The word that is the title for this post sums up most of Mitt Romney’s campaign for president of the US. And Vice President Joe Biden, if you didn’t notice, used the term in his debate with Ryan three times.

Vera H-C Chan writing for The Ticket explained the loaded message behind Biden’s use of ‘malarkey’.

Chan wrote, “‘Malarkey,’ as Merriam-Webster defines it, is ‘insincere or foolish talk.’ It’s a dismissive word to use, with avuncular overtones, and you’d use it to deem something as silliness, bunkum, hogwash—verging on nonsense, you (and a thesaurus) might even say.”

I read that many viewers of the debate turned to the Internet to discover what ‘malarkey’ meant, but I didn’t have to turn to the Internet thanks to my Irish heritage through my father. Lofthouse is a common name in England and Ireland—not Germany as many may think when first…

THERE ARE no words of sufficient force to summarize this week’s attempted murder of fourteen year-old Malala Yousafzai, in the northwest Pakistan city of Mingora. Yet as shocking as this savagery is, there is nothing new about it either: depravity is the business of the Taliban franchise. There are however some lessons to be drawn from the years during which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (abbreviated as TTP and known also as the Pakistani Taliban) terrorized the Swat valley and Mingora specifically.

The rise of the Pakistani Taliban coincided with, but was not an outcome of, the American and British entrance into the Northern Alliance battle against the Afghani Taliban. Here I should remind the reader that the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan share a name and a list of enemies but little else. In structure, interests and objectives they differ, and excepting a short-lived declaration of common purpose — to…

An old conservative friend sent me a link to a post on a popular Blog. The post was about U.S. Health Care Waste Larger Than Pentagon Budget.

In this post, Walter Russell Mead’s Blog said, “It’s not exactly earth-shaking news that there’s a lot of waste in the U.S. health care system, but this item we came across still managed to stagger us: A report by the Institute of Medicine estimates that as much as $750 billion is wasted in the U.S. health care system each year.”

Mead’s Blog was correct. This news isn’t new. However, it’s how his Blog ends the short post that misleads:

“Obamacare doesn’t seem to do much to solve any of these problems.”

Both of these statements are correct, but it’s what’s missing that creates a bias and ignores the truth. The implied conclusion is misleading for the following reasons:

No President and/or Congress have…

Here’s an “AGGRESSION” comparison between People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States (USA). To keep score, I will only count casualties (those killed on both sides—the wounded and cost of the wars will not be counted).  The most aggressive nation will have the highest score.

First Tibet (1950): Technically Tibet was an independent country from 1911-12 to 1950—thirty-eight years.

Before that, Tibet was ruled over by China starting with the Yuan Dynasty (1277-1367) ), Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) and Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) —five-hundred-forty-three years.

To read about this from a reputable Western source (because few in the West trust PRC sources), I suggest the October 1912 issue of The National Geographic Magazine.  There’s a piece in the magazine written by a Western trained, Qing-Dynasty doctor that the Chinese emperor sent to Tibet in 1907 for two years. His name was Shaoching…

I got a call from someone at my local hospital yesterday asking if I could go in to see her and have a chat about where I am currently and how they can possibly help. I have never been in the mental health system before and so was feeling really nervous and had no idea what to expect. The woman was really nice, made me feel at ease pretty much straight away and although was obviously emotional for me, I explained I didn’t let people in very easily and that this was an extremely difficult situation for me. She seemed to understand this and allowed me to take my time when needed.

Again, the issue of suicide was brought up and I was asked if I had any plans and the means of which to do it. I said it would only take a trip to a couple of shops…

I left Vietnam three weeks ago. Or was it even three weeks ago? Time stretches and compresses like a rubber band when we travel. I’ll go back. I saw a lot of the country but there is more to see.

During a break in class one day last fall, a sixth-grade girl named Thảo came up to me while I was writing on the chalkboard. Shyly, she referenced something I had said in the first half of the lesson. “Teacher, do you really love Vietnam?” Pausing, I looked at her and said, “Yes, I really love it.” Thảo’s face lit up and she skipped back to her seat.

I loved the way the neighbors’ four- and three-year olds came running up to me each afternoon when I arrived home from work, waving and smiling. “Hello, Cô tây! Hello, western aunt!” This, I learned, is the most important rule of travel: Always say…

By now most of the developed world has heard of the shooting at a Century 16 theater outside Denver in Aurora, Colorado after midnight on July 20 where many innocent people were gunned down as if they were defenseless sheep.

For details of this tragedy, I suggest reading Mass Shooting at Colorado Movie Theater, 12 People Dead; Witnesses: Chaos and confusion inside the Denver movie massacre, and “The suspected ‘lone-wolf’ shooter of the Batman movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo. earlier today has been identified as Ph.D. student James Holmes …”

If you already know the details, skip the previous links and read on. In recent years, there has been an epidemic of mass shootings in the United States. News radio, 620 WTMJ reported on fourteen incidents since 1991 where, including the tragedy July 20, one-hundred-fifty-eight have been killed and one-hundred-seventy-four wounded.

In addition, according to…

When Former 1st. Lt. Paul Berkowitz returned from his visit to Vietnam several years ago he created a video account of his trip that included footage shot there in 1970 when he was a combat photographer for the 221 Signal Co.

So, how much of an American am I?  Or am I un-American?

The young Army private shown in the photograph to the right is my Dad, John Miller, pictured from when he was serving in World War II.  He helped clean up the mess at Pearl Harbor, among other things in that war to end all wars.  Yes, he earned his way up to the rank of Sergeant by the time his Army days were over and he went home.

This black-and-white photograph of Dad was scanned, captioned, placed neatly into a glass-enclosed triangular case … along with the folded American flag that covered his casket on the day he was buried in central Idaho in October of 1960 after he was killed in a mining accident in Wyoming.  The flag was given to my mother, pregnant with me at the time, and she kept it tucked away until it…