Quick. Name the most dangerous terrorist organization in the US, organizations that are responsible for  47 of the53 most destructive terrorist attacks in the US.
Muslims? No.
Right wing Militias? No.
The Christian fundamentalist types? No.
It’s the Animal rights extremists.
Via SecondhandsmokeBlog, quoting from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decision U.S. v Christianson:
… between 2000 and 2005, 43 […]

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One of the frustrating things when working in child maternal health in poor countries is trying to integrate medical aims into the cultural background of the people, without destroying it.
This NYTimes story, about trying to get the Mullahs in Afghanistan to approve of their people using birth control, is a good example of how to […]

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One of the major causes of death in the world is malaria, but the World Health Organization estimates that 20 percent of the one million deaths from malaria are dying because the medicines that they are taking are substandard or outright counterfeits. If you include fake antibiotics and fake drugs used to treat tuberculosis, the […]

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Ah, Halloween is here, and the TV channels are full of stories of witches and ghosts and goblins of all sorts.
Most of it is harmless fun: art and literature helps mankind be able to confront the evils around them in a way that strengthens their ability to hope that confronting the more real evils around […]

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Ah, how quickly the grandchildren grow up. The grandsons have changed from computer game freaks to college geeks, and the granddaughters are now budding teenagers, on the threshold of being a woman.
In the past, the “Themes” for birthday parties were various Disney princesses; now little girls are starting to grow up, so the Theme of […]

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The latest kerfuffle on the Health Care bill is that the Obama church has leashed the Am Cath types against the Catholic bishops.
For those of you who are not Catholic, much of the church bureaucracy is full of those who claim Vatican II to justify changing the Catholic church into a Episcopalian wanna be church.
Luckily, […]

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The headline reads: Save the Planet: Eat a Dog.
No, it’s not an anti Filipino satire about poor rural people in the provinces who eat dogs. It’s actually a post in a New Zealand paper that reports on the “carbon footprint” of Fido, Kitty and other meat eating pets.
Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects […]

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We’ve had a few sunny days here in the Philippines to finish harvesting the rice. Our fields are on high ground, so the main problems we face are finding a dry day to cut and thresh the rice, and a rice mill to dry it.
Usually in our area, rice is dried in the hot sun. […]

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First came Typhoon Ondoy, which flooded Manila and the Laguna area.
Manila had at least one million people displaced from their homes due to flooding, and many whose houses were built in low lying areas were drowned from flash flooding that they did not expect. When even movie stars have to flee to the rooftops of […]

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I was delighted to hear that Mother Angelica and Deacon Bill Steltemeier have been awarded a medal by the Vatican. She deserves it. Mother Angelica is the founder of EWTN, a Catholic network that is found on many cable systems all over the world.
On the surface it sounds like a proper award.

But her story […]

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Hollywood is shocked, shocked that a 40 year old man who drugged and raped and sodomized a 13 year old girl despite her pleas to stop might actually face punishment.
I was a doctor when few women were in medicine (the year I graduated, only 6% of physicians were female). So I’ve seen more than my […]

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The flood waters in Manila are slowly subsiding. Family members who traveled to Manila yesterday for business reported that most of the roads were clear, but that the garbage and mud from the floods were all over the place. Some of the roads remained blocked, including major highway “underpasses” that were now lakes of water.
Several […]

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On my family blog, I often write the headline: Another Day, Another Typhoon.
The Philippines gets hit by about ten typhoons a year, but we live inland so are usually safe.
On Saturday, however, the winds were brisk and the rains very very heavy. Our house has good drainage, but the main street where the vendors have […]

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The father of the “green revolution”, Norman Borlaug, has died.
Some of use are old enough to remember when famines in Asia were common, and when the “Population bomb” types were predicting mass starvation of millions of poor people.
The famines didn’t happen, because Borlaug, and other agricultural scientists, developed high yield wheat and grains, along with […]

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Reportedly, when Thomas Beckett, a “born again” Christian, turned against his former friend Henry II to defend the rights of the church from a state takeover, Henry was heard to say the above phrase, and promptly several of his henchmen went out and killed the meddlesome bishop.
Nothing new there.
One of the dangerous things about priests […]

