Far East Cynic

Old School

Or why I am a dinosaur when it comes to on line courses. I am in the throes of taking a 16+ week class from one of America’s major universities. They have an on line program for the subject matter I am taking that is pretty comprehensive-involving on line classes

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Tax Time

I just finished my taxes-after having to take a time out to do some research on one particular set of deductions and non-deductions. I even ended up calling the IRS-where a very helpful lady helped me run the numbers to make sure I had it right. Guess we need to

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What should have been…..and never was.

Our future in space, stunted in its youth-because Americans, as a whole are pretty stupid. We went to the moon, in an aggressive fashion, and then pretty much stopped. When I think about all the money that has been wasted on all the wars between 1972 and  now-we could have

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Malevolent surgery

ma·lev·o·lent? ?/m??l?v?l?nt/ –adjective 1. wishing evil or harm to another or others; showing ill will; ill-disposed; malicious: His failures made him malevolent toward those who were successful. 2. evil; harmful; injurious: a malevolent inclination to destroy the happiness of others. 3. Astrology . evil or malign in influence. That is

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Music to orbit the Earth by.

I am a HUGE Jethro Tull fan. So much so-I am scheming to get to one of their performances when they tour the US this summer. So I found this unique video made with Ian Anderson and Astronaunt Cady Coleman to be pretty cool. She herself being an accomplished flautist.

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Tail wagging the dog.

That would be what Allen West seems to appear to thrive on doing. Earlier this week-our boy Allen West once again showed his “Reader’s Digest” understanding of history when he decided to play the Churchill card: Mr. Speaker: Will we be Chamberlain or will we be Churchill? Neville Chamberlain, the

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Memo to Paul Ryan……

I suppose we should get the greetings and pleasantries out of the way first. Paul Ryan, please DROP DEAD!   That’s how much I loathe his proposed and supposedly serious budget. None of his ideas are new, they are based on fuzzy math and proposals that don’t work. But the

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The setting sun……

If you look to the left you will find that today is the 66th anniversary of the sinking of IJS Yamato by American aircraft and naval gunfire. A few years back I wrote this post about the movie made in Japan that talked about it. Last night was Easter, but

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The politics of sadism

I’ll be writing about Paul Ryan this weekend-but the folks at Esquires blog have sized him pretty well: We are in an age dominated on one side by the New Politics of Sadism. Hurtful policies are enacted, not because of any logical benefit they might bring, but specifically because they

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Home the hard way

Arrived back in Shopping Mall at 4AM last night-by bus. Long story-and none of it good. Primarily it was a comedy of errors by people who were not prepared to deal with 47 angry and tired people when the aircraft weather diverted into southern Alabama. I’m tired and grumpy today.

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