1. It’s OK for Sarah Palin to support the passage of laws that would force you or me to give birth to a baby we don’t want, even if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest…

And it’s OK for Palin to point to her own Down Syndrome baby as an example of her pro-life credentials.

But if we wonder why she left her premature, special needs baby with caretakers just three days after he was born, we’re sexist.

2. It’s OK for Sarah Palin to oppose teaching biologically-based sex education in the schools. (She must have something against biology in general, since she thinks all high-school biology classes should also teach the ancient Jewish story about Adam and Eve along with evolution, so teenagers can choose for themselves which theory is more scientific.)

But if we ask any questions about her own daughter’s pregnancy, and wonder if it may be a result of her abstinance-only training, we’re sexist.

I can see why McCain picked a woman - he watched Clinton score points every time she yelled ’sexist’ when the votes didn’t go her way. Now McCain has a VP candidate whose idology would allow her to make life-changing choices for every American family, but her own family is ‘private.’

Give me a break.

Here is a short list of what Palin may support, given her brief association with the AIP. These quotes are taken directly from the AIP website (see link above):

1. In order to keep costs down the AIP believes we should privatize as much government services as possible.

2. It is a jurors right and responsibility to vote to acquitt if they feel the law is unjust.

3.Many in the AIP support INDEPENDENCE. Some support COMMONWEALTH and others support STATEHOOD.

It is the AIPs wish to get a true plebecite (vote) according to international law, only legal Alaskan citizens, it is in the language of the people, federal military and their dependants are not legal citizens and will not be allowed to vote in this plebecite.

4. The AIP opposes with rare exception, any secret activities or expenditures of funds of any government agency, state, federal or international.

There’s more, of course, but these seem to be the issues of most concern to the general population of the US at large. Some folks are saying that Palin should be disqualified from the VP office because the AIP supports the secession of Alaska from the US. That’s not how I read the policy issues on their website - they appear to be saying that Alaska citizens should have been given the right to vote for statehood, but were denied that opportunity. Is that true? I’m not up on the history, so I have to pass on that one.

The AIP has libertarian leanings. They don’t approve of the government borrowing money for anything other than capital expenses, they don’t approve of government bankruptcy, and they think parents should get to educate their kids any way they want. But they also think that a juror, not the state of US Supreme Court, should decide if a law is just or not.

I’m a Democrat, so I won’t be voting for the McCain/Palin ticket - but there isn’t anything on the AIP website that seems all that scary to me. Alaskans are an independent bunch. (There are many people who would like Washington, Oregon and northern California to have the opportunity to create their own independent nation, called Cascadia - maybe Palin would support our right to vote on that issue, too…)

OK, it was an interesting question, brought on by Palin’s somewhat strange behavior after her water broke in Texas, but the question is now laid to rest. The campaign announced that Bristol, the daughter in question, has been pregnant for 5 months. Trig, the baby, was born 4 months ago, so it can’t possibly be Bristol’s son.

But this is all beside the point. Gossip is fun, of course, but the real issue is about abortion rights. Palin is using little Trig to prove her Christian Right credentials.

A sitting governor chose to have a disabled child, instead of choosing an abortion. The socially conservative wing of the Republican party is excited to have a VP candidate who has proved herself to be pro-life by having the baby in spite of the fact that he will need life-long care.

Palin and her husband made a personal choice, and no reasonable person would question their right to do so.

However, she didn’t just make a personal choice. She would make that choice for everyone else in similar circumstances, if she had the chance.

The McCain/Palin presidency would put at least one and possibly two new anti-choice judges on the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade would be history.

Of course, Palin could afford to make the choice she did. Since she went back to work just three days after delivering a premature, special-needs baby, she obviously can afford high-quality child care for the baby (and the rest of her large brood).

However, her political views on abortion, informed by her religious beliefs, would force all pregnant women to bring their babies to term whether or not they had health insurance, whether or not they were married, and even whether or not the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. This is ‘compassionate conservatism’ at it’s worst.

As a long-time employee of one of the largest health insurance companies in the Northwest, I know that a pregnant woman without health insurance is disqualified from buying an individual plan. In fact, a pregnant woman’s husband is also disqualified, because the newborn baby would be eligible for insurance without going through underwriting. Big insurance companies make their profits by minimizing their risks, and this isn’t a risk they’re willing to take. In Oregon, a newly pregnant woman must immediately apply for the State’s high-risk pool, in order to get coverage in time so the policy’s pre-existing condition clause can run out before the baby is born.

