THE TRAGEDY OF LACK OF COMMUNICATION

Today the Al Sharpton Show on MSNBC had the people who manage the Neighborhood Watch.  The police should have understood the rules and known that Neighborhood watch does not allow weapons.  When this boy was shot, it seemed there was no question as to why he was carrying that gun.  It is clear they are to take no action, only to serve as the eyes and ears for the police.  The police didn't question that Zimmerman followed this boy even when he was told by the police to stop.

Zimmerman was not officially in the Neighborhood Watch program.  The police did not check his background; just took his word for whatever he said.  Here are the standards for Neighborhood Watch.  When it is the police who don't communicate properly on their job it is most serious. We count on them to be unbiased but this is not clear with the reports we are hearing.  Those journalists who were privileged to hear the enhanced version Zimmerman was heard top mumble 'f*cking coon'.  If the people had not united in the media and on social programs like Twitter , Facebook, and such, it would have stopped in Sanford, FL. Violence is apparently permitted by the police department in that city, given the film we were shown on the attack on a homeless man by the son, of a policeman, whose victim spent a year or so in hospital and recuperating but was given only a year of probation.

Should someone want a more complete reiteration of what happened the night Trayvon Martin was killed, click here.

This is a major event which must change the face of our blind eye to poor policing, racial acts of hate, biases from people who don't like anyone who is not like themselves. It should cover the disabled, the homeless, the other than 'American' ethnic accent, the 'wrong' religion, the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), and given Rush Limbaugh's response to Ms. Fluke, all females.  Unless i am mistaken, that leaves only White, American males in the 'right' Christian religion.



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LIES, AND THE PEOPLE WHO TELLTHEM.

In this day and age when any public figure or criminal is recorded at the scene of their lie or criminal act, what must people think to continue those behaviors as though they will not be found out.   The habit of campaigners using only a quote from a person's speech and attributing it to the speaker himself is not a fist nor a last trick to be used but now that everyone will hear about it, why would a wise man attempt it.  I presume the strategists know that the negative picture first seen will stay in people's minds the longest.

Either Romney does not pay attention to what he is saying, leaving it all up to his handlers, or he is just a liar who cannot be trusted.   He quoted Obama as saying if we continue to focus on jobs and the economy we will lose.  That was actually said by McCain in the 2008 election campaign and was merely being quoted by Obama.

 One who shoots verbally straight is Elizabeth Warren in the Massachusetts senatorial campaign.  Sher is running against Scott Brown and the polls are currently showing her significantly ahead.  I guess what old P. T. Barnum said  "You can fool some of the people all of the time; you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can never fool all of the people all of the time" may be true, especially after the teaparty fooled so many the last election.  Joe Walsh apparently had the colossal gall to say that he was n ot going to Washington to e a typical Republican.  Forewarned should have been forewarned, but it apparently wasn't enough.  To hear him: .click here

While not exactly liars, I detest the candidates who are quick to tell you what another candidate is thinking and feeling.  Joe Walsh claims he doesn't want to get re-elected.  However, he said he wouldn't not be like Clinton who wanted to be in office forever.

It is difficult to retain a positive outlook, Mommy,  The world's not a nice place out there.

TWO OF A KIND: JEB BUSH AND MITT ROMNEY

Happily, as Jeb Bush endorsed Mitt Romney today, we all got ready to hear him on the roster as VP candidate. Oddly, immediately after, Jeb Bush was on the film taken when he was praising the new law that allows those with guns to take control of their own safety.  I wonder if Gov Bush realizes that he (with this little bit of historic film), sets himself up as a very stupid person by giving out to the public that he would go along with the bill because the NRA were great supporters of his brother's candidacy for president.

Trayvon Martin

Jeb Bush can be credited as being one of many who set up conditions for Trayvon Martin to be massacred in a way that would have been legal had not too many people heard about the farce being perpetrated by the police in Florida covered by the law Jeb Bush happily signed and patted himself on the back for doing so..

One question that can easily be answered with some testing is who screamed for help that night.  It is easy for those who record musicians and for forensic specialists to figure out from the voice patterns just who that person was who called for help.  I believe I would be pretty clear it was the boy without the gun who called for help because Mr. Zimmerman was never in critical danger.

NRA can make lots of things go away but they will not be able to make this crime go away.  While I am not fond of the social media personally, I am grateful for Twitter and FaceBook because the average person need not remain in the dark any longer. People can now speak and even be heard before the distance their voice travels from the soapbox on the Common.

BILINGUALISM MAKES YOU SMARTER

Sometimes the news of the day is good, especially if it tells you something directly relating to you that is good.  In the mid-sixties, I worked in a very well-thought-of mental hospital.  Psychopharmacology had not yet grown up.  Many of the psychiatrists were from Vienna, havi8ng trained with Freud.  I remember being in awe of one psychiatrist who claimed he could 'smell' schizophrenia.  I hoped that as I grew in the field, I, too, would learn to smell the big "S".  These Viennese-born men said the brain cannot tolerate two languages and people will be driven to schizophrenia.  That is when I stopped listening to them  They were either all schizophrenic themselves (since they clearly spoke two languages) or (more likely) they were charlatans and knew nought of what they spoke.  I was raised bilingually and I knew I was certainly not schizophrenic.

