High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news.
It’s Holy Week here in the Philippines, which means lots of church going and Manila is emptying out for folks to go home for the Easter Holidays. First Things magazine discusses how Americans should view the crucifixion: not as an event to be watched, but as the result of our sins. They even quote Luther [...]
Well, today we Filipinos woke up and found we wouldn’t be losing Cardinal Tagle to Rome: Apparently an Argentinian bishop was picked for the next Pope. But choosing a name usually is a hint on what the Pope plans to do when in office, and it is interesting that Cardinal Bergloglino chose the name of [...]
This week we Catholics celebrate Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. A lot of good Catholics were slightly hung over from too much Mardi Gras on Tuesday, but never mind: The idea is that “there is a time to party and a time to fast”, and now the time to fast has arrived. Traditionally, at [...]
The latest reports is that our beloved President has breathlessly announced to Davos that he has eliminated corruption here since taking office, so come and invest your money here! From a headline in the Manila Bulletin: Aquino: PH Corruption Over With the days of corruption and mismanagement of the past administration finally over, the Philippines [...]
I love when elites at green sites put guilt trips on ordinary folks. Yes, these types of articles are needed to educate citified yuppies who love organic food and green living but are blithely unaware that these practices were routine in the days of their grandparents and remain routine in poorer areas of the country [...]
 Here in the Philippines, guns were confiscated under Marcos, and although one can get a permit, the average person doesn’t have permission to carry a gun. That is not to say that the average person doesn’t have a gun: most middle class folks have one or two guns or rifles illegally stashed in their homes, [...]
Part one discussed the way the Philippines went along with American pressure to pass a US style family planning program whose aim (denied by the president) is to limit population control. Reality check: every “discussion” of the bill by the Manila elites includes lamentations about the high population growth, and even a few politicians have [...]
Neocolonialism anyone? The Philippines passed an RH bill, a “Reproductive Health Bill” that requires medical personnel to push birth control on their patients, and all the US newspapers are rejoicing. The bill had the opposition of the powerful Catholic church, but in a country where the average number of kids per woman has fell from [...]
If I am voting against the President, it is not racism but because he is going out of his way to persecute the Catholic church: The problem? The week after taking office, the President removed conscience rights regulations from the federal regulations. This means that the only thing standing between Catholics and Muslims from being [...]
Ninety-five years ago, a bunch of ignorant hoi polloi went out into the fields of a small rural town to see a predicted miracle, and the big city MSM was there to laugh at them and to record how the fools would respond when they found nothing happened. Whoops: (photo Via Tea at Trianon) Yes, [...]
The headline in today’s Manila Bulletn is that hackers have taken down some government websites to protest the new “cyberlaw”. The cyberlaw is supposed to protect folks against having their email and facebook sites hacked, and to stop hackers from stealing your identity, but it also includes laws against libel: Basically, the group claimed, the [...]
In today’s news we read about multicity protests that burned flags and had to be broken up by police using water cannons. So where were these demonstration? Cairo? Beruit? Karachi? No, they were in China. The UK Telegraph has a story about these “spontaneous” demonstrations: China seized by second day of violent anti-Japan protests More [...]
This morning I rose and read the “sermon of the day” before I went to church, and sure enough, another highfalutin sermon on the Good Samaritan. For those who are not Christian, this is one of Jesus’ stories about a man beaten by robbers who was helped by a passerby who belonged to a rival [...]
This report from an Iranian blog on Global Voices, says they have such a chicken shortage the price of .chickens have soared. So someone decided to censor films and TV programs that show…chickens (!) Against a backdrop of lengthening food queues, Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the head of Iran’s law enforcement forces, has warned that films depicting [...]
The greens in the Philippines are fighting all GM food, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways. I mean, we are in the “organic rice” business, and use locally developed hybrids, so cheap, abundant “Genetically modified” rice imports from China are not in our best interest. But the search for new [...]
GMA and ESPN are now promoting hate speech against Catholics under the guise of accusing Filipine boxer Pacquiao of homophobia. From “An Open Letter to Manny Pacquiao From a Gay Filipina American,” …your parents give you Catholicism as a kind of heavy gift. A centuries-old guide for every life transition a human can go through. [...]
