GAYS & STRAIGHTS FOREVER

On a positive note, there have always been and always will be gay (bi-, gay, lesbian, transgendered) people. Laws, threats, oppression, torture, and death have not been able to stop them. Just as, on a negative note, there will always be hurtful affairs outside marriage, spousal and child abuse, addictions, hypocrisy, greed, corruption, injustice, and poor people. The flawed wiring of human creatures demands it....Now, is it possible to stop hitting our societal heads against the wall of fact, and start improving the sad, often tragic lives of us all?

SEMINOLES - NATIVE AMERICANS

MRS. THATCHER

On one hand, we have so few leaders who have strong convictions, who look stunning and unforgettable, who are women in power.... On the other hand, she did so many things that hurt her country, her citizens, Argentina, and ultimately, indirectly, America....       It is not nice to speak ill of those recently deceased, because     their loved ones and many strangers grieve for them, and     because we know we will soon be next. Yet some leaders, consciously, whether misguided or not, made wrong decisions,

AMERICA: 1936, 201?

HISTORY VS. TRUTH

History and truth are in the hands of the person in temporary power, subject to be changed at any moment by some writer who wants to win an award, secure tenure, sell books or a script. History and truth are relative.

MY CHINA

New York Times Book Review, by Jonathan Mirsky

TOMBSTONE

The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

by Yang Jisheng  (translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian), 629 pp., Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”