If there’s no insurance, a high-risk pregnancy and special-needs child could easily put a young family into bankruptcy - something Palin didn’t have to face. Even if a pregnant woman does have insurance, she may not have a husband who can support her, or a job that will allow her to take the many days off work that could be required by a sick baby. These are not problems that Palin had to face, but it could be a problem for thousands of women if Palin’s pro-life politics become public law.

So, the Palin baby rumor, interesting as it was for a few short days, simply misses the point. The important question is not “whose baby is it”? What we need to be asking ourselves is whether or not we want Palin and a conservative Supreme Court to make our own personal choices for us.

And one more thought on this issue - McCain, the ‘maverick’ of his party, evidently preferred Lieberman as his running mate. Unfortunately, he caved in to the demands of the far-right wing of his party and chose a pro-life candidate instead. He claims that Palin’s record mimicks his own maverick credentials, but the choice itself, made under pressure, shows that McCain will do almost anything to win - even if it goes against his own best judgement. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who is actually in charge, for a change?

Prices are already up for food in the US, although most people can still afford their daily rations. Some of the items that have gone up the most, like meat and milk, were already beyond the reach of some of America’s poor.

So what’s the deal? Most food price increases seem to be blamed on the increasing price of oil. Not the oil that’s needed to transport food half-way around the world or across the country - that does affect food prices in the store, of course, but it doesn’t seem to be the main culprit. And it doesn’t look like we can blame it on the petroleum products that are used in such huge quantities on American farms for fertilizers and pesticides and running machines.

The problem is that the world is running out of oil, and governments are hoping our corn and wheat can make enough biofuels to take up the slack. Our own government here in the US seems to be particularly keen on this idea, and it’s making some other countries downright miffed at us.

Of course, when you feed grains to cars instead of cows and chickens, the price of beef, milk and eggs must go up. And if you feed grains to cars instead of to people, the price of bread goes up.

When grain prices rise, there isn’t much you can do to make cheaper bread, except to use something else to make your bread with. Potatoes have been used in times of war, and potato bread got many people through the world wars in the last century. Some grains may avoid the gaze of our new biofuel zealots, perhaps barley or rye, and they could be used for bread instead of wheat. Or, we can just skip the bread and enjoy our baked potato. Potatoes are easier to bake than bread, anyway, and are probably better for us.

But what about the cost of nutrient-rich eggs, milk and meat? These are the traditional foods that kept humans going for millions of years, along with a few roots and berries. Our bodies are designed to run on the fat and protein of these foods, and we need the fat-soluble vitamins that we can’t get anywhere else (my apologies to vegetarians who think otherwise). How can we afford to eat these foods if the prices double or triple?

My suggestion is to think back the time, just a few generations ago, when we didn’t feed our corn and soybeans to animals. We let these critters feed themselves on pasture, which is by far the healthiest way for cattle to eat. Pigs snuffled around under trees for nuts and roots, fattened on skim milk and whey left over from making cheese , and got the slops from our table. Chickens made do quite nicely with bugs, seeds and weeds they harvested for themselves, along with a few handfuls of cracked grain to keep them happy.

Animals are still raised that way, of course. Not the animals that turn into our supermarket meat, or our supermarket milk or eggs, but there are still farms in the US that pride themselves on growing animals humanely - and that includes letting them eat the foods their bodies were designed for.

Even before the recent increase in grain prices, it was less expensive to fill a freezer with grass-fed beef or lamb than it was to buy the unhealthy grain-fed meat from the supermarket. And I buy good fresh milk from a grass fed cow for much less than a gallon of milk would cost at the store.

And these less expensive foods come with a bonus - grass-fed grazing animals make their own conjugated linoleic acid, or CLA, which has been proven to help us regulate our weight, and that’s why they’re the most important foods when you’re looking for natural weight loss. Plus, the proportion of omega-3 and omega-6 fats in grass-fed animals is almost perfect, unlike the fats on corn-fed cattle. It stands to reason that a healthier steer or cow will produce healthier milk or meat.

With the recession expected to be worse than anything we’ve seen since World War II, and food prices going up because of the worldwide hunger for oil, we might want to start thinking about a few survival tactics.