No, the Catholics here in the Philippines are not boycotting Lady Gaga: these are Protestant protests. Old leftie Bishop Cruz is blasting about corruption, the RH Bill and the plans of the elites to legalize divorce on his website, but not Gaga. The Catholic bishop’s website is worried about the ecology and corruption, but not [...]
Heh. The Honorable Senator Emmanuel D, Pacquiao, Aka the world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao, aka Pacman, who recently found religion, is now under attack. Why? Well, it s seems that he has made a remark against gay marriage, and his website has some Biblical phrases that imply promiscuous gay sex is wrong. Since Pacman has [...]
Most Americans know about the “Asian Tiger” economies (and if PNoy keeps hitting at corruption, the Filipinos may join that group). But did you know that other areas of the world are similarly expanding their economies? A day or two ago, I ran into an article that those “undocumented” immigrants in the US are now [...]
I see the anti Asian mafia have a new scalp on their belts, with the conviction of an Indian born student for a “hate crime” and invasion of privacy. But lost in the homophobia meme of the politically correct is a question: Do students have the right to privacy in one dorm’s room? Because in [...]
I noticed two of my grandchildren and a niece had shared the “Invisible children” film on my facebook site. This was a bit surprising, because one is a church going, volunteering teenager, the second is a sophisticated student in the UK, and the third one is a heavy metal music loving Goth. But all are [...]
Check this out: Natural Gas,via TPMBarnett’s webpage: natural gas deals are proceeding internationally: the flow out of North America alters things, regionalizing flows more as Japan and Germany move off nukes and seek to ramp up their use of gas to generate electricity, and as emerging markets in general ramp up their gas use… (cheap [...]
Here in the Philippines, thanks to Wikileaks, we know that not only American money is behind our “Reproductive Health Bill”, but that the American State Department is pressuring our president to pass the bill. Heaven knows that the Philippines does need access to cheaper Birth control, but it’s not as if it’s not available: they [...]
It rained last night, and more coming. In some ways, this is good news, because it means we don’t have to pay so much to irrigate our “dry season” crop. But it is bad news for the south, which is still recovering from the devestating storm that killed over a thousand people.. Superficially, the storm [...]
The NYTimes has an article about problems with the Global fund to fight AIDS. It seems that they checked the books and found some of the money was stolen or diverted, and as a result, a lot of European donors are not giving any more money until the problem is cleared up. You want honesty [...]
The LATimes has a story that India has now produced a thirty five dollar tablet computer for it’s students, or sort of… The plan is to distribute thousands of the computers in coming months to students at a government-subsidized rate of $35. It has taken several years to develop, faced a lot of skepticism and [...]
While CNN International is the “Michael Jackson trial” 24/7, and Google News’ major story is about someone called Amanda Knox, the story here in SE Asia is the floods from the typhoons. Here in the Philippines, large areas remain flooded, partly due to the fact that the irrigation dams are still open to drain the [...]
In my previous post, I wondered if the protesters on Wall Street had proposals of how to fix things, or if they were theoreticians from Nephelokokkygia. So exactly what do those Wall Street protesters want? A proposed list of demands can be found at their website. They don’t want much. Demand one: Restoration of the [...]
Some of the progressive blogs are lauding the protests against Wall Street as if these protests were an uprising of the “PEOPLE” against the rich, and a copy of the heroism of the Arab Spring. Now, I am aghast at the Wall Street shenanigans as much as the next person, but when the president and [...]
Here in the rice lands of Luzon, the latest news is bad. You probably read in the news that we were hit by Typhoon Pedring, but this time Manila was not devestated as in Typhoon Ondoy two years ago. Manila Bay’s affluent waterfront properties were damaged when the storm wall failed, but Manila was not [...]
How do respond to the bravery of men who catch a man eating crocodile, to protect their children from harm? You tell them they should be ashamed of themselves, and that they should let the dangerous animal go free. Yes, the foreigners who pay all that nice money to PETA to get foreign women to [...]
I had written two skeptical articles on the issue of “isolated tribes” in the Amazon region. In the first article, I pointed out that the idea that these people can and should remain isolated (by keeping out the governments and do gooders and developers) is wrongheaded, because that won’t stop the bad guys from moving [...]
