IT'S DUBAI'S TURN

Most of us have seen the pictures of excesses in Dubai sent around the world in email that have caused us to gasp...the sterling silver Mercedes, the ski slope indoors on the desert, the luxury townhouses or whatever on man-made islands with breathtaking views of the land and water, etc. However, the financial woes anywhere in the world seem to come back to haunt us as ours have been haunting the rest of the world for a while. Our stock market dropped markedly when Dubai made its current financial problems known.

For pictures of Dubai, click here. Ah, even the mighty falter! It is so easy to think the good times will remain forever, isn't it?

GARLIC AND SOME OF ITS MANY USES

If you can wait through the Chrome Google Ad, watch this video on garlic in China today. Those of us who are well acquainted with good old USA Gilroy garlic, will have to watch what is done about it or to it. Hopefully Gilroy will remain a staple in most American homes as well as my own.

Written by Ray Sahellian, MD on garlic's use and effectiveness: "Garlic is a member of the same group of plants as the onion. The bulb is the part used for consuming or as medicine. Epidemiological as well as laboratory studies have shown that garlic and onion consumption reduces certain cancer incidences in the stomach, colon, mammary, cervical, and other sites. The use of garlic for medicinal purposes dates to antiquity. Garlic bulbs were found in tombs of the pharaohs, in Crete, and in ancient cultures throughout the world. Hippocrates considered garlic to be a vital part of his therapeutic armamentarium
In an analysis of eight studies from Italy and Switzerland, researchers found that older adults with the highest onion and garlic intakes had the lowest risks of a number of cancers -- including colon, ovarian and throat cancers. Garlic is also helpful in dilating blood vessels, has cardiovascular benefits, and may have anti germ potential."

Each year, Gilroy, CA, has a huge harvest festival. Check out some of the recipes. Raised on a Mediterranean diet, I can attest to the wonderful power of garlic lowering blood pressure and cooling off a person in heated temperatures. However, it does not simply require garlic flavoring, but usually a requirement to ingest pretty much of the whole head of garlic. I found its power when I ate a generous helping, several times, of Skordalia and couldn't figure out why my teeth were chattering when the temperature was in the 90's. There are more recipes for this sauce than words for snow in the Arctic, click here for an excellent example.

Years ago, my husband and I had two male friends who were both chocolate and garlic lovers and so I quite facetiously said, "Next time I have you over to dinner I will make chocolate covered garlic for you." Glancing through an Italian cookbook I found that it was already considered a delicacy in Italy. The shocker was that they covered the raw garlic with chocolate; so I tried it. I felt like someone had taken claws all the way down my esophagus to depths in my body that have never burned like that before (or ever again, I might add)! Undaunted, however, I put the peeled head of garlic cloves in the microwave just briefly enough to cook the knife edge out of them, leaving that Heavenly bouquet which was then dipped in chocolate and allowed to harden. When it was served at a dinner, it was as though someone had vacuumed it all up in an instant.

Will the Chinese take yet another treat away from me by raising prices high enough for me to want to fore go its use? As soon as something good comes along, someone else starts manipulating the prices excessively. That's shoots the theory about garlic protecting us. It seems we must protect the garlic!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

It is possible only to give thanks for the turkeys of the feathered kind in our lives...not the rest who glut the airwaves and media, those teabaggers and birthers, the ones who decided what God has intended by a guess that is as accurate (perhaps) as that made by the rest of us who make no guess about what God intended but, rather, live morally, with integrity, and by the Golden Rule.

We seniors can give thanks to waking up every day. We are able to guess the weather by the amount of creak in our joints, and are, thankfully, able to recognize who and where we are. If the pains are less than the pleasures in our lives, we count ourselves very fortunate to be alive, have good health 'for our age', and enjoy friendship with people who return the pleasure of our being together.

I particularly give thanks to the many who promised to keep me in laughter when my husband was dying...now nine years ago. They have done a wonderful job at making sure I get my laughs daily. Not only do they share laughter with me but I am then able to share it with others. Some people call this a positive outlook on life...I think it is far more enjoyable to love and laugh than to frown, criticize, and be miserable.

