Assistant Village Idiot

A recent article suggesting that there is an heritability to political beliefs has fascinated me, and I have downloaded a fair number of jo...

More than any backwoods Tennessee preacher, Jim Wallis will tell you how God wants you to vote. For amusement, see what they do with people...

An economics article over at Brussels Journal discusses how Danish "Flexicurity" attempts to combine free market and protective el...

There is an article on the proposed "euthanasia" of severely disabled newborns in the British Sunday Times. An eerie quote from t...

We had preliminary training at work today about ERI - Epedemic Respiratory Infection - and what would be happening in the coming months for ...

When I went to bed the Republicans were taking it on the chin and the computer was acting screwy. When I awoke in the middle of the night, ...

The first six songs in the soundtrack are 1. O Little Town of Bethlehem 2. The Ash Grove 3. David's OCD Song (discussion of 1-3 here ) ...

The industrialized nations of the world consume almost 90% of the years of college in the world; nearly 50% is used by the US alone. There ...

My email contained a long comment about conspiracy theories that had been posted to this site. I couldn't figure out which topic it cam...

A second-term president’s party often loses a large number of seats in the mid-term elections. Republicans who fear being banished from the...

It is unusual for me to twice get links from high-traffic sites within 48 hours. It is odder still that I received them for my commentary o...

Ever wonder what all the fuss is about? Video here. I can now see why it both works and isn't torture.

I helped someone move today, an elderly woman from church who is going into a retirement community, while two of her daughters move into her...

I started this blog last November, and will reprise posts I like throughout the next year. I have no particular method in mind. Just ones ...

We have a doctor from Central Maine over to speak at Grand Rounds next week. I often like to google these guys in advance, to get some idea...

There is a marked contrast in how I treat the patients currently in the hospital and those at the group homes across grounds. Many of the l...

To go with my political language commentary about Republicans w orking for you and Democrats fighting for you, I have been noticing the ph...

The NYT has an article about how stupid the Bush Administration is putting captured documents from Iraq up on the web for translation. Why,...

I’m a numbers guy, a residual benefit of having OCD, so when organizations make claims with numbers in them, I juggle them around in my head...

Austin Bay gathers an estimate of how much it would cost the US to reconstitute the bank-tracing surveilling of terrorists that the New Yor...