My husband as a young teenager joined his older brother’s guerilla group to help rid Luzon of the Japanese in 1945. Alas, the story of the terrible fight, first in the city of Manila, and later against the fleeing Japanese hiding in the jungles and mountains of Luzon, is too often forgotten, overshadowed by those [...]
Will the hiring policies of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia result in the loss of jobs for Filipino and Indonesian maids? Last week, the Indonesian government was upset when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia beheaded a maid working there for murder. From RaissaRobles‘ webpage: Saudi authorities had refused to give Indonesian diplomats access to Ruyati Binti [...]
I am old enough to remember when women were exiled into specific specialties in medicine (quick: how many women Urologists do you know), and a similar problem was seen in college (few women in my advanced science classes) and in the newspaper (where women often were expected to write fluffy reports for the fashion and [...]
Many years ago, conspiracy theorists claimed the US was fighting in Viet Nam in order to exploit the oil fields in the Spratlys islands. This fact allowed the anti war humanitarians to dismiss the story that the US was there because a communist takeover of the region that would result in hundreds of thousand sent [...]
Should we ask students to “give back” to society? Actually, many do: all sorts of volunteers out there, such as the churches and religious groups helping to clean up after the recent tornadoes and floods. A lot of those doing so are following the family tradition. My grandkids routinely work at soup kitchens and in [...]
Last week, my son in law went for the fifth time to Manila to try to collect rent owed and damages for a house we rented out. (We bought it when he was attending university there, and now rent it out). In the USA, usually after a few months of non payment, you can get [...]
Like all Americans, I am happy that the terrorist leader Osama Ben Laden has been killed. Yes, as a Catholic Christian I pray for his soul, but unlike Time Magazine, I believe in hell, especially since there is no evidence that he repented his murders of the innocent on three continents. Yet shortly after the [...]
I am aghast when I read at MSNBC Money the “good” side of higher oil prices. Summary: it will make you buy a smaller car, not travel as much, and so you will be healthier from walking and Mother Gaia will be less polluted. Yet the real cluelessness is that the writer sees high oil [...]
Although the last holdouts in Corrigidor didn’t surrender until May 1942, it is April 9th that is the anniversary of the surrender of Bataan. At dawn, 9 April 1942, against the orders of Generals Douglas MacArthur… Major General Edward P. King, Jr., commanding Luzon Force, Bataan, Philippine Islands, surrendered more than 76,000 (67,000 Filipinos, 1,000 [...]
There is an old comedy monologue by the late Alan Sherman where he explains why he got fat: As a boy, his mother reminded him that people were starving in Europe, so he needed to eat everything on his plate. So I would clean the plate, four, five, six times a day. Because somehow I [...]
Phllip Jenkins has an interesting article on how fertility is falling in the Muslim world. In just the last thirty years or so, those very Middle Eastern countries that used to teem with children and adolescents have gone through a startling demographic transformation. Since the mid-1970s, Algeria‘s fertility rate has collapsed from over 7 to [...]
If you live in the Philippines, the big news of the day is sorrow and anger that China has executed three of our OFW (overseas foreign workers) for carrying drugs into China. The anger is partly because two of the “drug mules” were women with families, and many Filipinos who have family members overseas shudder [...]
I am aghast at a lot of the news coming out of US sites about what is going on in Libya. First, there are the “ain’t it awful” posts, lamenting that the side backed by the West hasn’t won yet, (in 7 whole days). Second, they find out that some of those revolting are Islamicists. [...]
the news of the Japanese earthquake is terrible. US Navy Photo from StrategyPage. But a few stories below the fold show how such disasters sometimes bring out the best in people. BelmontClubBlog points out how the US Navy is there, assisting the Japanese Navy in areas where the infrastructure makes other ways to deliver aid [...]
When my kids were in high school, I lived in a small Pennsylvania coal town, we had an excellent library. Why? Because a lot of kids of the coalminers wanted to go to college, and so the beloved “Library Lady” would try to keep up on textbooks, classics, encyclopedias, and other literature needed by the [...]
