For the Civics Challenged Americans

fas⋅cism  [fash-iz-uhm] –noun
1. (sometimes initial capital letter) a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power, forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.
This is not the Obama administration, but I can see why Glenn Beck wants people to think Obama is racist ... it helps cement other people's incorrect views of his government as fascist.

so⋅cial⋅ism  [soh-shuh-liz-uhm] –noun
1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.
This is also not the Obama administration. Where is this happening?

com⋅mu⋅nism  [kom-yuh-niz-uhm] –noun
1. a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.
This is also not in the cards of the current administration.

Na·zism (nät'sĭz'əm, nāt'-)
n. The ideology and practice of the Nazis, especially the policy of racist nationalism, national expansion, and state control of the economy.
Also not on the books of anything the Obama administration is doing

de⋅moc⋅ra⋅cy  [di-mok-ruh-see] –noun, plural -cies.
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
This is exactly what we have. Obama received the popular vote and the electoral vote in the last election. That means a majority of Americans voted for him and his ideals of health care reform. It is the few trying to exert its will on the many, not the other way around.

My Michael Jackson Moment

Michael Jackson's heydays were years before I took an interest in music — I was just 3 when "Thriller" came out and 8 when "Bad" was released — but I do recall the video for "Bad" when I was still a child.

It wasn't until "Dangerous" that I got to experience the whole Michael Jackson effect. I saw the premiere of the "Black or White" video and remember vividly each subsequent single and video. It was impossible not to notice, and while many people felt he was on his way out by then, it was a favorite album of mine for years because of how I could place events in my life around it.

Even if he was already hitting lows, he was higher than everything else out there. Michael Jackson had a way of making everything relative.

Of course, this isn't really a moment, it was well over a year, leading into his HBO broadcast European concert.

But my real Michael Jackson moment was sitting in my bedroom with the lights out and listening to "Dangerous" on cassette on my step sister's Walkman, not long after its release. I didn't want to be disturbed (hence the lights out and headphones), and I certainly wasn't. I listened to the album from beginning to end twice that night before leaving my room and returning to whatever else was going on in the house, and it was played over and over again many more times through the years.

"Dangerous" was a doorway for my sister and I. She latched onto MJ like he was hers, reading biographies, watching the TV movie (I don't know how many times). I began listening to his other albums, and even though they were 12, 9 and 5 years old at the time, there was something timeless about them.

He became an entertainer that my family could agree upon, and that wasn't easy. Play "Thriller" in the car and we could all listen to it blaring while driving across the state.

For me, he was a pop entertainer who was without equal who introduced me to music genres that I would have heard no where else in Western Pennsylvania. There was an artistry to him that never failed to shine through all the drama — personal and very public — and never tainted him in my own world.

I can't think of worse time for MJ to have passed. Was he on the verge of a true comeback ahead of retirement? About to further cement his place in history on his way out?

All I know is I'm waiting for his next record release, the apparently two unfinished albums that I can't find enough information about!

Diagnosis This

Something is missing from the health care overhaul debate, and it stands to have one of the biggest impacts — I think — on ultimately reining in costs and answers critics who question who has a say in patients' care, treatment, etc. etc.

And that is lifestyle changes.

If so many of today's ailments are preventable, to calm the crush that is sure to come with another 46 million people visiting the doctor's office, this is something that needs to be dealt with.

It starts with appropriate care for babies, to ensure they are growing up as healthy as can be. It involves better nutrition such as food stamps that have appropriate exemptions on them for the crap at the supermarkets (if it's money that you're not earning, is it really wrong to place demands on how it's used?) and better quality food at schools where there are no soda
or junk food vending machines.

This would also include no more subsidies for high fructose corn syrup and more subsidies for real food.

To go along with better nutrition, there should be a better emphasis on exercise with recess and Physical Education in school. As for education, how about something a little different with Home Economics, unless of course my high school's version of it is not the norm ...

In Philadelphia, there is already a tremendous resource with the medical universities and the health centers where seminars can be provided to help educate people on matters of health and wellness. This could be expanded to provide greater service to more people.

People must be responsible for their health, but they also should be informed.

Is this adding to the cost? Maybe in the short term, but after 10 years, the time frame with a scary $1 trillion price tag, there should be some noticeable improvements in people's health overall, and a generation out, the price should drop or remain the same (with the population growing).

Yes, $1 trillion is a big price, but I don't let it faze me too much for one reason: We are fixing a broken system, and the cost is always greatest upfront, as long as the plan put in place is the right one.

A real cynic on all of journalism

So this blog is active again. A few factors are behind this, not the least of which is the dire state of the newspaper AND media industry as a whole and the growing number of conversations on the matter that I find myself in.

It should be noted to (re)start that I’m a newspaper man. I’ve been reading newspapers since I was a kid, and, if you want to include high school, which is stretching it, I’ve been working in newspapers for the past 14 years.

I’ve never been a TV news fan, especially local TV news — never enough stories or substance. It seems the local TV station puts viewers in a bubble. They get the basics, but not the angles, nuances, heck, even all the story. And this effect can be seen in the ever shorter attention span of people (worsened by the Internet, yes). TV news lacks the breadth attainable with even a subpar newspaper, and too many good stories don’t translate well to TV.

