE EASY IF YOU HAD THE MONEY TO DO SO

It used to be easy to pay your bills but, like everything else today in our world, simple only defines minds today. Once, the world allowed 30 days for a bill to be considered paid on time. There were no fines that sometimes exceeded the amount of the actual bill for being a minute late. The bill came to you in the mail and you wrote a check and paid it, mailing it back for a few cents in postage. The postage never exceeded the amount of the bill.

Today, many places charge $5. to authorize payment to a real person on phone. It is made difficult for you to pay online unless you must promise to allow the company to withdraw whatever they want you to think you owe, automatically from whichever source you name. Had I allowed Verizon to do this I would have been out a few hundred since, in the two and a half years I've had their FIOS, cable TV and house phone, an accurate bill has been a rare novelty.

Webmasters seem to make a game out of seeing how quickly they can confuse the consumer. When you call a Service Representative to discuss a bill, it seems like a Murphy Law that an important phone call will beep in (to which you need to respond) and the representative comes back to you then, finding you not there, hangs up and the whole wasted time procedure must be repeated.

I'm not paranoid. I just know 'they' are all out to get us!

RESEARCH SHOWS OPTIMISTIC WOMEN LIVE LONGER

"The latest study by US investigators mirrors the findings of earlier work by a Dutch team showing optimism reduces heart risk in men.

The research on nearly 100,000 women, published in the journal Circulation, found pessimists had higher blood pressure and cholesterol.

Even taking these risk factors into account, attitude alone altered risks.?

"Lest we get too good at keeping our stress levels down and cortisol at minimum, someone writes: "Hans Selye, a foremost stress physiologist of the 20th century defined stress as “….the nonspecific response of the body to any demand made upon it (1).” Richard Lazarus, another highly regarded psychologist adds that stress is “…any event in which environmental demands, internal demands, or both tax or exceed the adaptive resources of an individual, social system, or tissue system.”
In many different societies, stress is a common term that is often associated with negative situations and settings. Yet, a stress-free life may also be harmful, because an individual will lose his/her ability to react to the different challenges of life. Every person has an optimal positive stress level referred to as eustress, while stress that is harmful is noted to be distress."

WEATHER IS NOT SO BAD IN NEW ENGLAND, AFTER ALL

Check out this article and video on a hotel collapse in Taiwan. Fortunately the 300 people within escaped prior to the building collapse so no one was hurt. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to be rushed out into a typhoon with all my stuff probably still in the hotel. The fantasy was not at all pleasant.

After this collapse was shown, there was a video and article about a demolition 'gone wrong.' Someone must have had an audible 'oops' over that one.

Living in New England there are lots of jokes made about the weather but we are pretty fortunate not to have many real disasters any where close to the magnitude of those in the Pacific and Asia. Typhoons seem to do much more damage in these areas than hurricanes do to the US Eastern and Southern coast.

While complaining is a sport in which too many people indulge, somewhere some of us need to sit back and say that maybe huge heating bills and shoveling snow is not really so bad, after all.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

Each summer seems to be a time when families who lived distanced from one another try to get to visit. Friends take their vacations to see other friends. It happens around major holidays as well. What, may we ask, keeps us tied to people whom we would probably not have as friends or associates if they weren't blood related?

From the Go English.com site: "People in the same family are related by blood and "blood is thicker than water" says that family ("blood") relations are more important than relations with friends. Example: "When my best friend and my brother got in a fight I had to help my brother; blood is thicker than water." "Blood is thicker than water" compares the thickness of blood (family relationship) to the thickness of water (friendships) and says that our family relations are more important ("thicker") than all others. Example: "Friends will come and friends will go but your family is always there for you; blood is thicker than water." Family relations (blood) are more important (thicker) than other relations (water) so "blood is thicker than water.""

Is this true any longer? I have been aided in times of stress in my life by friends more meaningfully than family members yet my ties are close to my family. I've concluded that only family members share a common emotional experience of family, cultural ties, and family history. There is always the family game of trying to find out which relative passed on the genes currently seen in a person in the current generation.

Today, with all the books about Vampires, making them seem a reality in our world, it would seem necessary that blood indeed be thicker than water with a very different meaning than the origin of the phrase. Thus was spawned a new generation of jokes about vampires never making deposits but only making withdrawals from blood banks.

Do a Google search for blood and loyalty and you get 5 million hits. Most are song lyrics and games. The concept has been in question since Cain and Abel where Cain is portrayed as the 'wicked' one. Today, due to instant world coverage by cameras as well as stories, we are shown example after example of parents killing their children, children killing their parents, and all combination of family violence and abuse. What happened to the thick blood phrase?