I’ve been too busy to watch the US news on our cable network, but the BBC reports are mainly about the fighting in Libya. But here in the Philippines, the headlines are about our workers. You see, there are at least 25,000 Filipino OFW’s (“overseas foreign workers”) in Libya, and although the government has arranged [...]
The ecosystem in the Philippine island of Palawan is unique, and to make it worse, the island has only recently been cleared of terrorists and reopened for tourism, so there is worry that the terrible scars from mining will destroy tourism too. A couple months back, a reporter and civic leader was assassinated because he [...]
While the US headlines were full of Charlie Sheen’s rants and news of labor union protests in Wisconsin, here in the Philippines, the headlines are about our stranded OFW (overseas foreign workers) in Libya. Every paper has photos of those who escaped arriving at the Manila airport, and the Philippine Inquirer notes that the government [...]
If you live in the US, mark your calenders: It’s the Great American Shake- out drill. check out this link for more information. so what do you do when an earthquake strikes? when I lived in Minnesota, we always kept emergency supplies in our car (in case we got caught in a snowstorm or skidded [...]
In a previous post, I joked that if the Governor of Wisconsin wanted to fire all his teachers, he could hire a lot of qualified Filipino teachers to replace them. Yet this is not quite a joke: The cut backs in US medical training have resulted in the active importation of foreign medical graduates to [...]
Clinton once had a line “It’s the economy, stupid”, and one longs for someone to teach economics to the present administration. I was always a union supporter, and many of my family and friends belonged to unions. But you know what happened to a lot of textile jobs in the northern states in 1950′s and [...]
I always say: “Follow the money”. A couple of days ago, a lot of my green bloglinks were rhapsodic about those isolated Amazon tribes who were filmed from a plane. So when I checked on the group that released the photos and story, voila, sure enough: they are run by folks with very European/white American [...]
Despite the fact that the shooting in Arizona was caused by a mentally ill person, the spin was followed by a week of Sarah Palin bashing. With the State of the Union address, it’s calmed down a bit, but nevertheless Time Magazine decided it was important news to complain that Sarah Palin put the flag [...]
When I heard that there had been a Native American prayer at the memorial ceremony in Tucson, I was not surprised. When I lived on Indian Reservations, we commonly had such prayers at most ceremonies or meeting. But for memorial services, we often also had Christian clergy (usually either Anglican or Catholic) give a prayer. [...]
The “meme” in much of the press is blaming right wing political talk for the tragedy in Tucson. Well, this is not new: I remember a similar paranoia against the right after JFK was killed in Dallas, never mind that his killer was a communist who had earlier tried to kill General Walker, a real [...]
Peace on Earth, Goodwill to men…except in the headlines. You see headlines about NATO troops killed in Afghanistan. Yes, that nasty war is still going on. But the headlines don’t put it into perspective: the Taliban wants to stop education of girls, and any western type education for anyone. But the headlines don’t talk about [...]
In Asia, marriage is about family, not the “nuclear” family but the extended family that cares for all it’s members. No social welfare in the good old days: The sick, the pregnant, the small children and the elderly were cared for by family members. In America, the culture is insisting that marriage is about “ME [...]
China has already used it’s economic clout to intimidate many countries to boycott the Nobel Prize cermony that honors their poet Liu Xiaobo. This boycott has gotten them criticism from some human rights groups, including those in our Philippines. The ability and willingness of China to use it’s economic clout for political purposes is a [...]
As an Asian, I am aghast that Thomas Friedman is picking up the propaganda line coming out of China and disseminating it on the New York Times editorial page. From today’s editorial: What if China had a WikiLeaker and we could see what its embassy in Washington was reporting about America? Reality check: China would [...]
Before the diuretics (especially the loop diuretics) became available in the late 1960′s, if a person had fluid retention from kidney or heart problems, we treated them with a very low salt diet. If they developed too much fluid retention (what in the good old days was called “dropsy”) we would hospitalize them, put them [...]
On Facebook, some friends noted they watched the “Day of the Dead” celebration in California and Tuscon. This is a Mexican custom which not so much “celebrates death” as it mocks death, and in most Latin American countries, it now coincides with All Saints day (November 1) and All Soul’s day (November 2), the days [...]