My thankfulness extends to others who, being aware that having made large family parties on Holidays for much of my life, feel it is now someone else's turn.

If you wish to thank a God, do so, but I do think our hard work, being caring of others, and hurting no one has to account for some of that for which we can be thankful.

DEFINING A POLITICAL PARTY

It seems that most people who claim to be in one party or another can't easily define what makes them in that party by goals or beliefs. It is rather amusing. More often I hear somebody say they are a Democrat because they hate Republicans, or vice versa. Even more ridiculous was the woman interviewed by the media who had bought two of Sara Palin's books to have autographed and was one of the hundred left without signatures when Palin just walked away, unannounced, and disappeared back in her bus while the hundred or so chanted and booed outside the bus. This particular lady who had waited in line for hours in the cold, complained about the $40 she had paid for the two books she was to have had Palin sign, but would now be returning them and would certainly NOT vote for Palin.

How sad that voting for an importance office as the leader of the Free World, rests with such empty reasoning. I would like to believe that an anomaly but know all too clearly from personal conversations that the choice is just as irrelevant and simplistic, all too often. Click here to read the entire resolution. With these criteria, not even Ronald Reagan would be considered a true Democrat. It rather makes the term 'true Democrat' somewhat an oxymoron.

Since the voting box is private, I've always wondered how many people say they are voting for someone just to avoid household arguments. Knowing a few vociferous, dogmatic, and insulting people, if you dare to support someone they do not approve it can become a most unpleasant interaction. Thus it is easy to agree with the loudmouth, making an argument impossible.

It makes a farce out of our system wherein all politicians should put country before party, constitution and laws before religious practice, and not just put all energy into getting re-elected. The system has certainly become as corrupted as software after a virus attack. It would be nice to think that there is action being taken in the Administration to move us away from the disloyal, divisive, falsehood perpetrators of the last group in office.

POSITIVE THINKING

It hadn't occurred to me that what may be positive thinking in one person's view is not to another. When I had a patient dying of cancer, she was told to read mind over body stuff and told me that she had felt punished by having to read it. She had tried to live a clean and stress-free life but facts and people around her never let that happen. One might ask what her genetics also had to do with her illness. At any rate, she felt that it was expected of her to cure her own cancer with mind over body and she was failing to be able to do it.

When Obama ran on a platform of Hope and Change I could easily relate to both concepts. However, the more I thought of it, I realized that too many people believe prayer is hope, about which they do nothing to advance themselves or their fellow man. Hard work and determination must accompany hope if change is to be the result. Those who pray that a higher power will do it for them, or may even think the President they voted for will do it for them instantly, are living an illusion. Only fools believe an accurate diagnosis means a total cure with no assist from the patient.

Positive thinking and hope make your body feel better. Less cortisol accumulates and your brain deteriorates more slowly as the years go by, giving reason to not leaving clinical depressions untreated. Just as 'you can't cure stupid', positive thinking alone cures little. It allows you to see happiness where others miss it, beauty when others see only blemishes, humor in even a hopeless situation. Positive thinking allows you to take control of your own life rather than waiting for someone else to do it for you. Positive thinking, however, must have facts and reality as a base, otherwise we must call it delusional thinking, which I believe is as contagious and lethal as the swine flu, or H1N1 as we lovingly refer to it.

Rise, Americans, not to do battle but to support the man you appointed to do a job for you. Give him time and ideas, not edicts. It is, after all, his job, not yours, to run the country.

COVETING MATERIAL STUFF; EXCESSES; LIFE INVENTORY

The title is somewhat misleading since it started in the Great Depression when wants and deprivation were the only excesses. For every action, there is a reaction...so say laws of physics. When someone is deprived, reaction is likely to be that there will be an attempt to live life so that a repeat of that wanting or sense of no control will not reoccur.

