The Villages Daily Sun...day.

      The New York Times famously displays on its masthead the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” The National Enquirer seems to have gone the route of “All the Dirt That Fits, we Print.”   Somewhere in the middle is our local (The Villages Daily Sun.”

        The paper has a large circulation for its population demographic, with distribution up 192% since 2003, while newspaper circulation around the United States has dropped 43 percent. This doesn’t include those outlets with digital circulation, like the WaPo and NYtimes. The Sun’s slogan should be “All the News that Fits Our Narrative, We Print.” The paper has stopped printing opinion letters to the editor, since some individuals, and I was one, insisted on responding to hate speech with reasoned response.

        The op-ed page features just about all Hard-Right columnists, including the two nastiest persons in America, “anchor baby” turned immigrant troller, Michelle Malkin and John Stossel, advocate for return to the age of Robber Barons. If you think that last is an exaggeration, Stossel actually defended $90 per case price gouging for bottled water, post Hurricane Harvey and Malkin has written that Japanese internment in the US was a “good idea.” Adriana Cohen and Walter Williams are but a tiny step down the vitriol slope, but on the too rare occasion, the Sun will run a column by Mona Charen, still markedly right of center, but literate and relatively moderate.

        Editorial policy hinges of course on the conservative politics of the developer’s family, who owns the paper and exerts political and self-serving editorial policy in a general way. For example: The Daily Sun's newspaper strategy has received criticism from residents and national media for its lack of coverage on topics of importance to the community. In 2017, over 32 sinkholes were reported in The Villages by media sources, despite The Villages Daily Sun reporting only one of those. According to Sun staff, speaking off record, employees had been instructed to not report on sinkholes and "anything complimentary about President Barack Obama."  A resident from The Villages who was selected to receive a private audience with Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, was told by the editor that the encounter was not newsworthy.

        On the other hand, being as fair and balanced as possible, (me, that is) local apolitical issues are generally well handled, and national news is generally syndicated Associated Press national releases. The future direction of the Sun may depend on the third generation of the Morse family, whose theater ties may well indicate a more tolerant attitude. We’ll see. I just wrote the above to give some sense of what it means to be a social liberal in The Villages. On balance, it could be worse ….it could be Kansas.

       So, what do we glean from today’s version?

        For starters, Red Tide is making a comeback in Southwest Florida, just in time for the snowbirds to begin flocking back. I wonder if there’s a previously undiscerned linkage?

       In completely unrelated news, it seems that some morons decided to desecrate what has been dubbed “America’s Stonehenge” using power tools to deface stones on this new Hampshire site which has, for years been a source of moderate controversy and what has been called, by some scientific authorities “pseudo-archeology.”  As far as anyone knows, the spot--located on the aptly named Mystery Hill, and accessible for a modest entry fee these days, was first settled by Jonathan Pattee and his family in 1823. Some say Pattee built it; there is more agreement that he destroyed much of it, selling the granite for sidewalks. With some of the stones at 4 tons, Patee would have needed a lot of Wheaties, just sayin’. There are markings on the rocks which are controversial because of what they have been claimed to be by believers and skeptics alike.

        One such “believer” former Harvard professor, Dr. Barry Fell, a linguist, investigated “inscriptions” found at the site. He said they could be “confidently set at about 800-600 BC and it was clear that Goidelic Celts," warlike early settlers of the British Isles--"were the occupants at that date, and in all probability, the builders too.”  Having read Dr Fell’s three best known books, “Bronze Age America”, “America BC” and “Saga America”, all I can say is read ‘em and make up your own mind.

Do we really think these were built by one guy?

rock carvings are hard to see, but plentiful

       In 1936, William Goodwin purchased the site, and until his death in 1950 took steps to preserve and research it. In his book, “The Ruins of Greater Ireland in New England,” he claims that the structures were built by Irish monks around AD 1000. I report, you decide.

        In a classic case of “You can’t fix stupid” (thanks, Ron White) one Cade Edmond Seimers, decided that taking a walk in Yellowstone at night and without a flashlight was even remotely a good idea, and he did so. Anyone who has been to the Park knows that the entire 3500 square mile region sits in the caldera of a (currently) dormant volcano which is located not on a plate boundary (fault line) like California or Japan, but rather over what is referred to as a “hot spot.” 

       The earth’s mantle is a liquid magma cloak which sometimes comes near the surface, not on plate boundaries (like the Pacific Ring of Fire, but in the middle. Mantle plumes are areas of hot, upwelling mantle. A hot spot develops above the plume, and if magma generated by the hot spot rises through the rigid plates of the lithosphere (rocks) it can and does produce active volcanoes at the Earth's surface. ... Hot spots are places within the mantle where rocks melt to generate magma. Hot spots exist around the world both undersea (the Hawaiian Islands are classic examples of islands formed as a plate moves over a hot spot) and under land masses as it has in Yellowstone. Apparently, determined to validate Darwin, Mr. Seimers, wandering around near Old Faithful in the dark, tripped (his word) and fell into a hot spring. The oddity isn’t that he did it, (well, OK, that is pretty weird), but that he lived to tell about it. He had to have stumbled on one of the coolest springs in the area, since Old Faithful erupts with 204-degree water. Falling into water at that temperature is a death sentence, even if the water isn’t one of the acid springs, which have dissolved humans and animals periodically. Temperatures underground in the park get as high as 456 degrees F. I repeat, you can’t fix stupid (but you can scald it!!)

The headline for this photo reads: "Man dissolved in boiling acidic water in slip at Yellowstone ..." Good thing our lucky friend didn't find this pool!

        In another example of understatement, A bridge on Taiwan collapsed on October 1. No bomb, no sabotage.  It fell down. It broke. The geniuses who report these things decided that their “may have been structural issues.” Wow! Asian wisdom prevails.

        And finally (mostly because I’m tired of typing and lunch is ready) “U.N. Security Council to Meet Tuesday on North Korea Launches.”  The story below the headline simply repeats with a bit more verbiage, that sentiment. North Korea has test launched a ballistic missile, not at any living target(s) and Britain, France and Germany didn’t like it, calling for “closed consultations” on the matter.

        This is an apparent continuation of the philosophy that “we” (western republics) are allowed to have these devices, but you Communists and/or Islamic nations  aren’t (unless you’re Russia, or China which are so big we can’t bully them like we do you (“you” being North Korea and Iran). Am I the only person of sound mind which finds that weird?

        I mean, both India and Pakistan are also nuclear capable, Pakistan, which sheltered Osama Bin Laden, since the late 1980s. As the nation which provided a haven for the mass murderer (so far) of the 21^st century, why aren’t we all “fatootsed” about that?

        Oh well lunchtime.