When I was a kid my family told stories about what it was like back during the depression. The older folks in my family enjoyed making things up when they were talking to us kids, so I have to discount a lot of their stories - but some things I actually witnessed myself.

I didn’t live through the depression, of course, but when I was a kid we often visited my great-grandmother in her little hand-made house in Imbler, Oregon. My mother’s mother grew up in that house, and helped feed the chickens and hoe the garden and milk the cow. When I came along, the barn, the chickens and the garden were all still there.

The lot they lived on was much larger than most city or suburban lots - 1/2 acre. And the house was much smaller than the houses people now assume you must live in - probably less than 1,000 square feet. The house burned down a number of years ago, but I can still see it in my mind’s eye. A wood-fired cook stove and trash burner kept it warm in the winter. The cellar was always filled with bottles of home-canned apples, apricots and peaches from their own trees. The garden was so large my great-aunt Ruby sold extra produce to the local store. And the chickens kept the garden producing heavily without purchased fertilizers.

There was no cow any more when I came to visit in the 60s, but the barn was still standing - and is still standing now. The family story claims it was built by my great-aunt Ruby, although that may have been one of their more fanciful tales. The cow provided a major portion of the nutrition to their large family during the depression.

How can you keep a cow on 1/2 acre? You and your neighbors agree to fence in your gardens to protect them from grazing cows, and then you simply let the cow out of the barn every morning after milking. She’ll come home at night when it’s time to milk again, and after mowing the grass along the roads. It was an American version of the long-gone English commons.

During the last depression, your family thrived, or not, depending on two things:

Do you have a house that’s paid for? And do you have a garden, some chickens, and a cow?

I’ve already dug my garden bed. I did it last year, after buying a tiny house with cash. It may not be fashionable to live in a little house surrounded by veggies instead of lawn grass, but I figured it was time to hunker down and get ready for whatever the world might throw at us. Oil prices aren’t likely to go back down, the folks in the Middle East aren’t likely to start liking us, and the mortgage crisis isn’t likely to get much better any time soon.

That’s why local food is becoming increasingly important. My advice - get a few chickens if your city allows them, or if you can sneak them in. Buy Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon, and start digging a spot for those ‘taters. And find a local source of grass-fed beef and fresh raw milk from a local grass-fed cow.

Even if the recession never comes, and even if food prices start going down again, you’ll still end up healthier than you probably are now. And all that good, home-grown food tastes better than anything you could ever buy with your hard-earned cash.

I reviewed the diet, but I did not recommend it. Here’s why:

This is not a diet. It’s a purge. The premise of the program, which has been around for years, is rather simple. You consume nothing but water, sometimes with lemon juice and cayenne pepper added, and wait for your body to cleanse itself of all the gunk that has been accumulating for years. Oh - and don’t forget the laxative tea.

As the authors admit, in sentence #3 on their web page, most people don’t last one day on the diet.

However, it makes great reading when celebrities give it a go and put their daily experiences up on a blog, which happens with some regularity. It’s a challenge, and everyone wants to know if they can stick it out, through the stomach cramps and the foul-tasting tea and lemonade. Sort of like Reality TV in real life.
And people who need to lose a few pounds fast, like some Hollywood stars, are often willing to do just about anything it takes - even if it means temporarily losing the pounds down the loo. If I had a few million bucks riding on the way by butt looks on camera, I might do it, too.

But let’s get serious…

Cleansing your colon is a good thing, but you can do it without severe stomach cramps and without sitting on the toilet for hours every day. So before you jump on the bandwagon, check out my full review at HowToThinkThin.com , and see what I recommend if you really want to clean out your system, but you’d rather do it without making yourself sick at the same time.

Just a note - I have written several books on weight loss and other health issues, but I don’t plug my own books on the review page. I just wanted to give folks an honest look at the Internet’s top 10 diets, and give you a heads-up about which ones work and which ones are just plain silly - before you decide which one to try.

Founder Nicholas Negroponte first came up with the idea of creating a cheap, easy-to-operate laptop computer, with the hugely exciting intention of making them cheap enough that even third world countries could afford to buy one for all their children.

It was dubbed the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and each portable computer was supposed to cost only $100. The price is still higher than that ($188 at the present), but the organization still hopes the price can be reduced.

Mass production of the machines began in November, and the government of Peru recently signed on to buy 260,000 of the machines for the country’s kids. One of Negroponte’s friends from Mexico, billionaire Carlos Slim, has also purchased 50,000 laptops to give to children in that country.

