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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

The Aliens are coming! The Aliens are coming! Or maybe not…. One of the amusement of studying ancient history is how all those sophisticated Yanks seem to think “primitive” people are stupid, so anything they don’t understand is attributed to “Aliens”. As Chesterton once quipped: Once people stop believing in religion, they start believing in [...]

read more from this topic.....

In the book The Hobbit, Bilbo was given a short contract that included “funeral expenses” and a right to one fourteenth percentage of the treasure. Peter Jackson in his usual fashion did Tolkien one better, so Balin gives Bilbo a long intricate paper contract with a lot more details, written in a satire of legalese. [...]

read more from this topic.....

Living outside the USA, I wonder if I would recognize my birthland if I return someday. We now see the NYTimes proposing that “we” get rid of the US constitution, which is standing in the way of what “we” want to do. AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching [...]

read more from this topic.....

An Unconquerable Soul Speaks Out From the Depths of Despair Pain and suffering has been the subject of poetry since the beginning of mankind.  In particular, those unjustly imprisoned and subjected to inhumane treatment often turned to poetry to ease their mental anguish and refocus their thinking from despair to hope of survival.  The author [...]

read more from this topic.....

The political hit job movie,  2016: Obama’s America is now out in DVD which means I got to see it. Film Summary: President Obama is trying to please his Marxist/anti-colonial father by remaking America to punish her sins, and that is why the US is going to hell. No, it’s not quite that bad, but [...]

read more from this topic.....

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, [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

“So JFK is going to be the new president. Right? Not so fast. Some goober decides to drive up to the Kennedy compound with dynamite in his car….” I have a long memory, so I’m still unwilling to bet that Mitt Romney will win or keep the Republican nomination, much less the election. I know [...]

read more from this topic.....

Ask any Air Force fighter pilot who served during the Cold War and Vietnam era what aircraft they flew; and they will most likely name one or more from the following list: F-100, F-101, F-102, F-104, F-105, and F-106.  Taken together, these aircraft are often referred to as “The Century Series” which is the title [...]

read more from this topic.....

The most famous death from “friendly fire” was the accidental shooting of Stonewall Jackson by one of his own men in May 1863. His death had serious consequences, since he no longer was there to be Lee’s “eyes and ears” when, a few weeks later, the Confederate patrol looking for shoes stumbled on to the [...]

read more from this topic.....

In Syria, the war is getting nasty. One recent massacre of women and children is being touted as the reason for someone (NATO? Turkey? The UN?) to step in and stop the killing. And news reports of the government bombing civilian areas make many shudder. StrategyPage points out that a lot of the massacres are [...]

read more from this topic.....

Should folks name a high school after a man who supported Eugenics? No, say the Canadian Metis blogger, ex-politician, and all around troublemaker Mrs. Gay Caswell on her blog. So who is she complaining about now? A Canadian bigshot who implemented socialized medicine in that country. Complains Mrs C: He followed the Regina Manifesto, a [...]

read more from this topic.....

What hath Drudge wrought? Or maybe I should say Breitbart: Heh…Wonder why the press didn’t find this five years ago. America’s watchdog seems to be at sleep at the wheel, and the fact that a two bit blogger found this public photo in at least two places suggests a major problem with mainstream American news [...]

read more from this topic.....

In their new book, Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President, Christian college professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter challenge claims about Thomas Jefferson made in the New York Times best selling book, The Jefferson Lies by David Barton. In The Jefferson Lies and his talks about the book, Barton claims that Thomas Jefferson included all the [...]

read more from this topic.....

Anti Catholicism has a long history in the US, an inheritance from England, where the religious wars for and against the regency of Queen Elizabeth led to Catholics being demonized as evil. ( Elizabeth was inconveniently conceived before her mother married, and many folks said her mother never married the king at all, so this [...]

read more from this topic.....

I had to laugh. Jane Fonda is among the fainting feminists who want Rush Limbaugh removed from the airways for insulting a woman. Well, she has a point. Technically, the word to describe those of either or both sexes who have sexual relations outside of marriage is “fornicator”, and this is not illegal in the [...]

read more from this topic.....

Yesterday, I published an essay about the Facebook fad “The Invisible Children”, a video about Joseph Kony and his murderous terrorist group, that has gone viral in the blogosphere. I ended the essay with the note that there is a time for war and a time of peace, and that the war to find and [...]

read more from this topic.....

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…

read more from this topic.....

“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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

Back in the “good old days”, a lot of states had “literacy tests” for voters. If you didn’t pass them, you couldn’t vote. Of course, it was a scam: the real reason for the testing was to eliminate black voters, and the fight to remove the laws was part of the civil rights movement to [...]

read more from this topic.....

While doing some investigation into the history of epidemics, I came across this fact in an article about Native American women veterans, many of whom served as nurses in the US Military.   Four Native American Catholic Sisters from Fort Berthold, South Dakota worked as nurses for the War Department during the Spanish American War [...]

read more from this topic.....

ArcheologyNews reports that a researcher claims Henry VIII didn’t die of a combination of syphillis, obesity related diabetes and malaria, (and perhaps a bit mentally unstable from cerebral syphilis and the mercury used back then to treat it). No, they claim it was a rare complication of the Kells’ antigen called McLeod syndrome. Research conducted [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....

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 [...]

read more from this topic.....