YES, WORDS DO HAVE IMPACT AND INFLUENCE

Listening to legislators on the Right calling Obama a Socialist certainly points to their own ignorance, but it also gets to be believed by many when they hear it over and over again. The worst of them were elected and must be endured until the next election cycle.  Not so with those on media.  They have contracts.  I do not watch Fox News because of the hateful rhetoric and lies.  I looked forward to Keith Olbermann because, while he didn't mince words on his opinion...it was clear when he gave opinions but I was not aware that anyone ever accused him of lying.  If Olbermann was 'freed of his contract' because of his Liberal stance, MSNBC is ignorant of the importance his thinking is to so many of us.  Their popularity will fade as someone as forceful as Coombs will no doubt replace him.

We will be left with Chris Matthews who never lets his interviewees finish a thought as they attempt to answer his questions.  Ed Schultz is good, as is Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. However, it seems the bosses want to have a B-flat media outlet.  It will cater to a B-flat audience.  I can only hope that people out there will have recognized the talent MSNBC had and tossed aside.  It will be like finding a treasure at a yard sale.Shame on MSNBC executives.  They are as knowledgeable about their viewers as Republicans are about the wishes of the 'American people'.

DISEASE CROSSOVER BETWEEN HUMANS AND ANIMALS

Pet owners rarely believe that many diseases and illnesses pass between humans and their pets. However, they do, even beyond dogs, cats, and mice.  More than fifty years ago, most children sported a pet turtle in a fish bowl with a little water and some rocks in it.  However, few are aware that the reason they came out of pet stores was that they were pulled because of the number of children who contracted salmonella from them.  Now it is known that reptiles also can infect humans with salmonella from being handled.  Word from the CDC.

Corn snakes, a very playful, friendly pet by many pose the threat to handlers who keep them around food or do not take antiseptic precautions when cleaning up after handling and carefully washing hands and food surfaces..
See more here.
and more here.

This article describes the danger of dogs or humans contracting pneumonia back and forth between them.  See here. 

 Needless to say there are also many parasites beyond giardia and worms but, again, too many people see nothing wrong with kissing their pets or having them like their faces and mouths as soon as they come in from the outdoors after using the world beyond as their personal toilets.and say 'how are you?' with a nose-in-butt routine where their noses re clearly better at diagnosing than their non-empirical thinking brains.

MICHELE BACHMANN WANTS NOT ONLY TO REPEAL THE HEALTH CARE BILL BUT OBAMA AS WELL.

Michele Bachman (R-Rep

)

Today on the House floor in her speech, Michele Bachman called for the repeal of the Health Care Bill and of Obama as President.

Merriam-Webster defines repeal as: 

re·peal

verb \ri-ˈpēl\

Definition of REPEAL

transitive verb

1:  to rescind or annul by authoritative act; especially : to revoke or abrogate by legislative enactment 

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 Obama was duly elected by the American public.  If there is any respect for that fact, she should shut her mouth and suffer his four years the way those of us who didn't want Bush as president had to suffer through his horrible years of putting our country in the financial toilet and withy wars that.killed well over 4000 of our service men and women.

It is beyond me to understand what people today who think they can do when they get elected to Congress or the Senate.  Just as we, the people, have only one vote, so do they.  Granted, their's is one among fewer which may carry a bit more weight, but it also seems to me that the Tea Partiers have a very disparate agenda.  There seemed to be a big mission to do away with the Health Care Bill and all it seems it accomplishes is point out their total naivete and the massive denial within the group.


I cannot help but continue to believe that there should be some sort of written exam for candidates to take, to test their knowledge and fitness for the office which they are seeking. 

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Annabella Bloom & Jane Austen

My suspicions should have been raised by the circular red balloon which reads The WILD &; WANTON edition,. published by Adams Media,  Shamelessly plagiarized by Bloom from the original by Jane Austen,  about ten pages of sexy encounter between Darcy and Elizabeth very near the end of the book have been added.  Lydia is portrayed as wanton and totally without scruples or morals in the early chapters, briefly.

The Jane Austen sequels which have been well written and original are take-offs on what might have been 'if' some other course was taken,k or they are set in another time period, or written in a way that clearly marks them as simply based on Jane Austen material but most is different and the story is made captivating.  Recently, some publishers decided to capture more of a market by renaming previously published books to include the Darcy name, reselling in the belief that the Darcy name in the title will pull in more readers.  Good authors have lost credibility by many of their readers who thought it a ploy of the author rather than the publisher and felt duped.

Excluding the original Austen P & P, I've now read 88 of these, skipping those others published in which Darcy is a Vampire or as equally unrelated to the Austen book.  For those of us who are true Austen fans, marketers/publishers need to understand they lose, not gain, readers with these tactics.  It is greedy, misleading,  damaging to good authors, and garners bad publicity for the publishers and sellers.  Readers, especially  those of us who buy the books, beware.  If you don't want to spend hours waiting for the book to be as it was advertised, you may end up almost  478 pages later feeling profoundly cheated  Steer clear of this one.


