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’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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On New Year’s Eve, Jessica Munday watched helplessly as her close friends, Matt and Melanie Capobianco were forced to hand over their adopted little girl, Veronica, to her birth father. Now Munday and Stephanie Brinkley (a Charleston adoption attorney) are on a mission to “save Veronica.”

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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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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 of […]

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BBGWatch.com - December 20, 2011 - Victor Ashe, a member of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), has called for keeping open the radio broadcasting facility on U.S. territory that is capable of transmitting shortwave radio programs to China. Some Obama Administration officials want to shut down the last remaining U.S.–based international broadcast station located […]

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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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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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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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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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This just in from Hollywood– Jon Corzine, who until about a week ago was Top Dog in the tanking Wall Street unreality series My Own Private MF Global has been cast as supervillain Two-Face in the next Batman opus. Buzz sez Bat producer Michael Uslan saw the Reuters piece The Two Faces of Jon Corzine […]

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Happy Halloween! Last weekend, New York Governor Andy Cuomo ordered his dog, Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings, to have state and city cops chase Occupy Albany campers out of a downtown park in the Capital City. But oops, both sets of cops (and Albany County District Attorney David Soares) balked. Lots of reasons. Some jake, some […]

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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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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.
Professional foragers […]

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The media freedom website BBG Watch reported that the Senate Committee on Appropriations has rejected the Broadcasting Board of Governors’ (BBG) proposal to end Voice of America (VOA) radio and TV broadcasts to China and criticized the BBG for the lack of transparency. The committee recommended $740,039,000 for U.S. international broadcasting operations, for the operating […]

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Money Ball is deservingly going to draw comparisons to The Social Network primarily because both are true stories about people who found success doing the seemingly impossible by going about their business in an unlikely and unusual way.  The other comparison will come from the fact that both had academy award level performances.

Money Ball is […]

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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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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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In case you are only aware of the “hits”, the movie Soul Surfer is a “sleeper”: a small movie that becomes widely seen by word of mouth recommendations.
I usually dislike surfer movies (e.g. Blue Crush) but I do like the photography of the ocean in them, so I watched this one.
The good news: some good […]

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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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 The man was well until his wife baked him a “healthy recipe” from the NYTimes “Healthy recipe section: Fava bean and artichoke stew.
He soon became pale and jaundiced, and it took awhile for the ER doc to figure out why the man was sick. He had an acute hemolytic crisis, where his red blood cells […]

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While the economy collapses, the Middle East is on fire, and our beloved President seems to be as unable to communicate with the American people as the previous president, the news stories are full of a tweeting congressman.
Jokes are easy to make about the problem, especially since the congressman’s name is easily mispronounced to resemble […]

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When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.
Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every […]

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In Massachusetts, a mom who stopped her son’s cancer medicines has been convicted of attempted murder.
Apparently, the son had autism, the mom was not a pristine heroine but a mom who resented being burdened with a handicapped son, and so when he developed a cancer that had a good cure rate with chemotherapy, she didn’t […]

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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, […]

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