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Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, after spending some days  praying about it, has decided to run for President of the Philippines next year, and his candidacy has upset a lot of plans.
The ruling party (theLakas-Kampi coalition) is saying “no big deal”, but actually it is, if for no other reason that he has “name recognition” […]

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One headline in the Philippine Inquirer described it as “Just Like the Titanic, minus the icebergs”.
The big news here in the Philippines is another ferry accident, but this one with a happier ending than that of last year’s “Princess of the Stars” disaster, because this time, the ferry didn’t flip over in a typhoon, but […]

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Yes, it’s recess time for the US Congress, and there are some red faces in Congress because the Wall Street Journal and the local newspaper in Seattle just noticed a cushy trip to the Galapagos, the Great Barrier Reef, and the South Pole as a fact finding trip to discover “global warming”.
One would think that […]

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On August 15th (August 14 in the US), Japan surrendered, ending the long struggles of World War II.
One would think that the end of a war that cost millions of Asian civilians their lives would cause rejoicing, but a lot of news organizations are ignoring the story.
The New York Times, admonished last year by a […]

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The beloved ex president of the Philippines, Cory Aquino, has died after a long battle with cancer.
Corazon Aquino is most famous for leading the “People Power” revolution that peacefully overthrew President Marcos in 1986, but she was more than that.
The entire nation has been sending in prayers for her, with masses, vigils, and prayer services […]

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The Anchoress today linked to a story in the National Catholic Reporter about a woman in North Korea who was executed for the “crime” of distributing Bibles.
Well, the gulags and executions in North Korea are an under-covered story in the West, at least until National Geographic’s roving reporter got arrested for “spying” a couple months […]

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An article on the left-leaning website Truthout announced yesterday that a “new direction in the war on terror” may result from a case that occurred in the last year of the Bush Administration. Bryant Neal Vinas, an American-born suspected terrorist who was captured in Pakistan, was given “all the rights of  American criminal suspects.” The results? […]

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Hillary Clinton declares the US is back in Asia.
Uh, I hate to tell her but I wasn’t aware that they left.
Here in the Philippines, there has been an ongoing revolt by the Moro tribes on and off for about a hundred years but with the resurgence of “charity money” funneled to AlQaeda linked terror groups […]

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Years ago, when I worked in Africa, the light in my office started to fail. There was no electricity during the day, so we got our office light via old fashioned windows. My first thought was a storm: but there were no clouds. Although the sun was shining, everything seemed to be dim. A phrase […]

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Doctor Sally Satel has an editorial in the NYPost promoting giving payment to those who donate organs, or to their families.
She tells a variation of the usual spin: by allowing money to enter into the decision on whether to donate, we would increase organ donations. Ergo, it would help save the lives of many people.
Ah, […]

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Ah yes, it’s tick season again, and my husband Lolo is busy removing the nasty creatures from our watch dogs.
For the dogs, the ticks are mainly a nuisance: but in some areas of the world, the risk of Lyme disease makes mothers hysterical if they find a tick on their kid.
The big question is if […]

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I wasn’t too surprised to see headlines in our local Manila paper that Michael Jackson had died.
Heck, sometimes the headline announces that x number of people passed the nurses’ examination this year, and usually under the headline is a photo of our lovely President.
But his headline is larger than usual, with a long story of […]

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As the mother of two adopted boys, I am for adoption, but now we are seeing couples like Sarah JessicaParker andMatthew Broderick “renting” a womb to obtain their newest child.
What’s wrong with this picture? After all, they give money, and a woman is paid a lot of money to carry their (genetically related) baby to […]

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Here in the Philippines, there are always demonstrations, usually by the leftists, but if things get bad enough, the opposition always reminds the government about the “People Power” revolution that overthrew Marcos.
At that time, thugs associated with Marcos assassinated exiled politician Ninoy Acquino who had just returned to Manila to run against Marcos in the […]

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Here in the Philippines, the headlines are usually full of big stories: a bomb in the south, a mudslide from the monsoons, or another corruption/bribery allegation.
But right now, the big story that everyone is following are the “Nip/Tuck” sex tape scandal. It seems that a prominent Manila plastic surgeon was seducing some of his patients, including […]

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