Detroit’s own John Conyers is rattling cages again. Noting that 46 million Americans lack basic health care, that the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that fails to guarantee health care to its citizens, and that we currently blow $1.7 trillion each year on health care (which works out to $5,800 [...]

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My grandchildren are not allowed to visit because of all the reports of terrorism in the Philippines. Stuff like this one: Four killed in bomb attack. Well, yes, must be Alqaeda related: a billard parlor bombed, can’t let people have fun, now, can we? You see, if the attack was “business as usual”, the rival [...]

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I’m opposed to slavery reparations, so I was pretty sympathetic when I read Michelle Malkin’s post denouncing a new bill that would give reparations to Japan’s World War II victims in Guam. After all, if anyone should pay them reparations, Japan should. (Guam has been a US territory since 1898, and Japan invaded it during [...]

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About 80% of the pigs in Guangdong province of China have died. Is it Swine flu? Is it from contaminated feed? Well, if it was humans, I would suspect either a hemorrhagic fever (Dengue, Ebola etc.) or contamination by something similar to warfarin (in the USA, sweet clover has a warfarin analogue, which can contaminate [...]

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The Mind Keepers by Kenneth Maclean Its great to come across such a good novel by an author you have never heard of. This is a techno thriller of the best kind, though the location is rather rural, rather than normal urban an environment. First of all I have to tell you that I read [...]

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On Tuesday, House Democratic leaders briefed their membership on their new proposal for funding the war in Iraq. The Democrats new plan will fund the Iraq war through July, but after that gives Congress the option of cutting off future funding.

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Royal Dutch Airlines (KLM) played an active role in helping Nazis flee from Germany to Argentina after World War II. This, according to today’s London Times and a Dutch TV current affairs program, “Netwerk.” Among those war criminals who might have made it safely to Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, aboard KLM were Adolf [...]

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Maybe not quite yet, but in some states, including Florida and Utah, selling your used CDs may become more difficult than getting a driver’s license in those states. Rhode Island and Wisconsin are slated to follow in these footsteps with similar legislation shortly. An article published yesterday on ARS Technica discusses the emergence on new [...]

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In Vienna, Austria, animal rights advocates want to have Hiasl, a 26-year-old male chimpazee, declared a “person” under the law. They argue that by declaring him a person, he can receive donations and have a court-appointed guardian to watch out for his interests. Austria isn’t the only country considering conferring such status on animals. According [...]

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Six militants have been arrested in New Jersey for plotting to “kill as many soldiers as possible” at the Fort Dix Army training base. The suspects have been planning this attack for more than a year and were caught attempting to buy automatic weapons from an FBI informant. The FBI began to investigate when a [...]

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In Pennsylvania now, only doctors with a certain amount of education can prescribe medications and medical equipment, including walkers. I don’t know about professions that this bill affects except nurse midwifes. A nurse midwife has almost as much education as a doctor.  The difference is that their schooling targets what they are doing.  They don’t take [...]

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I see stories like this in my local area quite often.  Where security has made it a need to stop a baby from being fed and asking people to stop doing business in there establishment.  I find it remarkable, honestly.  I guess I just don’t get what the big deal is.  Why are we so worried [...]

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After a series of deadly tornadoes swept through her state last weekend, Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius said today that the war in Iraq has created gaps in the federal government’s ability to respond to natural disasters. The tornadoes caused 10 deaths, and virtually destroyed the small town of Greensburg, KS.

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— OffStumped For All Things Right of Center, Bringing a Right of Centre Reality Check to Indian Politics, News Media Reporting and Opinion now in Hindi अब आप के लिये हिंदी मे. —     The fate of Uttar Pradesh is up in the air. As the seven phase all electronic voting comes to a close, Offstumped [...]

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— OffStumped For All Things Right of Center, Bringing a Right of Centre Reality Check to Indian Politics, News Media Reporting and Opinion now in Hindi अब आप के लिये हिंदी मे. —    The 7th (VII) and final phase of polls in Uttar Pradesh came to close with 46% turnout. The NDTV exit poll showed [...]

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Time magazine reminds us of a little history. When the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s law against sodomy in the summer of 2003, in the landmark gay rights case of Lawrence v. Texas, critics warned that its sweeping support of a powerful doctrine of privacy could lead to challenges of state laws that forbade such [...]

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From The Gathering Storm Blog Is Europe’s Islamic threat just hype? According to Irish blogger Aidan Maconachy (The Muslim Threat to Europe: Don’t Buy All the Hype), and author Philip Jenkins (God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis), it is. I won’t go into a detailed response to this head in the sand approach [...]

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Remember Michael Moore? That guy who made (I mean manufactured) that goofy film (I mean dissent) way back two or three years ago or whenever the hell it was? I think he even made two. Well as it turns out, now even the German leftist intellectual caste is turning against him. And that takes a [...]

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With the recent discovery of melamine-contaminated wheat gluten in dog food and e. coli turning up in spinach, one has to begin to wonder about the safety of our food supply. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, brings up the issue of the amount of food that is now being imported into the [...]

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In Sunday’s paper, the L.A.Times has a piece that mourns a downturn of a portion of Mexico’s economy and, naturally, the Times blames the USA for it. How is it that the USA is responsible for this downturn? New home construction is down in California and illegal Mexicans have found themselves out of work because [...]

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Most of us raised in relatively humane societies experience a deep aversion to killing or wounding innocent people.  We are trained to shoot only in self-defense or to defend others. An interesting phenomenon discovered by our military during the Korean war was that a significant number — possibly a majority — of our front line [...]

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The number of middle class and wealthy Chinese is growing in China, but the distribution of wealth is increasingly disproportionate. And the situation is worsening with the nouveau riche paying the government the fines required ( Fines range from under 5,000 yuan ($646) to 200,000 yuan ($25,800) depending on the violators location and income) to [...]

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