A lot of discussion is being made about the attack on Fort Hood, where a psychiatrist went amok and decided to kill his fellow soldiers.
Here in the Philippines, we sometimes see a quiet guy suddenly go “amok” and machete his relatives or superiors. Usually people can’t understand it, but actually everyone figures he had finally […]

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Two governorships have fallen to Republicans, if the headlines have it right.
Yet most of the pundits are saying this is not a sign of disenchantment with the Congress and the President, but only local politics.
I’m not sure I agree. I think it is a sign that the “ordinary” folks are worried, and that they trust […]

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I was startled to find this important editorial in the NYTimes:

A Final Verdict on the Presidential Salute

After a couple of paragraphs explaining the writer’s expertise in saluting, and another couple of paragraphs on the history of presidential salutes, we come to the conclusion:
(President Obama’s) salute, it struck me, was impeccable in every way.
Huh?
It’s true that […]

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Ah, Halloween is here, and the TV channels are full of stories of witches and ghosts and goblins of all sorts.
Most of it is harmless fun: art and literature helps mankind be able to confront the evils around them in a way that strengthens their ability to hope that confronting the more real evils around […]

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The latest kerfuffle on the Health Care bill is that the Obama church has leashed the Am Cath types against the Catholic bishops.
For those of you who are not Catholic, much of the church bureaucracy is full of those who claim Vatican II to justify changing the Catholic church into a Episcopalian wanna be church.
Luckily, […]

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We’ve had a few sunny days here in the Philippines to finish harvesting the rice. Our fields are on high ground, so the main problems we face are finding a dry day to cut and thresh the rice, and a rice mill to dry it.
Usually in our area, rice is dried in the hot sun. […]

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One of the more bizarre headlines in the news is a report that two people died in a “sweat lodge” and quite a few more people who were there required hospital treatment.
Any physician hearing of this will suspect the deaths were from one of two causes: One carbon monoxide (which reportedly has been ruled out) […]

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Vancouver Police Board members Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s mayor, and Terry La Liberte, a criminal lawyer, have been asked to put a stop to the Vancouver Police Department’s in-house fundraising for United Way.  
Canadians Opposing Political Psychiatry made the request in writing on Sept. 22, based on documented evidence supporting allegations that United Way benefited from […]

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Using a slight of hand and having his propaganda mill obscure what has been done, the Democrats and the Obama administration are planning to fund abortion in their health care bill.
The original “compromise” on abortion was a slight of hand that would force people to pay for abortion coverage themselves, similar to the way you […]

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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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The over-hyped story of a new “HIV Vaccine” cause a lot of people working in public health to worry.
Every time these stories come out, there are laypeople who think: well, there will be a vaccine so I don’t have to change my behavior”, and voila, case numbers spike.
That is why the Department of Health here […]

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Dr. Diep Le is fixing teeth in Quang Tri province.
Ho hum, another do gooder article, let’s all look away to the good stuff: blood and guts and political mudslinging.
But hold it a second. There is a lot more to the story.

Not only is Major Le an American born in Viet Nam, but she is working […]

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According to the Associated Press, Planned Parenthood plans to close five of its clinics in the state of Indiana in anticipation of a shortage in federal funding for the nonprofit organization. The clinics are located in Anderson, Franklin, Kokomo, northwest Indianapolis and Shelbyville.
The Indiana Family Health Council will begin distributing the funds for Title XX. […]

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The father of the “green revolution”, Norman Borlaug, has died.
Some of use are old enough to remember when famines in Asia were common, and when the “Population bomb” types were predicting mass starvation of millions of poor people.
The famines didn’t happen, because Borlaug, and other agricultural scientists, developed high yield wheat and grains, along with […]

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If I were to be asked why I am leery of the President’s Health Care bill, I Could tell you in one phrase:
It’s the bioethics, stupid.
You see, few lay people read bioethics journals, and so the public is blissfully unaware how many philosophers in academia are busy writing  “quality of life” formulas that will decide […]