 .

WHAT TEACHES PEOPLE TO LIVE IN THEIR OWN SKIN?

Speaking to the son of two extremely narcissistic parents, he told me he had to teach himself to be empathic because neither of his parents were.good at listening to other people's feelings.  We talked about this and I questioned how can a kid know that one should be empathic and actually figure out how to become self-taught as though it is an art. We are exposed to many more than our parents and can see for ourselves that many others have a better way of dealing with life.  That is what mentors are all about.

I believe that some day psychiatry will throw away personality diagnoses in favor of reflecting the results of brain tests of chemistry and watching, with scans,  how the brain handles particular informational stimuli.  For years I watched women diagnosed as 'borderline personalities' only to become perfectly 'normal' when their clinical depressions were properly treated with pharmacology.

Humans  have so many vulnerabilities that inhibit their comfortable adjustment to the society around them.  One of the worst is the empty feeling with which a clinical depression leaves one.  Regardless of how satisfying life may seem be at a given time, that empty hole in their psyche, felt in the pit of their stomach, never allows them to feel loved or worth being loved.  These two states are the most basic and universal desires of humans...to be loved and to feel lovable.  Its basic to most everything we do.

Happiness is certainly felt when one is comfortable in his/her own skin, feels capable of logical thinking and making reasonable life choices, and has many healthy relationships.  Alas, some people never achieve those abilities nor seem to have the equipment to achieve them.  One of the things I tried to impress graduate students who would soon be treating therapy patients was to realize that you cannot 'feel' for anyone else.  If you are caught up in emotions around someone else's experience,  you are not 'feeling for' that person. you are feeling for yourself and need to dig in your own memory for that which was triggered by the other person's experience.  Only by doing that self-exploration to gain insight into yourself will you be able to hold onto where you begin and end.

WHO IS REALLY TAKING THE COUNTRY?

The Teapartiers mantra is 'Take back our country'.  Just who has taken over our democratic country has been a question that is not unsolved, just not declared openly.  A recent article by Nathan Diebenow announces that Progressives are ready to 'uncloak' the secret financers behind the Tea party. "The Sunday, Jan. 30 event thrown by Common Cause, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization, aims to educate attendees in California to the Koch brothers who will be strategizing nearby with their mega-wealthy allies to win the 2012 elections."

The Tea Party is financed far beyond the many small contributions most of the Teapartiers themselves can give.  If has long been rumored that the multi-billionaire Koch  brothers are the 'angels' behind it all. Now, assuming that might be true, the next question must be, "Why?"  What is in it for them?  Certainly they need no more money, though money is clearly power.  Thus, is it power they are after?  If so what is the power they desire?  The Tea Party wants to 'take back the government'.  I was always taught that plotting to overthrow the government is an act of treason.  Are the Koch brothers, then, treason perpetrators?


Also from the article:  "Comedian Bill Maher on Friday lashed out at the followers of the Tea party movement whose activities are funded by Koch's Americans for Prosperity group.
"The Founding Fathers were everything you despise. They studied science, read Plato, hung out in Paris, and thought the Bible was mostly bullshit," he said.

'Who' is never enough.  We need also to understand the 'why'. It is the only way to protect ourselves. Had we appreciated that bin Laden was not only interested in violence and killing but, rather, to economically disable our country, we might not be in the economic mess we are in today.

MY REVIEW: THE KING'S SPEECH

All who know me have heard me insist that I only allow 'feel good' entertainment in my life.  I do not have to live with the misery there is in our world that other movie goers enjoy as heavy drama.  While this movie was one that made me cry, they were tears of empathy with someone who conquered a hurdle of great magnitude

.Colin Firth, now fifteen years older than when he played Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, was joined by Jennifer Ehle (picture on right) (who had played Elizabeth Bennett in the same production)  It was lovely to see her, though her part was a very minor role. 


The great Helena Bonham Carter did a magnificent job as the wife of the Duke of York, later Queen. (see below)

No one who has ever seen Ms Bonham Carter in a film could ever deny her extraordinary ability to play the most unusual parts. Tim Burton has featured her in many of his films.

It would be difficult to criticize this movie for content, script, acting, direction, production, filming, or any other parameter of a good movie.  The story is immensely touching as the Duke of York, who never thought to succeed his older brother to the throne, finds King Edward's abdication thrusts him into a position he never thought he could handle.  It is a story with which even we commoners can relate to the agonies presented to the Duke and the fortitude with which his wife supported him.  However, most touching is the relationship with an untitled commoner from Australia with no credentials who assisted him in a unique way and with whom the King remained a lifelong friend.

While I have somewhat a bias for English movies, especially when they are good, this one cannot be praised highly enough. 
Feeling passionate about many things, I can easily rave about them.  However, I believe anyone who watches this film will not disagree with my commentary.  It really is a must see, whether in a movie of a catch-later on DVD.