A lot of nonsense being written about Afghanistan: Some see it as a hopeless war, but the dirty little secret is that Afghanistan is about protecting India and the Silk Road (the central Asian countries with their oil and gas resources) for India and China. But what to do about Afghanistan? It’s not true that [...]
Awhile back, I posted about the scare of tiny amounts of lead found in some lipsticks. That was scary enough. But an article in today’s Philippine Inquirer caught my eye, and this is potentially more serious: That some imported “skin whiteners” have been found to contain mercury, so our active “green” movement want these cremes [...]
I love how Tom Friedman in the NYTimes lectures his US readers on “how the Chinese see us” by relating a skit on China’s government owned TV station where children were taught to ridicule the US: China’s CCTV aired a skit showing four children… getting ready to run a race. Before they take off, the [...]
I am bemused when the elites of both parties are horrified at a woman candidate who overturned their chosen candidate in the primaries. No surprise about this, after all the Press promises to promote the propaganda, never mind the truth of the matter. From the Atlantic: Chuck Todd said it first… “There will be an [...]
I abhor the anti Muslim bigotry that lies behind the entire kerfuffle about some bigoted “pastor” getting his ten minutes of worldwide fame threatening to burn a Koran. We Catholics put up with this type of ignorance for the last 250 years in the US. In the past, they picketed May processions/fiestas, telling us we [...]
The naive guys at the NYTimes Freakonomics blog have a short article on the cost of health care, especially medicines, in third world countries: A new study analyzed the effects of buying four basic prescription drugs in “low- and middle-income countries,†and the results aren’t pretty. “Buying brand name amoxicillin, for example, would push an [...]
One of the most chilling lines I have ever read can be found in the testimony of a witness to the Ampatuan Massacre of 57 people last year, in which the relatives of a rival politician were killed, along with 30 or so members of the press whose only crime was that they were there. [...]
Ah, the wonders of organic farming and living in a rural tropical paradise. Right now, we are in the middle of rice growing season (which started later than usual because the rains came late). So time to make the fertilizer. To grow organic rice, it means more preparation of the fields (plowing under and flooding [...]
Yesterday’s hostage crisis in Manila, where a ex police chief kidnapped a bus of Chinese tourists, made the headlines. Several were killed, and we expect lots of fingers being pointed at the rescuers for a botched hostage rescue. But no one is going to say that the motives were due to religion, or try to [...]
Unlike the US, where our priests would rarely preach about anything more serious than “Jesus loves you”, here in the Philippines, our clergy is politically active. And one of the latest campaigns in our district is to oppose a local casino. So the sermon in our church this week was “No to Casinos, No to [...]
I can see the outrage by animals lovers everywhere after they read the AP headline: Baghdad kills 58,000 stray dogs in 3-month span It’s all about rabies. One reason that Islam says that dogs are “unclean” was because stray dogs carry rabies and other diseases. (These edicts did not go against hunting or watch dogs, [...]
The Philippines inaugurated a new president yesterday: President Benigno Aquino III, the son of the late President Cory Aquino and the son of a martyr to our democracy, Benigno Aquino II. The day was declared a holiday, and over half a million folks turned out for the inauguration ceremony, despite the fact that it rained [...]
The Anchoress, a blogger who should know better, has her knickers in a knot about the sentimental painter Thomas Kincade. Kincade made a bundle marketing kitschy sentimental paintings to a niche market of Evangelical Christians who were ignored by the artistic community. And now, horror of horrors, it seems he was picked up for DUI. [...]
The Middle East figures Obama is a patsy and is vieing for who can hate Israel the most (the reborn Ottoman Empire, or the reborn Persian Empire?). At the same time, Obama’s oil spill policy gets ripped in the Rolling Stone of all places. There go the baby boomers. Time for a distraction, folks. Certain [...]
I was bemused when a minor lambast against “pacifists” trying to start a war against Israel led to this comment: “…the Israelis steadfastly refuse to publish a list of allowed goods and appear to change their minds daily on what is allowed. Eg. Hair conditioner is banned at the moment…” Oh my, no wonder the [...]