However, orders have come in much more slowly than the organization hoped. In many developing countries, paying for adequate health care and other necessary services must come first. Affluent Americans are being asked to help out by purchasing two of the machines for 400 bucks. They keep one, and the other goes to a child in a developing country. So far, this scheme has brought in orders for an additional 190,000 laptops.

Recently, however, the OLPC organization and it’s founder Nicholas Negroponte learned they are being sued for patent infringement.

The One Laptop Per Child foundation is being sued over its keyboard design by the Nigerian-owned, Massachusetts-based firm, Lagos Analysis Corp.

Lagos claims the non-profit organization illegally reverse-engineered their software drivers to make the OLPC keypad more accent mark friendly to foreign fingers.

The suit was filed in Nigeria, and the company plans to press further lawsuits in countries where the OLPC laptop is being sold.

The company states that its Konyin Multilingual Keyboard features four shift keys and a software driver specialized to more easily reproduce the uncommon accent marks found in Nigerian languages and dialects. Such diacritic ticks can be unwieldy in traditional keyboards, but are essential for the written language to be understood.

The company claims that Nicholas Negroponte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who founded the OLPC foundation, purchased two of the company’s keyboards in 2006 and used them to reverse-engineer its keyboard technology.

The outcome will be interesting - more to follow, I’m sure.

Information for this article came from allafrica.com

The giant truffle weighed 1.5kg (3.3lb), and was found near Pisa in northern Italy. The winning bidder was Mr. Stanley Ho, a casino owner from Macau.

Two other folks bidding for the truffle were British artist Damien Hirst and Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed.

Since I’m an artist myself, I naturally wondered how an artist could afford to bid on this amazingly expensive and somewhat odorous bit of fungus, so I looked up Mr. Hirst on the Web. Turns out he’s best known for his Butcher Shop series, in which dead animals like sheep, sharks and cows are displayed floating in formaldehyde. Now why didn’t I think of that?

Just in case you’re one of the millions of people who can’t actually afford to eat a truffle, here’s a bit of info:

The fungus lives underground near trees, and are said to smell like deep-fried sunflower seeds or walnuts. Dogs and pigs can smell the truffles through the soil, and that’s why Mr. Savini’s dog was able to make his owner such a big pile of money.

Trained truffle dogs don’t usually eat the delicacies when they find them, but pigs will. Sows are drawn to the odor of the buried fungus because it smells like a sex pheromone given off by boars. Perhaps that’s where the truffle got it’s reputation as an aphrodesiac.

The fungus is used (sparingly) by thinly shaving uncooked slices and serving over buttered pasta or salads, or by inserting the slices into meats or under the skins of roasting fowl. It must be assumed that the giant truffle will be soon eaten by it’s proud new owner and a fairly large number of dinner guests. The truffle oil that you and I might be able to afford to flavor our pasta doesn’t actually contain any truffles.

The buzz will bring in lots of listeners, without a doubt. And a bit of cash, too. Imus’ show on Monday will be four hours long, and $100 tickets have already been sold to benefit the Imus Ranch for Kids With Cancer. The show will usually be aired from 6-9 a.m. weekdays.

From reading through the news stories and blogs, it looks like Imus will have a black person on as a guest fairly often, which is probably intented to temper some of the anger from civil rights leaders like Rev. Al Sharpton. A lot of people are still a bit miffed because Imus called the Rutgers University women’s basketball players "nappy-headed hos." This writer doubts that Imus has any major change of heart on the matter, and will continue to say and do whatever he believes will get him the greatest amount of controversy, and the largest number of listeners to his radio show.

Some folks disagree with me - especially the people who are banking on the radio celebrity’s successful comeback. "I don’t have any doubt on his future," said Phil Boyce, WABC-AM program director. "He’ll obviously be wiser, smarter and a bit more careful. He’s learned from this. I’m not concerned that he’ll have a repeat." According to Fox News, he then also went on to say "Obviously we are doing this because we think we can make more money," Boyce said. "There’s an opportunity to charge more for our advertising rates. I am not ashamed of saying it is about the money. We are running a business."

Fortunately for the people in this particular business, America’s listeners love a controversy, and we have a short attention span. Next time Imus comes up with an "unacceptable" remark, we’ll all be just as shocked as ever.

Just in case you missed that "nappy headed ho’s" comment, here you go: