The BBC series Sherlock has hit the Philippines, and although I think the plots are stupid, the dialogue and characters are quirky enough to keep my interest. But as a doc, I got very annoyed with the Dr. Watson limp in story number one. Quick: What’s wrong with this picture? The answer is that he [...]

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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 [...]

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A lot of  the news about the Middle East is politicized in the US press, but today’s reports are not good. The Reuters news agency Religion section has this article, that cautions: The fabric of Middle Eastern society has fundamentally changed. Being Muslim has replaced being Arab as the primary identifying factor. The consequences are [...]

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There was a big story by National Geographic last week about illegal ivory being used by Philippino Catholics to make statues. They even named one of our more dubious priests as being involved in the practice. Corruption is not new in the Philippines, where winking at the law is a way of life and bribes [...]

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The kerfuffle of China’s land grabs against it’s Asian neighbors is not the only story that the MSM in the US is ignoring. This is the photo being ignored in the US Press: (Pope Benedict XVI waves to the faithful from his Pope-mobile upon his arrival to conduct an open-air mass service at Beirut City [...]

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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 [...]

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Everything in the news seems to be hyperventillation about politics.  What is worse, it seems to be about trivia that have little or nothing to do with the world wide economic problems, or about trying to fix them. (e.g. a friend on facebook dissing Ryan’s marathon speed instead of the details of his budget). So [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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As people move more and more to leading a green lifestyle, bamboo has been gaining in popularity. From fences, to clothing, to flooring, it is seen most everywhere. Construction is no different. Bamboo isincreasing at an overwhelming rate in construction usage. Being one of the most eco-friendly materials currently available, it is no wonder that [...]

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Yes, Children, he says it would have been okay for Sarah to kill Trig and sex with animals is okay too (as long as it is not cruel). But never mind: Being green means never to say you are sorry. So Peter Singer has been rewarded by being given a major government award by Australia, [...]

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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 [...]

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I once lived under a dictatorship, so we rarely believed what the government run media told us. Because of the censorship of the media, rumors tended to spread wildly and so to find out what was going on, we relied on word of mouth from other missionaries,  and every night we listened to the BBC’s [...]

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President Obama has a habit of making grand-sounding claims that shrink under closer examination.  I have previously written of such claims relative to deficit reduction and the cutting of regulations.  In both cases, reality was but a shadow of the president’s extravagant language.  Recent remarks in Columbus, Ohio continued the tradition as the president talked about the energy needs [...]

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The calamity of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to put corporate reputation as a subject very much in the spotlight and, hardly surprisingly, many commentators contrast BP’s past attempts to claim the moral highground on environmental matters with the stark reality of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that corporations should be [...]

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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 [...]

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Most folks don’t like going to the doctor’s office, and nearly everyone hates “needles”, whether they be fingersticks, blood tests, or getting your flu shot. But if you would ask people what is the worst test they ever had, they would say either a Barium Enema or a Colonoscopy. Yet cancer of the large bowel [...]

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I hate air pollution. When I travel in Manila, I have to use an asthma inhaler to stop an attack. Here in the provinces, I only have to use an inhaler in spring, when they burn off the weeds in the fields. However, science reporting on “green” issues often is so inaccurate that a lot [...]

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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 [...]

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Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use. You’d never know it, though, because the mainstream media has been perpetuating one myth after another about Brazilian Blowout while ignoring the facts. Last time, I wrote about a hatchet job made to appear as a legitimate study by Oregon OSHA [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Yum! Mushrooms. Who doesn’t like them (if cooked properly, even kids will eat them). The problem? Well, the Epicurious blog has an article on the joys of mushroom picking. It seems that a lot of yuppies in the Pacific Northwest have decided that the economic downswing is a good reason to take up this hobby. [...]

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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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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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On today’s program we were down a panel member, Ashley F. Brooks. However Mannie Barling and I were not deterred. We plowed on regardless! On today’s menu of Political Food was Monsanto and its long political tentacles. It is said that money buys influence, but just how much? In the case of Monsanto, it is [...]

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I am bemused when the sins that we recognized in the past are now being redefined by the modern world. Greed, of course, is behind our “addiction” to oil, the war in the Middle East (no blood for oil”)  and the manipulation  of the stock market. Lust however is still being touted by the NYTimes [...]

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