The New York Times published the results of some research that shows that bilingualism enhances brain power and makes people smarter,   Yudhijit Bhattacharjee  (who probably got smart just by learning to spell his own name) wrote:  "Speaking two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age."  For the complete article, click here.

For years I was told in school that I was not working up to my potential.  Perhaps I didn't, but I was not told that I probably had ADD (it had yet to be invented).  Added to my bilingualism, my mother would not tolerate a left-handed child so I was forced to be right handed which also helped my brain compensate to make me ambidextrous.. Last, I think the ability to multitask makes life fuller and faster. It must be said that I learned early in my career that not everyone above me is smarter than I and that I need to think everything out for myself rather than take anything said or read at face value.  It has led me in some interesting directions away from my friends and relatives in medicine, politic s, religion, diets, and many other areas.  Thinking for yourself can sometimes leave you standing alone.  It took many years for me to reach a comfort being there.  Knowing what you believe and don't believe can be a very gratifying place to live within yourself.  There is likely that no one is without faults or making mistakes.  However, knowing for yourself in what you can believe because it makes sense to you or has been proven, is helpful in lowering life's stressors.

REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE CALLED THE 'SLIPPERY SLOPE' PARTY

It is getting more painful to sit through the panels on media shows.  The producers of those shows seem to put people on who have no regard for the moderator, no courtesy to others,
and also little about what they are talking about.  Their attempt to predict the future is so often based on poor understanding of their subjects, people and otherwise,  The voices of doom and the worst possible outcomes are the most frequent guests, it seems.  To better undertand these 'slippery slope' arguments, click here.

When those arguments don't work, such as:  'If prohibition is lifted everyone will become alcoholics.'  There is no way to research is there is a greater percentage of alcoholics in our society today than when he we had prohibition or not.  We do know that there is less crime around alcohol services and the mob no longer control the market, delivery and profit.

The slippery slopers also believe (erroneously) that if marijuana is made legal everyone will up the drugs and become heroin addicts.  There is no research, to my knowledge, which can support that conclusion.  However, the most ridiculous slippery sloper I have recently heard is from Rick Santorum who said that if contraceptives are allowed, it only encourqages women to go out and have sex for pleasure.  (He is a firm believer sex should be for procreation only.)  South Americans have learned to have their massive free-for-all celebrations and festivals and often people DO have sex just for fun and pleasure.  Something must be good about it because it is the highlight of everyone's painful, overworked, poverty stricken life.A few hours of stress free time is healthy.  Why would anyone want to have a president who is so out of touch with the people he would represent.  He misses that he is not voted in as loco parentis,  It is assumed that , if you are old enough to vote, you are old enough to figure what is best for you and the politician is elected to represent you at the bargaining table between the parties.

THE MURDOCH EMPIRE GROWTH JUST HIT A BRICK WALL.

I will ass/u/me as Benny Hill would have described my thoughts at this moment.  On 3/13/2012, Rebekah Brooks (and her husband) were arrested for "suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice” – in layman's terms, an organized coverup. An article in the Christian Science Monitor stated:: "The scandal proved to be a takedown of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and thwarted, at the last minute, his efforts to take over Britain’s most lucrative cable TV operation, an outcome that would have given his global empire unprecedented power in the United Kingdom."  For the complete article, click here..

For those of us who have scorned our US Fox News Media Outlet, viewed by many of us as 'unfair and unbalanced ' rather than the advertised fair and balanced, we are seeing the arrests as quite fair.  Cheating does not belong in our media world.  Those who say, "Yeah, but lots of places do it."  are correct, which is why our jails are so full.

It has not been running in our news that I have seen these last few days as, undoubte4dly, a courtesy to Prime Minister Cameron from Britain while visiting President Obama..  At least that is what I ass/u/me.  That is fair.; 
The legal matters will continue regardless of whether our readers in the US are given all the details or not.

Recalling when Ma Bell was forced to become smaller, I deplore the administrations that allowed monopolies to multiply.  The words 'too big to fail' would have been prevented from being applicable had those regulations been in place.  When I hear Teapartiers and Republicans talk about getting rid of regulations, they sound like minor children wanting to break away from parental rules, totally immature. 

Those who agree must have grown up with the same selfish determination.  It seems strange to me that a country so full of regulations about our safety (there are fences everywhere to keep us from getting hurt by backing off a cliff) and all sorts of road rules, fines for not wearing seat belts, helmet requirements, and many others, would  Gingrich do away with child labor laws instead of trying to get children more focused on their primary task, education?  What has happened to fairness?  We are seeing so  little of it lately.

DOES PAKISTAN DESERVE OUT ECONOMIC AID?

The BBC had an article about a Pakistani doctor who aided the CIA with some information to help in the search for bin Laden..  As a result, a Pakistani commission is threatening that the doctor committed treason. 

My blog shall be brief today.  If helping us find a terrorist out to murder our president is treason, why are we as American taxpayers giving money to the Pakistani government when our children are not being properly educated, when we desperate;y need money to repair our own infrastructure and have so many other economic needs?