NOT EVERYONE SEES THE THINGS THE SAME WAY

Politicians often claim to be misunderstood because their words are being taken out of context.  People, unfortunately, give little concern to context.  If the Bush administration had understood Iraqi in their cultural context  better, they might not have made the great blunder of invading it and costing so many hundreds of thousands of lives.  Had they understood the importance of having good translators, they would not have rid themselves of the gay American service people who were doing the job, leaving them with inadequate resources for undercover and translator work.

Much of the world tends to speak in euphemisms,  Clearly we need to be protected from the harsh picture of reality.  We have now invented a politically correct language to avoid the image that supposedly burns in our brain, if we can distinguish between genius and mental retardation by simply using 'mentally challenged'.  Without doubt, our language must do some changing with civilization's advances but the intent to soften, to weaken all concepts, borders on denial and avoidance of the truth.  Lots of things are tragic, people do not always deserve what is handed them in life, but pretending things don't exist doesn't make them go away.

We have become a world filled with people who want no truth when lying to themselves.  However, lying seems to work well enough for lots of people and has now become a crashing habit in merchandising, politics, history books, religion, and in too many other places.  Wanting something badly just does not make it so.  Will our society learn this before we have totally destroyed relationships and our entire civilization?

I sincerely hoped there are enough realists, truth seekers, and even those who believe in the Golden Rule:  'Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You'.  However, even that wonderful plan falls short if you aren't telling the truth, valuing integrity, or are a sociopath, righ?.  That is yet another example of seeing the world differently , is it not?

HOW LIES FROM FOX NEWS ALTERS PEOPLE'S PERCEPTION OF REALITY

Robert Greenwald, (the founder of Brave New Films and the director of Outfoxed) spoke on the 9th on MSNBC's Ed Show.  His message is imperative for people who want to try to fight the power of large audiences who are being brain washed. 

The picture on the right is of a focus group of conservatives in Iowa, who listen to Fox.  Over 40% of them believe that President Obama is a Muslim  To see this video slip, click here.

'JUST IN CASES ' MOVES

On April 15, 2009, this appeared on the Internet.  "If you have invasive breast cancer, your surgeon will probably remove some of the lymph nodes under your arm during your lumpectomy or mastectomy. Examining your lymph nodes helps your doctors figure out the extent of cancer involvement. Cancer in the lymph nodes is associated with an increased risk of having cancer cells in other parts of your body."  Most surgeons just removed a lot of the nodes, tested them, and if they were clear remained satisfied with the gamble that the cancer hadn't spread.

The pain left to the woman was deemed a necessary precaution and consequence.

Richard Knox, writing for WBUR, on 2/9/11 says:  "
For years standard practice in breast cancer treatment has gone like this: If a biopsy of one or two "sentinel" lymph nodes near a breast tumor shows cancer has spread, surgeons should cut out other nearby lymph nodes to prevent it from spreading further.
The old conventional wisdom made sense. But a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association says standard practice is wrong — for tens of thousands of women with a new diagnosis of breast cancer.".

Like so many things, publicizing that even the doctors do not agree throws the choice for the cancer stricken woman into another gambler's choice.  It seems that all of life depends in the metaphoric toss of the dice.

TRACKING KEITH OLBERMANN

For those of us who valued Keith Olbermann, it looks as though we shall be seeing him as soon as the 6 months MSNBC forced him to agree to not be on a TV show of his own.  For several years my weekday evenings had been fortunate to have Keith Olbermann on the TV screen.  He has been one of the few commentators whose stations are afraid of  controversial or seeming to be racially biased

I, for one, find him trying Current TV is a public affairs channel which was co-founded by Vice President Al Gore. If Olbermann goes there, he would be landing at a much
smaller channel than his former home, MSNBC.

Well, there seems to be hope soon.  Click here.   Whatever, somebody has got to know his competence and viewer following and give hos voice a pulpit again.

COPING SKILLS 101

Muzzammil Hassan, a Pakastani-born TV exec in NY has been accused of stabbing and then beheading his wife six days after she filed for divorce to gain some control of her own life.  One might drone on about his lacking in anger-management skills,  However, cultures differ and murder is acceptable in some areas of the world.  A sense of honor finds stoning to death acceptable.  After all, a 13 year old girl, raped in Somalia, was stoned to death with no consequences to the barbaric men who carried out the sentence. 

The major reason people violate other's boundaries, bully, abuse, and are so seemingly  unkind to others is that they are unable to identify what emotion they are feeling and lack the inner data bank of choices of behaviors with which to appropriately react..

In order to remedy this lack, a language of feelings has to be taught and recognized.  A mental list of possible coping mechanisms must be developed   For example, you might be very angry and use the expressions, "I could kill you" when you mean your anger is indescribable and you have translated it into an action.  However, rules of society and laws forbid such action.  This is the kind of situation anger-management classes, as with road rage, were set up to teach most effectively.

