Gay Rights Activists seem to be demanding the Obama Administration to regularly kow-tow to them. That’s the only way I can interpret the blogosphere’s condemnation of Hillary Clinton’s supposed failure to address gay rights in her “meeting” with Moscow’s homophobic… Read full post »

According to the CDC, chronic diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, cancer, and diabetes, are both the most common and the most preventable of medical problem. They account for 75% of the nation’s health spending. 

To cut health care costs, the answer is simple: prevent those… Read full post »

Yet again, another shocking case of a woman publicly breast feeding has made the news. We “lactivists” think nursing a baby is  a perfectly natural function that should be welcome in the public arena. 

Others think that when a woman’s breast is involved, so is sex. Bill Ma… Read full post »

In a recent article in the New York Times, Mokoto Rich discussed a trend in school language arts programs to get rid of required reading in favor of letting student read anything they like. The 7th and 8th grade teacher in the article ditched To Kill a Mockingbird. The books her… Read full post »

Several years ago, my son fell on the playground in Bulgaria and broke his arm. The fracture was near the growth plate of the bone. Damage to the growth plates leads can cause the bone to stop growing or to grow abnormally. At the hospital, the doctors took an x-ray, decided… Read full post »

I have a brother with autism. Having lived with him, my worst nightmare for my children was that they would have autism, too. So when the vaccine-autism scare came out, I looked at the issue very closely. My children were more vulnerable than the average child -- they may have a… Read full post »

OS is like a magazine with no focus. A serious article giving dating advice to teens girls faces the same readers as a humorous piece about the problems of an aging prostate.  Light humor, political polemics, silliness, deeply moving accounts of personal tragedies, recipes, pictures of pets, tra… Read full post »

I named this blog cross currents with the plan of writing about cross-cultural experiences, so I thought I’d start at the beginning. (PS does anyone know how to make a banner from my pictures?)

In 1983, I graduated from college. I was an idealist. I thought with good-will, effort and… Read full post »

We love to search for magic bullets. Electric cars powered by wind and solar energy might would allow us to drive with zero emissions. Maybe this will happen some day, who knows? Yet in the search for a magic bullet, we ignore the simplest of solutions, one that’s been around for… Read full post »

My printer has been printing badly for some time. At first, thinking that maybe the kids had left the printer on and the print cartridges had dried up, we changed them. There was some improvement, but the printer doesn’t print black. We changed the black cartridge again. This didn’t help.… Read full post »

The best numbers I can find state that in the current Israeli attack on Gaza, around 850 Palestinians have died and over 3,000 have been wounded (CNN). It’s estimated that 30 to 40% of the dead are women or children. From the rocket attacks that Hamas is still launching into Israel,… Read full post »

I worked for the Federal Department of Labor in Boston. The first catch was I was hired as a temp while they processed my paperwork and the benefits wouldn’t start I got hired as a regular employee. I understood that when I took the job. I didn’t quite grasp that processing… Read full post »

In 1994, my then fiance, now husband and I were working for American companies in Moscow.  While Moscow was a very exciting place to be, November was grim. The sun set early, came up late and the city was dark after sunset (five o’clock). Only the red stars on the Kremlin… Read full post »

The root of the summer war is an internal conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia. The South Ossetians, simply put, have not accepted Georgia as their country.  They took advantage of the collapse of the Russian Empire in the early 1900s to try to declare independence from Georgia. In 1990, t… Read full post »

America needs a national curriculum. American students are among the most mobile in the world. One fifth of the nation’s students move every year.  Among the poorest students, the rate is higher.  Yet, America has no national curriculum. Standards are left up to each state and often t… Read full post »

Many people in America do not trust atheists. How, they ask, can you be a good person without religion as a guide for morality? They take it as a given that religion is the source of morality. I believe it is not. The issue is hard to disentangle, since for millennia,… Read full post »