Speaking with a customer service agent the other week, while waiting for her computer to catch up to our conversation, she let it be known that her household had dropped its newspaper subscription and made the switch to TV news, but that didn't last long. They dropped TV news and went back to newspapers simply for the diversity, depth and breadth of the news offered within the paper's pages.

Here in Philadelphia, if it hadn't been for The Philadelphia Inquirer, what medium would have put together the multi-issue series detailing problems in the insulated board that sets property taxes for each house in the city? Who would have known about the the backroom deals, the lack of transparency, the corruption? City Hall sure didn't. It was the newspaper that got the investigation and uproar started.

As for network news? I usually find if I’m watching one of the one-hour news shows, a story will catch my attention, but as for the show, station or TV reporter, don't even ask, all you will get is a blank stare from me. And the 24/7 news channels? Too much banter and conjecture and opinion and not enough news, to add to the problems already mentioned with local TV news.

The cable news networks also seem to have too many anchors with egos that, just by their very presence, immediately changes a story's credibility. I can find some entertainment in it, but the news is pretty light. And why are so any people in the news/media also the subject of stories?

While technology is making “news” increasingly easier to obtain, the problem comes in the lack of any uniform standards regarding what to report, what to rely on for sources and even when to post a story.

How about the bogus report a few years back about Apple CEO Steve Jobs being rushed to the hospital? It was posted on a blog, picked up by a major tech news Web site, and subsequently led to billions of dollars being erased in Apple's stock market value, only for the initial blog report to turn out false …

And this is just the tip of the iceberg on the technology front of the media.

What isn't complementing the ease of obtaining “news” is the reader’s ability to discern a Web site’s or source’s credibility and to seek out additional information to ensure the whole story is there before the reader shares the information with other people.

In an ever more self-absorbed, rushed and/or apathetic society, the problem seems like it will get worse before it gets better.

When the news was all packaged together, it lost the interest of readers who were craving snippets, bias and personality, but these very things are part of what is destroying the media, leading to an ever more tainted view of it. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that is spiraling down, down, down.

See, many newspapers have decades, even centuries of reputation built up. Social networks and blogs have 5, maybe 10 years, tops. And when the newspapers were getting started, an error wasn’t repeated a thousand times over in just a day, which quickly becomes the case.

More importantly, many of these sites offering “news” are put together by people who lack any sort of education in journalism.

In the meantime, the decimation of newspapers is leading to more errors and poor judgment within the pages.

The term “news” has been used loosely in this post. There already is an understanding by the reader when visiting CNN.com, MSNBC.com, even the BBC news site or some other site publishing news from The Associated Press or Reuters.

But these are general news news sites for the most part, and don't delve too deeply in other areas.

Real news also isn't found on the editorial pages of a newspaper, any commentary section of a Web site, or on the screen coming from a roundtable of TV analysts.

To be a well informed citizen will take more work going forward. It means following a story through the paper (it would be smart to subscribe), on a few online news outlets and from the TV.

Not doing so will make the propaganda work of the spin meisters all that much easier.

It was partially the lack of voice diversity in the national media leading up to the war in Iraq by President George W. Bush that led to the whitewash of support and we see where that got America.

Why should we listen to just one voice about any other topic that may directly impact us even more severely?

Another Reason to Disavow Religion?

AP News Alert:
10:19 PM 11/21/2008
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) _ Malaysia's top Islamic body issues edict to ban yoga for Muslims, says practice is un-Islamic.

Upon reading the story, there was nothing redeeming about this nonsense "fatwa" or the crazies who decided on it. In searching for this story, as my AP Newswire suspiciously broke down around the same time, I was introduced to only more insanity: Christian churches denying yoga groups access to the church building and fatwa against girls having short hair (it's sinful).

I read a story probably more than a month ago about some school in upstate New York that had been offering yoga as a gym class, but parents complained and guess what the solution was?

To teach yoga, but call it something else. That was perfectly acceptable!! The problem parents had with it was that it apparently promotes Hinduism, but the story didn't say the instructor was doing any such thing. The Hinduism aspect was also the reason Muslims in Malaysia were being banned from practicing it.

Now I realize that Hindu is a basis for yoga, but any yoga teacher I've had (probably 8 now) who mixed religious references with the practice in the slightest leaned more toward Buddhism, if any religion, but even that was completely secondary to the health benefits of yoga and clearing the mind and living peacefully.

I also don't see any detriment to yoga by focusing only on the health and lifestyle aspects, which is quite opposite of say, removing the pope and clergy from the Catholic Church, who are for disavowing Catholics who support(ed) Barack Obama for president.

Of course, this should be sort of nonsense news should be 'duh' for me because Islam isn't really known for being peaceful these days (no offense, but the radical factions are definitely in control of the image). And neither are a number of Christian faiths.

I mean, seriously, has anyone ever heard a yogi call for assassination of a country's leader? Nuking a country? Killing thousands? Infringing on civil or human rights?

I can only hope such negativity and stress offs these loonies while millions of people around the world are finding inner peace and a healthy, longer life in Warrior 1, 2 or 3!

Namaste!