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 […]

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 The man was well until his wife baked him a “healthy recipe” from the NYTimes “Healthy recipe section: Fava bean and artichoke stew.
He soon became pale and jaundiced, and it took awhile for the ER doc to figure out why the man was sick. He had an acute hemolytic crisis, where his red blood cells […]

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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 to […]

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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 them […]

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It was called “Operation Vengence”.
He had ordered the deaths of thousands of Americans using airplanes, and alerted the average American that a war of civilizations was now endangering them.
Therefore, the president used secret intelligence networks to find where the mastermind was hiding. And after some discussions, the president approved of the mission tasked to kill […]

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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 announcement, my […]

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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 prices as […]

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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, […]

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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 felt that […]

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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 1.75, […]

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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 at […]

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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. Well, duh. […]

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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 a […]

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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 had […]

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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 arranged […]

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TedLipien.com, Truckee, CA, March 1, 2011 — In this series of analyses for Free Media Online (FreeMediaOnline.org) — U.S. International Broadcasting in Crisis– Ted Lipien, former Voice of America acting associate director, examines recent Broadcasting Board of Governors’ decisions, with a focus on the latest controversial plan to completely eliminate Voice of America on-the-air […]

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FreeMediaOnline.orgTruckee, CA, USA, February 21, 2011 — As reported by PiratesWeek and Kim Andrew Elliott, a Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) employee who publishes his own private international broadcasting website, the BBG-managed Voice of America (VOA) websites were hacked on February 21, 2011, apparently by the “Iranian Cyber Army.” In 2009, VOA websites were […]

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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 names, […]

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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 on […]

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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 positive […]

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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 very important […]

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A lot of fundamentalist Christians see radical environmentalism as a neo pagan religion, so when some bimbo invoked a Mayan goddess, it was sure to raise a few eyebrows.
From the WashingtonPost:
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered […]

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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 jail anyone who even […]

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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 […]

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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 it […]

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When a major news outlet incorrectly implies that Catholics think Test Tube babies are not children in the eyes of God, I must simply protest.
From USA TODAY:
‘Test tube babies’: God’s work or human error?
Do you think a baby conceived in test tube is still a child in the eyes — or mind or […]

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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 banned.
Citing […]

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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 […]

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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 all out effort […]

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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 are […]

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