High-quality English language analysis and editorial writing on the news.
While the press is full of news about Boyance and Justin Bieber, one of the completely ignored stories has been how China is busy taking over Africa. Not politically, of course, but by investing in minerals, exporting their cheap goods to Africa and establishing stores there to sell things cheaply, and by investing in farm […]
The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out. Conservative commentary in 10 minutes or less. The traditional, incandescent light bulb is going extinct this year. Environmentalists touted the fact that even the light bulb industry wanted to get rid of them. Yeah, well of course they did. Listen in to find out how this further […]
The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out. Conservative commentary in 10 minutes or less. A one-topic episode, wherein I note how the global warming issue has been spun a long while ago, a little while ago, and today. This is an episode full of deja vu and irony, all packed into 10 minutes or […]
A friend once told me about living through the California North Ridge earthquakes: they had nothing, were camping out on the streets. But one thing impressed her: They had access to a small supply of drinking water that they had stored in their back yard, because the state had impressed on residents the need to […]
Most people think that the Deep Horizon disaster is old news. It was three years ago that the drilling rig disaster happened in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people lost their lives, that alone was a disaster. Eleven families were devastated. Eleven families had lost not just a loved one, but the major bread winner. […]
What if I told you that ice levels in Antarctica have reached 35-year record highs? What if I told you that the rise in the surface temperature of the earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that? And what if I told you that the lull […]
The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out. Conservative commentary in 10 minutes or less. The school voucher program in Louisiana is a fantastic success. The high school graduation is significantly up, and the poorest are benefiting the most. So, of course, Obama’s Justice Department is suing to stop it on the ground of … […]
In October of 2012, I noticed an article noting that global warming had essentially stopped since 1997. Well, it’s still stopped, and Professor Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology is taking a closer look at it. A paper by her in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics not only explains the pause, it suggests […]
The latest episode of the “Consider This!” podcast is out. Conservative commentary in 10 minutes or less. Once again I’m back with a 10-minute-or-less romp through the events of the day. I tried to keep from dealing too much with ObamaCare in this episode, having said as much as I did last episode, but this issue is […]
The press in Pittsburgh has been following an attack of Legionaire’s disease at a local VA Hospital last winter that caused an estimated 16 to 21 deaths. The latest article is a nice one that shouts “doesn’t anyone care”, but the answer is that yes, we do care, and the CDC did intervene to find […]
I am a big one about complaining about government regulations, partly because if you actually know how to think, you don’t need them, and partly because the stress in following the rules can distract you from the real problem: which in medicine is listening to the story underneath the story that the patient is telling […]
Over the course of the past several decades, an entire industry has arisen establishing an ideological and philosophical framework addressing the environmental issues facing modern society. Much of this thought stems from the worldview of contemporary liberalism, which often exhibits a mindset inimical to traditional religion and American socio-political culture and economics. The time has […]
Rising gas prices have been slowly putting dents in our pocket books. Governments, Big Business and Entrepreneurs have been hard at work trying to find an economical alternative to petroleum based vehicles, creating a hybrid vehicle movement. According to the US Department of Energy the average price per gallon of gas will remain the same […]
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 […]
If I am voting against the President, it is not racism but because he is going out of his way to persecute the Catholic church: The problem? The week after taking office, the President removed conscience rights regulations from the federal regulations. This means that the only thing standing between Catholics and Muslims from being […]
A lot of the news about the Middle East is politicized in the US press, but today’s reports are not good. The Reuters news agency Religion section has this article, that cautions: The fabric of Middle Eastern society has fundamentally changed. Being Muslim has replaced being Arab as the primary identifying factor. The consequences are […]
There was a big story by National Geographic last week about illegal ivory being used by Philippino Catholics to make statues. They even named one of our more dubious priests as being involved in the practice. Corruption is not new in the Philippines, where winking at the law is a way of life and bribes […]
The kerfuffle of China’s land grabs against it’s Asian neighbors is not the only story that the MSM in the US is ignoring. This is the photo being ignored in the US Press: (Pope Benedict XVI waves to the faithful from his Pope-mobile upon his arrival to conduct an open-air mass service at Beirut City […]
In today’s news we read about multicity protests that burned flags and had to be broken up by police using water cannons. So where were these demonstration? Cairo? Beruit? Karachi? No, they were in China. The UK Telegraph has a story about these “spontaneous” demonstrations: China seized by second day of violent anti-Japan protests More […]
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 […]
This report from an Iranian blog on Global Voices, says they have such a chicken shortage the price of .chickens have soared. So someone decided to censor films and TV programs that show…chickens (!) Against a backdrop of lengthening food queues, Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the head of Iran’s law enforcement forces, has warned that films depicting […]
The greens in the Philippines are fighting all GM food, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways. I mean, we are in the “organic rice” business, and use locally developed hybrids, so cheap, abundant “Genetically modified” rice imports from China are not in our best interest. But the search for new […]
As people move more and more to leading a green lifestyle, bamboo has been gaining in popularity. From fences, to clothing, to flooring, it is seen most everywhere. Construction is no different. Bamboo isincreasing at an overwhelming rate in construction usage. Being one of the most eco-friendly materials currently available, it is no wonder that […]
Yes, Children, he says it would have been okay for Sarah to kill Trig and sex with animals is okay too (as long as it is not cruel). But never mind: Being green means never to say you are sorry. So Peter Singer has been rewarded by being given a major government award by Australia, […]
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 […]
I once lived under a dictatorship, so we rarely believed what the government run media told us. Because of the censorship of the media, rumors tended to spread wildly and so to find out what was going on, we relied on word of mouth from other missionaries, and every night we listened to the BBC’s […]
President Obama has a habit of making grand-sounding claims that shrink under closer examination.  I have previously written of such claims relative to deficit reduction and the cutting of regulations.  In both cases, reality was but a shadow of the president’s extravagant language.  Recent remarks in Columbus, Ohio continued the tradition as the president talked about the energy needs […]
The calamity of BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to put corporate reputation as a subject very much in the spotlight and, hardly surprisingly, many commentators contrast BP’s past attempts to claim the moral highground on environmental matters with the stark reality of what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The idea that corporations should be […]
Check this out: Natural Gas,via TPMBarnett’s webpage: natural gas deals are proceeding internationally: the flow out of North America alters things, regionalizing flows more as Japan and Germany move off nukes and seek to ramp up their use of gas to generate electricity, and as emerging markets in general ramp up their gas use… (cheap […]
Most folks don’t like going to the doctor’s office, and nearly everyone hates “needles”, whether they be fingersticks, blood tests, or getting your flu shot. But if you would ask people what is the worst test they ever had, they would say either a Barium Enema or a Colonoscopy. Yet cancer of the large bowel […]
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