When I worked in one small midwestern town twenty years ago, on certain days, the food packing plants would have lots of folks calling in sick. Yup. “La Migra” had scheduled another “secret” raid to check on people’s papers. Of course, some of my patients had an excuse: They were born in Texas, at home [...]
The NYTimes Headline shouts out: More American Expatriates Give Up Citizenship WASHINGTON — Amid mounting frustration over taxation and banking problems, small but growing numbers of overseas Americans are taking the weighty step of renouncing their citizenship. The trouble? It’s a fake headline. If you bother to read down, you find The Federal Register, the [...]
The Puritans are back. In the past, they condemned gluttony, but now they blame all the abundent good tasting food for obesity, which is now epidemic all over the world. Yup. Blame the fast food places and those multinational corporations, and those who run efficient ways to make food cheap and abundant, from hybrid crops [...]
In the Philippines, only the middle class have pet dogs. Usually dogs here are for protection, and they are fed but not treated as a member of the family. We have five: Three large watch dogs, and two small white pets. Dogs here are traditionally fed left over rice, with a little soup to flavor [...]
Ah, it’s election time in the Philippines, and the US Embassy has warned us: In a travel advisory posted on its website, the US State Department urged extreme caution and raised concerns about possible election-related violence. “Sporadic violence throughout the Philippines is also possible before and after the May 10 national and local elections and [...]
Maureen Dowd, the red headed vixen of the NYTimes editorial page, gushes effusively on attending an art show in the Saudi kingdom: It was an unlikely moment, SoHo comes to Saudi Arabia — the first mixed exhibition anyone can remember in Riyadh, the stultifying capital of a country that bans any exhibition of skin, fun [...]
Sorry that we have to put these videos up in such a choppy fashion, but we have no choice. Both BNN and WSKY 97.3 have been working hard on this problem. This is part two of the jail house visit between Tommy Croslin, His father Hank Croslin, and his wife Lindsay Croslin. In part one [...]
The pseudo religious nonsense by popular clergy is enough to make an agnostic out of me. Doesn’t matter if it is the “we’re all gonna die if gays get rights” on the right or the “we’re all gonna die if we don’t live green” by the left. Such tirades always remind me of Mark Twain’s [...]
The story carries the headline: France: Catholic Church Rejects Ban on Full-Face Veils Except the “Catholic Church” did no such thing. The Bishop in charge of “interreligious dialogue” in France made a statement, but his opinion is not the opinion of the Catholic church. “If we want Christian minorities in Muslim majority countries to enjoy [...]
When I came to the Philippines, I ripped my CD collection into MP3′s and brought most of my collection here on mp3 CD’s or on my hard drive. I had a fairly nice collection of “elevator music” (to use my son’s description), mainly because I worked in rural areas where it was easier to listen [...]
Last week, we were stopped at a checkpoint while driving to the provincial capital for a doctor’s appointment. Nothing new about that: We had a lot of checkpoints awhile back, when there was a move to find the last few NPA members who hadn’t come in from the cold and become normal “militant” activists. But [...]
What does one do with a country like Haiti, where years of occupation, corruption, and many different types of aid from outside hasn’t worked? Lots of “it’s your fault” type stuff all over the internet: a lot of it uses the left wing’s meme of “Blame America” (and the right shouts back “Blame France”). Not [...]
One of the headlines on Drudge reads: CNN’s Gupta steps in for fleeing doctors… The actual headline at CNN says: Security concerns cause doctors to leave hospital, quake victims, but the URL says “haiti.abandoned.patients”. From the story Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field [...]
Next year is the Presidential year election here in the Philippines, so there are a lot of rumors and accusations being zinged back and forth. Ballot box stuffing occurs with every election, so the latest way the government is hoping to get around fraud is voting machines. There is a big trust in technology, so [...]
Being a long time Tolkien fan, I noted that the fan-site “The One Ring Net” had a note saying that the Professor’s birthday was January 3rd, and they suggested: Tonite at 9 pm, raise a glass of your favorite Beer to celebrate the birthday of JRR Tolkien. How appropriate. I usually don’t drink, but I [...]
