High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news.
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 […]
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. […]
Another big “story” in the news, saying that a big shot Harvard professor has found proof that Jesus was married. And if you believe that one, here is a copy of an ancient papyrus that I’d like to sell to you: this one is from the ancient book of LOLCATBIBLEexodux 32 What? There was no […]
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 […]
Back in February, I wrote sarcastically about the kerfuffle by some do gooders who were trying to “protect” some isolated tribes in Peru. Yes, let them live in their paradise, untouched by modern man. Because you are protecting them from government and anthropologists and and church do gooders, no one else will bother them. (and […]
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 […]
 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 […]
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 […]
I always say: “Follow the money”. A couple of days ago, a lot of my green bloglinks were rhapsodic about those isolated Amazon tribes who were filmed from a plane. So when I checked on the group that released the photos and story, voila, sure enough: they are run by folks with very European/white American […]
A lot of fundamentalist Christians see radical environmentalism as a neo pagan religion, so when some bimbo invoked a Mayan goddess, it was sure to raise a few eyebrows. From the WashingtonPost: Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to […]
This week’s bad science headline comes from the BBC: Last supper ‘has been super-sized’, say obesity experts The food portions depicted in paintings of the Last Supper have grown larger – in line with our own super-sizing of meals, say obesity experts. Let’s scroll down the article and find where they got their data: they […]
A small headline in the news: Guinea pig touted as solution to Congo food crisis. …it’s not known how or when guinea pigs — native to South America — arrived in Congo, but CIAT (the Colombia-based agricultural research institute, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture) researchers discovered them last year being kept as “micro-livestock” in […]
One of the neglected areas of my medical education was “ethnic” and “racial” aspects of medicine. One example of this is lactose intolerance.Only IndoEuropeans (and one small tribe in Uganda) are able to digest milk without problems.In the modern world, this means a lot of folks diagnosed with “irritable bowel” syndrome were actually lactose intolerant; […]
Mischievous conservative writer Jonah Goldberg links to a British site that keeps a list of problems caused by Global Warming. Acne, agricultural land increase, Afghan poppies destroyed, poppies more potent, Africa devastated, Africa in conflict, African aid threatened, African summer frost, aggressive weeds, Air France crash, air pressure changes, airport malaria, Agulhas current, Al Qaeda and […]
It is as if the entire Washington press corps has forgotten everything any of them knew in 2001 and early 2002 and have no perspective on what is going on in Afghanistan now. In late September of 2002 newspapers were flooded with glorious tales about the Northern Alliance – and the NA deserved every bit […]
President Obama was brought up in Asia, yet he seems clueless about Afghanistan, and of the geopolitical problems in this area. The press is even worse, preferring the simplistic out of date explanations of the “Afghanistan is Viet Nam” meme, or the “Stop the war” meme, or stressing civilian casualties “reported” by Taliban linked sources […]
I wasn’t too surprised that Proposition 8,which defended traditional marriage, passed in California because of the large number of Black and Hispanic Democrats who voted against it. Their votes were actually about how people traditionally live together, and the place of marriage in society, but fifty years after the sexual revolution, one doubts that the […]
Some Anthropology associations have been worried about the US Army recruiting trained anthropologists to help in the war on terror. Part of this is because they remembered how anthropologist helped the US during the war in Southeast Asia, and they viewed the war around Viet Nam wrong (huh…fellahs, ever hear of the boat people? the […]
There has been a small story that has gotten a lot of criticism in the news lately, about a nine year old girl in Saudi Arabia whose father “married” her to his friend. The news stories are unclear if he did this to get money, or if he just wanted to make sure the girl […]
On April 9, 1942, the American and Philippine soldiers who were holding out in the siege of Corregidor surrendered to the Japanese. The Manila Bulletin reminds us of what happened then: Some 72,000 men of the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) laid down their arms. On the Death March, 20,000 died. […]
A news article in the Christian Science Monitor describes an Anthropology class that teaches students to understand cultural change by making up fake cultures, and then going into the “big bad globalist conqueror versus poor natives who lose their wonderful culture” mode to teach them about globalization. The people of Mekka’ kneel in the dirt, […]
In describing the Taliban’s destruction of the two colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001, The Wall Street Journal noted: History has accustomed us to the persecutions that intolerance exercises on those persons whom it intends to subjugate and to the destructions inflicted on the monuments that represent their beliefs and convictions. … The case […]
A lot of talk and venom has been spit against Muslim women wearing headscarves. It makes one wonder if these “christians” have ever read the Bible admonition for women to cover their heads. No one follows the rule nowadays, but it is there, because in pagan societies, the veil was a symbol of a modest […]
I love conspiracy theories. The stories often have a smidgen of truth in them, but are amplified until they become larger. So we are now reading lots of news stories about the genitalia stealing witches in Africa and that mobs are going around killing the witches in Africa. Actually, the problem, called Koro, is a […]
As a Catholic Church, we need to be quite sensitive about the disposition of sacred articles that are no longer being used in our parishes. A trend developing is finding Catholic sacred articles on places such as E-Bay or other online salvage sites. The real problem with these sites is that there is no attempt […]
Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones – and all those others who have been searching for the Ark of the Covenant for the last 2,700 years. It’s been found in a small museum in Harare, Zimbabwe. “I felt a shiver down my spine… a strange sanctity seemed to shine from it…† The hero who […]
A quote from an ABC interview: It’s one of the biggest censorships of history. So, I thought somebody should say this, and then others might disagree, say, “Ahhh, this could not be! This is blasphemy!” But it’s OK — this is the 21st century. It’s time for information. It’s time for communication. They can go […]
Ah yes, that glorious left over Plesiosaur that somehow escaped extinction and although cold blooded and alone, managed to live in the cold Scottish Loch is probably dead. Yes, the Loch Ness monster is no more, a victim of global warming. At least that’s what Nessie Hunter Robert Rines told the UKDaily Record: Despite having […]
I once worked in Winslow Arizona, where the main tourist attraction is a nearby meteor crater that they tout as the “best preserved meteor crater in the world”. the photo is from their website, and if you ever get out there, consider a trip to the site. It’s not as much fun as the Roswell […]
The oh so politically correct anthropologists at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting.are going to debate if female mutilation under the guise of multiculturalism is okay. Writes John Tierney of the NYTimes: Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female […]
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