Many of those of us, Great Depression survivors, became pack rats. I hold onto things because 'I might need them later, if not at this moment' and because I could never replace them (clearly because they are so obsolete!). In today's world of built in obsolescence, it may be fear that you will never find the source for 'it' or' them' again or that too many companies will stop making that favorite product; 'it' dies and no one is making replacements or it costs more to fix it than 'it' is worth or you lack money with which to pay. While some replacements are an improvement, many are not and we must live with the memory of having had something to cherish (like a lover before losing that lover forever). A superfluity may gradually result. As George Carlin may have described it, I'm drowning in stuff.

People, you learn, come and go in your life. Some you will miss and some you will quickly forget, pushing into that part of your memory where they are brought forward only when someone else reminds you of them for a brief spot of time, then quickly recede into that vague storage place in your brain again.

Trying to hold onto things, I have taken pictures, bought 78s, then LPs, then CDs, and loads of sheet music. I bought a VCR and filled hundreds of tapes. I put some 78s onto reel to reel tape, copied a few favorites onto audio cassettes, and a few of those onto CDs. Pictures were printed, some slides, many of them digitized and it would have gone on to my becoming brain dead if I had not had an epiphany. I recalled my husband telling me that one could not capture and hold everything (That is not when I gave up trying to, though). The great picture that was missed must be a head picture, as he called it. The epiphany made me realize that I don't have to hold onto everything from my past. There will be new friends, foods, products, music, books and enough of anything else that is important to me.

Taking a life inventory shows me that I now have enough unwatched DVDs, unlistened to CDs, unread books, and food stored in the house that, if I bought nothing for the rest of my life, neither my body nor mind would starve. A new freedom from wanting has settled to a feeling of ease within...at last, I have enough...for now. Now my problem is how to get rid of enough of it to make my living space less of a blivet. (If you've read my blog before, you know that a blivet is stuffing three pounds of excrement in a two pound bag.)

AMERICAN DISCONTENT AGE

There has never been a time in our history when everyone is satisfied, and there, doubtfully, will ever be. However it is not just that some are discontent...it is 'how many', 'to what degree', 'over what', and 'what is being planned to be done about it' and 'by whom'.

In an attempt to make us a one-size-fits-all society, instead of accepting differences, there is an attempt to eliminate differences by enacting laws. One group does not believe in evolution and wants to do away with it being taught as a scientific concept. That would turn the clock back on scientific research on viruses and lots of other important research. Another group back to back alley abortions or unwanted children born while anything older than a fetus is not considered as a life to be respected.

Religious groups are fighting to get their ideas made into law and are, sadly, getting away with it because legislators are listening more to their clergy than their constituents. The gap between the top 1 percent and the remaining 99 percent of the U.S. population has grown to a record high. (see David DeGraw, Amped Status. Posted November 21, 2009.)

While there is a great pretense that race is not a presidential issue, a man who is half Caucasian, half African black is always referred to as our black president. Racists still abound and he is usually spoken of with reference to his racial origins as our 'black president'. The love/hate schism, set in many when GW Bush was elected, has festered and is now switched 180 degrees, spinning out of control. The Michelle Bachmanns, Sarah Palins and all the other hate mongers like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and too many to be separately listed seems to be steadily growing, if one is to judge from the radio air time and TV media time given to them. We laugh at the black humor of this being considered 'fair and balanced' news.

Suicide and crime have both risen as they are bound to do when people can no longer support themselves and their families. The saying: 'Desperate times require desperate measures.'is being mentioned more often. What was the administration thinking reappointing Tim Geithner and the other Bush economic carry-overs, (give-it-to-ones-who caused-the problem-in-the-first-place guys), and (lets-keep-our-guys-in-the-money thinkers).

The media's haste to make entertainment and get Nielsen ratings upped makes information being given to average citizens a distorted view of what is going on in the country. Most people are too lazy and disinterested to spend their time trying to ferret out what is really going on and seem surprised to hear anything that wasn't covered as headlines in the NY Times or told something someone else heard but they missed.

We can talk about the concrete, very real problems about the economy, Health Care and the need for all people to be covered, unemployment, etc. but I see little written about the depressed ambiance of the country in general. What we need are a few good social scientists asking the questions that the paid pollsters don't get asked to ask.