Those who travel by air in the future might soon face full body pat downs to check for bombs in the bosom and crotch, thanks to Umar the Panty bomber. But the real problem is that “no using the rest room for the last two hours of flight”. Apparantly, Umar spent an hour in the [...]
Those Medieval painters were a bit less puritanical than we moderns: A common motif in paintings was the Madonna Les Latte: the Virgin Mother breastfeeding the baby Jesus. Back in those days, if a woman didn’t breast feed her baby, it died. Yes, upper class women often would find a “wet nurse” to provide nutrition, [...]
Here in the Philippines, it is Christmas, and everyone is headed home to the provinces to celebrate with their families. Ferries and airports are crowded, and the Police are busy watching for some Abu bombs (the communist NPA traditionally agrees to a Christmas cease fire, so our area of town is safe). In Manila, and [...]
We read a lot of stuff in the news about “Heroes”. Often they are sports stars, or someone who is famous for being famous. But for once, Time Magazine got it right by including Muelmar Magallanes in their “Top Ten” Heroes of the year. Muelmar, the fourth of seven children, lived in a neighborhood in [...]
I’m not really following the Copenhagen conference on global warming. My specialty was public health, and I see both the problems of chemicals and pollution destroying people’s health, but I have worked enough in third world countries to think that a little pollution might be worth it if it helps poor people live a bit [...]
The massacre of fifty plus civilians, including 27 journalists, allegedly by a local politician attempting to eliminate an opposing candidate, has resulted in numerous arrests, and martial law being declared in that southern Philippine province. But as the military continue their searches for perpetrators and digging up hidden weapons, a lot of other things are [...]
The massacre of fifty people, including almost 30 journalists, at the end of November continues to cause problems here in the Philippines. They “know” who ordered the murders, and even have witnesses: the powerful Ampatuans. Father runs Maguindanao province, and son number one runs the neighboring province Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). The aim [...]
Mischievous conservative writer Jonah Goldberg links to a British site that keeps a list of problems caused by Global Warming. Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and [...]
The election season here in the Philippines is known for it’s violence, but Monday’s massacre has far reaching implications for democracy in this country. A powerful governor was planning for his son to follow him as governor. A local mayor decided to run against him, but received threats against his life. When he requested protection [...]
The murders at Fort Hood have been blamed on jihadi terrorism, a fantasy disease called post traumatic syndrome by proxy, and “going Postal”. Presumably “Road Rage” will be the next diagnosis for the Psychiatrist who went on his own personal terrorist strike. But until now, I was not aware that many of his victims were [...]
All Catholic Filipinos have a devotion to “Mama Mary”. It’s a cultural thing. Americans tend to be individualistic in their approch to religion, so tend to parse Bible verses. But the Philippines, until recently, was still a country of peasants, where religion was taught to children by stories and fiestas. So Jesus was “Kuya Jesus”, [...]
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: [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
The New York Times has an article on the obstacles to safe childbirth in Tanzania. I worked in two other African countries thirty years ago, and it doesn’t look like much has changed in these isolated and poor rural areas. … Only 20 percent of women in the area give birth at the hospital, and [...]
My grandkids are into Facebook, and most people in the US know how the anti war opposition used Facebook and other internet social sites to help catapult Senator Obama to win the US elections last year. But using Facebook groups for political purposes is not limited to the US. Here in the Philippines, we have [...]
There is a big controversy against Notre Dame University honoring President Obama with an honorary degree. Undoubtedly you have read the Notre Dame talking points, which are all over the news. These talking point insist: Only rabid right wing evil conservative bigoted Republicans oppose this honor, and most good pro abortion Democratic Catholics support the [...]
Here in the Philippines, there are the rich famiies, and the poor families, and a growing middle class (that’s us) who have to work for a living. At the same time, globalization has started to perculate into the provinces. Twenty years ago, they opened a McDonald in our provincial capital city. Five years ago, Jolibee [...]
Some Anthropology associations have been worried about the US Army recruiting trained anthropologists to help in the war on terror. Part of this is because they remembered how anthropologist helped the US during the war in Southeast Asia, and they viewed the war around Viet Nam wrong (huh…fellahs, ever hear of the boat people? the [...]