Tag: miscellaneous

This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage with Grace team. To learn more, please go to www.engagewithgrace.org, and see this story in today’s Boston Globe.

We make choices throughout our lives — where we want to live, what types of activities will fill our days, with whom we spend our time. These choices are often a balance between our desires and our means, but at the end of the day, they are decisions made with intent. But when it comes to how we want to be treated at the end our lives, often we don’t express our intent or tell our loved ones about it.

This has real consequences. Seventy-three percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, but up to 50 percent die in hospital. More than 80 percent of Californians say their loved ones “know exactly” or have a “good idea” of what their wishes would be if they were in a persistent coma, but only 50 percent say they’ve talked to them about their preferences.

But our end-of-life experiences are about a lot more than statistics. They’re about all of us. So the first thing we need to do is start talking.

“Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project” was designed with one simple goal: to help get the conversation about end of life experience started. The idea is simple: Create a tool to help get people talking. One slide, with just five questions on it. Five questions designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences. And we’re asking people to share this one slide wherever and whenever they can — at a presentation, at dinner, at their book club. Just one slide, just five questions.

Lets start a global discussion that, until now, most of us haven’t had.

Here is what we are asking you: Download the One Slide (PowerPoint) and share it at any opportunity — with colleagues, family, friends. Think of the slide as currency and donate just two minutes whenever you can. Commit to being able to answer these five questions about end of life experience for yourself, and for your loved ones. Then commit to helping others do the same. Get this conversation started.

Let’s start a viral movement driven by the change we as individuals can effect, and the incredibly positive impact we could have collectively. Help ensure that all of us — and the people we care for — can end our lives in the same purposeful way we live them.

Just One Slide, just one goal. Think of the enormous difference we can make together.

Looks like the Houston Chronicle is going all-out in its efforts to keep online readers informed about what’s going on in the wake of Ike. But there would appear to be a flaw in the system. Check this out, from an FAQ on the Chronicle’s Web site:

Question: When will the power come back on?
Answer: It could take weeks. CenterPoint Energy reports virtually all its customers — 2.1 million of its 2.26 million — are without power as of 10 a.m. Saturday.

Hmmm … OK, so who in the Houston-Galveston area is able to read the Chronicle’s Web site?

Next week I’m giving a 15- to 20-minute talk on the role of the media in the presidential campaign. What I’d like to do is mention a few media trends and how they may play out. I thought I’d put up a rough outline in the hopes that you might help me refine it. Here’s where I’m at right now:

1. Citizen journalism. From the “Macaca” video to Mayhill Fowler, expect the unexpected.
2. The rise of a liberal counter-media. Left-leaning, media-savvy Web sites such as Media Matters and, increasingly, the cable channel MSNBC mean Fox News and Rush Limbaugh no longer have the field to themselves.
3. The decline of the so-called objective press as a trusted source. The public that is most engaged with politics wants its political news delivered in the context of an ideological community.
4. The role of “undernews.” I believe that’s a Mickey Kaus term. I’m referring to stories and rumors that are kept swirling online, breaking into the mainstream later if at all.
5. The 24-minute news cycle. No longer is it enough to respond within a day or even in a few hours. There’s no longer a news cycle — it’s constant.

Well, there are five, which seems about right. But I’m not sure it’s the best five, and some are clearly subsets of the same phenomenon. If you’ve got a better idea, or some examples I should use to flesh these out, don’t hold back.

Paul Bradshaw observes that the news media were quick to run with the video of a Georgian television reporter whose arm had supposedly been grazed by a Russian sniper, but none made any attempt either to verify what had happened, or to respond to skeptical commenters.

This just in. The headline on this YouTube video is “Journalist gets injured in Georgia by the Russian sniper.” Go ahead and watch — it’s not particularly graphic, and the journalist was not seriously injured; it’s more shocking than anything.

I have no verification or information on what this is, but it was clearly taken of a television reporter in the midst of a newscast. Toward the end, an anchor appears. This was posted on Twitter by Andrew Dunn, a journalism student at the University of North Carolina.

More: CNN, in describing the video, says, “While on-air, a reporter is grazed by a bullet and goes on to say the shot was fired from the Russian-controlled area.” The source is listed as Georgia’s state television service.