The passengers on board the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day received a nice Christmas present.  The related events that took place are appropriate discussion topics for my blog’s entrance into the New Year.  The passengers on that plane were lucky-the lonely Nigerian lad that wanted to become a martyr and receive his quota of virgins in the hereafter had a faulty fuse for the bomb hidden in his underwear.  Voila the DHS’s secret weapon: terrorists’ stupidity!

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After a nor’easter that left ten-twelve inches of snow here in Concord (hard to tell exactly with the wind-blown powder), friends and neighbors are generally more in the Christmas mood.  As a native Californian, I prefer to have the snow in the mountains where it’s supposed to be – one way the snow and the opposite the beach, I say.  But I finished my shopping just before the storm on Saturday, so the snow didn’t matter so much to me, while some people left Christmas parties early this week to desperately try to finish up their shopping, making up for time lost during the storm and their procrastination.

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Not only is justice blind, but the old lady often moves slowly in our country.  You will recall that last spring (May 31) Mr. Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion terrorist, killed Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor that ran a clinic in Wichita, Kansas.  Mr. Roeder will finally come to trial on January 11.

Ironically the shooting took place in worship services at the Reformation Lutheran Church.  Mr. Roeder, a dupe of the anti-abortion movement, has confessed and will probably try to put abortion on trial by making the necessity defense, that is, claim that he had to do it to save the lives of the unborn children.

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Recent French ministry actions are examples of how authoritarian regimes and wannabe fascists attack their internet critics.  The internet has proven to be a powerful extension to a free press.  Not needing much infrastructure like printing presses nor human resources like reporters, copy writers, and editors, this chaotic media seems relentless in its pursuit and practice of free expression.

While it is not surprising that China with its heavy-handed control of Google and other incidents continues its attack on internet freedom, France’s recent moves show fascism is alive and well in Europe.  Secretary of State Nadine Morano has led the charge.  She recently went after a private citizen, a housewife with three kids, who caught the minister in a lie.  She subpoenaed the person’s internet address, obtained her identity, and sued her for “public insult towards a member of the ministry,” punishable by a fine of up to $18,000 (that this is possible is fascism pure and simple).

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The extreme right has all their anti-liberal forces worked into a frenzy because Senator Barbara Boxer asked an Army Corps of Engineers General to call her Senator instead of ma’am.  While you can admonish the Senator for not having a thicker skin, this is hardly the burning campaign issue Mr. Chuck DeVore and Ms. Carly Fiorina need to unseat the California Senator.  If this is the only fault these candidates and their rabid followers can find with Ms. Boxer’s senatorial career, they are pathetic.  From Mr. DeVore this might be expected.  Ms. Fiorina, bejeweled CEO failure from HP, should know better.

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(Roberto Kusminsky’s Counsel of the Wicked is published by Krillpress, ISBN 9780982144343.)

Buenos Aires is the most European city among the South American capitals.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that like most European cities, it has a long tradition of fine art and music, it is a melting pot of immigrants from the continent, and has a population that generally possesses a joie de vivre in spite of hard times.  The curse is that, like most European cities, it has often been afflicted with the disease of fascism.  Other South American countries have also been afflicted, suffering at the hands of several dictators-Stroessner in Paraguay, Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, Perez Jimenez in Venezuela, Pinochet in Chile, along with more recent additions like Chavez in Venezuela.  None were as flamboyant as the inimitable Juan Peron nor as deadly as the brutal and paranoid military junta that eventually followed him.  Mothers still congregate in the plazas of the city, looking for their missing sons and daughters.

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The incredible balancing act in Mr. Obama’s Nobel speech is now being called by some pundits “the Obama doctrine.”  In his speech he managed to walk the tightrope between accepting a prize of peace while gearing up for a surge of 30,000 to Afghanistan.  This peace-through-war view of the world probably made the Nobel committee regret their hasty decision of jumping on Mr. Obama’s bandwagon so soon into his presidency.

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In high school I often studied and was often amused by the little cliques that were formed (in my school some of these were gangs, but I’m talking about the more harmless ones).  I was even a member of such a group, a nerd herd that dominated the math and science courses, appeared on local TV in a San Joaquin Valley version of the College Bowl, took the extracurricular early morning “humanities honor class,” and generally did things together to the point of ignoring everybody else.  We weren’t particularly popular considering my home town is the county seat of one of the richest agricultural counties in the U.S., both then and now.  Looking back, I suppose we seemed kind of strange.  Most of the popular kids had other things on their minds, like cheerleading and sports.  They formed their own cliques.

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A constant theme of mine starting in Full Medical and carried through Soldiers of God and The Midas Bomb is my fear that the Chinese paradigm of an uncaring capitalism will become the futuristic model that will be adopted around the world.  I plan to continue to hammer on this theme in the future.

It can be a very successful brand of capitalism in the sense that it brings great power and wealth to a chosen few.  In the extreme it is more than capitalism without control-it is a capitalism driving the decisions of governments, letting them handle the day-to-day bureaucratic problems of controlling the masses (the industrialists and bankers usually do not wield the fire hoses nor shoot the rubber bullets-they have governments do the dirty work) while a few get filthy rich.  It is a capitalism that will exploit and demean the working class in its hell bent search for immediate profits while raping the planet.  It will worry about the education and welfare of its workers only to the extent that it needs someone to exploit.

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Bravo to Ms. Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe columnist, for “Facts and figures, myths and mantras”!  I enjoyed her op-ed piece (Friday’s Globe) and, as a practicing scientist with writing as a hobby, lament that we now, more than ever, cannot be completely certain of what appears in print.  From scientists that skew their data to politicians that invent statistics to internet ranters that attack celebrities with lies and innuendos, our society now faces the greatest attack on truth in the history of mankind.  And there is so much information available that winnowing the true from the false is often a daunting task.  It has become so notable that Mr. Steven Colbert has coined the term “truthiness,” implying that we have changed the binary true/false (two choices) to something continuous.

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