There is so much to be serious about, so much to be concerned about, so much to see what each person can do something about, what we as a nation can do to help… and yet, I think we would all go starkers if we didnt sometimes smile once in a while. In that spirit…. ta dah!

Driving through Tennessee in the outback, and there is plenty outback to Tennessee, one sees tiny shotgun shacks with tiny side yards planted in tobacco. Driveways ripped out, if ever existing, all aerable land, no matter how small, planted with sentinels of tobacco, yellow, green, brown, depending on time of year. One sees too that tobacco more or less takes care of itself til ready to harvest, so the poor...

this from the South Bend Trib. the only newspaper within a many mile area from my small hometown population 600. Harry Houdini was like a folk hero where I grew up… and every year on Halloween, people waited til near midnight to tell the story, not of his life… but of his life after. You decide. Houdini was never convinced in his lifetime that the dead could contact the living. But he vowed to continue...

Our political Quote of the Day comes from an op-ed column in the New York Post by law prof Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit, who says the government is to blame for the college loan bubble but Obama’s recent announcement of a fix will do little to fix it. Keep in mind when you read this must-read-in-full column that Reynolds works in the college community, so this is more than just an impersonal analysis: It’s...

I’ve been surprised about all the flat tax talk this October by Republican presidential candidates. The flat tax idea usually doesn’t surface much until April, when taxpayers and their helpers gather around dining room tables to figure out how much they can get away with in their tax reporting. The fact that flat tax mania among Republican White House aspirants has come to the fore this early thus...

A headline in today’s New York Times reads: “Occupy Wall Street Not Like Us, Tea Party Says.” The subhead then goes on to read: “Where Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party differ is in where they place the blame.” Nonsense. The Tea Party blames government for the country’s present economic problems. The Occupiers blame the heavies in the financial community. But these aren’t...

One wonders what would have happened for Cain if he made jokes about lynching black people who make no effort to work…but then later, much later, he said ‘awwwwww, that was a joke, and America needs to get a sense of humor.’ Unfortunately, Cain himself is becoming not a leader, but is seen as a reason to laugh as he blunders along trying to find his way into a presidential nomination. He had...

Call it propaganda or call it delusion, but Tehran is crowing about not only predicting Occupy Wall Street and allied groups, but says it considers itself primarily responsible for all the unrest – Eastern and Western – since the Arab Spring began. So could it be that the protests which began in New York on September 17 and have now spread across the developed world reflect a yearning to reject...

What is it about mainland China that prevents the emergence of innovators like Steve Jobs? While in the West it seems obvious that a lack of free speech, free expression and free association puts China at a disadvantage, this editorial from Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po shows that Beijing still has a way to go before it accepts that in order to unleash the creative power of its people, it will have to loosen...

Save Our Books! by Peter Funt DENVER — A protest by students at the University of Denver is eye-opening because of how it is being conducted, what it has so far achieved and, most of all, what it concerns. Students here are demanding more books. Activism at DU has a rich history, including the anti-war protest in 1970 known as Woodstock West, and the earlier Coffee Break Riot of 1965. In the ’65 incident,...

Is the state of the world really as dire as world leaders who recently spoke at the U.N. General Assembly would lead us to believe? Have we all gotten carried away with gloom and doom? For Argentina’s Diario Decuyo, columnist Andrés Oppenheimer cites a recent report that asserts things are on the upswing almost everywhere, from life expectancy to education levels to the number of wars. For the Diario...

Why do public school teachers have such a bad reputation in the US and get little pay? That’s one of the things I don’t get. It’s quite different over here. The job is well paid and respected by most folks. As a country with little natural resources, Germany depends on innovation and a smart work force. Education is good for democracy, happiness etc. The children are our future, yade, yade. The...

If you’re of a certain age you might remember a time when the U.S. was preeminent among wealthy nation s in a number of respects,including providing educational opportunities for all of its citizens regardless of their ability to pay. The U.S. has already fallen from the top in other respects. It now incarcerates more people on a per capita basis than any country other than China. It has the highest...

by WALTER BRASCH Parents demanded it be banned. School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries. It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA). “It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the...

Some might remember in my book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, I wrote about the veiled Muslim women transgressing the stringent rules of their religious and political land that forbades women to drive cars… that when the war broke out and people were imperiled, they ran and started up the engines of the family automobiles and drove all over hill and dale to warn people and help people. The very same...

Unless Mitt Romney (or Jeb Bush) stops the Rick Perry steamroller, we are heading toward a referendum on the value of human life next year. When Sarah Palin invented death panels to bash health care reform two years ago, with perfect pitch for political devastation, she planted a seed that has now flowered in the Tea Party frontrunner, who is being cheered for multiple executions in Texas by crowds who are also...

by WALTER BRASCH SpongeBob SquarePants may be hazardous to your mental development—if you’re a four-year-old. At least that’s what two psychologists at the University of Virginia claim, based upon a study they conducted that may have as many holes as the average sponge who lives under the sea. In the first paragraph of an article published this week in the academic journal Pediatrics, Angeline...

I’ve posted this before but over the last few weeks we’ve had debates over what is conservative or liberal. The one concern I’ve always had is that we tend to assume ourselves and our usually like minded friends as average and thus skew our results. I’ve fallen into the trap before and so to test myself for real I have gone to several of the political ideology tests on the web to find...

A quixotic and magnetic new film has been made by Dawn Gifford Engle in which Nobel peace Prize awardees such as Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchu Tum and other notables speak about the actual Mayan meaning of the end of the year 2012. There is a good long film clips here... A few years back, there arose a media-inflated rumor about 2012, rivaling, in my mind, a “barricade the...

The word eugenics was not used in Bachmann/ Perry argument. But, here is the definition. Does the matter they are discussing tilt into this: EUGENICS: the science of improving a human population… by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race, it fell into disfavor only after the perversion...

At a time when America appears lost, and its leadership continues its reckless bid for global supremacy, it is interesting to recall the story of the only American who participated in India’s freedom struggle and was imprisoned by the British-Indian government. He gave up Western clothes and donned home-spun Khadi dress. A highly impressed Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his Young India: “No Indian is giving...

I haven’t posted on TMV for a while due to various personal and business factors. I’ve sort of burnt out my brain with the overall inanity of our public discourse. However I still read Internet blogs of many other writers. A friend from Cleveland, OH sent me an email recently and I thought it was rather humorous and sad at the same time. I have reprinted it below (including extra comments from others)...

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence is being offered online this fall, free of charge, to “students” around the world. The introductory class is historically one of the largest at Stanford University, with about 200 students. In a YouTube overview of the online class, professor Sebastian Thrun explains that his goal is to have about 200,000 online students and make it “the largest online...

One of my favorite places on the web has been the Google News Archive, a wonderful storehouse of digitized newspapers, some of them stretching back 150 years or more. It was fascinating to just pick a year and go back and see what life was like. In May Google announced they would no longer be updating the site with new resources but that the search feature would remain for the papers they had stored. Today however...

The shocking statistics about Black family income released by the Pew Research center have not only caught the attention of Americans. For Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, columnist Mariusz Zawadzki writes with surprise that all the gains of the civil rights movement seem to have been either lost or diminished in the span of the last few years. For the Gazeta Wyborcza, Mariusz Zawadzki writes in part: Lincoln,...