Teenagers often think they are in love but do not know what to do if that love is not returned.   Their love, in their eyes, is synonymous with possession and their ego cannot tolerate a rejection.  Yet they are too young and inexperienced in knowing how to cope with feelings they can't identify and relate to satisfactory behavioral responses.  .A 48 year old man was stoned to death in Somalia for adultery, buried to his chest, while the villagers were forced to watch.  It is hard to believe that civilization has lagged so far behind in some places while technology has advanced exponentially.

When immigrants from countries where such practices are tolerated or where  growing up was struggling for survival having viewed massacres, rape, and other atrocities to themselves or witnessed love ones., One must wonder what wed do to help such people when they come to live or go to school in the United States.  I recall as a child that my parents and some of their friends talked about becoming citizens.  One had to salute the flag and, in essence, pledge fealty to the laws of our country.  But the laws are so complex, how do we enforce that they are followed since they are so poorly understood.  There is current panic over a threat that Moslems are trying to turn the country over to Sharia law.

We still have African immigrants who want to continue the practice of female genital mutilation, clitorectomies.  The laissez-faire notion of 'when in Rome as the Romans do', or assuming people will learn by example, 'monkey see; monkey do' is sufficient.is inadequate assumption.  It is not a wonder, then, that we are shocked as the court was when a mother admitted to shooting her two daughters when she shot her husband and then turned the gun on herself (unsuccessful in committing suicide as her arms were too short for the shotgun, it only blew out her shoulder)..  Few could believe a mother would kill her children in cold blood and still be sane.  They couldn't wrap their heads around her having done it out of love.  She didn't want to leave them alone as orphans when she shot her husband due to her inability to cope with her own life, with his lack of caring, flagrant flaunting of girlfriends, and having spent her entire inheritance on his own education then refused to help her with hers..

We expect a lot from people who have no way of knowing what path to follow, what tools with which to cope, and somehow know societal expectations.

SUPERBOWL VIEWED BY A FOOTBALL ILLITERATE

So I would not miss the beginning of the game, I listened to the two singers...the first being America  and the second, The Star Spangled Banner.  America was not too bad but why singers, shouting into the mike at the top of their lungs, think they can improve either as was written by singing harmony notes instead of the real melody, then wobbling some of the tones like an off-key trill, thinking  to enhance.  The songs  were clearly written and no singer ever improved them by making them arias.

Forced to watch it alone,  there was no one to answer my naive questions. I have never understood what constitutes 3 points and what makes 2 points  Google answered my questions and I didn't have to feed the computer chips, dips and beer.  I had never watched either team before.  They were both wearing orange!. At the beginning when they were all doubled over, all I could see was a field of orange butts .  I hadn't the foggiest idea which team was which.  By the end of the first quarter I noticed that half of them had white shirts and half black.  By the next quarter I realized that they weren't black, they were dark green, only looking black.  Using  my  powers of deduction, I figured the green must have been the Green Bay Packers and by the half  I had it confirmed.

My ego wasn't totally deflated; I can at least say I understood most of the commercials.   I am definitely the wrong generation of music lovers to have appreciated the half time show.  I hate people thinking they are singing when they are screaming into a mike, using atrociously poor grammar in the lyrics, and generally dumbing-down the message content of the lyrics..  Blinking and colored lights. weird hair-dos, andstrange clothes don't make it music.

The best of the evening:  Vince Lombardi came back home to Green Bay!  I love to see underdogs prevail.  It  was wonderful to see Aaron Rogers get some well-deserved limelight as MVP. It just wasn't the time for  Ben Roethlisberger. and the Steelers. 

DO YOU DESERVE WHAT YOU GET?

from Merriam Webster::

de·serve verb \di-ˈzərv

transitive verb

: to be worthy of : merit 

I have often heard it said that voters who voted against Obama but ended up with the Teapartiers, deserve what they got.  This strikes me as a complete misunderstanding of the verb deserve.  It is too often used as 'deserving punishment', oddly, because it punishes the rest of us who are probably totally 'undeserving'..  

Common misuse of concepts and words  makes meaning difficult to comprehend..  "I could care less" is the opposite of what people usually intend.  They want to convey that they care the least possible.  It might be better  if they mean what they say, "I couldn't care less."

Another non-thought-out phrase is, "You made your bed, now lie in it."  That is fine if it refers to singular actions that effect that one person.  However,. if the decision was made about something that effects many it becomes useless.

"You deserve the very best."  Usually contrived by marketers.  In fact, this is a useless expression because the speaker is in no position to see that the very best is attainable for anyone.  This confuses the recipient who often also has a concept that the world should be 'fair'.  The right to fairness is another misconception. While our world would be an Eden if everything were fair and deserved, reality has never provided for that to be for all of us.  We need to shape our own world as much as possible but few of us find complete fairness and deserved merit rewarded appropriately..