Secrets don’t make friends. That is a saying I learned in elementary school, and it has stuck with me these many years. It isn’t just that secrets don’t make friends; they end friendships, relationships, marriages, etc. One of the largest groups of people to keep secrets these days is African American gay men. What! You [...]

Anne Lamott wrote an interesting article for salon.com defending her Christian faith and her liberalism (something which many people find hard to reconcile), the article is here (you need to watch a short ad to view the whole thing):
God doesn’t take sides: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/04/27/gods_warning_signs/index.html
for more interesting discourse on christianity and liberal politics, check out jim wallis’ [...]

Apple gets upset over a new biography of Steve Jobs and pulls books by the same publisher from its stores.
Click here for the article
-Jean Chen

I don’t get to watch good news much; that is well –produced and meaningful. You may wonder, isn’t that a contradiction in terms? No, not if you tune into Nick News on Sunday night at 8:30 PST and see a true news artist, Linda Ellerbee has been wowing us public and commercial TV for decades [...]

I’ve been pretty anti-fast food the past couple of months. After reading the first half of Fast Food Nation and watching Super Size Me I swore the stuff off.
The whole Wendy’s finger-in-the-chili scandal turns out to likely have been a fraud. But what about this.

Check it out… the U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration!
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Nation’s Inmate Population Increased 2.3 Percent Last Year
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 25, 2005
WASHINGTON, April 24 (AP) - The nation’s prisons and jails held 2.1 million people in mid-2004, 2.3 percent more than the year before, the government reported on Sunday.
The inmate population increased [...]

I can’t believe that a group of volunteers is patrolling U.S. borders… why are people so scared of immigrants?
Click here for Yahoo News article
Minuteman Project Website
-Jean Chen

As Passover approaches, I become aware of a holiday, a celebration, a ritual highlighted by cultural awareness. I also received this article in the most modern convention, via cyber space, to remind me to look deeper than the media coverage of the Pope’s death. As you read on, perhaps some ray of hope [...]

We should all be very afraid right now. As you sit here reading this, another government agency is being turned over to the private sector. Privatization is occuring rapidly and haphazardly, so that potentiallt, before the end of the first decade of the 20th century, about eighty-five percent of government programs and services will be [...]

Check this out, it’s from Jeff Chang’s blog:
It’s been another one of those weekends for The Source and people around it. Allegations of sexual, corporate, and rap violence have been flying.
On Friday, Benzino announced he was stepping down from The Source. It’s Monday. Guess who’s bizzack?
In the meantime, former Editor-In-Chief Kim Osorio appeared at [...]

The day John Paul II died, I asked my husband what most stuck in his mind about this Pope, and his response was that he wasn’t Catholic, which I already knew. I thought that John Paul II’s visit to Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to assassinate him in 1981, was remarkable. It was [...]

there’s a really good article in salon about Gwen Stefani’s new trinkets — the 4 ‘harujuku girls’ that tag along with her and appear in all the videos for her new album ‘love. angel. music. baby.’ if you haven’t seen them, gwen’s hired 4 japanese girls (possibly some or all japanese-american) for her videos [...]

A friend called today to rant about the U.S. flag being flown at half -mast this week. She began her life as a catholic schoolgirl and then converted in her late teens. But she was seething.
At first I thought about how I barely pay attention to the news related to the Pope’s death (there [...]

NPR : Examining Private-Account Pensions in Chile
Click on the link and listen to the story. Chile has had private-account-style social security for 20 years, and it’s pretty successful. How’d they do it? Pinochet, the murderous dictator that the US supported, slashed spending to make it work, and you can bet he didn’t [...]

From the Washington Post:
Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo
By Mike Allen
The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last [...]