While down with the flu in January, I read a lot of Richard Stark. Aka Donald Westlake. A pile of volumes from Stark/Westlake’s Parker series towered on my nightstand. The adventures and misadventures of Parker, an ultra cold hearted professional thief, were the perfect antidote to fever.
The late Donald Westlake grew up in Albany, New […]

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It is written in oh so politically correct language, but it should set off alarm bells. A US government appointed ethicist at the National Institutes of Health just wrote an article in the British Medical Journal proposing the handicapped should be killed for organ donations.

Abstract
What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not […]

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It’s hard to follow American politics from ten thousand miles away (I live in the rural Philippines, and we get the news a day late), but as a Democrat, I was bemused to read in today’s papers that Rick Santorum just won in the Republican primaries of Minnesota and Missouri.
Santorum? I wasn’t aware he […]

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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 sell […]

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Though supporters of the Indian Child Welfare Act say it has safeguards to prevent misuse, Veronica and numerous other multi-racial children across the U.S have been hurt by it. Children who have never been near a reservation nor involved in tribal customs are affected. The Cherokee Nation alone is currently tied up in about 1,100 active Indian Child Welfare cases involving some 1,500 children.

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While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people…

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Ho ho ho! On December 21st, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) will gift the nation with the true number of existing home sales between 2007 and 2010. The NAR’s inflated numbers were flagged earlier this year by CoreLogic, a California based data firm. When confronted, the NAR grumped they’d look into it. Sounding more […]

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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 at […]

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This year’s hottest Thanksgiving event is being held in Minneapolis at the headquarters of Target Corp. The mega retailer, whose cheap designer duds keep Joe and Jane Doakes looking stylish even during a depression, will be celebrating T-Day in a novel way. Target’s chief execs and board of directors are ditching family gatherings in favor […]

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“Traumatic grief, with its unanswered questions, its numbing shock, its horror, its ability to sear disturbing images into our souls that cannot be erased by sleep or by time–this process follows the same general path both for persons and groups.”
When 12:30 struck, none of us fourth graders knew that our young president was being […]

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I read a name from the past in today’s news: Medgar Evers.
The name takes me back to the days of when as a child we visited our aunt who lived in the deep south, and I was astonished that there “colored only” restaurants and water fountains.
Evers was one of the heroes who fought for the […]

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One Minneapolis social worker once told me that the only reason my husband’s grandchildren weren’t removed from their parents sooner was because of the Indian Child Welfare Act. He said that had they been of any other heritage, they would have been protected much sooner.

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Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu was facing criticism for being too slow in building cases against participants in the Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver.  So he held a press conference in August where he introduced Constable Lee Patterson to explain how evidence is collected.  It was an odd choice of spokesperson, since Patterson is accused […]

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It takes a lot to shock Hollywood. But the news that Newt Gingrich has bumped Jon Corzine as supervillain Two-Face in the next Batman is making jaws drop in Dream City. Corzine was reportedly in like Flynn; his duplicitous doings at MF Global made him Two-Face to the max. Sure, Jon had heavy competition from […]

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I am bemused to see that there is a moderate earthquake in Oklahoma making the news.
Such things are not unknown, of course, but the “Green” oriented blogs are all blaming the earthquake on “fracking”.
This is a “hot” item, since the oil shales of North Dakota and Pennsylvania are potential “black gold” that will rewrite the […]

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I see the “Occupy Wall Street” folks are still there.
But what is puzzling me: usually a movement starts with a few activists and then slowly grows, as more who believe the same things join.
So exactly how many are in these rallies?
We know who is in the rallies: From Fastcompany.com via the Democratic underground.
Among the […]

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One of God’s top 10.
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

Contrary to what some think, coveting is not just wanting something. Coveting is wanting something that belongs to someone else. God […]

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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 living wage. This […]

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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 his […]

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Paranoia kills. And the internet, which allows anyone to post any conspiracy theory without having to include minor things like facts, is a growing problem for doctors, because our patients who google sometimes end up at conspiracy theory sites for their medical information.
And this ignorance is one reason why Bachman is now no longer […]

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The latest “Western” movie from Hollywood, about aliens and starring a petulant British actor, was a bomb, and that led many “experts” to again predict the demise of the Western as a film genre. Of course, the real reason for the problem is the nihilism of Hollywood, not the lack of stories.
So could I suggest […]

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Joe Biden’s visit to China has gotten little respect in the US press, who seem to despise his “everyday man” approach to things and who trumpet his verbal gaffes without noticing his common touch is something desperately needed by the elitist Obama administration.
During his trip to China, he visited an ordinary Chinese restaurant and ate […]

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The president is taking a much needed vacation, this time to Martha’s Vineyard.
So what does the Washington Post have for a headline this morning?
As rebels close in on Tripoli, Obama getting updates on Martha’s Vineyard
Why yes.
Martha’s Vineyard isn’t exactly in the middle of nowhere, and they do have internet connections, an airfield and a […]

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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 in […]

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This year, for the first time, our accountant told us we don’t have to pay any US taxes.
So what do I hear in the news? Lots of right wing criticism of those stupid people who don’t pay taxes while the rest of “us” work hard and have to pay.
Time out, fellahs.
For years, my husband and […]

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My summer reading this year kicked off with Cambodia’s Curse: the Modern History of a Troubled Land by former New York Times reporter Joel Brinkley. Brinkley won a Pulitzer in 1980 for his coverage (at the Louisville Courier Journal) of the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
The title Cambodia’s Curse bugs me. Though cultures resistant to […]

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From Freakonomics:Killer Cars:
An Extra 1,000 Pounds Increases Crash Fatalities by 47%

The Actual report name is “Pounds that kill: The external cost of vehicle weight.
Well, anyway, the study shows the obvious: If you have a big car that collides with a smaller car, the small car folks are toast.
Well, duh. Yes, all of that’s obvious […]

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“What would you do if you found out at age 16 that you didn’t have the right papers?”
I would do just as I did in Canada when the visa’s for my entire family ran out and we were denied new visa’s in Calgary. We left the country and did not re-enter until we had valid visa’s again.

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A lot of Americans seem puzzled about why NATO is so eager to get rid of Khadafi in Libya. Yes, he was behind the TWA bombing, but why get rid of him now?
But what the US press also misses is why Libyans are angry. To paraphrase James Carville: It’s the corruption, stupid. Khadafi has billions […]

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Los Alamos, with it’s nuclear facility, has been evacuated again. The NMNational Guard is busy helping with the fires near Alamagordo, as is the California, Colorado and North Carolina Air National Guard. From the BBC:

The town outside Los Alamos National Laboratory was evacuated on Monday.
On Wednesday, there were expected to be between 600 to 800 […]

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