Am I the only mother who is aghast at parents who live vicariously in their kids “achievements” when they put their child’s life at risk?
The latest was the 13 year old who climbed Mt. Everest:
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do before I die - I just happen to be doing it at this […]

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FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, May 02, 2010, San Francisco — Armenian genocide and Holocaust denials in radio and TV reports generated by private contractors working for the Broadcasting Board of Governors are linked to mismanagement and flawed programming policy at this US taxpayer-funded Federal agency, says FreeMediaOnline, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization […]

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FreeMediaOnline.org & Free Media Online Blog, May 02, 2010, San Francisco –An unknown hacker has posted a pornographic video on the Voice of America (VOA) LiveJournal blog website. The image seen on the VOA site showed a naked woman in a sexually suggestive pose. The post was titled “sexy.” The image was […]

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Obama’s Public Diplomacy Katabasis in Poland
President Obama may very well kiss the Polish American vote good bye after committing yet another public diplomacy blunder which gave Vice President Biden, U.S. Ambassador to Poland Lee A. Feinstein and some Congressional Democrats plenty of reasons to be pulling their hair out in utter frustration over his insensitive […]

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I almost swallowed my teeth.
The Headline states:
Earth Day Facts: When It Is, How It Began, What to Do
There it was, a large photo heading an article on the NatGeo webpage:
The caption accompanying the photo states:
Ira Einhorn—a leader of nonviolence, drug, and free-love movements in the 1960s—speaks at Philadelphia’s first Earth Day celebration […]

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This week’s bad science headline comes from the BBC:
Last supper ‘has been super-sized’, say obesity experts
The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger - in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts.
Let’s scroll down the article and find where they got their data: they examined 52 paintings […]

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If you follow the British news, you might have noticed an ongoing scandal about Scotland releasing the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombing (the bomb at Christmas time of 1988  that destroyed Pan Am 103 and took the lives of 270 people).
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released last August at Libya’s request because he was terminally ill […]

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A small factoid on StrategyPage:
the last decade has produced, for the first time, a large number of female combat veterans. There are nearly a quarter million of them, including over 5,000 receiving disability benefits (for injuries received in combat, or non-combat, operations).
Until recently, the “official” story was that woman were not allowed to serve […]

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One of the neglected areas of my medical education was “ethnic” and “racial” aspects of medicine.
One example of this is lactose intolerance.Only IndoEuropeans (and one small tribe in Uganda) are able to digest milk without problems.In the modern world, this means a lot of folks diagnosed with “irritable bowel” syndrome were actually lactose intolerant; and […]

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Shame the sponsors. That sums up the remedy advised by Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee member and Vancouver City Manager Penny Ballem on Wednesday Jan. 13, after she was briefed at City Hall on evidence of persecution of bloggers and other computer/internet users by the City of Vancouver.  Ballem (in photo above outside City Hall) encouraged […]

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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 suspect that […]

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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 restroom […]

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I am fascinated by what the US blogs are calling “Climategate”.
It seems that  one of the main scientific research labs behind Global warming, indeed the one whose data was one of the lynchpins  proving “climate change” was occuring, manmade, and severe, had their emails hacked and put on line.
When the emails were taken off line, […]

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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 […]

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After 30 years of delays, Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk has been brought to trial in Munich, Germany, on charges of assisting in the killing of almost 30,000 people in Sobibor, a Nazi extermination camp during World War II. The trial began Monday, December 1, 2009.
Demjanjuk, known as “Ivan the Terrible” because he was identified as […]

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The Daily Political Blog Politics Daily has published an article about hate crimes. The article is filled with data and statistics (taken from the FBI’s 2008 Hate Crimes Report) and these statistics indicate that hate crimes are up!
The idea that a crime committed against an individual may (if the individual is a member of a […]

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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — An article in the U.S. semi-official military newspaper Stars and Stripes suggests that the Obama administration’s plan for placing a limited number of Patriot missiles in Poland has no military significance and is being implemented largely for diplomatic reasons to appease Warsaw

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Today saw the first day of a public inquiry taking place in London into the events surrounding the British Government’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The hearing, conducted by retired civil servant Sir John Chilcot, aims to help answer key questions such as whether the government put pressure on legal experts, notably the then […]

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As Ludwig von Mises would remind us, economics is human action.  Twenty years ago today, human action vanquished oppression as the Berlin Wall fell and communism began to fall with it.
To celebrate the incredible event that many thought would never happen, I picked up William F. Buckley, Jr.’s The Fall of the Berlin […]

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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — A member of the Russian parliament has criticized Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski for his comments during a visit this week to Washington, but the Polish foreign ministry has disputed the accuracy of Russian news reports quoting Sikorski’s statement. The point of dispute is whether Sikorski has publicly asked for U.S. troops […]

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In science, there are all sorts of gossip that tweak the infallibility of scientists.
For example, the discovery of the “big bang” was postponed until they cleaned the antennae of Pigeon poop, and found it was the sky, not the poop, causing the hum of  the big bang.
And Penicillin may have been discovered because of carelessness […]

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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Due to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to prolong her stay in the Middle East, her scheduled meeting in Washington with visiting Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has been cancelled. The announcement of the cancellation was made Tuesday by the State Department spokesman Ian Kelly.

Tomorrow, of course, she has a meeting […]

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TedLipien.com, SAN FRANCISCO — Bill Clinton might have asked what the “enhanced” definition of “to enhance” IS? The U.S. Embassy in Warsaw is busy blaming a Polish translator for mistranslating U.S. Ambassador Lee Feinstein’s TV interview answer about Polish troops in Afghanistan, which caused a diplomatic uproar in Poland. In an interview broadcast last […]

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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Tony Blinken, national security adviser to the vice president, said in a briefing with reporters before Biden left for Europe October 20, that leaders in Warsaw, Bucharest and Prague should think less of what the U.S. can do for them and more about what they can do with the United States.

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This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner would not receive at the White House the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, who is on a visit this week to Washington. President Obama apparently wanted to avoid upsetting Chinese communist leaders before his official trip to China.
Unwelcome at the White House […]

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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Bloggers and Russian experts in the US have been trying to find out whether the Obama White House coordinated with the Kremlin the timing of the missile shield decision that deeply offended people in Poland and produced biting commentaries in the US. Speculations abound that Russian diplomats, working on instructions from […]

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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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Opinia.US SAN FRANCISCO — Displaying unprecedented boldness for a US diplomatic mission, the US Embassy in Warsaw conceded on its official public website that Poles believe that the “insensitive timing” — as the Embassy put it — of the Obama administration announcement on canceling the US missile shield system in Central Europe “shows that Obama […]

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Sweden, long an example that the Left has pointed to as a socialist enlightened economic haven, has been running away from socialist progressive ideals.  The latest domino to fall is the realization that tax cuts spur on the economy.
Sweden’s centre-right government on Saturday announced income tax cuts of 10 billion kronor to stimulate the job […]

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Supposedly, George W. Bush squandered all the goodwill we got from the world as a result of the 9/11 attacks.  Enemies became friends, the uncooperative became helpful, and all was right with the world, until Bush screwed it up.  What is forgotten in all of this is that those that opposed us before 9/11 opposed […]

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