head in sand. check.

[erastes]

 

-   - - 

I am now double tracking on the residential care fees and have gone back to the default stage of worrying. The thing is they don’t say whether the fees are monthly or weekly. I assumed monthly, but now I don’t know. It seems not enough for monthly, too much for weekly. If they are weekly, we are snookered as Dad’s pensions won’t cover them. argh. I have ostrich-in-the-sand-itis now, because I don’t want to ask for clarification. I’ll wait until i get another brochure and hope they are clearer. It was nice to have no weight on my shoulders for half a day, anyway. Dad of course, had no memory of asking me to ask for brochures and got half annoyed with me this morning as if I was about to shove him into a home against his will. Oh joy.

If anyone has a relative IN  a residential home, would you mind privately sharing with me (via email or PM) how much the fees are? I’m trying to save his house, you see—I can rent it, but don’t know how quickly I’d be able to do that in a crisis.

I am going to be unpopular saying this, but that hoo ha about the New Hampshire paper who is refusing to print a gay wedding announcement—well, it’s annoying, but that’s what newspapers do, choose their own political agenda. There ain’t no sich thing as a free press, if someone owns it, and someone runs it, then they decide what goes in. Forcing them to do otherwise makes a mockery of the whole bloody idea of free speech, although that’s a concept that people like to think they have, when really they don’t. or they do, but you have to take the consequences of it.

Words done, at least. And now I can’t get onto LJ or to Google. Great.

Comments

[angrboda]

Forcing them to do otherwise makes a mockery of the whole bloody idea of free speech, although that’s a concept that people like to think they have, when really they don’t.

Yes. This. Because freedom of press goes both ways. They have the freedom to print whatever they wish. And that also brings with it the freedom to NOT print something they DON'T wish to print.

Funny how so many people seem to forget that.

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree with your free press issue in principle, but in the US, 95% of the media have been bought out by half a dozen neocon corporations. What exists now is a propaganda machine pretending it's exercising free speech.

Network television refused to air Democrat rebuttals to GOP lies in the 2004 and 2006 elections (Probaly 08 as well, but I wasn't living in the US anymore and didn't keep track.)

It's not a free press anymore. Independents are bought out, starved out, and sometimes criminally bullied out. The Internet is the last free speech in America, and the corporations are jockeying to swallow that, too.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

Well, I agree with your free press issue in principle, but in the US, 95% of the media have been bought out by half a dozen neocon corporations. What exists now is a propaganda machine pretending it's exercising free speech.

Sad but true. Look at the media family trees. It's unreal.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

And here's yet another reason why the intarwebz aren't nearly as free as you thought. This link came from kylecassidy, who's the user rep for lj.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/more-privacy-headaches-for-facebook-gay-users-outed-to-advertisers.ars

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. The idea that there is anything private on the internet--except, to some degree, credit card transactons--is just wishful thinking. I use half a dozen diffent birthdates and maiden names, just to reduce the risk of some website being hacked.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

OTP here, but just wondering if you'd seen the older movie (1977) The Duellists. Couldn't recall if you'd posted about this one or not.
Review here that sounded as if (if you hadn't seen it already) you might like it...
http://twistedchick.dreamwidth.org/3497920.html

[lexin.livejournal.com]

I sympathise with the Aged P. problem. You know my situation with my mother.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

This was the first I'd heard about the wedding announcement story. I'm *SO* unsurprised. I live in NH, in Manchester, where the Union Leader is the local paper. It's been somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun for the last 40 years or so. It's actually improved in the last decade (not to say that it's editorial stance is reasonable, but it's about 50% less unreasonable that it was 20 years ago). When the founder, William Loeb, was still running it, it was really a horror.

Somewhere I have a clipping of an editorial from around 79 or 80 ranting against Dungeons and Dragons, with a wonderful list of things it encouraged which included the standard ones like witchcraft and devil worship, but stuck in my mind because they added feminism and Jungian psychology to the mix. (Which I guess means they're just as bad, somehow.... I can see why they don't like feminism, but I never could rationalize the Jungian psychology thing.)

About the same time they had another editorial on the evils of having co-ed dormitories at the local state university (co-ed in this context means girls on one floor and boys on another, for the most part). They ranted about them as "state sponsored whorehouses".

[vinnie-tesla.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, the story hasn't been getting much coverage here in New England.

Your mention was the first I'd heard of it, and my first thought was, "That'd be the Union-Leader?" Their regional nickname is 'the Nut of the North.'