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Although that email hoax of a couple years ago, claiming lipstick caused cancer, was a bit over the top, it is a bit worrisome that the FDA has indeed found lead in some of the most widely used brands of American lipstick.
How much lead are we talking? Well, the FDA found lead in all […]

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In our second look at the drug issue in America we decided to bring in a special guest. Dr Michael Provines is the COO for two Jacksonville, Florida drug treatment facilities. Also joining us on the panel was author Armando Aldazabar. Armando has two very drug-centric books in print What You Are Turning Me Into […]

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Once while filling in at an emergency room. I heard a conversation between an attending physician and the doc who had just arrived to work the evening shift. The attending physician asked him to check the X ray to ensure that the NG tube he had just placed was in the correct position before they […]

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For those of you who have not heard of grassfire.org: Its a non-profit 501(c)4 organization whose goal is to fight the kind of Liberalism we see coming out of Washington today; they do this through e-mail, news releases and with their website. On the Grassfire website you’ll find loads of information and petitions […]

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Well I bet nobody saw this coming.  Bogged down by sinking approval numbers for the President, and a growing disdain among Americans for the democrat led senate, Charles Rangel has enacted the ever-so-popular liberal defense mechanism, the race card.
 Rangel, the Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means committee stated that “bias” and “prejudice” toward Obama are fueling opposition […]

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Yes, the Academy of Family Physicians has been hijacked by the Democratic party to push their health care bill.
My latest email tells me:
We are closer than ever to achieving significant health care reform in America. Unfortunately, propaganda and misunderstanding about pending legislation threaten to derail its success.
“We” are closer? That implies that all Family physicians […]

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There is a lot of nonsense being written by all sorts about the late Senator Teddy Kennedy, but as a Senator, he was a hard worker for his constituents.
Yes, I know. Kennedy didn’t do such things personally, but he had a large and energetic staff to help him, and half the “trick” of being in […]

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There isn’t a lot in the local (Philippine) papers about the details of the US Health Care bill, but one article in our local newspaper mentioned that the President was getting out his own “activist base” to counter the grass roots protests at the town hall meetings.
WASHINGTON, August 18, 2009 (AFP) - President Barack Obama […]

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The rhetoric on the US Health Care debate needs to calm down a bit on both sides. There is enough fear in the grassroots about the bill that plans to ram through a bill at this point will only result in a Republican sweep in 2010.
Let’s cut through the rhetoric and check a few facts.
One: […]

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The headlines are not helpful. This one is from CBS News:
“Mutant Polio Virus Spreads in Nigeria
124 Children Afflicted This Year By Paralyzing Disease, Believed To Be Caused By Same Vaccine Used To Fight It
And other new sources print the same story with even more frightening headlines…
Reality check please.
Let’s talk about Polio. I’m old enough to […]

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It was an unhappy Arlen Specter who left the town-hall-style meeting in Lebanan, Pennsylvania this morning (Tuesday, 8/1/09). He did all he could to keep the meeting orderly: he had his staff rent a small auditorium at the Harrisburg Area Community College that seated 250 people, but over 1,000 showed up; he limited the questioners […]

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The following is the text of an e-mail I sent today to flag@whitehouse.gov.
“Hello,
I read, in their joint OpEd in today’s USA Today, that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer state as “fact” that: “health insurance reform will mean more patient choice.”
I thought you should know that that […]

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If you are wondering about Puffball Palin’s comments about the so called “death” panels, you should be aware that there have been calculations proposed by many “bioethicists” to limit care according to one’s quality of life.
Here is how the UK does it:

The basic idea of a QALY is straightforward. It takes one year of perfect […]

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Ahoy President Obama,
I hear you want folks to send you any fishy emails they receive about your health care reform plan. So I’m enclosing the ones I’ve received. I’ve stripped senders’ addresses because I know you have no interest in collecting that kind of info, you just want to correct disinformation. Incidentally, not all the […]

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From the desk of Charlie Churchill’s Parrot

But if we fail, then the whole world … will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister … by the lights of perverted science.
                                                        — Sir Winston Churchill, June 18, 1940
My Dear Democrat United States Congresspersons,
We do hope you are enjoying your well deserved […]

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